By Marsh Chapel

Introduction

“Have a good summer!” Has someone said this to you recently? Or, something similar? “Are you having a good summer?” “How’s the summer?” “What a great summer!”

It is such a simple phrase, but to the needy, reflective ear, it raises a mortal question, a singular and, perhaps shattering, perhaps justifying question: What is a good summer?

In the most cotidian of clauses, there lie embedded sacred moments which deserve and require our attention, our full and alert attention. Please…Thank You…Hello…Goodbye…God bless you…Have a nice day…Have a good summer.

What is a good summer?

Before addressing this question, I digress to offer a story. You perhaps know it. Or perhaps you have told it. A farmer had an odd habit of feeding his only pig in a distinctive way. He would hold the pig in his arms, and carry him under an apple tree. There the pig would happily eat his fill as the farmer, arms aching, waited. At last a neighbor asked: “John, that is one way to feed a pig, but, in addition to straining your back and arms, it must take a whole lot of time. Aren’t you worried about that lost time?” “Oh”, said the farmer, “Of course you are right, it is a lot of time, but, then…what’s time to a pig?”

In the distance that lies between pearls and swine, between the precious pearl of great price and the swinish disregard for the Holy, between a glorious moment known as this summer, and our human capacity to miss the significance of the precious gift of such time, there may emerge an articulation of the good news.

The Gospel then is a warning to those of us, like me, who raise such questions, and those of us, like you, who chew on them. What is a good summer? A mortal question, to be understood, and a saving truth, to be told, depend on hearing. Faith, that is, comes by right hearing, and such hearing by the word of God.

Thus the simple sentence, “Have a good summer”, is, like much in life, a very thin ordinary veneer covering a deep, existential interrogative: just what is a good summer?

What constitutes a good, a godly summer? Perhaps with your help, and under the shadow of the Holy Scripture, which towers over our experience like a steeple towers over our communion today, we can respond by raising other questions. One good question deserves another.

1. Interruption

Has your summer allowed an interruption? Of what? Of routine, of the usual of set patterns, of your own plotting and planning, of comfort, of discomfort, of what has been. Has summer provided a pause? Many of the parables of Jesus help us here, like that of the Rich Fool, a warning word from Jesus for the followers of Jesus. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

Wait, stop, think, heal write.

A Hindu proverb says: During its lifetime, the lordly goose looks down upon the humble mushroom. But in the end, they are both served up on the same platter.

Life is meant to become a rich offering toward God, not a laying up of treasure on earth where moth and rust consume, and thieves break in and

steal. Life is space and time when the bone wearying labor of pulling on oars against a mighty wind, may give way, by interruption, to a vision of the divine. Against all odds, He walked to them, and sat with them, and spoke to them, and blessed them.

Mark 6 carries the account of Jesus unexpectedly appea
ring to astonish, and so to encourage, his wayward disciples.

Speaking of interruptions, of thieves breaking in, and of the unexpected, please allow this brief digressive interruption.

It reminds us of the ostensibly humorous story of the burglar, speaking of greed and covetousness, who slipped with his flashlight into a dark suburban home. He took jewelry and cash. Then in the dark he heard a voice: “Jesus is watching. I’m warning you.” The burglar trembled, wondering who had spoken. Turning on the light, he saw a parrot in a cage, who said, “My name is Moses, and I warn you, Jesus is watching.” Relieved, for the moment, the burglar smiled and said, “What kind of silly suburban people name their parrot Moses?” The parrot replied, “The same kind of silly people who name their long toothed, ferocious dog, Jesus. I warned you, Jesus is watching.”

Life is more than security. The best things about life are free. Travel light…I shan’t be gone long, you come too…

2. Inflammation

Has your summer involved some inflammation? Has the season brought spirit to a fever pitch? Is there around now any love on fire? The country is scorching hot. Various volcanoes are flowing with lava. And in your heart? Where is the fire? What is it that you love so much that it makes you…now nostalgic, now tender, now torrid, now angry, now remorseful, now hot, now vengeful, now envious, now determined, now happy?

One religious worker told us this week of his moment of calling, when he heard at a prayer meeting, “There is nothing better you can do with your life than to give your life to something greater than yourself.”

The Bible readers among us are right to suspect that Hosea 11 smolders here. Listen to this loveliest of passages again: “When Israel was a child I loved him…”

I am not talking about passion only, eros only, the body only, feeling only. Though I mean all that. I mean, rather, something beyond mere ‘sloppy agape’. I mean the heart. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Julia Kristeva, French philosopher, said of summer that there are “three great things in life: to think, to heal, and to write.” A Schweitzer would have agreed, and said, “There are three great instruments—the Bible, the pipe organ, and the stethescope.” I say: find a way, your way, every day, to preach and to sing and to love.

Somewhere in every life there is a hot, scorched, midwestern summer. Remember it. Somewhere in every life there is a potent lava flow, about to burst, bursting, having burst. Seek it. Somewhere in every life there is the love of Hosea 11, God like a mother holding an infant to the cheek. Recover it.

Has your summer involved some inflammation?

For many years, across the river at MIT, Huston Smith taught religion to engineers. His passion, inflammation, was world religions. In many ways, he was a generation ahead of his time. But in his eighties he is on fire. He is on fire to help us understand the world’s great religious traditions, in the large as well as in the little. There on the bookstore shelf is Why Religion Matters. There is The Soul of Christianity. There is Huston Smith reminding us, with fire, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, and that “we are in good hands and so it well behooves us to bear one another’s burdens”.

Some summer reading will kindle our passion for the tru
e and the good and the beautiful. We need reminders of all three, in a world that has ample reminders of their absence. A train bombed in India. A tunnel collapsing in Boston. A Middle East in turmoil. A war of our own making now remaking us. And a broken leg, a knee to replace, a sudden loss, a new boss.

Have we forgotten the love we had at first? Now is the time to rekindle that holy fire. Out on the Cape. Along the coast in Maine. Up in the White Mountains. Along lake Winnepesake. And in the heat of the city, and in the thick of things too. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein…

3. Institution

Has your summer included the care and feeding of an institution? Yes, I could have used another word like ‘incarnation’, more theological and perhaps more accurate. But then we all would have gone home unclear, un conflicted, un confronted, and un helped. Operational incarnation means institution.

Life does not give ground before individuals apart from institutions. Transformation, lasting good change, in history, happens not through individuals only, nor through movements only. Real traction in history involves institutions. Like corporations, governments, businesses, schools, parties, universities, associations, cities, and, churches. A movement is not superior to an institution. An institution is a movement that has grown up.

The reading from Ephesians 1 ( I commend to you this wonderful chapter), coming from the hand of a disciple of Paul of Tarsus, is a reminder to us of the need for institutional life. Here is the gracious beginning of an account of ‘God’s people’. In the corporate life of the church—an institution itself which as Tillich reminded us is both a revelation and a distortion of the divine—we are given adoption, inheritance, spirit, promise, forgiveness, fullness. tells us to “set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth.” Christ, here, may be your lips, Christ, your reward, Christ, your glory, Christ, your new person, Christ, your Lord may truly be revealed in and through you. recites the tradition of deliverance, liberation, rescue, redemption, that is your birthright…

“In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will…”

Has your summer involved an institution?

4. Inspiration

Has this summer brought inspiration? Something? Something fine and true? Something sensual? Something grand and loving? I truly hope so. “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

2 Samuel 6 recalls David dancing furiously before the Ark of the covenant. The travels of this remarkable symbol, including to and from the home of Obededom the Gittite, are the subject of another sermon. Today is a happier moment in the account of the Ark, but not the only account, and others are less cheery. Nonetheless, here at the least the great King David is enthralled by a moment of uncontrolled glee.

I saw an eagle soaring in the mountains last Tuesday. Karl Barth, said that “the gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight”. And I remembered the proverb: “Three things are too wonderful for me, and four I cannot understand. The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a ship upon the high sea, the way of a serpent on a rock, and the way of a man with a woman.”

Has the summer brought inspiration?

David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, brought a different kind of inspiration, recently, in response to the disorders and tragedies in the natural world, notably the Tsunami. At least he is writing about God and Creation, and that itself is inspirational.

If nothing else, the Gnostics of the early centuries inhabited the same imaginative and spiritual universe as the earliest Christians: they no more than Paul took the principalities and powers and elements of this world as myths or allegories; they not less than Paul proclaimed themselves free from the tyranny of the ‘god of this world’. And, like Paul or the author of John’s gospel, the Gnostics understood spiritual liberation as something subversive of the order of the cosmos…a glorious escape from the kingdom of death. Any Christian who has not felt at least an occasional stirring of the pathos of Gnosticism…and a rage against the fashion of this world, and of a mysterious yearning for another and perfect world, at once strange and familiar, cannot in all likelihood fully appreciate the spiritual and moral sensibility of the New Testament.

Coda

Have a good summer

A summer that allows interruption

A summer that involves inflammation

A summer that includes an institution

A summer that brings some inspiration

(And, as you probably suspect that the sermon more deeply intends, in the same ways, have a good life).

posted in Uncategorized on 07.16.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 6: 1-13

Dark

Faith is a walk in the dark.

As Paul Tillich said many years ago, “Faith is the state of being grasped…by the ultimate in being and meaning…being grasped by an ultimate concern…being grasped by the Spiritual Presence… and opened…It is the act of keeping ourselves open…” (III, 130-1)

Faith is walk forward into the unknown, into the dark, and open entrance into the future.

Darkness need not surprise you. There may be no darkness in God, as 1 John declares.

But there is a lot of God in darkness. There may be no darkness in divinity, but there surely is divinity in darkness. The Bible tells us so.

In its very first sentence. In its very first sentence, the Bible tells us so. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, when the divine sermon spoke creation. Darkness. Darker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp. In the beginning, there was darkness—infused with divinity.

Darkness lurks in every Scriptural nook and darkness lurks in every Biblical cranny. Jacob scurries to the river called Jabbok. At night. The children of Israel would neither have heeded nor have needed a great pillar of fire, across the wilderness, except that they traveled…at night. Yahweh gave them a cloud of smoke—his daily obscurity—and a pillar of fire—his nightly obscurity, with which to chart their course. Obscurity squared. You remember the university professor of theology and culture, Nicodemus. Nicodemus saw the light, at night. Every Holy Week encounter happens at night. Jesus prays at night. Peter betrays at night. Thomas doubts at night. Mary shouts at night. All the crucial passion scenes occur at night. And Paul? Paul and Silas, past midnight, have their chains ripped off in a Roman prison. Their guard is petrified. But they are not surprised. The night time—is the right time…

You would like faith to be simple and sunny and clear? You would prefer that faith be as plain as the nose on your face? Or, plainer still, as plain as the nose on MY face? Really. When has that ever been so? With Jeremiah, walking, by night, in chains, to Babylon? With Samson, blinded, seeing a lifelong night? With Paul shipwrecked? With George Washington, Christmas Eve of 1776, marching in the snow at midnight, crossing the river to Trenton, with all the chips on the table? With Harriet Tubman, listening at 2am for bloodhounds along the Susquehanna? Or maybe with Dwight Eisenhower, at 3am, on June 6, 1944? Or with Nelson Mandela in the 28 years of darkness behind bars? No. Darkness surprises no one who lives in friendship with God, least of all you who have been baptized to the cross.

The word comes at night. First at night, in the Genesis pattern, “evening and morning…” The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. The light shines—IN THE DARKNESS.

Our Scripture today was formed, formed in the dark catacombs of Rome, seven decades after Christmas, and four decades after Good Friday. Mark lights a candle for faith by trying—throughout the Gospel and especially in this chapter—to answer a hard question. Why did Jesus suffer? Why did Jesus die? Why did Jesus fail? Why was the Messiah rejected, dishonored, and unheeded? Answer one, verses 1-6: so it is with prophets, especially at home. Answer two, verses 7-13: so to teach us to go forward into the dark, fearless. One needs no bag or second tunic, just a bit of attitude, and a whistle in the dark.

