Scripture for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost includes Amos 6:1a, 4-7; I Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
It is no accident that the scripture readings assigned in the church’s high stewardship season include Jesus’s parables about money, wealth, and management. Today we also hear the prophet Amos and the apostle Paul weighing-in on what matters most to them.
As parish leaders gather around the table to find ever-new and ever-old ways to engage us all in the twin tracks of supporting the life and work of the church, on the one hand, and supporting the personal spiritual practice of adventurous sharing, on the other, today’s readings come along like gifts from heaven.
Amos, writing several hundred years before the days of our Gospel, sounds the alarm warning “those who are at ease in Zion, and… who feel secure on Mount Samaria…”, who pamper themselves, indulge every appetite for the finest, most luxurious and expensive sensory experiences, but are not grieved by the ruin of society around them, and are not motivated to lift a finger to help their neighbors who have so little. Alas for them, declares Amos, for “the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.”
I’m going to guess we don’t have many reveling loungers sitting in our churches on Sunday. But we do live in a culture fascinated by such revelry, a culture that seems to aspire to serious lounging. Perhaps Amos had in mind an 8th-century BCE version of XS, a night club at the Encore resort in Las Vegas, where the drinks and cover charge bring in more revenue than the slot machines. $5,000-25,000 to reserve a table near the dance floor—now this is serious lounging—and for that your table is stocked with Belvedere vodka and Perrier-Jouet champagne, silver ice buckets, and more. A state of joyful delirium is promised from electronic dance music engineered by celebrity djs, and at 3:00 a.m. confetti cannons go off, showering the club with ribbons.
Probably not many of us will hear the siren call of that particular temptation. Personally, I can’t imagine a more apt description of Hades, where the rich fellow in our Gospel is undergoing torment. More on him in a moment.
First, we need to stop at the classroom of St. Paul, writing to his protégé Timothy. His subject appears to be wealth and money. He observes that as we bring nothing into the world, so we’ll take nothing out of it. He warns that the rich fall into temptation. They get trapped, caught up in distractions (just the opposite of what one might expect, since the rich appear to have many more options than ordinary people have, surely more than the poor—yet the multiplying of options opens the barn door to senseless and harmful desires that wealth makes possible, and in this state of distraction some people “wander away from the faith and pierce themselves with many pains”).
It is not wealth that Paul blames. It is the love of money that he calls “a root of all kinds of evil.” The Christian Gospel is not based on the claim that money is the root of all evil. It is the love of money that Paul criticizes, and that little word “love” is critical, for his subject is not money but contentment. Paul values contentment for everyone, but hear again how he defines it.
His theology of contentment starts with the liberating assertion that God richly provides everything for our enjoyment. A Christian’s hope is not in the accumulating of as much of that provision as possible. Our hope, our trust, our faith is in the sufficiency of God’s provision. That hope, that trust, frees us to be part of the pipeline of provision, to “do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for ourselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that we may take hold of the life that really is life.”
Notice how without apology Paul teaches the importance of contentment. It is for this that God frees us. Unless we claim that freedom, we will not have the contentment that Paul describes, the contentment that comes from behaving like God, acting in the likeness of God that both Old and New Testaments of the Bible insist God has placed in us, the image of God. Paul says that likeness is action. It is the doing of good for others. It is generous sharing of oneself. It is taking hold of real life.
The rich man in our Gospel today is, therefore, very poor indeed. He has the wardrobe of a rich man, and his table groans with the sumptuous dishes of the well to do. But he does nothing Godly. Most of all, he does not even notice Lazarus, a beggar whose health is so poor that his skin is covered with sores, and whose stomach is empty. He keeps hoping that crumbs will drop from the rich man’s table. He has no finer hope because the rich man has no fine hope, none of that contentment and truly rich faith that Paul values, faith that frees a person to be like God, to be a channel for providence, to generously share.
Maureen Dowd writes about how, in 1996, billionaire Ted Turner upbraided fellow Forbes 400 List members Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, calling them old skinflints for not loosening up their wads. At that time, Buffett and his wife were focusing on how to share their wealth after their deaths. But by 2008, Buffett and Gates began plotting philanthropy that would not wait.
They’ve enrolled 115 of their wealthy friends and associates to join them in a pledge to liberate a majority of their net worth. Buffett calls his recruiting campaign, Dialing for Dollars. He says he gives a warning to each billionaire. “If I’m talking to some 70-year-old fellow, I say, ‘Do you really think your decision-making ability is going to be better when you’re 95 with some blonde on your lap, or now?’”
Like all of Luke’s parables about wealth, the crucial moment now is highlighted in his story today. At virtually the same moment, both the nameless rich man and the poor beggar Lazarus die. It’s a dead giveaway that this story will have a surprising outcome, one that turns privilege on its head. The one who is honored by name is carried away by the angels to be with Father Abraham in heaven. The unnamed rich man also dies, and is buried. Period. No angels, no heaven, no companionship with Abraham. The last will be first, and the first last. This is more than death being the final equalizer: this is death transforming injustice, revealing truth, accomplishing judgment.
One person I visited this week, hearing this Gospel when we had eucharist together, angrily rejected this parable: God could not be like this, punishing beyond death, making salvation and damnation outcomes that are based on what a person deserves.
I could agree with her that “just deserts” is poor theology. Grace is the foundation of Christian theology, and our catechism teaches that grace is unearned and undeserved.
But, for heaven’s sake, it’s a story. And isn’t there something profoundly satisfying about one of these two reversals? Lazarus has been taken up in life that really is life. Moses the lawgiver, and the prophets like old Amos, and Father Abraham the exemplar of hope and trust and faithfulness, they’re all rejoicing at this vindication, aren’t they?
And the other reversal? Well, isn’t that for our instruction? There is the rich man who has, just like Amos’s lounging revelers, never grieved over the ruin of the poor, never noticed the underclass that cleans house, does the grunt end of landscaping, works at the casinos and swabs the toilets at Club XS for next to nothing—or has no work, and no prospect, no hope. The rich man has had countless moments of now when he could have looked, seen, noticed, responded, related, helped—but never did, never reached across the chasm between them.
And now? What a revelation, as he looks up across this even greater divide and sees the apotheosis of Lazarus! You would think he might be left speechless, but his self-care instincts are intact: “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue…” Send Lazarus. The very person he never lifted a finger to help…
Abraham responds tenderly: Child, remember… Get real. You are where you are because of all those countless moments of now when you did not choose to be aware, and so did not act.
No, I do not believe that we’ll get anyplace good by suggesting a stewardship of fear: Be generous, or else… We will not use this parable that way.
The poet Hilaire Belloc wrote about this parable. He imagined himself and the rich man arriving at the River Styx at the same moment. Each is bent over, shouldering an oversized duffel bag. In the rich man’s are “The fifteen sorts of boots you kept for town, the hat to meet the Devil in; the plain but costly ties; the cases of champagne…”
In the poet’s bag are “a mist of shadowy things; laughter and memories, and a few regrets, some honor, and a quantity of debts…” We may assume that each person has his or her own bag full of… whatever.
My own at the moment is full of projects, the garden to put to bed for the winter, ducks to get in order as I prepare to get away, always another sermon to write…
And, while praying yesterday, didn’t Amos and Jesus gang up on me and get me asking whether I’m grieving the ruin of lives here in the Berkshires, as drug trafficking and drug abuse spread like a plague… Am I noticing what the predatory industry of casino gambling will bring with it to Massachusetts? Really considering the results of terrorism in Kenya and Pakistan and Iraq and Syria? Grasp the dislocation of tens of thousands of people in Northern Colorado; and, two years after our flooding here, the ongoing unsettling of life for our neighbors at The Spruces?
Now, in every moment of now that God provides, we may become rich in awareness so that true needs are seen, neighbors met and served, the ruin of our society grieved and stopped, turned to take hold of life. We are called to get real, to recognize the seeds of our own creative stewardship, the makings of our own best contentment.
Maureen Dowd’s column appeared in the September 22nd issue of The New York Times. Hilaire Belloc’s poem “To Dives” is included in “Chapters Into Verse”, Volume II, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Honest Wealth, Dishonest Wealth
Scripture for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost includes Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; I Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
Could it be that the cardinal sin is squandering what belongs to God? That appears to be the message Luke wants to send home with us—drive home to us—in this parable he presents.
This one reminds us of other parables Luke has sent our way, as the Gospel writer remembers and reassembles the pithy, puzzling, potent little stories Jesus uses to wake us up to ourselves and to God.
Remember the rich fool who built more barns to warehouse his crops, thinking he had retirement all figured out, only to find he couldn’t count on the actuarial tables when God turned the tables and required his soul?
Remember the prodigal son who couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge, leave behind the demands of farm and family, hit the party circuit and let the good times roll?
Today’s parable is cut of the same cloth. Each of those earlier stories hinges on a moment of urgent interior decision. “I know what I’ll do,” says the rich fool: “I’ll build larger barns to hoard all that my wealth keeps spinning off, so I can keep it.”
“I know what I’ll do,” figures the prodigal son who stinks from the pig-sty he has been reduced to calling home: “I’ll go home, make good with Dad, and resume my old life.”
“I know what I’ll do,” the dishonest manager concludes as he sizes up the mess he’s in now that the owner has reviewed the audit: “I’ll make the rounds of my master’s debtors before they hear I’ve been sacked, and I’ll reduce their debts. That will leave everyone scratching his head wondering what to make of it, but I’ll be welcomed in those debtors’ houses as the one who saved them a bundle.”
It’s hard to find much that’s commendable in any of these urgent decisions. Each is driven by anxiety: the rich fool has crops that need storing before they spoil, the prodigal son desperately needs to find a better way than running away, the dishonest manager is fired with no prospect of a good recommendation. These are all crossroad moments of crisis, aren’t they? The solutions these three fellows find suggest that, left to our own devices, we have a certain instinct to take care of ourselves… but God wants us to aim higher.
All these parables contribute to the sense Luke expresses: wealth is dishonest. Wealth is dishonest if it persuades its owner that it belongs to him or her. That mirage of belonging deceives us into forgetting that whatever creative abundance we experience comes to us more as God’s gift than as our own accomplishment or deserving. Much more.
The old Hymnal has in it an old hymn that declares a timeless truth caught by the words of John Greenleaf Whittier: “All things are thine; no gift have we, Lord of all gifts, to offer thee; and hence with grateful hearts today thine own before thy feet we lay.” There is where a spiritual practice of stewardship begins: by declaring God’s ownership of all creation, including all creativity, we reconsider who owns what we call wealth, insist that it must be God, but realize also that material wealth doesn’t deserve to be high in the list of assets that matter to God or to us. Just high enough to be useful, high enough (and here I’m quoting our opening poem) “to spend as currency of love and life in making strangers friends”…high enough to “lavish, spread, fling” wide to serve God who is “prodigal with justice, peace, and love.”
