Scripture for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: 21-28
My father crossed the Atlantic in 1908 at the age of two, with his mother and sister, in steerage. His father and older brothers had come across from Scotland earlier, and I assume that once they had found work, it was time for the family to reunite in the new world.
What caused them to emigrate was never discussed in our family, but for sure it was hardship, not enough to go around, a chronic lack of work, poverty. I have from my father some of the precious things they brought with them: a punch bowl—a punch bowl, for heaven’s sake!—and a set of dessert plates with spaces in the rims for threading ribbon. These people were going to have a life again! Had these been wedding gifts? They’re in surprisingly good shape, once carefully packed in that steamer trunk, kept now for nearly a century on one set of shelves after another, silent reminders of a great and challenging journey compelled by hard times. Reminders, too, to be ready to celebrate, once good times came.
For a family, such a momentous move may come seldom. But if you could imagine time-lapse photography capturing all the movements of migrating humanity, from the beginning til now, planet earth would seldom be still. Some of those migrations would be massive, like the one going on now in East Africa, as Somalia empties itself one way into Kenya, another into Ethiopia, both of those nations increasingly desperate to stem the tide and bring pressure upon Somalia to take care of its own (which it won't, perhaps can't) or, failing that, to press other nations to intervene and locate new camps within Somalia.
Meanwhile, this famine respects no national borders and asserts itself as a regional disaster. None of its fleeing refugees will be carrying punch bowls or dessert plates, though we pray that they will see good days again, sooner than later. As they flee, they are barely able to carry themselves. People in many nations are feeling the distress of hard times. The peoples of East Africa are in the hardest of times, and we do right to keep plugging away, week by week, gathering our gifts in Raile’s Bowl, multiplying those gifts by matching dollars through our mission funding, and helping three world-class organizations do good in our name, the World Food Program, Doctors without Borders, and the International Rescue Committee.
Famine is the back-story of the Joseph saga coming to us from the Book of Genesis. Last week, we watched his brothers sell Joseph into slavery after that youngest upstart brother with the big ego had pressed their buttons one time too often. By the hindsight of a couple of decades living through the disaster of his own hard times, Joseph tells those same brothers, “It was not you who sent me here, but God…” And “here” was Egypt, where Joseph, by his talents and gifts and sheer chutzpah, had become like a father to Pharoah, a royal advisor to the king who was treated like a god.
Joseph, poster-child of resilience and making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation, impresses his masters by his natural talents, charm, and efficiency. Promoted and placed in the household of Potiphar, a royal officer, Joseph runs afoul of Mrs. Potiphar who is attracted by his physical beauty and then quickly frustrated and embarrassed by his principled rejection of her campaign to seduce him. This lands Joseph in jail, where he shows his stuff by correctly interpreting the dreams of two of Pharoah’s key servants imprisoned for displeasing their king. Meanwhile, Pharoah himself struggles with the meaning of mysterious dreams, so Joseph makes his mark as a psychoanalyst to the king, interpreting his dreams.
Joseph goes from strength to strength and glory to glory, and soon he is put in charge of the royal response to a massive famine in the land. Wisely, Joseph stockpiles foodstuffs while he can, filling Pharoah’s warehouses. The famine worsening, people line up at those warehouses for relief. When they can no longer pay with money, they pay with the deeds to their land, and, as the famine reaches yet deeper and wider, they indenture themselves as slaves to Pharoah.
Presiding over this national disaster is Joseph, Joseph the Just as Jewish tradition remembers him. Instituting a national system of slavery is far from just, but at its primitive best the story has Joseph saving the lives of the Egyptians and matching the inexorable collapse of that economy with the unifying order of central authority.
All of which is back-story to what is foremost throughout the Book of Genesis, the birthing of the nation Israel and God’s fulfillment of the promises made to Joseph’s paternal forebears, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, to settle them in a land, and to bless the world through them.
Though veiled, that fulfillment is happening before their eyes. Joseph has been a blessing to Egypt, serving its Pharoah and saving its people. And with that regional famine afflicting the land of Canaan where Joseph’s family of origin were still tending their sheep and claiming the land as theirs, the only way they would survive was by migrating south to Egypt where the food was, and where—who could ever have guessed it?—Joseph of the mighty ego, rejected by his brothers, had been given such power that he could welcome as resident aliens not just his father and brothers and families, but all their tribal counterparts who would have ridden the coattails of this miracle and been rescued from poverty. So down from the hill country they came in their donkey carts, their punch bowls and dessert plates packed for the journey. One day, generations hence, their descendants, numbering in the many thousands, would follow Moses out of Egypt and across to Canaan, into what they would call the promised land. The witness and message of the Bible as a whole, both Hebrew and Christian testaments, is, as Paul says today, that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
And universal, international, multicultural, so these readings suggest today. To fulfill the covenant promises made to Israel, God is at work in Egypt, to bless Egypt. In our Gospel, Jesus the Messiah blesses a Canaanite woman and recognizes that this crossing of boundaries helps fulfill his mission to serve and save the house of Israel.