Now, if we are honest, darkness is frightening. But not unexpected. Frightening, but not surprising. It is sobering to see a loved one taken off in a stretcher, down the long night hallway of uncertainty. Human life in a nuclear age is anxious life, ever shadowed life, lived against the background of a potential nuclear winter. Who would not sleep with one eye open, come hurricane season, when the wind begins to blow, after Tsunami and Katrina? Who is not sobered by the report of a potential subway bombing? Beware, beware a cheery, cozy, quasi Christ, unfamiliar with the dark. Beware a Jesus who has not been given his night license. Beware a loud, light, boxy, bongo, easy Christ. There are plenty around today. Steven Prothero’s excellent book American Jesus will show you the historical bestiary. Beware a trumpeted acclamation that it is already, always MORNING. As in, “It’s morning in America…” It isn’t. Jesus’ cross is the nighttime hallmark of his loving. In fact, in sum, his heavy walking is his loving. His departure is the heart of his loving.

You know from your experience about loving and leaving. Like a mother leaving a daughter at school, or a father leaving a son at camp, or a teacher leaving a student at graduation, or a boss leaving an apprentice at retirement, or a parent, perhaps a mother or father memorialized here today, leaving this earth. As Bonhoeffer’s sturdy words remind us, the leaving is the loving:

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap. He does not fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

The darkness is frightening, but you need not fear it. The edgy fragments of a post-modern sensibility—every generation and identity group for itself and the devil take the hindmost—is frightening, but you need not fear it. The
cataclysmic demise of authentic Christianity in the Northeast— lovely, large, lasting and liberal, and increasingly gone—is frightening, but you need not fear it. The emptiness of the world when your spouse dies and the thought of emptying the closets is a prospect worse than death itself is indeed frightening, but you need not fear it. Here is why. You come from a long line of women and men who have practiced discipleship in the dark. Who have earned their night licenses, as you also have done. Your people knew God…at night. You will too. Miguel de Unamuno had it right: “Warmth, warmth, warmth! We are dying of cold not of darkness. It is not the night that kills. It is the frost.”

We share with the early church an experience of God, at night. At their best, they knew how to take responsible risk. At their best, they knew both how to come and to go, to enter and to leave. At their highest, they trusted their instincts. At their finest, they had the guts to start out before dawn, before the fog lifted, before daybreak. They hoped, that is, for what they did not see. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see.

Do we minimize the obscurity of the future, the dark night of the unforeseen? Do we repress the forebodings of the subconscious? Do we deny the complexities of power? Do we call darkness light and night day? No. No. No. No. No.

Nothing of the night is foreign to us. Nothing of darkness is foreign to us. We avoid nothing, nothing, though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us. Darkness is no surprise.

Walk

We have learned to walk in the dark.

You will not want to race in the dark, like a cabbie hurtling down Commonwealth at midnight. We do not run headlong—foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. No. We do not hurl ourselves like fools into the black beyond. You know the value of virtue: prudence, temperance, courage, patience.

Walk.

Walk humbly. If we walk…we have fellowship. Walk by faith not sight. Walk with God. At night, especially, walk. Do not run. Walk.

Slow and steady wins the day. A stitch in time saves nine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let your head save your heels. Look before you leap.

Thunders Isaiah, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.” Those today sensing a call to the ministry want to remember Isaiah.

Ghandi weighed 100 lbs, wore a sari, and looked sorrier. He walked four miles a day. And, oh, by the way, he changed the world for the better. Jesus never left Palestine. He walked, preaching and teaching and healing. John Wesley walked slowly to Aldersgate Street, and more slowly home, a changed man. His horse walked all over England. Morality, generosity, piety followed the man on horseback. Said Wesley, “I am always in haste, but never in a hurry.” James Bashford peers down upon us from the stained glass of this hallowed space. He took his time. First as pastor (his highest honor), then as President of Ohio Wesleyan, then as Bishop of Korea. His way of living, walking, inspired a generation to take the world and make it young again. Like Branch Rickey, who integrated baseball. (But that was last week’s sermon!) Easy, slow. Walk. Saunter. Lollygag.

Self-destruction awaits a hasty pace in the dark. On the down side, Methodists and others have sometimes been hasty about doing all the good we can. Sometimes we are too optimistic in our accounting. We accentuate the positive, which is alright, but suffocate the negative, which is not alright. We engage in wishful thinking, when it comes to money, sometimes. We see what we want to see, rather than what is. After all, were we not meant to be “happy in God”? The newspapers this week, or a great history like David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (109ff), or our own experience itself, will confirm our penchant for hasty counting, and even for tragically overoptimistic accounting.

Take your time at night. Feel your way. Step along. Be careful. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is very hard to get it back in. Let your eyesight grow accustomed to the obscurity of experience and the hidden nature of God. Befriend shadows. Walk. Skulk. Lurk. Who hopes for what he sees? Said Alice Walker, “at middle age I slowed down so that whatever was trying to catch up to me would have an easier time of it.”

Abraham Heschel would call this Sabbath living:

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have, but to be, not to own, but to give, not to control, but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord…The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. (Sabbath, 9-11)

To face sacred moments.

Walk. Swing your arms. Smile. Greet your neighbors and their wayward kids. Take your time. Only the devil has no time to let things grow. It is a foolish farmer who pulls up his carrots every week to check their progress. Easy, easy.

Otherwise, you will miss the fullness of life and faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born 100 years ago this year, a great interpreter in word and life of Mark 6, is best remembered for his teaching, by word and sacrifice, about grace,
and his reverence for the walk of faith announced in today’s Gospel:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without contrition.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be SOUGHT again and again, the gift which must be ASKED FOR, the door on which a person must KNOCK. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs us our life, and it is grace because it gives us our only true life.

Costly grace takes time. It requires us to walk, and not faint. Costly grace takes time. Time to invite, and to tithe. Time to fish and to plant. Faith begins with giving way 10% of what we earn, and ends in inviting someone to dinner.

The only way to make headway in the dark is to walk. The night time is the right time—if you will walk.

Victor Hugo wrote, Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Here is the good news: Faith. . .is a walk. . .in the dark.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.9.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 5: 35-43

Greeting

Humbled and honored we are to stand among you today, in this happy and historic space. Another chapter of life and ministry is opening. We do not yet know each other, neither sanctuary congregation and preacher, nor radio congregation and preacher, so we will need to go on a bit of trust—trust in God, in the Gospel, in the Spirit, in the community and in ourselves.

We have traveled to you from Rochester, NY, from the arms of a wonderfully loving congregation in the Finger Lakes. A land of opportunity and enterprise. Opportunity: F Douglass, EC Stanton, SB Anthony, H Tubman. Enterprise: the Erie Canal, Carrier air conditioning, the Xerox Copy, the Kodak moment, and, not to be forgotten, the invention of--Jello. Hello, New England, hello!

This is also the region that invested earlier in Boston, providing the enrichment of George Eastman, the education of Howard Thurman, and the emancipation of Harriet Tubman, all of which bore fruit in this city on the Bay.

One said of his minister’s sermons, “sometimes I arise inspired, and sometimes I awake refreshed.” Both are good, which brings us into today’s text…

Sleeping Not Dead

The dear girl was sleeping, not dead. She is not dead, but doth she sleep…the wrong shall fail, the right prevail…

Looking back forty years to Jesus’ ministry, our writer has in stylized memory recalled a healing moment. All the Gospels, including are text, were formed, formed in the white heat of early church life, when the hand of death threatened a frightened church, perhaps in Rome, perhaps in the year 70.

So Mark will teach the meaning of a Hebrew phrase to his many Greeks. Talitha cumi. He will recall or imagine the child’s age, 12. He will repeat the standard command to secrecy which gives his gospel its strange allure. He will mention Jesus’ advice to eat. (Matthew and Luke, reading Mark 20 years later, are as puzzled as we are to interpret these features, and readily remove some of them.) In all, what looked like death turns out to be a need to wake up from slumber.

This is the meaning of the sermon, to wake us up from a death-like sleep, to take us out of the arms of Morpheus. With Mark’s frightened early church, we may again hear good news. Sometimes what seems like death is merely napping. A word fitly spoken, and a life rightly lived may cause us both to arise inspired, and to awake refreshed! For example, this holiday weekend, we may want to remember…

Winthrop

Out on the Massachusetts Bay, in the autumn of 1630, Governor Jonathan Winthrop spoke to frightened pilgrims, half of whom would be gone before spring. One can try to imagine the rolling of the frigate in the surf, out on the Atlantic. One can feel the salt breeze, the water wind of the sea. The Governor is brief, in his sermon for the day: “We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world”. A remarkable, truly remarkable warning, to our country, at the moment of its inception. Do they awaken us to a sense of compunction?

Lincoln

It is a cold day in early March, 1865. Four score and eight years after Independence, the nation has indeed become, as Winthrop prophesied in his Boston sermon, “a story and byword through the world”. 600,000 men will have died by the time Lee and Grant meet at Appomatox, approximately one death for every 10 slaves forcibly brought to the New World. This day in March, Mr. Lincoln delivers his own sermon, to the gathered and, we may assume, chastened congress. It is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address: “The Almighty has His own purposes…Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work that we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Into the next decade the state of Mississippi will spend 20% of its annual budget, each year, for artificial limbs. Lincoln himself will die within weeks.

A remarkable warning. Do these words awaken us
to a sense of contrition?

King

Now we witness another gathering, and we hear another sermon. A hundred more years have past. It is August 28, 1963, a sweltering day in the nation’s capitol. Thousands of women and men have gathered within earshot of Lincoln’s memorial, and within earshot of his Second Inaugural. They have come—maybe some of you were there—with firmness in the right as God gives to see the right, to strive to finish the work. A Baptist preacher captures the moment in ringing oratory: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.”

Remarkable, truly remarkable words. Do they awaken us to a sense of conviction?

Winthrop. Lincoln. King. 1630. 1865. 1963. These are three of the greatest sermons ever preached in our country’s history. Do you notice that not one of them was delivered in a church? Yet they all interpret the church’s Gospel to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Winthrop. Lincoln. King. They believed in God’s providence. They trusted, through terror, in God’s favor. They thought that persons, even they themselves,

had roles to play in the divine human drama. They spoke in a way that awakened the hearer.

They warned of tragedy, they endured tragedy, they honestly acknowledged tragedy. What Winthrop prohesied, and what Lincoln witnessed, and what King addressed is to some degree our national tragedy still. Though there has been progress, we still judge, far too much, by the color of skin and not by the content of character. As Dr Neville well said, from this pulpit last Sunday: Probably the deepest issue in our society is racism, a poisonous stain that mixes evil into the very best of our inventive history of democracy and our love of freedom.

A Sermon on the Mound

But God has not left us, nor does God abandon God’s children. God works through human hearts, to bind up the nation’s wounds. It is the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which will bring peace. The church has nothing better to do, nothing other to do, nothing more important to do, nothing else to do than to preach.

And some of the best preaching happens beyond church. Some is spoken and some is lived. Said Franklin, teaching the two values he thought important—industry and frugality: “none preaches better than the ant, and he says nothing”.

Here is one saving story from which, over time, we may gain strength and insight for our common story, poetry and preaching. For what Whitman said about poetry is doubly true for the Gospel itself: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and the night…Really great poetry is always the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.”

Branch Rickey

Next year we shall pass the 60^th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entrance into major league baseball. 60 years ago, the armed forces were still legally segregated. So were public schools. So, America in 1947, when a tee-totaling, Bible quoting, Republican, Methodist from Ohio, Mr. Branch Rickey, brought racial integration to major league baseball. Who remembers today this lone ranger type who spent most of a lifetime working for one transformation? Rickey was taught the Gospel in a church where there was to be no separation between a deep personal faith and an active social involvement. He was formed at a small Methodist school, Ohio Wesleyan, one of whose Presidents, Bishop James Bashford, peers down on us today from the beautiful stained glass of Marsh Chapel, looking out on Commonwealth Avenue. Rickey was one of those people who just never heard that “it can’t be done”. For thirty years, slowly, painstakingly, he maneuvered and strategized and planned and brought about the greatest change in the history of our national pastime. IT CAN BE DONE. How do I know? I have been watching the Red Sox over the last week! Quite a colorful team. Go to Cooperstown this summer and see the story unfold. There is a sermon on the mound, preached in life, brought to voice through one lone Methodist, in one lone lifetime, in one lone sport, in one lone generation. Things can change for the better. IT CAN BE DONE. But you need a preacher, like Rickey: “I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the reticence of wisdom”.

Where is the Branch Rickey of Wall Street? Where is the Branch Rickey to waken the local church? Where is the Branch Rickey of the urban public schools? Where is the Branch Rickey of your neighborhood? Where is that secular saint who doesn’t realize it can’t be done? Where is the preacher of the next sermon on the mound? And where are the actual preachers of the next generation who will remember and hope in grace and freedom?