Yes, the cardinal sin is to squander what belongs to God—except on what matters high to God. Then why so many parables about money and wealth? Perhaps because, as Eugene Peterson puts it his version of Luke in The Message, “If you’re honest in small things, you’ll be honest in big things; If you’re a crook in small things, you’ll be a crook in big things. If you’re not honest in small jobs, who will put you in charge of the store? No worker can serve two bosses: He’ll either hate the first and love the second or adore the first and despise the second. You can’t serve both God and the Bank.”
In other words, our financial stewardship is at the entry-level to our full practice of stewarding the riches of life given to us by God. We all need to remember that, when October rolls round and we find ourselves face to face with a pledge card from the church for the new year. That will be about a lot more than funding the budget needs of this parish. It will be about our interior encounter with anxiety and faith. It will be about listening to God’s encouragement to aim higher than that certain instinct to take good care of ourselves. It will be about the subtle dishonesties of wealth and poverty, having and not having. It will be about taking the prerequisite course in order to build the skills needed to take the electives, and among those skills are trust, gratitude, courage, generosity, and ingenuity.
Michael Hudson has his tongue in his cheek when he opens his poem by asking, “How would we use the wealth of God if it were ours today?”
It is ours today. Justice, peace, and love get named by the poet for the short list of God’s wealth assets. It’s easy to grow a longer list:
Imagination (which we squander when we keep doing the same old things that haven’t done much good in the past, but we keep wishing they would, and they’re so familiar)…
Freedom (which we squander when we are silent in the face of injustice, hatred, and violence)…
Ingenuity (increasingly squandered by deadlocked politicians and the special interests that paralyze our nation from tackling what we desperately need to reform)…
Vitality (squandered when we make choices that isolate people from community, deprive people of what best feeds them, or further toxify the world around us)…
Compassion (squanderable in every choice not to notice, not to count, not to care, not to include, not to invite)…
And wisdom, which to squander we have only to stop listening, stop paying attention.
That is still a mighty short list of the wealth that belongs to God, and is ours by God’s gift. I’ll bet you can add to it. In fact, this Gospel urges you to do that.
And I believe Luke tells so many stories about the lowest and poorest form of wealth precisely because he knows that the fullblown kingdom of God has come near to us in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This nearness sets us at a critical crossroad where urgent choices are to be made, choices by which we take humble part in the gracious dynamic of that kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. Our choices position us to be among the wealth assets of God… or not.
I hear Luke telling Jesus’s stories like this one today to motivate the honesty, the ingenuity, the imagination, the vitality, the compassion of believers. If non-believers find clever ways to accomplish the agenda of this world, it is for believers to exceed such shrewdness with creative ways to bring on earth the grace of heaven—in Hudson’s words, “in partnership with God.. trusted to waste, to lavish, spread, fling far too wide the riches of God’s grace.”
Thomas Friedman wrote recently about touring General Electric’s huge research lab in Niskayuna. He found there what he expects we would find at the research centers of most global companies where scientists and engineers from dozens of nationalities are using broad-based out-of-the-box collaboration to push out the boundaries of medical, manufacturing, and material sciences—let me quote Friedman: In these places, “optimal is the norm and every day begins by people asking, ‘What world are we living in, and how do we thrive in that world?’”
Well, we who by baptism are citizens of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, whom we know and love and serve as the way, the truth, and the life, whose Spirit feeds and leads us, forms and informs us… What if we learn to ask daily, “What world are we living in, and how do we help the kingdom of God thrive in that world?”
There is how not to squander the wealth of a day, the new day we are given as pure gift with each sunrise. If we all are asking these questions, unity will dispel anxiety. And our daily living will become an art form that releases into this world more energy than it consumes.
And won’t that be a miracle, many times over?
(Thomas Friedman’s piece “When Complexity Is Free” appeared in the September 15th issue of The New York Times. Michael Hudson’s meditation on Luke 16:1-13 appears in his book “Songs for the Cycle”, Church Publishing Incorporated, 2004.)
Could it be that the cardinal sin is squandering what belongs to God? That appears to be the message Luke wants to send home with us—drive home to us—in this parable he presents.
This one reminds us of other parables Luke has sent our way, as the Gospel writer remembers and reassembles the pithy, puzzling, potent little stories Jesus uses to wake us up to ourselves and to God.
Remember the rich fool who built more barns to warehouse his crops, thinking he had retirement all figured out, only to find he couldn’t count on the actuarial tables when God turned the tables and required his soul?
Remember the prodigal son who couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge, leave behind the demands of farm and family, hit the party circuit and let the good times roll?
Today’s parable is cut of the same cloth. Each of those earlier stories hinges on a moment of urgent interior decision. “I know what I’ll do,” says the rich fool: “I’ll build larger barns to hoard all that my wealth keeps spinning off, so I can keep it.”
“I know what I’ll do,” figures the prodigal son who stinks from the pig-sty he has been reduced to calling home: “I’ll go home, make good with Dad, and resume my old life.”
“I know what I’ll do,” the dishonest manager concludes as he sizes up the mess he’s in now that the owner has reviewed the audit: “I’ll make the rounds of my master’s debtors before they hear I’ve been sacked, and I’ll reduce their debts. That will leave everyone scratching his head wondering what to make of it, but I’ll be welcomed in those debtors’ houses as the one who saved them a bundle.”
It’s hard to find much that’s commendable in any of these urgent decisions. Each is driven by anxiety: the rich fool has crops that need storing before they spoil, the prodigal son desperately needs to find a better way than running away, the dishonest manager is fired with no prospect of a good recommendation. These are all crossroad moments of crisis, aren’t they? The solutions these three fellows find suggest that, left to our own devices, we have a certain instinct to take care of ourselves… but God wants us to aim higher.
All these parables contribute to the sense Luke expresses: wealth is dishonest. Wealth is dishonest if it persuades its owner that it belongs to him or her. That mirage of belonging deceives us into forgetting that whatever creative abundance we experience comes to us more as God’s gift than as our own accomplishment or deserving. Much more.
The old Hymnal has in it an old hymn that declares a timeless truth caught by the words of John Greenleaf Whittier: “All things are thine; no gift have we, Lord of all gifts, to offer thee; and hence with grateful hearts today thine own before thy feet we lay.” There is where a spiritual practice of stewardship begins: by declaring God’s ownership of all creation, including all creativity, we reconsider who owns what we call wealth, insist that it must be God, but realize also that material wealth doesn’t deserve to be high in the list of assets that matter to God or to us. Just high enough to be useful, high enough (and here I’m quoting our opening poem) “to spend as currency of love and life in making strangers friends”…high enough to “lavish, spread, fling” wide to serve God who is “prodigal with justice, peace, and love.”
Yes, the cardinal sin is to squander what belongs to God—except on what matters high to God. Then why so many parables about money and wealth? Perhaps because, as Eugene Peterson puts it his version of Luke in The Message, “If you’re honest in small things, you’ll be honest in big things; If you’re a crook in small things, you’ll be a crook in big things. If you’re not honest in small jobs, who will put you in charge of the store? No worker can serve two bosses: He’ll either hate the first and love the second or adore the first and despise the second. You can’t serve both God and the Bank.”
In other words, our financial stewardship is at the entry-level to our full practice of stewarding the riches of life given to us by God. We all need to remember that, when October rolls round and we find ourselves face to face with a pledge card from the church for the new year. That will be about a lot more than funding the budget needs of this parish. It will be about our interior encounter with anxiety and faith. It will be about listening to God’s encouragement to aim higher than that certain instinct to take good care of ourselves. It will be about the subtle dishonesties of wealth and poverty, having and not having. It will be about taking the prerequisite course in order to build the skills needed to take the electives, and among those skills are trust, gratitude, courage, generosity, and ingenuity.
Michael Hudson has his tongue in his cheek when he opens his poem by asking, “How would we use the wealth of God if it were ours today?”
It is ours today. Justice, peace, and love get named by the poet for the short list of God’s wealth assets. It’s easy to grow a longer list:
Imagination (which we squander when we keep doing the same old things that haven’t done much good in the past, but we keep wishing they would, and they’re so familiar)…
Freedom (which we squander when we are silent in the face of injustice, hatred, and violence)…
Ingenuity (increasingly squandered by deadlocked politicians and the special interests that paralyze our nation from tackling what we desperately need to reform)…
Vitality (squandered when we make choices that isolate people from community, deprive people of what best feeds them, or further toxify the world around us)…
Compassion (squanderable in every choice not to notice, not to count, not to care, not to include, not to invite)…
And wisdom, which to squander we have only to stop listening, stop paying attention.
That is still a mighty short list of the wealth that belongs to God, and is ours by God’s gift. I’ll bet you can add to it. In fact, this Gospel urges you to do that.
And I believe Luke tells so many stories about the lowest and poorest form of wealth precisely because he knows that the fullblown kingdom of God has come near to us in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This nearness sets us at a critical crossroad where urgent choices are to be made, choices by which we take humble part in the gracious dynamic of that kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. Our choices position us to be among the wealth assets of God… or not.
I hear Luke telling Jesus’s stories like this one today to motivate the honesty, the ingenuity, the imagination, the vitality, the compassion of believers. If non-believers find clever ways to accomplish the agenda of this world, it is for believers to exceed such shrewdness with creative ways to bring on earth the grace of heaven—in Hudson’s words, “in partnership with God.. trusted to waste, to lavish, spread, fling far too wide the riches of God’s grace.”
Thomas Friedman wrote recently about touring General Electric’s huge research lab in Niskayuna. He found there what he expects we would find at the research centers of most global companies where scientists and engineers from dozens of nationalities are using broad-based out-of-the-box collaboration to push out the boundaries of medical, manufacturing, and material sciences—let me quote Friedman: In these places, “optimal is the norm and every day begins by people asking, ‘What world are we living in, and how do we thrive in that world?’”
Well, we who by baptism are citizens of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, whom we know and love and serve as the way, the truth, and the life, whose Spirit feeds and leads us, forms and informs us… What if we learn to ask daily, “What world are we living in, and how do we help the kingdom of God thrive in that world?”
There is how not to squander the wealth of a day, the new day we are given as pure gift with each sunrise. If we all are asking these questions, unity will dispel anxiety. And our daily living will become an art form that releases into this world more energy than it consumes.
And won’t that be a miracle, many times over?
(Thomas Friedman’s piece “When Complexity Is Free” appeared in the September 15th issue of The New York Times. Michael Hudson’s meditation on Luke 16:1-13 appears in his book “Songs for the Cycle”, Church Publishing Incorporated, 2004.)
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Four Birmingham Girls
Scripture for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost includes Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; I Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
Across the nation this weekend, congregations are holding in precious memory four young girls who lost their lives in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by a domestic terrorist, aided by his cell group of Ku Klux Klansmen. It was a crude bomb, many sticks of dynamite with a timing device, stashed under the steps of the church, near the basement.