She and Jesus cross two boundaries to have this encounter. He is a Jew from Galilee to the north, she a Gentile from the coast, from what was in ancient times Canaan, the original “promised land” that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel colonized. This is an Arab woman who approaches Jesus. The first step was his, as he crossed from his country to hers. Culturally, just as great a step is taken as a woman speaks in public to a man, and the man replies.
Though he doesn’t, at first. She has shouted across all the gulfs that separate them (race, sex, religion), begging him to intervene on behalf of her tormented daughter. Jesus does not answer.
“Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us, just like that!” the disciples tell him. Perhaps when he sees how closed they are to her, he opens to her, crossing that gulf with thin words—like when a sailor on a rescue boat throws a lifeline to a boat in distress, he hurls a heavy knot (it’s called a monkey’s paw) wound around a stone and tied to a light line that the receiving sailor can pull across. At its far end is the heavier lifeline that will pull to safety.
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It isn’t fair to take bread out of children’s mouths and throw it to dogs.” That’s about as thin a line of compassion as a man can toss.
“You’re right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master’s table,” she says, catching that monkey paw in mid-air. She realizes that his replying means that he is opening to her, and she will not miss this moment. She will pull that thin line, and pull, and pull until that strong secure lifeline is in her hands. Subtly, he rises and opens to her the moment… to which she decisively rises, and in her bold appeal for God’s help, Jesus recognizes the same gracious God who has ordained his bold mission.
“For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind; and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind,” we sang, moments ago. That’s what our readings today announce.
And they challenge us to complete the verse: “If our love were but more faithful, we should take him at his word; and our life would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.”
Today’s Bible voices urge us to step across the boundaries of nations, look across the gulf of race and class, and gain from East Africa fresh perspective on our own relative distress, and from our own relative abundance throw the lifeline.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Keys to Metamorphosis
Scripture for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-32
Our exposure to scripture this summer has featured the series “As Jacob’s world turns.” His saga, rife with treachery and deceit while also rich with perseverance and faithfulness, now rolls into the Joseph saga, featuring Jacob’s favorite son. Yes, batten down the hatches: we’re in for two or three more weeks of patriarchal stories.
Like the story of Jacob and his brother Esau, Joseph’s cycle of stories begins where brothers have become enemies. You would think that Jacob might have learned to avoid favoritism: it was his being the apple of his mother Rebekah’s eye that helped set the stage for a whole generation of trouble. But Joseph is the brightest star in his father’s sky, because Joseph is the son of Jacob’s first love, his deceased wife Rachel, “the son of his old age,” as we heard today.
That creates a whole nest of angry brothers. Do you remember the musical, “Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”? While the other boys, the older brothers, got their clothes at J. C. Penney, Jacob took Joseph to Ralph Lauren.
Having reached the ripe age of seventeen when we meet him today, he can’t be expected to be the soul of discretion. Add to this the fact that he’s a dreamer—literally, he’s his father’s boy, for you remember how Jacob was visited by God in a dream, way back when. Joseph’s dreams predict his own bright future, and while a more circumspect young man might have kept those nocturnal visions to himself, Joseph is neither endowed with humility nor likely to pass up an opportunity to announce to his his brothers his superiority. The natural results of such self-celebration we heard today. They hated him.
There’s no one better than Elie Wiesel to comment on the patriarchal stories of the Book of Genesis. He offers an overview of the Joseph saga, and says that what this story is all about is “man’s capacity for transformation. The tale of Joseph is the tale of a metamorphosis—no, a series of metamorphoses.
“First, a family metamorphosis: a favorite child falls victim to his own prerogatives.
“A social metamorphosis: a poor immigrant becomes a huge success in his adopted country,” Egypt.
“A political transformation: a servant turns activist and changes the socio-economic policy of the land,” as Pharoah’s Egypt struggles with severe famine.
“A philosophical or artistic metamorphosis: the slave turns into a prince,” the stuff of opera and drama.
“And finally, a purely Jewish metamorphosis: a young refugee, without friends or connections, builds himself an astounding political career culminating with his accession to the post of chief royal advisor,” right-hand man to the Pharoah.