Maybe she is here today.

Maybe you are she.

Things can change for the better, when sleepers awake.

I heard William McClain, an African American preacher, tell about growing up in Tuskegee Alabama. He grew up listening to the team Branch Rickey fielded in Brooklyn. “When Jackie stood at the plate, we stood with him. When he struck out we did too. When he hit the ball we jumped and cheered. When he slid home, we dusted off our own pants. When he stole a base, he stole for us. When he hit a home run, we were the victors. And when he was spiked we felt it, a long way away, down south. He gave us hope. He gave us hope.”

Don’t let people tell you things can't change for the better. They can. This country can work. We just need a few more Branch Rickeys.

And a few more sermons on the mound…

posted in Uncategorized on 07.2.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Nearly every commentator today proclaims that our world needs more tolerance and forgiveness, even when they disagree about whom to tolerate and whom to forgive. On this anniversary of 9/11/01, we should weep to see that tolerance and forgiveness are in far shorter supply now than before that date. The American response to the criminal terrorism of 9/11 was to lash out with a “war” on terrorism instead of an international police action and criminal prosecution. Finding no terrorists who wanted a stand-up war, we then attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which had attacked us, overthrowing their governments and driving their people into chaos and devastation. We lied to the world and to ourselves about those governments’ connections with El Qaeda and about our motives for invasion. Our government simply could not tolerate those governments which did not like us. Of course, on the other side the American wars fueled the intolerance and vengefulness of many Muslim people across the globe who identify with Afghanistan and Iraq, recruiting more terrorists than Osama bin Laden’s advertisements ever could. Many non-Muslim nations around the world became intolerand and vengeful against the American way of life because of our response to 9/11. So the world is in a pitiful state, now, with regard to the kinds of tolerance and forgiveness necessary for a world harmony of civilizations.

St. Paul, in our lectionary text this morning, states the case for tolerance and the forgiveness that must accompany it. “Who are you,” he wrote, “to pass judgment on servants of another?” The background of his comment on not passing judgment is that the Roman Christians were a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles, lower class and upper class. The Jews were worried about being kosher, and the lower class people were somewhat superstitious about eating meat that had been slaughtered in sacrifice to idols. In the ancient Roman world most butcher shops were attached to temples—that’s where you got meat, and nearly all meat had been sacrificed to some god or other. In Paul’s sophisticated view, kosher laws were unnecessary and the idols were just statues. He regarded the Christians who wanted to be kosher or to abstain from meat they believed to have been sacrificed to real competing gods as simply weak in the faith of free Christians. But they were true Christians, he believed, and therefore should be welcomed. He called on both sides to tolerate the scruples of the other, saying each side is ultimately responsible to God, not to some principle.

Our text from Exodus does not seem to have much to say about tolerance, quite the contrary. It tells the familiar story of the Red Sea crossing at the beginning of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and the story is very confused. You will remember that the Israelites had gone into Egypt about two centuries previously, where Joseph, son of Jacob, or Israel, had been a high official. The land of Canaan had been in a deep famine, and the Egyptians took the Israelites in as a massive welfare case. Over the years the Israelites multiplied and flourished, and the Egyptians felt they had to suppress them with forced labor. You know the story of the burning bush when God called Moses to go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out to freedom. Moses called down plagues and pestilences upon Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to let his people go. Yet in each instance, God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that he said no. Yes, the Bible is clear that it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart. The final devastating horror was that God went through the land killing all the firstborn of people and animals, passing over only the Israelite families who had slaughtered a lamb or kid and smeared the blood on their doorposts. While the Egyptians were awash in grief, the Israelites stole their valuables and made a dash for the border. When the Pharaoh learned about that, he sent his chariots after the Israelites and our text tells what happened next. God led the people in the form of a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. When the Egyptians approached, God whipped around to the rear to defend the column of slow-moving Israelites. He instructed Moses to hold his hand and his staff over the Red Sea, which parted for the Israelites. The Egyptians in their chariots raced in after them, but their wheels clogged and then God sent back the sea and they were drowned. The Lord arranged all this, the text of Exodus says, so that he might gain “glory for myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his chariot drivers,” in the eyes of both the Egyptians and Israelites. To our modern sensibilities, this seems like somewhat adolescent behavior on God’s part, hardening the Pharaoh’s heart so that God can demonstrate his military glory. In ancient warrior cultures, however, of which Israel was one for a while, such glory-seeking was a virtue. How conceptions of God reflect their cultures is the topic of another sermon!) Of course we do not know whether any of this is historical. No Egyptian records mention anything like the escape of the Israelites or the loss of the entire Egyptian army.

The arbitrariness of God in this story was recognized by the Jewish rabbis early on. They tell about a victory party in heaven the night after the Israelites escaped through the Red Sea. Since God had done the fighting for the Israelites, the heavenly host was celebrating the victory of their divine hero. But God was found weeping. “Why?,” he was asked. “Although I rejoice for my children, the Israelites,” God answered, “I sorrow for my children, the Egyptians.”

In the rabbis’ tale lies a fundamental principle for tolerance, namely, that the feelings of all sides need to be taken into account. Or to put the point more theologically, God is as close to any one people as God is to any other. All are children of God. Of course, to understand God’s dealings with people in the form of a story, as the Exodus account is a story, is always to adopt the particular perspective of the story. The Exodus is a great model of freedom for Israel, but a model of ingratitude and thievery for the Egyptians and an utter disaster for the people of Canaan on whom the Israelites fell next. The stories of the Egyptians and Canaanites cast very different lights on Israel’s story of itself.

Let’s think about conflicting stories for a moment, as we try to understand Christian tolerance after 9/11. We Christians like to tell a story of ourselves as spreading a religion of love, peace, and justice through a world where those ways of relating to God and to one another are in short supply. Our story includes the Christianization of the Roman Empire, of Europe, of the Americas, and many parts of Asia and Africa. When Jews tell their story of Christianity, however, with two thousand years of Christian persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, the Christian self-image can be viewed only as outrageous hypocrisy.

A few weeks ago we witnessed the bitter grief of Jewish settlers being forced out of their homes in Gaza by their own army. For many of the settlers, that was like what happened to their European parents and grandparents under the anti-Semites. Yet, whatever you think about the justice of that forcible removal, we can hope that it will give the people of Israel deeper insight into the Palestinians’ insistence on the right of return to their own homes from which they were forcibly removed when the modern State of Israel was founded. Will the Israelis come to understand that the Palestinians have a similar story?

Or consider the story we Americans tell of ourselves regarding the founding of our nation. Good, upstanding, educated colonists led a revolution to separate Americ
a from the British Empire, because the economic and political policies of the Empire denied the freedom of the Americans to develop our own economic and political interests. The Americans’ scrappy little standing army, led by George Washington, could rarely win a stand-up battle against the vastly more powerful British war machine, with its trained mercenaries, supplied by the best navy in the world. So the war was fought mainly by colonial guerilla insurgencies that kept the British off guard, disrupted their supplies, and finally made the suppression of the insurgency too costly, especially when the French intervened to block the British navy and the support for the war diminished in Britain. We won that war, and when the British came back in 1812, we beat them again, pretty much the same way. Americans love the underdog, the resourceful people that get around the imperial economic machines and do not let more powerful people tell them what to do. That story is an essential component of our special sense of freedom and democracy. Now you know where I am going with this point. What people have a story like ours today? The Iraqi insurgents, of course. And we Americans are playing the role of the British Empire. Many dis-analogies exist between the American revolutionary situation and that of contemporary Iraq, and these should not be discounted. Nevertheless, the positive analogy of these stories is very strong.

Tolerance requires that we disengage ourselves from our own stories somewhat and see those stories from the standpoint of the others involved. The examples I have cited illustrate different ways in which national or religious stories relate. The stories of the Israelites, Egyptians, and Canaanites about the Exodus illustrate how one event can play very different and morally conflicting roles in the separate stories of the participants. The views of the Christians and Jews about Christian history illustrate how different perspectives within a single story give rise to radically different interpretations. The stories of modern Jews and Palestinians about their being forcibly removed from their homes, and the violence this justifies as counter-measures, illustrate how similar stories with heroes and villains reversed can lead to irresolvable conflicts. Northern Ireland has this kind of conflict of stories. So does the recent history of Muslims and Hindus in Pakistan and India. The similarity between the American revolution and the Iraqi insurgency illustrates the irony when one story defining heroes and villains becomes the narrative framework of another situation with the heroes of the first becoming the villains of the second.

Now I submit that tolerance is impossible so long as any group identifies itself with its story, or interpretation of a larger story, without also being able to honor the alternatives. The real problem is that God’s creation is too rich to be reduced to self-identity through narratives. We are tempted to solve the problem by enlarging the stories to be all inclusive. Where that is possible, all to the good. For instance, Christian self-understanding can be enlarged to acknowledge persecution of Jews, with appropriate repentance. We Americans can enlarge our current story to see how we have betrayed our founding story of freedom and respect for the underdog in our current policies. But sometimes mere enlargement of stories is not possible. Sometimes conflicts are real, and to maintain a close hold on our own story is to be committed to an intolerant narrative. A few weeks ago I preached against what theologians call the narrative understanding of Christianity, one based on a cosmic story of God fighting the forces of evil. That kind of narrative shrinks God into a finite, parochial player in a larger cosmic drama within which God might be the biggest and best but surely not the creator of the whole. Such a narrative is also a formula for hate, because it misleads people into hating those whom they believe God hates.

The Christian gospel instead builds on the rabbis’ understanding of God’s tears for the Egyptians. God is the creator of the whole cosmos, and all people are equally God’s children. Fundamental Christian tolerance relates to other people through our and their relation to God, not directly through our conflicting stories. Paul was exactly right when he said, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” This is to say, we do not live and die as defined by our own stories. “If we live,” said Paul, “we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” The same thing is true of every other people, regardless of their being Jew or Gentile, Christian or any other religion, virtuous or disgustingly sinful. Our primal identity is our relation to God in our own context, and that relation to God includes relating to other people as also first related to God in their context, and only secondarily as interacting with us in our context. Our fundamental relation to other people should be to treat them as living and dying to God, whose children they are.

No moral relativism lurks here, because we all, ourselves and all those others, stand under judgment to God. But we cannot make any deep, ontological judgment on those others, as Jesus remarked in the Sermon on the Mount. That judgment belongs to God. Because of this, our fundamental attitude toward others needs to be tolerance. Our proximate moral judgments need to be made in terms of our best understanding that is informed by stories in part, by historical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological understanding, by the critical imagination of the arts, and by experience of practical life. Most of all, our proximate moral judgments need to be informed by the conviction at the heart of our faith that even our enemies are loved by God and should be loved by us even when we have to oppose them. This is the meaning of Christian tolerance. Because we sometimes do have to oppose people, tolerance requires forgiveness, our forgiveness of them, their forgiveness of us, and God’s forgiveness of all. Paul said,

Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.

Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 09.11.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Let me reiterate my welcome to you this morning, especially to the new students and their families who are here for the first time. Because we are in the middle of a worship ritual, it is fair to point out that going away to college is itself a ritual act of great importance. Of course, it is not only a ritual: it is a real life transformation. Yet it has a ritual quality to it, a culturally defined celebration of a life change. In American society, going away to college, or I should say from the university pulpit, coming to college, marks the passage from childhood in the care of family to adulthood in the care of one’s own responsibility. People who do not go to college, or leave home for the military or make some other such culturally defined break from childhood often do not realize when adult responsibilities are upon them. The ritual character of coming of age by coming to college is extremely important.

The ancient Romans also had an important coming of age ritual, at least for the young men. Among other things it involved putting on clothes that only adult males were allowed to wear. The ceremony involved a young man being given an adult toga by his father, or some father surrogate. The Latin word for clothes is the root of our word “vestments.” The liturgical vestments that Dean Olson, Dean Young-Scaggs, and I are wearing in fact are ancient Roman costumes worn by government officials. We today have radically different clothes for our government officials, except for judges, and the Roman vestments linger on in church life rather than government because they have taken up a liturgical role within Christian history. Worship leaders in some Christian churches wear no special liturgical vestments. When I grew up in Missouri, most of the Methodist ministers wore black doctoral gowns to lead worship; few of them had Ph.D. degrees, although liturgical custom said it was alright for ministers to dress like Ph.D.s when leading worship. Our own vestments at Marsh Chapel reflect an older kind of Methodism with roots in Anglicanism and before that in medieval Christianity. I doubt that the leaders of Christian worship in the first three centuries wore robes like ours, because few if any were Roman senators. Only after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century was it likely that worship leaders dressed like government officials.

