Sermon Archives
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Questions and Answers
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Matthew 16:13-20
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
August 24, 2008 |
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I remember it well from our trip to Israel/Palestine last spring, the rocky little place just a few miles from the Sea of Galilee that our guide told us was the site of ancient Caesarea Philippi, the place where Peter made his confession of Jesus as the Messiah. We never had to go very far for another of these fabled places to open up before us. After all, Jesus made his way from place to place on foot. It was only the last few hundred yards that he rode on a donkey into Jerusalem as people threw palm branches on the ground and shed their cloaks in a sign of his peculiar kind of “royalty.” Even on narrow little roads our bus went quickly from one noted biblical site to another. And when we arrived at Caesarea Philippi we gathered together and read Matthew 16:13-20 out loud.
Caesarea Philippi is particularly significant as the site of Peter’s confession, for the place had long been entrenched in religious practice and importance. Centuries before Jesus the Canaanites had worshiped Baal there. That’s the god Elijah brought to shame when he implored the God we worship to bring fire upon the water-drenched sacrificial bull on Mount Carmel. After the Canaanites’ worship of Baal, the Greeks built a shrine in the same place in honor of the god Pan, and after them the Romans built a temple in honor of the emperor. In that time the city was rebuilt by one of Herod’s sons, Philip, who renamed it Caesarea Philippi in honor of both the emperor Tiberias and himself.
And so in this tradition-drenched place of gods and people who fancied themselves as such, Peter responded to Jesus’ question in a most direct and forceful way, causing a new fire to burn in the hearts of women and men from that time on. “Jesus said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’” This moment at Caesarea Philippi stands as one of the most striking in all of Scripture. Simon’s name is changed to Peter on the spot, and, in a play on words (the Greek word for Peter means rock) Jesus says his church will be built on the rock of this confession, Peter’s unequivocal answer to Jesus’ question.
When you get down to it, our faith itself is built on a constant exchange of questions and answers. It’s often frustrating to us when we seem to have more questions than answers. If there really is a God, then why the suffering and the death of the one I love? If there really is a God, why the Holocaust? If, then why? So many questions, so frustratingly few answers. And yet that’s our human condition, it seems to me. Our faith is bound in our questions when, in fact, we think we’d be much better off with a few more direct answers.
Sometimes, I suspect, we begin to question our faith itself when we have so many questions about it. But can we live without them, the questions I mean? Don’t they continue to kindle the fire of faith that despite the supposedly dampening questions somehow keeps on burning? One thing for sure; God is not threatened by our questions. Our faith is not diminished by our asking. But the questions we ask ought to be the real and significant ones. Such questions as Peter was forced to answer for himself even after he had answered the question Jesus put to him. How will my life have to change if I really follow Jesus as my Lord and Savior? To be a person of faith is to be willing not simply to put tough questions to God but rather to let God put the tough questions to us.
Who do you say that Jesus is? And what questions must we face after we’ve given the answer that compels us to follow in his way?
The women I spoke to our children about this morning – the ancient Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah – are the true heroines in the early lines of the story of Moses. Their act of defiance against the principalities and powers of their time led to the liberation of a people from slavery. Though those two women were instructed by a new Pharaoh to kill the male children born to their fellow Hebrews, they refused. They feared God more than the human authorities – an amazing testimony to their inner strength in a time of grave peril. To be a woman with no voice, no power – and yet in the strength of faith to stand against killing and cruelty.
What does it mean for us today to stand in the confession we all have made that Jesus is somehow, mysteriously beyond our knowing just how and why, God Incarnate, the awaited Messiah, the One for whom all creation has longed and groaned? As in the Moses story, Jesus came to us also as a helpless child. Warned by wise men from the East, his father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, protected him from the hands of soldiers instructed to kill all young male Hebrew children. He lived to adulthood to become whom God intended because the powers-that-be were unable to destroy what God had given us. They could not change the story, even with their hate and their might.
Sometimes it requires the courage of only a few souls to turn the tide. What would it take, for instance, for our own culture to adopt the tenets of Jesus Christ and stand up to violence and cruelty? Isn’t that the question that follows on the confession we make of the lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives?
In his book The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries theologian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote: “No one can consider the topic of Jesus as Rabbi and ignore the subsequent history of the relation between the people to whom Jesus belonged and the people who belong to Jesus. That relation runs like a red line through much of the history of culture, and after the events of the twentieth century we have a unique responsibility to be aware of it as we study the history of the images of Jesus through the centuries. The question is easier to ask than it is to answer, and it is easier to avoid than it is to ask at all. But ask it we must:
“Would there have been such anti-Semitism, would there have been so many pogroms, would there have been an Auschwitz, if every Christian church and every Christian home had focused its devotion on images of Mary not only as Mother of God and Queen of Heaven but also as the Jewish maiden and the New Miriam, and on icons of Christ not only as Cosmic Christ but also as Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, come to ransom a captive Israel and a captive humanity?”
And the question follows: Would we have wars and disregard of life and manipulation of lives and murder if we comprehended who Jesus really is? And who he is for us?
My friend Cynthia Jarvis at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church wrote in The Christian Century a few years ago: “Over the centuries human beings [have consistently broken] and neglected God’s law, then struggled with the results of despair and misery. In Augustine’s words, human beings who had been made for God were restlessly wrong without God. When the law was abandoned, they could not turn their lives rightly toward the One for whom they were made.
“These men and women are a mirror for us in their stories of high intentions and horrible disobedience. Whether we are trying to obey the commandments and achieve righteousness on our own, or turning toward other gods, we walk in darkness. And in this wilderness of our own making, we cry out for a word that – like the divine Presence in the wilderness – will dwell with us in the flesh.
“Where do we learn of the Word that is grace and truth? For this midwife’s tale [as in the one that saves Moses in Exodus 1], we turn to Matthew 16, where the midwives are men who ‘have journeyed blind’ with a new prophet. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Jesus asks his companions. And Peter responds with a new word and a new birth. ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ God’s word has been revealed in flesh and blood.
“Like Helen Keller when she realizes ‘that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand,’ Peter connects God’s word with the person of Jesus Christ. Says Keller of her moment, ‘The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!’ So said the disciples of Jesus Christ when the remnant of believers gathered around him.
“There is a part still to be played by those of us who believe in his name. We have not seen him with our eyes, but we have beheld the light his life shines upon our darkness. We have taken comfort in his nearness and courage from his suffering. We have been upheld by his grace, forgiven by his mercy and given a mighty hope in his resurrection. Through him we have been turned Godward.
“We are to bear witness, to receive him as midwives receive a life long awaited. We receive him not for ourselves alone, but so that another might be given life. Our part is to act as those summoned by God’ s grace to confess him as the Christ of God.
“Suddenly the birth is our birth, and Christ the midwife is pulling us out of darkness into his marvelous light, giving us power to become the rock on which Christ’s church may be built.”
Amen.
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When the Gospel Goes to the Dogs
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Matthew 15:10-28
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
August 17, 2008 |
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There is nothing more destructive than a civil war. There is nothing more vicious than a family squabble. There is nothing more bitter than an ugly divorce. Perhaps some of you here this morning unfortunately know only too well what I mean. When people who have been close to one another fall into conflict, no holds are barred, no weapons withheld. It’s an ugly scene.
There’s a little of that going on in the Gospel of Matthew. As I have pointed out before, Matthew’s Gospel in many ways reveals a family conflict. It’s the most Jewish of the four accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham, the patriarch of the house of Israel, rather than to Adam, the progenitor of all humanity, as the Gospel of Luke does. Throughout Matthew’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry he constantly shows how Jesus fulfills the Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah. The second Gospel speaks first and foremost to the Jewish people, trying to convince them that Jesus is the true Messiah for whom they have yearned these many years. And when you’re in the middle of a family struggle nerves can get raw.
That’s what’s happening in the first part of this morning’s reading – the part about the purity laws around food. To this day, of course, Jewish tradition holds laws about food preparation and consumption. Keeping kosher can be very important to the practice of Judaism as many of us might know through Jewish friends. Food laws were even more broadly observed in Jesus’ day. But sometimes such practices can become important in themselves, clouding the intent for which they were originally established. That’s what Jesus apparently is struggling against when he says that what is really important is not what goes into one’s mouth, but what comes out. In other words, purity laws should be based on morality, not on diet. It’s the heart that counts, not the stomach. One shows devotion to God not by what one eats or doesn’t eat, but by what one says and feels, by the intentions we bear toward others.
Now Jesus certainly had a point when he spoke that way, but such words drew him into conflict with his own people. As he walks along with his disciples they talk to him about this conflict and ask that he explain his little parable about plants not planted by God being uprooted. Clearly he means to say that despite strict observance of religious law, those who defile God by their thoughts and actions will cause their own fall from grace. No one is safe merely by being within the family. And obviously these words do not fall gently on the ears of those who consider themselves the established bearers of religious propriety and orthodoxy. Jewish religious leaders are offended by Jesus’ accusations.
These words then provide the framework for the second part of this morning’s reading, the part about the Canaanite woman. Jesus is now in the region of Tyre and Sidon, a region that still exists in the modern nation of Lebanon. It was a place to which Jesus and his disciples were apparently retreating for a little rest and recreation. But wouldn’t you know it – they simply can’t escape the life that’s taking shape around them. Suddenly a woman starts shouting at Jesus, calling out to him to heal her daughter who is possessed by a demon. The way in which the woman is described, a Canaanite, portrays her as a member of the people that Israel conquered in order to possess the land. Canaanites were considered pagan. One may then conclude that this woman is a worshipper of foreign deities, but she knows who Jesus is: Son of David is a Jewish title for the Messiah. The woman comes to Jesus shouting and asking him to heal her deranged daughter.
At first Jesus gives her the silent treatment. The disciples are irritated at her noisy insistence and tell Jesus to dismiss her. They are aware that this woman is making their presence noticeable, and they simply want to get away from it all for awhile. They are Jews traveling in a foreign country and do not want to draw attention to themselves. But the woman will not be put off. She knows what she needs and what she wants; and she knows who can help her. She will not be deterred.
It’s then that Jesus turns to her and says as clearly as he can that he will have nothing to do with her. He has been sent to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel; he couldn’t care less for those outside the fold. At least that’s what he says then, and it’s what he said earlier in Matthew’s Gospel when he told his disciples that their work is only with their own people. Still the woman persists, leading to a turning point in Jesus’ ministry.
