Not burdensome?

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love,” Jesus said. Some of you may think, “Isn’t it ironic? Here we are on Mother’s Day, and what do we get to hear? Just more proof how deeply embedded patriarchal language and thought worlds are in both scripture and church traditions.” Others among you may say to yourselves, “Don’t fret about it; it’s not like Mother’s Day is a great bastion against patriarchy, is it? Just get on with it.” And again others among you may have noticed that the second reading does indeed relate rather nicely images of motherhood to theological reflection: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,” we heard just a moment ago.

Born of God – that lovely phrase invites associations having to do with pregnancy and labor and the joy of welcoming new life. Our English translation continues by stating that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child,” but the original is a bit more specific: Everyone who loves the one who gave birth also loves the one who has been born.

The associations invited here are not just of the one who gave us birth or who cared for us with motherly affection — what comes into view here are familial bonds that go beyond “me and mom” to include all my siblings; and if you don’t know it from life, you’ll know it from literature and film that life with siblings is far from uncomplicated.

On Mother’s Day we tell our mom in special ways that we love her. Perhaps you sent her a card or drew her a picture; or you found beautiful flowers for her; or you’ll give her a call; or you insisted that she stay in bed until you bring her your best breakfast; perhaps you take her out for lunch. Mother’s Day is all about mom, except that it’s also about us, or, more precisely, about me, because I want her to love my picture better than my brother’s, and I want her to know that I made the near-perfect scrambled eggs while it was my clumsy little sister who burned the toast and spilled the coffee. And Mom? “I LOVE these eggs,” she says with a big, warm smile and I grow an inch and a half—but then she continues, “and this is the BEST toast I ever tasted. And the pictures you drew, I must say, you’ve outdone yourselves. Thank you so much! You are the kindest, most thoughtful and generous children any mother could wish for.”

I don’t know about you, but for many years I found being my mom’s child much easier than being the brother of my siblings, and I guess the same was true for them. Love and rivalry make an explosive mix, and I imagine that many a mother had to step between her feuding children, telling them to stop it and be more loving with each other. “Why should I love him? He hates me!” they both protest, and she doesn’t say, “Because I say so.” She says, “Because I love him and I love you.” You gotta love your siblings, because she who gave birth to them and to you loves them as much as you.

The author of 1 John uses this familial language to underline the indissolubable connection between our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. Our shared faith in Jesus is a shared birth that makes of believers one family—siblings, all of us. In this family, there are no grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins—we’re all first-generation children, born of God through faith, and given to each other as siblings through the love of Christ our mother and brother.

In 1966, Peter Scholtes wrote a simple little song, We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. They’ll know we are Christians by our love, was the refrain. Scholtes was a priest at St. Brendan’s, on Chicago’s south side, and the parish was about half Irish-Catholic and half Black-Catholic. It was the height of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, and Scholtes was moved by the testimony of Dr. King, Jesse Jackson, and others in the civil rights movement. He was also steeped in the worldview and language of John. “Children, let us love,” we read there, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”[1] And so Scholtes taught the youth choir at St. Brendan’s to sing of walking hand in hand and working side by side, returning again and again to the refrain, They’ll know we are Christians by our love. We are one, he taught them to sing, and our faith, our walk, our work, our lives are testimony to our hope that all unity will one day be restored.

When Dr. King came to Chicago on his first trip north, Scholtes and a fellow priest hung a welcome sign outside the church, and he weathered the protest of white parishioners that ensued. He invited Dr. King to come to St. Brendan’s for a cup of coffee and to meet the church members who made God’s love tangible in the neighborhood with a food pantry and a clothing closet and financial assistance. And Father Scholtes watched in disappointment as over the years, white congregants continued to move out of the neighborhood.[2] The vision of unity restored—visibly, tangibly—would have to wait. But the song continued, and the witness and work continued, in Chicago and in tens of thousands of places around the world, to this day.

Father Scholtes’s song is quite orderly and structured, compared to the dizzying speech of 1 John. In 1 John, notions of belief, kinship, love, obedience and victory are chasing after each other in a continuous loop, phrase after phrase in a mesmerizing whirl of words; rather than read them analytically, it may be more appropriate to hear them like a song, like music that reveals through rhythm and repetition how all the elements encircle a gravitational center that holds them all in orbit. The swirling movement in 1 John is centered in a life, a name and a testimony: Jesus Christ. Again and again we hear echoes of his words, “Abide in my love.” The love of God poured out in the gifts of creation is our dwelling place, our habitat, our home. Likewise, we become God’s dwelling place when we allow love’s flow to continue through us. Obeying Christ’s commandments we abide in love and love abides in us, and his commandments—you heard that quick detail amid the waves of words, didn’t you? — his commandments are not burdensome.

Not burdensome? Perhaps you hear echoes of Jesus’ teaching, criticizing leaders who tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others.[3] Perhaps you recall his words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[4] Light? Not burdensome? Just think about your siblings. Doesn’t he know what it’s like to live with a sister who occupies the bathroom for an hour every. single. morning? Doesn’t he know how burdensome it is to live with a brother who not only eats the last two pop tarts, but then puts the wrapper back in the box and the box back in the cabinet as though nothing had happened? Putting up with each other’s foibles day in and day out as siblings in the family of God is no walk in the park—and it doesn’t matter much if they are siblings living under the same roof with us or if neighbors choosing to move out of the neighborhood. Putting up with each other, holding on to each other, not giving up on each other is indeed a burden—and Jesus knows that, knows that better than any of us.

What I believe he wants us to understand is that love—demanding as it is—is of all burdens the lightest. Indifference is heavy. Self-absorption is heavy. Hatred certainly is heavy — any form of lovelessness is always the heavier burden. Love is of all burdens the lightest. “All you need is love” the Beatles sang in the 60s, and there’s a lot of truth to that. “This is my commandment that you love one another,” said Jesus; but not just any definition of love will do. Love demands explication, and so Jesus said: love one another as I have loved you. The criterium is not some fuzzy feeling, but Christ himself. Such love is primarily interested in the good of the other person, rather than one’s own. Such love does not attempt to possess, manipulate, or dominate the other. And far from a mere feeling of euphoria, such love is a disciplined habit of care and concern, a habit is shaped over a lifetime of friendship with Jesus. His commandment is not burdensome, because love drives out fear; love conquers estrangement; conquers jealousy and mistrust; heals what is broken within and between us—for whatever is born of God conquers the world.

We are facing profound estrangement and mistrust in this country and in the world, deep divisions. Many of you feel discouraged, because we can’t seem to see a path forward, out of the conundrum we have created for ourselves. Some things are changing at a breath-taking pace, and we have a hard time keeping up. Other things are changing much too slowly, and we become anxious. Through the gospel, God calls us to the long, slow work of love. It’s never too soon, and never too late. It is our testimony to the hope that all unity will one day be restored.

[1] 1 John 3:18

[2] With thanks to Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 2, 490-94.

[3] Matthew 23:4

[4] Matthew 11:28-30

Shepherd-folk

I don’t know much about sheep. I have some faint memories of sheep grazing in fields around the small town where we lived till I was five, and there was an airstrip at a military base nearby where they kept a herd during the summer to cut the grass. I read about sheep in commercials for merino wool and pecorino cheese, but that’s about it. Besides that, sheep show up in some movies — Babe comes to mind, and Brokeback Mountain — and, of course, in the Bible. When the Lord talks about sheep, hearing his words in Elizabethan English seems quite appropriate, given the inherent quaintness of the imagery:

Jesus said unto them, What man shall there be of you, that shall have one sheep, and if this fall into a ditch on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?[1]

Many of you will have watched recently the 30-second video of the boy who, with great care and effort, manages to pull a sheep out of a narrow ditch by its hind leg. The sheep takes off, with high leaps that suggest pure, ovine happiness—and plunges right back into the ditch, headfirst.[2] There aren’t many stories in the tradition about the wisdom of sheep. Andre Dubus remembers the first year he and his family lived in a very hold house in southern New Hampshire.