“No wonder,” says Wiesel, “that in our traditional literature Joseph is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship. Here is a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending, who owed his success to no one, who imposed his ideas on hostile surroundings thanks only to his natural gifts, who transformed exile into a kingdom, misery into splendor, and even humiliation into mercy. He was indebted to no one and that made him a free man, a man free to do whatever he chose.
“…Abraham is respected and admired; Isaac is pitied; Jacob is followed; but only Joseph is loved.
“…Abraham was obedient, Isaac was brave, Jacob was faithful. Only Joseph was just.”
All this transformation, you recall, happened in the land of Egypt, a nation we watch changing before our eyes today. Let’s pray that the Mubarak trial will help the people of Egypt hear a calling to a finer purpose than revenge, will help that nation metamorphose out of violence into peace, out of corruption into justice. If not, the future of a free Egypt could be in peril.
The transformation of a people is underway also in our Gospel today. Crowds play a role in the birthing of a new social order: we have seen that in Egypt, and there has been a large crowd in an open place in our recent portions of Matthew’s Gospel. Last Sunday, Jesus gave his disciples the greatest challenge they had ever faced: feeding a hungry crowd that numbered in the thousands. He also gave those disciples the best object lesson ever: When faced with an impossible task, generously model the first step towards the remedy, then trust God to be at work among the people. We have seen a similar model at work in this Arab Spring: at its start, handfuls of protestors boldly, generously, modeled the first step toward remedy, trusting God to be at work in the people. Risky, for sure. So, it seems, five thousand men (not counting women and children) were fed.
It is fresh from that public demonstration that Jesus despatched his worn-out disciples to get some rest, away from the crowds. Fishermen that they were, the twelve took to their boats. Jesus climbed a steep hill for his solitude, and from that vantage point he kept an eye on the twelve, and noticed their emergency, how a storm was engulfing them. And while I have no pet theory about what happened next, I see the point: that Jesus is the Messiah who is forever with his people, right in the thick of all the changes and chances and storms of this mortal life.
Following his own model from the feeding story, Jesus generously models the first step towards the remedy, then trusts God to be at work among the people. He walks toward them, calls out to them when their terrors multiply at the very sight of him and they mistake him for the Grim Reaper. He urges them to take heart and not be afraid—not that feelings should be denied, but that fear distracts people from the metamorphosis they must make. Trust, only trust, will focus them on that transformation.
Peter, always first among the twelve (first to get it, first to flub it), does what he sees his Lord doing: he will lead his brothers through this crisis. Jesus agrees: “Lead, Peter, come.” And his first steps are God at work in him. Then Peter notices the wind. The force that makes him lose balance. The distraction that breaks his focus. The opposition. The distance yet to go. The improbability of it all. And it sinks him. And his next step is God at work in him: “Save me!” he cries, honestly, openly, while simultaneously Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him, all of a moment.
“You had it right in those first steps,” I hear Jesus say to him. “More of those, next time. And remember to choose who and what you pay attention to.”
There are keys to proper metamorphosis, as disciples, as nations, as people of God: Trust God to be at work in first steps. Lead by generous modeling of the first step, trusting God to be at work in the people you lead and serve. Pay attention to whomever, whatever, wherever you recognize the call of God to originate. Let distractions sink around you, as you keep balance. When you lose balance, reach for the hand that reaches for you.
And, to do justice to Joseph today, shed all illusions of superiority. We’re all in this metamorphosing of the human race together, and the sooner that religions and nations cease believing that they are called by God to be exceptional and exclusively special, the sooner we may be free to know and love and serve the one God who works in people’s transformation, meets people in their throes of change, steadies people for the work of metamorphosis (the reaching-out), and calls people to lead.
(For more of Elie Wiesel on Joseph, find his book "Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends", Summit Books, 1976. The quoted material here comes from pp. 139-141.)
Our exposure to scripture this summer has featured the series “As Jacob’s world turns.” His saga, rife with treachery and deceit while also rich with perseverance and faithfulness, now rolls into the Joseph saga, featuring Jacob’s favorite son. Yes, batten down the hatches: we’re in for two or three more weeks of patriarchal stories.
Like the story of Jacob and his brother Esau, Joseph’s cycle of stories begins where brothers have become enemies. You would think that Jacob might have learned to avoid favoritism: it was his being the apple of his mother Rebekah’s eye that helped set the stage for a whole generation of trouble. But Joseph is the brightest star in his father’s sky, because Joseph is the son of Jacob’s first love, his deceased wife Rachel, “the son of his old age,” as we heard today.