What Jesus says next seems uncharacteristically harsh. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” What does he mean? By “children” he means the Jews. By “dogs” he means all others. And he’s not making a light comment here. When he puts the woman in the category of the “dogs” he’s attacking her harshly. He’s denouncing her in the crudest way. In fact, though some have tried to soften Jesus’ words because we don’t want to think of him as being nasty, Matthew gives us no clue that we should hear Jesus’ words in any way other than disparaging and demeaning. In fact, we might want to ask Jesus to take a look at what he’s just said about the things coming out of one’s mouth that defile a person. There’s quite a bit of irony here, and we are seeing Jesus in one of his most human moments. And it’s not a moment he can be proud of.
But clearly the Gospel wants to show us that even Jesus needed to be prodded and ultimately convinced that his own mission was broader than within his own family. To his bitter pronouncement against her, the woman responds quite cleverly, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” The Canaanite woman does not, at the moment at least, contend with Jesus’ implication that the Jews stand in a favored position. But she persists in her efforts to be seen and heard, and to receive the healing mercies of God. “Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”
And in that moment Jesus’ ministry takes a turn, a decisive turn that would reach fruition in the closing words of Matthew’s Gospel, in words we now call Jesus’ Great Commission, in words we use every time we baptize someone in his name – as we did here this morning – Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
These are remarkable words. They are remarkable words for Jesus’ own family who are reminded that if they are to think of themselves as chosen of God it is for the purpose that they might be a light to all nations. They are not to grow complacent or replace God’s claim upon their hearts with laws about their stomachs. It’s not what’s going in that’s important to God, but what’s issuing forth.
And these are remarkable words for all other people, too, all those outside the family circle. For when the Gospel goes to the dogs, it comes to us. Perhaps that’s difficult for us to realize here this morning, for by now we have begun to feel quite privileged ourselves. Certainly we feel more like those who sit at the master’s table than we do like dogs that eat the crumbs that get tossed or that fall upon the floor. But in Jesus’ day we would have been regarded merely as dogs in the masters’ homes. It is precisely because we have come now into this position of privilege that we need to be sensitive as Jesus himself was forced to be in order to understand and respond to the needs of others.
Jesus was fully human just as we are, and this passage helps us to know what being fully human really means. We say that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. We make only the first claim about ourselves. We are fully human, but surely not divine. And yet being fully human means, I think, to aspire to the divine. If as human beings we are made in the image of God, then we aspire to be as clearly in that image as possible. As another preacher commenting on this passage once said, “It is precisely because Jesus seems to have felt like saying ‘No’ to grace that his act of grace is so significant . . . and even as his human pride stirred up contempt deep inside his gut, he allowed grace to stir the fires of compassion and mercy in his soul.” My friends, we can learn so much from this.
A few days ago I was talking with one of the leaders of our local Interfaith Hospitality Network hosting program which begins tonight, and she told me about some of the people who will be staying with us. The mother and her children – and she named the mother and her children – who lost their home after the woman lost her job, but who has now found another job but needs some temporary housing until she can get enough for a month’s advance rent and security deposit on a new apartment. The father and his children – and she named the father and his children – who would have been separated were it not for the Interfaith Hospitality Network’s housing program, and our part in it.
I asked our leader how she knows all these people by name and can speak about them as if they are friends, and she told me how she has been going to other shelters so that these people won’t arrive on our doorstep as strangers. I was amazed and deeply gratified. Do you have any notion what that will mean to these people who are just this side of desperate? What Jesus’ acceptance of the unnamed Canaanite woman – as reluctant as it was initially – must have meant for her? Is there any better way than we can be human than to act in like ways ourselves?
A movie came out a few years ago called The Freedom Writers [that’s spelled w-r-i-t-e-r-s], based on the true story of The Freedom Writers Diary. That work tells the story of an idealistic 24-year-old white female English teacher who winds up teaching a very racially and ethnically diverse high school class in Long Beach, California, following the notorious Rodney King riots and gang violence a few years ago in the area. Her students are given no real chance of succeeding at anything, much less formal schooling. But the teacher refuses to give up on them and as an experimental project has the kids write ongoing personal journals, inviting them to the freedom of chronicling the trauma of their lives – the drugs, rapes, suicide, gang violence, immigration persecutions, criminal backgrounds, homelessness, etc. The more the teacher learns about her students the more she understands the immense pain they share, hidden behind a self-protective façade intended to mask the fear and intolerance of one another.
Defying numerous resistant forces, the teacher refuses to give up on her students, and in the end the class is transformed into the first safe place most of the young people have ever known. Inspired by the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement [spelled r-i-d-e-r-s] who worked to combat segregation, the students of Room 203 published entries from their journals in The Freedom Writers Diary. The Freedom Writers Foundation, a nonprofit organization found in 1997, emerged from this project and continues to seek to decrease high school drop-out rates, promote diversity tolerance, and support higher education.
The Canaanite woman of Matthew 15 knew what it was like to live on the margins of society and to have to shout her needs to the keepers of resources that could help her daughter thrive. She defied racial-ethnic divisions and social prohibitions of her time. She refused to take silence or “no” for an answer, even when those responses came from Jesus. And even Jesus, who talked tough to his own family about the dangers of thinking they laid exclusive claim to God’s mercy, had to be convinced to turn his head and acknowledge the genuine need of a woman in distress. How even harder, then, it must be for us sometimes to do the same.
And yet that is our challenge. The age-old tension between the “haves” and the “have-nots” of society’s material, spiritual, or relational resources is alive and well in our own time. Yet Scripture calls us over and over again to acknowledge and wrestle with this tension and to struggle to recognize that all “others” are precious ones just as much as we are, all of us created in the image of the Holy God. The stories of the Freedom Writers and of the Canaanite woman may leave us with more questions than answers, but both stories challenge us to question our assumptions about who the “other” is for us, an “other” who, for whatever reason, we deem unworthy of our attention or investment, an “other” we are tempted to write off as a lost or undeserving cause. These stories remind us that no one is “disposable” or beyond the boundaries of needing care and access to resources, whatever their backgrounds or country of origin. May our faith, imagination, and empathy be so great as to reach out to those who call upon us for acceptance and inclusion in the life we share.
And may we always remember where we came from ourselves. May we be assured that whenever the Gospel goes to the dogs, it comes to us. Amen.
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Stepping Out of the Boat
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Matthew 14:22-33
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
August 10, 2008 |
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Of all of Jesus’ miracles the story of his walking on water seems to linger on and on in people’s minds. Jesus is reported to have performed any number of miraculous acts of healing and bending the laws of nature, but this one seems to stand out from all the rest. I can’t help believing that the primary reason it resonates so strongly for us post-Englightenment rationalists is that it’s so preposterous. We can’t fathom, if you will, anyone walking on water. To many this “seawalking” miracle seems the least credible of all the nature miracles and has spawned literally thousands of religious jokes over the last two millennia.
How about the bumper sticker out there that says, “Next time you think you’re perfect, try walking on water”? Walking on water provides the quintessential test of our humanity. Try walking on water and see how mortal you really are. Even the disciples, of course, were impressed that night when Jesus walked to them on the water and calmed the storm. “Truly, you are the son of God,” they exclaim. And Matthew’s confession of faith should not be lost on us either.
Yet the jokes continue. There’s the old story about a priest, a minister, and a rabbi who were fishing in a rowboat out in the middle of a lake. They realized once they had thrown their lines in that they had forgotten the cooler of drinks. “Not to worry,” the priest said, “I’ll go get it.” And he stood up, stepped outside the boat, walked across the water to the shore, and came back the same way, carrying the cooler. The minister continued to fish as if nothing unusual had happened, but the rabbi, most impressed, became obviously distracted. About an hour later, they realized they had forgotten the ice. “Not to worry,” the minister said, “I’ll go get it.” And he stood up, stepped outside the boat, walked across the water to the shore, and came back the same way, carrying the bag of ice. The rabbi was beside himself with what he had just seen—and not just once but twice.
A little while later the three clergy fishermen ran out of bait. The rabbi, wanting to do his mitzvah for the day, thought to himself, “I’m also a man of God, so I should be able to walk across the water, too.” So he said to his colleagues, “Not to worry. I’ll go get some more bait.” He stood up, stepped outside the boat onto the water and immediately sank. The priest looked at the minister and said, “We probably should have told him where the rocks are.”
Years ago when I was a junior naval officer stationed at the Naval Academy a new superintendent was assigned to us. He was a handsome and dashing young admiral who had also married into one of our country’s most wealthy and socially established families. It seemed he had everything going for him. Then one day he came home from a ski vacation on crutches. It was hard to believe he could suffer any physical impairment from a fall on the slopes, so the story began to go around that he actually had been hit by a boat one morning on the Severn River as he walked across the water to his office.
Walking on water is surely a divine thing, not a human thing. Yet in this morning’s story we see not only Jesus walking on water but Peter as well. And Peter is one of us. On that rock Jesus builds his church, and all of us who follow in Peter’s wake ought to be able to do what Peter does. But how? In what way? Let’s take this story apart a bit.
We have this man, this teacher, this preacher, Jesus, who by all rights and the laws of nature should not be able to walk across the surface of the water. But he does. And then we have another man, one who will eventually become one of the most well known followers of Jesus. This other man challenges the water-walker to prove his identity by keeping Peter safe. Peter is willing to risk stepping out of the boat and into the water, believing that only Jesus can actually secure Peter’s safety. But he needs to test the situation first. “Let me do what you’re doing, Jesus!” So Peter steps out of the safety of the fishing boat and discovers that with Jesus, he can also do the impossible. He can walk on water.
But then Peter has second thoughts, even though he has already taken a few steps across the water. He looks down and realizes where he is and what he’s doing. His fears take over. It’s one thing to trust Jesus when the seas are calm, but when the waves whip up to white caps Peter’s not so sure anymore. But then as he begins to sink, his faith kicks in and he cries out for Jesus to save him. It’s then that he feels the hand of Jesus reaching out to hold him up, and together they walk back to the safety of the boat. And when they get back into the boat, the wind stops and the seas grow calm again.
