Wrestling With God

  There are only a few people in scripture who see God face-to-face. Scripture says that Adam and Eve hear God walking around in the garden while they are hiding, but they don’t see God’s face. Many prophets hear God speaking to them and serve as the mouthpieces for God, but they don’t see God face-to-face. Someone who does, though, is the prophet Moses. In Exodus 33, we read that “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” I love that. “As one speaks to a friend.” Moses--who stuttered when he spoke, who murdered a man and then fled the scene in shame, who had an inferiority complex when it came to leading his people.

Then we have Hagar. Remember her? She was an enslaved woman, given to Abraham by his wife Sarah to bear a child (No one asked Hagar if she wanted to do that). A woman without any social capital or agency. A woman on the run after Sarah treats her harshly and she flees into the wilderness. At the height of her brokenness, God reveals God’s face to her. By the way, she is the ONLY woman in the Bible who sees God face to face. She speaks to God, gives God her own name for Him (El Roi, God who sees), and says “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” Yes you have, Hagar.

            And finally, Jacob. Oh, Jacob. A lot of times when I open the Bible and read about the people God equips for God’s mission, I’m like “Him? Her?” and this week was one of those weeks where I thought “Him?”  

            But like Season 2 of a show where they give you the recap of the last season for a few minutes before the new episode starts, let me take you back to the beginning with Jacob. Jacob is a twin, the son of Rebekah and Isaac. Even before he enters the world, we learn that he is wrestling his twin, Esau, in the womb. In fact, his name means “to supplant,” “to take the place of, “to take by the heel.” Jacob comes out fighting, competing, and hoping to surpass the strength, favor, merits of his twin. Esau is a hairy guy who is a skilled hunter and a man of the field. Think Golden boy. Think man’s man. Jacob is “smooth-skinned,” a quiet man living in tents. Think, withdrawn, introverted child, jealous of the attention his twin gets. Esau is a daddy’s boy. Jacob is a mama’s boy.

            And not to skip over five chapters but like a movie montage, I just want to take you through the highlights of his life so that you get a sense for his humanity, this supplanter. First, Rebekah makes him trick his dad by dressing up as his brother. Jacob lies to him and makes his dad give him a blessing instead of his twin. Then he must flee because he lied to Issac, and Esau wants to kill him. Then, he falls in love with a woman but her dad makes him work for it; seven years of patience, before he can be with Rachel. He even gets the talk from Laban which made me laugh because that’s still going on today. “If you ill-treat my daughters,” Laban says, “or if you take wives in addition to my daughters…remember that God is a witness between you and me.” Then Laban, Jacob’s father-in-law lies to him about that and we’re not gonna get into the Leah/Rachel thing but find me after the service and we can chat. Then Jacob lies to Laban so that he can return home with his family. Then he tries to bribe his twin with presents so that Esau doesn’t kill him. I think y’all get the picture. We’ve got a man who has grabbed life by the heels alright and done whatever he has needed to do out of desperation or deception to supplant.

And it’s so human. Sibling rivalry. Check. Lies to his parents. Check. Runs away from home because it’s too stressful. Check. Falls in love. Check. Has a complicated relationship with his in-laws. Check. Suffers, deceives, is deceived. Check.  

            Are you tired? I am, and we haven’t even wrestled with God yet.

So here Jacob is. He’s on his way home to face Esau. He has been travelling and hears that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men. He’s afraid and distressed. He sends his flocks and herds and camels ahead, sends his companies of men ahead, and finally sends his family ahead, crossing the ford with them before returning alone.

            It’s time to wrestle. He takes off the armor, drops his weapons, gets everyone out of the stadium and steps into the ring alone.

            Alone, you know? Like when you wake up in the middle of the night with racing thoughts or the pain of grief or the sting of loneliness, the weariness of anxiety or grief or loneliness on you. Even if you’re sleeping next to a loved one or in a home with your family…alone; that’s how you feel. Alone, wondering how you got so estranged from the sibling, wondering how to make your Dad love you as much as your mom does. Alone…and wrestling.

And in this case, while we aren’t sure who exactly Jacob wrestles with, I’d like to believe that he wrestles with God. He wrestles all night. Even when he is struck on the hip and it goes out of joint, he holds on. Maybe he grabs this angel, God, by the heel. “Let me go!” the angel says. “Nope, not until you bless me,” Jacob responds.
            Who knows what blessing Jacob thinks he’s gonna get, but I guarantee it wasn’t the one he got. Sometimes we pray for one blessing and get another. We think something will be good for us and God says no no, I’m going a different route.     

            Up to this point in this story, Corinne Carvalho writes, Jacob has never been depicted as a strong man. That is Esau’s role. But Jacob survives out of pure stubbornness to give in. In doing so, in fighting through that sleepless night, by not letting go, his story goes from wrestling alone to persevering with many. He starts as Jacob and his new name becomes the name of our ancestors: Israel.

            Because church, this is really a story about Israel and God. Jacob’s new name is “he who has striven with God and prevails,” or “God perseveres.” Israel: a people who refuse to let go of God. That is our history. Not a people who supplant, a people with a NEW name. The name doesn’t mean morally perfect and the name doesn’t mean immune to suffering and the name doesn’t mean leaving the fight unscathed; the name connotes struggle, wrestle, walking away wounded, but walking away nonetheless.

As Beth Tanner writes, “We survive by nothing more elegant than not giving up.” We get through the days after a sudden death or a hard divorce or a failed test at school simply by getting up and getting dressed. Sometimes that’s all we can do. Every loss, every divorce, every cancer diagnosis, every death of someone we love leaves its mark. Or maybe, a limp. And sometimes all we can do is hang on because we are not a people of passive faith but a people willing to wrestle with and challenge God head-on, who stay in the ring and fight.

We get in the ring with God and hang on, even when we are tired, or in pain, or have doubts. We fight for a relationship with God. We confront God. We challenge God. Moses did that. Hagar did that. Jacob did that and I wonder if that’s why God chose to reveal God’s face to them. Because they were willing and free to be angry with God and they told God they didn’t understand how the world worked and they stayed and they fought.

I’m trying, and maybe you are too, to fight. With my questions and doubts and my pain and I’m trying to refuse to let go until I get that blessing; a blessing that also comes with a wound. If you live long enough, you know that wound. That wound is part of the Christian life. There was a man who carried a cross—he knew about that wound. Jesus showed us that--he showed us that he was far from perfect…fully human and fully divine. Jacob shows us that, too. He was far from perfect but he was faithful.

            In this text, he’s not a role model for moral perfection, he’s just someone who wrestled through the night and didn’t surrender. Those people are called anti-heroes. And aren’t those the most interesting heroes anyway? The anti-heroes? Severus Snape. The Grinch. Sherlock Holmes. Lisbeth Salandar. Loki. The Minions in Despicable Me. Jack Black in School of Rock. Jacob in the Bible. These are people who have scarred pasts, who make human decisions and who strive anyway for the good of other people.

  What I’m trying to say church is that God calls unlikely people into the movement and into a world in which the Spirit moves among us, doing the work of justice and peace. He puts us right into that work with a limp because that’s the way that we build empathy and compassion and relate to a God who walked on the earth and did the same.

When I was in Kentucky at General Assembly, I went to hear a man preach named Dr. Rev. William Barber. He has been arrested sixteen times for “emoting and praying too loudly.” He’s a leader of a movement called the Poor People’s Campaign and the leader of Moral Mondays, a series of weekly, racially diverse protests that began in North Carolina in 2013 after a certain group of people in that state pushed through restrictions on voting rights and unemployment benefits and other social programs.

            What’s interesting about him is that he’s not a man with a lot of physical strength. He was born with a form of arthritis known as ankylosing spondylitis that can lead to, among other things, inflammation and fusion of the spine. That’s the condition that he wears and walks with every day, limping in some ways. Barber brought the house down. He preached for 45 minutes without stopping and at the end of it, in his signature move, threw the binder with his sermon in it on the ground. That’s the fire he brings. This is what he says: “My commitment for the rest of my life — until I can’t go anymore, if the pain says I can’t, and even then I’m going to find a way to still do something — is to be with those in this country who every day have inflicted upon them the restrictions of a democracy that’s full of the arthritis of inequality. The pain of racism, and classism.” He says, “This cane has marched in marches,” he said, holding up the wooden staff. “It’s been in the jailhouse. It’s been in the White House. It’s been in the Senate confirmation hearings. It reminds me of when I couldn’t walk.”