The landlord wanted someone to live in it while he was working out of state, the rent was a hundred dollars a month, the house was furnished, had seven fireplaces (two of them worked), and in the backyard was a swimming pool. There were seventy acres of land, most of it wooded except for a long meadow, hilly enough for sledding. There were also three dogs, eight sheep, and a bed of roses. … The landlady wanted the roses there when she came home after the year, and the landlord wanted the sheep. They were eight large ewes, and he bred them. They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow.

“All we had to do about them,” writes Dubus, “was make sure they didn’t get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture.” Catch them and put them back, he makes it sound quite doable, doesn’t he?

The sheep did not want to leave their pasture, at least not for long and not to go very far. One would find a hole in the fence, slip out, then circle the pasture, trying to get back in. The others watched her. Someone in our family would shout the alarm, and we’d all go outside to chase her. At first we tried herding the ewe back toward the hole in the fence, standing in the path of this bolting creature, trying to angle her back, as we closed the circle the six of us made, closed it tighter and tighter until she was backed against the fence, and the hole she was trying to find. But she never went back through the hole, never saw it, and all our talking and pointing did no good. Finally we gave up, simply chased her over the lawn, around the swimming pool, under trees and through underbrush until one of us got close enough, dived, and tackled. Then three of us would lift her and drop her over the fence, and we’d get some wire and repair the hole.

Dubus hadn’t had much experience with sheep until then, outside of movies and church, that is. “When I was a boy,” he writes,

sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero’s cattle; or the villain’s ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero’s struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw Christ’s analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.[3]

Plunge right back into the ditch, headfirst.

In the Bible, shepherding is a metaphor for good governance, for attentive leadership that seeks to serve the flourishing of life in community. Psalm 78 proclaims the hopeful dimension of this vision,

The Lord chose his servant David,
and took him from the sheepfolds;
from tending the nursing ewes God brought him
to be the shepherd of God’s people …
With upright heart he tended them,
and guided them with skillful hand.[4]

Prophets like Ezekiel provide a much different, much more sober perspective of Israel’s shepherds: they feed themselves, not the sheep; they don’t strengthen the weak; they don’t heal the sick; they don’t bind up the injured; they don’t bring back the strayed; they don’t seek the lost; they rule with force and harshness; and so they scatter the sheep.[5]

When Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd,” he announces that he has come to seek the lost and bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, so that all would live in safety, and no one would make them afraid.[6] This shepherd doesn’t run when the wolf comes, far from it — he lays down his life for the sheep and takes it up again, so they may have life, and have it abundantly. He subverts royal visions of absolute power. The good shepherd lays down his life. Five times this phrase is repeated in the short passage from John, emphasizing a sovereignty that is entirely defined by love, love for God and love for us. This shepherd has but one goal: to gather us into a community of deep friendship with God and with each other.

‘One flock, one shepherd’ is the name of that vision in John. We don’t see much of that unity; we see multiple flocks of all shapes and sizes, mostly made up of sheep that look alike, bleat alike, and smell alike. But the good shepherd keeps reminding us, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold”—and while we may all think that the envisioned unity will come when finally all of them will have become more like us, Jesus’ mission is all manner of ‘we’ and ‘they’ becoming a new kind of ‘we’ by growing in likeness with him.

Some of us think that being scattered isn’t so bad. We’re quite comfortable in our respective little flocks, and when the comfort level isn’t to our liking anymore, we move on—there’s something for everyone! Some of us have convinced ourselves that the ideal herd size is actually the flock of one: I come to the garden alone, and that’s how I like it. Just me and the Lord; and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own—forget about the others. Others just make community so complicated.

The wolf, as you can imagine, is very pleased. The wolf loves to tell the lambs not to give in to “herd mentality” and to “forge their own path.” The wolf, of course, is mostly interested in a steady and convenient supply of lamb chops.

And the good shepherd? At the end of the Gospel according to John, Jesus says to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”

He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”

He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”[7]

This suggests that at the end of the story we sheep-folk are to become shepherd apprentices, loving Jesus, listening to the voice of Jesus, and caring for each other. James Rebanks comes from a long line of shepherds and he wrote about the trials and the beauty of the shepherd’s life.[8]

You need to be tough as old boots. ... The romance wears off after a few weeks, believe me, and you will be left standing cold and lonely on a mountain. It is all about endurance. Digging in. Holding on. … You’ll need the patience of a saint, too, because sheep test you to the limit, with a million innovative ways to escape, ail or die.

Who knows how many sheep he’s pulled out of the ditch, only to watch them leap off and plunge right back in, headfirst. He writes,

The apprenticeship period for a shepherd is … about 40 years. You are just a “boy” or a “lass” until you are about 60: it takes that long to really know a mountain, the vagaries of its weather and grazing, to know the different sheep, marks, shepherds, bloodlines, and to earn the respect of other shepherds. This isn’t just fell walking behind sheep with a dog friend – it requires a body of knowledge and skills that shepherds devote decades to learning.[9]

In other words, this apprenticeship is a lifelong project; which sound about right. Walking with Jesus, listening to his voice, growing in mutual love and knowledge, we sheep-folk become for each other what he is to us — we become shepherd-folk, committed to life’s flourishing.

[1] Mt 12:11

[2] https://youtu.be/f97zwQS6I4o

[3] Andre Dubus, “Out like a lamb,” in: Broken Vessels: Essays by Andre Dubus (1991)

[4] Ps 78:70-72

[5] See Ezekiel 34:2-6

[6] Ez 34:16, 28

[7] John 21:15-17

[8] James Rebanks, The Shepherds Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015)

[9] James Rebanks https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/agriculture/farming/11569612/Are-you-hard-enough-to-survive-as-a-shepherd.html

Creative maladjustment

When I read that there had been 45 mass shootings this past month, I thought it was a typo. Maybe 45 this year, I tried to tell myself, just to keep the sorrow at bay.

So I looked it up. The number was correct. The number of mass shootings in the United States for the year, as of April 16, is 147. In Indianapolis alone, there have been three; one on January 24, one on March 13, and the most recent one, on April 15.[1]

The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. Five more were hospitalized with injuries.[2] The shooting at the FedEx facility was yet another one involving a large capacity, military style weapon, and the President called it a national embarrassment.

I don’t know, he may not be able to call it what it is, hoping to move at least some Republican Senators to support legislation banning the use of military style weapons and large capacity magazines outside of the military and law enforcement—legislation supported by a large majority of voters, including a majority of registered Republicans. Crumbling bridges and underfunded schools, that's what I’d call a national embarrassment. But America’s paralysis in the face of repeated attacks in which four or more people are killed, often randomly, reveals an obsession on the part of too many, that I can only call idolatry—a death cult where my right to carry any kind of firearm I wish ranks supremely above any concern for public safety and public health. I can only call it idolatry because it holds my right to practically unrestricted access to weapons more sacred than my neighbors’ lives.

“The whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” Paul wrote in Galatians 5:14, echoing the teaching of Jesus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The only love I can detect in the refusal to let the public draw certain boundaries around my right to arm myself, is an isolationist variant of self-love, the very opposite of the love of God in Jesus Christ. So I’m not trying to make a legal argument or a political argument; I’m speaking from a place of deep theological concern about self-absorption masquerading as passion for the constitution.

I’m concerned, I’m troubled, I’m sad and angry, but mostly I’m heartbroken; mostly I feel like my soul is being pummeled and bruised by the reports and the statistics— and they just keep coming, relentlessly. And, of course, it’s not just the mass shootings. Charles Blow wrote on Wednesday,

One of the first times I wrote about the police killing of an unarmed Black man was when Michael Brown was gunned down in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. Brown was a Black teenager accused of an infraction in a convenience store just before his life was taken. Last summer, six years on, I wrote about George Floyd, a large Black man accused of an infraction in a convenience store, this time in Minneapolis. Both men were killed in the street in broad daylight.

He points out that every year since 2015, “the police shot and killed roughly 1,000 people,” but “Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than white Americans, and … unarmed Black people account for about 40 percent of the unarmed Americans killed by the police, despite making up only about 13 percent of the American population.” And he continues,

Something is horrifyingly wrong. And yet, the killings keep happening. … Now there is another: Daunte Wright, shot and killed during the day in Brooklyn Center, Minn., not far from where Floyd was killed. There is video. … The aftermath of these killings has become a pattern, a ritual, that produces its own normalizing and desensitizing effects.