I am not stressing the importance of liturgical vestments because I think there is one right way for liturgical leaders to dress, or even because I think liturgical vestments are important for anything except contributing to a consistent and symbolically rich, historically sensitive, service of worship. Rather, I stress the importance of vestments because of our text from St. Paul, where he says to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” What does he mean by “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ”? He means to vest oneself in the clothing of the Christian Way. Just as a Roman adolescent boy becomes a man by putting on the tunic signifying adulthood, Paul was saying, so would-be Christians should become Christians by putting on the Way of Jesus Christ.

One of the most famous conversions in Christian history was that of Saint Augustine in the fourth century, and I follow the interpretation of that conversion given by the theologian Carl Vaught. Augustine had been raised as a Christian by a pious mother, but had fallen away from her faith. As a young man he became a successful teacher of rhetoric and, hunting for a religion, tried out, first, the religion of the Manicheans and, then, the philosophical and religious practices of the Neo-Platonists. More than religious experimentation, however, he fell into a life of partying and sexual excess. (I am not suggesting that he was like anyone you will meet here at Boston University, you understand!) Augustine was tempted back toward Christianity, although he could not bring himself to affirm it. He prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet!” One day he was in a garden with a friend, in a terribly wrought-up state of mind about whether to convert to the Christian faith. He heard some children on the other side of the garden wall chanting a game-rhyme that meant “take up and read, take up and read.” So he took up a copy of the New Testament lying on the garden table and read our passage from Romans: “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Suddenly he knew what he had to do. He decided then and there to put off his way of life, which St. Paul called the way of the flesh, and to put on the Christian life. He put off the licentious way of life in which he had vested himself and put on the vestments of Christ’s Way. He had not solved all of his theological problems. He did not know yet the full implications of giving up the life he had been leading to take on the Christian life. Nevertheless, he put on the Lord Jesus’ Christ’s Way of life from that day forward and became one of the most important Christian leaders and thinkers ever.

What is the Christian Way summed up in the phrase, the Lord Jesus Christ? We know from the gospels that it does not necessarily have to do with giving up partying, sex, or riches, since Jesus was positive about all those things. Augustine had to give up those things because they were holding him in bondage so that, because of them, he could not put on the Lord Jesus Christ. In our text from Paul, the Christian way is beautifully described:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

That was Paul writing to the Romans. But possibly you noticed that he was quoting and glossing sayings of Jesus.

The big question for us is, how do we learn to love like that? It is one thing to say that we belong to a religion of love, and there are several such religions. It is quite another thing to put on the vestments of that religion so that we become lovers, as God is a lover. Of course, I don’t mean that you have to put on religious clothing, dressing like a Roman senator or a person with a Ph.D. Some Christians, like some Buddhists, do wear special clothes to indicate their invested religious identity. The true vestments of Christianity, however, have a lot to do with whom you associate with in your work and leisure. Augustine immediately told his friend, Alypius, who was in the garden with him, about his conversion and Alypius too converted and they began to help one another. So it will help you to cultivate Christian friends. It will help to join Christian groups. You are welcome in any of the groups we have at Marsh Chapel. It will help to read the Bible and theology, and to talk with serious friends about the meaning of the Christian life. It will help to develop habits of prayer and meditation. It will help to come to regular worship and meet people who are at very different stages in their practice of the Christian Way of love. For many people here, the true Christian vestments are brand new; for others they are nicely worn and comfortable. The Christian life is not basically about beliefs or even virtues. The Christian life is about putting on a pattern of behavior associated with Jesus Christ that leads to the cultivation of the way of love as Jesus taught and practiced.

So I invite you to invest yourselves this morning in the Way of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even the financial meaning of the word “inve
stment” derives from “putting on” the fortunes of the company in which you invest: the future of that company is your financial future when you give it your money. For you to invest yourselves in the Way of Jesus Christ, however, is not to have a balanced portfolio. I presume all of you students will try on the vestments of different religions. Everyone who reads the Daodejing becomes a Daoist for at least as long as it takes to clean their room and drink some tea. You will make friends with people who are deeply invested in different religious traditions from your own, and you might for a while invest with them for the sake of friendship. All that is to the good! But sometime you will need to invest all your heart, soul, mind, and strength in some particular Way, such as the Way of the Lord Jesus Christ. That Way has many forms, and it might take years to find those forms that suit your own life, that lead you to greater love. I admit that some forms of Christianity for some people lead them to lives of resentment, small-mindedness, and hate. But I urge you to invest in that Christian Way that leads to life and love.

The central ritual of the Way of the Lord Jesus Christ is the communion or Eucharist that we are about to celebrate. I invite you to put on the Lord Jesus Christ by coming to his table. No membership requirements exist for you to put on Jesus Christ at this table, for Jesus did not eat only with his disciples. No virtue requirements exist for you to put on Jesus Christ at this table, for Jesus ate with sinners as well as saints. No constancy or commitment requirements exist for you to put on Christ at this table, for Jesus never insisted that people come back. If you are here just because of custom, not commitment, come put on Jesus Christ and see whether things get serious. If you are curious about Christianity and its theology, come to this table to put on its intellectual Way for a while. If you are filled with doubts and rebellion, come put on Jesus Christ and see how doubts are contained within the Christian Way. If you already have put on Jesus Christ, come to his table to celebrate with his people. If you want to become better at the Christian Way, come to his table and put on Christ’s nourishment. If you are an outsider, come to the table and put on the fellowship of Jesus Christ. If you feel unworthy and ashamed, guilty and filled with self-condemnation, come to this table and put on the Lord Jesus Christ in whom there is no condemnation, for this table has the food of life. If you do not know how to love as God loves, put on Jesus Christ at this table and you will begin to learn. At this time of ritual transformation, where going to college means putting on adult responsibility, I invite you to do this by investing in the Lord Jesus Christ, our Way, Truth, and Life. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 09.4.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

St. Paul appeals to his Roman readers, and to us, “to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is [our] spiritual worship.” Because we have become so familiar with this phrase, it is worthwhile to reflect on how radical it is. Sacrifice, in Paul’s time, was a very common religious observance, practiced not only among Jews in Temple worship but also by the official pagan cult of Rome and nearly every other religion in that very pluralistic environment: Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, the Egyptian religion of Isis and Osiris, Celtic religions, and the religious practices of the peoples from the Steppes of what is now Russia. Although the religions differed in the manner and context of sacrifices, sacrifices took place frequently and were an ordinary part of their world. In the official Roman religion the patriarch of the family would perform a brief sacrifice with each evening meal, according to some scholars. In the Jewish religion of which Jesus was a part, there were four major yearly festivals of sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem plus dozens of other occasions each year in which people could make sacrifices, or pay priests to sacrifice for them.

Whereas Paul enjoins us to be living sacrifices, in all these religions, the thing sacrificed was a dead animal, not a living human being. Sometimes grain was offered, but that was not a sacrifice in the full sense. In the sacrifice, an animal was cut up and its parts re-arranged or redistributed so as to reinforce what the religious group believed is the proper divine ordering of the cosmos. For instance, in the Jewish sacrificial cult, some part of the animal is burned on the altar so as to go to God, some of the meat is given to the priests, other parts of the animal to the people making the sacrificial donation, and the blood is treated as sacred, usually splashed on the altar. This division marks out the distinctions between the divinity, the servants of the divinity, the people whose allegiance is to the divinity, and the fact that the divine ordering is a life and death matter, a matter of life-blood.

In some vague way, the sacrificial re-arrangement of the parts of the animal not only reflects pre-given distinctions within the religious dimension, it helps to create them. In the ancient world, a great many people believed that a failure to observe proper sacrifices would let the world slip into confusion and chaos. You will remember that St. Paul believed that the world had slipped to such a great confusion of the powers of evil and good that only the sacrifice of the Son of God could restore things to their rightful order. The ancient civilizations of India and China also were shaped with ideas and practices of sacrifices such as these.

These sensibilities are so alien to our own that we find it hard to take them seriously. Few of us sit easily with Paul’s frequent interpretation of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. Read the early chapters of the book of Leviticus to see detailed prescriptions for a variety of sacrifices that are the background of our Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Understanding what sacrifice meant in the ancient world is crucial for understanding what is demanded of us who do not take the language and practice of sacrifice seriously.

The first radical thing in Paul’s admonition to us to be living sacrifices is that we are human beings, not animals. Of course, many religions, especially in times before Jesus and Paul, had practiced human sacrifice, with the same intent as animal sacrifice: to bring order to the cosmos regarding relations between divinity and human life. Given the vigor with which Hebrew Bible writers condemn human sacrifice, it probably was the case that the early worship of Yahweh included it. Or perhaps it is better to say that the early worship of Yahweh was mixed together with the worship of other gods and somewhere along the line human sacrifice was included. But the strain of Israelite religion that came down to Jesus as the worship practice of Second Temple Judaism strongly condemned human sacrifice. How daring of Paul, then, good Pharisee that he was, to advocate that Christians regard themselves as sacrifices, restoring the cult of human sacrifice! Imagine this: we Christians believe in a strange form of human sacrifice, if we take Paul seriously!

Paul’s point in our Epistle today, of course, is that we should be living sacrifices, not dead ones to be dismembered with our body parts re-arranged. Therefore, his sense of human sacrifice did not involve killing anyone. In fact, for Paul, Jesus’ sacrifice unto death was the final, once-for-all, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. No one else ever again needs to be sacrificed to set right the relation between God and human beings, good and evil. The significance of Jesus’ atoning death was that Jesus did it! We do not have to atone for our sins, only accept God’s mercy. Moreover, for us to think that we do need to atone for our sins, to wallow in that guilt, is itself another sin, the sin of rejecting God’s forgiving grace in Jesus. The good news of the gospel is that we are freed from the guilty life for which a sacrifice might be required to set in right order, because that sacrifice has already been made, once and for all. At least this is the way Paul saw it in his world with its understanding of sacrifice.

With this in mind, we can understand some of the Christian symbolism that is obscure to our modern sensibilities. How were the body parts of Jesus, the human sacrifice, re-arranged? Most obviously, Jesus, once dead, came to life again, signifying that in the cosmic order of things, life trumps death; God is the God of the living. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into heaven signified that the way to God is open to human beings, after it had been confused or made chaotic by sin. In this respect, Paul called Jesus the first-born of many who will get to God. Yet in another symbolic sense, Jesus left his flesh and blood with us in the Eucharistic practice of his community. Each communion is a symbolic mini-sacrifice in which we, God’s people, get a share of the body of Christ, like in the ancient Mediterranean evening meal sacrifice.

With these reflections on the background of sacrificial thinking in Paul’s time, we can look more directly at his plea that Christians become living sacrifices to God. When he said we should present our “bodies” as living sacrifices, by “bodies” he meant our whole selves, not just our minds or souls or spirits. For Paul, and Christians generally, we are our visible, material bodies, and our bodies are more than mechanical bits of flesh, blood, bone, and nerve. Harmonized as living organisms, our bodies produce or embody all those realities of mind and heart, soul and spirit that we sometimes distinguish from body. A dead body, of course, is just a body. A living body is a person. Paul said to present our whole selves, our persons, to God as a living sacrifice.

But of course presenting our whole selves includes presenting our bodies, and this part of Paul’s plea that we be living sacrifices has enormous consequences. We need to take care of our bodies, if not for our own enjoyment, then in order to be worthy living sacrifices. In ancient Jewish law, only animals without blemish could be used in sacrifices, and in some occasions only priests without bodily blemish could perform the sacrifices. Paul was contradicting this point of Jewish law by saying that everyone should present themselves, not only those with unblemished bodies, or even unblemished character. Remember in our Epistle he went on to say that people
are different in their skills and also in their degrees of faith, yet all are members of one body. So we should understand that we need to make the best of the bodies that our genes and the accidents of our lives have given us. Some people are healthy, others sickly, some strong, others disabled, some naturally talented, others klutzes, some young, others old, some beautiful, others blemished. For instance, whenever my dermatologist examines me, he mutters under his breath about all the weeds in God’s garden of life. Or consider that in the history of Western Christian art, St. Paul is always represented as bald, an affliction I take more seriously than most! We have to make do with the bodies we have. Paul’s point was that we need to take as good care as possible of our bodies because we present them to God as our spiritual worship.

