38Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”
41But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”(NRSV)
The message of hospitality oozes from the pages of Luke’s gospel like salty moisture from a sea breeze. Just think about the expansive array of boundary-defying hospitality Jesus demonstrates: He breaks bread with tax collectors and other unsavory characters. He welcomes Gentiles and lepers. He feeds a community of five thousand with food for a family of five. He tells parables about forgiving fathers and wedding banquets open to impoverished strangers. He says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” (Lk. 6:27-28) And he embodies all of that by forgiving everyone who betrays and executes him.
Hospitality is more than “making nice.” Hospitality is holy water. It’s living water. It’s Sacrament. Hospitality is life itself, because it means sharing ourselves gratefully, generously, and fearlessly with others – especially, says Jesus, with the outsider and the outcast.
Immediately prior to today’s text, Jesus tells his unforgettable parable of the good Samaritan. The Church has tended to treat that story like a stuffed animal, something soft and cuddly. For Jews in 30AD, though, it’s an oxymoron and a scandal. In their minds, there is simply no such thing as a good Samaritan. Jesus crosses rivers and topples walls with this subversive parable.
After telling that story, he and his disciples enter an unnamed town where Martha welcomes them into her home. Then, like any good, first-century woman, she begins to prepare a meal for her guests.
The scene unfolds this way: At least thirteen men enter Martha’s home, at her invitation. They sit on the floor of the main room, likely the only room, and await Martha’s offering. The only other woman mentioned in the story is Mary, Martha’s sister. And Mary sits on the floor with the disciples. With the men! That’s not her place. In that culture, the limited and limiting role of women is to serve the men – with food and children. Because of that, women aren’t offered the privilege of education, and ignorance keeps them “in their place.”
Jesus doesn’t just permit a situation of revolutionary hospitality; he creates it. He encourages a woman, in a houseful of hungry men, to sit with those men, to think and to learn right alongside them, leaving the only other woman present to feed all fifteen people by herself. And while it would have made his disciples uncomfortable, it infuriates Martha. She complains to Jesus, pleads with him to tell Mary to get back where she belongs.
In The Message, Eugene Peterson renders Jesus’ response to Martha this way: “Martha, dear Martha, you’re fussing far too much and getting yourself worked up over nothing. One thing only is essential, and Mary has chosen it—it’s the main course, and won’t be taken from her.”
That’s not the response Martha expects, and certainly not what she wants to hear. She wants Jesus to shame Mary back into her place. And all Martha gets is a cryptic summons to seek the one and only essential thing…which is…
This is the point where the sheep in the dusty pen crowd around the trough expecting the shepherd to set the hay down right where they can get it. But do we even have to wonder what the one and only essential thing is?
The reason Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan is because a teacher of the law asks him what works he must perform to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers by asking, What does scripture say? And the man quotes the Shema: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
There you go, says Jesus.
When Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself, he’s saying to look for and to see yourself in others the way God sees you. Care for your neighbor with all the energy, compassion, and grace of God. Offer to everyone the hospitality that would make you feel truly welcomed, valued, safe, and beloved.
In Martha’s home, Mary is receiving from Jesus that kind of hospitality. And it’s not just a wonder to behold; it’s a disrupting scandal. But Jesus sees Mary through his own eyes. He sees himself in her, so, to love her is to love himself, and to love God more fully. And Mary, seeing herself through Jesus’ eyes, embraces Jesus before her and the Christ within her. She remains at Jesus’ feet, sharing in his love as one whose sole purpose in life is to love and to be loved.
Isn’t that the one and only essential thing?
Isn’t that the “main course” around the table?
Our son, Ben, was born in a birthing center in the small town of Rincon, GA, just north of Savannah. The night of Ben’s birth was the night Hurricane Hugo hit the southern Atlantic coast. The brunt of the storm hit Charleston, SC, but even in Rincon, rain came down in sheets. The wind shook the limbs of the live oaks like a cheerleader shaking pompoms. The storm surge overwhelmed drainage systems and flipped manhole covers like bottle caps. While I was fully and anxiously alert through all of that, Marianne was in her own parallel universe of childbirth. When the storm ended, parenthood had begun.
The midwife let us stay the whole night because of the storm. After Ben was safely with us, I lay down on the bed and slept as soundly as I had ever slept. Marianne stayed awake the entire night, staring at the tiny human being to whom she had given birth, basking not only in his presence, but a kind of love she had, to that point, never experienced.
My dad called that holy staring back and forth between mother and child the “primary relationship,” and it is essential for a newborn’s development. Some call it “the mirroring gaze”1 and apply it to a person sitting with God in silent, contemplative prayer.
Sitting at the feet of Jesus, Mary is caught up in “the mirroring gaze.” Jesus lives that kind of deep-sighted hospitality, and it’s scandalous because he leaves no one out of the intimacy he enjoys with God, whom he calls, “Abba,” the Aramaic equivalent of daddy. Imagine how much Jesus must want Martha to want to join them in the “gaze” of hospitality.
Nations, and other communities unbound to grace may claim exemption from showing hospitality. For Jesus-followers, though, that scandalous virtue is nothing short of sacrament. Indeed, it is the reason we practice open communion, welcoming – without prejudice – all who are present to the Lord’s table, and into “primary relationship” with him, thus deepening everyone’s practice of “the mirroring gaze.”
Being somewhat scandal-averse in an apprehensive world, I’m often tentative when faced with an opportunity to proclaim Jesus’ love. And while I lament my lack of courage, I do trust this to be our essential truth:
To share hospitality as scandalously as Jesus does is to love him, and to love God.
We experience relationship with God by loving each other as Jesus loves us.
And through this holy love, we inhabit, here and now, the kingdom of God – the gift “which will not be taken away from [us].”
Charge/Benediction:Richard Rohr writes: “Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.”2
In recent years, I have, like many others, struggled with the diminishing presence and relevance of the Church in the world. In the face of an uncertain future, I sometimes feel the discouragement so acutely as to imagine finishing out my working years doing something other than “professional ministry.”
