Merry Christmas to all! On this most blessed day, I share with you a poem by Lynn Ungar, titled "Incarnation":
The trees have finally
shaken off their cloak
of leaves, redrawn
themselves more sternly
against the sky. I confess
I have coveted this
casting off of flesh,
have wished myself
all line and form, all God.
I confess that I am caught
by the story of Christmas,
by the pronouncement of the Spirit
upon Mary’s plain flesh.
What right did the angel
have to come to her
with the news of that
unprovided, unimaginable
birth? What right
had God to take on flesh
so out of season?
When Mary lay gasping
in water and blood
that was of her own body
but not her own
did she choose one gleaming,
antiseptic star to carry
her through the night?
The flesh has so few choices,
the angels, perhaps, none.
The trees will shake themselves
and wait for spring.
The angels, unbodied, will clutch
the night with their singing.
And Mary, like so many,
troubled and available,
will hear the word:
The power of the Most High
will overshadow you
And in her flesh, respond.
(Thanks to Tuhina Rasche, fellow FTE Ministry Fellow, for making me aware of this poem through her sermon from 4 Advent on her blog, This Lutheran Life.)
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Saying "Yes" to God's call
In my baby book, my mother writes about my baptism when I was sixteen months old:
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”
Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.
Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.
And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.
The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.
There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
What happens when we get what we are waiting for?
Sermon preached at Wednesday Morning Prayer, Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, Tennessee.
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.
Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.
But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.
So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?
Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.
It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”
As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.
But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.
So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.
As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.
Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”
What more could we be waiting for?
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga. (my sponsoring parish) for their Stewardship Kick-Off Sunday, October 30, 2011.
You knew it was coming. Fall is here, with all of its traditional trappings: football season, pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, and, of course, the annual stewardship campaign.
Your stewardship committee, chaired by Steve and Ellen Bishop, have chosen Matthew 6:19-21 as the scriptural theme for this year’s canvass. Since we didn’t hear that passage in the lectionary this morning, let me refresh your memory.
In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes his hearers against storing up worldly possessions for themselves, advocating instead that they should set their minds and resources on things heavenly. Jesus says,
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Until very recently, I thought this passage was about what you treasure in the sense of what you hold dear. I thought that Jesus was asking us to examine what it is that we treasure, because those things that we most value will be where our heart is. But that’s really a rather redundant observation, isn’t it? “Your heart will be with the things you care about?” By definition, the things you care about are the things that engage and move your heart!
Upon closer examination, it became clear to me that this passage is actually a lot more “in your face” than that. The Greek word for “treasure,” thesauros, means “what is deposited” or “a store of valuable things.” The word was used in other Greek texts from the biblical era to refer to state warehouses used to store government goods and for temple treasuries where offerings would be collected, in the Temple at Jerusalem and also in the temples of other religions. These religious “treasuries,” or “treasure chests,” if you will, provided a model for the development of private money boxes, places where people could store their personal finances.
In other words, the “treasure” Jesus is referring to here is not “those things you most value,” but your money! In Jesus’s world, it was storehouses of grain or flocks of sheep that people put away to “plan for the future,” but in 21st century America, it’s often cold, hard cash that people “store up” for themselves on earth. That nest egg saved up for a rainy day, or the pile of bills you have stuffed under the mattress or collecting interest in the bank. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You become emotionally attached to the things you spend your money on.
I saw this verse illustrated powerfully by a pastor at a mega-church in South Carolina that I attended while I was visiting a friend. Allow me to share this very high-tech mega-church sermon illustration with you:
In this hand I have a nice pink heart. And in this hand I have a wad of cash. Jesus is telling us in this passage that where this (money) goes, this (heart) will follow. Not that if this (heart) is engaged with something, this (money) will follow, but the other way around. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Think about the ways you’ve seen this play out in the world. If your money goes toward an expensive new computer, your heart breaks when the computer breaks. If you invest your money in stocks and the market falls, your heart falls with it. If you give lots of money to your alma mater, your heart is suddenly a lot more affected by changes made to the campus or the curriculum, or the success of the football team.