So fat America needs to wake up and diet if we are going to present our bodies as our spiritual worship! Starving ourselves to look like Twiggy is no spiritual improvement. Lazy muscles need to go to the gym. Those of us who do enough manual labor to stay fit need to take care that we not abuse our bodies. The poverty that makes some people starve or abuse their bodies with too much work is not only intrinsically unjust but also an impediment to spiritual worship. Nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and other mood altering drugs have the potential to ruin the bodies we offer to God. People with chronic conditions such as hypertension or diabetes need to take special care to remain healthy. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Our bodies are not just for us, they are our sacrificial offering to God. They are part of our ultimate responsibility, and we need to be serious in their care. The reason for this is that they are God’s gift, and the only truthful way to be alive before God is to be grateful.

Our spiritual worship, Paul was saying, does not mean just going to church. In fact, in this whole section of his letter Paul does not mention worship in the sense of church liturgy, although I will not make too much of this point because I am very glad you are here. Rather, Paul meant that our spiritual worship is how we live in the whole of our lives. What we present to God as holy and acceptable is not our ritual liturgy but the whole of what we do and make of ourselves. Actually, one of the meanings of the ancient word from which “liturgy” comes is “work.” In that ancient sense, our entire lives are our “work,” our liturgies.

Paul said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The problem with this world, Paul thought, rightly I believe, is that it is a confusion of good and evil, a debilitating mixture of the sacred and the alienated, a chaos of responsibilities considered in ultimate perspective. When we pursue holiness as living sacrifices, in our many small ways we do bring a proper divine order out of this confusion and chaos. The activities of our living members move the cosmos to better order, just as they believed about sacrifice in the ancient world. Now I do not mean that morality will ever be simple and unambiguous. What is good for some people is often bad for others, and often we need to make choices between the greater of goods and the lesser of evils. Inevitably we are guilty of wrong-doing even when we are doing our best. And sometimes we cannot even understand what we are doing. Thank the merciful God for creating a religion for sinners!

My point, however, is that to be a living sacrifice is to sort out how we relate to God in everything we do, and to put first things first. Paul said that we should renew our minds so that we may “discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Although life is complicated and morally ambiguous, we still have guidelines for being living sacrifices. In the passage immediately following our text from Romans Paul wrote:

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

You see from these guidelines about what is good and acceptable and perfect, what a difficult job we have to be living sacrifices, so that through our lives we can move the world toward a divine order.

In a society that defines love as self-interest and in a country whose government justifies heinous crimes by citing America’s self interest, we need grace to make love be genuine, to separate ourselves from evil, and cling to the good. In a society that fosters exploitation of neighbor and with a government that insists on being honored above others, we need grace to practice mutual affection and compete in honoring one another. In a society of physical and spiritual couch potatoes, we need grace to serve God with zeal and an ardent spirit. In a land where the rich get richer and the poor poorer, we need grace to sustain hope, patience in suffering, and continued prayer. When we are taught to take care of our own and to condemn people who are different from ourselves, we need grace to serve the saints and extend hospitality to strangers. In a society whose government believes that bending others to our will is macho, we need grace to bless those who persecute us. In a consumerist culture that teaches that joy can be bought, we need grace to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. In a political culture that believes that dominating others is the way to harmony, we need grace to live in harmony without being haughty and to know the limits of our wisdom about what is good for others. In a country that suffered evil from criminal terrorists and responded by declaring a war on terrorism and, finding insufficient numbers of terrorists willing to stand up and be warred upon, attacked two countries that did not attack us, killing more people than all the victims of terrorism combined over the last century, we need grace not to repay evil for evil and to take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. In a nation that votes in politicians who like war, it takes grace to live peaceably with all. In the richest and most powerful nation in Earth’s history which still believes it needs to take vengeance on those who oppose its will for them, it takes grace never to avenge ourselves and to leave judgment to God. How can we not be overcome by all this evil, but overcome evil with good, except by grace?

Brothers and sisters, I assure you that we have the grace to present our bodies as living sacrifices, wholly and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. Let the witness of our lives call the world to love, goodness, affection, honor, zeal, service, hope, patience, prayer, charity, hospitality, blessing the persecutors, sharing joy and sorrow, harmony, humility, wisdom, forbearance of vengeance, and the overcoming of evil with good. These things are God’s order, and our living sacrifice can make them happen. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 08.21.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 45:1-15

Psalm 133

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

The Jesus Christ whom we encounter in our worship and hymns, in our formal theology and stories, even in the Bible, is someone who has lived in the minds and hearts of Christians through the ages, including ourselves; we have Jesus present to us through people’s memories and interpretations. We do not encounter the subjective person Jesus, any more than we encounter today George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Some people would say therefore that we do not encounter the real Jesus, that we engage merely the Jesus of other people’s memories. But the real identity of Jesus includes how he is understood and remembered by others. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have identities that include a lot more than their personal experience: they really live in the memories of others and in the consequences of their actions long after their deaths. Everyone’s identity is not merely their personal subjective experience but also how they are perceived by others and how they affect things around them, perhaps for hundreds of years. This larger sense of identity is that for which we are responsible before God, although, of course, we are not entirely responsible for how people understand us.

Jesus’ identity was not limited to his subjective experience even when he was alive in the ordinary sense, teaching the disciples. They tried hard to understand him, forming tentative images and ideas of him and his teachings in their own imaginations. Jesus was often critical of how they understood him: witness his impatience with their lack of understanding of his parable in the Gospel today. The disciples received rather quick feedback from him when their imaginative interpretations of his identity were off the mark.

We have the same situation. You know how it is when you want friends to understand you: you can tell from what they do and say what their images of you are, and you try to correct them so that they conform to your image of yourself. Of course, sometimes we do not understand our own identity, and a friend’s image might be closer to the mark. We pay psychotherapists big bucks to form images of us that reveal more deeply who we really are. Our true identity might include things we never would have thought about. For instance, we often find that we play important roles for other people of which we had not been aware, leading them astray, perhaps, involving them in a dysfunctional family situation, or serving as a healthy model, leading them to greater virtue and independence. Anyone who has a public role in life, and we all do in small if not large ways, has an identity that is more than the way we subjectively experience ourselves. Sometimes we can control and be responsible for elements in that public role. Other times our public life gives us an identity over which we have no control. When that is good, we rejoice in good fortune and, when that extended public identity is bad, we complain about fate.

So Jesus’ identity was not limited to his subjective personal experience. Nor was it limited to his identity for his disciples who could easily check out their understanding. Jesus personally thought of himself as a Jewish reformer, not the founder of a new religion; yet the early Christians extended his identity to be the founder of a movement named after his title as Christ. Jesus personally thought of himself as chosen by God to head a kingdom of justice dominated by the twelve tribes of Israel; that’s why he chose twelve special apostles, one to represent each tribe; yet St. Paul extended his identity to be a divine agent in a cosmic narrative for conquering Satan and the forces of evil, a conception wholly alien to Jesus’ personal way of thinking. Jesus in no way, personally speaking, thought of himself as divine—that would have been idolatry to any faithful Jew of his time; yet the conviction that he was divine, on the part of his followers in the early centuries, led to calling him the Second Person of the Trinity constituting God’s nature. Jesus personally knew nothing about worship of himself, especially led by people in priestly garb taken from the costumes of Roman senators, which would have astonished him. He knew nothing of his role in the worship life of monks and nuns in monasteries, or in the prayer life of Protestants, or in the setting of policies in mainline Churches today for charity in Africa. Yet in a very real sense, the Jesus who lives in all those movements that have taken place in his name has the identity given him by all those living roles. That is his public identity.

Of course, not every interpretation of Jesus in contexts beyond those he knew personally is valid, any more than his immediate disciples always understood him rightly. Jesus’ name has been taken for causes that he would abhor. We need to remember that the ovens in the Nazi prison camps were turned off only for Christmas and Easter, a perverse embodiment of Christianity. The problem of the validity of an extension of Jesus’ identity is particularly acute when the extension is to some kind of role that a human person cannot play, as when Jesus is identified with the symbol of the cosmic Christ, or the Second Person of the Trinity. Not every extension of Jesus’ identity by Christian communities is valid.

The doctrine of the Church in this regard is that these extensions need to be supported by the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit that interprets for us what is Jesus Christ’s true and new identity. Of course, we then need to identify the true Holy Spirit when our world is filled with so many spirits that seem to tell us what is divine. The tests of the Holy Spirit lie in its fruits, as you know: do interpretations of Jesus, and practices based on them, lead to joy, peace, patience, righteousness, piety, faith, hope, and love? Or do they lead to sourness, agitation, belligerence, self-righteousness, selfishness, denial, despair, or hate?

The feedback-testing our long extensions of Jesus’ identity is more indirect and takes a lot longer than the feedback Jesus gave to his immediate disciples. Yet the feedback is exceedingly fine. We are beginning to see now, for instance, that the belief that Jesus is God’s divine agent in a great cosmic drama of struggle with the forces of evil, leading to Armageddon, is a very dangerous image of Jesus. So many Christians who believe that fail to distinguish between their putative role in fighting God’s battles and God’s approval of their battles. When their own battles, which they assume have God’s blessing, are frustrated, they fall into deep resentment of ways of life other than their own, bitter defensiveness, readiness to go to war, arrogance about their own causes, greed for power, denial of evidence that they might be in the wrong, spiteful despair of reconciliation with enemies they are supposed to love, and delight in the hate of those they brand as God’s enemies. The fruits of the Spirit test out against the Christianity that takes Jesus to be God’s avenger, even when that image is in the Bible, as it is in the Book of Revelation.

One of the principle anchors for our understanding of the identity of Jesus is our grasp of who he was historically. Of course, we know that our knowledge of his historical identity is limited, and always filtered through sources such as the Bible and our traditions. But our gospel text today gives us an interesting insight.

When approached by the Canaanite woman, Jesus at first declined to help her, saying that his mission was only to the lost sheep of Israel. This reflected his understanding of himself as a Jewish reformer, somewhat in the mold of the prophets. He knew about other ethnic peoples, of course. He was rai
sed in Nazareth, which was about five miles from a new city that was being built by the Romans; since his family was in the building trades he had much connection with the Romans; the gospels tell several stories of his interactions with them as an adult. He preached in Greek towns, and probably spoke a version of Greek. Many Semitic peoples besides Jews lived in Palestine at his time, and in our particular story he was in Syria where he met the Canaanite woman. Yet at first he identified himself as a prophet for the children of Israel alone, to the exclusion of others.

As we learned, the Canaanite woman changed his mind. So far as I know, this is the only incident in the gospels in which Jesus is shown admitting he was wrong and learning something new. Those of you who look to highlight the accomplishments of women can point with pride to this story. Not only was she a woman, she was a Canaanite, belonging to a people whom the Israelites were supposed to have dispossessed from the land. Some of you saw the advertisement last Friday in the New York Times and perhaps other papers in the form of an open letter to President Bush from seven Lubavitcher rabbis and a lay person claiming that God owns everything and gave the whole Land of Israel to the Jews; they claimed that the eviction of Jewish settlers from occupied territories is a violation of God’s will and that President Bush had been appointed by God to bring peace and triumph over evil by protecting God’s people, by whom they meant the Jews, and their Holy Land. People today still believe that those other than Jews should be dispossessed from Palestine. Yet even in Jesus’ time, it was recognized as a land for many people. Because of the Canaanite woman, Jesus came to see that his mission was not only to Israel, but to all who come seeking faith. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is quoted as sending his friends to make disciples of all nations, a direct turnabout from his earlier preoccupation with Israel alone.

From the beginning, so far as we can gather, Jesus had a revolutionary table fellowship. That is, he talked, ate, and drank with women as well as men, with poor people and rich people, with prostitutes, tax collectors, and various other sinners. He not only said that we should not judge others—judgment belongs to God—but that we should love them, even our enemies. In all of this, he was running against the customs and morality of his Jewish community, at least as he conceived it. Yet that inclusiveness might have been limited to people within that community. His lesson from the Canaanite woman opened the door to an inclusiveness that went well beyond the limits of the kosher. This lesson was confirmed by St. Peter, as recorded in Acts 10-11, when he had a vision of unclean things that were permissible to eat and accepted the dinner invitation of a Roman.