We’re all in the same boat, if you will, or at least in boats that look pretty similar. It’s a lot safer to stay in those boats than to step out of them and trust that Jesus will have the power to make it possible for us to walk in ways that are new and different and even exciting. It’s a lot safer in those boats that spring little leaks or even big leaks than to step out and trust in our Creator. But our faith in the son of God and in his ministry and teachings makes it possible to walk in ways that can be counter-cultural, that do not fit neatly in the boats of conventional wisdom and cultural expectations. When we stay in those boats, our paths are limited. We can only walk so far before we’re stopped by the sides of the boat. Sure, the boat is built so it stays on the surface of the water. It’s safe. But our faith in Christ tells us that walking only in “safe” is not what God is calling us to do. God is calling us to step out of the boat and walk in faith.
Let me attempt to summarize what I think the Gospel is trying to tell us this morning in this little but powerful story of Jesus and his disciples out on a stormy Sea of Galilee in the middle of the night. Maybe it tells us, first of all, that we learn faith by doing faith. The Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard nicknamed Jesus “the Inviter,” because –wherever he was, and behind whatever he was doing – he was always inviting people to faith. So when Peter asks to come to Jesus on the water, Jesus, the Inviter, says, “come.” Step out of the boat. Come to me. Walk with faith.
Someone once said that frustration comes from being in a power struggle and losing. In calling Peter out of the boat Jesus is calling him from frustration to faith. Thus Peter was moving from reliance on his own failing wits and will to self-surrender to the Kingdom – that alone could save him. Kingdom power, says Matthew, is greater than any gale. Kingdom power is beyond the winds and the waves and the darkness. Kingdom power is ultimately our only security and certainty. And the only way to come to Kingdom faith is simply to rely on it. Trust it. Step out of the boat on it. Make a fool of yourself, if need be, to explore its deepest mystery. And that is what Peter does. In doing faith, Peter comes to a closer dependence on Jesus.
Then there’s this. You can’t grow in faith – take risks, change, and develop – and count on looking good all the time. In stepping out of the boat Peter reminds us that in order to be an agent of Kingdom power we must be willing to be a failure. In a way, we are lost the instant we know what the outcome of our results will be.
There’s a wonderful line in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George that has been haunting me ever since seeing the brilliant new revival of the play this spring on Broadway. In act two the grandmother of the young man purported to be a descendant of the painter George Seurat and his mistress who was also the young female model in his great portrait of life along the Seine on a Sunday afternoon in Paris is wound tighter than a drum trying to figure out who he is and where his life should go. His grandmother, drawing him close in nurturing wisdom, sings encouragingly to him: “If you know where you’re going, you’ve gone.” It’s all over. It’s done. No adventure, no risk, no excitement.
It’s the same in living the faithful life. Riskless Christianity – safe, stale, and stagnant Christianity – stays in the boat. It might be prudent. It might be sensible. No doubt it looks responsible and right. But it leaves us unchanged. Gospel living means we must look to Jesus as ultimately definitive for faith. And if Jesus were interested in looking good and successful – rather than being obedient to God – he never would have ended up on a cross. Or left a tomb empty.
And, finally, as boat-leaving people of faith, we need to know of the unfailing support of God and God’s family. We come to deep faith, and grow in deep faith, by sacrificing the unlived life of the boat for the high seas of Gospel adventure. But we never do so perfectly. Either we try to get “too far, too fast” and overstep our creatureliness in a quest for superiority or grandiosity – or we simply fall prey to being “of little faith.” We “notice the strong winds,” rather than Jesus, and we begin to lose our footing. Focusing on the problem, not the solution, we sink. But not to the bottom.
The Talmud says to Jewish students of God’s Word, “Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow.’” We Christians should take to heart this gracious wisdom for it affirms that we are a watched-over and cared-for people – more than we can even ask or imagine.
Who of us has not been, or is not now, somewhere out on the waves? In our moment of need a hand reaches down through the gale and the high seas. The hand of Jesus clasps us. And in that secure clasp we know that the demonic, destructive forces within us – and in the world about us – can never finally triumph: neither hardship, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine – nor nakedness, peril, or sword. We affirm the triumphant love of Christ from which we can never be separated – that will never let us
go. Or, as Paul also affirms in this morning’s reading from Romans 10: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Over vacation I read a book entitled The Shack which I came across just a couple of days before leaving. It’s a very theological book, self-published by the author William P. Young after being rejected by several major publishers. Suddenly it found readers – millions of them – and has been on The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. As the back cover says, the book wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” The specific pain in the book comes from a tragedy in the lead character’s life that he calls the great sadness of his life.
There’s a scene midway through the book where the protagonist, whose name is Mack, confronts God in three persons in a shack in the woods. One morning the Jesus character of God invites Mack to walk with him across the lake. Mack knows that story, too, and he sort of laughs it off. He’s not about to step off the dock and look like a fool sinking to the bottom with his lunch in hand. “So why do I have so much fear in my life?” he muses.
“Because you don’t believe,” responds Jesus tenderly. “You don’t know that we love you. The person who lives by their fears will not find freedom in my love. I am not talking about rational fears regarding legitimate dangers, but imagined fears, and especially the projection of those into the future. To the degree that those fears have a place in your life, you neither believe I am good nor know deep in your heart that I love you. You sing about it; you talk about it, but you don’t know it.”
A young friend of mine recently told me about his climb up Mt. Whitney this summer. There was a group of six amateur climbers and two professional guides. John is afraid of heights and admitted it to his guide at the beginning of the trek. “You’re not the first to be afraid,” he said. And John had trained and was determined to face his fears. As he described the climb I was held in rapt attention. I’ve been to fourteen thousand feet but not in a precipitous climb, clawing through snow and ice as clouds roll in. In one part of the climb they inched across a narrow ledge above a fifty-foot drop. “John, I want you to go first,” the guide said. “Then talk me through it,” he said. And on they went together. “Keep on coming . . . you’re doing fine . . . the worst part is over.” And at the end the guide took his hand and they smiled together in relief and satisfaction. “So how was the experience all in all?” I asked. “It was awesome,” John responded. “And terrifying.” A little like life itself, I thought.
Jesus comes to us and takes us by the hand, inviting us to step out of the boat that we might know the love of God in our lives. That leaves us with the challenge, I suppose, to step out with him, out of the seeming safety of the boat we’re in and risk the walk of faith, even across waters of seeming impossibility.
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Disjointed |
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Genesis 32:22-31
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Rev. Lisa Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
August 3, 2008 |
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He lies down there at the edge of the river, Jacob – “Heel, Trickster, Grabber.” Twenty years have passed since he was last in this wilderness place, fleeing his murderous enraged brother, Esau. Twenty years ago when he was no more than a callow boy, but clever. Not above grasping above his station – reaching for all he could get. Wrestling from life a better place than a younger brother might expect. As we meet him this night, Jacob is growing weary of wrestling.
We’ve come know him, heard how right from the start he and Esau wrestled – tormenting their mother Rebekah even in her pregnancy. Esau – who journeys there across the river – racing toward him with 400 men. Last time Jacob saw him, he was red with rage and would have choked the life from Jacob, wrestled his breath from Jacob if he had not fled. One dawn more and Jacob will know how this story ends.
Twenty years ago Jacob slept here in the wilderness – having left all he had known, with only his staff in hand and a stone for a pillow. That night he saw the angels coming and going to do the Lord’s bidding on earth. That night, he met the God for the first time, and was blessed. Was given a blessing – not one he had to scheme to steal or trick his way into.
[T]he LORD stood beside him and said, ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ Genesis 28:13-15.
I wonder if Jacob blushes this night twenty years later when he remembers what he prayed that morning. Having received this blessing of God, he prayed a prayer of conditions and bargains – Still Jacob then – “heel, grabber, trickster.”
‘If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.’ Genesis 28:20-22.
What folly, what hubris, bargaining with God. Bread to eat and clothing to wear were all he asked for – in that dark night with only his staff, a stolen blessing, a rock for a pillow. Look at him this night. Flocks of goats and sheep and cows and donkeys, camels and servants. Two sisters as wives – and their maids -- 11 boys and a daughter – he could well believe the promise that his descendants will number as the dust. And here he is now—about to come back to the land which God has promised, bringing with him the offspring God has promised and provided.
But on the far side of the river, Esau waits. Esau who he wrestled into submission by use of trickery and subterfuge. Esau and his 400 men, and all for which Jacob has labored for 20 years, and indeed the promises God has made, are again at risk, again in danger. And Jacob waits for the dawn to know whether he may come again to his father’s house in peace, or whether the day will break to reveal Esau’s bloody revenge. Jacob plots and plans and strategizes, but knows as the darkness falls that, for all that, he is radically dependent on God, and on the good will of his brother.
And Jacob prays again before seeking sleep --
‘O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O LORD who said to me, “Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good”, I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. 11Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. 12Yet you have said, “I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.” ’Genesis 32:9-12.
It is a careful prayer – but humble, full of gratitude and affirming Jacob’s unworthiness of all God has already done – honest about his fears -- but also so careful to remind God of God’s promises, “You have said: ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,’ and you have said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.’” Jacob depends in his prayer not on his own deserving, but on the faithfulness of God. And Jacob – Heel, Trickster, Grabber lays down to sleep – all he has schemed for, worked for, planned for, cheated and lied for, now on the line.
Oh Jacob, be careful in the night my friend. When you know the meaning of your name –when you have made your plans, employed your stratagems, lined up your resources. And the night shows them to be hollow and empty, shows how risky our daylight ventures are. Be careful when the night falls and you are alone to face your fears and demons, when you have called on the Lord God to abide with you, and are met by a presence who wrestles with you, who wounds you, and yet to whom you must hold fast. When you find you must face not only your brother, but your God, before you can find peace.
Who is this who comes upon Jacob? Is it some river demon who cannot face the dawn? Is it Esau, sneaking over in the night for one last match with his brother? Is it Jacob’s own personal demons with which he wrestles, his fears in the night. Or is it, as Jacob names the experience – God Godself down in the dirt, wrestling this one to a draw. This one who will become the father of a nation—the first of the peoples through whom all peoples will be blessed? When morning comes, the mysterious opponent is gone.
Jacob, too, is gone.
And Israel rises up, the one who has wrestled with God and humanity. Israel rises up, limping. Is he limping because his life is disjointed by this encounter? Its orderly structure and arrangement disturbed by wrestling with God on high? Or limping because he is finally walking in God’s way. Is what looks like a limp here and now, in this empire, really what walking in the kingdom of the Lord of the cross will look like. Out of step, struggling and striving to walk even now, in this place, the walk of the kingdom of the Lord of the cross, limping as we go.