When pondering why the Church is losing ground, I can’t get away from how far that we, the ecclesia, the “called out ones,” have simply turned inward. We do need to define ourselves clearly. It just seems to me that we’ve traded the certainty of finite definitions (doctrines, policies, and procedures) for the demands of the much more open-ended path of Jesus-following faith. As important and helpful as creeds, policies, and procedures can be for the Church, they all-too-easily become the focus of our labors to the exclusion of Jesus’ call to live lives of humility, compassion, mercy, justice, and peace, all of which are components of Love.
My moments of discouragement disturb me, but I have, so far, managed to return to my conviction that the Church, for all its petty shortcomings and perilous idolatries, is still the Body of Christ. Who we fundamentally areis not determined by how we explain atonement or perform baptism, but how we embody Resurrection, how we express gratitude, joy, and indignation, how we embrace people (within and beyond our congregations) who suffer from hunger, poverty, grief, trauma, and neglect, and how we care for a planet straining ever more feverishly to sustain all the lives that depend on it.
We are The Church when we trust our whole selves to God, whose Creation teems with such gratuitous beauty and diversity and such heartbreaking anguish as to shout to all with ears to hear that Agape Love transcends every distinction of ethnicity, race, and religion. When we fail to reflect the transforming Love of Jesus, we become his antithesis, not his body. Christians operating such a “church” not only disconnect from the world, they endanger it with loveless judgments and fearful condemnations.
In First John we read these eternally defining words: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:16b-20 – NRSV)
The word “love” has been bandied about so glibly that we often fail to feel its holy gravity pulling us toward all that God calls Beloved. And for the life of me, even when I get bewildered into despair, I can’t think of anyone or anything that gets excluded from God’s Belovedness.
As long as even a few prayer-actioned disciples continue to embody their Belovedness and to seek it in others, the Church will remain. In some form.
35On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.”
36And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 37A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. 38But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
39He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!”
Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
40He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
41And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Back in the mid 1970’s, I was, for about a year, a Boy Scout. I never amounted to much of a scout. I never even made Tenderfoot. I joined for the camping trips. I’ll never forget the weekend we went canoeing on the French Broad River in western North Carolina.
We traveled on a Friday night after school and set up camp by flashlight in some farmer’s field. The next morning, we ate breakfast, cleaned up, and headed for the river where we unloaded our borrowed and beat-up aluminum canoes. We put on those old cumbersome, orange, yoke-style life-vests with the mildew smell manufactured into them.
Our scoutmaster, Uncle Jack, gathered us around and said, “Listen up! Each canoe must have at least one person with the canoeing merit badge.”
I teamed up with Uncle Jack’s son, David, and a blonde-haired boy whose name and face I don’t remember. When we got into our canoe, David sat up front. The other boy sat in the middle, and I took the stern. We were next to last in line. Behind us, Uncle Jim, the assistant scoutmaster, and Alan Monfalcon, an older scout, brought up the rear of our flotilla.
Now, we were 13-year-old boys, so we were well on our way before we actually brought up the subject of the canoeing merit badge.
“I thought you had it,” I said to David.
“I thought you did,” he said. “You took canoeing at summer camp.”
“Yeah, but I failed it.”
The blonde-haired kid was just as clueless as David and me.
We were an un-merited team, and our sudden loss of confidence made us a disaster waiting to happen.
The section of the French Broad we were floating was smooth and lazy. So, there was no reason to have a proble…until a malevolent tree limb reached down and grabbed David by the collar of his life vest. The stern of the canoe swung around so that we were facing upstream. All three of us squirmed at once, in varying directions. And all I remember was the canoe pitching port side and greenish brown river water pouring in.
When I hit the water, I went into a full Poseidon Adventure panic. I completely forgot my canoe-mates, but I did remember, from my failed canoeing merit badge course, to stay with the canoe. It had flotation in either end. So, I lunged for the capsized canoe. And the moment my weight hit, that old hunk of aluminum sank – without even a gurgle.
To me, the river’s gentle current became a homicidal torrent sweeping me downstream. “Help!” I yelled “Help!”
“Grab something!” someone yelled.
I grabbed for a branch hanging over the water, and it broke off in my hand. A few feet later, I caught hold of a root near the riverbank. David, who’d already managed to get out of the water, scrambled toward me. He picked up a stick and held it out to me, but it was water-logged and rotten. And as soon as we both pulled, it broke.
“It’s no use!” I cried. “Save yourself!”
This was not my finest hour.
The next thing I knew, I was standing on the bank next to David. He had pulled me out. Uncle Jim and Alan had seen to the blonde-haired kid.
David put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,”
“You sure?” he said.
“Well yeah. I’m sure.”
“But Allen, you were hollering, ‘I’m going to die! I’m going to die!’”
“I was?”
“You don’t remember?”
I still don’t remember.
Everyone survived, and we eventually recovered the canoe, but in that terrifying moment, I was convinced, apparently, that I was going to die. Had Jesus been there, I might have screamed at him, “Do you not care that we are perishing?”
Mark wants us to feel the overwhelming fear of that night on the lake. Remember, he’s writing for Christians suffering persecution. They’re watching Roman soldiers storm Jerusalem and dismantle the Temple. For first-century Christians, following Jesus is like being in a boat, at night, in a deadly tempest. If Jesus is there at all, he’s asleep, and those who are awake and trying to pilot the boat don’t have the merit badge.
For centuries, the Church has found its salvation not in Jesus nearly so much as in its reliance on kings and nations who have claimed to protect it in exchange for the kind of outward loyalty feudal lords demanded from serfs. The world has seen through the duplicity of such self-serving fealty. And now, instead of working together to proclaim and inhabit the new reality of Resurrection, many Christians are circling their wagons into disparate camps of uniformity and conformity, arguing with and insulting each other. And as we lose members and relevance, as our own boat struggles to stay afloat, many of us cry, Jesus! Don’t you care that we’re dying?
Oh, my, Jesus says to us. What has happened to your faith?
Jesus says these words after having calmed the storm. Let’s play with that detail.
We’ve just been bailing water and hanging on for dear life in a threatening storm. When Jesus finally wakes up, he does whatever he does, and everything settles down. Then he sees that we’re no less scared now than when the winds and waters were raging.
“Why are you afraid?” he asks. “Do you [now float on peaceful waters and] still have no faith?”