Now there is another —  four bare words that convey the normalization of the  horrifyingly wrong. “It becomes hard to write about this in a newspaper,” says Blow,

because it is no longer new. The news of these killings is not that they are interruptions of the norm, but a manifestation of the norm. There is no new angle. There is no new hot take. There is very little new to be revealed. These killings are not continuing to happen due to a lack of exposure, but in spite of it. Our systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism.[3]

Idolatry, the normalizing of he horrifyingly wrong, and systems adjusted to a banal barbarism – these are realities pushing hard against our hope.

In today’s Gospel reading, Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelieving and wondering to draw us into a moment when the newness of resurrection life breaks in. Jesus, we’re told, appeared among the disciples and ate with them, and he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. It was the interplay of Christ’s living presence and their immersion in the scriptures that allowed his followers to absorb the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude.

Harvey Cox used to teach a course called “Jesus and the Moral Life” to undergraduates at Harvard. Some of his students identified as Christian, and many did not, but the content of the course was so compelling that their numbers kept going up until Cox finally had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. Initially, he ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. He did so out of respect for his students who came from a variety of religious backgrounds, but, as he wrote later,

there was another reason why I had been trying to steer around the Easter story: Classrooms, at least the ones I teach in, are not viewed as the proper venue for testimonies. What is supposed to go on in classrooms is ‘explanation.’ But not only did I not know how to explain the Resurrection to the class, I was not even sure what ‘explaining’ it might mean.[4]

Eventually he realized, though, that by leaving out this part of the story he was not just being unfair to his students, he was “also being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” He decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that they would have to decide among them on their own. … [And so he] set out to move from silence into at least some kind of conversation.” And when he did, he had his mind opened by the witness of the prophets.

It … became evident that stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice. … They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.

Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, and the resurrection of Jesus was God’s affirmation and fulfillment of that hope. “To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality,” wrote Cox, “but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the violent system that executed him.”[5]

Idolatry pushes hard against our hope; the normalizing of the horrifyingly wrong pushes hard against our hope; systems adjusted to a banal barbarism push hard against our hope— but God raised Jesus from the dead; and immersed in the community of believers and the witness of the scriptures, we too are having our eyes opened to his living presence and our minds to the true magnitude of his life, the true magnitude of his teachings, and the true magnitude of his execution and resurrection.

Dr. King loved to talk about proper adjustment.

Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life. … But there are certain things in our nation and in the world [to] which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all [people] of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism [and the] self‐defeating effects of physical violence… In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment — men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”[6]

When our institutions have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism and the idolatry of isolationist self-love, the advancement of creative maladjustment is the faithful, the hopeful, and, yes, the loving, response. It is our insurrection against the reign of death, in the name of Jesus.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/mass-shootings-2021.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/16/us/indianapolis-fedex-shooting

[3] Charles Blow https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opinion/us-police-killings.html

[4] When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 273-274.

[5] Ibid., 274.

[6] Excerpt from a speech at Western Michigan University on Dec 18, 1963. Dr. King frequently repeated the theme of “creative maladjustment” in speeches and sermons.

Free and fearless confidence

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Luke, the author of Acts, invites us to dream very concrete dreams: Now that God has raised the Lord Jesus from the dead – who shall we be and what shall we do?

We heard from Mark last Sunday, the Sunday of Sundays, how Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The news was overwhelming. To them, the question, “Who then shall we be now that Jesus is risen from the dead?” was not one that opened them to possibility, at least not at once—it was all too much, and so they ran, trembling with amazement.

We know they did not remain silent. We know they found their voices: They spoke, they declared and proclaimed what God had done. We know they found themselves immersed in a world that was at once familiar and completely changed—the resurrection was to them no longer merely something that happened to the body of Jesus, but rather a reality that also raised them up, that inspired and emboldened them—it was a new life, a new world, a new creation. What are the possibilities, we wonder with them, and Luke invites us to dream very concrete dreams.

With confident strokes he portrays the earliest Jerusalem church. He shows us a community united in purpose, “of one heart and soul,” and bound together in mutual belonging. “Imagine this!” he declares, “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. And imagine this: There was not a needy person among them.”

In the Gospel, Luke was careful to record Jesus’ teachings about the dangers and the proper use of wealth. “Take care!” Jesus declared. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And then he told us the parable of the rich man whose land produced abundantly; who thought he was wise in planning to build bigger barns to store the bumper crop—but God called him a fool. “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God,” Jesus said at the end of the story.[1] Luke also made sure we hear about the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man at the rich man’s door,[2] and how Jesus continued to stir the pot by teaching about treasure in heaven and saying, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”[3] Thankfully, Luke also told us about Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the tax collector who was very rich, and how this encounter led Zac the crook to give half of his considerable possessions to the poor and make fourfold restitution to anyone he had defrauded.[4]

And today Luke invites us to dream very concrete dreams: the brief reading from Acts shows us a community where Jesus’ teachings, his utter lack of selfishness, and his compassionate concern for the wellbeing and salvation of others was fully realized. And in this community being of one heart and soul didn’t mean that they all sang from the same hymnal, but “there was not a needy person among them.” Not one who didn’t eat so the kids would have a little more. Not one who cut their pills in half so the prescription would last longer. Not one who rolled out their blanket on a piece of cardboard under the overpass because they couldn’t keep a job.

Yet Luke didn’t paint policy solutions to economic challenges. Luke’s Easter postcard shows us a community where the life of Jesus found embodiment, and “there was not a needy person among them.” The picture is not a blueprint or an instruction manual for Christian community—although it has inspired movements from the monastic orders to the Shakers and the Catholic Worker houses—but it does show how profoundly our life together can be transformed in the Spirit of Jesus, when we are bold, not only in proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus, but in living it.

Earlier in chapter 4 of Acts, Luke tells us about Peter and John who were speaking to the people when several temple leaders confronted them. They were furious that the apostles were teaching the people and announcing that the resurrection of the dead was happening because of Jesus. So they seized Peter and John and put them in prison. The next day they had Peter and John brought before them and asked, “By what power or in what name did you do this?” Then Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, testified, and the council was caught by surprise by the confidence with which Peter and John spoke. After all, they understood that these apostles were uneducated and inexperienced. They ordered them to wait outside, and began to confer with each other. “What should we do with these men?” When they called Peter and John back, they demanded that they stop all speaking and teaching in the name of Jesus. Peter and John responded, “It’s up to you to determine whether it’s right before God to obey you rather than God. As for us, we can’t stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

Three times in this chapter, Luke mentions the apostles’ boldness, their free and fearless confidence, their cheerful courage in speaking and teaching in the name of Jesus.[5] And Luke wants us to see the same boldness, the same free and fearless confidence, the same cheerful courage in the lived proclamation of the community of believers, in the embodied witness of their generous solidarity: There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. In the name of Jesus, they broke down social barriers that distinguished between the worthy and the unworthy, the respectable and the unrespectable, the deserving and the undeserving. They subverted social hierarchies along with conventions of envy, avarice and accumulation—not to write the manual for Christian socialism, but to live boldly in the Spirit of the living Christ, in a community where belonging was not a question of income, social status, ethnic background, gender, or political affiliation. Everyone belongs because we’re each made in the image of God together. Everyone belongs because Jesus didn’t die for some, but for all. Everyone belongs because the Spirit of the living Christ is being poured out on all flesh.

Matt Skinner noted that “something greater than charity … is surging through this passage; believers are living out a commitment to belong to one another”[6]—a commitment to recognize, respect and treat one another as equally beloved children of God. And because money and possessions are commonly used to create distance and barriers between people, they become, in the commonality of resurrection life, tools to dismantle the distance and barriers between us,[7] be it through donations, restitutions, or reparations.

