Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

No greater homecoming can be imagined than Jeremiah’s prediction of a new covenant between God and Israel. The old covenant, given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, was written down. It had to be read to the people and the people had to study it. The old covenant required leaders who could interpret it to the people. Moreover, the people broke the Mosaic covenant, despite the fact that God was their “husband,” as Jeremiah’s text says. The old covenant was like a marriage and the people, the “wife,” had been unfaithful. With the new covenant, however, everyone would have the proper ways to behave toward God, and the faithfulness to do so, engraved on their hearts. Religious faithfulness would be virtually automatic in all Israel because God would internalize it as the source of their actions, not an option for action. Israel would not need to seek and defend a homeland with God as a liberating mediator. God would come home to Israel.

A little background about Jeremiah helps understand this text. The Kingdom of the twelve tribes of Israel that David had united lasted only through the reign of his son, Solomon. After that it was divided into a northern kingdom, which took the name Israel, and a southern kingdom called Judah, which contained the capital Jerusalem and was mainly the territory of the tribe of Judah. In our text, Jeremiah calls these kingdoms the House of Israel and the House of Judah respectively. Israel and Judah were caught politically between the great empires of Assyria in the north and Egypt in the south. For the most part they were bound as vassals to Assyria, that is, Iraq, but chafed and rebelled against the tribute they were required to pay. Israel, the northern kingdom, was utterly defeated in 722/21 and its leadership deported to Assyria. That was the end of Israel. Through the next century, Judah maintained its balance by appealing to Egypt against Assyria. Assyria overextended itself, however, and was defeated in 612 by the Babylonians, also in today’s Iraq. In 605 the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar decisively defeated the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco at Carchemish and Judah was fully under the thumb of Babylon. In 597 Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and deported the king, Jehoiakim, to Babylon, installing a puppet king, Zedekiah. Zedekiah tried to revolt in 587 and Nebuchadnezzar returned and razed Jerusalem to the ground, destroying the temple and taking the remaining aristocracy and perhaps many other Jews to Babylon. The prophet Ezekiel had gone to Babylon in 597 with the exiles and Jeremiah fled to Egypt in 587. As things turned out, about fifty years later the Persians, that is, the present-day Iranians, defeated the Babylonians, the Iraqis, and allowed some of the Babylonian Jews to return to Jerusalem to set up a new puppet kingdom and rebuild the temple. (As you can see, the twenty first century conflicts in the Middle East had their origins in the ancient Near East, with the addition of the Muslim Arabs in the 7th century of the common era and the Americans in the 20th.)

Jeremiah was called to be a prophet when he was but a boy, in 627 bce, while Josiah was king of Judah. Israel had been destroyed for nearly a century, but Josiah reconquered some of its territory while the Assyrians were dealing with the Babylonians. Jeremiah came from a priestly family and served in the court of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, between 597 and 587, who rebelled against the Babylonians, contrary to Jeremiah’s advice. The text of Jeremiah’s prophecy is chronologically scrambled, with bits from his 40 years of prophecy mixed around. Usually we can tell from events referred to when most of the passages were written, however. You will note in our text today that Jeremiah predicts that God will help both the House of Israel and the House of Judah, having destroyed them. This means that this passage is not an early writing when only Israel was destroyed but a late writing when both were destroyed, possibly after 597 when Judah first lost to Nebuchadnezzar or perhaps around 587 when the whole city was razed.

Now Jeremiah’s main problem was this: God had promised to protect Israel and to keep David’s descendents on the throne forever, even if they were not faithful. But in his lifetime Jeremiah saw things go from bad to worse with the final destruction of the remaining portion of David’s kingdom. How could a priest and prophet of Yahweh explain this? Jeremiah’s answer, like that of the other prophets, was that the people of Israel had themselves broken the covenant and that their political troubles were God’s punishment for this, like an angry husband punishing a wayward wife. Jeremiah also said, however, that God would restore Israel and Judah after punishing them, “sowing [them] with the seed of humans and the seed of animals,” as our text put it. Several weeks ago the lectionary reading from Jeremiah was about his investing in property to show confidence that Judah’s fortunes would be restored. In today’s text he says that God will give a new covenant in which God’s law is within the hearts of the people.

Of course he lost his investment with the destruction of Israel. Although the Persians did restore the Jewish aristocracy to Jerusalem and let them build the Second Temple, Judah was always a puppet state, first of the Persians, then of the Greeks under Alexander, then of the Romans as at the time of Christ and lasting until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. The secular State of Israel was established by the European powers in mid-twentieth century but has maintained itself very much as a client-state of America ever since. This was not what Jeremiah had in mind as the restoration of the House of Israel and the House of Judah.

Nor did the new covenant ever take place in the sense of writing the law of God on people’s hearts rather than on scrolls. There were brief periods of Torah purification, as in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah who built the Second Temple under the Persians, but these were very much an external application of the law, not an exhibition of its internal shaping of the human heart. St. Paul, in the second chapter of his letter to the Romans, describes conscience as a kind of law written on the heart, but applies it to Gentiles in contrast to Jews who have the much clearer external written law, and notes that both Jews and Gentiles often fail the law. When Jesus and Paul spoke of a new covenant in the Christian sense, it seemed to be quite different from what Jeremiah had in mind.

How then should we understand Jeremiah’s failed prophecy of a new covenant that would restore Israel’s political fortunes and secure the faithfulness of the people? It is tempting to think a thought that the ancient prophets would never allow, namely, that it is God who was unfaithful to the covenant and its promises. Many Jewish theologians after the Holocaust argued something like this: nothing the Jewish people might have done wrong could possibly justify the horrors of the Holocaust, and therefore there is no God, or God lied in the promises to protect the Chosen People, or God is unfaithful or impotent in the face of evil. Surely this response is understandable. Christians have a similar problem regarding divine promises when Jesus did not return after a very short time, sometime within the lifetime of Paul, as Paul thought. As the years went by without Jesus’ Second Coming, the early Christians temporized with remarks that a day of God’s time is like a thousand years of ours. But that strategy of indefinite postponement dulls the edge of urgency about salvation, and requires repeated and always arbitrary claims that the apocalypse is really tomorrow. The better understanding is to say, with John, Ephesians, and Colossians, tha
t salvation is already here if we but have the eyes to see it.

The problem, of course, is that if we conceive of God only as a very large spiritual person who makes promises and acts in history, the actual course of history refutes the claims of the prophets and apostles. God is not a big person, however, despite the imagery to that effect throughout the Bible. God is the creator of everything that can be imagined, and that includes persons. As creator, God transcends persons and spirits, as well as nature. You might want to say, with many theologians, that God is thus a super-person, a more-than-personal person. That is fine, so long as you do not say that God makes promises and behaves in history in a faithless way. Our theology must be deeper than this.

One clue for making it deeper is contained in the Jeremiah text. “In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But all shall die for their own sins.” In other words, people are individually responsible for what they do. One generation cannot do something that legitimately calls forth punishment on the next, nor can the sins of leaders justify punishment of the people. Ezekiel says much the same thing in the 18th chapter of his prophetic book. Although both prophets still accounted for Israel’s disastrous political fortunes by ascribing to them corporate guilt, they also saw that true justice needs to be tied to personal responsibility. This was the beginning of the insight that justice is defined by secular responsibility, personal and social, not by a large cosmic drama in which God is a principal player who turns out to be fickle.

A second clue to a deeper theology is in the parable from Luke about the corrupt judge who is finally swayed by the repeated insistence of the widow for justice. In Jesus’ parable, the corrupt judge is the analogue for God. I would not go so far as to say that Jesus would agree with my view that God should not be depicted as making promises. Nevertheless, he did not draw back from his analogy. The point of his analogy is that we should continually demand justice even when it seems that the controlling powers, ultimately God, are corrupt. The constancy of the demands for justice ultimately wears down a cosmos that seems to reward corruption, violence, power politics, imperial ambitions, and greed. Whereas the widow was seeking just judgment in a law suit, our demands for justice cry against poverty, oppression, terrorism, genocide, disenfranchisement, disrespect of other cultures, the sending of soldiers to fight unjust wars, and the failure to pray for enemies who resist unjustified attack and occupation. Whereas the widow needed someone else to give her justice, our demands for justice take the form of committing ourselves to its achievement, so far as we can, even to the point of sacrifice. This parable in Luke immediately follows Jesus’ prediction that God would come to separate those who practice righteousness from those who will be left for dead. “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather,” he said about those who do not pursue justice. When it seemed that injustice has all the power, Jesus told his disciples this “parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart,” as our text began.

Here is our Christian new covenant, which might indeed be a deeper meaning of Jeremiah’s. The great creator God is not like a super-king who fixes up history so that we win or who magically transforms our hearts to perfection. Jesus, however, shows us that the way through history’s injustices is through a commitment to righteousness that leads up the cross to resurrection into new life. And in that resurrected life, day by day, our hearts can be transformed into a holiness from which righteousness does spring as naturally as love. So I invite you into a Christian new covenant that gently transforms Jeremiah’s utopian vision into a realism of commitment in the face of adversity with confidence that new life comes out of defeat when commitment is unshaken and that with a Spirit of mercy and encouragement leads toward a perfection of heart. The invitation lies before you for a new covenant of Christian faith. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 10.17.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Today’s gospel from Luke disturbs our sensibilities because of its suppositions about slavery. Jesus refers to slavery as an accepted institution of society and does not speak against it. Moreover, he assumes that many of his listeners themselves have slaves and that they know how to treat them. You would insist, he says, that your slave finish serving you with evening food and drink, even after a long day in the field, before time off for his or her own dinner. Jesus approves the rather harsh and uncompromising treatment of slaves and uses that to make his point about the behavior he expects from the disciples.

This passage has not always been disturbing. It was one of the principal defenses of slavery in Christianity down to the 1860s in the United States. For much of Christian history, slavery did not need to be defended at all because everyone took it for granted. Jesus’ own statement needs to be understood in terms of the social situation of the ancient world, in which slavery was indeed an accepted practice. People could become slaves by being on the losing side in a war, by being sold into slavery by their parents, or by selling themselves into slavery because they otherwise lacked the means to take care of themselves. The children of slaves were slaves. The economies of most Mediterranean societies required slave labor. Much slave labor was menial and some was sexually abusive, but sometimes slaves rose to positions of great responsibility. Slavery in the ancient world did not have especially racial or ethnic connotations except in cases where the enslaved losers in a war were racially or ethnically different from the winners. The Hebrew Bible laid down some rules for the humane treatment of slaves but did not condemn the practice. St. Paul encouraged slaves to be obedient to their masters and in one instance persuaded a run-away slave to return to his master and his master to receive him back as a Christian, though still a slave. He did not suggest abolishing slavery or even that individual Christians should free their slaves.

While it was clear in the ancient world that many slaves were intelligent and responsible, there was also the belief that some people are “natural slaves,” that is, people in need of others to watch out for them while they do work within a limited sphere. Aristotle, for instance, believed that all women are by nature “natural slaves” and need men to take care of them, although they can manage a household. Without using slavery language for women, St. Paul believed that they needed to be subordinated to and taken care of by men, despite the plain evidence before his eyes that some women were paramount leaders in their congregations.