Fear doesn’t always subside quickly. When a friend of mine back in Mebane, NC overcame years of alcoholism, he, his wife, and daughter were all delivered from a demon. And it nearly cost them their family. Early in his sobriety, my friend was irritable and angry. More than once, his wife asked if she could just go and buy him a case of beer.
Why was she afraid?
It’s not uncommon for people who have sought, prayed for, and found deliverance from an abusive relationship to stay in or return to the nightmare.
Why are they afraid of?
When the women get to the tomb on that first Easter morning, a young man greets them with wonderful news: Jesus is not here. He’s alive! The women turn and run, says Mark, “for they were afraid.”
Why? What happened to their faith?
The story of Jesus calming the storm is not about supernatural power. It’s about the dreadful wonder of redemption. When we expect God’s deliverance to return us to some sort of happy Eden, the story of Jesus calming the storm suggests that we really don’t understand what deliverance offers – and costs. His deliverance doesn’t make things like they used to be. He delivers us from old arrangements based on merit and power. He saves us from old fears and prejudices. And letting go of all that can be as traumatic as a near-death experience. That’s why the metaphor of death and resurrection, dying to the old self and rising, by unmerited grace, to a new reality is the central metaphor in Christianity – as it is, in one way or another, in most enduring religious traditions.
For Christians, though, faith, hope, and love are familiar words, and they call us to an entirely new, and still mostly-distrusted way of living in a panicked, cynical world grappling for dominance.
Remember, though, the boat ride was Jesus’idea. Come on, he says, “Let’s go across to the other side.”
“The other side” has nothing to do with geography. It’s about the ongoing journey of discipleship. And when the journey proves dangerous, the disciples cry out, “Do you not care that we are perishing?”
And through word and deed, Jesus says, in effect, Perish away, my friends. We’re crossing over to a new life, a Sunday life.
51When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.52And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him;53but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.
54When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
55But he turned and rebuked them.56Then they went on to another village.
57As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
58And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
59To another he said, “Follow me.”
But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
60But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
61Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”
62Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”(NRSV)
Some call it The Seven Last Words of the Church: “We’ve never done it that way before.” When a congregation or denomination gets so ensconced in familiarity, when it commits itself to policies, procedures, and dogmas rather than to following Jesus in grateful, prayer-actioned love for God, neighbor, and earth, it creates static idols who are just projections of its own desires for control and comfort. And when focusing most of its energies on itself, that community is just digging a deep hole in soft sand. Eventually the sides will cave in and bury them alive. But hey, they tell themselves, at least it’s easy digging!
Jerusalem Jews and Samaritan Jews don’t get along. Each group is used to doing things their own habitual ways. And as far as Jesus’ disciples are concerned, it’s always open season on Samaritans. So, when a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, the disciples say, “Just give us the word, Jesus, and we’ll give ‘em hell!”
Luke says that Jesus “turned and rebuked” his disciples. He doesn’t record specific words, but I like to imagine Jesus saying something about giving people hell being rather inconsistent with the Gospel.
We can’t judge the disciples too harshly, though. Going back as far as Elijah’s mass murder of the prophets of Baal after Elijah called down fire at Mt. Carmel, as far as Joshua’s genocidal order at Jericho, and God’s total destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, hellish vengeance accurately describes “the way they’d always done it.” But when Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem,” he embarks on an entirely new spiritual path, a path on which neither vengeance nor violence belong. And that makes discipleship far more difficult than digging in soft sand.
Along the way someone says to Jesus, I’ll go with you.
Will you? says Jesus. Come on, then, but be ready to rely on the providence of God the way refugees rely on the kindness of strangers.
Jesus encounters two more potential disciples. Both of them declare their intent to follow Jesus, and being faithful Jews, they both say that they’ll join him just as soon as they have fulfilled their family obligations under the Law. We can almost hear each man say to himself, Jesus will really be pleased to see how dedicated I am to the way we’ve always done it since Moses. So, imagine their shock when Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead…[and] no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
When Jesus “sets his face” toward Jerusalem, he calls all disciples to do the same. So, St. Francis leaves family wealth and influence behind and lives in solidarity with the poor. Susan B. Anthony, a devout Quaker, wades into the anxiety of the post-Civil War years to lead a movement for equal voting rights for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Martin Luther King writes and delivers his prophetic and timeless I Have a Dream speech. Such followers set their own faces and join the Jesus journey, a journey from which there is no turning back.
John Rankin was born in February 1793 in Dandridge, TN.1As a young adult, he went to seminary and became a Presbyterian minister. Not known for his gifts as a public speaker, Rankin struggled as a preacher in his first church, Jefferson County Presbyterian Church in what is now Jefferson City, TN. As he matured, though, he found his authentic voice as a fervent abolitionist. After Rankin preached his views, his session told him that if he planned to preach against slavery ever again, he should go ahead and leave Tennessee. Unwilling to take his hands off the plow, Rankin decided to move his family to the free-state of Ohio.
On the way, Rankin happened upon the abolitionist congregation of Concord Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, KY, about fifty miles below the Ohio border. The congregation was looking for a pastor, so it was a match made in heaven. For four years, Rankin and the Concord Church worked to welcome, minister to, and even educate slaves. Violent mobs eventually forced Rankin to sneak his family across a frigid Ohio River, under the cover darkness, on New Year’s Eve 1821. In Ripley, Ohio, Rankin continued to preach against slavery, and became a major “conductor” along the Underground Railroad.
After the Civil War, another well-known abolitionist, a New Englander named Henry Ward Beecher, was asked Who ended slavery? Beecher said, “John Rankin and his sons did.”
John Rankin hailed from Jefferson County, TN, just 70 miles south of Jonesborough. Not only that, he attended Washington College, right here in Washington County. And not only that, his teacher, mentor, and, eventually, grandfather-in-law, was the Rev. Samuel Doak, another openly-abolitionist Presbyterian minister, who also happened to be the founding pastor of Hebron Presbyterian Church – which today we call Jonesborough Presbyterian Church. Rankin and Doak, along with many others, set their faces – however imperfectly – toward a calling bigger than the way we’ve always done it.
