Sermon delivered Sunday, April 24, 2016 (5th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical!
Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “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 moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
Showing posts with label Scripture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scripture. Show all posts
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Reading Scripture with people of other faiths
Sermon delivered Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 (Thursday in the Week of the Epiphany) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, during a Eucharist in which members of the Sikh community in Nashville were invited to be present to observe and/or participate in our worship, as part of an on-going interfaith dialogue. The scriptures appointed by the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary for this day were: Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 147; 1 John 4:19-5:4; and Luke 4:14-22.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The choice is ours
Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South, on the feast day of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.
Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.
But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!
It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!
We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.
Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.
The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.
The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.
So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.
Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?
There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Choose life, that you may live.
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 19, Year A), Sept. 11, 2011
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish).
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
Thus sang Moses and the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt, in the Exodus story that we have been reading for the past several weeks. This morning we reach the climax of the story: Moses leads the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry land, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, and the people of Israel sing. They sing a song of deliverance, a song of joy at being freed from slavery. They rejoice that God has triumphed over the evils of oppression and begun to move them toward a home in the Promised Land.
This sacred story of a God who brings freedom from slavery and oppression is at the heart of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It is a narrative that has given hope to millions of people in dark times, from Jews in Nazi-era Germany to African slaves in the United States to South Africans living under apartheid.
But despite the power and hope of this story, it is not only a story of liberation from oppression. It is also a story of revenge. It is a story of a God who “pays back” the Egyptians for the harms they have inflicted on the Israelites in captivity by “tossing them into the sea,” and of a people who rejoice in their deaths. It is a story of “us” verses “them,” a story in which God is clearly on “our side.”
I’ve often wondered what the story would look like from the Egyptians’ point of view. Unfortunately, the biblical accounts don’t give us much information about the Egyptians, apart from painting them as the “bad guys” opposing our friends and ancestors, the Israelites. The Egyptians are not “us,” they’re not part of our group, they don’t speak our language, and they don’t worship our god, so therefore they must be bad. But I’ve always felt that there must have been more to the story than that.
This summer, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There, I spent about two hours exploring the Archeology wing, which traced the history of all the peoples who have lived in “the Land,” as they called it, from prehistoric times to the Ottoman Empire. After gazing at ancient fossils of cave men and giant mastadons, I rounded the corner to enter a section of the exhibit called “The Land of Canaan.”
I wandered through cases full of jewelry and food bowls and even ancient women’s make-up cases. I saw statues of “Ba’al,” the Canaanite god who is so often pitted as the enemy of the God of Israel in the biblical texts. Even though I had learned about Canaanite religion and culture as a religion major in college, something about seeing the objects of their daily lives – the combs the women used to brush their hair, or the utensils they used to prepare their food – brought about an awareness of the full humanity of these people that had been lacking in my formation as a western Christian.
I found myself extremely saddened that my religious tradition and my sacred texts had essentially demonized this entire group of people, who got up every morning and ate their food and loved their children and praised God, whose only crime was that they happened to live in the land that the Israelites believed God had given to them, and that they had a different understanding of God than the Israelites did.
Learning the Bible stories as a child, and even as an adult, I’d come to associate the Canaanites with the “bad guys.” It was a process of cultural conditioning that was very similar to the ways in which I knew “Communist” was a bad word when I was growing up during the Cold War-era, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea what a communist was. Or the ways in which children today learn that “Muslim” and “Arab” are bad words, even if they don’t have any idea what Islam is or what Arab culture is.
As we are mindful today of the ten years that have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, I find myself wondering about the other side of the story. I remember very clearly sitting in my dorm room in college in March of 2003 and watching President Bush address the nation about the war we were about to begin in Iraq. He concluded his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.” Immediately thereafter, the news channel showed a clip of Saddam Hussein addressing his people, ending his speech with the promise that “God is on our side.”
Of course, they were both right – God is on our side – but the “our” in that sentence is much broader than either of them were imagining. God is on “our” side in the sense that God is on the side of humanity – that God is for us – for all people – in the sense that God wills salvation for all people. God is not against us as someone who wills our destruction – or the destruction of our enemies.
But wait a minute, some might say, doesn’t God destroy the Egypitans and deliver the Israelites? Wasn’t God clearly on Israel’s side? Weren’t the Israelites justified in celebrating the death of the Egyptians, who had oppressed them for so long? Weren’t Americans justified in celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden? Isn’t there Scriptural warrant for rejoicing in the death of one’s enemies?
Well, yes, of course there is. We heard some of it this morning in the Song of Moses:
“I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:1)
But there is also scriptural warrant against rejoicing in the death of those who sin against us and advocating for forgiveness instead. We see this in the parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew that we read this morning.