When you invest your money in something, you become emotionally attached to it. We even use the financial word “investment” to describe our emotional attachments: “I’m invested in my child’s education” or “I’m invested in the success of this new community initiative.” We may or may not be contributing financially towards these things, but we’re using a financial term to describe our emotional attachment. Perhaps this is due to this inherent link that Jesus points out between our financial investments and our emotional attachments.
If this is true, what does that say about how our financial giving to the church – or to other organizations that work to bring about the kingdom of God – affects our relationship with God? The mega-church pastor told his congregation that he was certain some members of his church had not fully given this (heart) to Jesus because they’d never given him this (money).
Now, when I first heard that, I recoiled. “What? You can’t love Jesus if you haven’t given him your money?” I scoffed to myself. “But surely ‘treasure’ in this passage means much more than just financial wealth. It sounds so crude to say that we have to give God a wad of cash to really give our hearts to God.”
But that statement stuck with me, and the more I investigated this passage, the more I’m convinced that that pastor was right. Because God demands all of our lives, not just some parts of them, and that includes even the areas of our lives we don’t like to talk about, like money.
We can’t compartmentalize which aspects of our lives we’re willing to give to God and which aspects we’re not. As the mega-church pastor put it, “If there’s anything in your life that if God said ‘give it to me,’ you’d say ‘no,’ that’s an idol.” And isn’t that so often our attitude towards our money when we feel that God is asking us to give it away? We’ll give our time and our talent all day long, but our money? Like the “rich fool” in the parable who builds bigger barns to be able to store more grain for himself for the future, we think that we can – and even that we must – store up treasures on earth so that we can provide for our futures.
It’s only responsible financial management to have a savings account, an IRA, an emergency fund, we say to ourselves, and to a certain extent this is true. But the problem comes when we think we are providing for ourselves, that we are ensuring our future financial success, forgetting that we are utterly dependent on the mercy and grace of God for our very being as well as all the material goods we have around us. We think that our money is ours to spend as we please, rather than a gift from God given to us to use for the service of God’s kingdom. Our hearts are focused on ourselves and our abilities rather than on God.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Where is your treasure? Where do invest your money? In paying the rent or mortgage? In fun outings with the kids or grandkids? In fast food? In attending theater or music concerts? In car payments? What does your bank or credit card statement tell you about where your heart is? Are you happy with what you find there?
Are there things that you want to value more, but you realize that other things have your heart? Maybe you wish you were more passionate about your faith or about church attendance. Maybe you wish you cared more about social injustices like discrimination or poverty. Maybe you wish you were more worried about the effects of warfare on children in other countries. Perhaps we should not just “put our money where our mouth is,” but put our money where we WANT our hearts to be.
In the same way that the Anglican tradition teaches that “praying shapes believing,” that through participating in worship and church life even when you don’t feel like it, you will live your way into the faith you hope to have, it is also true that “giving shapes caring.” What if instead of trying to will yourself to want to give or waiting until you felt called to give, you just gave? What if Jesus is right and your heart will follow your treasure? You might begin to care more about church, about God, and about working for the kingdom, because you would be invested – financially and thus emotionally – in those things.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
*The "mega-church" referred to in this sermon is NewSpring Church, founded in Anderson, S.C. but now with campuses in Greenville, Columbia, Florence, and Charleston, and with campuses "coming soon" in Spartanburg, Greenwood, Myrtle Beach. I attended the Charleston campus, and since the pastor, Perry Noble, is based at the Anderson campus, he was not even at the service, and the sermon was piped in on a live video feed. It's interesting how much of an impact his sermon illustration still made on me, even though I wasn't seeing it "in person." To watch the entire sermon, which was a "Frequently Asked Questions" about the church (the money/heart illustration was prompted by the question, "Why do you always teach on money?"), click here and choose "Frequently Asked Questions" (June 26, 2011).
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The choice is ours
Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South, on the feast day of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, 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. The other motif asserts 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).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “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).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “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.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, 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. The other motif asserts 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).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “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).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “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.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Thank you, John Macquarrie
"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
- John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments
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.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
Earlier this week, I attended the "closing retreat" for the 2010 Ministry Fellows. The 19 other people who had the same fellowship as I did came together at a conference center just south of Atlanta to share with each other what we did with our summers.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
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