That creates a whole nest of angry brothers. Do you remember the musical, “Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”? While the other boys, the older brothers, got their clothes at J. C. Penney, Jacob took Joseph to Ralph Lauren.
Having reached the ripe age of seventeen when we meet him today, he can’t be expected to be the soul of discretion. Add to this the fact that he’s a dreamer—literally, he’s his father’s boy, for you remember how Jacob was visited by God in a dream, way back when. Joseph’s dreams predict his own bright future, and while a more circumspect young man might have kept those nocturnal visions to himself, Joseph is neither endowed with humility nor likely to pass up an opportunity to announce to his his brothers his superiority. The natural results of such self-celebration we heard today. They hated him.
There’s no one better than Elie Wiesel to comment on the patriarchal stories of the Book of Genesis. He offers an overview of the Joseph saga, and says that what this story is all about is “man’s capacity for transformation. The tale of Joseph is the tale of a metamorphosis—no, a series of metamorphoses.
“First, a family metamorphosis: a favorite child falls victim to his own prerogatives.
“A social metamorphosis: a poor immigrant becomes a huge success in his adopted country,” Egypt.
“A political transformation: a servant turns activist and changes the socio-economic policy of the land,” as Pharoah’s Egypt struggles with severe famine.
“A philosophical or artistic metamorphosis: the slave turns into a prince,” the stuff of opera and drama.
“And finally, a purely Jewish metamorphosis: a young refugee, without friends or connections, builds himself an astounding political career culminating with his accession to the post of chief royal advisor,” right-hand man to the Pharoah.
“No wonder,” says Wiesel, “that in our traditional literature Joseph is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship. Here is a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending, who owed his success to no one, who imposed his ideas on hostile surroundings thanks only to his natural gifts, who transformed exile into a kingdom, misery into splendor, and even humiliation into mercy. He was indebted to no one and that made him a free man, a man free to do whatever he chose.
“…Abraham is respected and admired; Isaac is pitied; Jacob is followed; but only Joseph is loved.
“…Abraham was obedient, Isaac was brave, Jacob was faithful. Only Joseph was just.”
All this transformation, you recall, happened in the land of Egypt, a nation we watch changing before our eyes today. Let’s pray that the Mubarak trial will help the people of Egypt hear a calling to a finer purpose than revenge, will help that nation metamorphose out of violence into peace, out of corruption into justice. If not, the future of a free Egypt could be in peril.
The transformation of a people is underway also in our Gospel today. Crowds play a role in the birthing of a new social order: we have seen that in Egypt, and there has been a large crowd in an open place in our recent portions of Matthew’s Gospel. Last Sunday, Jesus gave his disciples the greatest challenge they had ever faced: feeding a hungry crowd that numbered in the thousands. He also gave those disciples the best object lesson ever: When faced with an impossible task, generously model the first step towards the remedy, then trust God to be at work among the people. We have seen a similar model at work in this Arab Spring: at its start, handfuls of protestors boldly, generously, modeled the first step toward remedy, trusting God to be at work in the people. Risky, for sure. So, it seems, five thousand men (not counting women and children) were fed.
It is fresh from that public demonstration that Jesus despatched his worn-out disciples to get some rest, away from the crowds. Fishermen that they were, the twelve took to their boats. Jesus climbed a steep hill for his solitude, and from that vantage point he kept an eye on the twelve, and noticed their emergency, how a storm was engulfing them. And while I have no pet theory about what happened next, I see the point: that Jesus is the Messiah who is forever with his people, right in the thick of all the changes and chances and storms of this mortal life.
Following his own model from the feeding story, Jesus generously models the first step towards the remedy, then trusts God to be at work among the people. He walks toward them, calls out to them when their terrors multiply at the very sight of him and they mistake him for the Grim Reaper. He urges them to take heart and not be afraid—not that feelings should be denied, but that fear distracts people from the metamorphosis they must make. Trust, only trust, will focus them on that transformation.
Peter, always first among the twelve (first to get it, first to flub it), does what he sees his Lord doing: he will lead his brothers through this crisis. Jesus agrees: “Lead, Peter, come.” And his first steps are God at work in him. Then Peter notices the wind. The force that makes him lose balance. The distraction that breaks his focus. The opposition. The distance yet to go. The improbability of it all. And it sinks him. And his next step is God at work in him: “Save me!” he cries, honestly, openly, while simultaneously Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him, all of a moment.
“You had it right in those first steps,” I hear Jesus say to him. “More of those, next time. And remember to choose who and what you pay attention to.”