Sermon ends with telling the end of the story from Genesis 33:1-11
The Charge (from Frederick Buechner’s meditation in The Magnificent Defeat)
“Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, [belong to the one] who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy, are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another we all of us fight-God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, [God] demands of us everything; before giving us life, [God] demands our lives-our selves, our wills, our treasure.
“Will we give them, you and I? I do not know. Only remember the last glimpse that we have of Jacob, limping home against the great conflagration of the dawn. Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”
The Blessing
As you wrestle in the night – may God bless you.
As the dawn rises, may God keep you and give you peace.
May you look into the face of your brother and of your sister
And see there the shining face of your God.
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Giving the Ending Away |
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Romans 8:26-39
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Rev. Lisa M. Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 27, 2008 |
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My agnostic friend Emily and I were enjoying brunch in a garden recently – and our talk turned to religion, and prayer in particular. She said she was always baffled and more than a little disturbed by those Christians who prayed over football games – those coaches and players who drop to a knee before a big game and ask the Lord God on high to intervene on their behalf. She thought it exemplified a selfish view of who God must be and seemed to trivialize prayer and the One to whom these prayers were prayed. I couldn’t agree with her more. How could the God who birthed us and all creation, the Savior, the Rock, the Sovereign One take any interest in the outcome of a football game – C’mon!
But baseball, now that is another matter entirely. The Bible starts with a baseball reference: “In the Big Inning, when God created the heavens and the earth.” And, if not for divine intervention, how does one explain one pastor’s experience yesterday of checking a score for her beloved team on the way to a wedding reception to find a hopeless 9:3 deficit, only to be greeted this morning by the news, perhaps the miracle, of a 10:9 victory.
On Sundays, when I know I might not be getting home in time to catch the whole game from the beginning, I will sometimes set my DVR to record the game. I avoid the radio and settle in to watch the game in delay for a real time experience. And sometimes, if it appears we are headed to extra innings, I have to jump for a moment into the ‘future’, to extend the length of the recording on the machine. Thus it was in a pivotal game last season that I jumped to the future just in time to hear Harry Kalas giving the ending away -- “Safe at home! The Phils win!!” But I watched the game any way – even knowing how it ended. I could enjoy the twists and turns without the usual knots in my stomach, my brief trip up to the future having given the ending away.
And that is what Paul seems to be up to in this morning’s reading. He is giving the ending away – jumping ahead in the story to the ending – leaving a tough part of the tale to tell us the end, to reassure us. In the first 7 Chapters of Romans leading up to this morning’s reading, he has rehearsed the whole sad story of human history – Gentile and Jew— from that very first pristine day to now -- and showed how all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All have sinned – every single bit of humanity. Gentiles who had the stars and all creation to lift our hearts to God and sing the praises of our creator, Jews who had the law and the prophets, the word of the Lord. Each and all would not, could not exist in obedience and devotion and covenant faithfulness to God and to one another.
And the course and trajectory of that story are dim. Paul says, “All who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.” Rom 2:12 No one, no one is free from the consequences. And because of our disobedience, death enters the human story and darkens all the days to come with its looming shadow.
And this is not so much about you singular or about me – but about “us,” about “all,” the whole team, all of humanity who is in the dock – sitting in the defendant’s chair. As in our prayer of confession today – our failure as humankind, from that first ancestor with dim glimmerings of cognition and wonder at the stars, to us today to some distant day – not just all humanity, but all creation sitting there under judgment, awaiting judgment.
If not for Jesus. If not for the intervention of God, the decisive presence of the divine one in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The one human who changed the course for all humanity, for all creation. The one fully God who freely chose to be in solidarity with us, and to live and die for us. So here in this pivotal chapter of Romans, Paul leaves the train of his argument for just a moment – to offer reassurance. To give away the ending here in the middle. There are many more chapters in the letter – and Paul will go on from here, must go on to tell the fate of Israel and the Jewish people and how God will work out God’s faithfulness to God’s covenant partners, God’s first covenant partners. Paul will tell, must tell us how we should behave – and who we should now be and become in light of the work of Jesus Christ. All this arguing he still has to do, all this working out of God’s purposes in the world and in the young community of hope that is the church, all these things are dependent, in a sense, on how the story ends. Because of how the story ends, how the story must end given who God is and what God has done in Jesus Messiah, in Jesus Annointed, in Jesus Christ – we can see the here and now, the present hard reality in light of the promised, assured ending. The future outcome shines back into this valley shadowed by death with illumination and promise and hope.
Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“For I am convinced that neither death…” Death.
“There were no footprints in the snow… Every second the major waited was one more tick of his wrist watch that, for the family inside the house, everything remained the same. To the major, the small wooden home looked as if it could have been dropped from his own hometown in Oklahoma – a house his own mother might have lived in if she were still alive. Now he had to walk up to someone else’s mother, carrying the name of someone else’s son.”1 “Then [he] climbed out of the truck and walked into the pristine snow. From then on, every step would leave footprints.”2
A marine casualty assistance calls officer, tasked to give the ending away to an unsuspecting, hopeful family with a soldier fighting in distant lands. To bring the devastating news of an unfinished life.
We are no different, really, than those parents waiting in that house. We all live in the valley of the shadow of death. Always under the shadow of death. Never knowing when it will come, or who it will claim, but certain, convinced that all will die, we all will die.
But Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life …” Life.
Life? What a funny thing to say here in the beginning of this parade of things, places and times which might stand between us and the love of God – I can understand Paul’s including “death” front and center – but why “life”?
Why life? Because life is full of plenty of footprints in the snow. The Marine officer put it this way: “The knock on the survivors' door is … not a period at the end of their lives. It's a semicolon."3 A semicolon; a time before and a time after which comes into all our lives. Life with its beautiful moments, sweetness, but so much grief, and failure, and shame and disappointment and hardship.
Plenty of footprints in the snow, plenty of mud on the jerseys – so pristine when the national anthem is sung and the umpire cries “Play Ball” – but it doesn’t take long to get called out, caught stealing, get thrown out of the game for a hot-headed moment, bang up against the outfield wall and miss the catch, have the home run ball arc foul at the last moment, get pulled for a pinch hitter. Life, when failing 2/3rds of the time is considered a great success. When every at bat, every pitch is measured against unachievable perfection.
The psalmist describes “life” this way: “The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. “ Psalm 90:10
But Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, …”
All things – natural and supernatural. Not just all things – but time, time present and time future. Not just all things, and all time, but all space – Neither height nor depth – all space, all geographic dimensions. Like a baseball field – all of it encompassing, encompassed in the world.
As WP Kinsella’s character puts it in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:
“No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No [one] could be that perfect. … The field runs to infinity. …There's no limit to how far a [player] might possibly hit a ball, and there's no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to retrieve it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There's no place in America that's not part of a major-league ballfield."4
No place in the world. No place in the universe. Neither height nor depth.
Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation…”
Just in case he didn’t already touch all the bases – Paul adds the final line –“Nor anything else in all creation” Anything at all in the created order, not one of these things, not one is not touched in his description.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The love of Christ. Christ who lived. Christ who died. Christ who was raised. Christ who is at right hand of God – not at the prosecutor’s table – not even at the defense table – but right there whispering in the ear of God on our behalf. Even sitting there on the Judge’s seat.
NOTHING can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord – all of us, any of us. Nothing. Our drinking and drugging family members, our enemies in other lands, our personal demons, our failings and sins, our poor children dropping out of high school, our dictators and oppressive rulers, our diagnoses and long illnesses, our sudden losses, our betrayals of those who trust us, our unjust economic policies, our oppression of others, our outcast state, and our casting out, our rejection of God – Nothing will be able to separate us, or them, from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And when we too are convinced of that, we can live with boldness and confidence and hope. We can look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. We can seek out the redemptive activity of God in ourselves, in our companions, in humanity, in all creation and cooperate with God in moving toward that good day, that ending that is coming. That little mustard seed that is growing, that yeast that is making enough dough for bread for the whole world. Matthew 13:31-33.
We can be like Paul, and give the ending away! We can tell those who suffer, like us, how it all ends -- “Safe at home!” Just like God intended In the Beginning. All together safe at home because of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
1 Final Salute, A Story of Unfinished Lives, p.3, by Jim Sheeler.
2 Rocky Mountain News, November 11, 2005, http://www.rockymountainnews.com/special-reports/final-salute/
3 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402086.html
4 W.P. Kinsella, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
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Hoe Down! |
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Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
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Rev. Lisa M. Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 20, 2008 |
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Karl Barth, the famous 20th century reformed theologian, is often quoted as having said something like, “Christians should read with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.”1 Although I’m pretty sure this is not what Barth had in mind, listen to this article from the July 15th edition of the Daily Telegraph2:
Robert Gailey, 79, watched in horror as sparks from a gas-powered garden tool caused the lawn and shrubs of his neighbours, Stuart and Phyliss McLean, to catch light. Mr Gailey had been using a Weed Wand, a [ ] hand-held flaming device which burns weeds, to treat the driveway of his semi-detached home in Paisley, Renfrewshire. Within seconds, the McLeans's manicured lawn and evergreen trees were aflame and Mr Gailey's wife, Mary, called the Fire Brigade. Mr Gailey, who holds a 1st in science from Glasgow University, admitted his embarrassment over the blunder: "I had been using the Weed Wand to get rid of weeds on my driveway. A couple of sparks had come off and before I knew it they had started a blaze in the garden next door… Thankfully, no damage was done to any of the houses and the bill for the repair work has been agreed on between myself and the neighbours." Last night, a Strathclyde Fire Brigade spokesman urged gardeners to take care when using potentially dangerous equipment. He said: "People should be extremely careful when they use blowtorch devices such as these in their gardens."
There’s something about us that does not love a weed. We can get a little obsessed with weeds, can’t we? Listen to the questions and concerns expressed in our gospel passage today by the slaves of the owner of the field: ”Where did these weeds come from?” “Do you want us to go and gather them?” Listen to the name the disciples give this parable in requesting an explanation: “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” Nothing about the wheat here, all eyes are on the pesky weeds and what can be done about them. “Can’t we root them out for you, sir? What are they doing here, any way? Please, sir, we are glad to get them right out of there! We have our hoes at the ready.”
And we have our hoes at the ready, too, don’t we?
