Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013 (18th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 20C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 16:1-13.
Our passage from Luke’s Gospel today presents us with one of Jesus’s more difficult parables, in which Jesus seems to encourage cheating and dishonesty. The parable is a story about a manager who “cooks the books,” so to speak, adjusting the amounts due from his boss’s debtors so as to give them a break and ingratiate himself with them so they will owe him a favor once he’s lost his job as a result of his corrupt dealings. As we listen to the story, we’re expecting a traditional outcome: the bad guy gets told what-for by the boss and faces the consequences of his actions. We’re probably expecting to hear about some weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But instead, the boss praises the manager for this behavior! And then Jesus summarizes his message with a strange piece of advice: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
What?? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, the Jesus who consistently warns us about the dangers of our riches becoming an idol, who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and tells us we must give up all our possessions to become his disciple. And just a few verses after this strange bit of advice, he warns us that no slave can serve two masters, that we cannot serve both God and wealth.
So what does this saying mean? Why does Jesus tell us to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
Well, first of all, it bears saying that this parable has been confusing to the church since its earliest days. Everyone from the early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome through the 16th century Reformers like Luther and Calvin and on to modern-day scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine has attempted to understand and explain it, and there are a variety of different interpretations.
Some say that the “master” in the parable represents God, while others say the “master” represents this world and wordly pursuits. Some say the “children of light” refers to the disciples of Jesus, while others say it is a reference to the Pharisees. One interpreter even suggested that the unjust manager represents Jesus himself, who goes against the typical rules of this world and turns things upside down, stepping in to cancel the debts owed to the master as Jesus cancelled the debts of our sin on the cross. [1]
Some try to make sense of why the manager was praised by suggesting that perhaps the master was really the one who was unjust, a rich tyrant who was oppressing all his tenants, and so the “dishonest” manager was actually the “good guy” by freeing the tenants from the debts they owed this unjust master. In this interpretation, the manager is a sort of “Robin Hood” figure, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some say that perhaps the master commended the manager because the manager actually had done the master a favor: he made the master look good and generous by cancelling a portion of the debts owed by his debtors, and perhaps the master would have been glad to collect anything, even a partial amount, on the debts that were owed him from people who had accumulated such large amounts of debt.
A fairly common interpretation across the centuries is that because the master commends the manager for acting “shrewdly,” what is praiseworthy about the manager is not his dishonest dealings, but his shrewdness, his cleverness, his creativity. Even though he has essentially stolen from his master, his master commends him out of a sense of resignation – like, “Well, this guy really took me to the cleaners, but hey – you’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity!” The lesson for us is that we should be as shrewd and clever in figuring out a way to assure a good eternal future for ourselves as this guy was in securing a good future for himself in this world.
Many interpreters have linked this passage with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that at the final judgment we will be rewarded based on how we have treated “the least of these,” and with Jesus’s many sayings about the last being first and the first being last in the kingdom of heaven. So, when Jesus says to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes,” the “they” he is referring to is the poor. Those who interpret the parable this way point out that even though Jesus says “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he also acknowledges that such wealth will not last – various translations have “when it is gone” or “when you fail,” showing that the goal of Jesus’s statement is not for us to put our trust in riches, but to point out that what will last is what we have done with our riches. If we “make friends” with the poor – even through unjust dealings – then the poor will be in a place to advocate for us in heaven when we arrive, saying, yes, these people offered drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Those who had been “last” in this world having been made “first,” they will be in a place of power in the next world and will be able to welcome us in if we have done right by them in this world.
One issue with that interpretation is that it still does not explain why we should make friends with the poor by means of dishonest wealth – couldn’t we do the same thing with honest wealth, with “clean” money rather than “dirty” money? And it’s also not clear that the debtors that the manager assists in this parable really were “the poor.” Given the fact that they had such large amounts of debt, they were probably also fairly rich farmers, so that forgiving their debts would hardly be an example of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but more like Robin Hood taking from the king and giving to the aristocrats. And it doesn’t deal with the fact that, however much the manager’s cooking of the books may have helped the master’s debtors, the manager was ultimately acting out of self-interest – a strange thing to hold up as an example, given how important right intentions are in other places in the scriptures.
At least one interpreter has suggested that the key to this puzzling parable is to read Jesus’s words sarcastically. [2] It is worth remembering that we do not have any indications of tone of voice in the scriptures, and we all know how much difference tone of voice can make in our understanding of any given statement! For instance, a few weeks ago when we read the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his followers they must hate father and mother, wife and children – basically everyone except Jesus himself – and then Father Bob got up during the announcements and told you all he hated you, everyone laughed because we could tell by his tone of voice and facial expression that he was joking. But imagine if you just read somewhere that the rector told the congregation he hated them! With no tone of voice or context, such a statement could be easily misunderstood! And that’s what some interpreters suggest has happened to this statement from Jesus. Most interpreters have tended to read this statement “straight” – that is, at face value, as genuinely expressing what Jesus meant to say. But what if he was being sarcastic?
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Sure, go ahead and try that. Use your dirty money to strike deals for yourselves. Look out for number one and make sure someone always owes you something. But what good will those friends be to you when that money is gone? Will they be there to welcome you into the eternal homes? In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”
Of course, we really have no way to know for sure whether Jesus was being sarcastic or not. (Perhaps this is one area where the oral tradition would have been more helpful than the written Scriptures!) And all of these interpretations have some point or another that doesn’t quite “fit” or make sense.
I thought there might be something to this parable that we Christians were missing because of some cultural blinders, so I turned to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, a collection of commentary on the Christian scriptures from the perspective of Jewish scholars and rabbis, of which Amy-Jill Levine is a primary editor. After a few notes connecting some of the Greek words used in this parable to similar words elsewhere in the New Testament and a few brief comments about the differing opinions as to who the “lord” and “master” represent in the parable, that resource summed things up with this helpful piece of insight: “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that if A-J Levine can’t even figure this one out, it’s probably time for me to throw in the towel!
But then that got me to thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the fact that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” There is a tendency for us as human beings to want to be able to explain things – it’s the impulse that drives both scientific discovery and our religious pursuits. We want to know God and understand the universe, and we like anything that makes us feel like we’re succeeding in that regard. We like the parables that are easy to understand because they give us a sense that we have things figured out, that we can summarize the mind of God with a nice little story about the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, where the message is, “we screw up, God forgives us, and we all live happily ever after.” Those stories make us feel good and safe, and rightly so. But parables like this one, that “defy any fully satisfactory explanation,” remind us that we cannot wrap God up in a nice little box and place him on a shelf next to the other subjects we’ve mastered, like arithmetic and spelling. In a sense, God himself “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”
So these confusing parables remind us, then, that we do not fully understand God. They are reminders of our limitations, and an opportunity for us to admit that we don’t know, that we don’t understand. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, students are often given koans to work on by their teachers. A koan is a kind of parable, but often more like an unanswerable riddle. A famous one that you may have heard before is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” They are meant to boggle the mind, to circumvent linear, rational thought, and to encourage the student to open her mind to a nonrational, intuitive response to the question – or simply to “be” in a state of unknowing, and to be comfortable with that.
I believe that Jesus often chose to answer people’s questions with parables rather than direct answers as a way to encourage a similar kind of response – stop trying to explain it all and figure it all out. See if you can get the sense of the point I’m trying to make from the gist of this story. Or maybe just take a step back and remember that God is God and you are not – and you don’t have to figure it all out.
So what did Jesus mean when he said we should make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth? The collective wisdom of the church throughout the centuries is: we don’t know. And perhaps that’s a pretty healthy response for us to have sometimes when speaking about the mind of God.
[1] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom,
Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus,
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Summarized in outline form on
GoBibleStudy.com, “The Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward” (9.22.10), http://www.gobiblestudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Parables_Grace_Capon_Unjust-Steward_Luke-16-1-131.pdf
[2] See Donald R. Fletcher, “The Riddle of the Unjust Steward: Is Irony the
Key?” Journal of Biblical Literature,
1963, p. 15-30 (esp. pages 27-29). And some comments in this thread at
Christianity Stack Exchange: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/what-is-the-parable-of-the-shrewd-manager-about
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Seeing with "kingdom eyes"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013 (15 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 17), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14).
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?, says the LORD.
Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 11, 2013 (12th Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 14) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 1:10-20)
For the past month or so, our readings from the Hebrew Bible have come from the prophets: Amos, Hosea, and this week, Isaiah. This prophetic tradition will continue through the rest of the season after Pentecost, with readings from Jeremiah, Joel, Habbakuk, and Haggai.
Although the details of their historical contexts differ, all the prophets speak to a people who in one way or another have fallen away from God. They point out the ways the people have not lived up to what God has called them to do and to be, and call the people back to right relationship with God.
Oftentimes the “issue” at hand for the prophets is that the people are worshipping other gods or have adopted ritual practices other than those prescribed by the God of Israel. Our passage from Isaiah often gets read in that way. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” God says to the people. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?”
At face value, it sounds like God is mad about the Israelites doing something he didn’t tell them to do, like worshipping Baal or other gods. And since both Judaism and Christianity ultimately came to believe that animal sacrifice is not necessary to please God, it is easy to read that understanding back into the text and judge the ancient people for their “primitive” understanding of God.
“Those silly people back then,” we think. “They actually thought God wanted them to kill animals for him? This passage clearly shows that God didn’t want sacrifices, but they kept on doing it anyway! Apparently they really were hard-headed and rebellious.”
Latent in this assessment is the assumption that we, the modern reader, are not so hard-headed, that we understand what true worship is, whereas the ancients did not.