Barber is inspiring to me because he wears his wound wherever he goes. I often try to hide mine—it’s vulnerable to wear the limp and walk anyway. It can feel exposing. But that’s the kind of life I want to have. I want to be welcomed to wrestle with God in the loneliness of the night and not let go. I want to be welcomed to wrestle with God when I don’t feel God’s presence or see God face to face. I want to be welcomed to wrestle with God when it feels impossible to hold on. I want to be known in my humanity, like Jacob, this unlikely anti-hero who becomes the name Israel; who takes himself and wrestles and becomes a people-group who persevere and strive with God. It’s not about perfection, it’s about salvation. I want to be like William Barber. I want to be like the Grinch. I want to be like Severus Snape, the most courageous character in Harry Potter and I want to be willing to wrestle with God. Do you?

A world of wounds

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” wrote Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949.

Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.[1]

You don’t need to be an expert in ecology to know that we live in a world of wounds, and to know that many of them are human-caused. There’s a growing consensus among scientists that Earth has entered the Anthropocene — the first epoch to be defined by the overwhelming impact of humans on Earth’s vital systems. Most of the geological epochs of the past 4.6 billion years have lasted millions of years each, but human beings are now affecting the conditions of life everywhere, and we have done so in what is, in the Earth’s history, the blink of an eye. The Anthropocene is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when fossil-fueled industrialisation accelerated dramatically. “For a long time, environmentalists were hampered by having to urge action against threats that were largely invisible or so dispersed that the underlying pattern could be denied,” Camilla Cavendish wrote a week ago in the Financial Times.

The community believed itself well and did not want to be told otherwise.

But climate change is no longer theoretical: it’s here. And it’s no longer something that happens elsewhere, to other people. We can all see it in the weather patterns, in wildfires, in the hottest summer on record.[2]

In a way, we’re merely waking up to what we have known for ages, and what some humans have pointed out with prophetic urgency, while others dismissed it as wildly exaggerated, too restrictive, or out of step with the times. The community that wants to believe itself well does not want to be told otherwise.

According to the biblical witnesses, human beings have a unique calling in God’s creation. We were created in the image of God to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing on the land, in the sea, and in the air.[3] We were indeed created for global impact, but dominion, although it may sound so very similar to domination, has nothing to do with it. Domination seeks to force its own vision upon the world, turning everything and everyone into means to self-serving ends. Dominion seeks to know and serve God’s vision for creation; dominion is about letting be, about seeing with kind attention, about naming the wonders, about caring for God’s creation as agents of God’s dominion. When human beings don’t know our place in creation, our dominion becomes abusive and destructive tyranny.

We are meant to serve as God’s agents, but we prefer operating without covenant obligations. In our sacred texts, this distortion of our relationship with God is called sin: the desire to be human without God, and its effects, which include further distortions in how we relate to each other, to the whole creation, and to ourselves. We choose self-assertion over love, and instead of serving God, we serve what Paul calls “the flesh.”

“Living ‘according to the flesh’ is to live for that which is transient, pursuing self-interests at the expense of others, and ignoring the presence of God,” is how one scholar describes the term. It is “a metaphor for the human tendency to seek and to possess all that brings immediate and imminent satisfaction to one’s own self. [And] the consequence of this way of living [, according to Paul,] is death.”[4] It’s like rushing into a dead-end-street, pretending it’s the freeway to a better, fuller life.

The impact, though, goes far beyond the ones doing the pretending, and not just since the beginning of the Anthropocene. Listen to this lament by the prophet Hosea,

There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.[5]

The land mourns, and all who live in it languish, because human beings live “according to the flesh.” “How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither?” Jeremiah cries out.[6] And Isaiah laments, “The heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have … broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth.”[7] A curse devours the earth; don’t we know it.

In Romans 8, Paul writes that

the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.[8]

It’s not just human beings who cannot fully be, under the reign of sin and death, who we were made to be: the whole creation is waiting, because its freedom is tied to ours.

We know, says Paul, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning until now.” Groaning—but God is a God of life and blessing, and God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered. And freeing people to be what they were created to be is characteristic of God’s redemptive work. It is a deliverance, not from the world, to some otherworldly plane, but to true life in the world.[9] Israel knows this because groaning under the yoke of slavery they cried out, and God heard their groaning, and made a way for them out of bondage in Egypt.[10] And the church knows this because God raised Jesus from the dead, making a way for humanity out of bondage to sin and death. And what God did for Israel, what God did for Jesus, God will do not only for those who are in Christ but for the whole created order.[11] Humanity’s freedom from bondage to sin and death and creation’s freedom from bondage to decay go hand in hand.

Christ has made us his own, and led by his Spirit, we enter ever more deeply into our transformation into the image of Christ, finally becoming true and faithful image bearers of God. The gift of the Spirit disturbs and disrupts what was previously a settled pattern of pride and denial. Those whom Christ has made his own, who pray with him, “Abba, Father” are weaned from the drugs that kept reality at arm’s length from them, as James Dunn put it so well.

Believers are being saved not from creation but with creation … Having the Spirit does not distance believers from creation but increases the solidarity of believers with creation.[12]

We rediscover who we were meant to be all along: caring agents of God’s dominion. Joyful participants in the communion of Creator and creation.

Paul calls the gift of the Spirit “the first fruits,” which announces the beginning of harvest season. The term echoes the joy of tasting the first homegrown tomato after long months of waiting. It sounds like hearing the opening bars of life’s redemption song, the great song of freedom for all of creation. Paul speaks of the great harvest of redemption for which the life of Jesus was the seed. The gift of the Spirit is the first fruits, the first taste, the first glance of the redeemed creation. And the gift of God’s Spirit kindles in us a burning restlessness that cannot put up with the world as it is. First fruits – we know there’s more where that came from, and we lean forward into that promise. That’s what our hope is, a leaning forward into the promise of resurrection for all of creation. And that is no facile hope. Audrey West writes,

This is hope as a woman in labor hopes: breathing through the pain, holding tight to a companion, looking ahead to what cannot yet be seen, trusting that a time will come when this pain is but a memory.[13]

Many of us struggle to hope like that amid the daily avalanche of life-draining news. But we are not alone – never alone in this world of wounds. God abides with the creation that waits with eager longing for the revealing of a humanity that will honor its calling as agent of God’s dominion. And God abides with the church in our desire to live, not according to the flesh, but led by the Spirit of Christ. God is not watching the drama of redemption from a distance, but doing the work, groaning with us, and inspiring us to trust the way of Christ and the pattern of his life, because it is the way to fullness of life for all.

We do live in a world of wounds. Three years ago, Bill McKibben wrote,

The battle is not just to swap out coal for sun; it’s to swap out a poisoned and unfair world for one that works for everyone, now and in the future. Of course, no matter what we do now, we’ve waited too long to prevent truly massive trauma. Already we see firestorms without precedent, storms stronger than any on record, Arctic melt that’s occurring decades ahead of schedule. We’re losing whole ecosystems like coral reefs; we have heat waves so horrible that in places they take us to the limits of human survival. Given the momentum of climate change, even if we do everything right from this point on those effects will get much worse in the years ahead, and of course their impacts will be concentrated on those who have done the least to cause them, and are most vulnerable. That means there is another area we need to be working hard: building the kind of world that not only limits the rise in temperature, but also cushions the blow from that which is no longer avoidable. … We’re going to need human solidarity on an unparalleled level, and right now that seems a long ways away. 

The biggest challenge we face in moving toward resilience, sustainability and healing in this world of wounds is not technical; it’s not even economic or political; it is the oldest challenge human beings have known: to live, not “according to the flesh,” but as fellow members of the household of God.

In grace, God has freed us from the tyranny of sin and death. In grace, we are finally free to welcome one another as agents of God’s dominion of love. And in this welcome, all living things will find fullness of life.

[1] Quoted by Curt Meine https://blog.oup.com/2017/01/130-years-aldo-leopold/

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/c283bb9c-1a67-4659-830d-98580fef2900

[3] Genesis 1:26-28

[4] Arland Hultgren http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2365

[5] Hosea 4:1-3

[6] Jeremiah 12:4

[7] Isaiah 24:4-6

[8] Romans 8:18-21

[9] Terence Fretheim, “The Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus,” Interpretation 45, 359; my italics.

[10] Exodus 2:23f.

[11] See N.T, Wright, Romans, NIB, 590.

[12] James Dunn in Romans and the People of God, Sven K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1999), 87-88.

[13] Audrey West http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1306

Trust the sower, trust the seed

Thomas Kleinert

In the spring, I planted a little herb garden: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. And no, I didn’t pay homage to Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair – I also planted basil. Parsley seeds are tiny, I just pinched them and sprinkled them randomly on the soil like salt on fried eggs. Sage seeds are larger and round, so I carefully put two of them in a row of shallow, pinky-size holes. I decided to plant two, because I didn’t know how many seeds would actually germinate and survive, and I was pleasantly surprised when all but one out of ten sage seeds germinated and grew into healthy plants. I did lose my entire first crop of parsley, though, because the seedlings came up quick, but got too much sun before they had strong roots. I should have paid more attention to Jesus.