Oh, we have tried with our modern farming techniques to move beyond the actual hoe to a figurative one. We genetically modify and bioengineer our crops. We stick a gene in our soy beans that resists Round-Up herbicide so that we can soak the fields with plant-killer – imagining we have found the easy answer to the problem of weeds with these “Round Up ready” crops. But recent studies show some of those pesky weeds developing a resistance to the plant killer without benefit of our bioengineering. I admit a little relief at this news, since although I affirm a high view of human vocation and God’s gracious invitation to us to exercise our gifts to make the world a better place, I can’t help but wonder whether genetic modifications could possibly be the instrument of redemption for which the whole creation is groaning?
We have our hoes at the ready. Not just in the garden, but in our communities. We are confident that we have what it takes to sort out the weeds from the wheat.
In his new book, The Big Sort, journalist Bill Bishop contends that as Americans have moved over the past three decades, we have clustered in communities of sameness. We have sought to be among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and politics. We segregate ourselves into communities of folks just like us. We can recognize wheat – our bumper stickers look the same! Bishop says we have moved not just into red states and blue states, but into red and blue neighborhoods. To steal a phrase out of context from our youth recently returned from Massanetta, the rule we impose on ourselves is “no purpling!” No mixing it up. As a consequence, we understand each other less and less, and tolerate one another’s perspectives almost not at all.
We have our hoes at the ready. Not just in our gardens and communities, but in our nation. We sort one another into citizen, accused criminal entitled to constitutional protections and enemy combatants. Oh, we can tell the weeds, even on secret evidence and water-boarded confessions. We divide ourselves into those deserving of health insurance and those who simply have not worked hard enough to earn it – especially all those poor children. We identify, hoes in hand, the folks with the right papers to work and the folks without ‘em. When we are afraid of the enemies who sow in the night, we can be especially quick with our hoes.
We have our hoes at the ready. Not just in our gardens, communities, nation, but in the church. In Philadelphia Presbytery, we examine candidates for ordination and attempt to call one a weed because of her flawed theology of the Trinity, never mind her fruitfulness and zeal for God’s people. We have our hoes at the ready as we sharpen them to prepare to extract a price from those congregations who would leave us, especially incensed with those who claim we are the weeds because our welcome is too broad and our theology is too loose and our reading of Scripture is too undisciplined, or perhaps even un-inspired. How dare they call us the weeds? Our denomination is now again facing votes in our Presbyteries over what the standard for ordination to service as elder, deacon, minister of Word and Sacrament will be. Will it be enough, in the language of the new proposal, if candidates “live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions”? Or we will continue to inquire into and exclude folks living in loving, committed gay and lesbian relationships and, where they are now lawful, marriages?3
We have our hoes at the ready – but Jesus says, “Hoe down!” Slow down. The kingdom of Heaven is a field and a patient Lord who waits for the harvest, not rushing. A Lord who cares enough for the wheat not to root out the weeds too soon. A patient Lord who knows that what looks like a weed today, may be discovered to be wheat when the harvest comes.
Until then, Hoe down! A judgment is coming and a harvest is coming. Some of us may hear the words at the end of the story with fear and trembling and defensiveness, “Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned.” Perhaps some of that busy hoeing we had hoped to do was about reassuring ourselves that we aren’t the weeds. If I can find an Other who is so different from me, who believes and acts so differently from the way I do – it is easy to imagine that she is a weed, and therefore I must be a wheat stalk.
But it is also easy to hear this part of the story in fear if you have a life like mine where you confront each day the ways you fall short of all the good you intend – where you regret the things you have done that you ought not to have done, regret the things you should have done that you did not do, regret the invitations to meet Jesus in the poor, the hungry, the lonely that you refused – if you have a life like mine, this part can make you tremble.
Hoe down! For Jesus makes clear that whoever we might be in the story, we are not the judges, and we are not competent to judge – either others or ourselves. The judgment is God’s, and God’s judgment is tempered by a desire to allow the best harvest, to wait for the wheat to be revealed. God is patient with the harvest, and we too are to be “armed with patience”4 in the time until the judgment comes.
Hoe down! God sorts this out. The patient God who does not turn us loose in the fields, hoes indiscriminately whacking, but who waits. The God who is active in the world and in our lives even when we declare as Jacob does, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Gen 28:16. As Paul tells us, “… all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Romans 8:14. We wait not only with patience, but with hope!
The last words of our passage are not words of judgment, but of harvest and celebration: “And the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Hoedown indeed! The Hoedown that comes at harvest – when the crop is safely gathered in; the great harvest party. The tables groan with corn and jersey tomatoes, fresh baked bread and fresh churned butter, great purply pans of blackberry cobbler and blueberry buckle.
Hoedown! With plenty of room at the table, when the guests at the feast are a big surprise (and include some we were pretty sure weren’t going to be invited back when we had our hoes sharpened and at the ready). Hoedown! Where the music is lively and the Great God of the Harvest, the Lord of the Dance calls us together. When we are partnered up, corners and squares, red and blue, male and female, black and white and every rainbow hue, and we dance.
Hoedown! Can you begin to hear the music now? As we hold onto our hoes, can we hear the fiddle tuning up? The washboard rhythm beginning? Does the beating of our heart and the tapping of our toes begin to echo the beating on the washtub drum? Can you begin to hear the music that will celebrate the harvest that is ripening in the field, that is surely coming, that is even now breaking into this world? People of God, children of the Kingdom, you’ve got to put your hoe down to take hands and dance!
1 But see this article from Princeton Theological Seminary’s Center for Barth Studies, finding the closest published quote to be: "The Pastor and the Faithful should not deceive themselves into thinking that they are a religious society, which has to do with certain themes; they live in the world. We still need - according to my old formulation - the Bible and the Newspaper." http://libweb.ptsem.edu/collections/barth/faq/quotes.aspx?menu=296&subText=468
2 Scientist’s Blowtorch Weedkiller Backfires, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2301484/Scientist%27s-blowtorch-weedkiller-backfires.html
3 As our brothers and sisters in the Anglican communion also struggle with this issue – perhaps we could heed the advice of Bishop Mwamba of Botswana: “Let's beware of excommunicating each other here on earth. For we shall find in heaven we are still bound together at the table of Christ's love.”
4 See Calvin’s commentary on this passage in his gospel harmonization, volume 1.
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What a Waste! |
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Matthew 13:1-9
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Rev. Lisa M. Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 13, 2008 |
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This week, maybe because of the sibling stories of Jacob and Esau, I was put in mind of my own family growing up, and in particular of our holiday celebrations. The fourth of five children, I was often in awe of my eldest sibling, my sister Sharon. With her 7 year head start on life, her bell bottoms, ironed hair and faint smell of woodsmoke incense, she was all things wise and cool to my eyes. She had a meticulous approach to Christmas tree decoration. After we struggled with the tangled lights and placed each ornament, it was time for the tinsel. Sharon’s rule: one piece of tinsel right at the tip of each branch, and with care and attention, you would create a thing of great shimmery beauty – the closest thing to icicles we would have in our tropical Guam Decembers. But after a few minutes of steady, obedient discipleship, I often grew tired of Sharon’s tyrannous care and careful stewardship of each shiny strand, and would grab a whole handful and fling it with abandon in the general direction of the tree. Most of it landed on the linoleum, some on the dog, some in my hair, or better, hers – and one or two large clumps might find a branch to cling to. What a waste!
Like our Parable of the Soils this morning. What a waste of good seed – because most of the soil, fully three quarters of it, was unprepared to receive the seed. I almost preached that sermon from this familiar parable – the Parable of the Soils. Calling your attention to which type of soil you are, which type of soil we are as the church. Which kind of soil we are, and how we can work hard to ‘be’ different soil. But you can’t really do anything if you are soil, can you? You just lie there, your own dirty, rocky, thorny self and BE.
I almost preached that sermon because I forgot until Matthew reminded me that -- having abandoned the synagogue for the seaside because of the scorn of the religious rulers – Jesus “told them many things in parables.” This is a parable. A parable -- not Aesop’s fable or an after school special with its simple moral at the end. A parable is a story form that twists, that surprises, that sticks with you and irritates and bothers and provokes arguments on the car ride home over what could it mean, that slips and changes meaning for you over time, that ultimately invokes a response. Silly preacher, I reminded myself, you don’t ‘explain’ a parable – at least not simply and easily. A parable coaxes us to listen together for what surprises. A parable invites us to live into it.
What surprises? This isn’t the Parable of the Soils, it is the Parable of the Sower. The sower went out to sow. What effort came before? What effort went into that bag of seeds slung across the shoulder? Was each one hand harvested the fall before? A full year’s growth the season before? Was some of the crop kept back from the family table or trade or sale so that it could yield the seed for this season? That bag of seeds is an investment, a significant investment in the future for the Sower and those dependent on the Sower for food and sustenance.
So, precious bag of seeds slung across the shoulder – The sower went out to sow. What should come next? We know, don’t we. Those of you who have, or have had gardens, or like me, grandfathers with gardens. What comes next? Soil is prepared for the precious seed, so that nothing will be wasted. The soil is first cleared of rocks, weeds pulled out roots and all, soil loosened and plowed, good earth, smelling ready and ripe for the good seed. A harvest hoped for in that precious bag of precious seed will not be wasted on ill-prepared ground. There is enough risk, isn’t there, of a late frost, or a bad flood, or no rain, once the seed is in the ground? There is enough risk, so a good sower, a sower worth his seed, prepares the soil. We plan and control what we can.
But wait! What kind of sower is this? What is up with this prodigal, wasteful, sower – Look! The sower went out to sow. And he scatters the seed with abandon. The precious seed, hand harvested, each one a kind of insurance policy for next year’s crop – his family’s food, his economic health, the precious seed dropped on rocky well-beaten paths to become crow food. Seed dropped willy nilly in the soil that’s about an inch deep with the rock waiting right under where it can never take deep root, so it becomes a sunburned shriveled thing which yields no fruit. Seed dumped into a field already richly strewn with thorns waiting to choke the life out of it. And whatever is left, the last bit of seed, scattered on good soil. What a waste!
What kind of world does this sower think we live in? Is this some kind of strange divine diversified portfolio? Does the Sower think this might be the year that shares of rocky soil take off, that a market for weed-choked ‘sub-prime’ baby plants develops?
What kind of world does this sower think we live in? Doesn’t this sower know that the world we live in is one of great risk, even to good seed. Of floods and drought and giant storms of wind. Of college tuition and looming retirement. Of unexpected diagnoses, of sudden falls, of cars that crash and folks who die too soon or leave our stories another way. Doesn’t the sower know this a world too precarious to waste good seed.