You and I are direct descendants of Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, John Rankin, Samuel Doak, St. Francis of Assisi, Paul, Peter, and anyone else who accepted Jesus’ challenge to set their faces toward a life that runs counter to humanity’s all-too-familiar scheme of pride, greed, and vengeance. Those things define the way we’ve always done it, because they define the nature of human sin.
The world is never reformed or renewed by chronic commitment or hopeless resignation to the way things have always been. It’s reformed and renewed by individuals and communities who see what’s before them, and who imagine what’s possible when they work for the benefit of others and of the whole. As followers of Jesus, as Easter people, we have been liberated from the ways of selfishness and despair so that we might live the new and renewing life of God’s household in the midst of all that feels stagnant, hopeless, and even threatening. As disciples, we’re like Abram whom God calls to leave all that feels comfortable and familiar.
“Go from your country and your kindred,” says God, “…and I will bless you…so that in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3)
God’s blessedness comes upon us not as reward for good works, not as escape from illness and suffering, and not as dominance in any form. It comes upon us as God’s call to follow Jesus. So, to live our God-given blessedness means living in relationship with God by living in relationships of gratitude, care, and stewardship. It means disciplining ourselves to look for, to see, to cherish, and preserve the image of God in every person and in all Creation.
“Follow me,” says Jesus, who then leads us faithfully, lovingly, graciously toward Jerusalem, the City of Peace, where our lives may prove temporary, but our witness and our joy, like God’s kingdom, prove eternal.
Our preparations for VBS reminded me of a story a friend of mine told me some 20 years ago. My friend’s then-second-grade girl sat in the back seat of a car on a bright autumn afternoon, surrounded by her mom, grandmother, and aunt. The child chattered on about Sunday school. Then she stopped and said, “You know, I just want to get more things about God into my head.”
Through a little gentle prodding, the adults learned that the girl wanted more stories about God in her head.
“That’s great!” said the grandmother, feeding the fire. “And you know what else is neat? When you read a Bible story one time, say when you’re young, or happy, or upset, it means one thing to you. And when you read it again later, it can mean something completely different to you. That’s how God’s Word is still so alive for me after all these years.”
“That’s right,” said the girl’s mother. “Maybe that’s part of why there are so many different denominations and so many different ways people worship and talk about God. We’ve all read the same stories, but with different stuff in our heads, different thoughts and concerns.”
“Hmm,” said the girl. “And then when we die we find out the real truth.”
Falling off a child’s tongue “the real truth” has a happy, cozy ring to it. Yet can become a seductive mire for those who believe that they have actually found it.
I find it liberating to be reminded that the “real truth” is something that none of us can get fully into our heads just yet. For now, the touchstone of truth is story, those wonderful creations of images and actions, characters and relationships, all brought together through human words to reveal some piece of the “real truth.” And while stories do get into our heads, even more do they get into our hearts, working their magic even when we aren’t thinking about them.
Our tradition holds that God chose a people (Israel) and a son (Jesus of Nazareth) through whom to be revealed. And perhaps this is so because God, a person, is best mediated through story, not through policies, procedures, and doctrines.
So, if we ever think we know God, if we ever decide that we have the “real truth” stowed away in our heads, may the story of one little girl’s spiritual curiosity renew our own eagerness to listen and grow. May her story re-call us into the storied quest for meaning and hope that we call the Christian faith.
2This is the story of the family of Jacob…3Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. 4But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.
5Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. 6He said to them, “Listen to this dream that I dreamed…the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
10But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him, and said to him, “What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow to the ground before you?” 11So his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
12Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. 13And Israel said to Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem?…Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.”
So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. 18They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. 19They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. 20Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
21But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.”22Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him.”
23So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore…25Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead…
26Then Judah said to his brothers, “…27Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. 28When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt. (NRSV)
Joseph, the firstborn of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel, enters the world as a favored son.
Try to imagine being Joseph. You grow up coddled by your father. After your mother dies giving birth to your little brother, your dad focuses on you all the more. As a young man, you must try to become yourself while carrying your father’s hopes and dreams, and your mother’s memory. You carry the burden of several lives, and only one of them is yours. Still, you can do almost no wrong. So, for all that’s truly wonderful about you, you are insufferably self-centered.
Now, try to imagine being one of Joseph’s brothers. Imagine feeling less loved than that spoiled brat. You’ve been a good son, but because your mother wasn’t Rachel, you feel as if you’ve been bred as part of a workforce the way a mule is bred to be part of a team. And when your father gives Joseph that splendid coat, it’s salt in your wounds.
Jacob’s family is unmistakably human. And its dysfunction is part of what makes the story real. The human family is always both broken and loving.
Reading through Chapter 37, we notice something else, something missing. There’s no mention of the Bible’s main character. Wherever God may be in this story, God is not being talked about, much less talking. So, this whole sleazy deal will have to play itself out before we can see where – if anywhere at all – God is lurking about, transforming brokenness into wholenes. And through it all, the naively arrogant Joseph contends with his brothers who become bitter, and mean as cornered snakes.
Again, that struggle makes the story real, because when we leave God out of our stories, or when we twist our perceptions and language so as to reduce God to a servant of our purposes, love gets diminished. Psychoanalyst and author, Robert Johnson, says that hate is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love, he says, is power.1 When one person or group seeks to control another person or group for selfish gain, love is the first casualty.
When mired in desperate quests for the fleeting certainties of power and control, and when anxiety about personal privilege and tribal dominance govern our actions and attitudes, we cannot love as we are loved. And perhaps that’s because what we’re trying to do is to seize absolute control – Godlike control – over our own lives. And isn’t that the very point of the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:1-7), or the people of Babel building the tower into the heavens (Gen. 11:1-9)? Aren’t they all trying to become “like God”? (Gen. 3:5)
If, the opposite of love is power, and if, as John says, “God is love” (1John 4:16), then to impose ourselves on others does violence to the image of God in all of us. In Genesis 37, the entire family of Jacob seems unaware that they’re in the midst of learning this lesson.
As Joseph lies in that pit, he probably thinks that he’s reached rock bottom. Before long, though, his brothers will sell him to a band of Ishmaelite traders for twenty pieces of silver. If, at that point, the brothers choose to deal equitably with one another, two pieces of silver is each man’s reward for his role in kidnapping Joseph, conspiring to commit fratricide, and then, after thinking better of premeditated murder, devising an elaborate lie to hide their treachery from their father.