At the moment of detonation, twenty-six children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for worship on the theme, “The Love That Forgives.” Four girls were killed, the other twenty-two were injured. The bomb exploded at 10:22 a.m.
At that moment this morning, our tower bell will be tolled four times. Whatever it is we’re doing at that moment will be interrupted by the friendly familiar sound of church bells around us, meant to remind us of the horrifying, unthinkable destruction that interrupted worship there that morning. The explosion blew a hole in the church’s rear wall, destroyed the back steps, and shattered all but one stained-glass window—one that shows Christ leading a group of children.
In the terms of today’s Gospel, here were four lost lambs, each of them laid on the Good Shepherd’s shoulders to be brought home, but not to their homes and their families in Birmingham, and not rejoicing.
In the terms of Luke’s Gospel, these girls were lost because so many righteous persons felt they needed no repentance. Racial hatred in the white community, aimed at blacks, seeped down from the top: Governor George Wallace, a week before the bombing, told The New York Times that to stop integration, Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.” He was dead wrong.
The loss of those sweet girls marked a turning point in the United States’ civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As insidious as was the evil that destroyed these girls, even more incisive was the resulting awareness that, to quote Dr. King, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” Slowly but dramatically, the righteous who needed no repentance discovered that they did.
In Cynthia Levinson’s book about the Birmingham Children’s March, she tells the story of Charles Morgan, Jr. “The day after the church bombing, (this white lawyer) gave a talk to a club for young white Birmingham businessmen. He told them, ‘The death of those four little girls was your fault as it was the guy who made the bomb… Most of all, blame all who looked the other way. Every person in this community who has in any way contributed to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry.’ Five weeks later, deluged by death threats after these remarks, Morgan and his family left Birmingham for good.”
It was no accident that the Klan targeted 16th Street Baptist Church. It had been a rallying point for civil rights activities through the spring of 1963, and was where the students who were arrested during that year’s Children’s Crusade were trained. The church was used as a meeting place for civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fred Shuttlesworth.
Tensions escalated when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress on Racial Equality became involved in a campaign in Birmingham to register African Americans to vote. And during that spring, civil rights demonstrations succeeded in persuading city business leaders to integrate public facilities in the city. The Klan saw but refused to read the handwriting on the wall.
But the tenacious grasp of Jim Crow showed itself in the travesty of Alabama’s legal system that ensued. A witness identified the fellow who placed the bomb at the church, but the suspect was charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit, and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six month jail sentence. Other suspects were named, but not prosecuted. No federal charges were filed.
The case was reopened in 1971, when a new Attorney General of Alabama requested the FBI files on the case and discovered that the agency had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the state prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover.
The seemingly forgotten case was finally brought to court in 1977, when the chief suspect was sentenced to life imprisonment; he died in prison in 1985.
It wasn’t until May of 2000 that attention returned to three additional Klansmen. One was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. A second died without being charged. The third had his trial delayed two year because he was found to be mentally incompetent, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison where he died in 2004.
At the funeral for three of the girls (one family chose to have a separate service), Dr. King spoke about life being “as hard as crucible steel.” Eight thousand mourners attended, including eight hundred clergy of all races. No officials from the City of Birmingham came.
In the arts, Spike Lee directed the 1997 documentary “4 Little Girls”. Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Birmingham Sunday”. Novelist Sena Jeter Naslund wrote “Four Spirits”, later adapted as a play.
The people of Wales raised money to rebuild the 16th Street Church, and gave a stained glass window depicting a black man, arms outstretched, reminiscent of the crucified Jesus.
And on May 24 of this year, President Obama signed a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. The medal was given to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to display and lend to other museums.
A number of musicians have told the girls’ story in song: Bruce Springsteen, Phil Ochs, Kate Campbell, John Coltrane, Nina Simone. Perhaps the most famous is Richard Farina’s “Birmingham Sunday”, sung by his sister in law, Joan Baez. In just a few moments we’ll hear this song, sung by Celia Twomey.
I think we’ll want to keep some silence after that song. Then I’ve prepared a responsive reflection to serve as our Prayers of the People today. It’s printed on a half sheet insert (see below). It’s constructed of quotations from the writings of Martin Luther King, and has some brief silences built into it.
(Much of the content above comes from the Wikipedia entry for “Four Birmingham Girls”.)
The Prayers of the People today take the form of a responsive reflection. Quotations from the writings of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are woven into the lines of both leader and people. Where you see three sets of dashes, these mark opportunities to pause and to listen to what has just been said.
Leader: Holy God, we hold in our memory four little girls whose violent deaths fifty years
ago showed us that human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable…
People: every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and
struggle…
Leader: Their deaths in the Sunday School of Birmingham’s 16th Street
Baptist Church convinced us that he who passively accepts evil is as much involved
in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
People: He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Leader: Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
People: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence
of our friends.
--- --- ---
Leader: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair serve
us as Sunday school teachers today. One of their lessons is that we must develop
and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive
is devoid of the power to love.
People: There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we
discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
Leader: Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
People: only light can do that.
Leader: Hate cannot drive out hate;
People: only love can do that.
Leader: I have decided to stick with love.
People: Hate is too great a burden to bear.
--- --- ---
Leader: Compassionate God, we hold these four little girls in memory, and we grieve.
We must accept finite disappointment…
People: but never lose infinite hope.
Leader: Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism
or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
People: We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together
as fools.
Leader: I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless
midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brother-
hood can never become a reality…
People: I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
--- --- ---
Dr. King’s quotations appear on www.brainyquotes.com and were arranged in this format by
The Rev. Peter Elvin for the Four Girls Jubilee observance.
Across the nation this weekend, congregations are holding in precious memory four young girls who lost their lives in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by a domestic terrorist, aided by his cell group of Ku Klux Klansmen. It was a crude bomb, many sticks of dynamite with a timing device, stashed under the steps of the church, near the basement.
At the moment of detonation, twenty-six children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for worship on the theme, “The Love That Forgives.” Four girls were killed, the other twenty-two were injured. The bomb exploded at 10:22 a.m.
At that moment this morning, our tower bell will be tolled four times. Whatever it is we’re doing at that moment will be interrupted by the friendly familiar sound of church bells around us, meant to remind us of the horrifying, unthinkable destruction that interrupted worship there that morning. The explosion blew a hole in the church’s rear wall, destroyed the back steps, and shattered all but one stained-glass window—one that shows Christ leading a group of children.
In the terms of today’s Gospel, here were four lost lambs, each of them laid on the Good Shepherd’s shoulders to be brought home, but not to their homes and their families in Birmingham, and not rejoicing.
In the terms of Luke’s Gospel, these girls were lost because so many righteous persons felt they needed no repentance. Racial hatred in the white community, aimed at blacks, seeped down from the top: Governor George Wallace, a week before the bombing, told The New York Times that to stop integration, Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.” He was dead wrong.
The loss of those sweet girls marked a turning point in the United States’ civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As insidious as was the evil that destroyed these girls, even more incisive was the resulting awareness that, to quote Dr. King, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” Slowly but dramatically, the righteous who needed no repentance discovered that they did.
In Cynthia Levinson’s book about the Birmingham Children’s March, she tells the story of Charles Morgan, Jr. “The day after the church bombing, (this white lawyer) gave a talk to a club for young white Birmingham businessmen. He told them, ‘The death of those four little girls was your fault as it was the guy who made the bomb… Most of all, blame all who looked the other way. Every person in this community who has in any way contributed to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry.’ Five weeks later, deluged by death threats after these remarks, Morgan and his family left Birmingham for good.”
It was no accident that the Klan targeted 16th Street Baptist Church. It had been a rallying point for civil rights activities through the spring of 1963, and was where the students who were arrested during that year’s Children’s Crusade were trained. The church was used as a meeting place for civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fred Shuttlesworth.
Tensions escalated when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress on Racial Equality became involved in a campaign in Birmingham to register African Americans to vote. And during that spring, civil rights demonstrations succeeded in persuading city business leaders to integrate public facilities in the city. The Klan saw but refused to read the handwriting on the wall.
But the tenacious grasp of Jim Crow showed itself in the travesty of Alabama’s legal system that ensued. A witness identified the fellow who placed the bomb at the church, but the suspect was charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit, and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six month jail sentence. Other suspects were named, but not prosecuted. No federal charges were filed.
The case was reopened in 1971, when a new Attorney General of Alabama requested the FBI files on the case and discovered that the agency had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the state prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover.
The seemingly forgotten case was finally brought to court in 1977, when the chief suspect was sentenced to life imprisonment; he died in prison in 1985.
It wasn’t until May of 2000 that attention returned to three additional Klansmen. One was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. A second died without being charged. The third had his trial delayed two year because he was found to be mentally incompetent, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison where he died in 2004.
At the funeral for three of the girls (one family chose to have a separate service), Dr. King spoke about life being “as hard as crucible steel.” Eight thousand mourners attended, including eight hundred clergy of all races. No officials from the City of Birmingham came.
In the arts, Spike Lee directed the 1997 documentary “4 Little Girls”. Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Birmingham Sunday”. Novelist Sena Jeter Naslund wrote “Four Spirits”, later adapted as a play.
The people of Wales raised money to rebuild the 16th Street Church, and gave a stained glass window depicting a black man, arms outstretched, reminiscent of the crucified Jesus.
And on May 24 of this year, President Obama signed a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. The medal was given to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to display and lend to other museums.
A number of musicians have told the girls’ story in song: Bruce Springsteen, Phil Ochs, Kate Campbell, John Coltrane, Nina Simone. Perhaps the most famous is Richard Farina’s “Birmingham Sunday”, sung by his sister in law, Joan Baez. In just a few moments we’ll hear this song, sung by Celia Twomey.
I think we’ll want to keep some silence after that song. Then I’ve prepared a responsive reflection to serve as our Prayers of the People today. It’s printed on a half sheet insert (see below). It’s constructed of quotations from the writings of Martin Luther King, and has some brief silences built into it.
(Much of the content above comes from the Wikipedia entry for “Four Birmingham Girls”.)
The Prayers of the People today take the form of a responsive reflection. Quotations from the writings of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are woven into the lines of both leader and people. Where you see three sets of dashes, these mark opportunities to pause and to listen to what has just been said.
Leader: Holy God, we hold in our memory four little girls whose violent deaths fifty years
ago showed us that human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable…
People: every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and
struggle…
Leader: Their deaths in the Sunday School of Birmingham’s 16th Street
Baptist Church convinced us that he who passively accepts evil is as much involved
in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
People: He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Leader: Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
People: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence
of our friends.
--- --- ---
Leader: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair serve
us as Sunday school teachers today. One of their lessons is that we must develop
and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive
is devoid of the power to love.
People: There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we
discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
Leader: Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
People: only light can do that.
Leader: Hate cannot drive out hate;
People: only love can do that.