Jesus never told a story about parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme – although he did mention mustard, mint, dill and cumin, now that I think about it – but he did tell stories about soil and seed, fig trees and vineyards, sheep and goats, and all of his stories were episodes in the great story of his life: the story of God’s reign on earth.

When I hear the parable of the sower, I notice extravagant generosity. I see a farmer walking across the field, with a large bag of seed slung across one shoulder, and, holding the bag open with one hand, spreading seed by the handful, scattering them across the land: No pinching of seeds here, no careful counting either. This farmer is sowing with abandon. I am reminded of the armadas of helicopter seeds launched by maples at the end of spring or the delicate seeds of dandelions sailing on the wind like clouds of promise. So many seeds, year after year, and no one keeps count how many germinate, how many grow to maturity, or how many get eaten by the birds or the squirrels, because year after year, there’s a new generation of maples and dandelions, and of birds and squirrels. The deep, generous wisdom at work in the wild flourishing of creation, is also at work in the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, I hear Jesus say. We are invited to trust the extravagance and faithfulness of God, particularly when all we can see is trampled, compacted soil where nothing will grow, or rocky ground, or creepy kudzu smothering all life but its own.

As you listen to the parable of the sower, where do you find yourself drawn into it? Do you identify with the sower who scatters seed with abandon? Or do you see yourself in the seed, thrown into conditions where you struggle to thrive? Perhaps you find yourself wondering what it might be like to simply fall on good soil and sing, “All I have needed thy hand has provided…”? Or do you compare yourself, your life, your heart to the ground? Do you think about the story’s four different soil types, wondering how receptive and responsive you are to the word of the kingdom? Every parable contains a multitude of stories, depending on how you turn it, how long you’re willing to sit with it, and how deep you let it sink in.

When the first generations of the church were facing difficult times in their mission and witness, when all their work seemed in vain, when the word of the kingdom they desired to live and spread appeared to go unheard and unheeded, they remembered the story of the sower, and they asked Jesus, “What does it mean?” And in the answer they received from their prophets and teachers in Jesus’ name, the risen Lord said to them,

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.[1]

The word of the kingdom may face a three-fourths failure rate, but among those who do hear it, really hear it, the yield is – wow! I mean “wow!” because the typical yield of wheat in Jesus’ day may have been 8 to 10 measures per measure of seed, maybe 15 measures in perfect growing conditions![2] The parable is speaking straight from everyday life in telling of seed picked by the birds, or of seedlings withering in the sun or getting choked out by competing plants – all that was the common experience of any Galilean working the land. But a crop of 30 measures for a measure of seed would have been a farmer’s dream come true times two, and Jesus tells us to imagine 100! Jesus tells us to imagine an abundance way beyond reasonable expectations, and especially in those relentless seasons when the word of the kingdom appears to go unheard and unheeded. Trust the sower, he tells us, trust the seed, and do your part to hear the word of the kingdom, to really hear it, and live it – there’s nothing for you to worry about, church, hear my word and live it! Pray for God’s kingdom to come, and live into it.

Beginning in v3, the word “parable” occurs twelve times in ch. 13. The word derives from a Greek word meaning “to throw alongside.” That is, basic to this kind of story is the notion of comparison; one entity is set alongside something else to be illuminated by the comparison. Thus “the kingdom of heaven” is “thrown alongside” or compared to and illuminated by everyday situations that point beyond themselves in ways that, according to one scholar, “[leave] the mind in sufficient doubt about [the parable’s] precise application to tease it into active thought.”[3] Thus a parable doesn’t just mean one thing, but it opens the mind and heart to perceive a meadow of illuminating thoughts and insights. One person says,

I see myself in the sower, and the seed is my life. The story encourages me to invest my life in the good soil of the kingdom, where it will bear fruit beyond my imagining.

To another hearer, God is the sower and the seed is God’s word.

Our lives aren’t always smooth, dark, rich soil, she says. There are times when we have been trampled on so much, our lives resemble hard, dense dirt roads, too hard for God’s word to penetrate. And there are rocky patches where hope springs up, only to wither away in the heat of hard days. And then there are times when God’s word really does take root, but the weeds of worldly worries overwhelm the seedlings. The sower, however, keeps sowing. The sower keeps sowing until some of that seed falls on good ground and bears fruit. As long as the sower keeps sowing, there’s hope for us.

And yet another who has pondered the words of the parable says,

I heard this old Arabic folk tale: When God created the world, he entrusted all the stones to two angels. Each had a full bag. As they flew over Palestine, one of the bags broke, spilling half the stones that were intended for the whole world. Sometimes I feel like the angel’s bag broke over my life, leaving no room for new things to grow. I like the thought that God will keep sowing until perhaps just one seed falls on that hidden spot of deep, rich soil in my life, and there it will sprout and take root – like a tree whose roots reach deep below the rocky surface.

And yet another who has let the words sink in, says,

The story makes me think about how receptive I really am to God’s word. When my faith seems weak, perhaps it is because I have allowed busyness and cares to fill my life, too many distractions and false loves, which threaten to choke off my faith like thorns overgrowing a seed-bed. Or have I become so set in my ways that my paths have become ruts, and I can hear nothing new, not even the word that can break me open?

Jesus has planted his life as a seed in the world, and he has scattered parables like a sower of stories, seeds that produce a rich harvest of listening and understanding, illuminating both his life and ours. And the harvest continues because the sower keeps sowing and those seeds bear fruit daily in faith, compassion and faithful action, and the lives of those who have received him in turn become seeds of the kingdom themselves, scattered and sown with the same extravagant trust in God’s faithfulness that characterized the life of Jesus.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth, [says the Lord]; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.[4]

[1] Matthew 13:18-23

[2] See references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_ancient_Rome

[3] See Warren Carter https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-15/commentary-on-matthew-131-9-18-23-5 and the widely accepted definition by C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, 1936

[4] Isaiah 55:10-11

The Wisdom of Children

Margie Quinn 

It is April 3rd and from the Capitol to Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet and Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet high schools, students walk out in protest or hold classroom "walk-ins" where they express sorrow, disbelief, and anger with educators. These protests follow the incomprehensible shooting at the Covenant School just days before. You can hear their screams downtown, “Children are dying! Don’t you care?”

It is June 4th, and I am in Atlanta, watching my friend Jenn’s kids dance with a Drag Queen. She is singing along to Beyoncé, the Prophet of Pride, who beckons children to wiggle their bodies and laugh with glee-who toss their hair in the air as a crowd of adults look on from the bleachers, including myself, too inhibited and embarrassed to get up and join them.

It is June 19th of this year, and a young climate activist named Greta Thunberg is dragged away from a climate protest by police in Malmo, Sweden. She is accused of disobeying law enforcement because she refuses to leave the scene of the protest. Thunberg may face up to six months in jail for this. Thunberg is known for her unshakeable, wild commitment to climate justice. She wears her light brown hair parted in the middle with two braids on either side. Perhaps she retains a youthful look on purpose as if to say, “Take us seriously!”

Thunberg, who has said, “We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.” A pastor from Colorado says that Thunberg is filled with “demonic spirits.”

It is the year 28 AD and an insect-eating guy named John who wears scratchy shirts and speaks with a sense of urgency has been thrown in prison and accused of having a demon inside of him. He is no reed shaken in the wind as Matthew 11 states. He is no leader dressed in soft robes, living in a royal palace. No, this man is a voice crying out in the wilderness with a crazed look in his eyes, a prophet of his time.

Our passage this morning begins with the children of the land whose song is never quite understood. When they played a glad song, no one danced; when the song became a dirge, no one was moved to tears. They were no better understood than John the Baptist, no better understood than Jesus.

And Jesus isn’t happy about it. He calls out the generation of his time. “Biblical scholars believe that when Jesus says, “This generation,” he is referring to the Pharisees, the religious leaders who claim to have wisdom and intelligence, who pride themselves on religious sanctity and priestly purity. In essence, they were those annoying kids in class who know every answer (and brag about it) or those fellow parents who can’t believe that you let your kid watch that tv show; or those ministers who guard biblical accessibility for the sake of seeming all high and mighty. Those people who will never be satisfied with the varied responses to the injustices of our time.

Well, Jesus has something to say about it. You “wise” leaders, what do I compare you to? Children sitting in marketplaces calling to one another, We played the flute for you, and you didn’t even dance. We wailed and you didn’t mourn. We wanted a sensible, rational, submissive follower and you gave us this weird guy who eats honey and is filled with demons. We wanted a pious, solemn prophet who distanced himself from the sinners, the outcasts of this world and you came in turning water into wine at a wedding and having a bunch of meals with fishermen and lepers; you glutton, you drunkard.