To give you an example, few of us believe that our system of taxation is just, and it will take a lot of time and attention from many to make it more equitable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t act in the spirit of equity and redistribution. For several years, some of you have made donations to the church from your tax refunds, and just recently, one of you signed over their entire stimulus check, knowing that we use it to help folks with low or no income to pay rent or their light bill, or to buy groceries. Those generous acts, regardless of donation amounts, won’t solve the many issues of poverty in our community, but they are concrete, tangible ways to live out our commitment to belong to one another. God has raised Jesus from the dead, vindicating his life of radical welcome, affirming his startling teachings, and empowering us to act with free and fearless confidence in including the excluded.

Many have asked over the years, “Did the church in Jerusalem really live like that?” Matt Skinner says, “It’s a fair question, for the stories display extraordinary self-giving and no other passages in Acts or the Epistles describe the same kind of communal dynamics.” But there can be no doubt that encountering the living Christ profoundly changed the lives of the earliest believers because they asked, “Who shall we be now that Jesus is risen?” There can be no doubt that they saw all things in new ways and that many of them walked away from lives governed by financial calculations and status-based privileges.[8] Justin Martyr (c. 100-160 C.E.), in the second century, just a few decades after Luke, wrote,

We who once took most pleasure in accumulating wealth and property now share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with [people] of different tribes because of their different customs now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them and pray for our enemies.

And more than two centuries later, the Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate, who vehemently opposed Christians and stripped them of their rights and privileges, acknowledged, “The godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours also. Those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”[9] I think the emperor said it well. There’s a table at the center of our life. A table where the living Christ is host. And at this table, there is no us and them. Everyone belongs.

[1] Luke 12:15-21

[2] Luke 16:19-31

[3] Luke 18:22-25

[4] Luke 19:1-10

[5] παρρησία Acts 4:13, 29, 31

[6] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-easter-2/commentary-on-acts-432-35-5

[7] See Willie James Jennings, Acts (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 50.

[8] See Skinner, note 6

[9] See Dan Clendenin https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20090413JJ.shtml

Courage to rise

Who will roll away the stone for us? The three women were on the way to the cemetery. They wanted to anoint the body of Jesus who had to be buried with haste late on Friday, since it was the day before the sabbath. Everything had to happen quickly, and it wasn’t the kind of burial they wanted him to have. Thankfully, Joseph of Arimathea had asked for the body and bought a linen cloth to wrap it in; and thankfully there was a tomb available, but it all felt rushed. The last thing the women remembered was that kind and generous man closing the tomb by rolling the heavy stone in front of the entrance. Now they were back; they had bought spices and oil. After all the violence and abuse Jesus had suffered, they wanted to touch his body one last time with care and gentleness. “Who will roll away the stone for us?” they wondered. If need be, they’d put their own hands and shoulders against it and push. They wouldn’t let that rock get between them and the body of Jesus.

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. Inside they encountered this angelic messenger who told them not to be alarmed and that Jesus wasn’t there; he had been raised, and he had better things to do than wait around at a tomb. “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Now we’ve heard our share of Easter stories, but this one is just so different. For just when we get to the moment when we would expect the women to dash out, carried on wings of joy, and run to proclaim the good news — the story, and with it the entire Gospel, ends rather oddly,

They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid …

Terror, amazement, fear, and silence—that’s hardly a shout of victory over death. Some would say, that’s no way to end a gospel. John does such a nice job with the woman in the garden and the breakfast on the beach, and Luke has the wonderful scene with the stranger on the road to Emmaus—what happened in Mark? Did the last page get lost? Or is the story meant to end this way?

Early Christian scribes who copied Mark’s Gospel weren’t sure either, and they tinkered with the ending. One added just a couple of sentences, indicating that the women did as they had been told.[1] Another scribe borrowed a few details from Matthew and Luke to compose a conclusion that would leave readers reassured that things were wrapped up nicely at the end of the story.[2] But what if this strange ending is exactly how Mark wants to tell this story? What if this gospel has this unfinished feel on purpose, and not because parts went missing? What if this gospel wants to leave us hanging in midsentence with a puzzled look on our faces?

They fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Now everyone has fled—no one in the story who has been with Jesus is willing to carry the message and continue the mission. Is there anyone else who might after all be a faithful disciple? The narrator has permitted us to be with Jesus the whole time. We heard the voice of God declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, when no one else heard it. We were present with Jesus in the wilderness, tested by Satan, when no one else was there. When his family rejected him, we witnessed the scene and we stuck with him. When religious leaders, crowds, and disciples misunderstood and abandoned Jesus, we stood by him. When the inner circle went to sleep in Gethsemane, we were awake and heard Jesus’ anguished prayer. When the disciples fled and were to be found nowhere near the cross, we were there. When Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we were there. And now we stand at the brink of this story in which all have failed, and the narrator leaves the hearers and readers, you and me, who may have thought the story was about somebody else, with a decision to make.[3] It’s like Mark is saying, “This is the story. You take if from here.”

Three times Jesus had told his followers about his death and resurrection, and he had told them — and we heard it! — “After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”[4] And this morning we heard the mysterious young man in the tomb say, “He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So the decision we have to make is, Will we trust the promise and go to Galilee? Will we follow Jesus on the way, living and proclaiming the good news of God’s reign? Not going is an option, as is silence. We can deny the whole thing, act as though it never happened, and continue to live in the Friday world where Jesus is in the tomb. Esau McCaulley wrote on Friday,

The women did not go to the tomb looking for hope. They were searching for a place to grieve. … We know what to do with grief and despair. We have a place for it. We have rituals that surround it. … For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive. … [And] God called these women to return to the same world that crucified Jesus with a very dangerous gift: hope in the power of God.[5]

The women fled from the tomb, trembling with amazement. If Jesus had been raised by a mighty act of God, and if by raising Jesus from the dead God had indeed changed everything – who would they be? How would they live in this new creation? Little wonder they were terrified. Jesus crucified, dead, and buried – the cruelty and injustice of it may break your heart, but it’s also what you’ve come to expect from the world. It’s a familiar plot, a sad confirmation of what you suspected all along. Real justice is hard to come by, and the systems rarely work in favor of the poor or the ones who tell truths the powerful would rather not hear or be heard on the streets. But Jesus raised from the dead, Jesus going ahead of his followers to Galilee, Jesus on the loose in the world, his kingdom mission continuing amid the world’s kingdoms and empires — that changes everything, because now not even death can keep our hope in the tomb.

The disciples who first followed Jesus were Peter, James, and John, and the three who stayed with him the longest, were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome — and all of them fled, overwhelmed by fear. But Jesus didn’t choose a new team. God raised Jesus from the dead, and God lifted up those frightened men and women to live as witnesses of the living Christ.

Mark doesn’t tell us that, but we wouldn’t be reading Mark if it hadn’t been so. And it continues to be so. Bill Sloan Coffin wrote in his little book, Credo, “Not only Peter but all the apostles after Jesus’ death were ten times the people they were before; that’s irrefutable.” And then he added a very personal note, saying, “I believe passionately in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because in my own life I have experienced Christ not as memory, but as presence.”[6] Not memory, but presence. I think I know what he means. Glimpses of the Risen One on the streets of Galilee and wherever the kingdom of God and its nearness is being proclaimed by his followers. Comforting presence when the human capacity for cruelty and foolishness threatens to overwhelm me. Challenging presence when I tell myself there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. Christ experienced not as memory, but as presence — in a friend, a stranger, in prayer, in sharing food. Jürgen Moltmann says,

The raising of Christ is proved by our courage to rise against death. That is not just a play on words. We show our hope for the life that defeats death in our protest against the manifold forms of death in the midst of life. It is only in the passion for life and our giving of ourselves for its liberation that we entrust ourselves utterly to the God who raises the dead.[7]

We show our hope by questioning why people go hungry and even starve when there’s plenty of food to go around. We raise our hands and voices when our legislators further criminalize sleeping in public spaces while doing nothing to assist the construction of homes that families can afford to rent or buy. We rise and sing the resurrection, we stand up, we speak up, we persist in the name of Jesus.

The first words in the gospel according to Mark are, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The written text is the beginning. The story we hear and read is the beginning. And it continues to unfold with us as participants who entrust ourselves to the God who raises the dead.