“Peter came and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Granted, this passage is about reconciling with other Christians, with those who are “one of us” who have offended us, but there are many other passages where Jesus and the Apostle Paul both advocate for forgiveness not only of people who are “one of us” but of people we perceive as our enemies as well.
Contradictory as they may seem, both these motifs – the idea that we are the chosen people, that God cares for us but hates the other, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies, and the idea that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32) – are present in the Bible. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And that means we have to choose which motif we will allow to take precedence in our interpretation of scripture.
Regardless of what some Christians may say, it is impossible to read the Bible without interpreting it – and people who think they are reading just the “plain sense” of the text are often unknowingly endorsing one particular interpretation without even realizing it. We will choose, either consciously or unconsciously, which of these two motifs we will allow to guide our lives as we read the Bible. And perhaps that isn’t an accident.
What if, just what if, the same God who created us with free will has implanted a free choice right smack dab in the middle of our Scriptures? What if the fact that the Bible contains these two seemingly contradictory messages is not an indication of the flawed human authorship of the Bible and a reason to dismiss it, but an opportunity for us to exercise the “reason and skill” with which God has endowed us?
In the story of the giving of the law in the Book of Deuteronomy, God presents the 10 commandments to the people of Israel with the exhortation that they can choose a life of blessing by following his commandments or a life of curses if they do not. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Perhaps we have a similar choice in the way we read Scripture. We can choose to focus on the triumphalist, exclusive passages of Scripture that assert that only we are God’s chosen, or we can choose to focus on the more inclusive and generous passages that assert that God cares for all.
There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that God rebuked the angels for rejoicing at the death of the Egyptians, saying, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”
Over three thousand years later, the British government and other Western powers persuaded the United Nations to recognize a homeland for the Jewish people in the historic land of Israel, thereby displacing the Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries. In 1948, the Palestinians became the modern-day Canaanites, those who were “in the way” and preventing the Jews from taking ownership of “their” land. With the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes and killed. The biblical texts that say that God gave the land to the Jews were used to justify severe violations of human rights against Palestinians. Some Palestinians fought back, and the violence from both sides has not stopped to this day, as we all know from what we see on the news.
But this summer, I visited the West Bank, and after meeting actual Palestinian people, I ceased to think of them as those “terrorist suicide bombers” we see on the news. I met these modern-day Canaanites, with very real, full, human lives, still living in refugee camps over sixty years later, wanting only to return to their family homes, but prevented from doing so by the Israeli government. I left Israel feeling very discouraged and disturbed about the way theology had been used to justify the violence that is so prevalent in that region, and the ways in which my own Christian tradition has perpetuated it.
On the plane back from Israel, I read the book Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie. In it, Mitch writes about the relationship he built with his childhood rabbi, Albert Lewis, in the years before his death. One day, Albert, whom Mitch calls “the Reb,” shows Mitch an Arabic schoolbook he’d found in an abandoned home in northern Israel shortly after the 1967 war. The conversation that ensued between them went like this:
“There’s a reason I gave that book to you,” the Reb said.
What’s the reason?
“Open it.”
I opened it.
“More.”
I flipped through the pages and out fell three small black-and-white photos, faded and smudged with dirt.
One was of an older dark-haired woman, Arabic and matronly-looking. One was of a mustached younger Arabic man in a suit and tie. The last photo was of two children, side by side, presumably a brother and sister.
Who are they? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, softly.
He held out his hand and I gave him the photo of the children.
“Over the years, I kept seeing these kids, the mother, her son. That’s why I never threw the book away. I felt I had to keep them alive somehow. I thought maybe someday someone would look at the pictures, say they knew the family, and return them to the survivors. But I’m running out of time.”
He handed me the photo back.
Wait, I said. I don’t understand. From your religious viewpoint, these people were the enemy.
His voice grew angry.
“Enemy schemenmy,” he said. “This was a family.”In our sacred texts, we have set before us life and death. Choose life, that you may live.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Sermon: Theological Education Sunday
Text of a sermon given Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Dalton, Ga. I was invited to preach by St. Mark's interim rector, Fr. Reed Freeman, who along with his wife Nancy, established the Freeman Award for Merit at the School of Theology at Sewanee, which I was awarded this past fall.
Today, if you didn’t know it already, is Theological Education Sunday. In 1997, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established the first Sunday in February as a day to encourage parishes to give at least a small portion of their budgets to supporting theological education. I stand before you as Exhibit A: a real, live seminarian!