People in power will never be satisfied with the radical ways we resist empire, that we denounce dehumanization that we condemn violence.

In fact, these resisters, denouncers, condemners are the very ones being handcuffed at protests and dragged through the mud for their glitter and glam, for reading books to children in libraries…all because we don’t trust the wisdom of their ways.

But Jesus does. Jesus turns to God and in usual fashion, as Mihee Kim-Kort writes, he flips the expectations of where wisdom is located and found, and how it is acquired or cultivated; that is, wisdom belongs to the little ones; the “infants,” to children, to the descendants, because it is given and revealed to them, specifically, by the Son.” Did you catch that in the scripture? Jesus, in this verse, is not referred to as the Christ, as the King but as the Son of Man, the child of a Parent. Thank you, Jesus says to his holy Parent, for hiding your wisdom from the powerful and haughty and revealing it to infants. Infants—the vulnerable and lowly, who have something to say about how God is best revealed in the world and in very beginning of the gospel of Matthew, how God is first revealed in the world.

 In fact, Mihee Kim-Kort goes on, the book of Matthew starts with Jesus as a child. “Jesus blesses the children (Matt 19:13-15), references Children of God in the Beatitudes (5:9), heals a young girl (9:18-25), uses children as an example in the discourse on welcome in (10:42), heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter (15:21-28), cures the boy with the demon (17:14-18) and the list goes on. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Children, he says, children! Watch me watch them. Watch me heal them. Watch me kneel at their feet. Let them lead us.

So if Jesus is in fact insisting that his blessing is known, not by the mighty and powerful, but by the infants and the lowly, then this is a time for us too to identify with the plight of those who live on the fringes of our society and the fringes of our lives. Jesus is not just addressing the failure of individuals to respond but the society as a whole, a whole generation actually, who aren’t listening to a song that is utterly clear, who aren’t grieving with the little girl that I saw at the Link Arms for Change event back in April, pigtails in her hair like Greta, who wrote in chalk on the sidewalk, “Protect us, not guns!”

It is the infants of this world, the innocent and naïve (or are they?), who somehow understand best the ways of God.  That God shows up as a young woman who takes a boat to climate conferences to keep her carbon footprint low; whose curious way of being in the world, with an Asperger’s diagnosis and an odd demeanor to some, scares people in power so much that they accuse her of being filled with demons.

And finally, after Jesus condemns those of us who are apathetic and indifferent and after Jesus prays to God, thanking God for instilling wisdom in the infants, Jesus speaks to the people with words that are often misinterpreted by our generation. “Come to me all who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” When Jesus says this, he’s addressing those who labor desperately to keep themselves alive in the economically oppressive and destructive system of Roman imperialism, the daily reality of most people in the late first century,” writes Warren Carter. He’s talking to the people who are down and low. He says, Take MY yoke upon you, not the oppressive yoke of status quo, of scoffing indifference or disgusted disdain…MY yoke, the gentle, humble child-like one, that flips the script and makes your burden light.”

Whereas Jesus describes the Pharisee’s teaching in Matthew 23:4 as heavy, says Warren Carter, his yoke, which may feel heavy to us at times, that we are carrying a cross that we don’t want to carry…it makes me and maybe you, follow a guy who makes it pretty clear that it’s always and has been and always will be bout love. And who teaches us better about love than kids?

So church, if we are looking for rest, we need look no further than the face of a child who beckons us toward justice, holding chalk in her hand. We look no further than a prophet named Jeremiah, called by God when he was 10 years old who yelled, “They say peace when there is no peace” and people thought him crazy. We need look no further than the gleeful uninhibited dancing of kids and Drag Queens, who don’t consider hate but consider the tune of a vibrant song. We need look no further than the urgent call of a man named John sitting in prison, committed to his “demonic” beliefs that, as Philippians says, preached that “for freedom, Christ has set you free. Are you ready for freedom? I don’t think you’re ready.” We need look no further than the rest of a tender healer, who eats and drinks with us, who reveals to us wisdom in the most unlikely of places.

So, will you try to mourn with our children, as I try? Will you try to dance with them, as I try? Will you choose action, not apathy, as they lead us toward a radical, revolutionary, Christ-led way of being in the world?

Ditch your soft robes. Get in the boat with Greta. Dance in the streets with Queens and kids. Pick up your chalk and scribble on the sidewalks. Come to Jesus if you are weary, and you will find rest for your souls. 

Amen.  

Remember whose you are

When I was little, we would go and visit my grandparents on Sunday afternoons. They were my mom’s parents, and they lived in the village where my mom and her siblings had been born and raised, and where most families who lived there, had been around for generations.

I noticed that whenever the grown-ups were talking about their neighbors, they would refer to them by their last name first. My grandpa’s name was Georg Simon, but in the village they referred to him as “der Simone Georg,” to my grandma as “die Simone Lisa,” and to my uncle as “der Simone Hans.” And when talking about my mom before she married my dad, they would call her “die Simone Anneliese.” It was a peculiar custom, but I didn’t know it was peculiar, it just was — I was little and I was learning how to be in the world. When I think about it today, I assume that last names came first in that village culture because belonging to a family was considered of great importance to a person’s identity.

Another curious thing I noticed was how grown-ups talked to children about who they were. When they met a child on the street or in a store, a child they didn’t know or recognize, they would sometimes inquire who that child was, only they didn’t ask, “What’s your name?” but, “To whom do you belong?” And in our German dialect that sounds a lot like “Whose property are you?”

One sunny Sunday afternoon, when everybody at my grandparents’ house was busy talking about grown-up stuff, I decided to go for a walk in the village. I knew how to get to the bakery and to the butcher’s shop, and I must have thought it was time to explore other parts of town. So I just walked out the door. I was four or five years old, and my own memories of the day are blurry, but family lore has it that the village police officer saw me, got out of his police car – in my memory it’s a dark green VW 1200 Beetle with white markings – and asked me, “To whom do you belong?”

Apparently, I didn’t like the question. They tell me that I put my foot down, declaring, “I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” The friendly officer asked me where I lived, and I pointed up the hill to my grandparents’ house on the edge of the woods, and mentioned that my grandpa was “der Simone Georg.” And then I got to ride in the police car all the way back to the house. It was a terrific adventure!

“I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” About ten years later, I went to confirmation class for a year. I had been baptized as an infant, and in preparation for our confirmation, about thirty of us were learning about the meaning of baptism and how to live as followers of Jesus and members of the body of Christ. One of the catechisms we studied, begins with the question, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” Not the kind of question you’d ask a fourteen-year-old, is it? The idea wasn’t for us to come up with our own answers, but to encourage us to know the church’s teaching and to wrestle with it, try it on, grow into it.

Q: What is your only comfort, in life and in death?

A: That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.[1]

I was fourteen years old. I believed that I belonged to nobody but myself – and the church taught me to find comfort in the thought that I did indeed not belong to myself, but to Jesus Christ. The church encouraged me to question some of my most firmly held assumptions: my independence, my autonomy, and my self-centeredness. I learned to repeat the answer, that I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. I learned to repeat the answer, but I didn’t believe it.

“I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” A year or two later, at a youth retreat, I was introduced to the passage from Isaiah where the prophet says,

Now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.[2]

That I liked, the promise of God’s presence. I liked the promise, because life was overwhelming at times and frightening, and I liked the thought that God knows my name. What I didn’t hear, not really, was the part where God says, “I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”

It took me a few years to realize that my adolescent rejection of any authority but my own wasn’t the whole story. I was a child of the times, and only slowly did I begin to see that I wasn’t nearly as free and independent as I imagined myself to be. It wasn’t easy to acknowledge that much of what I took to be my own thoughts and my own free choices had been shaped by my desire to fit in and conform to all sorts of stories and pressures. “The great idol of the modern age is personal independence,” writes Shawnthea Monroe. “We are heavily invested in the illusion that we think for ourselves, choose for ourselves, and do for ourselves.”[3] The question then becomes, in whose company do we think, choose, and act?

For a good many years now, I have indeed known no greater comfort than the promise that Jesus has made me his own, and I have known no greater freedom than to belong to him and to let his life and teachings shape my imagining, hoping, thinking and doing.[4] And I have discovered, and continue to discover, that everything I do, everything, ultimately is an act of obedience.

Paul, of course, drives this insight to extremes that most of us find very difficult to hear. He argues that human beings cannot be independent, and that when we refuse to live as creatures of God, in grateful and joyful dependence on God the creator, we do not thereby achieve independence, but become instead enslaved to sin.[5] In his argument, sin is not an individual act in which a person misses the mark, but rather an anti-godly power of cosmic scale, an invading power, a colonizing and enslaving power. “One of the hallmarks of slavery, ancient or modern, is that slaves do not have control over their own bodies,” writes Mary Hinkle Shore.