One part of Hellenistic and Roman culture that seems strange to us is the extent to which all human relations were seen in terms of dominance and submission. Relations among social classes were defined in terms of dominance and submission, and the relations between slave-owners and slaves were part of this. Sexual relations could not be conceived as equal, only as a matter of domination and submission. The flip side of the dominance and submission theme in the ancient Greco-Roman world was that everyone except the emperor was supposed to be on the look-out for who his or her lord or master is so as to be of service.

In our time almost no one would believe slavery to be morally tolerable, except perhaps in Africa where it is still practiced in some places. In our time, we are somewhat divided about whether men should dominate women. Most secular Western societies have adopted equal women’s rights, and mainline religions have gone along with that. Many evangelical Protestants, however, as well as Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, hold to the biblical injunctions to keep women in subordinate roles to men.

How should Christians respond to biblical assumptions about cultural matters that are in direct contradiction to what we have come to believe, for good reason, to be the moral course? We should look very carefully at the moral distance between the ancient world and our own. Just as we would not accept ancient science over against our own, so we should not accept ancient social customs regarding slavery or gender relations when we have come to know better. The Bible’s deep principle of the equality of all people as children of God contradicts many of the social customs that the Bible accepted uncritically, even if biblical writers had not drawn out that implication. Jesus’ own practice of treating women with great respect and near equality stood in contrast to the social expectations of his time. The implication of equal dignity for all persons has been drawn out abundantly in the last four centuries and we now believe in human rights; in Christian societies, that belief comes from the biblical principles of love and equality. We need not hold it against the prophets, Paul, or Jesus, that they failed to see the full social implications of the claim that God loves all people as equally divine children and that relations among people should be those of mutual love, to which slavery is a contradiction.

Nevertheless, though our sensibilities are rightly disturbed by Jesus’ positive use of slavery to make a point, we should still attempt to see the point he was making. His point was not about the institution of slavery at all. It was about duty to God that applies to everyone. Just as the ancient world believed that slaves owed perfect obedience to their masters and should not be rewarded extra for merely doing their duty, so everyone should be obedient to God and not get extra credit for being so. We do not enter life on a morally neutral playing field, where opportunities await for doing good that we can take up if we want some special reward, but that we can also simply ignore if we don’t want the reward. No. We are already defined by our obligations. To accept and engage those obligations is simply what is expected of us.

Jesus’ point in this analogy with slavery was to attack spiritual materialism. In his influential book, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, the Tibetan Buddhist theologian and missionary to America, Chogyam Trumgpa, defined spiritual materialism as the ego’s use of religion to enhance its own gratification. In Buddhist culture this often meant attaining spiritual powers so that others would look up to you. In Western and many third-world cultures a great many people think they should be religious and moral only for the sake of getting to Heaven, a place of infinite rewards. Good Christians are also prone to a kind of spiritual materialism that sees holiness as an ultimate ego gratification. Jesus’ point was that we should do our duty to God and neighbors just because it is our duty. The moral issues of our watch define us, and how we do our duty defines our moral worth, set in the context of God’s forgiveness and mercy. The proper motive for religious practice should be for its own sake, not for the sake of some reward.

Our proper relation to God, as you know, is very complicated, consisting in part of awe and reverence for the glory of the Creator, in part of gratitude for our lives and the bounty of creation, in part of confession of our sins and grateful reception of divine forgiveness, and in part of learning to love God as our Ultimate Beloved even though God gives us unfair lives, unlovely neighbors, pain, and death. Relations with our neighbors are partial versions of our proper relation to the Ultimate Ground of our Being. This complex religious life of holiness is extremely difficult, but it is not for the sake of anything except itself. To learn to live in holy awe, gratitude, repentance, and love collectively is the end and goa
l of life. Should some mastery of awe, gratitude, repentance, and love win respect from our neighbors or an afterlife in heaven is wholly beside the point, and the ego-lure of respect or heaven is likely to corrupt the true Christian path to which we are ordered. Jesus said, “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

Jesus, of course, was the “worthless” slave, as Paul said in Philippians 2, whose humility so perfected his relation with God that all of us who follow him into the duty of that slavery can come to holy awe, ultimate gratitude, repentant redemption, and the love that perfects human nature. I invite you to the table of Jesus where the slaves come for nourishment so that they can do their whole duty to God and neighbor. Come to the table where God’s glory suffuses humble food, and be in awe. Come to the table where Christ’s presence incarnates God in creation, and be filled with gratitude. Come to the table with confession in your heart to receive the blessed grace of forgiveness, and be empowered to live the unstoppable life of redeemed sinners. Come to the table where the true host is your beloved, and love God as a perfect lover. Come. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 10.3.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The gospel from Luke is one of the most colorful stories in the Bible and it has a vivid history in Christian art and imagination. The rich man is known as Dives, although that is just a Latin word for “rich man.” The images in the story that Jesus used for Hell and Heaven are not typical of the Hebrew Bible. For most of the Hebrew Bible, Hell or Sheol is a shady place where all souls go and gradually dissipate. Ecclesiastes pointed out that the rich and the poor, the good and the evil, all go to the same place and amount to vanity. A strong tradition of thought in ancient Israel was that God is the God of the living, not the dead, and that people who handle dead bodies are unclean and need to be purified. This tradition was more or less well represented in Jesus’ time by the party of the Sadducees, which included the priests who superintended the Temple worship. You will remember the incident recounted in the 20th chapter of Luke where the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus with a question about whose wife a woman would be in heaven if she had married each of seven brothers. The Sadducees themselves did not believe in the resurrection and thought this question revealed the contradictory nature of belief in a heavenly afterlife. Jesus answered that in Heaven people would not have sexual identities and would be like angels. He then reinterpreted the claim that God is the God of the living by citing Moses’ name for God, namely the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: if God is the God of the living, then in Moses’ time, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must still be alive in some afterlife.

In contrast to the Israelite belief that souls just fade away in Sheol, a tradition of immortality or resurrection grew up in Jewish thought during Hellenistic times, that is, after Alexander the Great conquered the area and brought in Greek culture about three centuries before Jesus. In Jesus’ day, this was represented by the party of the Pharisees, and Jesus was a theological Pharisee in this and other matters. The logic of this position was something like this. If the soul is naturally immortal, or all souls are resurrected from the dead, then the righteousness of God’s kingdom requires that in the afterlife the good souls must go to Heaven and the bad souls to everlasting Hellish punishment. In early Christian thought, some people believed that every soul is naturally immortal and therefore has to go someplace, to Heaven or Hell. Other early Christians believed that only the saved believers would be resurrected to be with God and Christ while the unsaved would simply remain dead with no resurrection at all. The Greek philosophical idea of natural immortality became more influential in later Christian thought so that by the time of the Middle Ages most people were convinced that every soul survived and had to go somewhere after death. In addition to Heaven and Hell, which rewarded good or bad people, the Medievals imagined Limbo for unbaptized children who had died before the age of responsibility and Purgatory for the people who were bad but could be made good by some eons of torture. Most of us today would doubt the benefits of eons of purgatorial torture. Jesus’ image of Heaven for Lazarus and Hell for Dives was not quite as elaborate as the Medieval imagery, but lay in that line of development.

Now we do not know whether Jesus’ image of Heaven and Hell in our text was what he really believed, or was a metaphorical appeal to the popular imagination for the sake of telling his story. His more usual image of last things was that God would cataclysmically come down from Heaven into history, punishing the evil-doers, rewarding the just, and setting up a global kingdom of justice with Jesus as its head. On this account Jesus would return to history and reshape it, although he also believed in treasure in Heaven. I myself suspect that Jesus’ vivid picture of Dives in Hell looking up at Lazarus in Heaven, resting in the bosom of Abraham as the spiritual says, was intended as something of a literary device for making his point.

It is interesting to note that Jesus did not say that Lazarus was a particularly good man. Nor did he say that the rich man Dives was particularly bad. We are left to infer that the sin of Dives was that he did not pay attention the poor man at his gates. Jewish religious law was quite clear that the wealthy have a responsibility of charity to the poor. Presumably, Dives’ brothers also were rich but callous, which is why he worried about their fate. The power of Jesus’ story is that its very picture of sumptuous wealth juxtaposed to crippling poverty brings to our mind, like a physical perception, the fundamental injustice of such disparities in wealth where the rich don’t care for the poor. You don’t need the law, or even an editorial comment, to see that it was wrong for Dives to feast sumptuously every day while beggars sought his crumbs with the dogs. It was up to Dives to do something about that. We can just see that.

Americans can see the point of Jesus’ parable even when it is hard to see that we are the rich people of the Earth while others scramble for the crumbs our global economy leaves them. Even poor Americans are rich by global standards. Remember that King David did not seem to see much wrong in seducing Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and then sending Uriah to the front lines to be killed in battle. Then Nathan, his prophet, told him about a rich man with many sheep who took his poor neighbor’s only and beloved sheep so he could give a banquet. David as royal judge condemned the rich man, and Nathan told him, “you are that man.” David got the point.

American global capitalism increases the world’s wealth and make many people richer. But it stomps those who cannot compete well. We blame non-competitive people for their own poverty and non-capitalist culture that makes them non-competitive. Our economic system increases the gap between the competitive and non-competitive, and demands that the non-competitive people give up their native culture to enter the shallow, rat-race culture of competitive wealth-seeking. If Jesus’ parable causes us to just see that Dives should be condemned, Jesus tells us Americans, “you are that man.”

Please understand that I am not against capitalism, nor against Dives dressing and eating well. The point is that we and Dives have a responsibility to the poor on our global doorstep, especially those whose poverty is accentuated by the system that provides our wealth. Capitalism, or any other economic system, is morally tolerable only when it cares for the losers. The deceptive mythology of capitalism, alas, likens economic competition to a sporting competition: the winners deserve to win by virtue of being better, and the losers deserve to lose precisely because they are less competitive. In real economic life, however, why should losing to the Haliburtons of the world mean that your people deserve to be poor and dependent on crumbs? Lazarus no less than Dives is a child of God.

Now all of these points make good sermon material and I hope you take them to heart. But notice that Jesus took the story in another direction. He said there was a great gulf fixed between Heaven and Hell that could not be crossed: no Purgatory or Limbo for Jesus! What you do in this life is what counts. Moreover, when Dives begged Abraham to send someone risen from the dead to warn his brothers, Abraham replied that Moses had laid down the moral standards, the brothers knew that, and that should be enough. You see, Jesus’ real point was not about the geography of Heaven and Hell. He concocted that scene to draw attention to the irreversible and absolute moral significance of what we do in
this life. It is not what we shall do in some heavenly or hellish afterlife that counts. Our worth consists in how we live in our own time. The scene of Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham and Dives in torment was Jesus’ imaginative expression of the worth of their respective lives. He said that the worth of those lives cannot be changed after they die.