And if all goes well – if we plan and measure and prepare and take control of all we can, even then the yield feels so small compared to the risks that we know will come again and again.
Maybe the question – What kind of world does this Sower think we live in is the wrong one. I wonder if this parable invites us to ask: What kind of world does this Sower from Jesus’ parable live in? What kind of world does Jesus’ usher in with the telling of such tales? “Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”
Even my grandpa’s zucchini in its best summer couldn’t have kept up in returns like that. And that was a fine summer – when we had dinner which began with fried zucchini appetizers, had stuffed zucchini for the main course and salad with zucchini in place of the cucumbers and a side of sautéed zucchini, followed by zucchini cake for dessert. When we kept all the neighbors in zucchini, and the rural route postal carrier coming down from the city who left a thank you note for the first bag we left for him, after the fifth giant bundle of green, ended up by emphatically informing us that “it is a violation of federal law to place anything but US Mail in your post box!” Even that summer of Grandpa’s miraculous zucchini was maybe a seven fold harvest, maybe ten. But 100, 60, 30! Imagine that world!
In a world like that, in a kingdom like that, you could afford to waste some seed. You could sow seed the way I sowed tinsel. Flinging it willy nilly, careless, wasteful! But this isn’t the story of tinsel with its 125 year land fill half life, or a dead tree cut off from its life-giving roots. NO – this isn’t a story about tinsel – but of living seed, hearty seed and bumper crops, miraculous harvests, yields beyond human imagining.
A Sower went out to sow. Look at her – casting on every kind of soil, every kind of space – so unconcerned with its fitness, its preparation, its worthiness to receive this gift. She lives in the world where: “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; 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.” Is 55:10-11. It shall not return empty.
So what are we to do in this world we live in – how do we live into the world, into the kingdom, of the Sower where such a waste is possible, because such a harvest is coming. How shall I exhort you this morning? “Be good soil!” But how can soil make itself better – cast out rocks, tear away thorns and weeds root and all, soften its hard heart. Dirt can’t. We can’t.
But God can. God can. And God does. The Sower who sows the seed with such generous abandon is also the One who waters the parched and weary land, who planted the first garden in the wilderness, who coaxed life in abundance out of nothingness and void. The Sower who showers seed on soil is also the Lord who works the soil, who digs around the unproductive fig tree and lays on the fertilizer to give it another chance at fruitfulness. The Sower who flings the seed out in joyous, generous wastefulness is also the Spirit who coaxes fruit from our lives.
So, bring your own dirty, rocky, thorn-infested, weed-choked, care worn selves and keep coming back. Come to worship, to the Table, to meet God in prayer in the labyrinth. Go to the places where you have met the Sower before – respond to the whispered invitations of the Spirit to come where you know you will meet the Sower. The Sower who is also the One who plants gardens, who causes floods of living water on parched places so that they bloom with life. Look into the eyes of the poor and grieving and needy, and look there for the Sower you seek. Lift up your eyes from your narrow prison cells or hospital or nursing home rooms and feel the rain on your parched places, the shower of life-giving seed into your barren fields, and into the lives of those around you. Hold the hands of the dying, and know they go to meet the One who is Lord of the Harvest, and let your tears at their going soften the soil of your life. Let those encounters seed you so that the fruits of the Spirit might be your harvest, an abundant harvest of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Galatians 5:22-23.
The Sower went out to sow with generous abandon, and is sowing still. Thanks be to God.
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Rest for the Weary |
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Matthew 11:16-30
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 6, 2008 |
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REST FOR THE WEARY
Matthew 11:16-30
Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 6, 2008
Our reading just ended with words that make most people’s top ten list of biblical quotations, along
with such other favorites as the 23rd Psalm, Micah 6:8, various poetic passages from Isaiah, Jesus’ words
of farewell in John 14, and a number of sayings from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and 6, especially
the lines about “considering” the lilies of the field. And, like many of the beloved sayings, these words
from Matthew 11:28-30 hold their poetic power best in the language of the early seventeenth-century King
James Version:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon
you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my
yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
What wonderful words of comfort. But if you’ve been following the lectionary readings the past
several weeks these words might seem to come from some unexpected place. If you were here just two Sundays
ago, you know that Jesus can sometimes be harsh. Jesus can be demanding. There is a cost to discipleship.
Family members will be set against family members as people line up or not behind his Kingdom teachings.
He says that his words will bring a sword before they bring peace. Following Jesus requires unwavering
loyalty and unceasing commitment. There’s nothing easy about it. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my yoke
is easy, and my burden is light. How did we get there?
It might be good to review a bit the progress of Jesus’ ministry. As he went around the countryside
teaching, healing, and proclaiming God’s Kingdom, both he and his message continued to be opposed,
especially by those in positions of power and authority. What he was bringing seemed new and different,
and when you hold positions of power and authority the new and different often feel threatening. In the
opening lines of today’s reading, then, Jesus compares the whole generation to obstinate children who
refuse to join in each other’s games. When one played the flute – that is, music for a wedding – the other
would not dance. When one group wailed, as at a funeral, the others refused to mourn. Obstinate,
cantankerous people. Nobody was ever satisfied.
That was nowhere more clear than in the way both John the Baptist and Jesus were received. John, you
recall, was a bit of an eccentric, living on the fringe, eating strange food and wearing only the most
basic of clothing. For his ascetic lifestyle he was considered, at best, just plain weird and, at the
worst, demon-possessed. Then along came Jesus who loved being with people, even people the “right” people
thought he should avoid, and he was considered, at best, a party animal and, at the worst, a glutton and a
drunkard. People are not only never satisfied, Jesus says, they simply don’t get it. We look on non
essentials and miss the point altogether.
Whatever their problem, Jesus asserts, people are missing the activity of God at hand in both himself
and in John. Neither John nor Jesus may look or act in ways that the religiously “wise and intelligent’
would expect, but God is never constrained by human wisdom. As far as Jesus is concerned, those who should
be dancing or mourning – especially in view of the message provided by both himself and his cousin John –
are not responding at all to the music.
Then there’s that curious prayer he offers in thanksgiving to God for having hidden the truth of his
message and identity from the pompous and presuming, reserving it instead for the little ones who see
despite their lack of institutional credentials. It’s the “little ones” Jesus always seems to care about
the most, those who have been left out of much that the world serves up but have been welcomed with amazing
grace at the heavenly banquet. In their simplicity and need, they seem to know what God offers and are
eager to receive it. They are among those who accept Jesus’ invitation to come to him and learn from him,
to take upon them his yoke and his burden, a weight that lifts them from servitude to perfect freedom.
On that somewhat troublesome notion of God deliberately revealing to some and deliberately hiding
from others, John Calvin believed this to be a way to say there are limits to human knowledge of God and
that this should not surprise or offend us, for no one can obtain faith by one’s own acuteness, but only by
the secret illumination of the Spirit. Some get so wrapped up in their own analysis of matters theological
and ecclesiastical that they cannot hear the voice of the Spirit breaking in. “There is nothing which we
yield to God with greater difficulty,” Calvin said, “than that [God’s ] will shall be regarded by us as the
highest reason and justice.”
And yet we often labor under the weight of a world we try to control or manage ourselves, or under
the weight of a God perceived as a kind of “celestial tyrant,” as British theologian N. T. Wright describes
it, a kind of “celestial tyrant imposing his will on an unwilling world and unwilling human beings,
cramping their style, squashing their individuality and their very humanness, requiring them to conform to
arbitrary and hurtful laws and threatening them with dire consequences if they resist.”
But, in fact, Jesus brings quite the opposite. “The whole point of the Gospels,” Wright asserts, “is
that the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and
dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a
God – the God recognized in Jesus – who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice
aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness.”
That’s what Jesus means when he offers his yoke, his burden, rather than the yoke and burden people
have become used to. To all who are burdened, whether by the driving demands of the shoulds and oughts of
a law-based faith or by the crushing weight of inevitable human suffering and deprivation, the final verses
of today’s reading fall like spring rains on parched soil. There is One who exchanges the millstones of
life for the yoke of grace.
But how is the weight of a yoke in any way light? A yoke, after all, is best pictured as that piece
of wood, heavy in itself, into which two oxen are fitted and harnessed to bear the weight of work in the
field. In Judaism, both in Jesus’ time and our own, the yoke has also been an image for the Torah, the
Law. While the yoke provides discipline, it can also chafe and weigh down oppressively. But as farmers
use yokes to bind two beasts of burden together in order that they might share the work of plowing, so
Jesus’ burden becomes light because he is the one who helps his disciples carry the burden. He does this
not only with words of comfort, but also with the authority of God behind them.
One writer has noted four “somethings” important to us all in these words of comfort. Number one is
“something to do.” What Jesus asks us to do is “come and follow,” change our direction from where we were
headed without the words of Jesus to where we can be now. Henri Nouwen would say that the Gospel in a
nutshell is God in Jesus saying to each of us, “Come close.”
Something number two is “something to leave.” What we are to leave with Jesus, of course, is our
burden. With a radical, childlike trust in the God Jesus reveals, we can lay down the burden of “control,”
of having to be God ourselves. One of the startling things we see in Jesus is that no matter how much he
did, he never hurried. He never fretted about what to eat or drink or what to wear. Worry, he said, is
useless.
Something number three is “something to take.” What we are to take is the “yoke” of God’s
unconditional love. Rather than Torah obedience, Jesus asks his followers to do the will of the God of
heaven, the will of complete love. While not a life of “ease,” this “easy yoke” is rest producing because
there is nothing we can do to earn it – or to lose it. It is the pure grace gift of God that can only be
freely received and, in turn, freely given. The “yoke” is for us the “service of perfect freedom.”
And, finally, something number four is “something to find.” At the core of learning from Jesus is to
find the “true Sabbath,” or “true rest” for our souls. The more we learn from Jesus, the less we are
controlled by the passion to possess. As we are grounded more and more in God’s unconditional love, the
compulsive need to be “better than” loosens its grip on us. The strained, hurried – almost breathless –
rush to have more and to do more seems to fade in importance. What we had once thought to be critically
self-important, we now can look at with a detachment bordering on laughter.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “To fix one’s eye solely on the simple truth of God, at a time when all
concepts are being confused, distorted, and turned upside down, is to be simple.” And at rest.
Jesus said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Amen.