The enslaver may force the enslaved into labor, inflict corporal punishment at will, or assault the enslaved sexually with no fear of prosecution for a crime. To be enslaved to sin is to be appropriated, body and soul.[6]

Outside of dependence on the giver of life, there’s not independence, but only fracturing and destruction. God, however, has broken sin’s mastery over humankind in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have been transferred from sin’s dominion to the motherland of grace. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul declares in his letter to the Galatians. “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”[7]

No more yoke of slavery, not for God’s children. We love the sound of that, the good news of liberation, the end of sin’s tyranny, let freedom ring! But there’s still the matter of obedience. “Do you not know,” writes Paul, “that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey?” Martin Luther wrote,

People talk about Christian liberty and then go and cater to the desires of covetousness, pleasure, pride, envy, and other vices. … We want them to know, however, that if they use their lives and possessions after their own pleasure, if they do not help the poor, if they cheat their fellow-men in business and snatch and scrape by hook and by crook everything they can lay their hands on, we want to tell them that they are not free, no matter how much they think they are, but they are the dirty slaves of the devil.[8]

In Paul’s mind, human life is either God-centered or self-centered, and few ideas are more easily twisted for selfish ends than the idea of freedom. For Paul, the only real freedom for human beings is a life lived in recognition of their creaturely dependence, and he doesn’t seem hesitant at all to qualify this freedom as being “enslaved to God.”[9]

And he expects us to go there with him, for argument’s sake. And he expects us to hear good news in that.

In the first-century mediterranean world, slavery was seen by many simply as a given. Scholars estimate that a third of the population in Italy were enslaved people, and that the Christian community in Rome, Paul’s initial audience, was made up of a majority of slaves and freedpersons, possibly as many as two-thirds.[10] They knew in their bones the reality of being enslaved, the full meaning of having been appropriated, body and soul, for the plans and whims and moods of another.

Did they know, I wonder, that belonging to God, being claimed as God’s own was not a mere transfer of ownership from one master to another? Did they hear Paul out and discover that the weak metaphor of being enslaved to God was already breaking down because they had been claimed, not as property, but as children?

And did you hear that you were called to freedom, and that freedom’s glory is the loving surrender to God’s reign of grace? Do you know in your bones that having been claimed as God’s own, you no longer belong to death’s dominion — that you belong to life in fullness, and fullness of life belongs to you? No more yoke of slavery, not for God’s children. Remember whose you are.

[1] http://www.ucc.org/beliefs/heidelberg-catechism.html

[2] Isaiah 43:1-2

[3] Shawnthea Monroe, Feasting, Year A, Vol. 3, 182.

[4] Philippians 3:12

[5] See James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC), 353.

[6] Mary Hinkle Shore https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-13/commentary-on-romans-612-23-6

[7] Galatians 5:1

[8] http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/gal/web/gal5-01.html

[9] Romans 6:22; see James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC), 345.

[10] See Dunn, 341; Brendan Byrne, Romans (Sacra Pagina), 200.

God of my seeing

Hagar is what some call “the other woman” in the story of Abram and Sarai. Abram, whose name means “exalted father,” is the head of the household, the one who has all the authority. Sarai, whose name means “the princess,” is his wife. And Hagar, whose name in Hebrew sounds like “the outsider,” is Sarai’s Egyptian slave.

The wife’s life revolves around her husband, and her slave’s life around her. Both women’s lives, though, revolve around the man, the “exalted father.” This shared situation, however, does not unite them, does not make them allies. Far from it. It makes them unequal rivals vying for status in the household. “Biblical co-wives,” writes Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “even blood sisters like Rachel and Leah, are such rivals that the Hebrew word for ‘co-wife,’ … is also the word for ‘trouble.’”[1]

Remember, it was Abram whom God called, Abram who received the divine promise, “I will make of you a great nation,” Abram who tried to imagine descendants as countless as the stars.[2] Nothing in the promises given to him specified who the matriarch of the great nation to come would be, not until ch. 17. And in ch. 16, after years of waiting have gone by, Sarai takes matters into her own hands.

In accordance with documented ancient Near Eastern practice, she offers her female slave as a surrogate mother. Abram accepts. Neither one mentions obtaining the enslaved woman’s consent. If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should. Ancient societies broadly accepted slavery as a regular part of social life. And just as an enslaved person’s muscles and skills can be utilized for the good of the master, so can an enslaved woman’s womb. In Sarai’s plan, Hagar’s womb is simply a legal extension of her own. “Go in to my slave,” she tells Abram; “it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”[3]

Abram agrees. He sleeps with her and she gets pregnant. Throughout, neither Sarai nor Abram call Hagar by her name. In their plan, she doesn’t appear as a person; she’s merely a “womb with legs.”[4] But now Hagar is pregnant, and she knows it, and she makes sure Sarai knows. “She looked with contempt on her mistress,” it says. “What sort of girl do we imagine Hagar to have been?” Lore Segal wonders.

Beautiful? Young? Was it a native meanness in her that made her kick the other woman where she knew her to be sore? Was it the primitive triumph of pregnancy? I think the Egyptian slave must have grabbed at the opportunity for once to take it out on the mistress who ordered her into the master’s bed. Why would she not have hated her Hebrew overlords the way the Hebrews would come to hate the Egyptians?[5]

Sarai confronts Abram about Hagar’s contempt, and he tells her, “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please.” The narrator tells us that Sarai dealt harshly with her, without further details, but there are echoes from Exodus and Deuteronomy where Israel remembers how “the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us.”[6] And like Israel, Hagar runs away. An angel of the Lord finds her by a spring and speaks to her. “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?”

“I am running away from my mistress Sarai.”

“Return to your mistress, and submit to her.”

Some of us already swallowed hard when the angel called her, “Hagar, slave of Sarai” as though that was her identity. And now she is to return? Return to her mistress? Return to oppression and abuse? If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should.

“You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you from their owners,” is what biblical law demands. “They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.”[7] And the angel of the Lord tells her to return, in accord with ancient Near Eastern laws and the laws of this country before the Civil War, laws in which property rights trump the liberty and dignity of creatures made in the image of God. And Hagar? She goes back. Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes,

She neither argues nor avoids the request. But before she gives up her autonomy, she exercises it by naming God according to her own experience. God called Hagar by name, the only character in the story to do so, and Hagar responds, naming God El Roi, “God of my seeing,” which can mean both “the God I have seen” and “the God who sees me.” … [Hagar] leaves her mark upon how people remember God.[8]

I want to believe, I have to believe that Hagar went back, not because she gave up, or because she was so used to doing what she was told, but because in the solitude of the wilderness, she saw something like promise, something like hope. In a way, I want to believe that in that wilderness moment, Hagar doesn’t go back, but forward into the promise. She gives birth to Abram’s firstborn son, Ishmael.

The story continues with today’s reading, after God told Abraham that he would have a son from Sarah. The story continues after 90-year-old Sarah laughed incredulously at a birth announcement she overheard from the entrance of the tent and soon laughed with unbridled joy at the birth of Isaac. The story continues with a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned, but the happy scene quickly deteriorates from celebration to envy and eviction.

“Cast out this slave woman with her son,” Sarah says to Abraham with cold clarity, “for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” She does not speak their names, in her thoughts there’s room for only one name, Isaac. Renita Weems writes,

For a black woman, the story of Hagar is a haunting one. Even if it is not our individual story, it is a story we have read in our mothers’ eyes those afternoons when we greeted them at the front door after a day of hard work as a domestic. And if not our mothers’ story, then it is certainly our grandmothers’ story. For black women, Hagar’s story is peculiarly familiar. It is as if we know it by heart…

She continues,

At some time in our lives, whether we are black or white, we are all Hagar’s daughters. When our backs are up against a wall, when we feel abandoned, abused, betrayed and banished; when we find ourselves in need of another woman’s help… we, like Hagar, are in need of a woman who will ‘sister’ us, not exploit us.[9]

In the first act of Hagar’s story, she runs away from oppression. In the second act, she is cast out by her wealthy husband and left to try and keep his child alive by herself. It’s a devastating story, and a powerful one that shines its light on the devastations we commit against each other’s dignity as God’s beloved. Phyllis Trible wrote many years ago, in her classic, Texts of Terror,

Kept in her place, the slave woman is the innocent victim of use, abuse and rejection. As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people. Most especially, all sorts of rejected women find their stories in her. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying upon handouts from the power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others.[10]

I love how Renita Weems uses ‘sister’ as a verb that hints not only at caring action and loving commitment, but also at shared resistance against whatever prevents human beings from seeing each other as siblings in the struggle.