Since your rector has informed me that you currently have a member in the discernment process about to head off to seminary next year, I assume that at least some of you know well about the process of forming new clergy. You know about discernment. You know about sending folks to seminary. But some parishes don’t. If your parish hasn’t supported a seminarian a while, or if you don’t live in a town near a seminary, you’re likely never to come across this strange breed of person: the seminarian. And you’re likely to get the impression that priests sort of fall from the sky, manna-like, a perfectly-formed creation of God in heaven.
So that’s why they trot us out once a year to talk, real person to real person, with the people in the pews – or as my husband affectionately refers to himself and other laity, the “pewsters.”
So. Hello, pewsters. I’m Tracy, the seminarian. I’d like to talk with you this morning about how I found my way to seminary and about why I think theological education is so important for the future of the church.
I never expected to become an Episcopal priest. I was raised in the Lutheran Church, but I saw much of what happened there as empty ritual. After a “conversion experience” at a Baptist youth rally in late high school, I left the Lutherans for non-denominational evangelical churches, drawn in by people who seemed really passionate about what they believed. I soon found that some of my views on women’s leadership and on God’s presence in religions other than Christianity were not welcome there, and I eventually found my way to an Episcopal Church while pursuing a graduate degree in world religions and interfaith dialogue in the Boston area. At the time, I’d assumed I’d become a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker – I wanted to help educate the public about religions. Little did I know, God had other plans.
Ever since my high school “conversion experience,” I had been struck by the many calls to care for the poor that I found in Scripture. Passages like the one we read from Isaiah 58 this morning began to haunt me. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice... to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?” Or Micah 6:8, which we heard in the lectionary last Sunday: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” Or John 21:17: “If you love me, feed my sheep.” Or Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Passages like these rang in my head as I walked, eyes down, past the many homeless people on the streets of Cambridge, as I rushed to class or to the store.
After being tormented by this Scriptural soundtrack in my head for over a year, I finally responded to the proddings – or shall we say HARASSMENT – of the Spirit. I began to volunteer with an outdoor church in Cambridge for people who either would not or could not enter traditional churches. Most of our parishioners were people who lived on the streets.
The first time I attended the Outdoor Church, I bit back tears as I stood with several homeless people and two ministers in the middle of a public park, gathered in a circle around the rickety metal push-cart that held the simple altar linen and wooden cross, while the minister stretched out his hands and recited these words as part of the Eucharistic prayer: “Out of your desire to draw us into your infinite love, Jesus was born into the human family and remained with people who were outcast.” As the priest at my parish in the Boston area had said of this gathering, “It really felt like CHURCH.”
At that moment, I knew I was where God had been calling me to be for some time. For the next year and a half, I tredged several miles down to Harvard Square, rain or shine – or snow! – and worshipped with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge Common. We would then journey through the streets of Cambridge on foot, offering lunch and Communion to anyone who looked like they might need it.
After doing some writing about my experience with the Outdoor Church, some of my mentors began to suggest that I might have a call to ordained ministry. Several years of discernment and several geographical moves later, I found myself in seminary at Sewanee.
In seminary, I got a chance to examine more closely many of those Scriptural passages that led me to my involvement with the Outdoor Church, and sparked my call to ordained ministry. I learned, for instance, that the author of Matthew’s gospel is not actually referring to the poor and outcast when he says, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Instead, this is a sectarian statement that claims that people will be sent into “paradise” or “everlasting torment” at the end of time based on how they have treated Christians – and in particular, Matthew’s community and how THEY thought people should be Christian, which was to continue to follow Jewish practices like the Sabbath and keeping the ritual food laws -- as we heard in this morning's reading from Matthew -- "I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it." The Greek phrase translated as “the least of these” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is actually probably more accurately rendered “these little ones,” and is a phrase used to refer to Jesus’s disciples in the Gospel of Mathew.
I also learned that some of the wonderful injunctions to care for the poor in the Old Testament, like this morning’s reading from Isaiah 58, were couched within what I found to be a rather problematic theology. After learning the historical context in which Isaiah 58 was written, I realized that the message of this passage is not just that God prefers ethical and just behavior to going through the motions of empty ritual – that I could get on board with – but that the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel’s defeat by the Babylonian Empire was actually God’s PUNISHMENT on the Israelites for not living in such a manner. If we were to translate this into our own day, it would be something like, “Care for the poor, or I’ll send another country to destroy the United States in a massive war. Thus says the Lord.”
Now, recovering the ancient meaning of the text doesn’t mean we have to stop there in terms of our own understanding of and relationship with the text. The task of biblical studies is determining what the text meant in its own day; the task of theology is determining what it means for us today.