Leader: I have decided to stick with love.
People: Hate is too great a burden to bear.
--- --- ---
Leader: Compassionate God, we hold these four little girls in memory, and we grieve.
We must accept finite disappointment…
People: but never lose infinite hope.
Leader: Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism
or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
People: We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together
as fools.
Leader: I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless
midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brother-
hood can never become a reality…
People: I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
--- --- ---
Dr. King’s quotations appear on www.brainyquotes.com and were arranged in this format by
The Rev. Peter Elvin for the Four Girls Jubilee observance.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Syria: America's Response?
Scripture for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost includes Jeremiah 18:1-11;Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
Before I’d had a chance to read these propers, I’d been wondering how we would move from Gospel to sermon, given the preoccupying subject hanging overhead: America’s response to Syria. There’s barely a need for segue from this portion of Luke, where kings wage war with kings, but not before considering the cost. Who could have expected the Revised Common Lectionary to provide such a platform today?
What does need noticing is the rather puzzling summary teaching, insisting that no one can become a disciple of Jesus without giving up what he or she clings to. Including, it seems, the expected primacy of one’s own nuclear family and the status quo of the settled life.
Equally deserving of attention is what our therefore empty hands are free for, and that is carrying the cross of Christ.
Before we are done with this sermon, we will need to consider whether these themes of giving up what we naturally cling to, and carrying the cross of Christ, help us see what is at stake in our engagement with Syria’s civil war.
Engagement with any country’s civil war, especially any country in the Middle East, can be a fool’s errand, especially if it’s done with the assumption that any state or head of state outside the war zone can influence the outcome. In his news analysis last Sunday, David Sanger wrote, “No United States intervention would alter the long-term balance of power in the Syrian civil war. That was the bitter lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars for Mr. Obama: any American president who thinks that, by dint of force or example, he can change the nature of societies is bound for a comeuppance…
“Thus Mr. Obama’s insistence that any action in Syria has to be divorced from the civil war that has torn the country to shreds. Instead, the president wants to fight on territory more directly linked to American interests: the notion that once weapons of mass destruction are used in ordinary conflict, the potential for disaster—for America, and certainly for its allies and partners on Syria’s borders—rises dramatically.”
“What is the source of our first suffering?” This foundational question, asked by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, was answered by the poet Seamus Heaney: “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.” Our first suffering lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. Unless we speak up, unless we pursue what Heaney called “the silent things within us,” tyrants and tyrannies go unnamed, unopposed, and dangerous.
“It matters if nothing is done,” insisted Secretary of State John Kerry, “not least because of the signal it sends to the Iranians, the North Koreans and others who are measuring Mr. Obama’s willingness to enforce other red lines on far worse weapons.”
And so, says Sanger, our President identifies a policy explainable to a war-weary America, and announces a way to exercise his “light footprint” strategy, fighting from a distance with drones and cyberweapons and one-time “shock and awe” missile strikes that are designed to not get us mired in another Middle East nightmare.
How convinced are you that bombing selected targets in Syria will get us anywhere good? Will it be a symbolic use of power that Syrian President Assad can hijack simply by surviving and so look all the stronger to his constituents and his allies?
Will a “light footprint” intervention send the right message while keeping us out of Syria’s civil war, or will our act of war catapult this internal fratricide onto a world stage? And might that describe the objectives of Middle Eastern militarists who would love to see the United States drawn in, bankrupted, and isolated—in high drama, for all the world to see?
It is never the wrong moment to ask, What would Jesus do? In this season commemorating the power of peaceful protest, what would Dr. King do?
But let’s get the tenses right. What did they do? Neither of them inflicted violence. Both of them absorbed it in their own lives.
And another change in tense is important: What does Jesus do? There is no light footprint in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ: he comes to stay. And he deals with our realities, accompanies human beings as they deal with their realities. While we’re not likely to imagine him condoning violence, he doesn’t seem shy illustrating his teaching about his kingdom by asserting that a king’s command must marshal enough readiness and enough support to accomplish the king’s purpose.
It is no accident that in the history of redemption neither Jesus of Nazareth nor Martin Luther King was given an earthly kingdom to rule. Theirs is a kingdom in but not of this world, a gracious arrangement that frees them to give us all that we treasure about them. It is Barack Obama who occupies the Oval Office, and sits in the situation room of the White House as Commander in Chief.
He has made his decision, and now calls upon an enormously dysfunctional Congress to ratify that decision. I assume he does this to flush out into the open and resolve once and for all questions about the authority and funding necessary to bomb Syria.
So he turns to the legislative branch of government and urges them to debate. He knows that this opens the door to counter-proposals that would amend the action he has decided on. When the houses of Congress debate, they have on the table before them legislation, and at least in theory the purpose of debate is to perfect the resolution before them, making a law or an action fit the realities, the exigencies, that govern how those legislators perceive the world.
Columnist Thomas Friedman has a two-part counter-proposal: First, increase the training and arming of the Free Syrian Army, including the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons it has long sought. Second, put Assad, his family, and his Cabinet and military on notice that they will be brought before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and cause them to consider a future in which their only international travel will be to North Korea and Russia. Friedman calls his proposal “Arm and shame.”
Here is his argument: “A limited… cruise missile attack meets (President) Obama’s need to preserve his credibility. But it also risks changing the subject from Assad’s behavior to ours and—rather than empowering the rebels to act and enlisting the world to act—could make us owners of this story in ways that we do not want. ‘Arm and shame’ is how we best help the decent forces in Syria, deter further use of poison gas, isolate Assad and put real pressure on him or others around him to cut a deal. Is it perfect? No, but perfect is not on the menu in Syria.”
In a similar spirit, another syndicated columnist ends his recent piece, “May God bless—and, if necessary, forgive—the United States of America.”
There’s humble acknowledgement that any military option—launching the weapons or shipping the weapons—appeals to us as being what Jesus would do, or what Dr. King would do.
Let’s go back to the teaching we’re given today. No one can become a disciple of Jesus without giving up what he or she clings to. Including, it seems, the expected primacy of one’s own nuclear family and the status quo of the settled life. And what our empty hands are free for is carrying the cross of Christ.
In our face-off with Assad’s Syria, are we called to give up something we cling to? Surely not our contempt for the use of weapons of mass destruction, and surely not our commitment to preventing their use. For some, perhaps for many, it may be a newly-honed isolationism that must be given up. For some, perhaps for many, we may need to give up the fear of making a mistake in the calculus of the Middle East (where every option appears to be a mistake), and pray that at least we make a creative mistake, surrendering our distaste for ambiguity and praying for courage to see and make the best choice from among those few which our real world presents. A certain sacrifice of certainty may be the shape of the cross we must carry.
As Congress returns from its August recess, we will be challenged to give up our bleak pessimism about our democratic institutions and dare expect them to function on our behalf, and on our behalf as global citizens who recognize the urgent value of international law in creating what essayist Ross Douthat calls “a stable, rule-based, multilateral world order.”
He says that President Obama must remind us that, even with the mistakes that have been made, his predecessors have bequeathed him “a world that—no matter what the headlines suggest—is more at peace than at any point in human history… a world with fewer invasions, fewer war crimes, fewer massacres than in the past. And if we want to keep it that way, there has to be a price for crossing lines.”
Now, this week, the Congress—and, indirectly, we the people—must discern what lines we ourselves must, or must not, cross, and why. To imagine that there will not be a price to pay for doing so (for doing either) is neither realistic nor in touch with the Gospel call to be open to truth, including hard truth. But gracious also is truth that makes us free to confide not in our own pretended strength, but in the strength of God (the only true superpower in our universe), free to allow the reshaping of our obedience on the spinning wheel of history where God the potter reforms, reworks spoiled vessels to new purpose.
I will never forget the Christmas when the camel, a recumbent camel made of plaster of Paris many decades before, fell and shattered into a hundred pieces. And there, in the largest chunk, was a perfectly recognizable angel, kneeling. It hadn’t met the maker’s mark, but rather than waste it he built upon it a magnificent camel.
We want to be on the side of the angels. It may be our calling to be the camel.
By the very nature of debate, we will feel divided in the days ahead, perhaps broken and shattered. We must pray for grace to find our greater unity, not a conformity of opinion but a comprehension of truth and justice and love and mercy, and carry that unity into our thinking, our conversations, and our actions, and be bound together by its thick strength.
(The several op ed pieces cited here—and Francis X. Clines’ reflection on Seamus Heaney-- appeared in the September 1st Sunday Review section of The New York Times.)
Before I’d had a chance to read these propers, I’d been wondering how we would move from Gospel to sermon, given the preoccupying subject hanging overhead: America’s response to Syria. There’s barely a need for segue from this portion of Luke, where kings wage war with kings, but not before considering the cost. Who could have expected the Revised Common Lectionary to provide such a platform today?
What does need noticing is the rather puzzling summary teaching, insisting that no one can become a disciple of Jesus without giving up what he or she clings to. Including, it seems, the expected primacy of one’s own nuclear family and the status quo of the settled life.
Equally deserving of attention is what our therefore empty hands are free for, and that is carrying the cross of Christ.
Before we are done with this sermon, we will need to consider whether these themes of giving up what we naturally cling to, and carrying the cross of Christ, help us see what is at stake in our engagement with Syria’s civil war.
Engagement with any country’s civil war, especially any country in the Middle East, can be a fool’s errand, especially if it’s done with the assumption that any state or head of state outside the war zone can influence the outcome. In his news analysis last Sunday, David Sanger wrote, “No United States intervention would alter the long-term balance of power in the Syrian civil war. That was the bitter lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars for Mr. Obama: any American president who thinks that, by dint of force or example, he can change the nature of societies is bound for a comeuppance…
“Thus Mr. Obama’s insistence that any action in Syria has to be divorced from the civil war that has torn the country to shreds. Instead, the president wants to fight on territory more directly linked to American interests: the notion that once weapons of mass destruction are used in ordinary conflict, the potential for disaster—for America, and certainly for its allies and partners on Syria’s borders—rises dramatically.”
“What is the source of our first suffering?” This foundational question, asked by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, was answered by the poet Seamus Heaney: “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.” Our first suffering lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. Unless we speak up, unless we pursue what Heaney called “the silent things within us,” tyrants and tyrannies go unnamed, unopposed, and dangerous.
“It matters if nothing is done,” insisted Secretary of State John Kerry, “not least because of the signal it sends to the Iranians, the North Koreans and others who are measuring Mr. Obama’s willingness to enforce other red lines on far worse weapons.”
And so, says Sanger, our President identifies a policy explainable to a war-weary America, and announces a way to exercise his “light footprint” strategy, fighting from a distance with drones and cyberweapons and one-time “shock and awe” missile strikes that are designed to not get us mired in another Middle East nightmare.
How convinced are you that bombing selected targets in Syria will get us anywhere good? Will it be a symbolic use of power that Syrian President Assad can hijack simply by surviving and so look all the stronger to his constituents and his allies?