The last words from the lips of Jesus’ followers in the gospel of Mark are a question: Who will roll away the stone for us? This is the stone designed to keep Jesus safely entombed. It is the stone we perceive as separating us from the life and the love Jesus embodies. It is the stone too big for us. And Mark says, “Look again and see. The stone has already been rolled back.”

[1] Mk 16:8b “The Shorter Ending”

[2] Mk 16:9-20 “The Longer Ending”

[3] See Eugene Boring, Mark (Interpretation), 449.

[4] Mark 14:28

[5] Esau McCaulley, The Unsettling Power of Easter https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/opinion/easter-celebration.html

[6] William Sloan Coffin, Credo, 28; my emphases.

[7] Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 32.

Wondrous love

Paul gives the church a pattern of thinking and living that is shaped by the way of Jesus. “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ,” he tells his readers, “united in spirit and mind, side by side in the struggle to advance the gospel faith.”[1] He keeps writing about unity, describing it as being “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”[2]

I imagine there were already among Paul’s first audiences some who thought, “Oh, I’m all in favor of everybody being of the same mind, as long as we come to full accord around my mind. Behold how very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity—and I’m the one defining it!” I imagine Paul knew that many of us would take off in that familiar direction, and so he emphasized “having the same love.” Unity of mind leaves the door open for practices of domination and exclusion, where they belong to our unity only if they come around to thinking the way we think. Having the same love excludes any such domination, because in love the focus of attention is on the other—the child, the lover, the neighbor, the stranger. The focus is on them and their need, their perspective, their hope.

And so Paul urges his readers to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit” and “in humility [to] regard others as better than yourselves. Look to each other’s interests and not merely your own.”[3] Such words were foreign and rare in a city like Philippi. The citizens of Philippi cherished their connections to the imperial household and their privileges as friends of Caesar. Roman culture valued force, competition, and honor-seeking. Humility was not considered a virtue. Roman society, much like ours, was built on the pursuit of status. You move up, and you cultivate networks of people who can help you move up even higher. The only reason for you to look around is to check out the competition with a quick glance over your shoulder. But you press on, your eyes on the next rung of the ladder, leaving behind those who cannot keep up.

Jesus’ movement is in the opposite direction —What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss to lay aside his crown… According to Paul’s hymnic declarations, Jesus enjoyed the highest status imaginable: equality with God. But his life showed that he did not regard his status as something to be held onto at all costs and used to his own advantage. Jesus emptied himself. To me, the language of emptying suggests a fullness being poured out, not in a single act, followed by other acts, but continually, in one lifelong, unceasing motion.

Jesus humbled himself. He became a human being—and not a man of high status, but a slave serving others. Holly Hearon observed, that

the primary contrast lies here, between the form of God and the form of a slave. In terms of the social hierarchy of the ancient world (much alive in the world today), the contrast could not be more extreme. God is the one who reigns above all other rulers, before whom every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth bends ... In between God and slaves are many social strata, each one serving those above while also being served by those below. A slave, however, only serves.[4]

A slave only serves. The point of Paul’s poetry, though, is not the glorification of self-degradation or the affirmation of societal power arrangements—Paul’s point is that our salvation comes by way of love’s unstoppable invasion of sin’s reign. Jesus came down, all the way down, nothing but the will of God on his mind, loving us with complete compassion and with a vulnerability for which we have no words. We call this week ‘holy’ because Jesus’ life on earth, and particularly his final days, reveal to us the heart of reality, and it’s not relentless competition in the pursuit of power and status. It is this other-centered love in the pursuit of true community. Jesus came down, all the way down, for our sake.

On the cross, his career in reverse reached its end and he died the most cruel and degrading death, reserved for slaves and insurrectionists against Roman rule. In the passion narratives of the Gospels, the emphasis is on how Christ is humiliated — spat upon, tortured, mocked, and crucified. In Paul’s poem, no one does this to Christ. Christ chooses. Christ humbles himself. Christ acts. And in emptying himself of his status, he does not give up his self—no, he gives full expression to his self in his relationship with God and with us.[5] He reveals who he is and who we are.

Who we are is part of the truth we must face when we look to the cross. This is what we are capable of doing to each other in the name of religion, in the name of justice, or in the name of political calculus. This is our doing—not theirs, not the Romans’ or the Jews’. This is the dark Friday truth.

The hopeful side of it is that it’s not all our doing. Jesus acts, and he reveals who he is and who God is. God is the one who highly exalted Jesus: who raised him from the dead, and gave him—the abused, tortured, mocked, and crucified slave—the name that is above every name, so that now at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

We call this week holy, because the story of Jesus reveals who God is, and not despite the cross, but because of it. We look to the cross and we see love that goes all the way for the life of the world, for our liberation from the power of sin, and for a future not bound by the past.

Amid the polarization and division in this country, we struggle to see a way forward toward unity of vision and purpose. Paul urges the church, polarized and divided as we are, to cultivate patterns of thinking and living that are shaped by the way of Jesus. That may not sound radical, but it’s the most radical thing I’ve ever heard.

[1] See Phil 1:27-30 (NRSV and REB)

[2] Phil 2:2

[3] See Phil 2:3-4 (NRSV and REB)

[4] Holly Hearon https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sunday-of-the-passion-palm-sunday-3/commentary-on-philippians-25-11-14

[5] See Hearon, reference above.

New heart

The psalm for this day, Psalm 51, calls for a story. The scribes who assembled the poetry, prayers and songs that grew into the collection we know as the book of Psalms, added a brief introductory note to this one, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

That is quite a story—about power, desire, and deception. It begins in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle – but that year king David sent his generals out and he himself stayed in Jerusalem.

Late one afternoon, he rose from his couch and, walking about on the roof terrace, he saw a woman bathing, a very beautiful woman. He sent one of his aides to find out who she was, learned that her husband was out with the army, and sent for her.

She came over, and perhaps they had a couple of drinks; the record doesn’t go into details. They made love, and perhaps that’s not the right choice of words, assuming that Bathsheba likely had little say in the matter. She went home, and a few weeks later, there was a message for the king. I imagine it was a handwritten note David himself opened and read. It was brief and to the point: “I’m pregnant. Bathsheba.”

Right away the king concocted a plan to hide the consequences of his adulterous affair. He called Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah back from the front lines. Scheming to make him think the child was his own, he told him, “Go home, take a break, spend some time with your beautiful wife.” But Uriah refused; he told his king that he couldn’t indulge himself while his men were in battle. The king resorted to making him drunk, yet Uriah, ever the good soldier, still resisted the comfort of his wife’s bed; he spent the night camping out with the other officers.

Now David stepped even deeper into the morass he himself had created. He gave secret orders that Uriah be put in the front lines where the fighting was fiercest, and to make sure he died there for king and country. And so it happened. Word came that Uriah had been killed in action.

On hearing the news of her husband’s death, Bathsheba lamented; the record doesn’t reveal if she was heartbroken or merely going through the motions. All we’re told is that, after the period of mourning was over, David sent for her and she became his wife.

End of story? Not quite. The prophet Nathan came to the palace, and he told the king of a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb and slaughtered it for dinner. David was furious, “That is an outrage! Not in my kingdom! The man who has done this deserves to die!” After that forceful royal declaration, Nathan didn’t have much to add. “You are the man,” he told the king.[1]

That was when the fog lifted, the fog of self-absorption, entitlement and abuse, and David finally saw what he had done. This psalm, the learned scribes wrote in the margins of their scrolls, this psalm is the sort of prayer that fits such a moment. A moment of sudden, painful clarity when you see yourself without the usual filters, when you see yourself as the person your actions betray you to be, rather than the person you imagine yourself to be, or the person you try to project to the public. The words of this psalm, the learned scribes suggest, are more appropriate for such a moment than the carefully composed apologetic press releases which kings, presidents, governors, and CEOs have their aides release after accusations can no longer simply be ignored or dismissed. Psalm 51 is an invitation to honest reflection, a “liturgy of the broken heart.”[2]

Just about every word from the vocabulary of human sinfulness is listed in the opening lines: my transgressions, my iniquity, my sin, the evil I have done in your sight – it’s like there aren’t enough words for the horror, the guilt, and the shame. We are listening to the voice of a grown up man who reflects on his capacity to do evil. The “I”, though, that speaks in this psalm is not only David, as the scribes suggest—“I” is every reader, every listener who recognizes their own self in these words, “I” is all of us, at the moment when the fog of illusion and denial lifts and we realize our capacity for being who we do not want to be and doing what we do not want to do.