So, here’s the situation at the end of Genesis 37:
Joseph, who has exploited his father’s favor, finds himself the property of some vagabonds. In a matter of hours, he goes from privileged son to powerless slave.
Ten young men have terrorized their brother and sold him into bondage. And they deceive their father about their actions.
And an old, careworn Jacob must mourn another death he helped to create.
To banish love and peace from community life, or to exile these holy gifts to some knickknack shelf with other pretty words and decorations, is to lose awareness of God’s dynamic presence and energy in our lives and in the Creation.
For all who have ever wondered if the very idea of God is pure fantasy, or if God has left us to the arbitrary mechanics of chance, we can find ourselves in this story. Maybe we feel ripped from a place of comfort and privilege, and bound to some outside force. Maybe we wrestle with silent remorse because we can’t confess an act that causes suffering. Maybe we mourn the irreplaceable loss of someone we loved or of some great hope. Whatever the case, when driven by selfish concerns, love and peace disappear.
Now, some of us have probably jumped ahead. We’re already hearing a powerful Joseph say to his groveling brothers, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:19-20)
We may know how this story ends, but when we’re caught in the midst of the God-drought of our own Chapter 37, we can’t see it. And when we fear the worst, it’s natural to fall into despair where love and peace are as absent as God seems to be. It’s easy to give up in that place. It’s easy to decide that only the strong and the proud survive, and that only violence wins. But pride and violence are tools of fear and vengeance, not gifts of the Spirit.
To those who follow Jesus, that desperate place can become an Emmaus Road, a place to experience firsthand the power of Resurrection. We experience it by surrendering ourselves to it the way an experienced paddler who falls out of a kayak turns feet first and gives herself to the flow of the river. She doesn’t know what will happen, but she knows that if she lies back and uses her feet to avoid the obvious dangers, the current will eventually deliver her to calmer waters. And if it doesn’t, she probably knows that her life would have been diminished by not having entered the river at all.
When you feel as if you must declare Chapter 37 in your own life, when you feel as if God has abandoned you to chance and chaos, that is the very place it’s most important to show love and to speak peace. You stand in a place in which, through the power of Resurrection, you can experience, and bear witness to, the love and the peace of the living, redeeming, purpose-creating God.
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (NRSV)
Clichés about suffering abound in both biblical and colloquial traditions. You’ve heard the kind of thing:
“All things work together for good for those who love God.”
“Give thanks in all circumstances.”
“God never gives you more than you can handle.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“We’re strong in the broken places.”
Some of us take great comfort in proverbs like these. Indeed, I proclaim the benefit of living gratefully. And while medical science has proven that a bone is not made stronger by having been broken, an experience of suffering can certainly give a community or a person new strength through new perspective. Having said that, I still will never accept the Everything happens for a reason or God never gives you more than you can handle platitudes. In my opinion, those are just denials in sanctimonious clothing.
When Paul encourages the church in Rome to understand that suffering leads them through character-building endurance and all the way to hope, he echoes a strong-in-the-broken-places theology. And he’s trying to do far more than soothe the aches and pains of individual lives while they try to “get to heaven.” That approach to scripture tries to domesticate the holy Mystery of God into something for bumper stickers and greeting cards. Paul’s teaching is part and parcel of his effort to lead the early church community away from both despair and pride.
In the first fifteen verses of Romans, Paul goes through all the niceties of salutation and his prayer of thanksgiving for his readers. With verse sixteen he gets down to the business of altering an ages-old, religious worldview. He challenges the Roman congregation, made up of devoted Jews who are now following Jesus, to accept uncircumcised, Roman Gentiles as equal partners in the body and work of Christ. Paul is calling into question old notions of who’s in and who’s out, of who decides and why. He knows that calling Jews to open the doors of the Church wider than the Temple doors under the Mosaic law is going to bend some of his readers to a breaking point. Moving from a life of law-based rewards and retributions to a life in the open-ended realm of grace may liberate the community, but that liberation comes at a cost. To quote another common but accurate cliché, The truth will set you free; but it’ll kill you first.
Paul’s challenge to the church at Rome wells up from lessons he learned the hard way, namely that following Jesus is not some easy formula for a happy and healthy life. To the contrary, following Jesus means just that:Followinghim. And Jesus leads us into the anguish and the ambiguities of human life. Following Jesus means trusting the path of Jesus’ love, and sharing it with others. It means speakingtruth to the people to whom Jesus spoke it. That includes speaking truth to power – which cannot accept Jesus’ truth as good news, because his truth doesn’t build nations, armies, and stock exchanges. Jesus’ truth proclaims the kingdom of God.
In our faith tradition, the kingdom of God represents the most essential nature of reality, but power and wealth are ambivalent toward the kingdom. If power and wealth can use, the Church, the Christian institution, to manipulate people into killing and dying to protect the supremacy of the strong and privileged, then they will, like the Emperor Constantine, grant the Church favored status. And since the days of Constantine, the Church has, willingly and often, adapted itself to the shielding vocabularies and symbols of many nations. While the Church has avoided much suffering that way, it has also surrendered its identity as truly faith-based institution. By contrast, when the Church really follows Jesus, when it proclaims the kingdom by loving and serving God before all else, and by working non-violently for peace and justice, then wealth and power have always perceived God’s kingdom as a threat to be opposed and, when necessary, oppressed.
Paul knows that communities who proclaim God’s kingdom almost always suffer for it in some way. He’s lived on both sides of that experience. He has caused that suffering and endured it. And he doesn’t want to lose any Christian community to sentimentality, selfishness, or nationalism.
Preacher, you’re gone to meddling, again.
I understand. Sometimes I don’t much want to hear what I think a text is calling me to say, either. But try to imagine how the early church would have heard Paul saying that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
Modern, first-world ears tend to hear most things from inside the blinders of individualism. Why should Ihave to do this or that? What’s in it for me? We ask such things when faced with something not of our own choosing, or something potentially unpleasant. And who could blame individual Christians in first-century Rome who said that there was nothing “in it” for them? Nothing but suffering, anyway. Remember, Paul writes his suffering-to-hope letter to a community of Christians for whom faithfulness to Jesus could mean dying as lion-fodder to the bloodthirsty delight of powerful and wealthy Romans.