Do we believe, as the ancient Israelites did, that God punishes nations for their behavior by wreaking national disasters and military conquest upon them? Some Christians do. You may remember that shortly after 9/11, Jerry Falwell said that gays and lesbians and feminists “helped this happen” by making God angry at America. Or that Pat Robertson claimed that the earthquake in Haiti last January was God’s punishment on that country for making a pact with the devil. Most Episcopalians I know were horrified by these statements, but they’re actually not too far off from the way the ancient Israelites would have understood and interpreted God’s agency in the world.
Or do we believe that God will judge the people of the world at the end of time based on how they have treated us? Not whether the most vulnerable among us have been cared for, or even whether they are Christians or not, but whether they have given Christians special treatment?
If we don’t want to affirm this kind of theology and what it says about God’s nature, what does that mean for the way we read Scripture? Is there a way to affirm the call to ethical and just societies that Isaiah 58 presents without believing that God will send terrorist attacks and earthquakes upon us if we mess up? Can we continue to read Matthew 25 as a calling to care for the poor, even though that wasn’t what the author of that text meant to say?
These are the questions we wrestle with in seminary, and they are of ultimate concern for the future of the church. How we read Scripture matters. How our clergy read Scripture matters. The consequences of misuse of sacred texts can be immense, as any cursory glance at Christian history will show: slavery, the Crusades, the Inquisition, you know the story. It’s not something most of us are proud of. But it’s a very real part of our tradition and history as Christians, and I believe it’s crucial that our future clergy are educated in such a way that we become self-aware enough not to repeat it.
And although studying Scripture critically can uncover some unsettling things about how the church has moved away from the original meaning of some of the texts, in some ways it can actually be liberating or helpful to us in our ministry. For example, had I known what I know now about Matthew 25, I would have had an answer for the homeless man in Cambridge who had seen this verse posted on the outside of a shelter where he’d stayed and asked me, “What does that mean, the LEAST of these?” His tone of voice made it clear that he wasn’t at all flattered at being considered “least” of anything, and that if such a mindset were motivating the people who ran the shelter, it came across to him as derogatory and patronizing.
And this is why theological education is so important. Our understanding of and interpretation of Scripture has a direct, personal effect on the people with whom we serve and minister. We need our priests to be educated and intelligent interpreters of Scripture. But seminary is much more than biblical studies and theology – we also study church history, liturgy, ethics, and get practical experience through field education placements at nearby parishes, with opportunities to reflect on our experiences with our peers.
When you financially support theological education, you’re not just helping one man or woman and their family pay to go to seminary. You’re supporting the future of our church and the impact it will have on the wider world. You’re supporting all those folks on the street who are wondering if God considers them “less than” people with more money when they see Matthew 25 posted on the walls of their shelter.
Now, “Theological Education Sunday” was established to promote financial support of those studying for ordained ministry. But I personally believe that “theological education” shouldn’t be just about clergy. One of the reasons I’m proud to be at Sewanee is that it is the home of the Education for Ministry program, better known as EfM, which seeks to educate all Christians in the basics of the faith – biblical studies, church history, and theology – in a four-year program offered in parishes across the country. EfM believes that all Christians – that means all of you! – are ordained to ministry by virtue of their baptism. Although it’s certainly important to support seminary education for clergy, I’d also like to encourage us on Theological Education Sunday to think about how we are educating the laity in their faith. How are we giving them opportunities to discern THEIR callings, to live our THEIR ministries? EfM is a wonderful program, but it requires a “tuition” fee of several hundred dollars as well. How do we make quality Christian formation and theological education accessible to every member of the church?
But let’s get back to Isaiah. What does all this high-falutin’ talk about seminary education have to do with Isaiah’s message of bringing justice to the poor? Wouldn’t our money be better spent helping a homeless person get an apartment than supporting some already-privileged person to go off and sit in the luxury of a university setting for three years getting a graduate-level degree?
Maybe it doesn’t have to be an “either/or” scenario. The best of our seminaries are about training people how to respond to Isaiah’s call for justice for the poor. I’m currently taking a class at Sewanee that involves traveling to Chattanooga once a week to visit various urban ministries and outreach programs and to learn very practical lessons about effective ways to organize people in responding to God’s call for justice for the poor. Supporting theological education is supporting the poor, in that it provides educated and adept clergy who will be able to answer that call to justice and motivate others to do the same.
And if it didn’t cost anything to go to seminary, maybe some of those “homeless poor” who feel a call to ministry could be my classmates.
Today, if you didn’t know it already, is Theological Education Sunday. In 1997, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established the first Sunday in February as a day to encourage parishes to give at least a small portion of their budgets to supporting theological education. I stand before you as Exhibit A: a real, live seminarian!