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When Faith Gets Serious |
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Genesis 22:1-14
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
June 29, 2008 |
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In the story of the sacrifice of Isaac we have before us one of the most notorious of all stories in the Bible, Old Testament or New. What kind of God would require the sacrifice of a child? we ask. That has always been the question. For some, such a story is a deal breaker. Such a God is not God for me. Others would like to explain it away. There must be a way out, a way to rationalize the story into something we can tolerate. Others, including our friend and noted biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, insist that we must take the story for what it is, an account that illuminates the inscrutability of God.
When Moses asked to see God’s face, to know God’s name, God replied, “I AM.” I am who I am. And we are never to know completely God’s nature or identity. As Paul said, now we see “through a glass darkly,” in a mirror dimly. What we know of God and of ourselves is only partial now. Then will come a clarity. Then, but not now. For the time being we must be satisfied with the mystery, the inscrutability of God.
The particular mystery of God in which Abraham lives and moves and has his being is the mystery of God’s testing and of God’s providing. It seems on its face a contradictory mystery. How is God both tester and provider? The testing is made obvious in the opening words: After these things God tested Abraham. After the faithful response to leave his roots and homeland and journey to a new and strange place; after the birth of a son in old age, a son in whom God promises a future, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; after all that, and more, God tests Abraham. Tests him in a big way. “[God] said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ [God] said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love . . . and offer him . . . as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’”
And what does Abraham do? He gathers together a couple of servants and provisions for the journey and sets off to yield his son – in whom the whole promise of his life is embodied – and prepares to offer him up as a sacrifice to God’s demands. The whole thing sort of turns our stomachs, doesn’t it? We see so much today of religious extremism, and, in fact, there have been instances over time when some people more crazed than faithful have imitated Abraham’s response with children of their own to dire consequences. The whole situation feels repugnant, doesn’t it? Especially as the innocence and vulnerability of the child Isaac enter the story so poignantly.
“Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God . . . will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together.” I can think of few scenes anywhere in literature, biblical or other, more touching than the image of father Abraham and son Isaac walking together up the mountain toward an apparent tragic end. Even though I know the end of the story, it gives me goose bumps and troubles my mind.
But it is precisely in this moment of the story and in Abraham’s response – God . . . will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son -- that the story turns from God the tester to God the provider. Does Abraham know how it all will end? That just as he is about to light the kindling that will ignite the wood that will end the life of the child he has yearned for his whole life, in whom his destiny is bound, he will spy a ram caught in the thicket? An obvious providential gift from God that will spare the life of Isaac and restore Abraham’s future?
It spoils the story to think that. It discredits the obvious faith Abraham has clung to throughout the story so far. We must accept that Abraham does not know how it all will end and, in fact, that had it ended another way, God still would have kept the promise through a different resolution. God the tester is also God the provider. What God has promised, God will deliver. But how and when we cannot ever know. God’s means are inscrutable. God’s ways are not our ways. And if we are faithful people we must live without knowing. We must live only by trusting. If that’s not enough for us, then perhaps we best think twice about this faith business. Living with the inscrutability, yielding to not knowing, moves us from despair to hope.
The truth of it is, of course, that most people who claim to be faithful – and are faced with the dual identity of God as tester and God as provider – really want only half of the equation. We want the provider, but we can do without the tester, thank you. Brueggemann calls this a kind of “complacent religion.” “Most complacent religion,” he says, “will want a God who provides, not a God who tests. Some in bitterness will want a God who tests but refuse the generous providing. Some in cynical modernity will regard both affirmations as silly, presuming we must answer to none and rely upon none, for we are both free and competent. But father Abraham confessed himself not free of the testing and not competent for his own provision.”
You see, that’s the whole crux of the matter for the truly faithful person. The truly faithful person – and Abraham is raised up consistently as that model for us – the truly faithful person will know that she is neither free from the testing nor competent for her own provision. That is, the truly faithful accept the Bible’s assertion that God acts this way with God’s people. God both tests and provides. Those who have the most difficulty with this concept are those who insist on a “reasonableness” in their God.
“But this text,” Brueggemann reasserts, “does not flinch before nor pause at the unreasonableness of this story. God is not a logical premise who must perform in rational consistency. God is a free lord who comes as he will. As the ‘high and holy One,’ God tests to identify his people, to discern who is serious about faith and to know in whose lives he will be fully God. And as the one among the ‘humble and contrite,’ God provides, giving good gifts which cannot be explained or even expected. We are not permitted by this narrative to choose between these characteristics of God.”
Through the story Abraham learns again something more about who God is. Though God tests him mightily, God provides for him graciously. And God learns a bit, too. God learns that Abraham really is a faithful person, in the same way that God learned about Job’s faithfulness. In the critical moment of the story – when our nerves have been set on edge – “the angel of the Lord called to [Abraham] from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ [God] said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’”
Now God knows. And now Abraham knows again, knows a bit more, has a further glimpse into God’s ways with him. The future promised in Isaac is not dead. The child lives and the promise stays alive. The journey of faith goes on. Where next? Who knows? It is not in the knowing, but in the trusting.
Friends, it is so with each and all of us as well. Our journey of faith is not in the knowing, but in the trusting. We have evidence in the faith story held in the Bible and played out in some perhaps less dramatic but nevertheless similar ways in our own lives that God as tester and provider cares for us and will see us through the circumstances of our lives that sometimes threaten to undo us. But through it all we are urged to take heart and go with God into those places unknown, yet holding the promise of a life beyond our imagining.
We cannot hear the story of Abraham and Isaac without hearing in it the story of God and Jesus of Nazareth, can we? When Jesus speaks to his disciples about the suffering he is about to endure, he always speaks about it as both crucifixion and resurrection. God the tester, God the provider. The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate expression of the testing of God. Like Abraham on his way to Mount Moriah, Jesus in Gethsemane is in a situation where he must choose. In that situation, God finds that Jesus, like Abraham, trusts the promise. I would rather not drink this cup of suffering, but your will be done, not mine. And just as the passion sayings of Jesus speak of the testing of the crucifixion, they also speak of the resurrection as God’s ultimate providing. The resurrection is the miracle by which God provides new life in a situation where only death is anticipated. On this seeming contradiction of God testing and providing, our faith is built.
Paul understood this, too, and exhorted early Christians to learn from the stories the Bible provides. When faith gets serious, we need all the help we can get. “God is faithful,” Paul told the people of Corinth, “and [God] will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing . . . will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” God tests and God provides. What brings the two characteristics of God together is God’s faithfulness. In the story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac, God learns that Abraham is faithful. But Abraham learns something, too, something that we can learn as Abrahams’ descendants – that God is faithful and will keep the promise. And when faith gets serious, what more can we count on than that?
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Wilderness God |
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Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39
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Rev. Lisa Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
June 22, 2008 |
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Today’s Old Testament and Gospel lessons are why I love the lectionary. The three year cycle of lectionary readings which we generally follow to guide our preaching here so often call us to the discipline of hearing the hard words of scripture and struggling with them, encouraging the preacher and the congregation to face hard texts with courage, and without always finding an easy peace. Sometimes, the lectionary brings us to Sundays when we are tempted to change our punctuation – replacing exclamation points with question marks at the conclusion of our scriptural readings: “The word of the Lord? Thanks be to God?”
Today is one of those days, the preacher and her congregation tremble whichever way we go. In our New Testament reading Matthew gives us a smorgasbord of some of the hardest words of Jesus – the true cost of what our “Pledge of Allegiance” to him and his way might look like. The difficult images of family division and strife which he says are the natural consequence of following him. The counter-cultural values which lead him to a cross are to become ours. “Whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
And the Old Testament, to which we will turn most of our attention today, gives us no easy alternative. It is one of the stories Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible calls a “Text of Terror.” The story of the slave woman Hagar and the lad Ishmael. We begin with insecure Sarah – earlier in the story she sent Hagar into her husband’s tent, imposing a sexual servitude on her, to get the son God promised. From this union, Ishmael was born. In our scripture today, Sarah has heard the rest of the divine promise, that the cons was to be her’s as well as Abrahams, and seen God’s promise come to maturity in her own laughing son, Isaac, who has survived the rigors of infancy to make it to his weaning party. Now, Sarah demands that Hagar and her boy be cast out into the wilderness. Sarah is unwilling to take any risk that the divine promise to her son will be usurped – or that her fragile standing in the social structure will be undercut.
It is easy to blame Sarah and to forget the ways she too was at risk in her social and cultural context. She was a childless first wife in a patriarchal world. A world where fertility was the chief asset a woman brought to her marriage and her society; where “barrenness” was always the woman’s fault; a world where a woman’s place could be quickly usurped by a younger, more fertile second wife. No idyllic Big Love here.
We are often cautioned when reading the Bible and trying to apply it, not to make too direct a comparison. It is good to be mindful of the vast distance between 2008 in affluent Swarthmore Pennsylvania USA and thousands and thousands of years ago in the Old Testament world of wandering nomadic/early agrarian patriarchs and matriarchs with their oppressive servant/slave holding economy.
It is such a distant time and place, isn’t it? Where old age, experience and wisdom are unappreciated and undervalued – especially in a woman. Where one’s social worth is judged by “productivity” and the material assets one can bring to a family or a society. Where a woman’s value is often judged by the number and success of her offspring. Where one’s country of origin and parentage can be almost entirely deterministic of one’s economic security, one’s political rights and one’s hopes for the future. Where those persons oppressed and fearful of their role in the social system turn to casting out or standing upon the ones beneath them in the social order to assure their own survival and security and prosperity. Long ago and far away?
But this is not really Sarah’s story – though she sets the action in motion with the help of a couple of other significant characters. It is Hagar’s story, and that of her son Ishmael. The story of the first single mother in the Bible. It is the story of wilderness and what she finds there. And who.
I heard a story on the radio this week of a modern day Hagar: Maria Cruz. Maria’s American dream was to buy a modest little brick home in Wheaton, Maryland for herself and her 10 year old son, Dair. A dream which came true just long enough for Dair to plant a rose bush out front. “I just like to see the house with beautiful flowers,” he said. Maria, living on her modest housekeeper’s income, was among many Hispanics targeted by sub-prime lenders, and encouraged by her realtor, she bought the home with a low teaser rate mortgage and the promise that there would be a steady stream of tenants to share the home and help pay for it from among the immigrants working in the construction trade. Just a few months’ later, victim of the collapse of the housing market, her construction worker tenants without jobs, and the sub-prime crisis, Maria is facing foreclosure and homelessness. She says, “My dream is all gone now. All messed up. I did feel very sad for my son, but he is very strong. We are in God’s hands. We are going to pray every single day. For poor people like us, that is the only way.”