As fundamentally evil as that is, the faith to which Paul calls Christians is evidenced not by a rise to conquering power, not by securing a lives of privilege, but by intentionally living a life faithful to Jesus, even in the face of worldly threats. And a Jesus-lifeis lived in community as a witness to the power of Resurrection. Now, Resurrection doesn’t end suffering; it redeems the relentless and otherwise purposeless suffering around us and within us.
That’s not to say that everything happens for a reason. It is to say that God is not proven weak or, even dis-proved by the reality of suffering. Love is never overwhelmed by the world’s rampant selfishness, violence, and despair. In following Jesus, we create communities who embody Jesus’ own commitment to feeding and clothing the poor, praying with the sick, weeping with those who grieve, speaking up for those who’ve been told that their lives don’t matter, and to worshiping God and God alone, the one who makes all things new. God makes all things new not, as nations have tried to no avail to do, by coercive force, but by the love that God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – has poured out for us. God’s love makes us one community, one body, and sends us out to live as a blessing in and for all Creation.
Suffering that is endured with love produces within us, individually and collectively, the character of love. And love always lives in hope. I would define hope as the active and determined commitment to love.
We are merely witnesses to that love. So even when we feel defeated and hopeless, love, as Paul tells the Corinthians, abides. Love remains. Love cannot be defeated, because God is love.
Genesis 11 marks the end of what biblical scholars call the “pre-history.” It includes the two versions of creation, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, the flood, and God’s covenant with Noah. In Genesis 10, we hear of the global dispersion Noah’s sons – Japheth, Ham, and Shem. The purpose of that chapter is to affirm the diversity of families, languages, and nations of the world. The last verse of Genesis 10 reads, “These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” (Gen. 10:32)
After all that, Genesis 11 reads like a random cut-and-paste in some frat-boy’s unedited term paper that he threw together the night before it was due. Listen for God’s Word.
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. (NRSV)
In the space between Genesis 10 and Genesis 11, we jump from humankind expanding to the entire known world, speaking all sorts of languages, and occupying all sorts of nations, to everyone clustered in one place speaking “one language [with all] the same words.” At the end of the pre-history, the nations destroy their uniquenesses. They build a city and begin constructing a tower that will reach to the heavens.
Come on,they say, let’s make a name for ourselves!
This makes the anthropomorphic God of the pre-historic tradition start wringing his hands. He turns to whomever it is that this human-imaged God has around him, and whose help he apparently needs at the moment, and says Oh no, if the people keep this up, they’ll be so powerful and proud, we won’t be able stand them. We have to stop this! Come on, let’s go stir things up and confuse them.
Why does God feel like all this cooperation is such a bad thing? Well, like Adam and Eve, they’re committing the most common of all sins: They’re trying to become God. And they’re going at it the way most nations and institutions inevitably do. Looking, sounding, and acting pretty much the same, they interpret homogeneity as an entitlement to stockpile power and pride. Then, as most powerful and proud human communities and institutions do, they fall into a pathological certainty that they have earned and own some kind of divine favor. So their power becomes increasingly violent and their mind- and heart-numbing pride reaches ever higher.
The building of the mythic tower of Babel stands as an unforgettable metaphor for humankind’s fear of and resistance to the God-willed beauty, and now the God-protected permanence of diversity in the Creation. In his commentary on Genesis, Walter Brueggemann writes, “the fear of scattering expressed in [Genesis 11] is resistance to God’s purpose for creation. The peoples do not wish to spread abroad but want to stay in their own safe mode of homogeneity. The tower and city are attempts at self-serving unity which resists God’s” purposeful scattering of humankind.1
Brueggemann then defines the unity to which God calls us in biblical texts. “The unity willed by God is that all of humankind shall be in covenant with [God]…The scattering God wills is that life should be peopled everywhere by [God’s] regents, who are attentive to all parts of creation, working in [God’s] image to enhance the whole creation.”2
For Brueggemann, the unity of the people at work on the tower of Babel reveals their fear and idolatry. Any time human beings work that hard to build monuments of self-exaltation, or monuments of exclusion of the other, we’re building doomed towers of Babel. We’re worshiping ourselves rather than God. We’re trying to impose and protect an artificial order of control and conformity. While nations often operate that way, the Church cannot – not without working against God. To be the Church means choosing to live in a new order of things, an order based on God’s people-scattering, speech-tangling, Creation-affirming unity. And that new order is evidenced and driven by something entirely different from monuments, wealth, and worldly power.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. And the usual text for this day is Acts 2, the coming of the Holy Spirit among the disciples in Jerusalem. In that story we find some interesting similarities to the story of the tower of Babel. For starters, all the followers of Jesus, like the people of Babel, are “in one place.” (Acts 2:1b) On top of that, Jerusalem is full of “devout Jews from every nation under heaven.” (2:5) They’ve gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost, the Festival of Weeks, the yearly celebration of wheat harvest. And in Jerusalem, they hear the followers of Jesus, all of them Galilean Jews, speaking of and praising him in a multitude of languages. Acts names fifteen separate nationalities who hear the gospel in their own tongues.
Luke is making the same point that the ancient writers of Genesis make: God is the God of all humankind. All peoples, all nations, all cultures, all languages, and every skin hue imaginable belong to and are beloved by God. God doesn’t merely “tolerate” the diversity of the earth. Having created it, God is in love with it.
Today, the word Pentecostal is associated with a particular style of worship that feels alien and uncomfortable to many “decent and orderly” Presbyterians. And I confess to being one of them, bless my heart. But Pentecostal is a word, indeed a language from which we dare not stray too far. A Pentecostal community intentionally opens itself to the Holy Spirit’s unifying call to scatter into the world with words of mercy and deeds of justice. To be truly Pentecostal is to trust that, come what may, God surrounds and pervades the violent and suffering messiness around us, planting seeds of redemption and harvesting joy.
To celebrate Pentecost as Christians is to celebrate far more than “what God has done for us.” That phrase has been corrupted by the prosperity gospel to mean anything that makes our lives easier, even when our ease comes at the expense of some other person or part of Creation. To celebrate Pentecost is to follow Jesus in declaring with our whole lives – with our political, economic, social, vocational, and recreational choices – what God is doing, in and through us, now, in the power of the Holy Spirit, for the sake of all Creation.