Since your rector has informed me that you currently have a member in the discernment process about to head off to seminary next year, I assume that at least some of you know well about the process of forming new clergy. You know about discernment. You know about sending folks to seminary. But some parishes don’t. If your parish hasn’t supported a seminarian a while, or if you don’t live in a town near a seminary, you’re likely never to come across this strange breed of person: the seminarian. And you’re likely to get the impression that priests sort of fall from the sky, manna-like, a perfectly-formed creation of God in heaven.
So that’s why they trot us out once a year to talk, real person to real person, with the people in the pews – or as my husband affectionately refers to himself and other laity, the “pewsters.”
So. Hello, pewsters. I’m Tracy, the seminarian. I’d like to talk with you this morning about how I found my way to seminary and about why I think theological education is so important for the future of the church.
I never expected to become an Episcopal priest. I was raised in the Lutheran Church, but I saw much of what happened there as empty ritual. After a “conversion experience” at a Baptist youth rally in late high school, I left the Lutherans for non-denominational evangelical churches, drawn in by people who seemed really passionate about what they believed. I soon found that some of my views on women’s leadership and on God’s presence in religions other than Christianity were not welcome there, and I eventually found my way to an Episcopal Church while pursuing a graduate degree in world religions and interfaith dialogue in the Boston area. At the time, I’d assumed I’d become a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker – I wanted to help educate the public about religions. Little did I know, God had other plans.
Ever since my high school “conversion experience,” I had been struck by the many calls to care for the poor that I found in Scripture. Passages like the one we read from Isaiah 58 this morning began to haunt me. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice... to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?” Or Micah 6:8, which we heard in the lectionary last Sunday: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” Or John 21:17: “If you love me, feed my sheep.” Or Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Passages like these rang in my head as I walked, eyes down, past the many homeless people on the streets of Cambridge, as I rushed to class or to the store.
After being tormented by this Scriptural soundtrack in my head for over a year, I finally responded to the proddings – or shall we say HARASSMENT – of the Spirit. I began to volunteer with an outdoor church in Cambridge for people who either would not or could not enter traditional churches. Most of our parishioners were people who lived on the streets.
The first time I attended the Outdoor Church, I bit back tears as I stood with several homeless people and two ministers in the middle of a public park, gathered in a circle around the rickety metal push-cart that held the simple altar linen and wooden cross, while the minister stretched out his hands and recited these words as part of the Eucharistic prayer: “Out of your desire to draw us into your infinite love, Jesus was born into the human family and remained with people who were outcast.” As the priest at my parish in the Boston area had said of this gathering, “It really felt like CHURCH.”
At that moment, I knew I was where God had been calling me to be for some time. For the next year and a half, I tredged several miles down to Harvard Square, rain or shine – or snow! – and worshipped with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge Common. We would then journey through the streets of Cambridge on foot, offering lunch and Communion to anyone who looked like they might need it.
After doing some writing about my experience with the Outdoor Church, some of my mentors began to suggest that I might have a call to ordained ministry. Several years of discernment and several geographical moves later, I found myself in seminary at Sewanee.
In seminary, I got a chance to examine more closely many of those Scriptural passages that led me to my involvement with the Outdoor Church, and sparked my call to ordained ministry. I learned, for instance, that the author of Matthew’s gospel is not actually referring to the poor and outcast when he says, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Instead, this is a sectarian statement that claims that people will be sent into “paradise” or “everlasting torment” at the end of time based on how they have treated Christians – and in particular, Matthew’s community and how THEY thought people should be Christian, which was to continue to follow Jewish practices like the Sabbath and keeping the ritual food laws -- as we heard in this morning's reading from Matthew -- "I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it." The Greek phrase translated as “the least of these” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is actually probably more accurately rendered “these little ones,” and is a phrase used to refer to Jesus’s disciples in the Gospel of Mathew.
I also learned that some of the wonderful injunctions to care for the poor in the Old Testament, like this morning’s reading from Isaiah 58, were couched within what I found to be a rather problematic theology. After learning the historical context in which Isaiah 58 was written, I realized that the message of this passage is not just that God prefers ethical and just behavior to going through the motions of empty ritual – that I could get on board with – but that the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel’s defeat by the Babylonian Empire was actually God’s PUNISHMENT on the Israelites for not living in such a manner. If we were to translate this into our own day, it would be something like, “Care for the poor, or I’ll send another country to destroy the United States in a massive war. Thus says the Lord.”