Will a “light footprint” intervention send the right message while keeping us out of Syria’s civil war, or will our act of war catapult this internal fratricide onto a world stage? And might that describe the objectives of Middle Eastern militarists who would love to see the United States drawn in, bankrupted, and isolated—in high drama, for all the world to see?
It is never the wrong moment to ask, What would Jesus do? In this season commemorating the power of peaceful protest, what would Dr. King do?
But let’s get the tenses right. What did they do? Neither of them inflicted violence. Both of them absorbed it in their own lives.
And another change in tense is important: What does Jesus do? There is no light footprint in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ: he comes to stay. And he deals with our realities, accompanies human beings as they deal with their realities. While we’re not likely to imagine him condoning violence, he doesn’t seem shy illustrating his teaching about his kingdom by asserting that a king’s command must marshal enough readiness and enough support to accomplish the king’s purpose.
It is no accident that in the history of redemption neither Jesus of Nazareth nor Martin Luther King was given an earthly kingdom to rule. Theirs is a kingdom in but not of this world, a gracious arrangement that frees them to give us all that we treasure about them. It is Barack Obama who occupies the Oval Office, and sits in the situation room of the White House as Commander in Chief.
He has made his decision, and now calls upon an enormously dysfunctional Congress to ratify that decision. I assume he does this to flush out into the open and resolve once and for all questions about the authority and funding necessary to bomb Syria.
So he turns to the legislative branch of government and urges them to debate. He knows that this opens the door to counter-proposals that would amend the action he has decided on. When the houses of Congress debate, they have on the table before them legislation, and at least in theory the purpose of debate is to perfect the resolution before them, making a law or an action fit the realities, the exigencies, that govern how those legislators perceive the world.
Columnist Thomas Friedman has a two-part counter-proposal: First, increase the training and arming of the Free Syrian Army, including the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons it has long sought. Second, put Assad, his family, and his Cabinet and military on notice that they will be brought before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and cause them to consider a future in which their only international travel will be to North Korea and Russia. Friedman calls his proposal “Arm and shame.”
Here is his argument: “A limited… cruise missile attack meets (President) Obama’s need to preserve his credibility. But it also risks changing the subject from Assad’s behavior to ours and—rather than empowering the rebels to act and enlisting the world to act—could make us owners of this story in ways that we do not want. ‘Arm and shame’ is how we best help the decent forces in Syria, deter further use of poison gas, isolate Assad and put real pressure on him or others around him to cut a deal. Is it perfect? No, but perfect is not on the menu in Syria.”
In a similar spirit, another syndicated columnist ends his recent piece, “May God bless—and, if necessary, forgive—the United States of America.”
There’s humble acknowledgement that any military option—launching the weapons or shipping the weapons—appeals to us as being what Jesus would do, or what Dr. King would do.
Let’s go back to the teaching we’re given today. No one can become a disciple of Jesus without giving up what he or she clings to. Including, it seems, the expected primacy of one’s own nuclear family and the status quo of the settled life. And what our empty hands are free for is carrying the cross of Christ.
In our face-off with Assad’s Syria, are we called to give up something we cling to? Surely not our contempt for the use of weapons of mass destruction, and surely not our commitment to preventing their use. For some, perhaps for many, it may be a newly-honed isolationism that must be given up. For some, perhaps for many, we may need to give up the fear of making a mistake in the calculus of the Middle East (where every option appears to be a mistake), and pray that at least we make a creative mistake, surrendering our distaste for ambiguity and praying for courage to see and make the best choice from among those few which our real world presents. A certain sacrifice of certainty may be the shape of the cross we must carry.
As Congress returns from its August recess, we will be challenged to give up our bleak pessimism about our democratic institutions and dare expect them to function on our behalf, and on our behalf as global citizens who recognize the urgent value of international law in creating what essayist Ross Douthat calls “a stable, rule-based, multilateral world order.”
He says that President Obama must remind us that, even with the mistakes that have been made, his predecessors have bequeathed him “a world that—no matter what the headlines suggest—is more at peace than at any point in human history… a world with fewer invasions, fewer war crimes, fewer massacres than in the past. And if we want to keep it that way, there has to be a price for crossing lines.”
Now, this week, the Congress—and, indirectly, we the people—must discern what lines we ourselves must, or must not, cross, and why. To imagine that there will not be a price to pay for doing so (for doing either) is neither realistic nor in touch with the Gospel call to be open to truth, including hard truth. But gracious also is truth that makes us free to confide not in our own pretended strength, but in the strength of God (the only true superpower in our universe), free to allow the reshaping of our obedience on the spinning wheel of history where God the potter reforms, reworks spoiled vessels to new purpose.
I will never forget the Christmas when the camel, a recumbent camel made of plaster of Paris many decades before, fell and shattered into a hundred pieces. And there, in the largest chunk, was a perfectly recognizable angel, kneeling. It hadn’t met the maker’s mark, but rather than waste it he built upon it a magnificent camel.
We want to be on the side of the angels. It may be our calling to be the camel.
By the very nature of debate, we will feel divided in the days ahead, perhaps broken and shattered. We must pray for grace to find our greater unity, not a conformity of opinion but a comprehension of truth and justice and love and mercy, and carry that unity into our thinking, our conversations, and our actions, and be bound together by its thick strength.
(The several op ed pieces cited here—and Francis X. Clines’ reflection on Seamus Heaney-- appeared in the September 1st Sunday Review section of The New York Times.)
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
You Host the Banquet
Scripture for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost includes Jeremiah 2:4-13; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14
When you are invited to a banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and your host comes and says to you, “Give this person your place.”
Oooh…. Not a good thing to happen to you.
Academic communities (at least those with long histories) once upon a time had formal dining halls, refectories, and at one end, raised on a dais, would stand the high table. My seminary had one when I arrived at Chelsea Square in 1969. Faculty members and graduate fellows sat at it—well, some faculty, older professors mostly, while the younger sat at student tables. Even though we were all graduate students, if you weren’t a graduate fellow you wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to sit at the high table.
Unwittingly, I came close to that experience at another place and another time. It was during a retreat at a monastery in the early 1980s, before moving here. There was still a lot of formality and antiquity around that refectory, including a high table—though it wasn’t elevated, so perhaps it’s better to call it a head table, where the Superior of the order sat, and where he called the shots as to who else sat there with him. Though meals were often in silence, with a brother reading aloud from an edifying book, this evening may have been a feast day when conversation was allowed; and the Superior had his agenda, prompting him to say to one guest and another, So-and-so, sit here—ensuring that a strategic conversation could take place, with him.
I entered the room and went to the central space among the tables. The Superior was there, greeting guests, so I went to him and after saying hello I stepped to one side while he continued being the host. Then I heard him say, “Peter, come and sit at my table.” I was surprised to hear that, but obediently I went to the remaining chair at that table; whereupon the Superior looked at me and asked, “Why are you sitting there?” The Peter he had in mind was standing to his other side.
To be honest, I can’t recall exactly how this played out, except that I felt just like Jesus foretold in his parable: disgraced. I may have voluntarily relocated to another table (that “lowest place” Jesus mentions) or it may be that the Superior, after making a humorless hash out of this little snag in his plans, may have officiously urged me to stay put (they’d find another chair somewhere). What I do remember is that there was no conversation whatsoever in the little cluster of people I got cloistered with at that meal. If it was the head table, the head was turned in one direction only.
What I’ve remembered from that evening is my relief at leaving that room.
It could be that Father Superior was giving much-needed pastoral care to the guests within his orbit. It could be that he was greasing the gears of creating friends of the monastery. It could be that he was indulging his own desire for conversation with like-minded people he already knew and enjoyed. All three possibilities are entirely natural and commendable.
But the words of Hebrews chapter 13 do not come rolling to mind as I recall my experience of that meal. “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” The injunction is actually to put yourself in the sandals of your guest. Just as caring for prisoners requires of us an empathy “as though (we) were in prison with them,” so meeting and hosting strangers calls for that same power and skill and blessing of empathy, feeling-with the other.
Do you think of your coming to church as an opportunity to be obedient to this call to practice mutual love? Blessed are those who do, and blessed are the strangers whom they greet and befriend and share what they themselves already have: a familiarity with this remarkable community of people, a respect and affection for the foot soldiers in this ragtag army of disciples, a place in the life and mission of St. John’s, given to us by God, to be done for God and by the Spirit of God.
What might happen if we learned to think of ourselves as hosts of this banquet? Would we let anyone who comes to our house a stranger remain one for long? If you imagined having your own head table—the people you will give your attention to today—will you welcome to your circle today at least one or two people who you don’t yet know?
Believe me, I know the objections.
I’m an introvert. I never know what to say. Give them a warm greeting. Give them your name, let them give you theirs. Trust where it goes next. Have a simple conversation. If they’re new, thank them for coming. If you’ve just discovered they’re 8:00ers who overslept, or 10:00ers with their golf clubs in the back seat, say it’s good to get better acquainted.
I’m wiped out, weary, and am here to get my tank refilled. And maybe what has you on fumes is all the hosting and caring that you do at work, at home, as a volunteer… But what comes to you here comes through doors and windows of your soul that you open. And did you catch the prophet Jeremiah’s sharp words for people who dig out cisterns for themselves, only to find they’re too cracked to hold water? By contrast, he reminds us that the living God is to be met in encountering the fresh and the new, that God is a fountain of living water to be splashed around in, not a commodity measured by the cupful but a deep freely flowing wellspring.
And perhaps the most intimate objection: I’m afraid. What if my approach is rejected? And what if the stranger I’m facing is noticeably different from me? (Doesn’t fear always get us focusing on differences?) I’m old—what do I have in common with a first-year at college? Or, as we heard Jeremiah express his fear last Sunday, I am only a child—what do I bring?
So we need that coaching from Hebrews: imagine yourself in the sandals of the stranger you face. You’re afraid? And he or she is not?
And the very otherness of experience and viewpoint and opportunity is the treasure revealed when the banquet we host is blessed with such variety as Jesus values for his guest list: the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind. These are essential, he says, for his banquet. And we should be afraid of difference?
What will happen if we all believe ourselves, and behave as, hosts at this banquet?
More and more people will believe that they belong at this table, and that, unlike any high or head table, this one has no limit as to who has a seat, who belongs.
No one will fear feeling alone at coffee hour.
Circles of people in conversations will never close but always be open to draw in one more person, always one more person.
No one will fall into the gulf between the announcement of a parish picnic and the enjoyment of a parish picnic.
People will more quickly find their next calling to serve, their next adventure in ministry, and the grace to do it encouraged, supported, and blessed.
When you are invited to a banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and your host comes and says to you, “Give this person your place.”
Oooh…. Not a good thing to happen to you.