There are keys to proper metamorphosis, as disciples, as nations, as people of God: Trust God to be at work in first steps. Lead by generous modeling of the first step, trusting God to be at work in the people you lead and serve. Pay attention to whomever, whatever, wherever you recognize the call of God to originate. Let distractions sink around you, as you keep balance. When you lose balance, reach for the hand that reaches for you.
And, to do justice to Joseph today, shed all illusions of superiority. We’re all in this metamorphosing of the human race together, and the sooner that religions and nations cease believing that they are called by God to be exceptional and exclusively special, the sooner we may be free to know and love and serve the one God who works in people’s transformation, meets people in their throes of change, steadies people for the work of metamorphosis (the reaching-out), and calls people to lead.
(For more of Elie Wiesel on Joseph, find his book "Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends", Summit Books, 1976. The quoted material here comes from pp. 139-141.)
Monday, August 1, 2011
Resources of Heaven, Known on Earth
Scripture for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 32:22-31; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21
On the main stage of scripture this summer has been the drama of the Jacob saga from the Book of Genesis. He has tricked his brother Esau out of his inheritance rights, then fled the country both to escape Esau’s wrath and to find a wife. Make that two wives, we saw last week, and a tribe of children (make that twelve tribes, in time), all of which was indeed a long story covering twenty years and a major humbling of cocky Jacob.
Now it is time for him to return to the land of Canaan, the new and so-called Promised Land which Jacob’s grandfather Abraham and father Isaac and their generations had been settling, claiming as given to them in the providence of God. At a deeper level, these stories are about the creation of the nation Israel. We heard this morning the pivotal story of Jacob being renamed Israel. For God’s promises to be fulfilled, Jacob/Israel must be reconciled with his brother Esau, who occupies the land.
Burning in Jacob’s memory is his brother’s hot anger at being deceived, twenty years ago. Is it typical of some of our fears that we don’t give other people credit for having changed since we last offended them?
The context for our portion of the story today is this. Every creature making up Jacob’s world is in caravan approaching the border: his two wives, their maids, all the children those several women have brought into the world by him, goats, sheep, camels, cows, bulls, donkeys, and assorted servants. Many hundreds of animals and dozens of people are encamped at a place called Mahanaim, as Jacob gets his act together.
He sends emissaries to Esau, with a prepared speech alerting Esau to what he doubtless already knows: Jacob is coming with an entire village of family and retainers, and wants to find favor in Esau’s sight.
Something is lost in transition here. Jacob’s agents hightail it back to report that they found Esau, “and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him!” Nothing is said about what was said in their encounter with Esau, leaving Jacob to fill in the blanks.
Is it human nature that, in the absence of knowing, fearing takes over; and in the presence of a guilty conscience, fearing multiplies? Jacob, greatly distressed, reverts to type (he is a prototype Episcopalian) and first, before praying, problem-solves… and then prays. He divides his caravan into two companies, hoping to cut his losses if Esau attacks.
Then he prays, “I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, please, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.”
The next day, Jacob selects a present for Esau: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, and on it goes (you get the idea)—we’re talking a major financial stimulus package. Again, emissaries are rehearsed for a speech to Esau. Jacob sends this whole bleating, mooing, whinnying parade on it way, and, before settling down for the night, says, “Perhaps he will accept me.”
But this night, Jacob will not be settled. He rises and sends on its way all that remains of his caravan across the ford of the Jabbok, an eastern tributary of the Jordan River. He is left alone. But not alone. A lot remains to be settled, and Jacob wrestles with all his life. He wrestles not just with his issues: it is an actual opponent he fights. The other half of his long-divided self? Even when Jacob is at his lowest, he does not give in. His adversary pleads, “Let me go, for the day is breaking, and a far more important thing must happen…”
“Not unless you bless me,” stammers Jacob. And in the exchange that follows, Jacob emerges with a new name, Israel, the one who strives with God and with humans, and prevails. Jacob has been struggling with God, and wins God’s blessing. That, says the story, is the story with the nation Israel.
There is quite a struggle going on in our Gospel today. One crowd after another presses in on Jesus for his blessing, his healing, his teaching. He has to escape, for his soul’s health. He takes a boat. They follow by the land route. His heart melts at their neediness.
Is it to protect him—or to protect themselves—that his disciples interrupt his flow of compassion, tap their wristwatches, cast a disapproving look around the barren landscape, and say, “This place is a wasteland. There’s no time left in the day. Send these people away to the villages before the stores close—or we’re going to have a catastrophe on our hands!”
“They need not go anywhere. They need you to feed them.”