What does this imply for us? First, it means that what we believe about the geography of the afterlife is not important one way or another so long as we get Jesus’ point: we stand under judgment for what we do and are in this life. Unlike Dives who seems to have been oblivious to any absolute judgment on his life, we should live with a consciousness that what we do now has ultimate significance for who we are before God. The danger in afterlife-thinking is that we are tempted to postpone taking our lives seriously. Jesus turned afterlife-thinking around to say, “be serious here and now.” Not later but now we live under divine judgment. Now our lives have ultimate significance for defining our worth.

A second implication is that we should therefore attend to the issues that arise on our watch with utmost seriousness. The poor are on our doorstep: what can we do about them now? Countless other issues in addition to poverty shape the moral contours of our environment. Dealing with them all is how we live in our own time.

The Christian gospel is that, no matter how good we are now and throughout our lives before God, it is never good enough. Yet God loves us anyway and receives us with mercy, restoring us to good standing. But now, being restored, we have no excuse for not amending our lives and pursuing the holiness of justice and mercy in the way we live in our own time. Christianity says that Dives can be changed in his own lifetime.

So I invite you to take your life in our time with ultimate seriousness, knowing that this is the life you have to lead and none other. I invite you to accept the grace of God in Christ to give you the power of righteousness while you still have this life to lead. I invite you to look at the world around you and make a difference for justice. Help the poor, improve the economy, oppose the selfish, put peace ahead of control, treat your enemies as you would be treated, protect nature as God’s creation, cherish friends as God cherishes you, create high culture and a decent society because you are creators in God’s image, forgive because God forgives, renew others because God renews, love every one and every thing because God does, and live your life now with the laughter and joy of absolute seriousness because this is the life God gives you. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 09.26.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Money is a touchy subject. We don’t like people telling us how to spend our money. Some synagogues deal with this neatly by means of a membership system. You pay up front for a year’s worth of benefits. By contrast, most Christian churches wave the issue in your face with a weekly Offering ritual. It is good to be reminded that we leave this world in the same penniless state in which we enter it. So we can live with the Offering. But sermons on money? Forget it.

Preachers know this and typically keep things simple. We praise the virtues of generosity and diligence, and hint that listeners should support the “Kingdom of God” with pledges and donations. I will not object if you send mountains of money to Dean Neville in support of this fine chapel. But I am not standing in this sacred place to raise money. Today our readings force us to grapple with the Bible’s view of money. Is it mammon from hell, as Jesus and Luke suggest? Or is it manna from heaven, the key to health and happiness and a form of divine blessing? The biblical perspective on money, wealth, poverty, and economic justice is painfully out of sync with our way of life. Jeremiah and Jesus and Luke never remotely imagined our economic circumstances. Yet there is something timeless about the Bible’s preference for the poor and marginalized. So how should we think about money and what should we do?

First, then, let’s get this biblical view of money, wealth, poverty, and economic justice out into the open. Many years ago as a newly minted minister I was just beginning to lead a Sunday evening worship service when a young woman entered the door of our church with a child about 6 years old. They both looked unhealthy. The woman was strung out on drugs and desperate for money. I still vividly remember what I felt, especially for the child, who may have been the woman’s daughter or just borrowed for the evening. This was a heartbreaking scene of desperate need and child abuse, scenes common around my city church. Do you feel compassion joined with a shudder of horror when you contemplate such a desperate situation? The driving principle of the biblical view of money is as simple and direct as those emotions of compassion and horror. The Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ teaching alike prioritize the poor and vulnerable, the sick and lonely, the marginalized and disenfranchised. Economic arrangements that protect and support these people are good. Economic arrangements that do not are wicked. It is an uncompromising litmus test.

The Democratic Party in this country has been drifting away from these bracing principles of economic justice. Their opponents mocked them as “soft-hearted liberals,” saying that government welfare breeds dependency and laziness in the poor. Save for a few lone voices, democrats seem to have succumbed to this critique in their quest for the hearts of the vast American middle class. But at no point does the Bible apologize for being idealistic and compassionate in its litmus test for economic justice. I wish we would worry less about the poor taking advantage of tax-based hand-outs and more about suffering children, here and abroad. It makes long-term economic sense as well as moral sense. Taking care of children is the surest path to peace in a world that easily sacrifices peace on the altar of power. It is soft-hearted and hard-headed and biblical all at once.

In this country the most loudly trumpeted Christian view of money is the prosperity gospel. Just as God took care of the Israelites in the desert with manna from heaven, so God will send you money, in proportion to your faith and generosity. We have all heard this used as a fund-raising technique on radio and television religious broadcasts and there is no shortage of books to fill in the details, in case you are wondering how to get in on this remarkable financial scheme. It is ironic that such a popular Christian view has so little biblical support. It reminds me of New Guinea cargo cults. My Bible-translating missionary friends used to tell me about native people going into a dangerous frenzy every time an airplane arrived from the sky gods with wondrous goods and supplies. If they could get their religious rituals just right, they believed, they could induce the gods to send more planes with more good stuff. See the similarity with the prosperity gospel? If we live and believe just right, we can get God mysteriously to send us all this good stuff.

Since I have just slammed the Democratic Party in this country, let me cast my jaundiced eye on the Republican Party. One of the invocation prayers at the recent Republican National Convention in New York included the statement, addressed to God, that “You have blessed us to be the most prosperous nation on Earth.” (The RNC website records that it was Bishop Keith Butler, Southfield, MI, who delivered the invocation at the beginning of a Republican National Convention session, Sep 2, 2004, 9:02pm, New York.) You know, I have a good idea of how hardworking and imaginative people get their money, and I don’t think God sends it from heaven. Religion sometimes helps people be hardworking and imaginative but powerful economic systems that create good jobs and opportunities matter more. This prayer sanctifies in a national audience the prosperity gospel’s cargo-cult superstition. Worse, it pretends that the massively disproportionate resource consumption of this country is just the sort of thing God favors, a divine blessing. This is a dangerous fiction. In the biblical perspective, being the most prosperous nation on earth conveys deadly serious responsibilities and brings not divine blessing but divine judgment.

Everywhere we look, it seems, the biblical view of money and wealth is ignored. But the Bible doesn’t budge: it is manna from heaven when used to support the poor and defenseless but its influence on our moral sense and our social priorities can make it mammon from hell.

This is abundantly clear in Jesus’ curious parable of the sneaky steward. It seems to be a story of white collar crime. The steward accepts responsibility for managing the affairs of a wealthy landowner, botches the job through laziness or corruption, and then deepens his wickedness to make last-minute friends among other wealthy people by discounting their debts to his boss. He is going to need those friends immediately because he is being fired. I suppose it is the ancient world’s equivalent of monster.com, a clever way of getting your résumé out there. On this reading, the steward certainly is not a heroic character.

There is another interpretation in which the much maligned steward is not so bad. In this part of the ancient world, the very few wealthy landowners such as the steward’s master hired people to run their affairs and gave them a lot of authority. Think of
Joseph running things for Pharaoh. So the steward probably had the discretion to discount debts. As for his corruption, the story refers to rumors, not facts (think of Joseph again). On this reading, the master was gullible, believing local trash talk, and the steward was the victim of a conniving competitor. He had to do something. Without friends who needed his skills, his alternatives were straightforward. He didn’t have the money to run a farm for a wealthy landholder, and he lived in an occupied country that didn’t have a military, so the vast peasantry was his fate. There he would dig ditches and plant crops. If he didn’t like hard labor, the only choice was begging in the streets. That’s how it goes in economies with no middle class and not much of a social welfare system, both in ancient times and today. So the steward did his sneaky thing and survived.

In Jesus’ context, wealth was rare and brought great power. It meant profiting from a system that kept most people hard underfoot. It is no wonder that his pro-peasant preaching insisted that you can’t serve God and money. Still, Jesus found a moral in the parable of the steward: religious folk should be as smart about matters of ultimate concern as worldly people are about their economic affairs. Luke took that spiritual message and gave it an economic twist, urging his readers to use dirty dollars wisely. Make sure that your arrival at the pearly gates of heaven draws cheering crowds of people who remain eternally grateful for your generosity in this life. Lucre might be filthy, but you can buy good stuff with it, so spend it as though heaven means more to you than feathering your earthly nest. Jesus’ and Luke’s messages differ, so it is no wonder that this passage does not read smoothly.

At this point, we have four biblical insights about money and wealth. One: the Bible’s litmus test for fair economic arrangements is the way the poor and vulnerable get treated. Two: you can’t serve God and money. Three: be smart about ultimate matters in your life and don’t let the desire for wealth destroy you. Four: if you’ve got money to spend, it is nothing to be proud of, so spend it on things that advance good in the world and create a home for yourself in heaven. These are all worthy take-home messages. But do they make sense in our context?

What would Jesus or Luke or Jeremiah say about flexible economies full of opportunities for creative and disciplined people, which girlie-man Arnold Schwarzenegger correctly says is the secret of immigrant success? What would they say about Alan Greenspan’s subtle adjustments in a Federal Reserve interest rate, tuning economic growth to create employment while keeping inflation in check? Or about international loans used to leverage social and economic change in poor nations? Or about the way global free trade spreads wealth but also brings hated economic and cultural side-effects?

Our world is not the world of the Bible and I find it difficult to apply Jesus’ and Luke’s views of money to our economic choices. Whereas Luke calls money unrighteous, I give my children weekly pocket money to help them learn how to manage money, partly because I have seen how economic activity can be a means of personal growth. Should I teach them money is evil instead? We have seen wise economic support gradually transform run-down communities, improving health and welfare for thousands, as well as the reverse process due to economic neglect. Should we reject the prosperity and safety brought by wealth and productivity as wrongheaded?

Jesus was a great advocate of the poor. But how do we follow his example? Does caring for the poverty-stricken mean tax-funded social welfare programs or do we replace government help with a thousand non-profit points of compassionate light? We all know about micro-loans to the poor, initiated by Muhammad Yunus’s amazing Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. But the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an both ban interest on loans, a policy that would destroy micro-loan initiatives. Does caring for the poor allow us to ignore these sacred texts on this question and spread micro-loans around the world? I hope so.

Unfortunately, Jesus did not talk much about the economic arrangements of his own time, which might have helped us figure out how to implement his vision. He did say that his followers should pay taxes to the Roman Empire that occupied their country; they were Caesar’s coins after all. But that’s a tough sell for Bostonians who revolted over taxation by a foreign government. Jewish law dictated a schedule of debt forgiveness but debt holders routinely preserved loans by transferring them to holding companies when debt relief time came. Did Jesus think this was a sensible way around a silly rule or a devious way to observe the letter of the law while violating its spirit? We simply do not know how Jesus would advise us to implement his views of money and wealth in his time or in ours.

Of course, the bible is not entirely without cutting-edge economic wisdom. And here I hope you’ll allow me a little humor for the patient children present as this sermon turns for home. Did you know that President Bush’s economic opportunity zones are biblical? The area around the Jordan River got especially rich when its banks overflowed. Investment interest appears in the Moses story: Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the river bank and drew out a little prophet. And what does the Bible say about selling or holding your investments in hard times? Well, Noah was floating his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.