One of the problems with this interpretation is that this passage is not about the people adopting unacceptable religious practices. In fact, all the religious rituals described in this passage – offering sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, observing the Sabbath, celebrating the appointed festivals on the religious calendar – had been commanded by God in the Mosaic law. By all outward appearances, the people were actually doing everything right. They were performing the ritual actions God had said God wanted. So why does God suddenly say he doesn’t want them to do the very things he had commanded them to do?
Well, because they were really only fulfilling one part of the instructions God had given to them. God had not only given commands about ritual practice, but also about ethical behavior – and the people weren’t doing so great with the second half of that equation. Their ritual observances, however correctly they were performed, were not acceptable to God because outside of worship, the people continued to behave unethically.
This is not an unfamiliar theme in our own day -- that outside of worship, people continue to behave unethically. Christian author and speaker Brennan Manning observed this about the modern-day church: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, but walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” However much we may be tempted to assume we in the modern world have “matured” and made “progress” from the “primitive” times of the ancient world, human nature has not actually changed very much. It may be dressed up with technological advancements and an “evolved” understanding of God and what kind of rituals God requires, but the fact remains that it is still easier to say the words of faith than it is to live them.
We read the Scriptures not so that we can pat ourselves on the back by how much “progress” we have made since ancient times, but so that we can hear how God is still speaking to us today. In order to do that, sometimes we need to undertake a little modern translation. To hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people through this passage from Isaiah, we might consider what it would sound like if we translated all those references to ancient Israelite worship to references to our worship in the Episcopal Church today. It might sound something like this:
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of your Eucharists and baptisms;
I do not delight in red wine,
or these flimsy wafers you call bread.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked you to pour water over things and call them holy?
Don’t come to church any more;
giving your tithe is futile;
lighting candles and processing down the aisle is an abomination to me.
Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter… the calling of vestry meetings and diocesan conventions --
I cannot endure these sacred gatherings while you go on sinning.
Your liturgical calendar and your church gatherings
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you say the Prayers of the People just as they are written in the Book of Common Prayer,
I will not listen;
Because your hands are full of blood.
Hopefully this “modern translation” makes clear that the meaning of this passage is not that God hated the sacrifices of the Israelites, any more than God hates us celebrating the Eucharist. Those things were and are the core elements of our ritual lives. This passage must be read with a tone of thick sarcasm, spoken like an angry lover in a quarrel: “You expect me to accept those roses after what you’ve done??” God speaks in this passage like a hurt lover refusing to accept an otherwise desirable gift because the giver has been unfaithful.
If we want to consider what the Spirit is saying to us through this Scripture today, we must consider how our hands are “full of blood” in the Episcopal Church today. How are we complicit in the world’s ways of violence, degradation and exploitation of our fellow human beings? Are we nurturing scorn and contempt for our brothers and sisters who have left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with Anglican churches in other parts of the world? Are we gaining revenue for our ministries by investing funds in companies whose business practices may not be in line with the ethical teachings of Jesus and the prophets? Do we provide food or financial assistance to those in need but ignore the systemic inequalities that keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty?
The “blood on our hands” may not be literal blood from going out and slaughtering anyone, but in subtle and often unintentional ways, even we, who think of ourselves as a “social justice-minded church,” can participate in and benefit from the unjust structures of this world. That is why we have the prophets to call us back, to sit us down for a “come to Jesus” meeting and point out where we have fallen short. And the good news is that like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, we can make a choice to change our ways once we have been made aware of our sins, and God has promised forgiveness if we do. Even at the end of that angry speech about how much he hates our rituals because of our unethical behavior, God still ends with a promise of forgiveness: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.”
God’s promise is that he will wash away the blood on our hands, offering us new life, another chance – over and over and over again. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to repent and return to the Lord whenever we fall into sin. Not if we fall into sin, but when – because, human nature not having changed much in 2,500 years, we know that we will. And we also know that God’s grace and mercy will be there for us every time, because God’s nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years either. Like the lover who ultimately forgives her partner because her love is stronger than her anger, so God’s love for us is stronger than God’s anger over the ways we are unfaithful. And that, my friends, is good news.
Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.
For the past month or so, our readings from the Hebrew Bible have come from the prophets: Amos, Hosea, and this week, Isaiah. This prophetic tradition will continue through the rest of the season after Pentecost, with readings from Jeremiah, Joel, Habbakuk, and Haggai.
Although the details of their historical contexts differ, all the prophets speak to a people who in one way or another have fallen away from God. They point out the ways the people have not lived up to what God has called them to do and to be, and call the people back to right relationship with God.
Oftentimes the “issue” at hand for the prophets is that the people are worshipping other gods or have adopted ritual practices other than those prescribed by the God of Israel. Our passage from Isaiah often gets read in that way. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” God says to the people. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?”
At face value, it sounds like God is mad about the Israelites doing something he didn’t tell them to do, like worshipping Baal or other gods. And since both Judaism and Christianity ultimately came to believe that animal sacrifice is not necessary to please God, it is easy to read that understanding back into the text and judge the ancient people for their “primitive” understanding of God.
“Those silly people back then,” we think. “They actually thought God wanted them to kill animals for him? This passage clearly shows that God didn’t want sacrifices, but they kept on doing it anyway! Apparently they really were hard-headed and rebellious.”
Latent in this assessment is the assumption that we, the modern reader, are not so hard-headed, that we understand what true worship is, whereas the ancients did not.
One of the problems with this interpretation is that this passage is not about the people adopting unacceptable religious practices. In fact, all the religious rituals described in this passage – offering sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, observing the Sabbath, celebrating the appointed festivals on the religious calendar – had been commanded by God in the Mosaic law. By all outward appearances, the people were actually doing everything right. They were performing the ritual actions God had said God wanted. So why does God suddenly say he doesn’t want them to do the very things he had commanded them to do?
Well, because they were really only fulfilling one part of the instructions God had given to them. God had not only given commands about ritual practice, but also about ethical behavior – and the people weren’t doing so great with the second half of that equation. Their ritual observances, however correctly they were performed, were not acceptable to God because outside of worship, the people continued to behave unethically.
This is not an unfamiliar theme in our own day -- that outside of worship, people continue to behave unethically. Christian author and speaker Brennan Manning observed this about the modern-day church: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, but walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” However much we may be tempted to assume we in the modern world have “matured” and made “progress” from the “primitive” times of the ancient world, human nature has not actually changed very much. It may be dressed up with technological advancements and an “evolved” understanding of God and what kind of rituals God requires, but the fact remains that it is still easier to say the words of faith than it is to live them.
We read the Scriptures not so that we can pat ourselves on the back by how much “progress” we have made since ancient times, but so that we can hear how God is still speaking to us today. In order to do that, sometimes we need to undertake a little modern translation. To hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people through this passage from Isaiah, we might consider what it would sound like if we translated all those references to ancient Israelite worship to references to our worship in the Episcopal Church today. It might sound something like this:
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of your Eucharists and baptisms;
I do not delight in red wine,
or these flimsy wafers you call bread.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked you to pour water over things and call them holy?
Don’t come to church any more;
giving your tithe is futile;
lighting candles and processing down the aisle is an abomination to me.
Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter… the calling of vestry meetings and diocesan conventions --
I cannot endure these sacred gatherings while you go on sinning.
Your liturgical calendar and your church gatherings
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you say the Prayers of the People just as they are written in the Book of Common Prayer,
I will not listen;
Because your hands are full of blood.
Hopefully this “modern translation” makes clear that the meaning of this passage is not that God hated the sacrifices of the Israelites, any more than God hates us celebrating the Eucharist. Those things were and are the core elements of our ritual lives. This passage must be read with a tone of thick sarcasm, spoken like an angry lover in a quarrel: “You expect me to accept those roses after what you’ve done??” God speaks in this passage like a hurt lover refusing to accept an otherwise desirable gift because the giver has been unfaithful.
If we want to consider what the Spirit is saying to us through this Scripture today, we must consider how our hands are “full of blood” in the Episcopal Church today. How are we complicit in the world’s ways of violence, degradation and exploitation of our fellow human beings? Are we nurturing scorn and contempt for our brothers and sisters who have left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with Anglican churches in other parts of the world? Are we gaining revenue for our ministries by investing funds in companies whose business practices may not be in line with the ethical teachings of Jesus and the prophets? Do we provide food or financial assistance to those in need but ignore the systemic inequalities that keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty?
The “blood on our hands” may not be literal blood from going out and slaughtering anyone, but in subtle and often unintentional ways, even we, who think of ourselves as a “social justice-minded church,” can participate in and benefit from the unjust structures of this world. That is why we have the prophets to call us back, to sit us down for a “come to Jesus” meeting and point out where we have fallen short. And the good news is that like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, we can make a choice to change our ways once we have been made aware of our sins, and God has promised forgiveness if we do. Even at the end of that angry speech about how much he hates our rituals because of our unethical behavior, God still ends with a promise of forgiveness: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.”
God’s promise is that he will wash away the blood on our hands, offering us new life, another chance – over and over and over again. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to repent and return to the Lord whenever we fall into sin. Not if we fall into sin, but when – because, human nature not having changed much in 2,500 years, we know that we will. And we also know that God’s grace and mercy will be there for us every time, because God’s nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years either. Like the lover who ultimately forgives her partner because her love is stronger than her anger, so God’s love for us is stronger than God’s anger over the ways we are unfaithful. And that, my friends, is good news.
Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Martha's problem was not her actions, but her attitude
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 21, 2013 (9 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 11), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Luke 10:38-42.
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear the familiar story of Mary and Martha. This passage is a favorite for use in women’s Sunday School classes or women’s retreats, where women are often asked, “Are you ‘a Martha’ or ‘a Mary’?”– which is just church code language for asking whether you are a “Type A” personality, organized and task-oriented, or a “Type B” personality, more carefree and process-oriented.