Feeding people at the JAMA food pantry and Loaves and Fishes are Pentecostal acts.
Tending to homeless families at Family Promise is a Pentecostal act.
Working for social and economic justice is a Pentecostal act.
Calling ourselves and others to live in ways that allow the earth and climate to heal is a Pentecostal act.
Whatever we do to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our enemies is always a Pentecostal act.
As a community created by Pentecost, the Church’s purpose is not to build monuments – towers, steeples, walls, and elaborate, sacrosanct doctrines – but to scatter into an idolatrous, wagon-circling world to embody God’s transforming presence, and to give voice to God’s grace.
As we enter the world around us with the heart and mind of Christ, we discover the true unity being offered to us through the only lasting power at work in the world: The power of God’s Holy Spirit.
1Walter Brueggeman, Genesis, in the series Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982. p. 99.
Before we read the text from Acts 11, let’s look back one chapter. In Acts 10, Peter climbs up on a rooftop to pray, and he has a vision. He sees a sheet lowered from heaven, and it’s full of animals that the Hebrew scriptures explicitly label unclean. A voice says, “Get up Peter, kill and eat.” Faithful to his Jewish heritage, Peter interprets the vision as a temptation, not an invitation, so he refuses. This happens two more times, and each time ends with the same pronouncement: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
Peter soon learns that he received this vision as preparation to receive Cornelius, an uncircumcised Gentile, as a full member of the Church. And during Peter’s and Cornelius’ first meeting, the Holy Spirit descends on Cornelius and his family, and they begin praising God.
Peter and the small group of circumcised brothers who are with him are thunderstruck. Having been taught – as a matter of identity and security – to separate themselves from Gentiles, they never expected to welcome such people into the family of faith. But neither could they deny what they were seeing and hearing.
In what was, at the time, an unthinkably radical move, Peter, without hesitation, says to his colleagues, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47)
With that story in mind, let’s read Acts 11.
Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. 2So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, 3saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”
4Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, 5“I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. 6As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ 8But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 10This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven.
11At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. 12The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. 13He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; 14he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’
15And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 16And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”
18When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.” (NRSV)
Did any of that sound familiar? In back-to-back chapters, Luke tells the exact same story. In chapter 10, Luke narrates Peter’s story as it happens. In chapter 11, Peter retells his story to the church council, the circumcised believersin Jerusalem.
There are at least a couple of things in play here. For one, biblical literature often uses repetition as a means to emphasize the theological significance of a teaching or an event.1Luke is making it clear that Peter’s vision of a welcoming and inclusive church is essential to a faithful and a spiritually healthy understanding of God.
The ancient kosher laws did important work. They helped to set the Hebrews apart as a kind of anomaly – a monotheistic culture in a polytheistic world. And Israel’s God got deeply involved in all aspects of Hebrew life – so much so that people were told what kind of animals they could and couldn’t eat, what kind of animals they could and couldn’t use in sacrifices, what kind of fabrics they could and couldn’t wear, and, of course, what kind of people they could and couldn’t welcome and associate with.
While the ancient Hebrews lived as an anomaly, there’s a foreshadowing anomaly in the law, as well. In the midst of all those restrictive laws, that included casting suspicion over all non-Hebrews, God gives specific instruction on dealing with “aliens,” people who cross territorial borders and enter Israelite domain. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 19:33-34) Scripture repeatedly bears witness to God’s expectation that the faith community show hospitality to people from other lands and cultures.
Peter and his fellowcircumcised believerslive in the midst of a growing tension between the laws that set them apart as Jews, and the call to welcome everyone. That tension is growing because the life and teachings of Jesus have made clear that whatever can be achieved through hospitality takes precedent over whatever might be gained by protectionism. One major difference between true and false religion is that true religion offers compassion to those who get labeled otherand treated with suspicion and contempt. False religion tries only to keep itself safe. This lesson had to be learned through repetition – thus the repeated stories of the Pharisees learning it, the disciples learning it, Saul learning it, Ananias learning it, Peter learning it, the circumcised believerslearning it. And now, their stories are teaching us.
That brings us to the second thing in play. As we acknowledged, in chapter 11, Peter tells his personal story, his testimony, to the church council. He shares with his colleagues a transforming experience that called him to break with the legalistic practices of their tradition and accept uncircumcised Gentiles as brothers and sisters in Christ. “Who was I that I could hinder God?” he says. By implication, he’s saying to the entire faith community – then and now – Who are we that we can hinder God?Peter unambiguously summons others to follow him in opening wide the doors of the church – as wide as the arms of Jesus were opened on the cross.
Those who oppose Peter have plenty of scripture to back up arguments against his reformist policy. But Peter doesn’t argue some new doctrine. He tells them a story. Just like Jesus did. Repeatedly. He shares a purely subjective experience as a way to explain his actions and to call his brothers and sisters to a resurrection posture toward the creation.
One commentator on this passage says, “Stories, not arguments, change lives…Generally,” he says, “arguments [and debates] tend only to crystalize differences…to keep two sides apart…[creating] winners and losers.”2Isn’t that the way so much of our culture is dealing with differences now – one “side” trying to beat down people on the other “side,” and not only with arguments but with insults? Stories work differently. They have the power to move us toward rather than away from each other.
I really struggled at this juncture in the sermon. What direction should I take? What kind of illustration would work the best? But there’s just too much going on: immigration, race, climate change, abortion, gun violence, hunger, defense spending. You name it, and our culture is saturated with opponents warring with each other in win-or-lose battles. And on the whole, it seems that most of us are weary of all the reminders about all the things that cause friction and division. So, in spite of the fact that today’s text invites an illustration of the power of storytelling, I’m simply going to challenge us, once again, to listen more carefully and compassionately to each other.
I will say this: the issues – immigration, race, climate change, abortion, gun violence, hunger, defense spending – may be classified as political because elected officials create policies about such things, but for followers of Jesus, they are, at heart, theological/spiritual issues. How we interact with each other as human beings, and how we grapple with our differences as we interact, has everything to do with how we understand God and how we embody Jesus.