“But… but…”
“Yes. And, and… Bring to me here the food you have.” In John’s version, a child provides the loaves and fishes. Here, it must be the disciples who empty their pockets, and among them is barely enough to feed the twelve. “Take no staff for your journey, no money, nothing extra,” they quote him to one another under their breath. “Of course that’s all we have.”
And yet it is not all they have. So many ages ago, Jacob dreamed of a ladder uniting heaven to earth, announcing that the resources of heaven are available on earth, not because they are earned or deserved or even recognized, but because it is God’s nature and desire to give.
So it happens on that hillside. What happens? They balance the budget between what they have and what they need. Jesus takes the little that came out of those abstemious disciples’ pockets and makes a big deal of that bread and fish. He takes them into the public eye, gives God the eye, blesses the problem of not-enough by breaking it open to public scrutiny, and reveals how this is simultaneously the solution, the giving that he models for the disciples to do, and they in turn model for each person in the crowd to do, each person who has (tucked away in unabstemious pockets—no one told them not to be prepared) sharing with each who has not.
There’s much to be learned at the new Neighborhood Center food pantry in North Adams, on Eagle Street. Stuart, Cynthia, Rich, perhaps others of you too, can tell stories like some I’ve heard: how community members come with so little, need so much, get what’s available to be shared, then come back a couple of weeks later with something they want to share, like supermarket coupons they can’t use. And how, at the end of a Wednesday the shelves are bone bare, but by the time next Wednesday rolls around the shelves are full again—the up-front volunteers may not know how that happened, while the back-room crew of shelvers know just where that food came from, having unloaded the Food Bank truck that someone’s giving has paid for, and having emptied the shopping bags of nonperishables from local donors. And it’s all amazing and very Godly.
No less now than two thousand years ago, Jesus’s disciples are called to feed the crowds. Those in whom the Messiah is glorified are given the Messiah’s work to do. That may be at the Neighborhood Center where, last Wednesday between 9 and 2 one hundred families were served, lined up along Eagle Street waiting their turn. And it will be in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia and in the chaotic nation of Somalia, where hundreds of thousands, the vanguard of millions, are in danger of death by starvation.
And it will be in Washington, where it is given our elected representatives to deal with national debt and credit, to model abstemiousness without failing to feed the hungry, without creating yet more hungry, and without passing the bill to our children and grandchildren.
What ever became of Esau and Jacob/Israel? Since this isn’t appointed to be read next week, let me tell you:
“Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. He put the maids with their children in front, then Leah with her children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all. He himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother.
“But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. When Esau looked up and saw the women and children, he said, ‘Who are these with you?’ Jacob said, ‘The children whom God has graciously given your servant.’ Then the maids drew near, they and their children, and bowed down; Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down; and finally Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. Esau said, ‘What do you mean by all this company that I met?’ Jacob answered, ‘To find favour with my lord.’ But Esau said, ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.’”
Then there follows a very civilized exchange: “No, I insist!” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly.” “No, I urge you to accept…” And so Esau did accept, and did what was wanted by Israel, the man (the nation) of problem-solving and of prayer.
May such a good reconciliation be achieved in Washington tomorrow, an outcome that models giving, forgiving, sharing, and the acceptance of responsibility.
On the main stage of scripture this summer has been the drama of the Jacob saga from the Book of Genesis. He has tricked his brother Esau out of his inheritance rights, then fled the country both to escape Esau’s wrath and to find a wife. Make that two wives, we saw last week, and a tribe of children (make that twelve tribes, in time), all of which was indeed a long story covering twenty years and a major humbling of cocky Jacob.
Now it is time for him to return to the land of Canaan, the new and so-called Promised Land which Jacob’s grandfather Abraham and father Isaac and their generations had been settling, claiming as given to them in the providence of God. At a deeper level, these stories are about the creation of the nation Israel. We heard this morning the pivotal story of Jacob being renamed Israel. For God’s promises to be fulfilled, Jacob/Israel must be reconciled with his brother Esau, who occupies the land.
Burning in Jacob’s memory is his brother’s hot anger at being deceived, twenty years ago. Is it typical of some of our fears that we don’t give other people credit for having changed since we last offended them?
The context for our portion of the story today is this. Every creature making up Jacob’s world is in caravan approaching the border: his two wives, their maids, all the children those several women have brought into the world by him, goats, sheep, camels, cows, bulls, donkeys, and assorted servants. Many hundreds of animals and dozens of people are encamped at a place called Mahanaim, as Jacob gets his act together.
He sends emissaries to Esau, with a prepared speech alerting Esau to what he doubtless already knows: Jacob is coming with an entire village of family and retainers, and wants to find favor in Esau’s sight.