In an attempt to soften the edge for poor Martha, who often gets a bad rep as the uptight taskmaster, the leaders or facilitators will sometimes reassure those of us who identify with Martha that being “a Martha” is not a bad thing, that Mary and Martha were both devoted followers of our Lord; they just had different ways of showing their devotion. Martha showed her devotion by taking care of the details and preparing the house, while Mary showed her devotion by sitting with Jesus and listening to his teachings. The assumption is generally that both ways of showing devotion are equally valid, just different – so that those of us who identify with Martha don’t wind up feeling “less than” our friends who are more contemplative like Mary.
But if we look closely at the text, Jesus actually does issue a value judgment about Mary and Martha’s behavior and motivations. Nowhere in the passage does Jesus say that both Mary and Martha’s ways of being are equally valid. Instead, Jesus says that “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).
Now, in Martha’s defense, she was probably doing all the appropriate things a woman would be supposed to do in that culture to prepare for a house guest – preparing a meal, washing the guest’s feet, offering the guest a place to stay. There was a lot of work to be done to offer proper hospitality to a guest, and Martha was the kind of woman who was going to make sure everything was taken care of, and done well. This in and of itself is not a bad thing – and Jesus does not chastise her for her attention to detail or her desire to provide appropriate hospitality to a guest. Instead, he critiques her because she is “worried and distracted by many things.” The problem is not with her actions, but with her mindset.
The “better part” that her sister Mary has chosen is to sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to his teachings – which was the position of a disciple. For this moment, at least, Mary has remembered her identity as a beloved child of God and a disciple of Christ. By contrast, Martha has lost sight of her identity – her mind is on tasks to be done rather than on the joy of being in the presence of her Lord.
We really have no way of knowing whether Mary was really a “Type B” kind of person, always laid back and happy to sit in blissful meditation all day long, or whether she could be just as task-oriented and organized as Martha at times. And we don’t know for sure that Martha didn’t know how to stop doing and just be. Maybe she was just as capable of sitting still as Mary was. But the point is that whatever their usual habits or personality types, in this particular moment, Mary is in a better “head space” than her sister Martha. She is able to be truly present with Jesus during his visit, something that Martha cannot do because of her many worries and distractions. Mary has not lost sight of the forest for the trees, so to speak. She has not gotten so caught up in preparing for Jesus’s visit that she forgets to actually enjoy his visit.
How many of us have been there – so caught up in the details of what needs to be done to prepare for a big event that we forget that this event was supposed to be an enjoyable and joyous occasion? I’m sure any one of us could share a few stories about that friend who gets so caught up in the details of entertaining that everyone feels like they’re on pins and needles at her parties because her stress levels are so high – or an uncle who was so obsessed with arranging the details of where everyone was going to stay at the family reunion that he ruined the event for everyone – or the boss who was so worried about taking care of details for the big corporate event that he didn’t seem to enjoy the event at all.
While it is true that each of us have a little of both “Martha” and “Mary” in us, it is also true that their behaviors in this story do represent distinctive personality types. Some of us are more prone than others to “worried and distracted” behavior. Some of us are more likely to let the details kill the spirit of the event, to get so caught up in the moment that we lose sight of the big picture. If you feel a bit uncomfortable by how much you see yourself in Martha’s behavior in this story, then the lesson in this story is particularly important for you. That lesson is this: the details are important, but they are never more important than the spirit of the task. Things are never more important than people. Expectations, customs, and to-do lists are never more important than relationships.
This is not to say that we should throw out all our to-do lists and go meditate under a tree somewhere and stop working or feeding our children. It is important to “do” things sometimes, and we can show our devotion to God through service. The passage immediately preceding the story of Martha and Mary is the story of the Good Samaritan, which we heard last Sunday – and that is certainly a story that shows the importance of serving others, that teaches us that faith must be rooted in action. If the Good Samaritan had not done something, the injured man’s needs would not have been met. But imagine what the story would be like if the Good Samaritan had helped the man, but while doing so he was irritated and worried because taking the time to help this man was really delaying him from his next appointment, and while he was going with him to the inn, he started yelling at the priests and Levites who passed by, “You call yourselves spiritual leaders? And you’re leaving me to do all the work?” That would certainly change our perception and assessment of the “Good Samaritan,” wouldn’t it?
With Martha, the issue was not her actions, but her attitude. Active, loving service is an important part of a vibrant life of faith. But worries, distractions, and resentment are not. This is why it is so important for those us with strong “Martha tendencies” to remind ourselves that it is precisely in those moments when we feel like we don’t have enough time to enjoy life that it is most important to take time to do so: to take off the apron and sit down in living room to enjoy a drink with your guests, to take a break from the project for work and go out for a hike with your friends or family, to let go of structure and constant words in your prayer life and allow yourself to simply be in God’s presence.
The “better part” that Mary chose was to be attentive to the present moment, to sit at the feet of her Lord and remember her identity as a disciple. If you ever find yourself getting so caught up in a task that you forget why you’re doing it in the first place, or begin to become resentful of those who aren’t doing it, you might think of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, and take a step back and remember who and whose you are. You, like Mary, are a disciple of the Lord, invited to sit and be still at his feet. You are a child of God, a God who loves you and wants to spend time with you just as you are. A God who comes to visit you, just as he came to visit Mary and Martha, and who desires not a household put in perfect order, but an open heart ready to receive him.
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear the familiar story of Mary and Martha. This passage is a favorite for use in women’s Sunday School classes or women’s retreats, where women are often asked, “Are you ‘a Martha’ or ‘a Mary’?”– which is just church code language for asking whether you are a “Type A” personality, organized and task-oriented, or a “Type B” personality, more carefree and process-oriented.
In an attempt to soften the edge for poor Martha, who often gets a bad rep as the uptight taskmaster, the leaders or facilitators will sometimes reassure those of us who identify with Martha that being “a Martha” is not a bad thing, that Mary and Martha were both devoted followers of our Lord; they just had different ways of showing their devotion. Martha showed her devotion by taking care of the details and preparing the house, while Mary showed her devotion by sitting with Jesus and listening to his teachings. The assumption is generally that both ways of showing devotion are equally valid, just different – so that those of us who identify with Martha don’t wind up feeling “less than” our friends who are more contemplative like Mary.
But if we look closely at the text, Jesus actually does issue a value judgment about Mary and Martha’s behavior and motivations. Nowhere in the passage does Jesus say that both Mary and Martha’s ways of being are equally valid. Instead, Jesus says that “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).
Now, in Martha’s defense, she was probably doing all the appropriate things a woman would be supposed to do in that culture to prepare for a house guest – preparing a meal, washing the guest’s feet, offering the guest a place to stay. There was a lot of work to be done to offer proper hospitality to a guest, and Martha was the kind of woman who was going to make sure everything was taken care of, and done well. This in and of itself is not a bad thing – and Jesus does not chastise her for her attention to detail or her desire to provide appropriate hospitality to a guest. Instead, he critiques her because she is “worried and distracted by many things.” The problem is not with her actions, but with her mindset.
The “better part” that her sister Mary has chosen is to sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to his teachings – which was the position of a disciple. For this moment, at least, Mary has remembered her identity as a beloved child of God and a disciple of Christ. By contrast, Martha has lost sight of her identity – her mind is on tasks to be done rather than on the joy of being in the presence of her Lord.
We really have no way of knowing whether Mary was really a “Type B” kind of person, always laid back and happy to sit in blissful meditation all day long, or whether she could be just as task-oriented and organized as Martha at times. And we don’t know for sure that Martha didn’t know how to stop doing and just be. Maybe she was just as capable of sitting still as Mary was. But the point is that whatever their usual habits or personality types, in this particular moment, Mary is in a better “head space” than her sister Martha. She is able to be truly present with Jesus during his visit, something that Martha cannot do because of her many worries and distractions. Mary has not lost sight of the forest for the trees, so to speak. She has not gotten so caught up in preparing for Jesus’s visit that she forgets to actually enjoy his visit.
How many of us have been there – so caught up in the details of what needs to be done to prepare for a big event that we forget that this event was supposed to be an enjoyable and joyous occasion? I’m sure any one of us could share a few stories about that friend who gets so caught up in the details of entertaining that everyone feels like they’re on pins and needles at her parties because her stress levels are so high – or an uncle who was so obsessed with arranging the details of where everyone was going to stay at the family reunion that he ruined the event for everyone – or the boss who was so worried about taking care of details for the big corporate event that he didn’t seem to enjoy the event at all.
While it is true that each of us have a little of both “Martha” and “Mary” in us, it is also true that their behaviors in this story do represent distinctive personality types. Some of us are more prone than others to “worried and distracted” behavior. Some of us are more likely to let the details kill the spirit of the event, to get so caught up in the moment that we lose sight of the big picture. If you feel a bit uncomfortable by how much you see yourself in Martha’s behavior in this story, then the lesson in this story is particularly important for you. That lesson is this: the details are important, but they are never more important than the spirit of the task. Things are never more important than people. Expectations, customs, and to-do lists are never more important than relationships.
This is not to say that we should throw out all our to-do lists and go meditate under a tree somewhere and stop working or feeding our children. It is important to “do” things sometimes, and we can show our devotion to God through service. The passage immediately preceding the story of Martha and Mary is the story of the Good Samaritan, which we heard last Sunday – and that is certainly a story that shows the importance of serving others, that teaches us that faith must be rooted in action. If the Good Samaritan had not done something, the injured man’s needs would not have been met. But imagine what the story would be like if the Good Samaritan had helped the man, but while doing so he was irritated and worried because taking the time to help this man was really delaying him from his next appointment, and while he was going with him to the inn, he started yelling at the priests and Levites who passed by, “You call yourselves spiritual leaders? And you’re leaving me to do all the work?” That would certainly change our perception and assessment of the “Good Samaritan,” wouldn’t it?