Now, recovering the ancient meaning of the text doesn’t mean we have to stop there in terms of our own understanding of and relationship with the text. The task of biblical studies is determining what the text meant in its own day; the task of theology is determining what it means for us today.
Do we believe, as the ancient Israelites did, that God punishes nations for their behavior by wreaking national disasters and military conquest upon them? Some Christians do. You may remember that shortly after 9/11, Jerry Falwell said that gays and lesbians and feminists “helped this happen” by making God angry at America. Or that Pat Robertson claimed that the earthquake in Haiti last January was God’s punishment on that country for making a pact with the devil. Most Episcopalians I know were horrified by these statements, but they’re actually not too far off from the way the ancient Israelites would have understood and interpreted God’s agency in the world.
Or do we believe that God will judge the people of the world at the end of time based on how they have treated us? Not whether the most vulnerable among us have been cared for, or even whether they are Christians or not, but whether they have given Christians special treatment?
If we don’t want to affirm this kind of theology and what it says about God’s nature, what does that mean for the way we read Scripture? Is there a way to affirm the call to ethical and just societies that Isaiah 58 presents without believing that God will send terrorist attacks and earthquakes upon us if we mess up? Can we continue to read Matthew 25 as a calling to care for the poor, even though that wasn’t what the author of that text meant to say?
These are the questions we wrestle with in seminary, and they are of ultimate concern for the future of the church. How we read Scripture matters. How our clergy read Scripture matters. The consequences of misuse of sacred texts can be immense, as any cursory glance at Christian history will show: slavery, the Crusades, the Inquisition, you know the story. It’s not something most of us are proud of. But it’s a very real part of our tradition and history as Christians, and I believe it’s crucial that our future clergy are educated in such a way that we become self-aware enough not to repeat it.
And although studying Scripture critically can uncover some unsettling things about how the church has moved away from the original meaning of some of the texts, in some ways it can actually be liberating or helpful to us in our ministry. For example, had I known what I know now about Matthew 25, I would have had an answer for the homeless man in Cambridge who had seen this verse posted on the outside of a shelter where he’d stayed and asked me, “What does that mean, the LEAST of these?” His tone of voice made it clear that he wasn’t at all flattered at being considered “least” of anything, and that if such a mindset were motivating the people who ran the shelter, it came across to him as derogatory and patronizing.
And this is why theological education is so important. Our understanding of and interpretation of Scripture has a direct, personal effect on the people with whom we serve and minister. We need our priests to be educated and intelligent interpreters of Scripture. But seminary is much more than biblical studies and theology – we also study church history, liturgy, ethics, and get practical experience through field education placements at nearby parishes, with opportunities to reflect on our experiences with our peers.
When you financially support theological education, you’re not just helping one man or woman and their family pay to go to seminary. You’re supporting the future of our church and the impact it will have on the wider world. You’re supporting all those folks on the street who are wondering if God considers them “less than” people with more money when they see Matthew 25 posted on the walls of their shelter.
Now, “Theological Education Sunday” was established to promote financial support of those studying for ordained ministry. But I personally believe that “theological education” shouldn’t be just about clergy. One of the reasons I’m proud to be at Sewanee is that it is the home of the Education for Ministry program, better known as EfM, which seeks to educate all Christians in the basics of the faith – biblical studies, church history, and theology – in a four-year program offered in parishes across the country. EfM believes that all Christians – that means all of you! – are ordained to ministry by virtue of their baptism. Although it’s certainly important to support seminary education for clergy, I’d also like to encourage us on Theological Education Sunday to think about how we are educating the laity in their faith. How are we giving them opportunities to discern THEIR callings, to live our THEIR ministries? EfM is a wonderful program, but it requires a “tuition” fee of several hundred dollars as well. How do we make quality Christian formation and theological education accessible to every member of the church?
But let’s get back to Isaiah. What does all this high-falutin’ talk about seminary education have to do with Isaiah’s message of bringing justice to the poor? Wouldn’t our money be better spent helping a homeless person get an apartment than supporting some already-privileged person to go off and sit in the luxury of a university setting for three years getting a graduate-level degree?
Maybe it doesn’t have to be an “either/or” scenario. The best of our seminaries are about training people how to respond to Isaiah’s call for justice for the poor. I’m currently taking a class at Sewanee that involves traveling to Chattanooga once a week to visit various urban ministries and outreach programs and to learn very practical lessons about effective ways to organize people in responding to God’s call for justice for the poor. Supporting theological education is supporting the poor, in that it provides educated and adept clergy who will be able to answer that call to justice and motivate others to do the same.
And if it didn’t cost anything to go to seminary, maybe some of those “homeless poor” who feel a call to ministry could be my classmates.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
"I have called you friends."