In just a few minutes, we will hear from some of the youth who just returned from an immersion trip to Tucson. They went to the border to learn. What forces drive persons and families to flee their homes? What, or who, casts them out like refuse? What small steps can we take toward breaking those patterns of oppression? And where is God in all of this? Their desire to learn, their desire to create and live in beloved community, gives me hope.

One last observation. When the water in the skin was gone, Hagar sat and wept, and waited for her child to die. In that gut-wrenching moment, God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The life-giving water was already there, and now she saw it. The God Hagar named El Roi, “God of my seeing,” is the God who opens eyes. In the wilderness, in the parched places of our days and of our world, may God open our eyes.

[1] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 225-226.

[2] Genesis 12:2; 15:5

[3] Genesis 16:2

[4]   Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Sarah and Hagar,” in: Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 95.

[5] Lore Segal, “The Story of Sarah and Hagar,” in: Genesis: As it is written, ed. by David Rosenberg (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 134.

[6] Deuteronomy 26:6

[7] Deuteronomy 23:15-16 NRSV

[8] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 231.

[9] Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 98.

[10] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 28.

Sarah shall have a son

Does anyone care what Sarah’s thoughts might be? Is anyone interested in what she might say, how she might respond to the promises of God? God makes big promises: The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great.”[1] We know the story. We love it. We’ve heard it more times than we can remember. The story of the new beginning after Babel. The story of God’s persistent desire to have a covenant people to bless the world. The Lord said to Abram, “Go!” and Abram went and he took his wife Sarai. Did the Lord speak to Sarai? If so, nobody cared to weave it into the story. Sarai was barren; she had no child – and for all we know, she never said a word when the Lord said ‘go’ and Abraham went.

A few adventures later, God again spoke to Abram, and this time Abram pushed back, gently, saying, “You have given me no offspring, so a slave in my house is to be my heir.”

No, said the Lord, “No one but your very own issue shall be your heir. … Look toward heaven and count the stars … so shall your descendants be.”[2]

God makes big promises. “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her and … give you a son by her… and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”

“Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac.” And the Lord was very precise, saying, “at this season next year.”[3]

Within a few verses, we arrive at the next scene, Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He sees three men, runs to meet them, greets them, invites them to stay, hastens into the tent to tell Sarah to make cakes, runs to the herd and takes a calf and gives it to the servant who hastens to prepare it – its a whirlwind of hospitality, and then Abraham takes the food and sets it before them and watches them eat. This was a very nice meal, the best he had to offer. Welcoming the three guests, he had promised a little water, rest, and a little bread – this was a feast: choice ingredients, freshly prepared, fragrant and plentiful.

“Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked. Perhaps before Abraham had been curious to know who his three guests might be, and where they came from, but now he had to wonder how they knew her name. “There, in the tent,” he said. Few words. Noticeably few, especially after the rush of words pouring from his lips when he welcomed his guests. Who were they?

“I will surely return to you in due season,” one of them said, “and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Did anyone care what Sarah thought about the prospect of a pregnancy in the sunset years of her life? Did anyone even consider telling her about it? Clearly not. She overheard the words, listening at the tent entrance. “Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age,” the narrator tells us, like we needed reminding. “It had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women,” the narrator tells us, and we notice that we are being told the most personal details about her, but she doesn’t have a say in this conversation among men about her body, her womb, her role in the unfolding of the story of God’s promise.

She laughs – not out loud, no, she laughs to herself, wrapped in this cocoon of silence. She can’t believe what she just heard – and we realize that Abraham must have never told her about the divine promise that she would give rise to nations, that kings of peoples would come from her womb. Why is nobody talking to Sarah, except for Abraham who tells her to make cakes, but doesn’t seem to be the least bit interested in her reaction to the promise of a son?

And now the Lord speaks. “Sarah, come and join us. Forget about menopause. The years of waiting are coming to an end. Come, mother of nations. Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? Come, let us hear you laugh for joy!”

You know it’s not what the Lord said. The Lord speaks to Abraham, asking him why Sarah laughed, asking him if anything is too wonderful for the Lord, and repeating to him the promise, “At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”

And Sarah, still only overhearing a conversation rather than having a voice in it, denies having laughed, out of fear. One scholar writes, “That God would descend to a ‘no, I did not’ / ‘yes, you did’ squabble hints that this narrative is supposed to be funny.”[4] Do you think it’s funny? Abraham falling on his face, laughing at the prospect of a trip to the maternity ward when mom is 90 years old and dad 100, that is funny. Sarah chuckling, that is funny, but her alone being questioned for her incredulous response, that is far from funny. That is wrapping the cocoon of silence a little tighter. That is fear invading a space where hope and joy are supposed to erupt. It feels cramped and suffocating. It feels like the Southern Baptist Convention telling female pastors and all women that God did not and will not call them to ministry, because God may have poured out God’s Spirit upon all flesh on Pentecost, except for the Spirit of prophecy, proclamation, and pastoral leadership – those gifts, according to the Southern Baptist Convention and a few other assemblies, are poured out exclusively on male flesh. Women are to stay in the tent and wait for their husbands to tell them about the promises of the Lord.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? The question waits for an answer, and invites those who might ponder it, invites us, not just once, but again and again, to respond with a confident ‘No! Nothing’s too wonderful for the Lord!’, to err on the side of trust, to err on the side of joyful expectation, to err on the side of wonder. Does anyone care what Sarah’s thoughts might be? Is anyone interested in what she might say, what perspective she might add to the conversation, how she might respond to the promises of God? And what about others whose voices and perspectives are habitually excluded: is anyone interested in what they might say, how they might respond to the promises of God?

Back in 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a now famous commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. He shared some thoughts about worship and slipping into default modes that have nothing to do with who or what we might think we worship.

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. … If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. … Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

The serious lack of curiosity about what women might be thinking or the refusal to pay attention to what they are saying – those are default settings, born of the worship of power, thousands of years old, and amply reflected even in our most sacred texts. But those ancient, sacred texts also challenge us to question those default settings in the light of God’s promises, the light of Jesus’ teachings and ministry, the light of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. Wallace said,

The so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.[5]

I thought I would speak this morning about Jesus sending us into the so-called real world as messengers of the kingdom. We are sent to be compassionate disrupters, practicing a hospitality as generous as Abraham’s in our encounters with others, attentive to them, their needs, and their thoughts, seeking to keep the promise and truth of God’s coming reign up front in daily consciousness.

I thought I would unpack that some more, but not today. Today we stop by the maternity ward to celebrate, because the Lord did for Sarah as the Lord had promised. Sarah conceived and bore a son, at the time of which God had spoken. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”[6] The chuckles of incredulity, tinged with sadness and cynicism gathered up over the years, gave way to peals of laughter. And Sarah didn’t stop laughing and telling until she was done laughing and telling, in free, unbridled joy. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

[1] Genesis 12:1

[2] Genesis 15:3-5

[3] Genesis 17:15-21

[4] Song-Mi Suzie Park, Connections, Year A, Vol. 3, 70.

[5] https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[6] See Genesis 21:1-6

Mercy calls and responds

Today’s gospel passage presents five scenes for our attention. The first scene is brief, a single verse, and astonishing in its brevity. There’s Jesus walking along, he sees Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, he says, “Follow me,” and Matthew gets up and follows him. The second scene is a dinner at a house, where Jesus and his followers are being questioned for his sharing a meal with tax collectors and other notorious sinners. We sense there’s tension. Then there’s the scene of a parent pleading for his dead child, interrupted by yet another scene of a woman suffering from severe illness who touches Jesus. He tells her to be courageous, calls her “daughter,” and she is made well. Then the third scene continues in the fifth, at the leader’s house, where Jesus interrupts a funeral, makes people laugh, and raises the dead girl. The arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward fullness of life.

Jesus calls Matthew to follow him, just like he called Peter and Andrew, James and John at the beginning of his ministry in and around Capernaum.[1] Those first disciples were fishermen, an honorable, respected profession. Jesus finds Matthew sitting in a booth by the road, and it’s safe to assume he’s at his job as a toll or tax collector – far from honorable, not respected, his profession is habitually mentioned in a single breath with prostitutes or the broadest possible term of exclusion, sinners. In the gospels, tax collectors and sinners go together like mac ‘n cheese, except that nobody likes them. And Jesus calls at least one of them. And not just that, he eats with them, and not accidentally, more than once, and with many of them. And with whom one chooses to eat was a matter taken very seriously in first-century Jewish and Roman culture.