More seriously, Jesus did give financial advice on one occasion. He told a rich young man to give his money away in order to be saved. Some saintly people have given away everything and lived with the poor, but I guarantee they weren’t raising families in Boston. Let’s face it: by global standards, most of us are wealthy, and on the wrong side of Jesus’ teaching on money. But I don’t want us to regard our wealth as intrinsically wicked, as unrighteous mammon useful only for buying our way into heaven. I want us to use our money wisely, to make a difference in the world by means of it, to be thankful for the security and comfort that it brings, and to act positively instead of obsessing over money and mortgages and bills and taxes. I want us to take a stand against rampant consumption, to be mindful of the whole world and not just our own families, to advocate for global economic responsibility and ecological prudence.

That’s what I want. But what practical advice would Jesus give you, if he were preaching here? Well—and this is thought provoking—I am pretty sure he would not be hanging out here. Despite the many Bible stories documenting Jesus’ social preference for the poor and sinners, suburban middle-class Christians think they would be Jesus’ favorites if he walked among us. The Cosmic Christ may like hanging out with everyone equally. But not the biblical Jesus. If he were in this country at all—and that’s a big leap—he would be preaching and healing in the streets of South Boston and Dorchester, calling gang members to be his disciples, living out his commitment to the poor and marginalized, and paying little attention to big churches and anxious wealthy people. I am sure that most church folk would find Jesus as offensive as the religious leaders of his own time did. I am sure that most would overhear his message about money and the poor and think it unrealistic. And I am sure Jesus would not compromise his message, not for a second, not even in the smallest degree, not for anyone.

Living a life of poverty in solidarity with the poor might make you one of Jesus’ favorites. But if you’re not going to do that—and I’m not—then all we really have to go by is Jesus’ l
itmus test: we can tell how well we are handling the wealth we have by evaluating the circumstances of the poor all around us. There might be a place in the kingdom of God on earth for wealth, even though Jesus was poor. There might be room for lovely homes and mortgages, even though Jesus was sometimes homeless. There might even be a role for executives in luxurious boardrooms deciding the fates of thousands of workers, even though Jesus was sometimes unemployed. In Jesus’ picture of that kingdom, however, there is no place for people who don’t care about the vulnerable, who don’t acknowledge the effects of their over-consumption, who are numb to the circumstances that immerse children in disease and ignorance and violence, or who refuse to bend their influence to change those circumstances. Jesus was incredibly idealistic. He didn’t care about being practical. He wanted to transform our values, open our eyes to exploitation and poverty, and devote ourselves to God’s service.

My question for you, dear listeners, is what will you do? What wealth do you possess but do not yet use on behalf of the poor? What influence might you wield but do not yet bring to bear on unjust economic circumstances? What compassion do you feel but do not yet pour out on behalf of our planet’s poor? Forsake your possessions and live with the poor, if you have that saintly calling. Otherwise, rein in your lifestyle and use your resources on behalf of the kingdom of God with the shrewdness of the steward in Jesus’ parable. Resolve today to root out the evil of self-righteous neglect in your own life. Decide today to make one small change to alter the world around you. Sponsor a child through one of the agencies that make that convenient. Spend some of your spare time volunteering. Read something that raises your consciousness about growing poverty in the United States. Meditate on the deadly poverty of the last hundred years in much of the world—the two-thirds world it is called, not for nothing. And in all that you do, if you intend to follow Jesus seriously, never forget his litmus test for economic arrangements. It is tough. It is idealistic. It is impractical. But it is also good and true and beautiful. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 09.19.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

New people in Boston know a great deal about getting lost. Those of you new to the University this academic year surely must have noticed that many streets do not have name signs. Sometimes, traveling down a street, the cross streets will be named but not the one you are on. If you do by chance know the name of the street you are on, it might not last because likely the name changes every few blocks. And if you ask a native how to get to the Boston Library, for instance, they will say, “go past Kenmore Square to Copley Square and it’s across from Trinity Church.” If you protest that you don’t know where the squares are or how to get from one to the other or what Trinity Church looks like, they’ll say this means you probably are not from Boston, a misfortune from which you might not recover. The only remedy, I know, for being lost in Boston is to root for the Red Sox through enough near-miss seasons as to enter into total mental empathy with native fans who know how to get from Fenway Park to anywhere.

Jesus’ point in the Gospel reading from Luke was not about being lost, although that too would be worth a sermon, but about losing something you value and the effort you expend on finding it. In our text he told two parables. One was about the shepherd who lost one sheep and left all the others to go after it. He risked ninety-nine sheep for the sake of finding the lost one. The second parable was about a woman with only ten coins who scours her house to find one that is lost. She did not risk her nine remaining coins to find the lost one, but she worked hard to find it. In both cases, Jesus emphasized the great joy that comes from finding what is lost, a greater joy than enjoying what was not lost. He editorialized on both parables by saying there is greater joy in heaven for the recovery of a sinner than for all the righteous people who are not lost. People who think of themselves as righteous are always uncomfortable with these parables.

Jesus knew about this discomfort, of course. Immediately following our reading today in Luke is the parable of the Prodigal Son. As you know in that story, a father loses his younger son who wanted to leave home and seek his fortune; the son squanders away his fortune in riotous living—not at all like going away to college, you understand--and he returns home to be a slave in his father’s house. The father receives him with the greatest possible joy, dresses him in the best robes, and kills a fatted calf to give him a party. It was like finding the lost sheep, the lost coin, but far more joyous because it was the father’s child. It was like heaven rejoicing at the salvation of the sinner. Then the elder brother comes in from the field where he had been working and throws a fit at the festivities for his brother. He complains he has worked like a slave all his life for his father who has never once given him a party, not even a goat, let alone a fatted calf. He refuses to come in, and the father goes out to mollify him, saying that the elder son would be his inheritor and that he too should welcome his brother home because the boy had been dead and was brought back to life. Jesus stopped the story there and did not say whether the elder brother ever came in to accept his brother, or his father’s love.

The most dramatic part of the parable of the Prodigal Son is that it has no ending. So we are prodded to ask, what is the story really about? It is not only about the prodigal who lost his wealth and came crawling back to heaven. Nor is it really only about the loving father who accepted him back and rejoiced more over his return than over his long-suffering eldest son. The parable is about the righteous elder brother who lost his innocence: he was jolted to discover that his years of righteous obedience and service to his father were morally ambiguous, motivated in part by selfishness and pride in being superior to his brother, not only by the love he protested.

In Luke’s gospel, the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son go together. Just before those parables, Jesus had been addressing a large crowd of his disciples and just afterward he returned to addressing his disciples. But these three parables, in chapter 15, are addressed to Pharisees and scribes who had been criticizing him for socializing with known sinners. The Pharisees and scribes were like the elder brother, representing the tradition of faithfulness and strict observance of religious obedience in the large household of Jewish faith, of which Jesus and his disciples, as well as critics, were members. What kind of righteous people could they be to object to Jesus ministering to sinners? On the other hand, what is the point of righteousness if the recovery of sinners is so much more important than the congratulation of the righteous? Why should anyone be righteous, they might ask, if it is better to be a sinner and repent in the nick of time?

The answer, of course, is that you should be righteous, not for the reward or congratulations, but because that is the righteous thing to be. The proper motive for righteousness is in the righteousness of the deed, not in having an identity with status. When the motive for righteousness is to have an identity that prides itself in being better than the identity of sinners, then the moral ambiguity of that righteousness corrupts the righteousness itself. Taking pride in one’s righteousness is an innocence well lost.

Americans these days know something about this kind of loss of innocence. No matter what you think about the upcoming Presidential election, things are vastly changed since the Presidential campaign four years ago. The United States now occupies two countries that did not attack us or provide a greater threat to American security than any number of other countries. This was justified by a new doctrine of “pre-emptive war,” which everyone knows deep down is just another name for a war of aggression when no immediate threat is present. So the American innocent sense of being the righteous defender of peace and justice is made ambiguous by our occupation of foreign territory.

In the grief and confusion after 9/11, the third anniversary of which we remembered yesterday, the government made the perhaps understandable mistake of declaring a “war on terrorism.” War is what you fight to conquer or hold territory and control a government. Terrorists duck when attacked and hold no territory, and they govern no peoples except themselves. What was needed was a massive international police action against the criminal terrorists. But misled by the rhetoric of war we attacked and conquered Afghanistan instead, driving out an admittedly bad Taliban government, which no more could control Al Qaeda than Mr. Karzai’s puppet government can. We pray that Mr. Karzai’s government can bring stability, but Al Qaeda still flourishes in the hills, as do the Taliban forces; the tribal leaders, whom our press calls warlords, have more power than the central government.

In respect of Iraq, our government either deceived itself or attempted to deceive the nation about connections with Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. Surely someone in the government knew how terrible war is and should have insisted on making certain about the need to go to war before doing so. Some Americans believe the government deliberately lied about its motives for war, and others believe it was only incompetent with regard to intelligence. In either case, Americans’ traditional innocent pride in their government has become morally ambiguous.

Our soldiers, for the most part, have fought valiantly, taking care t
o minimize civilian casualties where possible, and coping with the shock of being hated by many people whom they thought they were liberating. But the prison scandals have cast a pall of ambiguity over the integrity of the military and the American tradition of procedural justice.

Both Presidential candidates call for outcomes that would make it the case that our fallen soldiers are not dying in vain. Would to God that were so! The same thing must be said for the Iraqi soldiers who died under the rain of our bombs. No soldier’s death should be in vain. But what else could those deaths be but vain in some very profound sense, if the war should not have been fought in the first place? Deep down, everyone knows this, and the attempts to find something good to come out of the war only confuse the nation’s tortured conscience.

Our country has so lost its innocence that it seems to be more sharply divided than at any time since the Civil War. Deep down everyone knows the sad tale I’ve sketched, though it is told with many spins. Some people so sharply mourn the loss of innocence and life that they insist our course must have been right somehow, despite the evidence, and are ready to believe anything that reinforces that view. Other people are so angered at the loss of innocence that they rage that their righteous nation has been stolen from them. Debates about economic, environmental, and welfare policies occupy a lot of middle ground. Even the so-called “culture wars” of the last two decades were fought over a broad middle ground. But the sad tale of American military adventures has so divided the country that even our sense of being a united people has been made ambiguous. Honest and wise people differ over where to go from here, and no easy solutions present themselves. What is certain is that, wherever we go, it will be without the innocence we felt four years ago.

Without suggesting anything about what Jesus might say concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I do believe that Jesus would say our loss of innocence is a good thing. You can lose a sheep and find it again. You can recover a lost coin. You can even have an estranged child return to you. All of these losses recouped are like divine joy at the redemption of sinners. The deeper meaning of Jesus’ parables here, however, has to do with the false righteousness of the Pharisees and scribes, as Luke describes them. Their sense of moral superiority blinded them to the value of Jesus associating with sinners. In a like manner, the accursed innocence of American false righteousness has blinded us to the necessity to work for peace and justice, prosperity and security, with sinners, among whom we are.