However, this prayer doesn’t invite us to wallow in guilt or fall into despair; it encourages us to see ourselves in the light of God who heals what is broken between us and within us. Before the litany of sin that dominates the opening verses, the prayer appeals to the character of God who is merciful and whose steadfast love and tender compassion have been affirmed by generations of God’s people. The place to reflect on our sin, according to this psalm, is in the light of God’s grace. Much of what sin entails cannot be seen in the dim shadows of a guilty conscience or a disillusioned self-image, but only in the bright, unflattering light of grace.

Sin is not just a churchy word for not doing the right thing. Sin is a reality, a power. Sin is a fracture, a brokenness in our relationship with God, a brokenness that impacts how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. Sin distorts every aspect of our thinking, speaking, and doing, and sin reigns when we fail to know ourselves and one another as God’s own. It is like being completely out of tune in a creation that sings the glory of God.

Many prayers for help say, “Change my situation, so I may praise you.” But this Psalm teaches us to say, “Change me.” We know how to ask for a clean slate, for a new beginning, a second chance, or a third. This Psalm, though, rises from a place of deeper insight. Sin is not an occasional misstep, something we do or fail to do now and then; it’s bigger than that. It’s a reality that pervades our lives and distorts our entire being.

A young man goes and buys himself a gun, murder in his heart. He drives to three buildings and kills eight human beings. He holds female bodies responsible for his own thoughts and desires, and he eliminates the threat they pose in his mind, to his self-image, by murdering them. He is the one who pulled the trigger, who knows how many times, but the sin is not merely murder. He looked at other human beings and didn’t see fellow-creatures, made in the image of God, persons worthy of reverence and respect—he saw desirable and disposable objects. He had learned to see others that way, to think of them that way, and to treat them that way. Sin distorted his vision, his attitudes and thoughts, and, in the final consequence, his actions.

Perhaps the prosecution will ask for the death penalty, further continuing the myth of violence as a legitimate means in the pursuit of justice. And perhaps his conviction and execution will allow us to perpetuate the myth that he is, or rather, was, the problem, and that we don’t need to think or talk about the fact that it’s easier to buy a gun than a bottle of liquor, or the fact that so many mass shootings are committed by young, white men, or the fact that attacks against people of Asian descent, and particularly women, have increased dramatically over the past year.

Psalm 51 comes from a place where the fog lifts, and suddenly we see that we are not who we imagined ourselves to be. And it teaches us to pray, Wash me in your mercy. Bathe me in your healing grace. A clean slate will not do. Create in me a clean heart.

In this prayer, and in Scripture in general, heart does not refer merely to the organ that pumps blood through the body, supplying every cell with the oxygen and the nutrients it needs to thrive. “The ancient Israelites understood the heart as a faculty. They knew the heart as the seat of will, invention, reasoning, discernment, and judgment.”[3] They knew the heart as a hub where our sensibility and imagination, our mind and will come together to shape our perception and give direction to our actions. And the witness of Scripture is very consistent in pointing out that we have a heart problem.

We have hearts that gravitate toward pride and fear and idolatry. Jeremiah speaks of sin as “written with an iron pen” and “engraved on the tablet” of our hearts.[4] But Jeremiah also speaks of a renewed covenant, “when God will write God’s law upon the hearts of the people, [and] their hearts will embody and empower the true relationship they share with God and one another.”[5] Yes, human sinfulness is powerful, pervasive, and persistent, but God’s faithfulness is more encompassing than the reality of sin. And not only more encompassing, but also more powerful.

As we learn to pray with Psalm 51, we begin to envision ourselves and our communities no longer entangled in the cursed consequences of our sinfulness, but knit together by the creative possibilities of God. We begin to see beyond the habits and stereotypes that distort our perception, our imagination, and our actions.

The learned scribes of the past determined that this Psalm called for a story, and they drew the connections to David and Nathan, Bathsheba and Uriah. They encourage us to draw the connections to our own stories and to ask God to renew us, inside out. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. A spirit of honesty to sustain our efforts to reestablish truth and trust in our communities. A spirit of hope to strengthen our belief that change, though slow, painfully slow, is possible. A spirit of courage to surrender to God who makes all things new. This psalm calls for a people to pray it and live it, a people after God’s own heart. By the grace of God, may we belong to that people.

[1] 2 Samuel 11:1—12:7

[2] James L. Mays, Psalms, 202.

[3] Anathea Portier-Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/reformation-day/commentary-on-jeremiah-3131-34-11

[4] Jeremiah 17:1

[5] Portier-Young, see reference above.

Lifted up

Snakes get my attention. More than once have I been startled by that dark, wavy outline on the ground, on the edge of my field of vision, only to realize that it was a stick that scared me. Last week, Nancy and I went to see our newborn grandson Liam and his parents at their home, and I almost jumped off the front steps leading up to the door—there was a snake stretched across the handrail. Nancy just laughed—she already knew it was there, she had stopped by their house before, she knew it was a rubber reptile, and she let me know that its purpose was to keep birds from flying against the window by the door. We know how easily birds confuse the reflection of the sky on glass with the open sky itself. I noticed two more snakes, resting on top of the trimmed hedge like sunbathers, and I had visions of unsuspecting delivery people tossing boxes of pizza or diapers up in the air and running back to their vehicles, terrified.

My fear of snakes—or call it healthy respect—isn’t rooted in lived experience; I suspect it’s programmed into my DNA, a gift from ancient ancestors. Along with this fear, they have also passed on their fascination with serpents. The snake appears in the myths of peoples around the globe, and its image is among the oldest symbols humans have used. Our ancestors have been particularly intrigued by the snake’s ability to shed its skin, to quite literally slip out of it like some worn-out piece of clothing, and they associated powerful ideas like renewal and rebirth with it.

In Scripture, the serpent has a prominent role in the story of the garden of Eden, and a less prominent one in Exodus. There we read how God called Moses to go back to Egypt, and to tell God’s people that God had observed their misery, and knew their sufferings, and would deliver them from the Egyptians, and bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

In the course of the conversation that follows that call, Moses says, “Suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” And the Lord responds, “What’s that in your hand?”

“A staff.”

“Throw it on the ground.”

So Moses threw his staff on the ground, and it became a snake. Moses, with healthy respect, drew back from it, but the Lord said, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand.[1] That’s strong imagery, and it’s tempting to think that Moses’ crook was imbued with magical power or that Moses himself, the reluctant but faithful servant of God, possessed powers to divide the waters by simply stretching out his hand over the sea—but the power was God’s, and God’s alone.

What Moses did have, and God’s people did have, was the courage to trust God’s promise of liberation and land, good and broad land, flowing with milk and honey. And so they walked out of Pharaoh’s Egypt, into the wilderness—with joy, with hope, with confidence. But when the wondrous deliverance at the sea led only to more desert and hunger and thirst and one kind of trouble after another, they started complaining. “The people became impatient on the way,” we read in today’s passage from Numbers. Can you blame them? It’s one thing to hear stories about their wanderings, it’s another to do the wandering. And forty years of wandering is a very long time.

What happens to a promise when the horizon keeps moving from one line of dusty hills to the next without ever opening up to that good and broad land? The words that once had the power to inspire courage and hope slowly turn into mere talk without resonance or response. Regret and resentment set in, faith erodes. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they said to Moses. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” To some they may sound like spoiled children, but forty years of wandering is a very long time. Forty years means that early on some of them had to make peace with the thought that they themselves might not ever set foot in the land of promise, but perhaps their children or their children’s children.

When the poisonous snakes came among them, and bit them, so that many of them died, the people immediately assumed they were being punished for speaking up, that giving voice to their frustration after years of wilderness wandering was an offense to God and to Moses. “Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us,” they said to Moses. It is painful to think that God would act so punitively, but we know that this is where our hearts and minds can take us when trust in God’s faithfulness erodes. Don’t complain, or God will send snakes, the implicit theology seems to be. Just keep walking, eat your manna, don’t complain.