Telling our stories honestly, and listening respectfully to others tell theirs, lays the foundation for all the conversations and decisions that follow. Wherever you think you stand on whatever spectrum, if you speak and listen in love, you will be opened further than you expected – maybe further than you wanted. You may or may not change your mind on an issue, but you will have a new perspective. Whatever the case, through that process, you will find yourself closer to God because you will find yourself closer to your neighbor.
1Robert W. Wall in his article Exegetical Perspectivein Feasting on the Word, Year C/Vol. 2. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds. Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2009. P. 451.
2Ibid. But from Stephen D. Jones’ article Homiletical Perspective. P. 453.
22At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter,23and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.
24So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
25Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me;26but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.27My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.28I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.29What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.30The Father and I are one.”(NRSV)
“On Christ the solid rock I stand.” So goes the old hymn.
If only it were that easy.
Has trying to affirm not just the love, power, and justice of God, but the very existence of any kind of Creator ever felt like standing on thin ice? For those of us who have felt that way, maybe it’s because we want from faith in God things that neither faith nor God offer. Then again, maybe the deeper troubles come if we never struggle with faith.
The men who approach Jesus in the temple during the Feast of Dedication are devoted Jewish leaders. They know the Torah backward and forward. They practice and teach their faith. They do look for the Messiah, but do they really hope that Jesus is the Messiah? Or do they want to silence another messianic wannabe? Posers were a dime-a-dozen in that oppressed culture. Whatever the case, the one for whom they wait stands in their midst, and they fail to recognize him. Maybe it’s because they expect only what they want and want only what they expect.
Demanding certainty, these institutional leaders approach Jesus and say, in effect, If you want us to believe that you’re the Messiah, make us believe.
And Jesus says, To this point, I’ve done all I can to show you. But you still don’t believe because you don’t really know what you’re looking or listening for.
Regardless of faith tradition, religious leaders who connect more with institutions and narrowly-focused doctrine than the wonder of the Spirit tend to suffer from a blinding and deafening lack of awareness and imagination. They want faith to be a science, but faith is an art.
Faith sees beauty in the midst of the world’s brutality and decay.
Faith hears the still small voice of God in the midst of life’s uproar and chaos.
Faith hopes in the midst of despair.
Faith trusts what doesn’t even appear to be believable because faith interprets particular human experiences as dynamic relationship with something that defies proof.
As an art, faith is always open and creative, always in motion, always becoming. Faith makes us artists-in-residence in our communities, participants in God’s ongoing creation and re-creation of the world.
When asked about her faith and her work, Mother Teresa once said, “I am a just a pencil in the hand of God.” And when reading the poetry of her life, we hear the Shepherd’s voice. We see his presence – and all this in a woman who struggled constantly with moments when her faith faltered on thin ice.
One of the compelling things about art is that the more we practice a craft, the more we begin to see new things in our own work. And through faith, we can recognize a greater hand at work in our own hands, a bigger heart beating in our own hearts. Had Mother Teresa not poured herself into her work day after day, she might have completely lost connection with God. Perhaps it’s fair to say that her work savedher, and not by earning God’s favor. By remaining in relationship with those in need at her doorstep, she remained in relationship, even if tentatively so, with the one who often seemed so far away.
Jesus understood and taught that same artful awareness. Embracing his oneness with the Father, he recognized and declared that his work was the Father’s work. Being of one creative mind, they fashioned new possibility and new direction in the Creation. Openness to Jesus’ art allowed Zacchaeus to discover gratitude and generosity, and Saul to discover wholeness and vocation, like Michelangelo discovering David in a chunk of marble. But when the critics asked the artist to explain his work, Jesus said, Well, step back and look at it for yourselves. What do you see? What does my work say to you?
Even now, Jesus invites us to decide for ourselves what we see, because naming what we see in him is part of discovering and practicing our own holy art and enjoying the blessings of our practice.
The Monday night book group just finished reading A New Harmonyby John Philip Newell. At the very end of the last chapter Newell talks about the transforming power of finding the object or objects of our love. To discover those people, places, circumstances, or visions for which we are willing to pour ourselves out in love is to experience salvation.1Using Nelson Mandela as an example, Newell says that “many will say that Nelson Mandela saved South Africa. But…Mandela would be the first to say that South Africa saved him. In the people of South Africa he found the object of his love, and in giving himself for them he found his true stature of soul.”2
Though a lifelong member of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, Mandela’s faith was never as conspicuous as that of, say, his colleague Desmond Tutu. Nonetheless, Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help heal a nation torn apart by decades of racially-motivated abuse under apartheid rule.3As such, that commission was a thoroughly Spirit-inspired, faith-based, creative effort to bring peace and wholeness to individuals, communities, and an entire nation. And as its leaders, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and others placed themselves in positions of deep humility under the guidance of God’s infinitely resilient love.
As always, love is the key. Love is the multi-tool of grace. Love is like a brush to the painter, a pen to the writer, clay to the potter, an instrument to the musician, empathy to the actor, and an oven to the cook. Being one with the Father, Jesus shared God’s absolute love for all Creation. And he poured himself out, unstoppably, “even [unto] death,” (Phil. 2:8) to declare his love for all people and all things.
When we find and name the object of our love, and offer our love for the well-being of the Creation, through means consistent with the example of Jesus, we creatively engage our oneness with Christ. And Jesus’ voice speaks through us, just as we have heard and seen it through the self-giving love of others.
“If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
My life is as plain as it gets, says Jesus. Watch and listen.
If you experience faith as thin ice, seek the object of your love. Seek someone or something to which to give yourself, some reason to pour yourself out in compassionate, non-violent love, and watch what happens. Thatis your art. Draw it. Write it. Build it. Plant it. Grow it. Sculpt it. Knead it. Bake it. Knit it. Dance it. Sew it. Sing it. Organize it.
Philip Newell uses the phrase “abandon ourselves to love.”4To “abandon ourselves to love” is to discover our true and deepest voice, the voice which is an echo of the voice of God. To love is to know oneness with God – and thus to know salvation.
When we share ourselves in agape love, everyone and everything wins.
1A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul, John Philip Newell. Jossey-Bass, 2011. Pp. 168
Jabbok in the Foothills 