We struggle to transcend partisanship and hear the gospel in the turmoil of our divided politics. Where is the Holy Spirit in the political racket? I believe at least four promptings of the Spirit can be discerned.

First and most obviously, we need to respect, honor, and love those with whom we disagree. When no common ground can be identified, this is difficult, especially when the dispute is fueled by grief and anger. But we all have the common ground of loss of innocence, whether we admit or deny it, with the consequence that we have to work together to make the best of a morally ambiguous situation.

Second, the gospel prompts us through the Golden Rule systematically to look at ourselves from the perspectives of those who oppose us. This means we each must empathize with all the divided perspectives within American politics. More importantly, it means we must look at America through the eyes of its opponents: our “insurgents” are their “freedom fighters,” our “liberation” is their “foreign occupation.” Christians especially should aim for a God’s-eye view, and God sees through every perspective, loving all the sinners on all sides.

Third, the gospel prompts us to be with and help the people who are hurt, the grieving families of fallen soldiers (on all sides), the civilians maimed or grieved, the economies shaken, the elderly, sick, and uneducated whose lives could have been improved were it not for the cost of our wars. Irrespective of political or national stance, each hurting person is like a lost sheep or an estranged child for whom we have responsibility. Every bombed house is someone’s lost coin.

Fourth, the Spirit insists we must come to terms with our loss of innocence. We can ask forgiveness of our own failings in the measure we forgive others. We can be wise about policies only when we are transparently honest. We can go forward only if we know the costs will be high and the outcomes ambiguous. And as redeemed sinners, we cannot under any circumstances back away from the hard issues on our watch just because we know we might fail or do evil in some respects even as we win for the good in others.

The gospel calls us to love the whole creation, despite its ambiguities and pains. The Christian way to the joy of heaven is through the wilderness of crosses. This is a hard lesson for students, especially new ones, who, like the grieving and angry, want a clear path to righteousness. Let me invite you, however, into the company of redeemed sinners whose innocence is lost, the company of Pharisees and scribes who have heard and understood Jesus’ parables. In this company, the griefs and rages of ambiguous life can be borne with heavenly joy. May God receive and bless us all. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 09.12.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Last Sunday’s sermon was about a very difficult text in Colossians whose point was that the death of Christ Jesus on the cross means that human beings, individually and in our communities, are reconciled to God. The early Christians symbolized this in the imagery of animal and human sacrifice. I apologize for the complexity and far-fetched imagery in that text, and in my sermon. If your eyes glazed over for a bit last week, that is perfectly understandable. A preacher has the duty to deal with the hard texts and you might be comforted to know that I do my duty only rarely.

The texts for today from Colossians and also from Luke follow up on those from last week and are not difficult at all, you will be pleased to know. They have extreme and unusual imagery, but the point is brilliantly clear. Although life has many obstacles and problems, the only thing of ultimate importance that holds us back is our sin. But Jesus Christ has taken away our sin and we are free. Free! Free! And therefore we should ask the most of life, live it to the fullest, and rejoice that because we are related to Jesus the fullness of God is all around us.

Today’s text from Colossians begins by enjoining us to live with devoted thanksgiving in the Christian faith. It warns us not to be taken captive by the deceitful philosophies of the pagan religions devoted to what the author calls “the elemental spirits of the universe.” In the first century people believed that the universe was populated not only by the different kinds of angels I mentioned last week, the “thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers,” but also by many other kinds of spiritual forces, some of which are demonic. The early Christians interpreted the pagan religions to worship one or more of these forces, and rejected all such paganism in favor of the worship of the High God, the Creator of all the universe including invisible spirits, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who was revealed in Christ.

We twenty first century people who worship in a university church are not likely to be tempted by first-century paganism, although we should not forget that many of our sisters and brothers in other lands do live very much in a world they see to be populated by spirits of all sorts. Our own brand of false worship is more likely to be devoted to what contemporary cynics say are elemental spirits.

The cynics among us say that power is our greatest desire, however we try hypocritically to be humble: so go after power honestly and ruthlessly. The cynics among us say that political dominance is the real goal of international politics, however we try hypocritically to represent ourselves as peacemakers, so go after dominance honestly and with all the might at our disposal. The cynics among us say that greed is the real underlying motive of all action, however we try hypocritically to represent ourselves as generous, so go after all we can get by any means we can get away with. These and other elemental forces in human society can become objects of worship, and the cynical people say to be honest about that. The Christian gospel says, No. Like the spirits created by God according to the first century belief, power, political strength, and enjoyment of possessions are good things in their places, even necessary; but they cannot be worshipped without displacing worship of the true God. Give them up, says Colossians, and don’t be deceived by the cynical philosophies.

Of course, giving up worship of such idols of our age is not easy. Part of the meaning of original sin is that we are committed to them and to the social structures that they rule, whether we consciously want to be or not. But Hallelujah! We are freed from bondage to sin. As Colossians put it in a striking metaphor, we are spiritually circumcised with Christ and have put on his spiritual flesh. Circumcision, you know, was the symbolic rite given to Abraham and his descendents that made them God’s people and the heirs of God’s promise to make them flourish. Spiritual circumcision makes us God’s people and heirs to God’s promise to bring us close to him. Spiritual circumcision means that all of us, Gentiles and Jews, are God’s people. Christians carry the flesh of Christ on their bones.

Then Colossians has an even more powerful image. It says that Jesus’ baptism was like his dying. To go down into the water is to die. When we Christians are baptized, as young Naomi Fassil will be this morning, this is like dying to our sins. We lose the flesh of sin. When Jesus rose up out of the baptismal water, this was like his rising from the dead. And so with us: when we rise from baptism we are already resurrected from sin and living with God. This is a different theology of baptism from that which says it is a bath that cleanses us from sins. It is more than being just an initiation rite into the Christian community. Rather, Colossians says that baptism is the rite of death and resurrection. The third chapter goes on to say that we, or at least the Christians in Colossae, have already died, spiritually, and are already raised with Christ in heaven. We are also living here in history, even while we “have been raised with Christ,” and therefore we should “set our minds on things that are above.” We should get our act together, put to death the practice of earthly evils. Colossians says

But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:8-11)

Baptism gives us a whole new self, and we have to learn how to live with that self in holy ways. What about the sins of our old self? They are “nailed to the cross!” We still have all the problems of life, of course, and we will sin in the future; but we are enjoying our true identity in heaven already, right now, we do not stumble on those problems because of our sins. They are nailed to the cross. Our old sinful habits of addiction to power, dominance, greed, deceit and countless other things might still be strong, but they do not control us because our sins are nailed to the cross. Colossians tells us that in baptism we have already undergone death, and with that our sins and their due punishment are nailed to the cross. We have already undergone resurrection with Christ, and so we should live as already resurrected people. What strange and yet powerful good news!

This theology of salvation is different from St. Paul’s, which says that we struggle through this life until we are saved at the end of it in a future resurrection when Jesus comes again. The problem with Paul’s theology of salvation is that Jesus did not come soon as he expected, and despite Paul’s claim that we have grace to live new lives now he is easily interpreted to mean that present life is just a holding action until some future time. Paul’s phrase is that we are “walking between the times.” Justification by faith alone, one of Paul’s famous doctrines, has been interpreted to mean that if we just believe, God will take care of us later. Colossians’ theology says that we are already raised and live in the presence of God with Christ, and that life on earth is the very important task of sanctification, living in holy ways. Sanctification, for Colossians, is not earning salvation: we already have salvation in the baptismal form of death to our sins and resurrection to new life. S
anctification is the perfection of how to live in this world as holy people. The injustices of this world are a hundred times more horrific to us now, because we see them as infections of a world that should be sanctified. Addressing them cannot be put off until some future salvation. The Letter to the Ephesians and the Gospel and Letters of John agree with Colossians, as does the Methodist tradition on which this university and its chapel are based.

How should we live as holy people, already enjoying God’s salvation and learning to live worthy of it in our daily lives? How should we live the life of renewal of the new self? Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer quotes Jesus saying that we should pray regularly to God as the hallowed or holy one whose holiness we approach. We should pray that Earthly life be made like God’s perfect kingdom. From this comes our commitment to justice. We should pray for continued forgiveness of sins we might commit as we too forgive those who sin against us. We should pray that we not fall into special trials or temptations, as these shall surely arise in daily life. Moreover, Jesus goes on to say, in Luke’s account, that we should demand of the world the resources to be generous, like the man who pounded on his neighbor’s door to borrow bread to entertain his visitors. Be persistent, said Jesus, in working for the resources to be generous. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Of course this does not happen every time, as the crucified One came to know from personal experience. Sometimes our parents, or our communities, do give us snakes instead of fish, scorpions instead of eggs. But by and large God is generous and we should look for grace in abundance as resurrected members of God’s household. According to Luke, Jesus did not say that God will give us fish and eggs. Rather he said that God would “give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” The Holy Spirit is far more precious than food.

How should we live our daily lives as people who have gone down to death with Christ and risen with him? We should live in the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit that surrounds us and is available for the asking. The Spirit is in the hands of friends who help us. The Spirit is in the face of strangers who wake us to our new selves and to new duties. The Spirit is in the arms of Christians gathered to comfort and strengthen one another. The Spirit is in the words of scripture, in literature that penetrates the ambiguities of life, in poetry that takes us to the heights and depths. The Spirit takes some form in every case of our need when we attempt to sanctify the lives we lead.

We are about to sing a wonderful old hymn about being in the resurrected state right now: “It Is Well with My Soul.” When sorrows in this life roll like billows of the sea, the Spirit is peace like a river that carries us through. When temptations come, as surely they will, when it seems as if the evil and injustice against which we contend has Satanic force, the Spirit assures us that Jesus has come through it all before us. Remember the great line, “My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.”

My friends, as we are about to baptize Naomi Fassil and welcome her into the household of faith, let us be reminded that this is not only a rite of initiation. Nor is it only a symbolic washing away of personal sins—Naomi is far to young to need that kind of bath, and many of us were baptized long before we were old enough to have mastered the art of sinning boldly. When Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan, he went down into the waters of the primal creation, the voice of God spoke his approval, and the spirit of God descended, just as at the original creation. Jesus rose from his baptism a new person, like a second creation. Let us be reminded today that baptism means that we also have conquered death and come into resurrection. Let us welcome Naomi and live with her the lives of resurrected and holy people. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.25.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

We Christians relate to God by relating to Jesus Christ. Of course, Christians share many things with people of other religions, for instance a commitment to ethical life, a love of justice and peace, a reverence for holy people and places, and awe at the majesty of what is most ultimate, known as God in the language of monotheisms but going by other names in other religions. What makes Christians different, and what distinctly shapes our approach to ethics, justice and peace, reverence, and awe, is our relation to Jesus Christ. According to St. Paul, Christians are supposed to be “in Christ,” although he had difficulty saying what that meant.