So the opening scene of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector, and Matthew responding without any noticeable hesitation, that scene opens the door to the house where we get to see what that means: it’s a dinner party, and clearly Jesus enjoys hanging out with the kind of people who don’t get many, if any, dinner invitations.

The door is open, we can see the whole dining room, and suddenly we realize that we now need to take a good look at where we see ourselves in the scene: at the table, in the company of Jesus, or at the door, with the baffled ones, or mildly angry ones, who ask, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” It’s a good question, you know, we don’t want our kids to hang out with the wrong crowd, because bad habits rub off, bad choices might become harder to avoid, strong principles might be watered down, and if we don’t want that for our kids, why would we expose ourselves to that kind of company, to folks with questionable ethics, you know, folks who’ve lied and cheated and laughed at racist jokes or even told them? Aren’t those kind of boundaries important, and shouldn’t we do our part to draw and maintain them?

Jesus knows what we’re worried about, he’s overheard us talking at the door, he knows what and how we’re thinking, and he says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” It’s a saying everybody knows, and it’s a reminder that curing people has been part of Jesus’ ministry from day one. “Jesus went throughout all Galilee,” we read in chapter 4, “teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”[2] Jesus didn’t just talk salvation, according to the Gospels, he lived it. In him, God’s saving power became present among us, feet on the ground, heels and toes in the dirt, hands on blinded eyes, fingers in deafened ears, kind embrace of hardened hearts, compassion touching the untouchable, rescue for the parched and the drowning, deliverance for people victimized by powers from which we cannot save ourselves, rescue from sin and despair.

“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners,” he says to us. I have not come, I hear him say, to call the righteous into gated castles of perfection. I have come to call sinners, to touch and be touched by what is broken and make it whole. I have come to call sinners and walk them into righteousness. I have come to remind you who you are – all of you, forgetful bearers of the divine image!

Do we see ourselves standing at the door, looking at the room, or are we sitting at the table where Jesus calls sinners to gather and find new life? He quotes the prophet Hosea and says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘Mercy is what I want, not sacrifice.’”[3] Kindness between people is what I want, loyal love, deep respect for every bearer of the divine image – generous sacrifices are terrific, but in the absence of kindness toward neighbors, they are meaningless gestures. Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want.

Go and learn implies movement, it implies study and discovery, growth and transformation, it implies watching how Jesus embodies God’s mercy and learning from him, learning with him, how to be as he is, and do as he does. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus declares in the sermon on the mount; “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”[4] Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. Go and learn what fulfillment looks like. Go and learn what divine mercy infusing every dimension of human interaction looks like. “Blessed are the merciful,” he says, “for they will receive mercy.”[5] Blessed are the merciful, for they will discover that all of life is a river of mercy, and not a cosmic tit for tat.

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” This is the third scene, a sudden interruption of dinner conversations and shared reflections on the wideness of God’s mercy. This is Matthew’s version of the scene. In Mark’s version, the child is near death, and the father is desperate for Jesus to come quickly and heal her.[6] The urgency is palpable; any delay unbearable. In Mark’s story, news of her death arrives while they’re on the way to the leader’s house. In Matthew’s story, the girl is dead, and the father kneels before Jesus and tells him to come and lay his hand on her – and Jesus gets up and follows him.

Those words stunned me earlier this week. “And Jesus got up and followed him.” This moment of rising and following is the mirror image of the call scene at the tax booth, only here it is Jesus who follows. This man’s need, this father’s faith carries just as much authority as Jesus’ call to discipleship. Jesus calls, and a person follows – and here we see the reverse of the dynamic of persistent mercy, a person calls, and Jesus follows. And he follows this parent to the darkest place imaginable. What was it he said? Go and learn what this means, mercy is what I want. We’re watching mercy move, we’re watching mercy flow and infuse the darkest place imaginable. We’re watching mercy disrupt the young woman’s funeral.

There is laughter when he says she’s not dead, only sleeping. This is the only moment anyone laughs, explicitly, in the Gospels.[7] Some are laughing at Jesus, deriding him. But others are laughing because of Jesus. “When the Lord restored Zion, we were like those who dream,” it says in the Psalm; “our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.”[8] Some are laughing at the fool who can’t tell the difference between sleep and death, but we are laughing with the Lord of life, to whom death is mere sleep.

When the parent knelt before Jesus, telling him, “Come and lay your hand on her, and she will live!” Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose up. The language of resurrection is beautifully ambiguous and suggestive. One rises in the morning to take a shower, and it simply means to wake up and get up. Only Jesus didn’t simply get up, he rose. And the next one in Matthew’s story to get up like that, is the girl whom Jesus took by her hand, and she rose.[9]

We are laughing because the arc of this five-scene-narrative universe is short, but astonishing, and it’s bent toward resurrection and fullness of life. “Call to us now, and we shall awaken,” we sometimes sing in the company of sinners gathering at the table of the Lord, “we shall arise at the sound of our name.”[10] In response to mercy’s call, we shall awaken, arise, and arrive.

[1] Matthew 4:20-22

[2] Matthew 4:23

[3] Hosea 6:6; quoted in Matthew 9:13 and again in 12:7

[4] Matthew 5:17

[5] Matthew 5:7

[6] See Mark 5:21ff.

[7] Here and in the parallels in Mark 5:40 and Luke 8:53; laughter is implied in Luke 6:21, 25

[8] Psalm 126:1-2

[9] See also the scene in Matthew 8:24-26 in which Jesus was asleep (!) while the boat was being swamped by waves, and he got up to rebuke the winds and the sea; and, of course, Matthew 28:6, where no translation suggests “he was awakened.”

[10] Gather Us In, Marty Haugen

To notice and to praise

I still remember that early summer evening years ago when I was driving home through the rain. We were still living on Wortham then. I made the final right turn and parked the car at the end of the driveway just after it had stopped raining. Then I sat there for a moment, listening to the rest of a story on the radio.

Eventually, I pulled the key from the ignition and opened the door. It was late in the evening, the sun was low, light pouring through the trees, drops of water sparkling in the grass. I was about to open the back door of the car to grab my bag from behind the seat, when there was this hint of sweet fragrance rising from the freshly-bathed world. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I just stood there. Then I slowly turned toward the tall magnolia tree in our neighbor’s yard, quietly breathing in so as not to startle its graceful blooms, I guess, hoping the breeze would carry one more wave of scented air to me – and there it was. Such goodness. Such generosity. I still didn’t move, and for that moment, I was completely at home in the world; my whole being was a thank you to the giver of life and delight.

Didn’t cost me a penny. All I had to do was be there. All I had to pay was a little attention. Our days are full of these wonders. Honeysuckle. Watermelon. Peaches. Such goodness. The porch swing. The hammock. The beautiful noise of children playing at the pool. Such goodness. The joy of noticing all the places where the Wrens love to stop before they fly to the nest to feed their young. The wonder of a Great Blue Heron gliding across the river with such grace and nary a sound. Such beauty.

This morning, we listened to the entire first chapter of Genesis and then some. Some of you may have thought, “Really, the whole chapter, all seven days? How about one day at a time? He could have done a seven-week sermon series, complete with a couple of Wednesday nights on Faith & Science and a couple more on climate change and sustainability. Why waste it by pouring it all out at once?”

Why pour it all out in one reading? Because it’s the story of life in one chapter, from first light to God’s rest. Because it’s poetry that wasn’t written to be chopped up into lectionary sections, but to be spoken, read and heard with at least a small measure of the Creator’s extravagance in creating. And we listen to the whole poem because God takes time creating. God doesn’t just snap the divine fingers and immediately bring creation into being. God speaks. God makes. God orders. God invites the earth to bring forth. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this grand poem.

The first day. The second day. The third day. God is not in a hurry. Like an artist who steps back from the detail, again and again, to behold the whole as it is taking shape, God pauses to observe closely how the earth brings forth plants yielding seed of every kind and fruit trees. The fourth day. God notices how the waters swarm; God sees how birds fly across the sky and where they build their nests. God lingers with delighted attention over every movement of every wing. The Sparrow, the Mocking Bird, the Barn Swallow. The fifth day. God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights.

“Why so many forms?” Annie Dillard asks in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork – for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl – but that it all flows so freely and wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.[1]

Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside for us, you know, for the “crown of creation.” We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were. The waters were already swarming with living creatures of every kind, and birds of every kind were flying across the vast expanse of the sky and nesting in the trees along the banks of the rivers, and the land was filled with animals of all shapes and sizes—let us make humankind, God said, in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over all this, as far as the eye can see.