Something is lost in transition here. Jacob’s agents hightail it back to report that they found Esau, “and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him!” Nothing is said about what was said in their encounter with Esau, leaving Jacob to fill in the blanks.
Is it human nature that, in the absence of knowing, fearing takes over; and in the presence of a guilty conscience, fearing multiplies? Jacob, greatly distressed, reverts to type (he is a prototype Episcopalian) and first, before praying, problem-solves… and then prays. He divides his caravan into two companies, hoping to cut his losses if Esau attacks.
Then he prays, “I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, please, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.”
The next day, Jacob selects a present for Esau: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, and on it goes (you get the idea)—we’re talking a major financial stimulus package. Again, emissaries are rehearsed for a speech to Esau. Jacob sends this whole bleating, mooing, whinnying parade on it way, and, before settling down for the night, says, “Perhaps he will accept me.”
But this night, Jacob will not be settled. He rises and sends on its way all that remains of his caravan across the ford of the Jabbok, an eastern tributary of the Jordan River. He is left alone. But not alone. A lot remains to be settled, and Jacob wrestles with all his life. He wrestles not just with his issues: it is an actual opponent he fights. The other half of his long-divided self? Even when Jacob is at his lowest, he does not give in. His adversary pleads, “Let me go, for the day is breaking, and a far more important thing must happen…”
“Not unless you bless me,” stammers Jacob. And in the exchange that follows, Jacob emerges with a new name, Israel, the one who strives with God and with humans, and prevails. Jacob has been struggling with God, and wins God’s blessing. That, says the story, is the story with the nation Israel.
There is quite a struggle going on in our Gospel today. One crowd after another presses in on Jesus for his blessing, his healing, his teaching. He has to escape, for his soul’s health. He takes a boat. They follow by the land route. His heart melts at their neediness.
Is it to protect him—or to protect themselves—that his disciples interrupt his flow of compassion, tap their wristwatches, cast a disapproving look around the barren landscape, and say, “This place is a wasteland. There’s no time left in the day. Send these people away to the villages before the stores close—or we’re going to have a catastrophe on our hands!”
“They need not go anywhere. They need you to feed them.”
“But… but…”
“Yes. And, and… Bring to me here the food you have.” In John’s version, a child provides the loaves and fishes. Here, it must be the disciples who empty their pockets, and among them is barely enough to feed the twelve. “Take no staff for your journey, no money, nothing extra,” they quote him to one another under their breath. “Of course that’s all we have.”
And yet it is not all they have. So many ages ago, Jacob dreamed of a ladder uniting heaven to earth, announcing that the resources of heaven are available on earth, not because they are earned or deserved or even recognized, but because it is God’s nature and desire to give.
So it happens on that hillside. What happens? They balance the budget between what they have and what they need. Jesus takes the little that came out of those abstemious disciples’ pockets and makes a big deal of that bread and fish. He takes them into the public eye, gives God the eye, blesses the problem of not-enough by breaking it open to public scrutiny, and reveals how this is simultaneously the solution, the giving that he models for the disciples to do, and they in turn model for each person in the crowd to do, each person who has (tucked away in unabstemious pockets—no one told them not to be prepared) sharing with each who has not.
There’s much to be learned at the new Neighborhood Center food pantry in North Adams, on Eagle Street. Stuart, Cynthia, Rich, perhaps others of you too, can tell stories like some I’ve heard: how community members come with so little, need so much, get what’s available to be shared, then come back a couple of weeks later with something they want to share, like supermarket coupons they can’t use. And how, at the end of a Wednesday the shelves are bone bare, but by the time next Wednesday rolls around the shelves are full again—the up-front volunteers may not know how that happened, while the back-room crew of shelvers know just where that food came from, having unloaded the Food Bank truck that someone’s giving has paid for, and having emptied the shopping bags of nonperishables from local donors. And it’s all amazing and very Godly.
No less now than two thousand years ago, Jesus’s disciples are called to feed the crowds. Those in whom the Messiah is glorified are given the Messiah’s work to do. That may be at the Neighborhood Center where, last Wednesday between 9 and 2 one hundred families were served, lined up along Eagle Street waiting their turn. And it will be in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia and in the chaotic nation of Somalia, where hundreds of thousands, the vanguard of millions, are in danger of death by starvation.
And it will be in Washington, where it is given our elected representatives to deal with national debt and credit, to model abstemiousness without failing to feed the hungry, without creating yet more hungry, and without passing the bill to our children and grandchildren.
What ever became of Esau and Jacob/Israel? Since this isn’t appointed to be read next week, let me tell you:
“Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. He put the maids with their children in front, then Leah with her children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all. He himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother.