Our two texts today present very different images of Jesus Christ. The Gospel from Luke shows Jesus as a teacher in the intimate setting of a dinner party. The texts from Luke for the last several weeks have presented various other settings for Jesus as the herald of the kingdom of God and the healer. Last week’s text showed Jesus talking with a lawyer about eternal life, with Jesus telling the story of the Good Samaritan. This text is set in the home of Mary and Martha. We know them much more fully from the Gospel of John in which they are shown as having a long and intimate friendship with Jesus. They were a well-to-do family in Bethany, near Jerusalem, where Jesus spent a lot of time. John tells of Jesus raising their brother Lazarus from the dead, which was both Jesus’ most important miracle, according to John, and also the reason why the authorities became concerned about Jesus and resolved to put him to death. The household of Mary and Martha was very important for Jesus.

The incident in our text contrasts their characters in ways that have become almost clichés in Christian preaching: Mary is spiritual while Martha is practical. It was Martha who issued the dinner invitation and prepared the banquet, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet as a disciple. You doubtless have heard sermons about these two personality types for Christian women, the pillar of the church who cooks the meals and the devotee who reads spiritual books all day. Both are approved, although Jesus was a bit annoyed that Martha was making such a fuss, possibly because she wanted more attention. She also seemed a bit jealous of the attention Mary was getting as a Jesus-freak. Jesus’ response was to say that one dish would be plenty for the dinner and that she did not have to serve up a banquet.

What is important about this story is not anything that Jesus was teaching; his remarks are not recorded, although Luke does quote Jesus’ teachings in many other passages. What is important is his personality, the way he handled the touchy relations between the sisters. He had great affection for them both and was able to give Martha credit as his senior hostess and cook while also saying that she did not have to work so hard. He did not say that doe-eyed discipleship is more important than hospitality, only that hospitality can be kept in due proportion. He comforted Martha about her excessive worries and distractions. This is not Jesus the charismatic teacher or magical healer. This is Jesus the very human and hungry friend who adjusts and perfects the way people around him exercise love.

Compare this presentation of Jesus—it’s not even fitting to attach the title “Christ” to him in this vignette—with the text from Colossians. Colossians is what theologians call “high Christology,” focusing on the divinity of Christ. Our passage does not use the personal name “Jesus,” although Colossians elsewhere uses the phrase “Christ Jesus.” The first thing our passage does is to call attention to the distinction between the invisible God and Christ as its image. “Invisible” as applied to God in the first century does not mean only that God cannot be seen because of being an immaterial spirit. It means rather that God is so high above human comprehension and categories that nothing can describe God directly. John says (1:18) that no one has ever seen God, which is a change from claims in Exodus that Moses and others saw God; by Jesus’ time, people understood God as so high as to be the creator of everything that can be imagined at all. As our Colossians text puts it, God created all things visible and invisible in the sense of being spiritual, and therefore is above them. To say that Christ is the image of this High God is to say that he is the first thing that can be known and described about the unimaginable God. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 4, and the author of Hebrews, in the first chapter, also say that Christ is the image of God in this sense.

Colossians says that Christ provides an image by which we can grasp the unimaginable God, because Christ is the firstborn of all creation. Christ is the first creature who then becomes the means by which all other creatures come to be. “[F]or in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers.” “ Thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers” are various ranks of angels, invisible spirits, according to the first century belief. The idea of Christ as the one who is “before all things” and in whom “all things hold together,” is like the idea of Logos at the beginning of the Gospel of John, a primordial structure and power by means of which all the world is created. In John, the suggestion is that the Logos is a companion to God the creator. Colossians is plain that Christ is the first creature, subordinate to God yet prior to all else.

Later theologians in Western Christianity would side with John, interpreting him to mean that the Logos is equal to God, and is fully a part of Trinitarian divinity. Theologians in Easter Orthodox Christianity would keep the emphasis on subordination in Colossians, emphasizing that the Son is begotten by the Father and that this is not a reciprocal relation. However we line up with that later dispute, Colossians says that we understand the incomprehensible God by understanding Christ.

What is it that we understand of Christ? First, as mentioned, that Christ is the structure through which all other things are created. Second, Colossians says that Christ is the head of the Church and likens the Church to the body of Christ. Because the Church is supposed to be the body that properly worships God, Christ is the Head that directs that worship: we should worship God as Christ says to worship and comport ourselves ethically in God’s kingdom according to the model of Christ our Head. Third, Colossians says that Christ is not only the firstborn of all creation but the firstborn of the dead, the first to be raised. Here the text is clearly talking about Christ Jesus, the man, whom the Christians knew to have been crucified and raised from the dead. Thus, as image of God, we understand Christ Jesus to reveal God as not only creator but as redeemer. “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” which is to say that everything divine that can fit into a human being fit into Jesus, and by relating to the person of Jesus we find the redeeming Creator.

Now I know this high Christology is complicated, working with symbols that seem strange and unintelligible in our culture. But please bear with the argument in Colossians for a few more minutes. The text characterizes the ordinary state of human beings as estranged from God and hostile in mind: this is the human predicament from which salvation must rescue us. We are estranged and hostile. God reconciles us to himself, says Colossians, “by making peace through the blood of [Christ’s] cross.” The reference here is to the institution of ritual sacrifice in Israelite religion. According to Leviticus as well as Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, Israel was a holy nation that could present
itself blameless and irreproachable to God so long as it kept the covenant. But when the covenant was broken in any way, large or small, the people had to sacrifice something to God, grain or an animal, in order to repair their holiness and ability to approach God. God in the Torah instituted the sacrifice rituals as means to repair the covenant, because God knew the covenant would be impossible for people. God’s mercy provided a ready remedy.

Christians interpreted human sin as so great as not to be repairable by any sacrifice of grain or animals. So just as God had earlier provided the rituals for sacrificial repair of the covenant, now God provides Christ the firstborn of all creation as himself the sacrifice that once again reconciles human beings to God.

The idea that a sacrifice can reconcile estranged and hostile parties is uncomfortable to modern sensibilities. We are very far from the Levitical sensibilities of the ancient world. Yet we do understand something of Colossians’ argument: it was human beings who were estranged from and hostile to God—God was not estranged and hostile, according to our text. So God sent that which is most precious, the firstborn of creation, as a sacrifice to call us back from estrangement and hostility, and that in the form of the man Jesus who had to be crucified. Because of that sacrifice we have a fresh start, and never again does the sacrifice have to be made no matter what evil we do.

You might ask how we can tolerate these images of blood sacrifice. They were commonplace for first century Christians but are gross for us. Yet there is something in human evil, something in the evil of natural suffering and the deep injustice of the institutions on which we have built our society that is even more gross. The blood guilt we bear for what it costs the Earth for us to live, for the harm we do one another, for the repressions built into civilization even at its best, calls for blood sacrifice. This is only a symbol, a symbol used by the early Christians to understand the crucifixion of Jesus. But we cannot do with a less powerful symbol. Christ the symbol of God reveals God as the creator whose love accepts blood guilt and reconciles us even when we are estranged and hostile. That symbol cleanses our hearts and directs our faith even when we cannot take it literally.

The practical question for contemporary Christians is how we can relate to Jesus Christ whose blood bought us redemption, knowing how alien these symbols are. I believe we need to understand first that wise and loving Jesus who traveled about teaching that we always live in the sight of God, that we are in God’s kingdom whether we know it or not, and that what counts in God’s kingdom is our practice of love. The teaching is important, but the person who taught it is the more important to know, the friend so kind as to straighten out Martha and Mary. The Bible gives us much to work around in our imagination as we think about this Jesus who would be our friend too. Can we imagine Jesus gently correcting our faults as he did Martha’s? To be related to Jesus as his friends, and to him as our friend, is the first step in relation.

The second is to see God in Jesus, who is his primary image. God is humble, like Jesus, condescending to heal our little estrangements and hostilities as Jesus healed Martha’s. Yet the savagery of nature’s indifference to suffering, the outrage of death, the depths of greed, and the perverse human pleasure in causing pain constitute an evil strain in creation so profound that a simple teacher’s love cannot heal it. We need to symbolize the extremity of God’s love with the savagery of the crucifixion’s blood sacrifice if we are to recognize what needs healing. So it is Christ Jesus crucified that lets us engage the High God whose redeeming power is equal to creation’s need. And it is Christ Jesus the firstborn of the dead who leads us to live before God as redeemed and renewed persons.

Only through such powerful symbols can we admit the problem and embrace the cosmic power of the answer. These symbols allow us to engage the problem honestly and to engage God as imaged by Christ Jesus. Even if the symbol of blood sacrifice cannot be tolerated as a literal explanation of redemptive history, only that image can engage us with the unimaginable God so that we see the seriousness of creation’s redemption of which we are a part. Only when we live in Christ Jesus, firstborn of all creation and friend of Mary and Martha, can we let God’s cosmic love seep into our bones and sinews to heal estrangement and hostility, and finally make us lovers. Only then can we envision the invisible God in the person of Christ Jesus, our lover and beloved, pioneer of our faith. We are grateful for people who can accept these symbols naively. We praise God that we can see the symbols broken and yet also live by them to engage our Creator and redeemer. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.18.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

In one of the most arresting images in biblical literature, Amos says that God stands in the midst of the people with a plumb line. Builders use a string with a weight on the bottom, a plumb line, to determine whether a wall is vertical and straight. Less subjective than eyeballing the wall, and governed by the cosmic force of gravity, a plumb line is an absolute measure. God stands in the midst of the people with an absolute measure for their deeds, and Amos quotes God saying that because of this measure he would destroy both the religious and political establishment of Israel. Amos does not say God is thinking about destroying Israel—he is going to do this. God is not into tough love, for Amos. Justice is the order of the day.

We do not like this harsh “Old Testament” God, believing as most of us do that God is loving, rather the way we dream our mothers were loving. Often we think, or hope, that divine judgment is nothing but God’s efforts to get us to do better. Yet there is something very important in the plumb line image. Who and what we are before God is our absolute identity. No excuses. No extenuating circumstances. No promises of doing better tomorrow. Moreover, divine judgment is not something to come later, postponed by a long life. As Amos says, God is even now holding the plumb line in the midst of the people. We live before God absolutely every day of our lives, whether we know it or not. One of the earliest heresies in Christianity, call Marcionism after its founder Marcion, said that the harsh God of the Old Testament was evil and that Christian should believe only in the SuperLoving HighGod. Marcionism was quickly condemned, however difficult it was for Christians to reconcile the God of judgment with the God of Love.

A profound reason exists to pay attention to the God with the plumb line. Unless we are held responsible in an absolute sense for who and what we are, we have no self, as our colleague Peter Berger would say. If we relativize ourselves with excuses from the past, or promises for the future, we ourselves turn out to be personally absent. Our moral self reduces to the conditions within which we live, the influences of others upon us, and the limitations of our bodies. Although of course, we live within such conditions, influences, and limitations, our moral selves consist in what we make of them. Our moral selves develop through time, maturing from childhood, with many starts and stops, with repentance and promise of doing better. Yet who we are at any time, indeed who we are over our lifetime, is what we make of ourselves within the conditions, influences, and limitations given us. This is our true self, our true identity, our soul, and we comprehend this only when we imagine standing in absolute perspective before God, who is in our midst with the plumb line.