From the Wednesday morning Eucharist today, the Feast Day of St. Matthias:
"[Jesus said,] ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name." (John 15:12-16)
"[Jesus said,] ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name." (John 15:12-16)
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Biblical ethics?
It seems that my Basic Christian Ethics class will be giving me the most food for thought this semester. This week, in the first part of a section on "The Bible and Christian Ethics," we considered the role of the Old Testament in Christian Ethics. As part of our reading for Monday's class, we were assigned the following passages of Old Testament texts for reading:
Exodus 20-23 (The Ten Commandments and other laws)
Leviticus 20:6-26 (the "purity laws," including the infamous anti-homosexuality passage)
Deuteronomy 5:1-21 (The Ten Commandments again)
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (Israel's instruction to teach the law to their children)
Deuteronomy 10:12-13 (Summary of the law: What does the Lord require of you? To love and serve him.)
Deuteronomy 13:6-11 (Commandment to kill your children if they lead you astray from the worship of the one God.)
Deuteronomy 20:10-20 (Guidelines for war against other nations, including an injunction to kill all the people in the towns they conquer, but not to kill any trees!)
Deuteronomy 22:13-30 (Laws about sexuality, particularly about the importance of women being virgins when they are married -- the penalty is death if they are not.)
Isaiah 1 (The prophet denouncing the empty ritual of the temples as having no meaning because the people have turned away from God.)
Amos 5:18-24 (More condemnation of empty ritual - "I despite your festivals; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies")
Micah 6:6-8 ("What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.")
Among these passages, we find some real gems of "biblical ethics" -- for instance, in the passage from Exodus, we are told that killing another person is grounds for the death penalty. But killing a slave is grounds only for punishment, not death for the slave-owner, and only if the slave dies immediately. If the slave survives for a few days after being beaten and THEN dies, "there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner's property." (Exodus 20:21) How are we to apply THIS Scripture in today's world?
Or what about Deuteronomy 13:6-11, which instructs parents that they should kill their children if they worship any gods other than the God of Israel? So should modern-day Christian parents kill their children if they decide to convert to Hinduism or Islam?
At the same time, however, within this collection of sometimes horrific laws, there are also laws that I consider morally commendable, such as the prohibitions against lending money at interest (Exodus 22:25-27), and against oppression of "resident aliens" (Hebrew: gur, meaning one who is unable to be at home due to war or famine -- a modern-day equivalent would be refugees or undocumented immigrants, according to our Old Testament professor Becky Wright), since the Israelites were themselves once aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).
So what to do with these texts? How do we construct a consistent biblical ethic based on Scripture? Do we simply "pick and choose," throwing out the passages about killing one's children and keeping the passages about not oppressing refugees? What does it mean to say that this text is the "Word of God"?
Many of my classmates did not seem troubled by the difficult passages in the Old Testament, making comments about taking into account the time and context in which the Old Testament was written, and using analogies of human development to say that the earliest Old Testament laws were given to the people of Israel in an early state of development morally and that today we have progressed to a higher state of moral being in which we are able to understand and interpret more nuance than people were then.
But these arguments seemed hollow to me. For one thing, the idea that humanity has progressed over linear time (often associated with "modernist" thinking) was somewhat disproved by the atrocities of the 20th century, including two World Wars and the Holocaust. And it seems inconsistent to me to on the one hand talk passionately about how we should take more seriously some of the Old Testament teachings on economics (the idea of a Jubilee Year where all debts are forgiven, the practice of keeping the edges of the fields un-plowed and left for the poor to eat) while at the same time arguing that we should not pay attention to those parts of the Old Testament that seem offensive to us today.
For one thing, not everyone is agreed about which parts of the Old Testament are offensive. I find the so-called prohibitions against homosexual behavior to be offensive, but many Christians do not. The Evangelical churches I was a part of in college would criticize this kind of approach to the Bible for using "man's judgment" to evaluate the worth of "God's Word." Who are we to question God's Word, they would ask? And in some ways, I am still asking this question.
I suppose I am looking for a consistent way to read the Scriptures, and I want to be up front and honest about what standard I am using to evaluate them. If I want to say that certain passages are not in keeping with what I know about God and God's will -- well, where did I get my ideas about what God and God's will are like? I suppose I got my ideas about God from reading other passages of Scripture (like Micah 6:6-8 and many of the Gospel texts), but other parts of it come from my own inner sense of right and wrong, of what is good and just.