With Martha, the issue was not her actions, but her attitude. Active, loving service is an important part of a vibrant life of faith. But worries, distractions, and resentment are not. This is why it is so important for those us with strong “Martha tendencies” to remind ourselves that it is precisely in those moments when we feel like we don’t have enough time to enjoy life that it is most important to take time to do so: to take off the apron and sit down in living room to enjoy a drink with your guests, to take a break from the project for work and go out for a hike with your friends or family, to let go of structure and constant words in your prayer life and allow yourself to simply be in God’s presence.
The “better part” that Mary chose was to be attentive to the present moment, to sit at the feet of her Lord and remember her identity as a disciple. If you ever find yourself getting so caught up in a task that you forget why you’re doing it in the first place, or begin to become resentful of those who aren’t doing it, you might think of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, and take a step back and remember who and whose you are. You, like Mary, are a disciple of the Lord, invited to sit and be still at his feet. You are a child of God, a God who loves you and wants to spend time with you just as you are. A God who comes to visit you, just as he came to visit Mary and Martha, and who desires not a household put in perfect order, but an open heart ready to receive him.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Jesus's encounters with so-called "would-be disciples" actually pose questions for us about the cost of discipleship
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 30, 2013 (6 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 8), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Luke 9:51-62).
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear a series of exchanges between Jesus and three unnamed individuals who express a desire to follow him. Traditionally, these individuals have been called “would-be disciples,” because the assumption is that they did not ultimately decide to follow Jesus, but offered excuses rather than commitments when confronted with the demands of discipleship.
But the text doesn’t actually tell us what the motivations of these individuals were – we don’t know for sure that their statements were “excuses” – and we don’t know how they responded to Jesus’s words to them.
We do hear about the response of “would-be disciples” in other parts of the Gospels, like the man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-27). Jesus told him that even though he had kept all the commandments, he lacked one thing – to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. This story, which appears both in Mark and in Luke, does tell us about the man’s response: “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22). It is clear in the story that the man left, that he did not immediately leave everything to follow Jesus. But the text doesn’t tell us anything about the responses of the individuals we hear about today. Matthew’s Gospel includes an account of two of the three individuals we hear about in Luke, but it does not give us any detail about their responses either.
The fact that the writers of the Gospels did not tell us anything about the motivations of these individuals nor about how they responded to Jesus’s statements leads me to think that the significance in this passage is not in what those individuals did or didn’t do, but in the words that Jesus said to them. In including these brief exchanges between Jesus and several unnamed individuals, the Gospel writers were preserving sayings of Jesus that they felt were important to his message and that they wanted to pass on to future generations. The point was not to judge the motivations or intentions of the so-called “would-be disciples,” but to impress upon the reader or hearer of the Gospel texts the cost and demand that following Jesus would place on their own lives. The question is not, “What did those three individuals do?” but, “What will you do?” Not, “Were they ready to be committed followers of Christ?” but “Are you ready to be committed followers of Christ?”
Each of these three statements, isolated as they are as pithy one-liners, tell us something about the cost and demand of following Jesus. The first statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” alludes to the itinerancy of Jesus’s ministry; he traveled from place to place, always on the move as he brought his message to more and more people in the region. Contrary to some interpretations, this statement probably does not indicate that Jesus was literally “homeless,” since other passages of Scripture indicate that he had a home in Capernaum (see Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1-2) [1], but it does indicate that following Jesus will not lend itself to a comfortable, stable life. For the earliest followers of Jesus, making a commitment to follow him meant sacrificing time at home with family for time spent on the road. In our own day, touring musicians or authors, business travelers, and deployed military personnel know the personal sacrifice that such travel requires. In the first century, being a follower of Jesus was not a job for the homebody!
In our current context, the lifestyle for most Christians has changed dramatically. No longer is it expected that we leave home or family to follow Jesus; in fact, it is often assumed that establishing a stable home and family is one of the most important things a Christian could do. In the United States, following Jesus does not even require leaving our neighborhood, since there are a plethora of churches available to meet our spiritual needs within walking or short driving distance of our homes. For most of us, becoming a follower of Jesus does not require giving up any material or interpersonal comforts in the way that it did for the first disciples. But throughout the ages, Christians have continued to hear the call to leave the comfortable and familiar and risk a life of constant movement and itinerant ministry in order to serve Christ and share the Gospel. The lives of missionaries and others who have followed this path remain for us an icon of that call to give up material stability that God may still issue to any of us today. As we consider Jesus’s response to the first individual who says he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, we must ask ourselves: If following Jesus meant that we would have nowhere to lay our heads, that we would have to give up the stability and comfort of our homes, would we be wiling to follow Jesus wherever he went?
The second statement, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” has long been a subject of discussion and debate among commentators and scholars. How is it that Jesus could be so seemingly harsh and dismissive of the grief of a man who had lost his father? Isn’t it rather unforgiving and cruel not to allow this man the time to go home and take care of the things required of him by Jewish law and custom? First, it is highly unlikely that this man would be out walking the streets if his father had just died. Traditional first-century Jewish practice was to bury someone the same day that they died, and then not leave the home for seven days during the time of prescribed mourning, called shivah. So, if this man is out walking the streets of society, his father is either not dead yet, as some commentators have suggested, or his father’s body has already been placed in the family tomb but has not undergone the secondary burial that many Jewish families practiced, which involved placing the bones of the deceased in an ossuary a year after their death and burial. This was the final step in the burial practice, and marked the official end of the mourning period for the children of the deceased. [2] If this is what the man refers to when he asks to first go and bury his father, he is asking for a delay of a certain amount of time before he comes to follow Jesus – anywhere between a few weeks to eleven months, depending on how recently his father had died.
In any case, the key request of the man is time – he is willing to follow Jesus, but not immediately – he first needs time to tend to some important family obligations that would have been respected as sacred by any devout Jew. Jesus’s refusal to grant him this time comes not out of disrespect for those traditions, but out of a sense that there is no time. Remember, the beginning of our Gospel passage today tells us that “the days [had drawn] near for Jesus to be taken up,” and “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. If this man waits to follow him for several months or a year, it will likely be too late – Jesus will already be gone from this world. Given the urgency of the moment, even the most sacred family obligations must be neglected if this man is to join the movement. The teachings of the Apostle Paul and other early church leaders about preferring the single life over marriage came out of a similar sense that time was of the essence. They believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the “last days,” and that Jesus would return very soon for the final judgment of the world, so it didn’t make sense to pursue relationships and marriage – but to stay in whatever state one was in – married or single – and focus one’s attention on preparing for the immanent Second Coming.
As twenty-first century Christians, we no longer feel this urgency about the impending end of time as the earliest Christians did, and thus our understanding of what is most important in our life together has changed. We have moved out of “emergency mode” into stability. But Jesus’s response to the man who asks for time to tend to his family obligations encourages us to ask ourselves: If time was of the essence and we were in “emergency mode,” where would our deepest loyalties lie? If necessary, would we be willing to neglect even our most important family obligations in order to follow Christ?
Jesus’s third statement, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” tells us that following Jesus requires total focus and commitment. Again, the sense of urgency and lack of time explains Jesus’s rejection of the man’s request to go home and say goodbye to his family. In order to be ready to follow Christ, we must be entirely forward-looking, not caught up in the past or what our lives were like before we met him. Just as most of us could not drive forward in a straight line if we were turned around looking out of our back window, so a farmer cannot plow a straight line if he is looking behind him instead of forward. In order to do a proper job plowing the field, the farmer must be focused forward, looking ahead of him, not behind, and concentrating solely on his task in the present moment. Jesus’s words invite us to consider: Are we able to be completely focused on the task of following Christ in the present moment? Do we ever “look back” to our past in a way that hinders our ability to effectively do the work Christ has called us to do?
Jesus’s words to these three unnamed men remind us of the cost of discipleship, that following Jesus requires a willingness to choose him over all else. To those who desire to follow him, Jesus asks the same question he asked James and John when they wanted to be close to him, to sit next to him “in his glory”: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). In other words, “Are you sure you want to do this? It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. We’re headed to Jerusalem. The road is hard and it leads to death.”
Those of us who are indeed baptized with the baptism of Christ are baptized into his death, as the Apostle Paul said (Romans 6:3). But the good news is that we are also baptized into his Resurrection. In baptism, we are united with Christ’s very body (Galatians 3:27), so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The high cost and demand of discipleship is possible only if we recognize that it is not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry working through us. What discipleship requires, then, is a willingness to surrender, to “let go and let God,” as the saying goes, to allow Christ to live in us and work through us, and then, when the time comes for us to make whatever sacrifice we are asked to make in our journey of faith, we can say with full confidence, “We will, with God’s help.”
[1] For more on the argument that Jesus was not “homeless,” see Dave Barnhart, “Why Jesus Wasn’t Homeless (And Why It Matters),” posted on May 13, 2013 at Ministry Matters: http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/3933/why-jesus-wasnt-homeless-and-why-it-matters#axzz2XM2DohAv
[2] For more on secondary burial customs, see Byron R. McCane (Duke University), “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt. 8:21-22,” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (Jan 1990), 31-43.
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear a series of exchanges between Jesus and three unnamed individuals who express a desire to follow him. Traditionally, these individuals have been called “would-be disciples,” because the assumption is that they did not ultimately decide to follow Jesus, but offered excuses rather than commitments when confronted with the demands of discipleship.
But the text doesn’t actually tell us what the motivations of these individuals were – we don’t know for sure that their statements were “excuses” – and we don’t know how they responded to Jesus’s words to them.
