"There is validity in the sight of God, and there is validity in the sight of the church. It cannot be assumed that these are always necessarily the same. ... [I]t must be assumed that sometimes what is deemed invalid in the churches is valid in God's sight, especially if there is evidence of holiness of life. Likewise, Christians believe that the sacraments of Christ are 'doors to the sacred' in a very special sense, but they cannot and should not deny that there may be other doors to the sacred, even in non-Christian religions."
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The woods do not work well as a labyrinth
Today, our Contemporary Moral Issues class met at our professor's house and we had a guest speaker from the Center for Religion and the Environment lead us in "Opening the Book of Nature," a class he teaches to instruct people in seeing God in nature and "reading" God's presence in nature. The ancient church fathers and saints wrote about the "two books" -- the book of scripture and the book of nature -- that were essential to understand God. We've gotten really good in post-enlightenment western Christianity about analyzing the "book of Scripture," but have all but let the "book of nature" go.
This all sounded good enough, and I was looking forward to the hour that we were given to "wander" in the woods behind our professor's house. It was very "retreat"-ish, and all my "aha" moments where I've really felt a sense of direction and purpose and what I believe to be God's call to me have all happened when I have been out in nature on retreat. So this was a familiar scenario to me. Only problem was, there weren't any clearly marked trails right behind her house, and there were three miles of woods to explore with no signs of "civilization."
Unfortunately, the good sense of direction that I generally pride myself on failed me, and I got completely lost. I came upon the same spot on the woods three different times, after being SURE that I was headed in the opposite direction, back towards the house, I'd suddenly find myself again back at the same spot. My husband, who is an Eagle Scout and lived in Alaska for a number of years and is familiar with wilderness survival and wanderings, later informed me that the human tendency in such situations is to walk in circles. I wonder what that says about our spiritual and intellectual pursuits.
I was sort of following these open paths (or what I saw as open paths) through the woods, thinking I'd let the woods guide me as I would a labyrinth. Only problem is, the labyrinth is carefully engineered (by humans!) to do what it does -- to bring you to the center and then bring you back out again, without you having to focus on remembering where you've been or where you're going. It's a nice metaphor for being led by God. But out in God's actual creation, following a path and allowing it to lead you without being aware of your surroundings only leads to being lost and scared. So how should we REALLY approach our relationship with God? Is the labyrinth really such a good metaphor? It certainly doesn't work to use God's untamed creation that way.
This all sounded good enough, and I was looking forward to the hour that we were given to "wander" in the woods behind our professor's house. It was very "retreat"-ish, and all my "aha" moments where I've really felt a sense of direction and purpose and what I believe to be God's call to me have all happened when I have been out in nature on retreat. So this was a familiar scenario to me. Only problem was, there weren't any clearly marked trails right behind her house, and there were three miles of woods to explore with no signs of "civilization."
Unfortunately, the good sense of direction that I generally pride myself on failed me, and I got completely lost. I came upon the same spot on the woods three different times, after being SURE that I was headed in the opposite direction, back towards the house, I'd suddenly find myself again back at the same spot. My husband, who is an Eagle Scout and lived in Alaska for a number of years and is familiar with wilderness survival and wanderings, later informed me that the human tendency in such situations is to walk in circles. I wonder what that says about our spiritual and intellectual pursuits.
I was sort of following these open paths (or what I saw as open paths) through the woods, thinking I'd let the woods guide me as I would a labyrinth. Only problem is, the labyrinth is carefully engineered (by humans!) to do what it does -- to bring you to the center and then bring you back out again, without you having to focus on remembering where you've been or where you're going. It's a nice metaphor for being led by God. But out in God's actual creation, following a path and allowing it to lead you without being aware of your surroundings only leads to being lost and scared. So how should we REALLY approach our relationship with God? Is the labyrinth really such a good metaphor? It certainly doesn't work to use God's untamed creation that way.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Choose life, that you may live.
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 19, Year A), Sept. 11, 2011
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
“There’s a reason I gave that book to you,” the Reb said.
What’s the reason?
“Open it.”
I opened it.
“More.”
I flipped through the pages and out fell three small black-and-white photos, faded and smudged with dirt.
One was of an older dark-haired woman, Arabic and matronly-looking. One was of a mustached younger Arabic man in a suit and tie. The last photo was of two children, side by side, presumably a brother and sister.
Who are they? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, softly.
He held out his hand and I gave him the photo of the children.
“Over the years, I kept seeing these kids, the mother, her son. That’s why I never threw the book away. I felt I had to keep them alive somehow. I thought maybe someday someone would look at the pictures, say they knew the family, and return them to the survivors. But I’m running out of time.”
He handed me the photo back.
Wait, I said. I don’t understand. From your religious viewpoint, these people were the enemy.
His voice grew angry.
“Enemy schemenmy,” he said. “This was a family.”In our sacred texts, we have set before us life and death. Choose life, that you may live.
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