Academic communities (at least those with long histories) once upon a time had formal dining halls, refectories, and at one end, raised on a dais, would stand the high table. My seminary had one when I arrived at Chelsea Square in 1969. Faculty members and graduate fellows sat at it—well, some faculty, older professors mostly, while the younger sat at student tables. Even though we were all graduate students, if you weren’t a graduate fellow you wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to sit at the high table.
Unwittingly, I came close to that experience at another place and another time. It was during a retreat at a monastery in the early 1980s, before moving here. There was still a lot of formality and antiquity around that refectory, including a high table—though it wasn’t elevated, so perhaps it’s better to call it a head table, where the Superior of the order sat, and where he called the shots as to who else sat there with him. Though meals were often in silence, with a brother reading aloud from an edifying book, this evening may have been a feast day when conversation was allowed; and the Superior had his agenda, prompting him to say to one guest and another, So-and-so, sit here—ensuring that a strategic conversation could take place, with him.
I entered the room and went to the central space among the tables. The Superior was there, greeting guests, so I went to him and after saying hello I stepped to one side while he continued being the host. Then I heard him say, “Peter, come and sit at my table.” I was surprised to hear that, but obediently I went to the remaining chair at that table; whereupon the Superior looked at me and asked, “Why are you sitting there?” The Peter he had in mind was standing to his other side.
To be honest, I can’t recall exactly how this played out, except that I felt just like Jesus foretold in his parable: disgraced. I may have voluntarily relocated to another table (that “lowest place” Jesus mentions) or it may be that the Superior, after making a humorless hash out of this little snag in his plans, may have officiously urged me to stay put (they’d find another chair somewhere). What I do remember is that there was no conversation whatsoever in the little cluster of people I got cloistered with at that meal. If it was the head table, the head was turned in one direction only.
What I’ve remembered from that evening is my relief at leaving that room.
It could be that Father Superior was giving much-needed pastoral care to the guests within his orbit. It could be that he was greasing the gears of creating friends of the monastery. It could be that he was indulging his own desire for conversation with like-minded people he already knew and enjoyed. All three possibilities are entirely natural and commendable.
But the words of Hebrews chapter 13 do not come rolling to mind as I recall my experience of that meal. “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” The injunction is actually to put yourself in the sandals of your guest. Just as caring for prisoners requires of us an empathy “as though (we) were in prison with them,” so meeting and hosting strangers calls for that same power and skill and blessing of empathy, feeling-with the other.
Do you think of your coming to church as an opportunity to be obedient to this call to practice mutual love? Blessed are those who do, and blessed are the strangers whom they greet and befriend and share what they themselves already have: a familiarity with this remarkable community of people, a respect and affection for the foot soldiers in this ragtag army of disciples, a place in the life and mission of St. John’s, given to us by God, to be done for God and by the Spirit of God.
What might happen if we learned to think of ourselves as hosts of this banquet? Would we let anyone who comes to our house a stranger remain one for long? If you imagined having your own head table—the people you will give your attention to today—will you welcome to your circle today at least one or two people who you don’t yet know?
Believe me, I know the objections.
I’m an introvert. I never know what to say. Give them a warm greeting. Give them your name, let them give you theirs. Trust where it goes next. Have a simple conversation. If they’re new, thank them for coming. If you’ve just discovered they’re 8:00ers who overslept, or 10:00ers with their golf clubs in the back seat, say it’s good to get better acquainted.
I’m wiped out, weary, and am here to get my tank refilled. And maybe what has you on fumes is all the hosting and caring that you do at work, at home, as a volunteer… But what comes to you here comes through doors and windows of your soul that you open. And did you catch the prophet Jeremiah’s sharp words for people who dig out cisterns for themselves, only to find they’re too cracked to hold water? By contrast, he reminds us that the living God is to be met in encountering the fresh and the new, that God is a fountain of living water to be splashed around in, not a commodity measured by the cupful but a deep freely flowing wellspring.
And perhaps the most intimate objection: I’m afraid. What if my approach is rejected? And what if the stranger I’m facing is noticeably different from me? (Doesn’t fear always get us focusing on differences?) I’m old—what do I have in common with a first-year at college? Or, as we heard Jeremiah express his fear last Sunday, I am only a child—what do I bring?
So we need that coaching from Hebrews: imagine yourself in the sandals of the stranger you face. You’re afraid? And he or she is not?
And the very otherness of experience and viewpoint and opportunity is the treasure revealed when the banquet we host is blessed with such variety as Jesus values for his guest list: the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind. These are essential, he says, for his banquet. And we should be afraid of difference?
What will happen if we all believe ourselves, and behave as, hosts at this banquet?
More and more people will believe that they belong at this table, and that, unlike any high or head table, this one has no limit as to who has a seat, who belongs.
No one will fear feeling alone at coffee hour.
Circles of people in conversations will never close but always be open to draw in one more person, always one more person.
No one will fall into the gulf between the announcement of a parish picnic and the enjoyment of a parish picnic.
People will more quickly find their next calling to serve, their next adventure in ministry, and the grace to do it encouraged, supported, and blessed.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Calling the Silent Woman to Cross the Line
Scripture for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost includes Jeremiah 1:4-10; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
Ho hum, another healing. The temptation is to under-read this story because it doesn’t lend itself to great cinematography. Not much action. The woman in whom the miracle happens doesn’t get any good lines to speak. This video clip won’t go viral.
But there are facets of this story that deserve wiping off to see how they refract light.
Read the whole Gospel of Luke and you’ll see that this is the last time Jesus visits a synagogue. From here out, he’s outdoors, on the street, in the market, at other venues… but not in church. Could be that this encounter today convinces him that he has spent enough redemptive capital addressing the hypocrisies of the local parish. He’s got the tee shirt that says “God’s sabbath is for consistent acts of lovingkindess: Love your neighbor as yourself, whether your neighbor is an ass or a human.” He’s got greater challenges ahead than the local parish church.
But it’s in this house of prayer that he embraces one of those challenges: the place of women among the people of God.
Let’s open that subject by acknowledging that two thousand years later, women are still not ordained bishops in the Church of England. In the Episcopal Church here in the states, ordained women still report resistance to being called to serve as rectors in the larger parishes.
Globally, I’d bet the ordination of women is practiced by only a minority of Christians. Among the great majority of Jesus’s followers, men wear the vestments and claim the voice of authority, while everyone knows without the women there would be no church. The place of women among the people of God in the 21st century is still distorted by hypocrisy.
Yes, it was worse in the 1st century. Here’s a description: “The Palestinian Jewish culture was one of the most patriarchal in the Mediterranean crescent. The home and family were basically the only spheres where women could play significant roles in early Judaism. This was true not only because of the extensive power that a father had over both his wife and daughters in determining their activities and their relationships, but also because various levitical laws were interpreted in such a way that women were prohibited from taking significant roles in the synagogue due to their monthly period of levitical uncleanness. Women could not make up the quorum that constituted a synagogue, could not be counted on to recite the daily “Shema, Israel” (of praise) or make the pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, nor are there any known examples of women reading the Torah in the synagogue in Jesus’ era.”
Indeed, this woman Jesus calls forward today is silent. For eighteen years, a spirit has crippled her: “She was bent over and was quite unable to stand upright.” Standing is the classic posture for prayer and praise and participation in the worship of God’s people.
Where was she in that synagogue? Were the women in an ell or a room to one side, separated from the men? Wherever that was, it must have been there that she appeared, and Jesus noticed her. He called her over, invited her to cross that dark line of separation, apartness, otherness-- to cross the steep mountain range separating the women from the men.
What drew his eye to her? Was it her disability? Her determination? I’ll bet you can call up the image of someone from your circle of family and friends… my late aunt Jessie, severely bent over, moving slowly, deliberately… my colleague Don, a burley guy who was a cop before he was a priest: I sat behind him at a funeral in Worcester last week; even with a back brace, he too is unable to stand up straight. Cords of compassion are set thrumming at the sight of a person with some condition that has done its crippling worst. In Greek, it reads “a spirit of weakness” (how loose and roomy language is!). And that may be what summons compassion, this sense of being diminished, of losing certain freedoms, not possessing former strengths—none of which leaves the person spiritually weak. Aunt Jessie didn’t lose her spark, her laughter. Don, with that bent body, celebrates the eucharist this morning at the altar in Worcester. Deep strength is not invalidated by physical weakness, may even rise from it.
As she makes her painful way to him, slowly, deliberately, her weight against a wooden staff, her face cast down by the physics of her ailment, I’ll tell you what I hear: expressions of shock, hummings of encouragement, sharp intake of breath, cluckings of disapproval, the shufflings of people making way for her, the firm landings of her stick upon the floor.
And there she is, standing before the men and the women, and the One in whom male and female meet complete. On that spot Jesus announces to her emancipation from her bondage, resurrection from her living death, inclusion in the people of God, revelation as a daughter of Abraham and Sarah. Immediately he makes the Word flesh by laying his hands on her. And I can only assume that the sounds we heard before we hear again, only sharper, clearer, as he violates yet one more levitical law, touching a woman in public.
Indignation pours from the heart and the mouth of the local pastor, flooding the room with his sour breath. “Six days have been defined as work days. Come on one of the six if you want to be healed, but not on the seventh, the Sabbath!” So he kept shouting, perhaps egged-on by some of his flock, men of substance, guardians of obedience, culture police.
Don’t you think there must have been some who shot back, “And who will heal us if we do? You?”
Now Jesus makes a strategic choice. He hears the presiding minister repeating his pathetic public policy statement, and Jesus shoots back, responding to this fellow’s message but actually addresses the congregation: “You frauds! Each Sabbath every one of you regularly unties your cow or donkey from its stall, leads it out for water, and thinks nothing of it. So why isn’t it all right for me to untie this daughter of Abraham and lead her from the stall where Satan has had her tied these eighteen years?”
That’s how it reads in “The Message”, which goes on to say, “When he put it that way, his critics were left looking quite silly and red-faced. The congregation was delighted and cheered him on.” Jesus’s strategic choice was right on: rather than arguing with the pastor in a closed loop, Jesus rightly located the hypocrisy in the divided inconsistent hearts of many within that room, and rather than framing a conversation within the ecclesiastical system (where it would be all about religious law), Jesus intercepted the message of the minister to his flock, feigned a return volley to that fellow but in fact lobbed his reply to the people, and made it all about justice and mercy.
The New Revised Standard Version, our lectern text, says, “When he had said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”
Maybe. But it won’t be long before that kind of nervous twittering is heard at the gates of Jerusalem, when Jesus arrives to face his ultimate challenge.
The shame that Luke mentions may be an important facet of this story. You could say that this woman’s crippled condition, her weakness, represents a basic shame laid on the backs of all women by cultures that perpetuate inequality by specious primitive prejudice. That is truly the spirit of weakness that afflicts woman: it is the men’s arguments and self-ordained authority that cripple her. These are among the powers and principalities that Jesus disarms, for male and female to meet in him and be saved from the alienating power of shame.