We do hear about the response of “would-be disciples” in other parts of the Gospels, like the man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-27). Jesus told him that even though he had kept all the commandments, he lacked one thing – to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. This story, which appears both in Mark and in Luke, does tell us about the man’s response: “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22). It is clear in the story that the man left, that he did not immediately leave everything to follow Jesus. But the text doesn’t tell us anything about the responses of the individuals we hear about today. Matthew’s Gospel includes an account of two of the three individuals we hear about in Luke, but it does not give us any detail about their responses either.
The fact that the writers of the Gospels did not tell us anything about the motivations of these individuals nor about how they responded to Jesus’s statements leads me to think that the significance in this passage is not in what those individuals did or didn’t do, but in the words that Jesus said to them. In including these brief exchanges between Jesus and several unnamed individuals, the Gospel writers were preserving sayings of Jesus that they felt were important to his message and that they wanted to pass on to future generations. The point was not to judge the motivations or intentions of the so-called “would-be disciples,” but to impress upon the reader or hearer of the Gospel texts the cost and demand that following Jesus would place on their own lives. The question is not, “What did those three individuals do?” but, “What will you do?” Not, “Were they ready to be committed followers of Christ?” but “Are you ready to be committed followers of Christ?”
Each of these three statements, isolated as they are as pithy one-liners, tell us something about the cost and demand of following Jesus. The first statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” alludes to the itinerancy of Jesus’s ministry; he traveled from place to place, always on the move as he brought his message to more and more people in the region. Contrary to some interpretations, this statement probably does not indicate that Jesus was literally “homeless,” since other passages of Scripture indicate that he had a home in Capernaum (see Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1-2) [1], but it does indicate that following Jesus will not lend itself to a comfortable, stable life. For the earliest followers of Jesus, making a commitment to follow him meant sacrificing time at home with family for time spent on the road. In our own day, touring musicians or authors, business travelers, and deployed military personnel know the personal sacrifice that such travel requires. In the first century, being a follower of Jesus was not a job for the homebody!
In our current context, the lifestyle for most Christians has changed dramatically. No longer is it expected that we leave home or family to follow Jesus; in fact, it is often assumed that establishing a stable home and family is one of the most important things a Christian could do. In the United States, following Jesus does not even require leaving our neighborhood, since there are a plethora of churches available to meet our spiritual needs within walking or short driving distance of our homes. For most of us, becoming a follower of Jesus does not require giving up any material or interpersonal comforts in the way that it did for the first disciples. But throughout the ages, Christians have continued to hear the call to leave the comfortable and familiar and risk a life of constant movement and itinerant ministry in order to serve Christ and share the Gospel. The lives of missionaries and others who have followed this path remain for us an icon of that call to give up material stability that God may still issue to any of us today. As we consider Jesus’s response to the first individual who says he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, we must ask ourselves: If following Jesus meant that we would have nowhere to lay our heads, that we would have to give up the stability and comfort of our homes, would we be wiling to follow Jesus wherever he went?
The second statement, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” has long been a subject of discussion and debate among commentators and scholars. How is it that Jesus could be so seemingly harsh and dismissive of the grief of a man who had lost his father? Isn’t it rather unforgiving and cruel not to allow this man the time to go home and take care of the things required of him by Jewish law and custom? First, it is highly unlikely that this man would be out walking the streets if his father had just died. Traditional first-century Jewish practice was to bury someone the same day that they died, and then not leave the home for seven days during the time of prescribed mourning, called shivah. So, if this man is out walking the streets of society, his father is either not dead yet, as some commentators have suggested, or his father’s body has already been placed in the family tomb but has not undergone the secondary burial that many Jewish families practiced, which involved placing the bones of the deceased in an ossuary a year after their death and burial. This was the final step in the burial practice, and marked the official end of the mourning period for the children of the deceased. [2] If this is what the man refers to when he asks to first go and bury his father, he is asking for a delay of a certain amount of time before he comes to follow Jesus – anywhere between a few weeks to eleven months, depending on how recently his father had died.
In any case, the key request of the man is time – he is willing to follow Jesus, but not immediately – he first needs time to tend to some important family obligations that would have been respected as sacred by any devout Jew. Jesus’s refusal to grant him this time comes not out of disrespect for those traditions, but out of a sense that there is no time. Remember, the beginning of our Gospel passage today tells us that “the days [had drawn] near for Jesus to be taken up,” and “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. If this man waits to follow him for several months or a year, it will likely be too late – Jesus will already be gone from this world. Given the urgency of the moment, even the most sacred family obligations must be neglected if this man is to join the movement. The teachings of the Apostle Paul and other early church leaders about preferring the single life over marriage came out of a similar sense that time was of the essence. They believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the “last days,” and that Jesus would return very soon for the final judgment of the world, so it didn’t make sense to pursue relationships and marriage – but to stay in whatever state one was in – married or single – and focus one’s attention on preparing for the immanent Second Coming.
As twenty-first century Christians, we no longer feel this urgency about the impending end of time as the earliest Christians did, and thus our understanding of what is most important in our life together has changed. We have moved out of “emergency mode” into stability. But Jesus’s response to the man who asks for time to tend to his family obligations encourages us to ask ourselves: If time was of the essence and we were in “emergency mode,” where would our deepest loyalties lie? If necessary, would we be willing to neglect even our most important family obligations in order to follow Christ?
Jesus’s third statement, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” tells us that following Jesus requires total focus and commitment. Again, the sense of urgency and lack of time explains Jesus’s rejection of the man’s request to go home and say goodbye to his family. In order to be ready to follow Christ, we must be entirely forward-looking, not caught up in the past or what our lives were like before we met him. Just as most of us could not drive forward in a straight line if we were turned around looking out of our back window, so a farmer cannot plow a straight line if he is looking behind him instead of forward. In order to do a proper job plowing the field, the farmer must be focused forward, looking ahead of him, not behind, and concentrating solely on his task in the present moment. Jesus’s words invite us to consider: Are we able to be completely focused on the task of following Christ in the present moment? Do we ever “look back” to our past in a way that hinders our ability to effectively do the work Christ has called us to do?
Jesus’s words to these three unnamed men remind us of the cost of discipleship, that following Jesus requires a willingness to choose him over all else. To those who desire to follow him, Jesus asks the same question he asked James and John when they wanted to be close to him, to sit next to him “in his glory”: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). In other words, “Are you sure you want to do this? It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. We’re headed to Jerusalem. The road is hard and it leads to death.”
Those of us who are indeed baptized with the baptism of Christ are baptized into his death, as the Apostle Paul said (Romans 6:3). But the good news is that we are also baptized into his Resurrection. In baptism, we are united with Christ’s very body (Galatians 3:27), so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The high cost and demand of discipleship is possible only if we recognize that it is not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry working through us. What discipleship requires, then, is a willingness to surrender, to “let go and let God,” as the saying goes, to allow Christ to live in us and work through us, and then, when the time comes for us to make whatever sacrifice we are asked to make in our journey of faith, we can say with full confidence, “We will, with God’s help.”
[1] For more on the argument that Jesus was not “homeless,” see Dave Barnhart, “Why Jesus Wasn’t Homeless (And Why It Matters),” posted on May 13, 2013 at Ministry Matters: http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/3933/why-jesus-wasnt-homeless-and-why-it-matters#axzz2XM2DohAv
[2] For more on secondary burial customs, see Byron R. McCane (Duke University), “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt. 8:21-22,” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (Jan 1990), 31-43.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Two widow's sons raised, two similar yet different messages
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 9, 2013 (3rd Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 5) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (1 Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17)
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we are capable of amazing things
Sermon delivered Sunday, May 19, 2013 (The Day of Pentecost) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17, 25-27)
On this Day of Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the church in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God in Christ with us, dwelling inside every baptized Christian and guiding the church to continue God’s work in the world.
Before his crucifixion, Jesus promised his followers that God would send them another Advocate after Jesus was no longer physically present with them. We heard this promise in today’s Gospel reading. In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to his disciples the night before his death and he says to them,
“…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you… the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:16-17, 25-27).
The Greek word translated as “Advocate” is parakletos, which can also be translated as “counselor,” “comforter,” and “intercessor.” The original Greek term had legal connotations – a parakletos is something like a defense attorney – one who advocates for you by arguing your case in front of another. The literal meaning of the word parakletos is “one who is called in” – more specifically, one who is called in to assist someone in trouble. When Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will be a parakletos for them, it is a word of reassurance. “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” he says (John 14:27). In verse 18, which our lectionary leaves out, Jesus says that he will not leave his followers orphaned after he leaves this earth. He reassures the disciples that although they may fear his departure, God will not abandon them. The Holy Spirit will be with them, to assist them when they are in need, to defend them to anyone who may accuse them, to guide and teach them. They need not fear, because the very presence of God will dwell in them, a constant inner companion and guide.
The promise Jesus made to the first disciples he also makes to us. As Christians, we too have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. Although the biblical accounts differ as to when and how the Holy Spirit comes to people, it is in most cases connected closely with baptism. In some cases, the Holy Spirit comes upon people before they are baptized, as in Acts 10, when the Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles while Peter preaches to them, causing Peter to ask, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). At other places in the book of Acts, Peter and the other disciples promise their new converts that they will receive the Holy Spirit when they are baptized (Acts 2:38), but there are at least a few cases where the Holy Spirit comes to people after their baptism. In Acts 8, the people Philip baptizes in Samaria do not receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism, but only after Peter and John visit and lay hands on them (Acts 8:9-17).
The lack of consistency in the biblical accounts about when and how the Spirit comes to people is testimony to the fact that we cannot know exactly how and when the Spirit will move, nor can we control it. Jesus himself acknowledges this unpredictability of the Spirit, when he says to Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit’s dynamic, unconstrained activity breaks down any boundaries we might draw about when and where God is present and pushes us to acknowledge the mystery of God’s movement in the world.