The Christian gospel is that divine judgment is not the whole of the story, and it is not the whole story for Amos and Judaism: the God of justice is also the God of mercy. Among the most important elements in the development of a moral self are the occasions in which we respond with repentance before God and with gratitude for mercy. Sometimes we imagine God to be in time because our true selves develop in interaction with the ultimate divine perspective. Yet imagining God to be temporal, to be a being within time, always runs the risk of domesticating the eternal majesty of the God who creates time itself. The true absolutely ultimate God before whom we become our true selves is the eternal God within whose plenitude we live as temporal beings with eternal life.

Jesus was asked, according to Luke, what one must do to inherit eternal life. He did not answer with a metaphysical discourse on the eternal God, which you were afraid I was about to inflict upon you. Rather, Jesus turned the question: What does it say in the Bible? The questioner, a lawyer, answered by citing the line from Deuteronomy 4 that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, combining this with the line from Leviticus 19 that you should love your neighbor as your self. “Right,” said Jesus. When Matthew and Mark tell this story, they put the lines from scripture in Jesus’ mouth, not that of the lawyer. It must have been Jesus’ central teaching about the law and justice.

According to Luke, the lawyer did not let the matter lie, but questioned Jesus about who his neighbor was. Commentators suggest that he meant to limit his liability by circumscribing those who counted as neighbors. Jesus responded with the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. You know the story. A man was badly mugged while traveling to Jericho and was left by the side of the road. Two religious people came by, a priest and a Levite, who had religious responsibilities to all the people of Israel. They did not want to get involved and passed by on the other side of the road. A Samaritan came by who pitied the man, took him to a hotel, tended his wounds, and said he would pay for the man’s recovery. The lawyer, when questioned, said it was the Samaritan who had been the neighbor, and Jesus “said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

Jesus’ point, of course, was that the people with the ethnic and religious obligation to the victim were not real neighbors. The real neighbor was the Samaritan who was ethnically as well as religiously alien. In fact, relations between Jews and Samaritans were worse than alienated, they were hostile. Athough he was himself an observant Jew, Jesus had little patience with ethnic or religious differences. As Luke pointed out in the text for last week, Jesus took his mission to Samaritan as well as Jewish towns. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus talked with a Samaritan woman, which was forbidden, offered her the water of life, and told her that religious differences make no difference when God is worshipped in spirit and in truth. Jesus healed Canaanites and Romans also. Although he was slow to come to this conclusion, ethnic and religious identities did not count.

What counted for Jesus is loving people. St. Paul in Romans 13 and again in Galatians 5 says that loving neighbor as self sums up all the law. The epistle of James says the same thing. The Gospel of John does not cite the line about loving neighbors from Leviticus, but it argues even more forcefully that Jesus’ work and identity was to teach people to love one another despite difference that would justify indifference or hate. Love is the very center of the Christian gospel, and it was recognized as such from Jesus’ time down to today.

With respect to divine judgment, then, the inference seems clear. What is the plumb line by which we are judged? For Amos, it was the law, and for Jesus and the Christians it was love as the summary of the law. In fact, where law means social and religious patterns that distinguish one group from another, as was clearly the case in much of the Torah, love trumps those differences. Jesus relativized the law, in the sense of religious patterns, to faithfulness to love.

Who are we before God? We essentially are lovers, good lovers or bad lovers. People who do not make lovers of themselves in the midst of the conditions, influences, and limitations of life have no self. No soul. Actually, that cannot be quite right. Everyone is held responsible in ultimate perspective, even if people utterly fail at responsibility. So we should say that everyone has a self or soul: the worry is whether it is happily loving or wretched, blessed or damned. Our eternal life depends on how we are lovers, said Jesus.

To love our own kind is easy, especially when they love us back. The Samaritans and other aliens teach us to love in the hard cases. Like the Good Samaritan, truly responsible lovers are those whose love extends to thos
e who are alien to them, especially those whom others have failed to love. We learn the hard lessons of love when aliens, from whom we should expect indifference or hate, love us instead. Thank God for aliens!

Now according to Jesus, we are to love God, as well as neighbors, with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. Who, for us, is more alien than God? How can we love the eternal creator whose plumb line holds us in judgment? How can we love the creator who gives us conditions of life filled with war and poverty, influences from people who would warp the soul, limitations of disease and death, all the ambiguities of the sometimes fell environment from which we present ourselves to God?

Some people say we love in trade. Because God loves us, we love God. Yet God’s ordinary treatment of human kind is very mixed, loving benefits yes, but also indifference and sometimes hateful punishment. We can no more liken God’s true love as creator to a human lover, such as the Good Samaritan, than we can think of God’s eternity as the time of a dialogue partner. How hard it is for us to appreciate that even the hardships, suffering, and death of life, especially innocent life, are the creatures of a loving creator! Yet there is some sublime loveliness in the Creator that transfigures all these considerations. The one who holds the plumb line and calls us to account can become our beloved. We do not love God by willing to do so. What we will is that God help us. Yet by learning to love the unlovely among our neighbors, we can attain that integrity of self, that maturity of soul, which lets us take God as our lover.

Charles Albert Tindley, the great African-American hymn-writer, understood this subtle transformation: we begin by crying to God for help and end up becoming God’s lover when help fails. We’ll shortly sing his extraordinary hymn, Stand by Me. It starts with nature’s brute forces: “When the storms of life are raging, stand by me. When the storms of life are raging, stand by me. When the world is tossing me, like a ship upon the sea, thou who rulest wind and water, stand by me.” It moves to human struggle: “In the midst of tribulation, stand by me. In the midst of tribulation, stand by me. When the host of hell assail, and my strength begins to fail, thou who never lost a battle, stand by me.” Then to personal failings: “In the midst of faults and failures, stand by me. In the midst of faults and failures, stand by me. When I’ve done the best I can, and my friends misunderstand, thou who knowest all about me, stand by me.” Then oppression and enmity: “In the midst of persecution, stand by me. In the midst of persecution, stand by me. When my foes in war array undertake to stop my way, thou who saved Paul and Silas, stand by me.” Tindley knew that God does not calm all seas, protect us from all defeat, reverse our failures, or give us all victories. The most fortunate among us just get old. Verse five says: “When I’m growing old and feeble, stand by me; when I’m growing old and feeble, stand by me. When my life becomes a burden, and I’m nearing chilly Jordan, O thou Lily of the Valley, stand by me.” Readers of the Song of Solomon know that the Lily of the Valley is the beloved, not a champion, but the beloved. Somehow Tindley moved from demanding that God behave like a Good Samaritan to singing that God, his Beloved, receive his love. To love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength is to be able to take God as our lover. As we come closer to the Lily of the Valley, we also embrace the plumb line in our midst. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.11.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

For Americans the Fourth of July is a quasi-religious holiday, something scholars call a function of our “civil religion.” Civil religion is the set of practices that articulate the basic values of our national life that derive from religious sources. Thanksgiving is the other great American civil religious holiday, and it celebrates gratitude. Memorial Day is a lesser civil holiday celebrating military sacrifice, and Labor Day, also a lesser civil religious holiday, celebrating working class people in democracy.

The Fourth of July celebrates freedom in two senses, first, independence from foreign domination and, second, self-determination of national life so as to foster individual freedom and to welcome of all kinds of people into citizenship. The Fourth of July is the most important of our civil religious holidays in that it rehearses those ideals in America’s mythic self-understanding by virtue of which we think America is an exception to the usual course of nations. American exceptionalism is much justified in that this was the first modern democracy to be successful, the most pluralistic of cultures that still is united under the rule of law, the most vigorous and inventive economy in the world to have grown through a century of turmoil, and the safest place for preachers such as myself to point out the religious improbity of the government without fear of retribution. To take St. Paul’s line, that you reap what you sow, the successes of American exceptionalism reap the good seed sown by the Revolutionary Patriots.

My question for the day is, What is the Christian Gospel, not the civil gospel, relative to this Fourth of July? The question is complicated by the fact that for many people, here and abroad, the United States currently plays a role more like the British in our revolution than like the colonists. It is our troops and mercenaries that occupy nations that did not attack us, our troops who are ambushed in out of the way places like Lexington and Concord, our troops who will be remembered for bombing wedding parties and killing women and children, our troops who are opposed by guerillas fighting for God and country. Like the British in the late eighteenth century our motives for foreign wars seem to be a combination of righteous desire to advance proper democracy, as opposed to the French kind (if I may make a bad joke about the revolutionary conflict), and an imperial desire to establish a world economic order that works to the benefit of our economic elites.

Of course our current situation is much more complicated than this, and events can be read many ways. Nevertheless, like the British in the eighteenth century, our policies now seem to be driven by the thinking of Empire, with both benevolent and malevolent motives. The benevolent motives have to do with imposing the grand values defining American exceptionalism on other peoples regardless of their own cultures of conflicting values. The malevolent ones have to do with reducing freedom to the freedom to pursue avarice. To much of the Muslim world, American freedom and democracy mean only those social forms that foster greed, with no transcendent moral principles whatsoever. However ignorant that view might be of the complexities of religious values in American history, it does point out that for a great many American colonists other than the Founding Fathers in July, 1776, economic promise was the most important motive for seeking independence from Britain and a representative government. The avarice sown in the American dream of independence is being reaped today in the enormous human and financial costs required to sustain empire. It seems that only the oligarchs are getting rich.

So what is the Christian Gospel for Americans on this holiday? Luke tells of Jesus sending seventy of his disciples to all the towns he himself intended to visit. They were to be something like advance teams, of two people each, who would heal the sick and say that God was near and Jesus was coming, which might be the same thing. In the previous chapter Jesus had sent his intimate group of twelve disciples on a similar mission, promising them the power to heal and cast out demons. He did not promise the same power to the seventy, but they received and exercised it anyway. We Christians, like the seventy, are commissioned to go out into the world to heal, which means also peacemaking, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God is near, that is, that we live and are judged in the perspective of God. This is a crucial part of our Gospel for today.

A strange part of Jesus’ instructions to both groups of disciples was that they should go into a town and simply preach and heal. If someone accepts and hosts them, fine; if not, they should shake the dust of that town off their feet and go on to the next. Evangelistic success is not the point: presenting God’s word and power is the point. Behind this, however, is the fact that the villages included Samaritan and Canaanite communities as well as Jewish ones. Last week’s gospel told of Jesus leaving a Samaritan community in a hurry because they objected to his orientation to Jerusalem—the Samaritans rejected worship at the Temple in Jerusalem in favor of worship on their mountain. The point is that Jesus sent his disciples to all the villages, not just the Jewish ones where they had a religious connection; this was in contrast to Jesus’ earlier stance that he was sent only to the House of Israel. I take this to mean that in our own Christian mission of healing, including peacemaking, and preaching the presence of God, we should be true first to the message and mission, not to taking care of our own people first.