Maria Cruz is hoping in the God who hears. The wilderness God who comes to us in times of chaos and darkness, when our dreams are dying. Hoping in the God who hears.
Which is more than Hagar dared to do. She wasn’t lifting up her voice in prayer and petition after she cast Ishmael under a bush and walked away so she would be spared the sight of his death – she was sobbing in uncontrolled despair. And apparently not sobbing alone – as God hears the boy’s cry and an angel calls out to Hagar. And a well is revealed, lives are restored, and promises are made to make a great nation of him, in an echo of those promises made regarding Isaac.
There is the good news – isn’t it? Ishmael’s name means “God hears” and God’s ears are tuned especially to the cry of the widow and orphan – or those made so by the abandonment of a still living father and husband. In an earlier passage, Hagar names God: “The God who sees.” And there is good news in knowing that in our own wildernesses, God does hear, God does see – and seeing and hearing our plight moves God to respond with compassion, with care, with provision in the wilderness.
How do we learn to trust the promises of God in our own wilderness? Where are the wells in your life and in mine? Do they spring up from the font where you were welcomed into God’s family, redeemed, and marked as Christ’s own forever? Do your wilderness wells bubble up and overflow here at the table as you are renewed for the journey, a guest of Jesus’ himself until that day when all will feast together? Is your thirsty heart tended by the waters of friendship – by the eyes and ears of a friend, a Stephen Minister, a family member or teacher who hears your story, who weeps with you, who lifts his or her voice to God in prayer for you? Do you find the living waters as you trust not the global economy, but the economy of grace – that in giving we receive, that in losing our lives we find them. That true worthiness is found when we oppose unjust systems and take up crosses.
And there is good news that we have this story at all – this little detour into a promise made in the wilderness to a woman and her son who wander out of the narrative after this and into their own story. We wonder how different a world we would have today if Isaac – the son of Abraham, the inheritor of the promise to the Jews, and Ishmael, the forefather of Mohammed and the patriarch of the Muslims – if they had been allowed to continue to live together in their father’s home. What would our world look like today if the one named Laughter, and the one named God Hears, had been allowed to continue playing together and struggling together as part of one family?
Wherever we find ourselves today, isn’t it good news to hear that God’s story of great nations and promises and blessing are not only to the descendants of Abraham through Isaac; not only to our claim in that promise by our adoption into the chosen people by Jesus’ grace. God has other stories, and sometimes our scriptures point us to them. God’s promise to Hagar and care for Ishmael remind us that there are other narratives in which God acts and other promises God makes and keeps. It is good when our own holy texts remind us that chosenness is not the same as exclusiveness!
But even with this good news in the midst of human action, human failing, human desperation – we are invited to look head on at the reason this is a troubling text – even a text of terror for the oppressed and cast off. What of God’s action, or inaction at the start? What of the divine complicity with Sarah that gets this whole sequence rolling? What of the word to Abraham approving his abandonment of son and wife? “Do not be distressed about the boy, or about your slave woman. Do whatever Sarah tells you, for it is through Isaac that your line shall be continued.”
Some folks explain God’s action by pointing out that this is God after the rainbow. This is the practical God trying to continue to nurture the Divine Plan in spite of human sin. This is God, wild and unpredictable, but nonetheless the One who is determined and who has promised not to be God without us. This God just lived through Cain and Abel and understands what human families will do when jealousy and fear live under one roof together. This is God working the divine will while leaving room for human action – no matter how undesirable. A wild God and unpredictable, but nonetheless a God who continues to struggle with us and to allow us to struggle with God. Who takes Sarah’s fear and Abraham’s quick and unquestioning ‘obedience’ and Hagar’s desperation and sees and hears and who nevertheless chooses to continue to be God with us.
Is this explanation enough? Does this redeem the text? I wonder. We live into a faith that sometimes does not answer all our questions in an easy way, if at all, for now.
And so, as we wonder and struggle -- Hagar, in your wilderness confusion and despair, lift up your cries and demand a hearing from the God who provides for the widow and orphan – the God who hears and the God who sees. And so Sarah, stretch out your hand, not to cast others away in your fear of losing what you so tenuously have gained, but in welcome and generosity and solidarity, trusting in the God who provides and whose promises are sure and true. And so Abraham, when you imagine you hear the ready assent of God to a way that troubles you, ask again, listen again – bargain and plead for your child and his mother at least as passionately as you once did for those cities filled with strangers.
And now to the God who is God with us, the God whose ear is open to our cries, and whose eye is on the sparrow, and upon the descendants of Hagar and Sarah, and even upon us, be glory and honor now and forever.
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Come, Labor On |
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Matthew 9:35-10:23
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Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
June 15, 2008 |
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Today’s Gospel reading is one of the longer passages we encounter as we follow Jesus’ ministry from manger through cross to empty tomb. And it’s packed with action and advice. Matthew wants us first to know just who Jesus has gathered together. He gives us the names of the twelve, listing them in pairs as if somehow they might be complementary personalities: Simon and Andrew, James and John, even lesser known Simon the Cananaean and infamous Judas Iscariot, the betrayer.
And at their helm is Jesus – teacher, preacher, and healer, one who cured “every disease and every sickness.” Jesus’ ministry, we are told, grew out of his deep love and compassion for the world. Whenever he saw suffering or need he saw an opportunity to proclaim the reality of God’s Kingdom. He saw the people around him as people “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” And so Jesus takes on that role, an identity that in the Gospel of John would become synonymous with his essence as Emmanuel, “God With Us,” the Word made flesh. He becomes for us The Good Shepherd who knows his sheep and whose sheep know him.
He also knows that much good can happen in the world – the harvest is plentiful – the only problem being a need for workers in the field. So he calls together the twelve to go with him into the world. It’s as our hymn urges us, as well – Come, labor on. Who dares stand idle on the harvest plane/While all around us waves the golden grain? Indeed, the people who need saving are like a harvest waiting to be reaped. Jesus calls first for prayers to God, the “Lord of the harvest,” to provide the necessary workers.
Can you hear in that plaintive prayer his call to us? We should. We are the workers Jesus calls, those who have responded to his voice as lost sheep to the shepherd showing us the way. We are the ones who can make a difference.
A number of you have asked me since last Sunday what kind of response we had to session’s challenge to the rest of us to support the Interfaith Hospitality Network’s effort to provide temporary housing for homeless families in Delaware County. I am happy to report that the response was enthusiastic and plentiful. People came forth as leaders, as workers, as financial contributors, as organizers, as idea people. And not just the usual suspects. I heard a somewhat cynical voice predicting that it would be the same people responding who always do. But this cause has brought forth some new leadership. We will go forth with the project. We will make it work.
But making something work for Jesus’ sake in the world is not always a given. “See,” Jesus says in today’s reading, “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” What an intriguing call! Jesus was never naïve. He knew the nature of the world. He urges us to be wise in the ways of the world, to be aware of its pitfalls and temptations. At the same time he wishes for us a continuing innocence that sees the beauty of the flower despite the thorns that accompany it. Wise as serpents, innocent as doves. The follower of Jesus should be no one’s fool. Live in the world, but do not be overcome by it. In but not of. This warning lies at the heart of our calling.
But who are we to be called? What credentials do we hold? What special gifts do we bear? It might be good to ponder what qualified the original twelve of Jesus’ followers for the work they were called to do. Someone considering this imagined writing a letter to Jesus as if from a management consultant firm, advising him of the nature of the twelve disciples he chose. It’s addressed simply to Jesus, Son of Joseph, Woodcrafter Carpenter Shop, Nazareth, Galilee.
Dear Sir:
Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve men you have picked for managerial positions in your new organization. All of them have now taken our battery of tests. We have not only run the result through our computer, but have also arranged personal interviews for each of them with our psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant.
The profiles of all tests are included. You will want to study each of them carefully. As part of our service, we make some general statements.
It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in background, educational and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. They do not have the team concept. We would recommend that you continue to search for persons of experience in managerial ability and proven capability.
Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. Andrew has absolutely no qualities of leadership. The two brothers, James and John, place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas demonstrates a questioning attitude that would tend to undermine morale. We feel that it is our duty to tell you that Matthew has been blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James the son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus have radical leanings and registered high manic-depressive scores.
Only one of the candidates shows great potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness who meets people well and has a keen business mind. He has contacts in high places and is highly motivated, ambitious and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man. All the other profiles are self-explanatory.
We wish you every success in your new venture.
The letter is signed: Sincerely yours, Jordan Management Consultants, Jerusalem, Judea.
Guess we don’t always know everything, do we? Especially when it comes to how God may use all gifts for the good purpose of the Kingdom and that some who have all it takes and more may be overcome by the ways of the world to betray all the good that was meant to be. How, then, are we to hear the call and respond as the followers we would proclaim to be?
Karl Rahner, one of the great theologians of our time, contends that we suffer in our age from what he calls “a meaningless complex with its associated feelings of emptiness.” An existential crisis, if you will. A feeling that what needs to be accomplished for the good of all is insurmountable considering the little each of us can bring to the effort. Sure, the twelve were called by Jesus to go out into the world. But what does an “apostolic vocation” have to do with us? What does preaching and healing in Christ’s name have to do with us – practitioners in business, education, law, and medicine? How does a parent, a CEO, a webpage builder, an administrative assistant become a productive disciple of Christ? What’s the connection?
One of the early church fathers, Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, maintained that Christ gave two ways of life to the Church. There was what he called the “perfect life” on the one hand and the “permitted life” on the other. The “perfect life” was intended for the overtly and conspicuously religious – clergy, monks, and nuns. These callings were ordained for life and were a “higher” way of Christian living. The “permitted life,” on the other hand, was for Christians who lived and moved in and around the secular world – people who conducted an active life in commerce, or as farmers, fishermen, or craftsmen.
With the Reformation, Martin Luther burst the bubble of conceit around this entrenched, hierarchical notion of “higher” and “lower” ways of being Christian. Returning to Scripture for authority, he emphasized that Jesus was a carpenter, the Apostles were fishermen, and Paul was a tent maker. No “division of holiness” here, Luther maintained. God and the angels smile, he said nearly five hundred years ago, when a man changes the diapers of his infant child. What a nice thought on this Father&# | |