The extension of Christianity beyond the Jewish world to the many worlds of the Gentiles was not an easy thing for early Christianity. St. Paul argued strongly for it, and eventually won out. But the extension is still not complete today. In this day of religious as well as economic globalization, we have mastered the art of indigenizing Christianity to many cultures, even those very far from the traditional cultures of European Christianity. But we have not mastered the art of letting Christianity serve all cultures, regardless of whether people in those cultures want to become Christians. Too often, we have taken Jesus’ commandment to “make disciples of all nations” to mean to recruit Christians in all nations. This interpretation is fine so far as it goes, but is too narrow. Our Christian discipleship is to offer God’s hospitality to everyone. God’s creative love can bring renewal and blessing to anyone, and it is offered universally. Our job as disciples is to invite people into that divine love so that they can be renewed and blessed. Jesus did not ask the Canaanite woman to sign up as his follower. He simply healed her daughter.

The first principle of offering God’s hospitality is to respect people for who they are. This means accepting them in their own religions, in their own social cultures, and in their own political interests, even when they oppose our own. Of course we are not without moral standards. These standards include those values I mentioned a moment ago: joy, peace, patience, righteousness, piety, faith, hope, and love, and all the institutions of life that support these things and oppose sourness of spirit, agitation, belligerence, self-righteousness, selfishness, denial, despair, and hate. These virtues and vices are universal to all religions, and to the great philosophies of secular culture. We Christians should guide our own behavior by them. But under no circumstances can we use them to judge others. Judgment of others belongs to God alone. Our role as Christians is to host other people as they come to God, and to host God’s creative love in the lives of those other people. True Christian discipleship is to give away the privileges of membership in Christian culture and to cultivate a Christian culture of conveying God’s love to others, in whatever language and religious forms do the job. As Jesus came to see, when confronted by the Canaanite woman, the radical openness of God’s love embraces even those whom our religion has taught us to exclude. What a radical transformation for world history!

Just how did the Canaanite woman teach this momentous lesson? She did two things. First, she demanded access to God’s healing power that she saw in Jesus. Who among the world’s suffering masses has not called out for relief in some language or other? Second, she used the power of humility to undermine the icy refusal of privilege. Jesus said that only the people of Israel were privileged to receive his holy meal of the healing grace of God. She said that even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table. If the people of Israel, or we self-proclaimed Christians, sit at the table of privilege regarding God’s grace, she and the other outsiders will crawl to the floor to eat the crumbs. Immediately the claims of privilege dissolved in embarrassment at the arbitrary restriction of grace. Of course he healed her daughter!

What do we learn of Jesus’ contemporary identity from this story from his ancient personal life? Our Lord leads us today to examine our religion to ask whether we are working to serve our religious community to the exclusion of others, or are we forming our Christian community to host others in the presence of God. How do we serve the Muslims and Jews, the Hindus and the Buddhists, the Confucians and Daoists, the secular people and the wretched of the Earth who lack even any religion whatsoever? Do we ask first whether they might become Christians? Shame! Let us ask first how God can bless them. Our Lord also leads us to look for great faith in others, any longing for connection with God that might bring joy, peace, patience, righteousness, piety, faith, hope, and love. Even when we do not have that faith ourselves, we need to seek it out in others and bring it into the presence of God as we can. As for ourselves, what we learn from this critical point in Jesus’ evolving identity is that the hero in the story is not the disciples, not even Jesus: it is the outsider woman whose faith led her to such humble self-abasement that Jesus’ inherited sense of privilege for his own people was emptied. If only we had the power of her faith, think of what we could do!

Who was Jesus? He was a man of God who learned the universal showering of God’s love despite himself, when confronted by a faith whose humility undermined his sense of privilege. Who is Jesus today? He continues to be the mediator of God and the soul of the Church who, among other things, teaches us to empty even our Christianity’s sense of privilege for the sake of those who call upon God. This is Jesus’ identity as our present and risen Lord. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 08.14.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel or divine being—Jacob thought it was God—is a classic story of struggle to win a blessing. Sleeping in the open by himself after having sent his family, flocks and troops on ahead, Jacob was engaged by a man or angel or god in a wrestling match that lasted all night. Jacob was ferociously strong, a point made earlier in the narrative when on two occasions he lifted huge stones that usually could be moved only by several men working together. The god could not get away from Jacob, but had to do so because, according to ancient beliefs, the god could not last in the light of day. Even after the god sprained Jacob’s hip, Jacob held on. Jacob demanded a blessing, and at last the god relented and gave Jacob a new name, “Israel,” which meant that Jacob would be the father of that great people, Israel. Jacob demanded to know the god’s name, but the god refused; in ancient times it was thought that to know a person’s real name is to have some power over him. Jacob was satisfied that he had seen God face to face and lived; indeed, Jacob’s physical encounter with the god was more intimate than merely seeing. So, the first-level moral of the story is that you can wrestle with God to win a new divinely-blessed identity, and also to see God face to face. Jacob is the model of the spiritual striver, indeed perhaps of the mystic.

This incident takes on added significance when read in the context of the overall Jacob story, which runs from Genesis 25 to 35. That story is an artful contrivance based on the plot of Jacob’s birth, his fleeing from home, and living for twenty years with his shifty uncle Laban while he marries two of Laban’s daughters plus two concubines, and has twelve children by the four of them. He becomes vastly wealthy. Then Jacob returns home with all his belongings; the wrestling match takes place on the homeward journey. The art of the story is that the incidents on the outward journey are paralleled by incidents on the homeward journey. For instance, Jacob is born competing with Esau, his twin brother who was first out of the womb, and the end of the story has the brothers living peacefully and happily together. As a young man, Jacob cheats Esau out of their father’s blessing by disguising himself as Esau. Esau is furious, and Jacob flees to his uncle Laban, ostensibly to find a wife. Parallel to this, Esau welcomes Jacob back with much forgiveness on the return home. While fleeing Esau on the outward journey, Jacob has the dream about angels going up and down on the ladder to heaven, and this is paralleled by our story of the wrestling match with a god just before Jacob meets Esau for their reconciliation. The land Jacob flees to, Haran, is the place where his grandfather, Abraham, originally came from, and Uncle Laban is the brother of Jacob’s mother, Rebecca. So Jacob’s wives are his first cousins, keeping the heritage all in the family, as it were. Even Jacob’s flocks are taken from Laban’s flocks. For our culture, all this seems a bit incestuous, and the people who say the biblical ideal of marriage is one man and one woman simply don’t know the Bible. But the point of the Jacob story is to emphasize the purity of the heritage of Israel. Jacob, now renamed Israel, is the father of twelve sons whose descendents are supposed to be the twelve tribes of Israel, and the lineage goes back with purity to Jacob’s father, Isaac, and then back to Abraham to whom God made such extravagant promises about the Promised Land. Jacob’s Uncle Ishmael, who is older than his father Isaac and, at least according to the Muslims, is the rightful heir of Abraham, is excluded from the lineage of Israel. I talked about that several weeks ago. The Jacob story begins with a long genealogy of Ishmael’s descendents; Ishmael married outside the Abrahamic clan and his descendents are not part of Israel. Jacob’s brother, Esau, who had a better claim by birth than Jacob to be the heir of Abraham and Isaac, also married outside the Abrahamic clan, and his descendents became the Edomites, not the Israelites. A long genealogy of Esau’s descendents comes at the end of the Jacob story. Thus the illegitimate genealogies frame the story of the legitimate one. According to the Jacob story, only Jacob’s lineage is kosher, as it were.

The guiding theme of the Jacob story, however, is not only legitimacy of heritage, but alienation and reconciliation. As a young man, Jacob cheats his brother, deceives his father, and provokes God. Returning home, Jacob is eventually reconciled with his brother and father, and in our wrestling incident is reconciled with God, who had blessed him rather well all the time. The point is that God is faithful to the legitimate descendents of Abraham and provides the conditions for their reconciliation even when, like Jacob, they are greedy and full of lies. Jews and Christians have long taken the Jacob story to be a parable for the reconciliation of those who deservedly are alienated from the divine heritage. Christians have often interpreted Jacob’s wrestling partner to be Jesus Christ, or some kind of anticipation of Christ.

So let me say that the moral of the wrestling incident, when read in the context of the larger Jacob story, is that God comes to us when we are yet sinners and, if we hold on hard enough, not giving up even when the night is over and God has wounded us sorely, we can win the blessing of reconciliation with God and other people. Holding on to God in this struggle requires the tenacity that Paul described as faith. Although Jacob did not begin as a particularly admirable person, he clung to God in the pursuit of his own righteousness. May we all do as Jacob did: fight without giving up for reconciliation with God and our neighbors! No matter how bad we are, God comes to wrestle.

I admit that the metaphor of wrestling with God is a little sweaty for this time of year, and probably appeals to men more than to women. But you get the point.

A deeper dimension of this wrestling story needs to be investigated, however. Just who is the fellow with whom Jacob wrestles? What is his name, so coyly withheld? The text allows many answers: An angel? A primitive clan god belonging to Abraham and Isaac’s clan but not to Laban’s or the Canaanites? The one true God of Israel as the editors of the story have Jacob believe? The text admits of all these answers. I want to leave the historical dimensions of this question for biblical scholars and turn instead to a non-biblical source: a Methodist hymn.

Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer and brother of John Wesley who with him founded the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century, wrote a hymn-poem on the text of this story. He called it, “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown.” It speaks in the voice of Jacob addressing the wrestling partner, whom he calls the unknown Traveler, and the first stanza is as follows. Listen to how it fits the story:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,

whom still I hold, but cannot see!

My company before is gone,

And I am left alone with thee;

With thee all night I mean to stay

And wrestle till the break of day.

My sermon title comes from that last line.

That first stanza had a double meaning for the Wesley brothers. In addition to referring to the Jacob story, it referred to their own partnership in the Methodist movement. They often wrestled over what to do, and Charles was critical of John. But when Charles died, both of them were in their 80s, and John was devastated that his “company before is gone and I am left alone” with God. Shortly after Char
les’ funeral John tried to teach this hymn to a congregation and broke down in the attempt. I suspect that many widows and widowers feel this way about the loneliness of their remaining years with God alone.

Charles Wesley’s hymn gives a strange exposition of the Jacob story. It has Jacob say that he need not tell the unknown Traveler who he is himself, because his sin and misery are obvious, and besides the Traveler already calls him by name. The Genesis text does not suggest this introspection on Jacob’s part, although the name “Jacob” meant the “supplanter” because Jacob supplanted Esau as the receiver of Isaac’s blessing, and thus his name did refer to Jacob’s early sin. Wesley’s Jacob is desperate about his own unworthiness and does not need even to confess it. He asks, “But who, I ask thee, who art thou? Tell me thy name, and tell me now.” Not the Traveler’s blessing, but his identity, is what Wesley’s Jacob wrestles for. The hymn goes on with several stanzas that end, “wrestling, I will not let thee go till I thy name, thy nature know.”

Wesley’s Jacob asks our central question. We all wrestle with powerful forces, forces that make us to reveal our inmost identity when we often would hide that, even from ourselves. What are those forces with which we wrestle? God? Demons? What is their nature? Greed? Ambition? Fear? Doubt? Hate? Pride? Complacency? These deep struggles define our souls. They are the things that concern us ultimately, as the theologian Paul Tillich liked to say. Our lives are shaped around them as we wrestle with them through the years.

In Wesley’s exposition, Jacob becomes a Christian and asks whether the Traveler is Jesus:

In vain thou strugglest to get free,

I never will unloose my hold;

Art thou the man that died for me?

The secret of thy love unfold;

Wrestling, I will not let thee go

Till I thy name, thy nature know.

You see, there are a great many things with which we might wrestle ultimately that are not worth the effort. We all wrestle to make a living. But if we take it too seriously, it will deform our souls. We all wrestle to have a career. But taken too seriously, that deforms us. We wrestle to have family and friends, and we never have family and friends without long-term wrestling. But taken too seriously, that leads to dependency. We wrestle with our own character flaws, our greed, ambition, fear, doubt, hate, pride, complacency and a hundred other vices. To be sure, we need to work on these things. But if we wrestle with our sinful selves too seriously, we will be deformed into nasty judges whose self-hate sours everything. Haven’t we all known “religious” people like that? People who wrestle too much with what’s wrong turn into nihilists. The only thing worth wrestling with ultimately is God.