This is radical stuff. Before Jesus, no Jewish women were allowed to be disciples of a great teacher, but that is where his movement goes, and this woman who now stands before him eye to eye is part of that movement. And so are we.
(The description of the place of women in 1st-century Palestine is given by Ben Witherington, III, in his article, “Women: New Testament” in “The Anchor Bible Dictionary”, Vol. 6, page 957.)
Ho hum, another healing. The temptation is to under-read this story because it doesn’t lend itself to great cinematography. Not much action. The woman in whom the miracle happens doesn’t get any good lines to speak. This video clip won’t go viral.
But there are facets of this story that deserve wiping off to see how they refract light.
Read the whole Gospel of Luke and you’ll see that this is the last time Jesus visits a synagogue. From here out, he’s outdoors, on the street, in the market, at other venues… but not in church. Could be that this encounter today convinces him that he has spent enough redemptive capital addressing the hypocrisies of the local parish. He’s got the tee shirt that says “God’s sabbath is for consistent acts of lovingkindess: Love your neighbor as yourself, whether your neighbor is an ass or a human.” He’s got greater challenges ahead than the local parish church.
But it’s in this house of prayer that he embraces one of those challenges: the place of women among the people of God.
Let’s open that subject by acknowledging that two thousand years later, women are still not ordained bishops in the Church of England. In the Episcopal Church here in the states, ordained women still report resistance to being called to serve as rectors in the larger parishes.
Globally, I’d bet the ordination of women is practiced by only a minority of Christians. Among the great majority of Jesus’s followers, men wear the vestments and claim the voice of authority, while everyone knows without the women there would be no church. The place of women among the people of God in the 21st century is still distorted by hypocrisy.
Yes, it was worse in the 1st century. Here’s a description: “The Palestinian Jewish culture was one of the most patriarchal in the Mediterranean crescent. The home and family were basically the only spheres where women could play significant roles in early Judaism. This was true not only because of the extensive power that a father had over both his wife and daughters in determining their activities and their relationships, but also because various levitical laws were interpreted in such a way that women were prohibited from taking significant roles in the synagogue due to their monthly period of levitical uncleanness. Women could not make up the quorum that constituted a synagogue, could not be counted on to recite the daily “Shema, Israel” (of praise) or make the pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, nor are there any known examples of women reading the Torah in the synagogue in Jesus’ era.”
Indeed, this woman Jesus calls forward today is silent. For eighteen years, a spirit has crippled her: “She was bent over and was quite unable to stand upright.” Standing is the classic posture for prayer and praise and participation in the worship of God’s people.
Where was she in that synagogue? Were the women in an ell or a room to one side, separated from the men? Wherever that was, it must have been there that she appeared, and Jesus noticed her. He called her over, invited her to cross that dark line of separation, apartness, otherness-- to cross the steep mountain range separating the women from the men.
What drew his eye to her? Was it her disability? Her determination? I’ll bet you can call up the image of someone from your circle of family and friends… my late aunt Jessie, severely bent over, moving slowly, deliberately… my colleague Don, a burley guy who was a cop before he was a priest: I sat behind him at a funeral in Worcester last week; even with a back brace, he too is unable to stand up straight. Cords of compassion are set thrumming at the sight of a person with some condition that has done its crippling worst. In Greek, it reads “a spirit of weakness” (how loose and roomy language is!). And that may be what summons compassion, this sense of being diminished, of losing certain freedoms, not possessing former strengths—none of which leaves the person spiritually weak. Aunt Jessie didn’t lose her spark, her laughter. Don, with that bent body, celebrates the eucharist this morning at the altar in Worcester. Deep strength is not invalidated by physical weakness, may even rise from it.
As she makes her painful way to him, slowly, deliberately, her weight against a wooden staff, her face cast down by the physics of her ailment, I’ll tell you what I hear: expressions of shock, hummings of encouragement, sharp intake of breath, cluckings of disapproval, the shufflings of people making way for her, the firm landings of her stick upon the floor.
And there she is, standing before the men and the women, and the One in whom male and female meet complete. On that spot Jesus announces to her emancipation from her bondage, resurrection from her living death, inclusion in the people of God, revelation as a daughter of Abraham and Sarah. Immediately he makes the Word flesh by laying his hands on her. And I can only assume that the sounds we heard before we hear again, only sharper, clearer, as he violates yet one more levitical law, touching a woman in public.
Indignation pours from the heart and the mouth of the local pastor, flooding the room with his sour breath. “Six days have been defined as work days. Come on one of the six if you want to be healed, but not on the seventh, the Sabbath!” So he kept shouting, perhaps egged-on by some of his flock, men of substance, guardians of obedience, culture police.
Don’t you think there must have been some who shot back, “And who will heal us if we do? You?”
Now Jesus makes a strategic choice. He hears the presiding minister repeating his pathetic public policy statement, and Jesus shoots back, responding to this fellow’s message but actually addresses the congregation: “You frauds! Each Sabbath every one of you regularly unties your cow or donkey from its stall, leads it out for water, and thinks nothing of it. So why isn’t it all right for me to untie this daughter of Abraham and lead her from the stall where Satan has had her tied these eighteen years?”
That’s how it reads in “The Message”, which goes on to say, “When he put it that way, his critics were left looking quite silly and red-faced. The congregation was delighted and cheered him on.” Jesus’s strategic choice was right on: rather than arguing with the pastor in a closed loop, Jesus rightly located the hypocrisy in the divided inconsistent hearts of many within that room, and rather than framing a conversation within the ecclesiastical system (where it would be all about religious law), Jesus intercepted the message of the minister to his flock, feigned a return volley to that fellow but in fact lobbed his reply to the people, and made it all about justice and mercy.
The New Revised Standard Version, our lectern text, says, “When he had said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”
Maybe. But it won’t be long before that kind of nervous twittering is heard at the gates of Jerusalem, when Jesus arrives to face his ultimate challenge.
The shame that Luke mentions may be an important facet of this story. You could say that this woman’s crippled condition, her weakness, represents a basic shame laid on the backs of all women by cultures that perpetuate inequality by specious primitive prejudice. That is truly the spirit of weakness that afflicts woman: it is the men’s arguments and self-ordained authority that cripple her. These are among the powers and principalities that Jesus disarms, for male and female to meet in him and be saved from the alienating power of shame.
This is radical stuff. Before Jesus, no Jewish women were allowed to be disciples of a great teacher, but that is where his movement goes, and this woman who now stands before him eye to eye is part of that movement. And so are we.
(The description of the place of women in 1st-century Palestine is given by Ben Witherington, III, in his article, “Women: New Testament” in “The Anchor Bible Dictionary”, Vol. 6, page 957.)
Monday, August 19, 2013
Coveting the View at the Cost of Justice
Scripture for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost includes Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56
“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard…” Now there’s a set-up for a song that was bound to turn heads and capture the attention of all sorts and conditions of folks attending the annual harvest festival at the great temple in Jerusalem. Songs about wine and wineries were expected, but what made this one stand out was who it was at the microphone: it wasn’t one of the expected crooners. It was the well-known prophet Isaiah, and he was about to let loose with a broadside to the bow of Israel’s self-satisfaction, a songlike parable that starts cleverly with an appeal to sweet reason and ends with a sharp reproach and a dire threat.
His parable is built on a metaphor. Israel is a vineyard. We notice a recurrence of that image in today’s psalm, where the interweaving of Egypt and Israel in history and legend is expressed in a verse addressed to God: “You have brought a vine out of Egypt; you cast out the nations and planted it.” Such a simple one-sentence summation of that long process by which generations of Hebrew immigrants took control of the land of Canaan, which they came to call the Promised Land—a point of view, an article of faith, that has fueled endless hostility around land and boundaries that still grips the Middle East.
Isaiah builds his case. His beloved is God, and this is a love song in that it celebrates the sheer lovingkindness of God to Israel in subduing the wild culture of the original settlers of the land, the Canaanites, and in their place cultivating a fine vineyard of choice vines meant to delight God and inspire the world. Isaiah’s vineyard on a very fertile hill is much like St. Matthew’s city on a hill, a light to the nations.
Wasting no words, utilizing words most cleverly, Isaiah shifts his song from celebration to alarm and lament, pivoting on that tiny word “but”: but the grapes that the vineyard yields are wild grapes. Bitter grapes. In Hebrew, literally, “stinking fruit.” If that’s all you remember from this sermon, consider how successful Isaiah’s song has been! What memorable lyrics!
I call him clever because he uses a play on words that sound similar but are in sharp contrast. In our text today we heard, “When I expected my vineyard to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” In Hebrew, it reads, “I looked for ‘mishpat’ (justice), but instead there was ‘mishpah’ (bloodshed).”
In an attempt to convey what the Hebrew does with sound, one early 20th-century commentator translated it, “For measures He looked—but lo, massacres! For right—but lo, riot!”
Can you imagine a better-fitting verse to describe a God’s-eye view of what has happened in Egypt over the past two or three weeks? I should say an expression of God’s-heart, God’s breaking heart, as Muslims kill Muslims, as Muslims kill Coptic Christians, and, the odds are, as some Coptic Christians inflict violence in self-defence and in reaction to what is coming down on them.
I know I’ve jumped the rails. Isaiah’s famous parable does not speak of Egypt at all. But how cam we ignore the proximity of this text to that tragedy unfolding across Egypt? Can’t we hear God lamenting over post-Morsi Egypt, “I looked for justice, but instead bloodshed… for intelligent measures, but lo, massacres! For right, but lo, riot.”
We must pray that verses from the Koran are being heard to fit this tragedy, to address the hearts and minds of Egypt’s people to end this descent into madness.
And we must look closer to home, to let Isaiah’s love song fit us and our culture here.
Jesus gives us ample warning today to face the temptation to hypocrisy. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
That is quite precisely the task of the prophet: interpreting the present. Because Jesus makes prophesying sound like a responsibility expected of all who follow him, let’s hear this as a call to sharpen our own skill set. As we believe in the priesthood of all believers, let’s affirm the prophetic role of all believers.
The late Canadian scholar R. B.Y. Scott helps us appreciate the message of Israel’s famous prophets who emerged eight centuries before the common era:
“All confronted a society where a period of prolonged prosperity for the ruling classes had absorbed their interest and established new standards of luxury and social power; as a corollary, the old sense of kinship among members of the community was lost, the poor were exploited and oppressed, and justice was no longer administered in accordance with the old standards of right. At the same time, the meaning of religion itself was changed; worship became an occasion of display, and the worth of sacrifices was measured by their costliness. The forms and ceremonies adopted from Canaanite religion had become dominant, and the living relationship to the Lord as the covenant God (of love) peculiar to Israel was now a fading tradition…”
So here Isaiah announces that a day of reckoning is at hand, when those who have produced in their lives the bitter fruit of distorted religion and have lost their moral compass “will know a devastation like that of a vineyard abandoned to the wild beasts of the wilderness.”