In the book of Psalms, though, we hear a very different voice:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?[2]

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.[3]

With the Lord one day is like a thousand years,[4] but God knows that for God’s people forty years can feel like a lifetime, and “just a few more weeks” can feel like entering the homestretch or like “no end in sight.” God knows that to God’s people justice deferred can be indistinguishable from justice denied. God knows that to God’s people the promise delayed can feel like the promise broken.

Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” The Lord didn’t smite the serpents or send them to a different part of the wilderness to bother the Canaanites or the Edomites, which suggests, to me at least, that their presence was not a punishment, but simply their presence. The serpents were there because they lived there, because there were plenty of rodents for them to eat there. They simply occupied their place in God’s good creation.

So the Lord didn’t take away the serpents from them as the people had asked Moses to pray, but neither did the Creator tell Moses to give the people a lesson in wilderness ecology. In fact, the Lord, who is very partial to speaking as a mode of communicating the divine will, and very critical of graven images because of their potential for encouraging idolatry, the Lord did a very risky thing by telling Moses to make a serpent and put it upon a pole for all to see—so that whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. The power was not in the bronze sculpture, nor in the pole, nor in Moses who made and assembled the piece. The power was God’s who both visualized and fulfilled the promise of life in the very thing God’s people could only experience as yet another deadly threat. God assured them through the power of healing that the promise was not vain—and that was enough for them to resume the journey.

They carried the pole all the way to the promised land where it was given a home in the holy of holies for generations. The last time it is mentioned in the Old Testament is in 2 Kings, where we’re told that “[King Hezekiah] broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it.”[5] The symbol of God’s faithfulness had become, in Cameron Howard’s words, “a bronzed, domesticated, manufactured idol.”[6] The image had ceased to point to the living God; it only pointed to itself. Any object, of course, any building, any ritual or idea is in danger of becoming a mere idol, a bronzed or gilded dream.

Jesus, according to the Gospel of John, picks up the broken tradition of the serpent in the wilderness. He picks it up to speak of his own being physically lifted up on the cross as well as of his being lifted up in exaltation by God, for the sake of life. From our perspective, the cross is torture, a violent assertion of imperial power, a triumph of sin, a moment of complete humiliation and defeat. But from Jesus’ perspective, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are a single movement of exaltation. And just as Israel was “paradoxically required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ ‘lifting up’ in humiliating crucifixion” and see it, recognize it as God’s glorification of Jesus and the salvation of the world in the embrace of this love and life.[7] In the embrace of this love, life in fullness is both the promise that draws us into communion with God and God’s creation, as well as its fulfillment. In the embrace of this life, we already participate in the fullness we await. May God continue to bless your journey.

[1] Exodus 4:1-5

[2] Psalm 13:1-2

[3] Psalm 22:1-2

[4] 2 Peter 3:8

[5] 2 Kings 18:4

[6] Cameron B.R. Howard  https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-numbers-214-9-3

[7] See Lance Pape https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-314-21-3

Life and promise rhyme

He was 75 years old when they left Haran;[1] she was 65 then. They packed their portable belongings and left, following the call and promise of God. “The land that I will show you”—that was all God told them about their destination. And there was the promise that God would make of them “a great nation.”

Twenty-five years later they had journeyed far and wide, but Sarai was still childless. Abram had a son, Ishmael, with Hagar, a slave who served Sarai; the boy was a teenager when God appeared to the old man and renewed the covenant promise, saying, “I will make you exceedingly numerous. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and kings shall come from you.”

The old man took it all in—the extravagant promise, the new name, Abraham, the detailed instructions about circumcision—but when God mentioned Sarai, and that her new name would be Sarah, and that she would give birth to a son and that kings of peoples would come from her—that’s when Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He was a hundred years old and she was ninety, and God was talking about a baby, their baby.

This is the first time in the Bible somebody breaks down laughing. Not that for generations there wasn’t much to laugh about, but this is the first time laughter erupts in the text—and Abraham didn’t just laugh, he fell on his face and laughed. I imagine he was laughing so hard, he had to hold his sides. You may think that’s not appropriate somehow, that one is to show reverence and awe when God speaks, that such laughter smacks of disrespect—but God apparently didn’t see it that way. God kept speaking to Abraham and reiterated, “Your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac”—that’s Yitzhak in Hebrew, meaning “he shall laugh.” And in due time, Sarah gave birth to a boy, Abraham named him Yitzhak, and Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”[2] It was no joke, and it wasn’t that God, like the worst kind of bully, was having fun at an elderly couple’s expense, no—at first their laughter may have been tinged with disbelief, but when Sarah was showing, they were laughing with hope, and when the little one was born, they couldn’t stop laughing with unbridled joy. Psalm 126 begins, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.” When life and promise rhyme, God’s people laugh.

Curiously, “aside from general appreciation that laughter is good for us… we know little about laughter itself,” one scholar wrote. “Laughter typically appears in human babies around 3-1/2 to 4 months of age, but we know little about the details of the developmental process.” We do know that people around the globe laugh, ha-ha-ha or hee-hee-hee or ho-ho-ho, and nobody laughs ha-hee-ha or hee-ha-ho, but we don’t know why. We do know that “it is pleasurable to laugh at or with people, [and] quite unpleasant to be laughed at. … Court fools and presidential aides learn early in their careers that it is safer to laugh with the boss than at him or her.”[3] According to wikipedia,

Laughter is a physical reaction in humans consisting usually of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system resulting most commonly in forms of “hee-hee” or “ha-ha”. It is a response to certain external or internal stimuli. Laughter can arise from such activities as being tickled, or from humorous stories or thoughts. Most commonly, it is considered an auditory expression of a number of positive emotional states, such as joy, mirth, happiness, relief, etc.[4]

Joy, mirth, happiness, relief—when life and promise rhyme, God’s people laugh: they chuckle, titter, giggle, chortle, cackle and snicker, they snort and roar and guffaw. When life and promise rhyme.

Again and again, in Genesis and Exodus, and in all of Scripture, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah face obstacles to the realization of God’s twofold promise of a new generation and land: childless women, migrations out of Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, desperation in the wilderness, corruption in Jerusalem, exile in Babylon—and again and again the question is raised: Will God—can God—keep God’s promises? Will God remain faithful despite the near constant stumbling of God’s people, despite idolatry and greed and abuse of people and land and all living things? Will God remain faithful despite our stubborn refusal to do justice and love kindness and walk with God?

We are entering the third week of Lent, and the words are sinking in that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.[5] And we tremble at his words, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” We tremble because our lives are so entwined and infused with his, and he calls us to follow him to the cross. He calls us to follow him on the way of radical hospitality and life-giving compassion, aware that his divine mission elicits rejection and violent antagonism from those invested in maintaining the status quo. We tremble as he announces with utter clarity that he must be killed, that his faithfulness to God’s mission of healing and redemption will inevitably result in his death, because his commitment to God and to us will not falter.[6] We tremble because the execution of this faithful one is the ultimate obstacle to the realization of God’s promises. He will be crucified by the empire—and who can actually hear the words “and after three days rise again”?

We know the ways of empires, it doesn’t take great imagination to understand their simple logic of domination. Empires win every time—until they fall and other empires take their place. But a crucified man rising again after three days? The prospect of that is about as likely as a ninety-year-old woman having a child with a hundred-year-old man. Preposterous. Ridiculous. Fall-on-your-face laughable.

But the day came when Sarah put little Yitzhak in Abraham’s arms and they laughed.

The day came when the Hebrew slaves walked out of Pharaoh’s brick yards and they laughed.

The day came when their children crossed the Jordan and with the taste of milk and honey on their lips, they laughed.

The day came when the exiles once again trekked through the desert and returned to the land—their mouth filled with laughter, and their tongue with shouts of joy.