Wesley’s Jacob cries, “Yield to me now—for I am weak but confident in self-despair!” This introspective Jacob, in his self-despair, has nothing left to lose, and this gives him enormous strength. Remember the Janis Joplin song, “Freedom’s just another name for having nothing left to lose”? If Jacob had hope in his own strength, getting along without victory over the Traveler, he would have given up. But he becomes more insistent. “Speak to my heart, in blessing speak, be conquered by my instant prayer.” What gall! What confidence founded upon total despair, could let Jacob demand that the Traveler be conquered by his prayer! We softer types usually think of prayer as a petition. For Jacob it is a demand that God be conquered and reveal the Traveler’s name and nature. “Speak,” says Jacob, “or thou never hence shalt move, and tell me if thy name is Love.” Love is Jacob’s guess, or hope, for the name and nature of his intimate wrestling partner.

Love is the only thing worth a lifetime of struggle. Love is the only thing that will not deform us when we embrace it each day. Love is not always an adversary, as suggested by the reference to wrestling. But one engages love like in a wrestling match. Learning to love through all the stages of life, with all the crowd of our friends and enemies, requires holding on through the night, again and again. What more important question can we ask than whether our ultimate concern, that with which we wrestle ultimately and life-long, is love or some fake?! So easily do we deceive ourselves, that we are about God’s business of love, that we need to go to the bottom of despair to ask Jacob’s question: is your name and nature really love?

Wesley, of course, is alluding to the text in 1 John that says “God is love.” He also suggests indirectly that the Traveler whose name and nature might be love is Jesus. But he does not say either directly. His Jacob does not ask explicitly whether the Traveler is God or Jesus, only whether his name and nature is love.

Then Wesley’s Jacob hears in his heart the Traveler’s whisper of his name and nature, a voice the Jacob in Genesis never heard:

‘Tis Love! ‘tis Love! Thou diedst for me,

I hear thy whisper in my heart.

The morning breaks, the shadows flee,

Pure Universal Love thou art:

To me, to all, thy mercies move—

Thy nature, and thy name is Love.

The secret power of Wesley’s song is that it speaks salvation to the individual heart because it recognizes the paradoxical universality of love: “to me, to all, thy mercies move.” If the love that answered Jacob’s despair were only for Jacob, healing only Jacob’s vices and alienation, that would be for Jacob a fake love, a love that answers only his selfish concern for his own salvation. Wesley knew that real divine love loves everyone, the entire creation, and only an individual’s recognition of the universality of that love beyond his or her own benefit has true healing for that individual. Of course the point is that being healed means loving all those others just as the saving love has loved oneself. Truly to wrestle with saving love is to wrestle for the salvation of others as much as oneself. If the apparent love with which one wrestles is not the love of those others as well, then it is fake and cannot truly address the singularity of one’s own heart. Not all of the evangelicals of Wesley’s time, or ours, got that point. Even John Wesley frequently said that, although he knew intellectually that Christ died for the salvation of all, real salvation means the recognition that it applies to oneself. Charles Wesley reversed this in his hymn: in order to know that saving love applies to oneself, one has to recognize that it applies to those others just as well.

When pure universal love is the one with whom we wrestle through the night, nothing of God’s business is impossible for us. Our vices will be cured and our hopes fulfilled, as these things count within God’s love.

Lame as I am, I take the prey,

Hell, earth, and sin with ease overcome;

I leap for joy, pursue my way,

And as a bounding hart fly home,

Through all eternity to prove

Thy nature, and thy name is Love.

Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.31.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Dearly Beloved, we have in our gospel text this morning five of the classic sayings of Jesus: the mustard seed, the yeast of the loaf, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price, and the harvest of good and bad fish. Most of you have heard many sermons on each one. Gird your loins, because you are about to hear another. I should point out at the beginning, however, the special significance of this particular kind of Jesus-saying. In the last century, some influential theologians and their preacher-students argued that Christianity is to be understood in terms of a great story, a narrative. They demoted God from being the creator of all history and stories and turned God into an actor within the story, fighting against evil, which was sometimes personified as the Devil. Those of you who have followed the “Left Behind” series of books, which seems to provide the metaphoric if not theoretical substance for much contemporary conservative Christianity, might think that the witness of Christianity is a story, the story of God redeeming the world from evil forces. The New Testament does have passages that present such a narrative, particularly in some of the writings of Paul and in the Book of Revelation. The greater part of the New Testament gospels, however, is not about a story like this at all. Rather, it is about our proper relation to God who holds us under judgment. We are right now in the kingdom of heaven whether we know it or not. Most of Jesus’ own teachings, as in our texts today, and in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in Matthew’s gospel, and the Farewell Discourses in John’s gospels, and in the parables and admonitions throughout all the gospels, are about our proper relation to God now before whom we stand under judgment, not about a cosmic war between God and Satan. Whereas the cosmic drama can be called “Christian Narrative,” Jesus’ kind of teachings, and that of other books in the New Testament, can be called “Christian Wisdom.” In our time, many conservative Christians take the narrative to be the primary form of Christian understanding, with the wisdom passages interpreted as support for the narrative. Many liberal Christians take the Wisdom teachings to be primary, and the narratives as symbolic or metaphorical language to intensify the points of wisdom about our relation to God.

Our texts this morning about the kingdom of heaven fall under three sorts of wisdom teaching. The first two make the point that from very small and insignificant things can come very large and spiritually important results. The seed of the mustard plant is tiny. Yet it grows into a shrub that both is large and shelters other beings. This is to say, from a tiny, insignificant beginning, a great charity can come. Those of you who think you have nothing significant to contribute to the work of Christ in the world, don’t worry. You do not know what great things might come from your small gifts. We should note from this passage that small gifts in the kingdom of heaven are recognized by how they provide for others. How many of our sisters and brothers in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Latin America would welcome nothing fancier than a secure place to make their nests!

The second saying, that a woman’s bread-yeast leavens the whole loaf, makes the point that some Christian virtues need not be imposed from on high. When insinuated subtly, like yeast, they can spread throughout the whole community and transform everything. Yet they are not seen themselves. Who thinks about the yeast in bread, if you haven’t made the loaf yourself? Jesus, of course, was not thinking about the Christian community when he thought of the loaf, because there wasn’t any such thing in his time. He was thinking rather about his whole society, and the yeast was the gospel and witness of his small band of disciples. Speak the truth in small places, and it might well spread throughout the whole. What a hopeful message! May we have the humility to understand our gospel lives on small terms, and yet have the courage to knead them into the entire loaf of our society!

The second sort of wisdom teaching in our gospel this morning is about the unique and overwhelming value of the gospel that we hear. You stumble on some great treasure in a field, and then quickly go to buy the field to gain ownership of the treasure. Jesus’ point is clear: when you discover a great treasure, you should mortgage your future to acquire it. The gospel message is that you need to be willing to sacrifice a lot or all of your previous investments when you discover the treasure of the gospel: the gospel will bring you into God’s presence. Your retirement fund brings only pre-mortem security.

The story of the pearl of great price makes much the same point, but with a significant existential distinction. Here you are, the pearl merchant, or spiritual seeker, hunting out some kind of heavenly bargain. Let’s be plain about what it means to be a spiritual seeker, rather than a committed practitioner. A seeker is one who has rejected all the options encountered so far. So the seeker’s mentality juggles two passions. One is the negative passion of rejecting the religious culture of birth, and also all those alternative cultures offered as possibilities. The other is the hopeful passion that keeps one moving, always looking, experimenting, risking ridicule and humiliation because of unanswered religious questions.

Suddenly you come upon a religious way of life, like the others as one pearl is like other pearls, but vastly more compelling and beautiful. At this point, you sacrifice all your other commitments and bring to the pursuit of this pearl of great price everything that you have so far invested in other spiritual paths. Jesus had a profound point here. Spiritual commitment is not divided democratically among lots of possibilities. You need one particular path. You might be able to synthesize one traditional path with other paths, but the synthesis has to add up one singular path to which you can give your whole devotion. Jesus’ gospel, he was saying, is that path.

These last two sayings of Jesus make the point that religious life is ultimate. We have many important and legitimate concerns in life—making a living, helping our family, serving the nation, perhaps making a contribution to society and culture that moves beyond our immediate contacts. The religious dimension of life, however, means that in and amongst all of these concerns there is a call to an ultimate concern, something before which we would sacrifice everything else. Hopefully we will not be called upon to sacrifice our other duties and interests. Hopefully we can find the ultimate within each of them. But when push comes to shove, sell everything else and buy the pearl of great price or the field with the treasure of heaven.

The first two sayings of Jesus, about the mustard seed and the yeast, declare that we can do great things out of proportion to our powers. The second two sayings declare that this is possible only if we subordinate, perhaps to the degree of sacrifice, our other concerns to focus on the heavenly treasure and pearl. The fifth saying, that fishing nets are indiscriminate about what they haul in and that fishermen have to separate the good fish from the bad, is more complicated. This passage has lent itself to the belief of some of our conservative Christian sisters and brothers that there will come a final showdown, an Armageddon, in which God’s forces of righteousness will battle it out with the forces of evil, and finally prevail. But all the passage actually says is that there is a real difference bet
ween good and evil and that this distinction will be recognized in each individual case. Each of us, sinner, schlub, seeker, sage, or saint, revealed nakedly as who we are, stands in judgment before God. Neither fudging nor excuses is allowed when we stand in ultimate judgment. Moreover, that ultimate judgment is not some distant moment when we die and show up on St. Peter’s. Rather we stand under judgment every moment of our lives, and because the Hound of Heaven has our scent, we should always be prepared to give an account.

Fortunately, the gospel of Jesus Christ promises mercy and forgiveness to all who confess their sins. We do not have to wait for a judgment on history to know that we stand before God now. We do not have to wait upon some mythic cosmic drama in the distant future, or perhaps a rapture next week, to acknowledge our ultimate relation to God. Our eternal identity within the eternal life of God is the matter of utmost urgency to us now and at every moment. Theologically speaking, it would be a religious subterfuge to say that our ultimate identity in God’s perspective depends on whether God wins some historical battle with Satan and evil. That ploy is a device for escaping responsibility and displacing it onto God, as if God were a character role in a drama about the victory of good or evil over one another.

The surprising thing about all these Jesus-saying is that the kingdom of heaven is never represented as a hereafter in some transcendent sense. Rather, the kingdom of heaven is something we should look for in our daily lives, says Jesus. Like great plants growing from bitty leaves, or a smidge of leaven making a whole loaf rise. Like suddenly finding a great treasure in our workplace, or a pearl of great price among the things we deal with daily. Like suddenly recognizing that, though we fly with turkeys, we shall be judged as to whether we soar like eagles. Other places in the Bible refer to heaven as a transcendent hereafter. I’m sure you have many different images of a heavenly afterlife. But in our gospel text for today, there is none of that afterlife transcendence business. All of these sayings of Jesus refer to the kingdom of heaven at hand, in the daily affairs of Earth, not in the bye and bye. How do they help us understand our situation to be in heaven in Earth? I believe three important lessons can be drawn.

First, because we live in God’s kingdom, even if we miss the point and believe we are only in our own kingdoms, there are real differences between right and wrong, like good fish versus bad fish. To be sure, sometimes affairs are too complicated to be understood clearly, and sometimes there is real moral ambiguity in the sense that what helps also hurts. Nevertheless, for Jesus there are profound and plain values that distinguish right from wrong. These are summed up as love, and are made specific in the public sphere in terms of justice, peacemaking, humility, care for the poor, and so forth. You know the list. In more private spheres love means kindness, forgiveness, non-judgmentalism, acceptance of people different from ourselves, and you know that list too. When our politicians sacrifice justice to greed, peacemaking to belligerence, humility to bullying, and care for the poor to tax breaks for the rich, we know the net contains bad fish. When our social culture sacrifices kindness to indifference, forgiveness to retribution, non-judgmentalism to contempt, and inclusiveness to chauvinism, we know the net contains more bad fish. Jesus says we need to behave like the good fish.