Yes, we are latecomers to the miracle of life, but the only creatures made in the image of God, the ones entrusted, honored with the sacred responsibility of representing God’s dominion in how we live with each other and with all of God’s works. We are the first creatures who not only participate in the miracle of life, but who have been given the capacity to see the commonality of all life; the first ones to see how fearfully and wonderfully made all creatures are and how each is connected with the others in a single web. We are the first creatures who don’t just float along with the current in the river of life, but delight in naming every creature swimming with us. We are the ones who observe the motion of the planets and in endless wonder explore the depths of the universe and the grammar of the genome. We are the ones gifted with the capacity to see everything that God has made and how very good it all is, and to say so.

When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the universe, he didn’t count days, but he arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. He first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe into not seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. Our solar system came into existence on August 31. The first multicellular life on earth appeared on December 5, fish on December 18 and birds on December 27. Human beings arrived on the scene about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. And we started writing down our stories and songs only about half a second ago in cosmic time.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” one of us asked in awesome wonder many centuries ago, and the question still resonates. All creatures praise God by simply being what they were created to be. We were created in the image and likeness of God to represent God’s dominion, to participate in the unfolding of God’s creation, and there was great joy in heaven when the first human beings looked around with awe and delight and said, “Thank you.” Frederick Buechner wrote,

Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again, either.[2]

Morning by morning, new mercies we see. All we have to do is be there. All we have to pay is a little attention.

We listen to the entire opening chapter of Genesis on a Sunday morning in June, because it invites us to step out of our little boxed-in worlds and to live amid the unfathomable splendor of a gazillion creatures great and small, each vibrating with the love of God, and giving that love a shape that changes from moment to moment and yet remains one for as long as God speaks. We listen to beautiful scripture to better remember who we were made to be; to remember that dominion has nothing to do with feeling “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] We were made to be, not autocratic despots, but representatives of God’s dominion – seeing, hearing, tasting, delighting, making, naming, caring, resting, and praising the One whose love is expressed in all of it.

Summer, of course, is the perfect season for us to fully immerse ourselves in God’s delight in life’s unfolding. So have a full, slow, free, and wild summer, filled with wonder and praise.

[1] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1988, 137.

[2] Cited by Debie Thomas https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140609JJ.shtml

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Dominion of Love,” Journal for Preachers 2008, 26.

A body like a forest

I like to think of the church as a planting of the Lord, to display God’s glory – but it’s not thousands of acres of soybeans, all the way from your toes to the horizon. Nor is it the backyard version with a row of tomatoes here, and two neat rows of corn there, and a gardener armed with Miracle Gro in one hand and Round Up in the other. I like to think of the church as a forest – with layers and layers of life, intricately woven in the depths of the earth, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, displaying God’s glory.

Inspired by Scripture, we think of the church as a creation of the Spirit, and we associate the Spirit with the breath of God, a dove descending from above, a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and tongues, as of fire, inspiring speech and understanding. Joel speaks of the Spirit being poured out, and Paul adds to the richness of imagery by suggesting that we drink the Spirit. Drinking, pouring, blazing, burning, hovering, blowing – all the ancient cosmic elements are hinted at, water, wind, and fire, except one: earth. Earth is in view, in all instances, as that which is transformed, revived, and renewed by the heavenly Spirit’s active presence.

Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit loves variety, so the wide range of imagery seems more than appropriate. I like to think of the church as a planting of the Lord, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, and yet displaying the glory of God. Trouble is, not all kinds of unruly are glorious. 

The trouble facing Paul in Corinth became manifest in divisions and quarrels between groups in the church, in rude and thoughtless behavior at the table, and in the false, pious pride of some who thought of themselves as more advanced in spiritual things than the rest of the church. One author calls it “a confused mayhem of competition” “We’re the true Christians,” it appears some assured one another, “compared to us – the few, the proud, the spiritual – the rest are mere amateurs.” They loved to talk about the flashy, spiritual experiences they themselves had or were able to inspire in others – proof, to them, that they possessed the Holy Spirit. The others? Eh, not so much.

Paul told them to cut it out. “What do you have,” he writes in chapter 4, “that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” We’re recipients of divine grace, so what’s there to boast about? And then Paul gave the church one of the first lessons in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.
And there are varieties of services, but the same Lord.
And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

There’s a rich variety of gifts, services, and activities in the church, all of which share a common source and purpose. Healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, teaching, singing, visiting shut-ins, making dinner for homeless guests, tweaking numbers on a spreadsheet to balance the budget, mailing bulletins, praying at the table – all these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is Lord is gifted by the Holy Spirit, not just the few who like to be recognized as the spiritual major league players. The Holy Spirit is not a special gift to a select few in the church, but the Giver of all gifts to the church. All who confess Jesus as Lord, all, without exception, are recipients of the Spirit’s gifts.

There’s nothing to boast about. All there is to talk about is the proper use of the Spirit’s gifts. And what is proper according to Paul?

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

The gifts aren’t for individual self-aggrandizement but for the community.  Each gift, however unique and spectacular it may appear, is meant to be used for the common good. And each gift, however common and unspectacular it may appear, is essential for the well-being and usefulness of the whole. Spiritual gifts are not religious status symbols; they are means to serve the community in a variety of ways, as part of the mission of the church in the world. Now, I don’t think that Paul wants us to spend our time gazing into the mirror or into the depths of the internet, wondering what our personal gift profile might be. I’m certain he would prefer that we simply be about the business of using our gifts in service to the community. Most of your gifts you’ll discover as you go, and a good number of them others will see in you before you yourself have a clue.

Paul tells the church that differences aren’t something we must grudgingly accept. Diversity, including diversity of gifts, is a necessary dimension of being church we must embrace and cultivate. To make his point, Paul uses the common metaphor of the body.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of the one Spirit.

In Paul’s world, the world of the Roman empire, the metaphor of the body was used to maintain the status quo by admonishing the lower classes to stay in their place. Here’s a great example by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, from his History of Rome.

A commonwealth resembles in some measure a human body. For each of them … consists of many parts; and no one of their parts either has the same function or performs the same service as the others. If, now, these parts of the human body should be endowed, each for itself, with perception and a voice of its own and a sedition should then arise among them, all of them uniting against the belly alone, and the feet should say that the whole body rests on them; the hands, that they ply the crafts, secure provisions, fight with enemies, and contribute many other advantages toward the common good; the shoulders, that they bear all the burdens… [and so on]; and then all these should say to the belly, “And you, good creature, which of these things do you do? What return do you make and of what use are you to us? Indeed, you are so far from doing anything for us or assisting us in accomplishing anything useful for the common good that you are actually a hindrance and a trouble to us and … compel us to serve you and to bring things to you from everywhere for the gratification of your desires. Come now, why do we not assert our liberty and free ourselves from the many troubles we undergo for the sake of this creature?”

What would be the outcome? Starvation. “No one can deny it,” the speaker declares.

Now consider the same condition existing in a commonwealth … composed of many classes of people not at all resembling one another, every one of which contributes some particular service to the common good… For some cultivate the fields, some fight against the enemy in defense of those fields, others carry on much useful trade by sea, and still others ply the necessary crafts. If, then, all these different classes of people should rise against the senate, which is composed of the best men, and say, “As for you, senate, what good do you do us, and for what reason do you presume to rule over others? Not a thing can you name. Well then, shall we not now at last free ourselves from this tyranny of yours and live without a leader?” If … they should take this resolution and quit their usual employments, what will hinder this miserable commonwealth from perishing miserably by famine, war and every other evil? Learn, therefore, plebeians, that just as the belly … nourishes the body even while it is itself nourished, and preserves it while it is preserved itself, and is a kind of feast, as it were, provided by joint contributions, which as a result of the exchange duly distributes that which is beneficial to each and all, so in commonwealths the senate … provides what is expedient for everyone, preserves, guards, and corrects all things.

Paul has no interest in admonishing plebeians to stay in their place and to trust the wisdom and benevolence of a senate composed of the best of men. Paul uses the body metaphor to speak of this new community where men and women, rich and poor, free citizens and enslaved people, Jews and Gentiles come together, recognizing each other as indispensable members of the body of Christ in the world, and, perhaps even more challenging, as equally beloved siblings in the household of God.

The gospel is inherently cross-cultural and inevitably at odds with every cultural enclave – including our own. The gospel is neither Orthodox nor Protestant, neither traditional nor contemporary, neither liberal nor conservative. The gospel is bound to no particular culture, gender, nation, ethnic group, or class. It is a challenge to any culture that isn’t a culture of love.

I like to think of the church as a forest – with layers and layers of life, intricately woven in the depths of the earth, a wild and wonderful web, unruly, yet displaying God’s glory. No, not all kinds of unruly are glorious. The Holy Spirit is at work in the world, creating a community where love reigns, and in that work we are both recipients and agents of the Spirit’s transforming power. Thanks be to God.

See pdf (including references, which aren’t in this post)