But even if we can’t define exactly how one receives the Holy Spirit, the scriptures testify that all who are baptized do have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. When we baptize(d) Amelia Anne Suit, Nina Mae Harder, and James Thomas Sullivan (at the 8:45 service this morning), we will say (said) to them that they are “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” (BCP 308). The Holy Spirit is the gift of all baptized Christians, living in you and in me and in these newest three members of Christ’s church.
So what does it mean to have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us? First, it means we are – or have the ability to become – holy. Traditionally, the work of the Holy Spirit has been associated with sanctification, the process of making something holy. When the Holy Spirit enters us and lives in us, it begins to transform us in the process that the Eastern Church calls theosis – becoming one with God. As the Holy Spirit unites our lives with the life of Christ in our baptism, in some mysterious way we actually participate in the life of the Trinity. Through the Holy Spirit’s work in us, we too become holy, as God in Christ is holy.
Secondly, having the Holy Spirit dwell in us means that we are capable of amazing things. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Say what? Jesus’s followers will do greater works that Jesus himself? How is that possible? Greater works than healing the sick? Than walking on water? Than raising the dead? We modern people often think of these miraculous acts as unique to Jesus, but the Gospels and the Book of Acts tell us that the disciples also did miraculous works like these. Remember the story of Peter walking out to Jesus on the water? Jesus invites him to come to him on the water, and Peter does so – but about halfway out, he gets scared and starts to sink. When his focus is on Jesus, Peter is indeed able to do the works that Jesus does, but when he is distracted by the strong winds and fear creeps in, his faith falters – and with it, his ability to do miraculous works.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus is constantly reminding his followers of the power of faith – “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says, “you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20). So it’s not surprising that as he prepares to leave them for the last time, he reminds them of this once again: “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, nothing will be impossible for us.
Even though we as a culture tend to be skeptical about miracles, most of us probably can think of “Spirit-filled” experiences that either we have had ourselves or we have heard about through others that defy rational explanation. It might be a healing that mystified the medical professionals. Or a strong, uncanny sense that we should call someone, only to find out that they too had been feeling a strong draw toward us at that moment. Or it might be the experience of mystical creativity – a song or a poem or a painting that we are sure we did not create, but that “came to us” through the inspiration of the Spirit. Whatever these miraculous, Spirit-filled experiences might be, our faith invites us to embrace them, not to explain them away. And it also invites us to consider what else might be possible if we let go of our fear and opened ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit working through us. Now, I’m not suggesting that you all go out and try walking on water – at least not without a life jacket! – but I am suggesting that you seriously consider where and how the Spirit is moving you to act, even if it seems crazy and impossible, and to stop pushing those proddings aside. Trust the power of the Holy Spirit that lives in you, and remember the words of Jesus and of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary – that nothing is impossible with God. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 1:37).
On this Day of Pentecost, as we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we welcome three new members of Christ’s Church, as we are reminded of the vast realm of possibility which lies open to us through the power of the Spirit, we say with the writer of Ephesians, “Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20, BCP translation).
On this Day of Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the church in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God in Christ with us, dwelling inside every baptized Christian and guiding the church to continue God’s work in the world.
Before his crucifixion, Jesus promised his followers that God would send them another Advocate after Jesus was no longer physically present with them. We heard this promise in today’s Gospel reading. In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to his disciples the night before his death and he says to them,
“…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you… the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:16-17, 25-27).
The Greek word translated as “Advocate” is parakletos, which can also be translated as “counselor,” “comforter,” and “intercessor.” The original Greek term had legal connotations – a parakletos is something like a defense attorney – one who advocates for you by arguing your case in front of another. The literal meaning of the word parakletos is “one who is called in” – more specifically, one who is called in to assist someone in trouble. When Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will be a parakletos for them, it is a word of reassurance. “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” he says (John 14:27). In verse 18, which our lectionary leaves out, Jesus says that he will not leave his followers orphaned after he leaves this earth. He reassures the disciples that although they may fear his departure, God will not abandon them. The Holy Spirit will be with them, to assist them when they are in need, to defend them to anyone who may accuse them, to guide and teach them. They need not fear, because the very presence of God will dwell in them, a constant inner companion and guide.
The promise Jesus made to the first disciples he also makes to us. As Christians, we too have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. Although the biblical accounts differ as to when and how the Holy Spirit comes to people, it is in most cases connected closely with baptism. In some cases, the Holy Spirit comes upon people before they are baptized, as in Acts 10, when the Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles while Peter preaches to them, causing Peter to ask, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). At other places in the book of Acts, Peter and the other disciples promise their new converts that they will receive the Holy Spirit when they are baptized (Acts 2:38), but there are at least a few cases where the Holy Spirit comes to people after their baptism. In Acts 8, the people Philip baptizes in Samaria do not receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism, but only after Peter and John visit and lay hands on them (Acts 8:9-17).
The lack of consistency in the biblical accounts about when and how the Spirit comes to people is testimony to the fact that we cannot know exactly how and when the Spirit will move, nor can we control it. Jesus himself acknowledges this unpredictability of the Spirit, when he says to Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit’s dynamic, unconstrained activity breaks down any boundaries we might draw about when and where God is present and pushes us to acknowledge the mystery of God’s movement in the world.
But even if we can’t define exactly how one receives the Holy Spirit, the scriptures testify that all who are baptized do have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. When we baptize(d) Amelia Anne Suit, Nina Mae Harder, and James Thomas Sullivan (at the 8:45 service this morning), we will say (said) to them that they are “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” (BCP 308). The Holy Spirit is the gift of all baptized Christians, living in you and in me and in these newest three members of Christ’s church.
So what does it mean to have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us? First, it means we are – or have the ability to become – holy. Traditionally, the work of the Holy Spirit has been associated with sanctification, the process of making something holy. When the Holy Spirit enters us and lives in us, it begins to transform us in the process that the Eastern Church calls theosis – becoming one with God. As the Holy Spirit unites our lives with the life of Christ in our baptism, in some mysterious way we actually participate in the life of the Trinity. Through the Holy Spirit’s work in us, we too become holy, as God in Christ is holy.
Secondly, having the Holy Spirit dwell in us means that we are capable of amazing things. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Say what? Jesus’s followers will do greater works that Jesus himself? How is that possible? Greater works than healing the sick? Than walking on water? Than raising the dead? We modern people often think of these miraculous acts as unique to Jesus, but the Gospels and the Book of Acts tell us that the disciples also did miraculous works like these. Remember the story of Peter walking out to Jesus on the water? Jesus invites him to come to him on the water, and Peter does so – but about halfway out, he gets scared and starts to sink. When his focus is on Jesus, Peter is indeed able to do the works that Jesus does, but when he is distracted by the strong winds and fear creeps in, his faith falters – and with it, his ability to do miraculous works.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus is constantly reminding his followers of the power of faith – “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says, “you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20). So it’s not surprising that as he prepares to leave them for the last time, he reminds them of this once again: “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, nothing will be impossible for us.
Even though we as a culture tend to be skeptical about miracles, most of us probably can think of “Spirit-filled” experiences that either we have had ourselves or we have heard about through others that defy rational explanation. It might be a healing that mystified the medical professionals. Or a strong, uncanny sense that we should call someone, only to find out that they too had been feeling a strong draw toward us at that moment. Or it might be the experience of mystical creativity – a song or a poem or a painting that we are sure we did not create, but that “came to us” through the inspiration of the Spirit. Whatever these miraculous, Spirit-filled experiences might be, our faith invites us to embrace them, not to explain them away. And it also invites us to consider what else might be possible if we let go of our fear and opened ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit working through us. Now, I’m not suggesting that you all go out and try walking on water – at least not without a life jacket! – but I am suggesting that you seriously consider where and how the Spirit is moving you to act, even if it seems crazy and impossible, and to stop pushing those proddings aside. Trust the power of the Holy Spirit that lives in you, and remember the words of Jesus and of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary – that nothing is impossible with God. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 1:37).
On this Day of Pentecost, as we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we welcome three new members of Christ’s Church, as we are reminded of the vast realm of possibility which lies open to us through the power of the Spirit, we say with the writer of Ephesians, “Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20, BCP translation).
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 21, 2013 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Scripture: Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30)
Although today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, it might also appropriately be referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” On the fourth Sunday of Easter in every year of our three-year lectionary cycle, the readings emphasize the image of God as a shepherd. There is always a reading from chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, where Jesus talks about himself as the good shepherd, and the psalm is always Psalm 23, that most beloved of psalms that proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
So why do we have a “good shepherd” Sunday in the middle of Easter? The primary image of Easter is of Jesus as a lamb, not a shepherd – Christ the Passover lamb who was sacrificed for us – the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Isn’t it mixing metaphors to talk about Jesus as the shepherd in the season when we proclaim him as the lamb?
Perhaps, but paradox has always been at the heart of the Christian faith. The ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas or images in one’s mind at the same time is a particular skill necessary for the Christian life. We proclaim that God is one, but also say there are three persons in the Trinity. We say that Christ has defeated death and sin, and yet both death and sin are still all too prevalent in the world around us. So thinking of Jesus as both the lamb and the shepherd in the same season is right in line with the paradoxical nature of many of our Christian claims. In fact, this apparent mixing of metaphors can serve as an illustration one of the central Christian paradoxes: the claim that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.