I guess I can be thankful that I am a part of the Episcopal Church, which approaches faith through the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, tradition, and reason -- not the "sola scriptura" (or "Scripture alone") of Martin Luther and the later Reformist (Protestant) churches. That at least gives me grounds to bring my own reasoning (in the context of the wider Church community) to bear on the Scriptures, rather than feeling obligated to take them all literally, at face value, and try to follow every law and regulation within them.
Exodus 20-23 (The Ten Commandments and other laws)
Leviticus 20:6-26 (the "purity laws," including the infamous anti-homosexuality passage)
Deuteronomy 5:1-21 (The Ten Commandments again)
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (Israel's instruction to teach the law to their children)
Deuteronomy 10:12-13 (Summary of the law: What does the Lord require of you? To love and serve him.)
Deuteronomy 13:6-11 (Commandment to kill your children if they lead you astray from the worship of the one God.)
Deuteronomy 20:10-20 (Guidelines for war against other nations, including an injunction to kill all the people in the towns they conquer, but not to kill any trees!)
Deuteronomy 22:13-30 (Laws about sexuality, particularly about the importance of women being virgins when they are married -- the penalty is death if they are not.)
Isaiah 1 (The prophet denouncing the empty ritual of the temples as having no meaning because the people have turned away from God.)
Amos 5:18-24 (More condemnation of empty ritual - "I despite your festivals; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies")
Micah 6:6-8 ("What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.")
Among these passages, we find some real gems of "biblical ethics" -- for instance, in the passage from Exodus, we are told that killing another person is grounds for the death penalty. But killing a slave is grounds only for punishment, not death for the slave-owner, and only if the slave dies immediately. If the slave survives for a few days after being beaten and THEN dies, "there is no punishment, for the slave is the owner's property." (Exodus 20:21) How are we to apply THIS Scripture in today's world?
Or what about Deuteronomy 13:6-11, which instructs parents that they should kill their children if they worship any gods other than the God of Israel? So should modern-day Christian parents kill their children if they decide to convert to Hinduism or Islam?
At the same time, however, within this collection of sometimes horrific laws, there are also laws that I consider morally commendable, such as the prohibitions against lending money at interest (Exodus 22:25-27), and against oppression of "resident aliens" (Hebrew: gur, meaning one who is unable to be at home due to war or famine -- a modern-day equivalent would be refugees or undocumented immigrants, according to our Old Testament professor Becky Wright), since the Israelites were themselves once aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:21).
So what to do with these texts? How do we construct a consistent biblical ethic based on Scripture? Do we simply "pick and choose," throwing out the passages about killing one's children and keeping the passages about not oppressing refugees? What does it mean to say that this text is the "Word of God"?
Many of my classmates did not seem troubled by the difficult passages in the Old Testament, making comments about taking into account the time and context in which the Old Testament was written, and using analogies of human development to say that the earliest Old Testament laws were given to the people of Israel in an early state of development morally and that today we have progressed to a higher state of moral being in which we are able to understand and interpret more nuance than people were then.
But these arguments seemed hollow to me. For one thing, the idea that humanity has progressed over linear time (often associated with "modernist" thinking) was somewhat disproved by the atrocities of the 20th century, including two World Wars and the Holocaust. And it seems inconsistent to me to on the one hand talk passionately about how we should take more seriously some of the Old Testament teachings on economics (the idea of a Jubilee Year where all debts are forgiven, the practice of keeping the edges of the fields un-plowed and left for the poor to eat) while at the same time arguing that we should not pay attention to those parts of the Old Testament that seem offensive to us today.
For one thing, not everyone is agreed about which parts of the Old Testament are offensive. I find the so-called prohibitions against homosexual behavior to be offensive, but many Christians do not. The Evangelical churches I was a part of in college would criticize this kind of approach to the Bible for using "man's judgment" to evaluate the worth of "God's Word." Who are we to question God's Word, they would ask? And in some ways, I am still asking this question.
I suppose I am looking for a consistent way to read the Scriptures, and I want to be up front and honest about what standard I am using to evaluate them. If I want to say that certain passages are not in keeping with what I know about God and God's will -- well, where did I get my ideas about what God and God's will are like? I suppose I got my ideas about God from reading other passages of Scripture (like Micah 6:6-8 and many of the Gospel texts), but other parts of it come from my own inner sense of right and wrong, of what is good and just.
I guess I can be thankful that I am a part of the Episcopal Church, which approaches faith through the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, tradition, and reason -- not the "sola scriptura" (or "Scripture alone") of Martin Luther and the later Reformist (Protestant) churches. That at least gives me grounds to bring my own reasoning (in the context of the wider Church community) to bear on the Scriptures, rather than feeling obligated to take them all literally, at face value, and try to follow every law and regulation within them.
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