I think it’s worth adding that the very next verses in the Book of Isaiah cast shame on people who build up great estates without regard to the impact on fellow Israelites and to the community as a whole. The specific doom that Isaiah sees befalling them is this (and oh my, it is so clever): by coveting the land that had once belonged to the many, the few wealthy ones who have deprived their neighbors of their land now deprive themselves of neighbors. The powerful and well-to-do are made to dwell alone, in a ghetto of their own making, with only their own kind around them, no diversity of neighbors to love (as six of the ten commandments require of us), and no workers nearby to hold the community together.
Do you think Williamstown needs to hear a prophetic word? A word about the profound worth of affordable housing? A word about coveting the view at the cost of justice?
If you think I may be going off the rails again by asking these questions, I can this time assure you that Isaiah’s parable directly addresses the subject I’m highlighting, which is social justice. The gist of Isaiah’s message might be paraphrased, God speaking: Not in my backyard, not in my vineyard, will I countenance the dispossessed, the vulnerable, the insecure playing second fiddle to the privileged, the well-connected, and the intimidating.
Isaiah’s parable is about more than land use. But clearly, the deeper theme of social justice then and now requires a community to have a deep and honest conversation about land use. We are fortunate that in our emerging progress around affordable housing, Williams College is demonstrating tangible encouragement of such conversation, by donating land for a project intended to provide housing for displaced Spruces residents.
For Isaiah, for people of faith today, and for people willing to interpret the present time,
that conversation must be rooted in the belief that gives Isaiah’s metaphor its power: the vineyard does not belong to a wealthy individual, or to a neighborhood association, or to any human owner. It belongs to God. The land in our community belongs to God.
All claims of ownership, all arrangements of custodial management, must answer to God. That is a higher accountability than answering to law.
Believe me, I can hear the objections to this approach. We would not want the theocracy required to administer it. A government of priests would likely be worse than a government of lawyers; and a government of prophets? Risky, as well.
Which is why ascribing ownership to God is not an approach: it is reality, from the viewpoint of faith, and its implication is that people of faith understand legal ownership as primarily stewardship answerable to God, answerable from what a person believes matters most to God and to the widest community.
Such faith is the subject of our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. By faith the Israelites left Egypt (and bondage) behind, passing through the Red Sea as if it were dry land. By faith all those famous and infamous Hebrew heroes did what they did (which had lots to do with keeping their homeland defended and extended). The point of our second lesson is that all the stewardship we exercise in this world is shaped and guided by faith.
Jesus makes it clear that putting into action what we believe will bring with it division. We are certainly experiencing that in Williamstown, as we attempt to discuss land use and as we propose ways to keep achieving affordable housing. Households and friendships are divided. Jesus treats conflict and controversy as necessary signs of people at work, pursuing truth and justice, learning grace and mercy, practicing faithfulness. I find a certain complex comfort in this, and even deeper peace in his insistence that these are signs that God is at work.
May our work be crowned with success. The success of clear understanding about how publicly-owned land may be used. The success of building healthy creative alliances that will result in building the housing needed for Spruces residents first, and then a wider range of people who need it. And the success of coming together as a community that will be known for, and healed by, its desire to do what is just and right.
R. B. Y. Scott’s commentary is found in Volume 5 of “The Interpreter’s Bible”, Abingdon Press, 1956. The quotation here is from page 199.
“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard…” Now there’s a set-up for a song that was bound to turn heads and capture the attention of all sorts and conditions of folks attending the annual harvest festival at the great temple in Jerusalem. Songs about wine and wineries were expected, but what made this one stand out was who it was at the microphone: it wasn’t one of the expected crooners. It was the well-known prophet Isaiah, and he was about to let loose with a broadside to the bow of Israel’s self-satisfaction, a songlike parable that starts cleverly with an appeal to sweet reason and ends with a sharp reproach and a dire threat.
His parable is built on a metaphor. Israel is a vineyard. We notice a recurrence of that image in today’s psalm, where the interweaving of Egypt and Israel in history and legend is expressed in a verse addressed to God: “You have brought a vine out of Egypt; you cast out the nations and planted it.” Such a simple one-sentence summation of that long process by which generations of Hebrew immigrants took control of the land of Canaan, which they came to call the Promised Land—a point of view, an article of faith, that has fueled endless hostility around land and boundaries that still grips the Middle East.
Isaiah builds his case. His beloved is God, and this is a love song in that it celebrates the sheer lovingkindness of God to Israel in subduing the wild culture of the original settlers of the land, the Canaanites, and in their place cultivating a fine vineyard of choice vines meant to delight God and inspire the world. Isaiah’s vineyard on a very fertile hill is much like St. Matthew’s city on a hill, a light to the nations.
Wasting no words, utilizing words most cleverly, Isaiah shifts his song from celebration to alarm and lament, pivoting on that tiny word “but”: but the grapes that the vineyard yields are wild grapes. Bitter grapes. In Hebrew, literally, “stinking fruit.” If that’s all you remember from this sermon, consider how successful Isaiah’s song has been! What memorable lyrics!
I call him clever because he uses a play on words that sound similar but are in sharp contrast. In our text today we heard, “When I expected my vineyard to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” In Hebrew, it reads, “I looked for ‘mishpat’ (justice), but instead there was ‘mishpah’ (bloodshed).”
In an attempt to convey what the Hebrew does with sound, one early 20th-century commentator translated it, “For measures He looked—but lo, massacres! For right—but lo, riot!”
Can you imagine a better-fitting verse to describe a God’s-eye view of what has happened in Egypt over the past two or three weeks? I should say an expression of God’s-heart, God’s breaking heart, as Muslims kill Muslims, as Muslims kill Coptic Christians, and, the odds are, as some Coptic Christians inflict violence in self-defence and in reaction to what is coming down on them.
I know I’ve jumped the rails. Isaiah’s famous parable does not speak of Egypt at all. But how cam we ignore the proximity of this text to that tragedy unfolding across Egypt? Can’t we hear God lamenting over post-Morsi Egypt, “I looked for justice, but instead bloodshed… for intelligent measures, but lo, massacres! For right, but lo, riot.”
We must pray that verses from the Koran are being heard to fit this tragedy, to address the hearts and minds of Egypt’s people to end this descent into madness.
And we must look closer to home, to let Isaiah’s love song fit us and our culture here.
Jesus gives us ample warning today to face the temptation to hypocrisy. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
That is quite precisely the task of the prophet: interpreting the present. Because Jesus makes prophesying sound like a responsibility expected of all who follow him, let’s hear this as a call to sharpen our own skill set. As we believe in the priesthood of all believers, let’s affirm the prophetic role of all believers.
The late Canadian scholar R. B.Y. Scott helps us appreciate the message of Israel’s famous prophets who emerged eight centuries before the common era:
“All confronted a society where a period of prolonged prosperity for the ruling classes had absorbed their interest and established new standards of luxury and social power; as a corollary, the old sense of kinship among members of the community was lost, the poor were exploited and oppressed, and justice was no longer administered in accordance with the old standards of right. At the same time, the meaning of religion itself was changed; worship became an occasion of display, and the worth of sacrifices was measured by their costliness. The forms and ceremonies adopted from Canaanite religion had become dominant, and the living relationship to the Lord as the covenant God (of love) peculiar to Israel was now a fading tradition…”
So here Isaiah announces that a day of reckoning is at hand, when those who have produced in their lives the bitter fruit of distorted religion and have lost their moral compass “will know a devastation like that of a vineyard abandoned to the wild beasts of the wilderness.”
I think it’s worth adding that the very next verses in the Book of Isaiah cast shame on people who build up great estates without regard to the impact on fellow Israelites and to the community as a whole. The specific doom that Isaiah sees befalling them is this (and oh my, it is so clever): by coveting the land that had once belonged to the many, the few wealthy ones who have deprived their neighbors of their land now deprive themselves of neighbors. The powerful and well-to-do are made to dwell alone, in a ghetto of their own making, with only their own kind around them, no diversity of neighbors to love (as six of the ten commandments require of us), and no workers nearby to hold the community together.
Do you think Williamstown needs to hear a prophetic word? A word about the profound worth of affordable housing? A word about coveting the view at the cost of justice?
If you think I may be going off the rails again by asking these questions, I can this time assure you that Isaiah’s parable directly addresses the subject I’m highlighting, which is social justice. The gist of Isaiah’s message might be paraphrased, God speaking: Not in my backyard, not in my vineyard, will I countenance the dispossessed, the vulnerable, the insecure playing second fiddle to the privileged, the well-connected, and the intimidating.
Isaiah’s parable is about more than land use. But clearly, the deeper theme of social justice then and now requires a community to have a deep and honest conversation about land use. We are fortunate that in our emerging progress around affordable housing, Williams College is demonstrating tangible encouragement of such conversation, by donating land for a project intended to provide housing for displaced Spruces residents.
For Isaiah, for people of faith today, and for people willing to interpret the present time,
that conversation must be rooted in the belief that gives Isaiah’s metaphor its power: the vineyard does not belong to a wealthy individual, or to a neighborhood association, or to any human owner. It belongs to God. The land in our community belongs to God.
All claims of ownership, all arrangements of custodial management, must answer to God. That is a higher accountability than answering to law.
Believe me, I can hear the objections to this approach. We would not want the theocracy required to administer it. A government of priests would likely be worse than a government of lawyers; and a government of prophets? Risky, as well.
Which is why ascribing ownership to God is not an approach: it is reality, from the viewpoint of faith, and its implication is that people of faith understand legal ownership as primarily stewardship answerable to God, answerable from what a person believes matters most to God and to the widest community.
Such faith is the subject of our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. By faith the Israelites left Egypt (and bondage) behind, passing through the Red Sea as if it were dry land. By faith all those famous and infamous Hebrew heroes did what they did (which had lots to do with keeping their homeland defended and extended). The point of our second lesson is that all the stewardship we exercise in this world is shaped and guided by faith.
Jesus makes it clear that putting into action what we believe will bring with it division. We are certainly experiencing that in Williamstown, as we attempt to discuss land use and as we propose ways to keep achieving affordable housing. Households and friendships are divided. Jesus treats conflict and controversy as necessary signs of people at work, pursuing truth and justice, learning grace and mercy, practicing faithfulness. I find a certain complex comfort in this, and even deeper peace in his insistence that these are signs that God is at work.
May our work be crowned with success. The success of clear understanding about how publicly-owned land may be used. The success of building healthy creative alliances that will result in building the housing needed for Spruces residents first, and then a wider range of people who need it. And the success of coming together as a community that will be known for, and healed by, its desire to do what is just and right.
R. B. Y. Scott’s commentary is found in Volume 5 of “The Interpreter’s Bible”, Abingdon Press, 1956. The quotation here is from page 199.
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