The image of Jesus as the shepherd emphasizes his divinity, while the image of Jesus as lamb emphasizes his humanity. As the shepherd, Jesus is wise and in control, guiding the sheep who otherwise would not know where to find food and water, and protecting them from the dangers of wolves and other predators. As the lamb, Jesus is vulnerable and powerless, experiencing the full depths of human pain and the power of evil as he dies on the cross. Perhaps we could say that on Good Friday, Jesus is the lamb, but after Easter, Jesus is the shepherd. After the Resurrection, we see that Jesus is indeed wise and in control, having overcome death itself to bring new life to “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). Having gone before us to prepare the way, the sheep-turned-shepherd now guides us through the pains of death into the well-springs of life.
You might have noticed, as you listened to the readings today, that some of them sounded familiar from their use in our burial liturgy. Psalm 23 is the most obvious one, but actually all of the passages we read from today except the one from Acts are included in our prayer book as appropriate scripture to be read at funerals. Psalm 23 talks about not fearing as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and the promise of dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. The Revelation to John offers a vision of departed souls who have come out of a “great ordeal” gathered before the throne of God and praising him, with the promise that they will no longer hunger and thirst, and that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). And in the Gospel passage, Jesus talks about his promise to give those who follow him eternal life. All of these passages speak of death and Christian understandings of the afterlife, but they also share the common thread of the image of God or Jesus as a shepherd.
Why is it that the image of the Good Shepherd speaks to us so deeply in times of death and loss? Perhaps it is because it is comforting to remind ourselves that God is in control, that God guides and directs our lives even when we, like sheep, do not have the understanding to find our own way to the nourishment we need. It is comforting to know that even when it may seem to us that we are passing through a dangerous and threatening place, the shepherd knows where we are going and will guide us safely there.
But our understanding of God as our shepherd has an additional depth of meaning beyond the concept of a strong protector and guide. The passage from Revelation brings the two metaphors together when it asserts that “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” Because the Lord who is our shepherd has also been a sacrificial lamb, he knows intimately not only the streams of life, but also the valleys of death. The shepherd who guides us is also a sheep who has known what it is to be lost and to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
So when call upon the image of the Good Shepherd as we lay those we love to rest, we are not only invoking the protection and guidance of God, but the empathy of God. We are reminding ourselves at the same time of the omnipotence of God and the vulnerability of God. No matter what the circumstances of the death, whether it be a peaceful death at the end of a long life well lived or the shock of a life cut too short by illness or acts of violence like the bombings in Boston on Monday, the Good Shepherd we call on knows the full range of our human grief. He has been with us in the agony of the slaughtered lamb on Good Friday and he knows the way to the joy of the Resurrection. Because we have a shepherd who has traveled this path before, we can follow him confidently not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.
This is why, even as our hearts ache with grief, we can say in the burial liturgy that “even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” We say “alleluia” because we put our trust in the promise of the Resurrection, the promise that, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). To sing “alleluia” even at the grave is a fiercely defiant cry of hope rooted in the full assurance that our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep.
Although today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, it might also appropriately be referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” On the fourth Sunday of Easter in every year of our three-year lectionary cycle, the readings emphasize the image of God as a shepherd. There is always a reading from chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, where Jesus talks about himself as the good shepherd, and the psalm is always Psalm 23, that most beloved of psalms that proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
So why do we have a “good shepherd” Sunday in the middle of Easter? The primary image of Easter is of Jesus as a lamb, not a shepherd – Christ the Passover lamb who was sacrificed for us – the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Isn’t it mixing metaphors to talk about Jesus as the shepherd in the season when we proclaim him as the lamb?
Perhaps, but paradox has always been at the heart of the Christian faith. The ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas or images in one’s mind at the same time is a particular skill necessary for the Christian life. We proclaim that God is one, but also say there are three persons in the Trinity. We say that Christ has defeated death and sin, and yet both death and sin are still all too prevalent in the world around us. So thinking of Jesus as both the lamb and the shepherd in the same season is right in line with the paradoxical nature of many of our Christian claims. In fact, this apparent mixing of metaphors can serve as an illustration one of the central Christian paradoxes: the claim that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.
The image of Jesus as the shepherd emphasizes his divinity, while the image of Jesus as lamb emphasizes his humanity. As the shepherd, Jesus is wise and in control, guiding the sheep who otherwise would not know where to find food and water, and protecting them from the dangers of wolves and other predators. As the lamb, Jesus is vulnerable and powerless, experiencing the full depths of human pain and the power of evil as he dies on the cross. Perhaps we could say that on Good Friday, Jesus is the lamb, but after Easter, Jesus is the shepherd. After the Resurrection, we see that Jesus is indeed wise and in control, having overcome death itself to bring new life to “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). Having gone before us to prepare the way, the sheep-turned-shepherd now guides us through the pains of death into the well-springs of life.
You might have noticed, as you listened to the readings today, that some of them sounded familiar from their use in our burial liturgy. Psalm 23 is the most obvious one, but actually all of the passages we read from today except the one from Acts are included in our prayer book as appropriate scripture to be read at funerals. Psalm 23 talks about not fearing as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and the promise of dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. The Revelation to John offers a vision of departed souls who have come out of a “great ordeal” gathered before the throne of God and praising him, with the promise that they will no longer hunger and thirst, and that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). And in the Gospel passage, Jesus talks about his promise to give those who follow him eternal life. All of these passages speak of death and Christian understandings of the afterlife, but they also share the common thread of the image of God or Jesus as a shepherd.
Why is it that the image of the Good Shepherd speaks to us so deeply in times of death and loss? Perhaps it is because it is comforting to remind ourselves that God is in control, that God guides and directs our lives even when we, like sheep, do not have the understanding to find our own way to the nourishment we need. It is comforting to know that even when it may seem to us that we are passing through a dangerous and threatening place, the shepherd knows where we are going and will guide us safely there.
But our understanding of God as our shepherd has an additional depth of meaning beyond the concept of a strong protector and guide. The passage from Revelation brings the two metaphors together when it asserts that “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” Because the Lord who is our shepherd has also been a sacrificial lamb, he knows intimately not only the streams of life, but also the valleys of death. The shepherd who guides us is also a sheep who has known what it is to be lost and to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
So when call upon the image of the Good Shepherd as we lay those we love to rest, we are not only invoking the protection and guidance of God, but the empathy of God. We are reminding ourselves at the same time of the omnipotence of God and the vulnerability of God. No matter what the circumstances of the death, whether it be a peaceful death at the end of a long life well lived or the shock of a life cut too short by illness or acts of violence like the bombings in Boston on Monday, the Good Shepherd we call on knows the full range of our human grief. He has been with us in the agony of the slaughtered lamb on Good Friday and he knows the way to the joy of the Resurrection. Because we have a shepherd who has traveled this path before, we can follow him confidently not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.
This is why, even as our hearts ache with grief, we can say in the burial liturgy that “even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” We say “alleluia” because we put our trust in the promise of the Resurrection, the promise that, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). To sing “alleluia” even at the grave is a fiercely defiant cry of hope rooted in the full assurance that our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Easter Message: God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary
Sermon delivered Easter Day, Sunday, March 31, 2013, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin. TN. (Scripture passages: Year C: Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12)
To observe Christianity from the outside, filtered through the lens of American culture, it might seem that Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter. After all, we see decorations on homes and town squares, hear Christmas music playing in stores and restaurants, and receive Christmas cards and presents from friends and family. By contrast, the cultural celebration of Easter is much more muted. Sure, you might see a few giant Easter baskets in some neighbors’ yards, but nothing like the total light extravaganza that takes place in December. Though the greeting card companies stock the aisles with Easter cards, they just don’t seem to be as popular as that annual Christmas letter. And when was the last time you heard “Welcome, happy morning” or any other Easter hymn blaring over the loudspeaker at the grocery store? And as far as the secular mascots go, everyone knows that Santa Claus is way cooler (and usually brings way better presents) than the Easter Bunny.
But despite the message sent by our culture, Easter is actually the most important Christian holiday, even more important than Christmas. The Easter message – that Jesus was raised from the dead – is the central claim of Christianity, the core message of our faith. It is also significantly more controversial than the message of Christmas – that Jesus was born. Perhaps the wider culture prefers Christmas to Easter because it is easier to affirm that Jesus was born than to affirm that he was raised from the dead. Even people who do not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah can accept the historical fact that he existed, and thus, that he was born. But our Easter faith demands something much more challenging of us than an acknowledgement of Jesus’s birth and a respect for his teachings. It demands the proclamation of an outrageous claim – that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
Jesus’s Resurrection is not accepted as historical fact in the way that his birth is because it is not universally acknowledged, nor was it universally experienced. In Peter’s famous speech to the Gentiles in Caesarea that we heard from Acts today, he tells them that “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses” (Acts 10:40-41, emphasis added). It certainly would have been a lot easier to “prove” that the Resurrection happened if God had allowed Jesus to appear to all the people rather than only to a select few. But as it is, the evidence for the Resurrection is limited to the experiences of a relatively small number of people, whose testimonies we are asked to accept on faith. And once we have accepted it, we are to join them in their witness, to spread the message of Jesus’s Resurrection and ask others to accept our testimony on faith as well.
So why didn’t God allow Jesus to appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection? If God is all-powerful and desires to bring all people to faith in Christ, why did God not make the Resurrection of Jesus as undeniable as the fact of his birth? Why didn’t he appear to the whole world and prove his triumph over death and the powers of sin? Why would God choose such a messy and inefficient means of delivering such an important message? Although we will never have definitive answers to these questions in this life, this humble means of spreading the news of the Resurrection does seem to be in keeping with what we know of the nature of God through the earthly life of Jesus.