And the day came when the women returned from the grave and told the other disciples, and none of them could decide whether to laugh or cry until it sank in that God had indeed raised Jesus from the dead. That’s when their cautious, very restrained and doubt-filled laughs branched out and bloomed and burst—and waves of joy filled and lifted them. And they were braver than they had ever been or thought they could be; and kinder; and more committed to true community. It was as though the realization of God’s unshakable faithfulness made them not just want to be, but actually be more faithful followers of Jesus.

To be in covenant, I have learned from Walter Brueggemann, means to be a “partner in the practice of loyal solidarity.”[7] It means to recognize God’s loyal solidarity with us, and to become in its embrace new human beings who embrace others—especially those at the bottom and on the margins of the worlds we create—in loyal solidarity. It means to resist the idolatries and power dynamics of the empire with the liberating practice of the kingdom of God.

Today we receive a special offering for Week of Compassion, which is one of the many ways in which we seek to live in loyal solidarity. Week of Compassion helps us multiply our impact in disaster relief here in the U.S. and around the world, in sustainable development projects that empower women and marginalized communities, in supporting refugee families and immigrants, and in building relationships with ecumenical partners. This year’s theme is, Let Love Flow. There’s a river flowing from the heart of God through every part of creation, every cell, every leaf, every living thing, every person, every ocean and forest, every planet and star. Love wants to flow so life can flourish.

In Kenya this means, quite simply and wonderfully, assisting local partners in building water supply systems at the village or neighborhood levels. This means better drinking water. This means girls can go to school instead of hauling water over long distances. This means more productive gardens and fields. This means growing incomes.

I’ve looked at so many pictures from Kenya, and although they’re silent visuals, I can hear the boys laugh and scream with delight, and I can hear the women laugh and talk about new possibilities while they fill large canisters at the community fountain. I can hear and see, almost taste, what happens when we let love flow. And I begin to imagine what else loyal solidarity would allow us to be and do. For whenever we let love flow, life and promise rhyme.

[1] Gen 12:4

[2] Gen 21:6

[3] Robert R. Provine, “Laughter” American Scientist 84. 1 (Jan-Feb, 1996): 38-47. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter

[5] Mark 8:31

[6] See Ira Brent Driggers https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-mark-831-38-5

[7] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah (WBC, Vol. 2), 114.

A revolution in the heart of God

“Never again,” God said to Noah and his family, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[1] The story of the flood, a story from our mythic past, was never meant to be a children’s story, but that’s how many churches have treated it in recent years, sanitized and illustrated. The story is a very serious and disturbing reflection on humanity’s capacity for evil and the challenge this presents to the Creator. It’s a story of heartbreak and regret.

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”[2]

And the Lord brought a mighty flood upon the earth,  and with it came death and devastation. Flood waters have a way of wiping out everything—homes and businesses, roads and bridges, animals of every kind, gardens, fields, forests and orchards. The rain doesn’t stop, the rivers roll out of their ancient beds, the oceans rise—the flood strips us of everything, even the land to stand on. Everything is washed away, goes under, disappears in a violent undoing of creation.

The only reason we get to hear and tell the story is that in the midst of that raging chaos was a small vessel, and on it were a family and animals, two of every kind—and God remembered them. God made a wind blow over the earth, the waters subsided, and the pioneers of a new beginning stepped out of the ark: Noah and his family, and every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth.[3] That’s when God made a promise never to commit that kind of global destruction again, never again to look away and allow chaos to take over.

The Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”[4]

What had changed? The inclination of the human heart still was and is as evil as it had been before the flood. But the devastating flood effected an irreversible change in God’s  commitment to humanity and the rest of creation. Ever since the flood, God’s relationship with humanity has been marked by patience and forbearance. Nothing about the inclination of the human heart has changed; what has changed is God, and that alone is why the post-flood situation is decisively different. Walter Brueggemann calls it “a revolution in the heart of God,” a revolution that changes everything.[5] Evil has not been eradicated from creation, but the relation of Creator to creature is now defined by committed compassion and unqualified grace:

“I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[6]

Nothing is said that would explain what might have evoked that conversion in the heart of God—and nothing is said about what human beings should promise to do as part of some kind of mutual post-flood agreement. In this covenant, all of the obligation rests with God. God saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart—and this covenant, this revolution in the heart of God, meant that such divine suffering would continue. Terence Fretheim says,

This kind of divine response means that God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power. For God to decide to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, means that God’s grief is ongoing. God thus determines to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world. The cross of Jesus Christ is on the same trajectory of divine promise.[7]

We begin this season of Lent by remembering the first covenant which redefines humanity’s relationship with God. And we remember that this covenant includes all living creatures and the earth itself. We remember that God’s commitment to the flourishing of creation is unshakeable—while we struggle, continue to struggle, to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life. And this is where Mark draws our attention away from ourselves and toward Jesus who was baptized by John in the Jordan. A scene by the river, a scene in the wilderness, and a scene in Galilee, and in each of them, all the attention is on Jesus. One moment we see him coming up out of the water, and we hear the heavenly voice call Jesus “my son” and “beloved”—and suddenly we see him, still wet, driven by the Spirit, walking into the wilderness.

Mark tells the story with urgency. Wilderness. Forty days. Satan. Wild beasts. Angels. Forty days in five quick strokes. We hear “wilderness” and memories flood in of Hebrew slaves stumbling toward the promised land, of Isaiah singing of a highway for the exiles to come home from Babylon. We hear “forty days” and our imagination takes us to Moses on the mountain and to Elijah on the way to Mount Horeb. “Wild beasts”—that sounds ominous, a little dangerous even, and perhaps you imagine hyenas laughing in anticipation of a good meal or lions prowling around the solitary man in ever closer circles. But perhaps you can also hear echoes of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry of peace, of days when the wolf lives with the lamb and the leopard lies down with the kid. Perhaps you remember Adam and Eve in the garden, surrounded by animals, delighting in naming them, unafraid. Perhaps you sense a promise of peace in this forty-day communion of human being, wild animals, and angels.

Mark tells the story with urgency, but let’s linger a little where the angels wait on Jesus. The story of Elijah comes to mind, the prophet who had fled into the wilderness from the fury of Queen Jezebel. Elijah who was tired of calling God’s people to repentance, tired of feeling like he was the only voice of resistance in an idolatrous culture, tired of fighting. “It is enough,” he said, exhausted in body and soul, before he fell asleep under a tree. He woke up when an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” There was a bread and a jar of water. Elijah ate and drank and went back to sleep. The angel of the Lord came a second time and waited on him, saying, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”[8] Mark shows us Jesus alone in the wilderness, and by mentioning that “the angels waited on him” he lets us know that Jesus is being nourished for a long, demanding journey.

In the wilderness, it’s only you and the great silence; you and your thoughts and all that gets stirred up by the great silence. Wendell Berry wrote,

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible.

The forty days are about those “inner voices.” For Jesus, the forty days were about remembering and completely trusting the voice from heaven calling him my son and beloved. In Scripture, Satan is the name given to voices that can whisper with seductive charm, scream with blunt intimidation, or argue with chilly reason—but, regardless of tone or volume, voices that only speak in order to silence the voice from heaven that calls God’s children beloved. In the wilderness, says Berry,

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. [9]

We do struggle to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life—but we are not alone. We are in the company of Jesus who faced all that we face in our loneliest, hungriest, and most exhausted moments, who unfailingly responded to other lives with clarity and love, and who lovingly draws us into the communion of all creatures that life is meant to be. Mark doesn’t tell us how Jesus stopped Satan’s chatter, but in the very next of the Gospel’s fast-paced scenes we see Jesus back in Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

We enter the season of Lent remembering the revolution in the heart of God: In the covenant made with the descendants of Noah and all living creatures,

God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power … to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, [and thus] to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world.[10]

We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus on his way from the wilderness to Jerusalem. We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus, and we step into the wide space he opens for us to repent, and we let ourselves be made whole in his image and likeness.

[1] Gen 9:11

[2] Gen 6:5-7

[3] Gen 8:1, 18-19

[4] Gen 8:21

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 84.

[6] Gen 9:9-11

[7] Terence Fretheim https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-genesis-98-17-2

[8] 1 Kings 19:1-8

[9] Wendell Berry, “Healing” (1977) in What are people for? (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 11.

[10] Fretheim, see note 7.