The tragedy for contemporary Christianity is that so many Christians who believe in the story of God fighting the Devil think that they can be good fish just by taking on the name of God or identifying themselves by the name of Jesus Christ. They think that, if they are on God’s side, then God must be on their side. But that self-righteousness so often leads them to act like the bad fish: they fool themselves into believing that the greed of our economy has God’s favor, they claim that their war-making is righteous because God is at war with the Devil, they think that arrogance toward others is justified because they are the spokesmen of Jesus, they dismiss those who suffer on grounds that they must deserve it, and they believe that they deserve to be richer themselves. Because they think God is at war and they are on God’s side, they believe that their own wars are God’s battles. That belief corrupts Jesus’ values of love, justice, peacemaking, humility, charity, kindness, forgiveness, non-judgmentalism, and inclusiveness of love. Jesus said to love our enemies, not fight them. The true Christian theology is that the unmeasurable wild creator God loves even the forces of evil, and redeems them. The little apocalyptic God who wars against the Devil and unbelievers is a holdover of ancient paganism, and has entertainment value only for those whom Jesus would regard as the bad fish.

How do we behave like good fish instead? Here is the second lesson from the gospel sayings. To live with the values of the Christian gospel is likely to require sacrifice, discipline, and the focusing of our many interests on what needs to be done to live the life of the gospel. All of creation is good, we Christians say, and our lives are lived in many dimensions, with many purposes. Nevertheless, we need to put first things first in order to love properly and teach others to love as well. Christian discipline does not mean getting rid of all the dimensions and interests of life save one: it means ordering them all so that they add up to a life and community of love. Learning such discipline is a life-long task for spiritual development, and it requires both individual and community effort. Moreover, it sometimes requires sacrifice, like selling prized possessions to buy the field of treasure or the pearl of great price. Think of the sacrifice Jesus made in order to be true to the priorities of love and redemption of enemies.

The third lesson from our collection of Jesus’ sayings is that our small efforts at the disciplined living of the way of love can have enormous consequences. Like the great bush that grows from a tiny mustard seed, sheltering many birds, our small loving endeavors of justice, peacemaking, humility, care for the poor, kindness, forgiveness, non-judgmentalism, and acceptance of people different from ourselves, can make a difference worthy of the kingdom of heaven far beyond what we see. Like a little leaven in the loaf, we can raise our whole society with the multiplier effects of love. We do not need to enlist anyone else in an army to fight God’s battles as we see them. We need to model for them, and lead them into, the ways of love that have the power to redeem the worst.

The kingdom of heaven is where we live now, and our citizenship consists in being called to the disciplines of advancing love in justice, peacemaking, forgiveness, kindness, redemption and all the rest we know so well. Jesus’ point is that, because this is heaven’s kingdom, our small acts of faith have ultimate significance. Let us rejoice in our hope. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.24.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

What a pleasure it is to welcome all the fathers this morning, on Father’s Day, especially since I am a father myself, in fact a grandfather for two months as of today! I salute my son-in-law, Jeff, the father of my granddaughter, Gwendolyn, and also my other son-in-law, Stephen, who is about to become a father in six weeks or so, God willing. Today I also think about my own father, Richard, whom I remember with ever increasing respect and love, despite the fact he died more than thirty years ago. The contours of families can be traced through the lines of fathering. Of course they can be traced just as well through the lines of mothering, but this is Father’s Day and the mothers had their turn several weeks ago.

These sweet sentiments are strangely out of place, I must say, in the Revised Common Lectionary that has given us the readings for this morning. In the gospel, we have one of Jesus’ more vituperative attacks on the family, saying “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,” and so on. I’ll come back to this. But first we need to conjure with the story of Abraham and Hagar.

Now Abraham was a great hero of Israelite history. He brought his family out of Mesopotamia into Canaan and established the nation of Israel, which is named after his grandson. Both Jews and Christians look upon Abraham as the founder of their faith. The Arabs trace their ancestry to Abraham’s son Ishmael, and Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are often called the “Abrahamic faiths.” Yet if we look at Abraham as a family man, there is much to worry about.

Abraham was a kind of nomadic war-chief who traveled with a very extensive kinship family—we know most about his nephew Lot, formerly of Sodom—all of whom had many retainers, slaves, and herds; Genesis 13 says he was also rich in silver and gold. As Abraham traveled through Canaan his forces sometimes had pitched battles with the armies of the city-states there. His wife Sarah was very beautiful in her youth, and when they visited Egypt the Pharaoh was smitten with her. Not wanting to get into trouble himself, Abraham said Sarah was his sister, and the Pharaoh married her. But God, in a rare moment of swift justice for adultery, even though poor Pharaoh did not know he was committing adultery, sent plagues on the Egyptians. Pharaoh found out the cause, that Sarah was Abraham’s wife and expelled Abraham’s whole clan from Egypt, blaming Abraham for not being honest to claim his wife. Abraham was not the kind of man to stick up for his wife. Nor was there any suggestion that he loved her.

He seemed, however, to be obsessed with having children, and interpreted his wanderings as a journey to a land God promised to him and his descendents, who would be as numerous as the stars of the night sky. But as he and Sarah got older, they were still childless, and Abraham complained to God that the heir of his house was a Syrian named Eliezer of Damascus. (I’m not sure why Lot was not an acceptable heir within the family.) Sarah was worried about Abraham’s obsession and finally told him to take her Egyptian maid, Hagar, as a wife whose child would be Abraham’s family heir. Polygamy was the standard form of marriage in the biblical view for those rich enough to afford it. When Hagar became pregnant, she looked with contempt on old, barren, Sarah, which was a great mistake. Sarah complained to Abraham and Abraham said she could do whatever she wanted with Hagar. Sarah beat her, and Hagar ran away. God’s angel appeared to Hagar, struggling pregnant and thirsty through the wilderness and told her to go back to Abraham’s encampment, which she did. She gave birth to Ishmael and Abraham did raise him as his heir. But then thirteen years later, Sarah in her very old age became pregnant and bore Isaac. This is where our Genesis text comes in.

Ishmael liked to play with his little brother, according to the text, and I think this is the only expression of love in the whole Abrahamic story except for the mention that Abraham loved Isaac when he agreed to murder him and offer him as a sacrifice as he thought God had commanded. Sarah’s reaction to Ishmael’s affection for Isaac was to have a fit of jealousy and demand that Ishmael and his mother Hagar be turned out into the desert. Of course she wanted her own son Isaac to be Abraham’s principal heir rather than Ishmael who had already been acknowledged at her own suggestion. So Abraham, who had given his senior wife to Pharaoh, gave his junior wife and her son, his heir, to death in the desert. As our text recounts, God rescued them. The Islamic version of the story is that Ishmael remained Abraham’s heir, and Isaac turned out to be only a younger brother.

Now this is not an uplifting story for Father’s Day. Fathers are not all perfect, as we know. But who would want a father who sent his wife to the bed of another man in order to feel safe himself? Who would want a father who was ready to kill his child because he thought God wanted that? Who would want a father who would let a senior wife disown and imperil a junior wife and her son who is the first-born heir? The text says that Abraham was coached in most of these things by God, but we wonder who was doing the reporting.

If we look at Abraham’s story, not in the context of the biblical saga of creating the Jewish and Christian peoples, but in the context of what it says about fathering, two important points stand out. First, our ideals for fatherhood, which derive from the ethic of Jesus and have to do with loving, teaching, and care-giving, are a far cry from the behavior of Abraham the patriarch. We should take care not to let Abraham’s model, or that of a good many of the other heroes of the Hebrew Bible, influence our ideas of fatherhood too much. We can accept St. Paul’s praise of Abraham as a man of faith who followed God blindly, even to the point of readiness to kill his own son. But we should bite our tongue if there ever is a suggestion that we should behave that way ourselves, those of us who are fathers or potential ones. I suspect mothers ought not look to Sarah as a model either. The heroes and heroines of the Hebrew Bible are not good models of parenting. Although we can derive ideals for families from the larger values of the Bible, such as love, care, and responsibility, we cannot derive them from biblical models, and need to be very careful to reject the main part of biblical family values. I’ll come back to this later.

Second, we need to be cautious about accepting Jesus’ admonition to think of God as our Father. To be sure, to think of God as a Father rather than a warrior is an advance toward the Christian ethic of love. But we need to be discriminating about the senses in which God should be thought of as a father. In Jesus’ teachings, God was like a father in being a loving caregiver, providing his children fish, not snakes, bread, not stones, and noting the fall of every sparrow. But would Jesus have thought of God as fatherly when he wiped out all humanity except Noah and his family in the flood, and nearly all the animals as well? Was it fatherly to wipe out all the people of Sodom and Gomorrah except Lot’s family? Even Abraham was against that! Was it fatherly of God to side with the Israelites, and then the Christians, against all the other peoples of the world who were equally his children? Think of the biblical stories of God demanding the slaughter of all the women and children of people’s defeated by God’s army! Those people were God’s children too. We need to be extremely thoughtful in accepting the character
of God as depicted in all the parts of the Bible as fatherly.

Or to put the point another way, we need to examine biblical history, especially its depictions of God, with a moral as well as theological point of view. For that history shows all the biases of its authors, biases we take to be morally questionable as well as theologically self-serving. The Bible is the great source of the revelation that grounds and guides the Christian religion, as well as Judaism, and to a lesser extent Islam. Yet in order to understand that revelation we need to read the Bible with discernment, both moral and theological. For, the culture of biblical times, especially regarding family as an economic and biological unit rather than a social unit of love and care, and its acceptance of slavery, contains many things we find to be morally incompatible with a social life based on the ethical principles of Judaism and Christianity.

This brings me back to the nasty things Jesus said about the family. Jesus is never recorded to have said anything positive about the family structure as he knew it, except to apply some of its metaphors to non-kinship relations, as when he said that all people who do God’s will are his brothers, sisters, and mothers, explicitly denying any special status to his own brothers, sisters, and mother. That saying is recorded in Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 8, all three. Luke duplicates the same saying as in our Matthew text this morning, about setting a “man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Jesus actually was quoting the prophet Micah, chapter 7, where these lines were a complaint about the degenerate times in which Micah lived. Jesus applied the lines more generally to the family structure of the society that he knew: his own gospel was so devastating to traditional family structures that it would bring not peace, but a sword, setting family members at war with one another.

I need immediately to remind us of what Jesus’ main message was, although you all know it. His message was that people should emulate God’s love of all creatures, including all human beings. This has direct implications for justice, peace, poverty, and care for those who need help. The way to emulate God’s love, Jesus said, is to live in communities voluntarily drawn together, like his band of disciples, where people could love one another and practice the maturing responsibilities of love. The Beatitudes in Matthew chapters 5-7 and the Farewell Discourse in John 13-17 are compact summaries of Jesus’ teachings. The Church from very early on has taken this ideal of voluntary communities devoted to God and God-like love as its own definition. Unlike the ancient Judaism of Jesus’ own religion, which defined one as a member because of a kinship identity, being Jewish, the early Christian community was open to anyone who voluntarily joined and took on the divine role of loving, with its obligations to justice, peace, care, and personal love.

In our time we have almost completely abandoned the ancient view that the family is primarily a social arrangement for managing property and producing heirs. An economic dimension is important to family life, of course, and our laws define economic rights and responsibilities. But we reject the economic exploitation of women in the ancient family, and also the belief that children are important mainly for giving parents descendents and heirs: we think children are important for themselves. We say rather that families are the most intimate social arrangements for learning how to love, where married people grow old together through all the forms of love on life’s stages, where children can learn to be loved and to love, and where extended families express the mobility of love in our society. The ancient world said a woman could be divorced for being barren or an economic bad deal; Jesus was dead set against divorce in this sense, as are most of us. We regard divorce as a tragedy, but allow that its main justification is some kind of breakdown in love, however complicated this might be. That we have no-fault divorce, and laws to protect children against bad parenting, indicates that even family membership has a voluntary dimension, and that its highest rules have to do with good care. Our own time is not in all respects an improvement on biblical times. But in matters of family values, we have taken on Jesus’ larger value of love in community, and that is an advance.

So with regard to Father’s Day we celebrate the Christian model of fatherhood as devotion to a loving community, practicing and teaching justice and peace, caring for the poor and the needy, practicing and teaching love to all family members, especially children, inspiring the love of God, and nurturing appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Parenting is much more shared these days than in the past. Many fathers are the chief economic providers for families, but many others take care of children while others earn the living. Fathers often share both economic and domestic work. There are single fathers who bear both burdens. There are fathers separated from children by divorce or the distance of independent careers, fathers who are widowed or bereft of children through death. There are new fathers with small children, and there are grandfathers of multigenerational families. Let us celebrate today with all fathers who, in any of these conditions, who can bear themselves as lovers of God and love as God loves, with justice, peace, care, responsibility, and intimacy of affection. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.19.2005 at 11:00 am