Despite Jewish expectations that the Messiah would overthrow the occupying Roman government and restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus arrives as a baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, in the ancient near Eastern equivalent of a rest stop, to a poor, virtually unknown family. The star of Bethlehem and the stories of the magi coming from the East notwithstanding, his birth was probably largely unnoticed in the world’s terms. When he began preaching and teaching as an adult, he did not seek fame and power, but traveled humbly on foot in the midst of a community of people from all walks of life, but primarily those who were poor. He taught his disciples that in contrast to the world’s rulers who lord their power over their subjects, it should not be so among his followers. Instead, he taught them that “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42-45). His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem before the Passover, which we commemorated last week on Palm Sunday, was not a grand military processional led by a powerful king on a horse ready to lead a revolution against the occupying powers, but a peaceful and joyful celebration led by a peasant riding a donkey. The night before his death, he takes the role of a servant in washing his disciples feet, and he goes willingly to death on the cross, executed in a shameful manner among common criminals. He has no crown but the crown of thorns, no throne but the cross.
And yet, despite the utter humility of his life, we who call ourselves by his name – Christians – have been unable to resist the temptation to use royal and militaristic language to talk about his death and Resurrection, saying that he has “won the victory” over death, and that he now “reigns” in heaven as “king.” We talk about Jesus “conquering” death and the grave, but Jesus himself did not seem to be interested in “conquering” much of anything, but rather in transforming things through mercy, prayer, and service. Even after his Resurrection, Jesus is no more the powerful king some of his disciples wanted him to be than he was before his death.
In Luke’s account of the story, Jesus’s first appearance to the disciples after his Resurrection is on the Road to Emmaus, which comes immediately after the Gospel passage we read today. Although the angels at the tomb appeared in dazzling white clothes, Jesus appears as a regular guy walking down the street, and the disciples don’t even recognize him. It’s not until they sit down to eat together, when he reenacts the four actions of the Last Supper – taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to them – that their eyes are opened and they recognize who he is. After his Resurrection, Jesus is not a regal king riding in as a triumphant conqueror, but a regular guy walking down the road and sharing a meal with his companions – doing the same kind of thing he had always done when he was among them before his death. In his Resurrected life, as in his earthly life, Jesus reminds us that the extraordinary is mediated to us through the ordinary.
Perhaps Jesus did not appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection because the God we know in Christ is not a God who forces himself on others through showy displays of power, but who comes among us humbly and gently, among the outcast and the lowly, in ways that make it easy for those of us expecting power and looking for “triumph” to miss him entirely. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the Resurrection was not an event that drew universal recognition beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it took place quietly and humbly, in an unmarked tomb, and was witnessed by a small group of unassuming, mostly poor people, and that the news about it spread through the messy and inefficient means of word of mouth. Because in this, we see the truth that Jesus taught us time after time in his early ministry, that God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary.
God used the testimony of regular first-century people to spread the news about the Resurrection, and God continues to use regular people like you and me to spread the message of the Gospel today – because we, too, are called to be witnesses to the Resurrection. Although we were not among those who experienced Jesus in the resurrected flesh in Jerusalem, we have a continual opportunity before us to, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we have an opportunity to encounter the presence of Christ in the elements of the bread and wine. The Resurrection is as extraordinary as the ultimate undoing of the powers of death and sin and as ordinary as bread and wine. It is as distant as an empty tomb in first-century Palestine and as near as the wafer on your tongue. And so, as we carry on the testimony of the apostles that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again,” we become witnesses with them to the Resurrection. As we go forth nourished from this table, our experience here enables us to join with them in proclaiming, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!"
To observe Christianity from the outside, filtered through the lens of American culture, it might seem that Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter. After all, we see decorations on homes and town squares, hear Christmas music playing in stores and restaurants, and receive Christmas cards and presents from friends and family. By contrast, the cultural celebration of Easter is much more muted. Sure, you might see a few giant Easter baskets in some neighbors’ yards, but nothing like the total light extravaganza that takes place in December. Though the greeting card companies stock the aisles with Easter cards, they just don’t seem to be as popular as that annual Christmas letter. And when was the last time you heard “Welcome, happy morning” or any other Easter hymn blaring over the loudspeaker at the grocery store? And as far as the secular mascots go, everyone knows that Santa Claus is way cooler (and usually brings way better presents) than the Easter Bunny.
But despite the message sent by our culture, Easter is actually the most important Christian holiday, even more important than Christmas. The Easter message – that Jesus was raised from the dead – is the central claim of Christianity, the core message of our faith. It is also significantly more controversial than the message of Christmas – that Jesus was born. Perhaps the wider culture prefers Christmas to Easter because it is easier to affirm that Jesus was born than to affirm that he was raised from the dead. Even people who do not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah can accept the historical fact that he existed, and thus, that he was born. But our Easter faith demands something much more challenging of us than an acknowledgement of Jesus’s birth and a respect for his teachings. It demands the proclamation of an outrageous claim – that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
Jesus’s Resurrection is not accepted as historical fact in the way that his birth is because it is not universally acknowledged, nor was it universally experienced. In Peter’s famous speech to the Gentiles in Caesarea that we heard from Acts today, he tells them that “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses” (Acts 10:40-41, emphasis added). It certainly would have been a lot easier to “prove” that the Resurrection happened if God had allowed Jesus to appear to all the people rather than only to a select few. But as it is, the evidence for the Resurrection is limited to the experiences of a relatively small number of people, whose testimonies we are asked to accept on faith. And once we have accepted it, we are to join them in their witness, to spread the message of Jesus’s Resurrection and ask others to accept our testimony on faith as well.
So why didn’t God allow Jesus to appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection? If God is all-powerful and desires to bring all people to faith in Christ, why did God not make the Resurrection of Jesus as undeniable as the fact of his birth? Why didn’t he appear to the whole world and prove his triumph over death and the powers of sin? Why would God choose such a messy and inefficient means of delivering such an important message? Although we will never have definitive answers to these questions in this life, this humble means of spreading the news of the Resurrection does seem to be in keeping with what we know of the nature of God through the earthly life of Jesus.
Despite Jewish expectations that the Messiah would overthrow the occupying Roman government and restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus arrives as a baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, in the ancient near Eastern equivalent of a rest stop, to a poor, virtually unknown family. The star of Bethlehem and the stories of the magi coming from the East notwithstanding, his birth was probably largely unnoticed in the world’s terms. When he began preaching and teaching as an adult, he did not seek fame and power, but traveled humbly on foot in the midst of a community of people from all walks of life, but primarily those who were poor. He taught his disciples that in contrast to the world’s rulers who lord their power over their subjects, it should not be so among his followers. Instead, he taught them that “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42-45). His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem before the Passover, which we commemorated last week on Palm Sunday, was not a grand military processional led by a powerful king on a horse ready to lead a revolution against the occupying powers, but a peaceful and joyful celebration led by a peasant riding a donkey. The night before his death, he takes the role of a servant in washing his disciples feet, and he goes willingly to death on the cross, executed in a shameful manner among common criminals. He has no crown but the crown of thorns, no throne but the cross.
And yet, despite the utter humility of his life, we who call ourselves by his name – Christians – have been unable to resist the temptation to use royal and militaristic language to talk about his death and Resurrection, saying that he has “won the victory” over death, and that he now “reigns” in heaven as “king.” We talk about Jesus “conquering” death and the grave, but Jesus himself did not seem to be interested in “conquering” much of anything, but rather in transforming things through mercy, prayer, and service. Even after his Resurrection, Jesus is no more the powerful king some of his disciples wanted him to be than he was before his death.
In Luke’s account of the story, Jesus’s first appearance to the disciples after his Resurrection is on the Road to Emmaus, which comes immediately after the Gospel passage we read today. Although the angels at the tomb appeared in dazzling white clothes, Jesus appears as a regular guy walking down the street, and the disciples don’t even recognize him. It’s not until they sit down to eat together, when he reenacts the four actions of the Last Supper – taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to them – that their eyes are opened and they recognize who he is. After his Resurrection, Jesus is not a regal king riding in as a triumphant conqueror, but a regular guy walking down the road and sharing a meal with his companions – doing the same kind of thing he had always done when he was among them before his death. In his Resurrected life, as in his earthly life, Jesus reminds us that the extraordinary is mediated to us through the ordinary.
Perhaps Jesus did not appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection because the God we know in Christ is not a God who forces himself on others through showy displays of power, but who comes among us humbly and gently, among the outcast and the lowly, in ways that make it easy for those of us expecting power and looking for “triumph” to miss him entirely. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the Resurrection was not an event that drew universal recognition beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it took place quietly and humbly, in an unmarked tomb, and was witnessed by a small group of unassuming, mostly poor people, and that the news about it spread through the messy and inefficient means of word of mouth. Because in this, we see the truth that Jesus taught us time after time in his early ministry, that God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary.
God used the testimony of regular first-century people to spread the news about the Resurrection, and God continues to use regular people like you and me to spread the message of the Gospel today – because we, too, are called to be witnesses to the Resurrection. Although we were not among those who experienced Jesus in the resurrected flesh in Jerusalem, we have a continual opportunity before us to, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we have an opportunity to encounter the presence of Christ in the elements of the bread and wine. The Resurrection is as extraordinary as the ultimate undoing of the powers of death and sin and as ordinary as bread and wine. It is as distant as an empty tomb in first-century Palestine and as near as the wafer on your tongue. And so, as we carry on the testimony of the apostles that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again,” we become witnesses with them to the Resurrection. As we go forth nourished from this table, our experience here enables us to join with them in proclaiming, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!"
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Repentance based on love, not fear
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35)
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
“I love thee, Lord, but not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet for fear that loving not
I might for ever die;
but for that thou didst all the world
upon the cross embrace;
for us didst bear the nails and spear,
and manifold disgrace,
and griefs and torments numberless,
and sweat of agony;
e'en death itself; and all for one
who was thine enemy.”
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
When I survey the wondrous cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
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