This is a hard lesson, that we Christians should be in solidarity with Christians all over the world who heal and preach the presence of God before we are in solidarity with our national identity as Americans. Surely American Christians have great resources for healing and should deploy these all over the world, especially in poorer countries. Moreover, American Christians have an extraordinary peacemaking role in Iraq and Afghanistan. In no way does this mean that American Christians should interfere with the Iraqis’ and Afghans’ own efforts to establish a self-determining and efficient government—indeed peacemaking means getting out of their way, and supporting their efforts as they see fit. Our prayers today should be long and fervent for the new Iraqi government. As to preaching the proximity of the kingdom of God, I do not suggest that we or Christians anywhere try to convert Muslims to Christianity. Jesus had no conception of supporting one religion against others. He told the Samaritan woman at the well that the worship of God in spirit and in truth would transcend religious differences. Nevertheless Christians can testify to the critical presence of God by honoring the devotion of Muslims and by silently witnessing to the contradiction between God’s peace on the one hand and the slaughter of innocents in terrorism and the beheading of kidnapped people for propaganda gain. The most powerful Christian testimony for the Muslim world would be a direct criticism of the contradiction between Christian values and the brutality of empire.

This might be the hardest part of Jesus’ commission to us, his disciples: to shake the dust off our feet when our own American towns and institutions reject the humility of healing and peace, and the testimony that we stand in God’s presence. How hard it must have been for the seventy abruptly to leave their own hometowns when they were not honored as prophets within it!

Jesus’ instructions make the Gospel particularly difficult for American Christians today. It is tempting in our purist moments t
o identify only with Christians around the world and forsake any special identification with America. Some of our more radical brothers and sisters do just this. Nevertheless, Christians who are Americans have special responsibilities for their democratic participation in American politics. We should insist that the Christian commitments to peace, justice, and kindness trump every other political motive in laws and policies where these are at stake. But political matters are devilishly complicated. Rarely are things as they seem. Ideological simplifications are the work of the devil. Political sound-bites are Satan’s syllables. Christians ought not abstract themselves from politics for the sake of a pure gospel; we should immerse ourselves in politics so as to think through the political ambiguities and complexities to how the Gospel can be embodied.

Nothing in politics is of ultimate significance. Nothing political is a divine call. This is why civil religion is only a quasi-religion: sometimes it goes sour to give ultimate sanctions to non-ultimate projects, which is demonic. To identify patriotism with religion is idolatry. Nevertheless, how we immerse ourselves in public life, including politics, is of very ultimate significance for our identity and service. It is how we present ourselves to God. Or as Jesus put it, God is coming and so get ready.

Paul noted in the text from Galatians that God is not mocked. We mock God when we claim divine sanction for some political purpose. We mock God just as much when we withdraw from politics in the name of religious transcendence of conflict. Although Jesus announced that God’s kingdom was at hand, he sent the disciples, and went himself, to witness to that. American Christians can celebrate the Fourth of July, 2004, by committing our political lives to discerning what to do to embody peace, justice, and kindness as ways to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. I commend to you that political engagement, which makes love of country a function of love of God.

As a final point, you all must have noticed that Jesus instructed his disciples to take no provisions, extra clothes, or money. They were to rely on the chance hospitality of the world to which they ministered. Jesus’ point, I believe, was to warn the disciples not to think that making elaborate preparations would guarantee success. No matter how well we provision ourselves for ministry, the world will take what it will take and reject the rest. The surprise of the disciples was that, even though they had no expectations and were ready to move on if things did not go well, the demons fell before them. May we live in hope that peace, justice, and kindness are possible for our world. But let us also know that such worldly success is not the last word: Jesus’ orientation to Jerusalem got him killed.

The ascetic approach to ministry Jesus advocated sometimes might put us in the position of hungry beggars. Not everyone is lucky in hospitality. Nevertheless Jesus provided the disciples, and us, with a meal that is all-sustaining. Here is the water of life and the cup of salvation. Here is the body of Christ that becomes our body. I invite you to join in the patriotic celebration of God’s kingdom. I invite you to the table for the only provision that counts for the Christian journey. Come, let us give thanks and enter into the presence of Jesus. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.4.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Religion and psychology teach us that things often symbolize a lot more than they are by themselves. I remember the day in my Freshman year when I learned about Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexual symbolism. Suddenly my campus vanished and was replaced by a surreal landscape of towers and tunnels, fertile courtyards and soaring arches bursting with light at the top. For all my new vision, however, I have to say that my sex life was not improved. It really was just a bunch of college buildings. Similarly, some religious people like to see signs and portents in everything. Catching a cold is a sign of God’s disfavor; finding a parking place around here during a Red Sox game testifies to the Parking Angel. Some people think that if they are well-born, handsome, rich, or successful, surely God is with them and they deserve it. On the other side, many people take suffering as a sign that the victim deserves the suffering as punishment. In all those cases, things simply are what they are, for natural reasons, and the visions of cosmic meaning are mere projections, often pathological projections.

Nevertheless, there are occasions when the works people do, in fact, testify to something bigger and more important than the works themselves. Jesus, in our gospel lesson, for instance, was being questioned about his real identity. Was he the Messiah or not? He did not answer by quoting scripture or giving a philosophical analysis of what messiahship is as applied to himself. Rather he said, “the works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me.” People are what they do with what they have. Jesus was what he did, and his religious identity came from what he did in God’s name. Of course Jesus’ answer was more complex than met the eye. People in his time expected the Messiah to be a military leader like King David who would drive out the Romans and establish Jerusalem as the capital of the world where people from all nations would come to worship God. Jesus did nothing of the sort, although actions such as riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday might have suggested that to some people. Rather, Jesus redefined what it means to be Messiah with his works, the humility of them, the humanity of them. Jesus claimed authority over his disciples by washing their feet. So Jesus’ works not only testified to his identity as Messiah, they redefined the very role itself.

A more touching example in our texts of works that testify beyond themselves is the story in Acts of Dorcas, or Tabitha. I suppose that Peter’s work of raising her from the dead is important because it testifies to the power of God that he exercised in the name of Jesus. But I want to call your attention to Tabitha’s works rather than Peter’s.

Notice that Dorcas was called a disciple. The term “disciple,” or even “apostle,” was not limited to the Twelve who had been especially named by Jesus. It applied to many people, including many women. The woman’s Aramaic name, Tabitha, and Greek name, Dorcas, are both given; they mean “gazelle” in their respective languages. In the text they are alternated: Tabitha, Dorcas, Dorcas, Tabitha; obviously both are important. I suppose that this means that the Christian community in Joppa was a mixture of Aramaic-speaking Jews and Hellenized Jews who spoke Greek, and that Dorcas was of the latter group. Or perhaps she was even Greek and not Jewish. If so, it was altogether more significant for Peter to visit her, because he was slowly moving outside the definition of the Christian movement as wholly conforming to Jewish practice. This incident is related just before his experience with the Roman centurion Cornelius in which he came to declare all foods clean to eat, throwing over the kosher limitations. If Dorcas was in fact Greek, it was a bold move for Peter to minister to her.

What is most striking about Dorcas, or Tabitha, is that she seems to have been a long-time mainstay of the Joppa Christian community. This incident must have occurred within the first twenty years of the founding of the Christian movement. If we follow the chronology in the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke as a second volume to his gospel, Tabitha’s death and revival probably occurred much earlier than twenty years, say, within the first five or ten years. Yet Dorcas was settled with a group of widows, obviously a well-articulated group within the Christian community, and had worked with them for years making clothing. Most ancient Jewish and Hellenistic societies were organized around family life, and widows had little or no place unless they were supported by their children. The Christian communities from the very beginning gave a special place to the widows. What would our churches today do without the women who make the congregation the center of their lives, like a family?

Tabitha “was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” When she sickened and died, the other widows washed her body and laid her out for what we would know as a wake, and sent for Peter to come. The widows stood around fondling the garments she had made for them, the material results of her good works, the works themselves. Now to what did those works testify? They are not the works of a Messiah, or even of a great leader and now miracle worker like Peter. So far as we know, her good works were in paying attention to the needs of those around her. Like most of us, she attended to those in her community to whom she could relate directly, to the issues of security and health in her neighborhood, as exemplified in making clothing for people. Moreover, she must have done this superlatively, because her community so deeply mourned her that they sent for Peter and asked him to come without delay. Perhaps they hoped he could bring her back to life as Jesus had revived Lazarus, but without the delay that had raised such tensions in the Lazarus incident. Whatever the hope, Dorcas was deeply loved for her charity and good works by those around who had come to know her as a person of charity and good works. Her works testified to the sanctity and healthy good life of the Christian community in Joppa. They testified to her responses to the needs of that community. They testified to the fact that the community could love her and fight against her death.

We, of course, need to do good works that testify to the grounds and obligations of our faith. Every one of us lives in a community with needs, and what we do in response to those needs testifies to the quality of our faith. Let’s keep the order right. It’s not that we first have faith, and then respond to the needs in proportion to our faith. It’s that we first practice good works, and this determines the quality of our faith. Any of us can have right beliefs, but that does not mean we act upon them. Many of us go through existential trials to decide that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior; sometimes this decision costs great humiliation in front of secular friends. But even having made that decision, whether it’s real depends on what we do. Let us present our deeds before a neutral observer, say, God, and ask whether, given what we do it looks as if Jesus is our Lord and Savior. Our works testify to who we are. What testimony do we want them to give? What testimony do they in fact give? “By their fruits you shall know them.”

I’ve been speaking of the testimony of our works as if we testify as individuals. But friends, we are in this together. A fundamental need in our community is for courtesy. We can each be courteous to one another, but we need to establish widespread social habits of courtesy. Poor people need help, and we individually can contribute to efficien
t charities; but we need collectively to develop an economy that minimizes poverty. To be marginalized is humiliating, and we can individually reach out to people who are marginalized because of race, class, sex, religion, or history; but we need collectively to develop a culture that embraces all without humiliation or deprivation of rights. We can individually express our political views when nothing much turns on it; but now that our country is occupying two countries that did not attack us, or have the plausible means or will to do so, the needs for collective political responsibility are astonishingly compelling. Those of us who are Christians would like to say that our works, from common courtesy and local helping to responsible engagement of political affairs, testify to a Christian faith commanding love demonstrated by God in Christ, sustained by martyrs, carried down to us by the faithful, and made our responsibility by our baptism in these, our times.

So I invite you to the communion table, the elementary work of Christian practice. From this table go out renewed in courtesy, charity, community building, and commitment to craft a society of which Jesus could be proud. Go out from this table comforted against the inevitable failure to be perfect in courtesy, charity, community, and politics, remembering that our kingdom is not of this world. Yet this table, showing Christ’s presence here, manifests the fact that our kingdom, which is of God’s world, is in this world. Here is where we have to be like Tabitha-Dorcas, and live out our faith. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 05.2.2004 at 11:00 am