“But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. When Esau looked up and saw the women and children, he said, ‘Who are these with you?’ Jacob said, ‘The children whom God has graciously given your servant.’ Then the maids drew near, they and their children, and bowed down; Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down; and finally Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. Esau said, ‘What do you mean by all this company that I met?’ Jacob answered, ‘To find favour with my lord.’ But Esau said, ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.’”
Then there follows a very civilized exchange: “No, I insist!” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly.” “No, I urge you to accept…” And so Esau did accept, and did what was wanted by Israel, the man (the nation) of problem-solving and of prayer.
May such a good reconciliation be achieved in Washington tomorrow, an outcome that models giving, forgiving, sharing, and the acceptance of responsibility.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
God the Heart-Searcher
Scripture for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Though I won’t spend much time on the adventures of our friend Jacob today, how can I let that first reading go by without making a few observations?
Jacob the deceiver, Jacob the trickster, has been outclassed, outgunned, by his Uncle Laban, the brother of Jacob’s mother Rebekah. Jacob has fallen head-over-sandals for Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel. Jacob agrees to seven years’ labor (oh, what love will make a fellow do) as a kind of dowry for Rachel. Those years seemed but a few days because of his love for her.
Meanwhile, on a lower plane of life, Laban has spun a web of deceit. First, he gets Jacob drunk at the wedding feast. Add some poor lighting and the strategic use of a veil, and when morning comes and Jacob rolls over in the marriage bed, he finds it was Leah he had married!
When Jacob objects, Laban plays his final hand by claiming that local custom prevents marrying the younger before the older.
“Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” Doesn’t it make you want to scream? Imagine Jacob’s outrage… and helplessness. “Completing the week” means staying the course with Leah, making her his wife by honoring the customary bridal week of celebrations. So Jacob agrees, and at the end of that week Laban gave Jacob Rachel in betrothal—in essence Jacob emerges with two wives, though it will cost him a second term of seven years’ service to Uncle Laban.
The story has a preposterous side, doesn’t it? Remember that these Genesis stories have two levels. One is the surface story about the legendary individuals of Israel’s past, a family album of the chosen people. The other level is rather like a survey course: these stories help explain Israel’s becoming a nation. In that larger story, Jacob will be renamed Israel (stay tuned, next Sunday) and will be the progenitor of twelve children, twelve tribes, eventually clustered in two geographical units, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. Today’s installment can be seen as explaining that two-state division: Jacob had two wives (not to mention their handmaids, who also bore him children… but that’s best left for another day).
What makes us want to scream is how Leah is violated by her father’s elaborate deception. She knows she is not loved by Jacob in the way that he loves her sister, but she is consigned to that loveless future. In the full story, God will hear her lament and, while Rachel remains childless for some time, Leah bears several children, establishing her security and her influence. The point of God’s blessing her with children appears to be that God is also peeved with her male oppressors.
But, as we saw last Sunday, all this deceit and violation is in the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage God gets to work with, and it does not diminish God’s covenant love and faithfulness towards God’s people. Redemption works its way across the years and generations. Jacob, for instance, finally gets a taste of what he dished out to his brother Esau. Now he knows, with a wounded heart.
And God is the heart-seeker. That is how St. Paul describes God in today’s second reading, and that I would like to explore.
There is knowing, and there is knowing. Jacob’s saga teaches us this. He knows what he wants (a wife and family), so he sets out on a journey to get what he wants. That journey requires him to know himself, to know the full complexity of human nature, to know an intimate struggle with God, and, rising out of all these intimate knowings, to return to his alienated brother Esau with a new capacity for knowing him.
In St. Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome, he teaches that all we need to know about the Church—its God-given nature and mission—is learned by knowing Jesus, the Messiah sent by the love of God to liberate creation from the bondage, corruption, misery, and injustice that were known to characterize the world in that first century. That these traits still describe the world is evident from reading the morning’s news… which tells us that the Messiah’s work is still underway, or, to put that another way, Paul tells us in his letter that in the resurrection life that believers are given in Christ, those who share the glory of the Messiah will have the world entrusted to their care. The Messiah’s work is still underway through God’s people.
To know the Messiah is to know the Church, and the Church is charged with knowing the world. That’s an awful lot of knowing. Refreshing to me is the opening verse from Paul today: We do not know how to pray. We see and feel the suffering of the world and what Paul told us last Sunday is so true: the creation seems subjected to futility and in bondage to decay. Then he said, The creation is groaning, yes--but groaning in labor pains, for God has enfleshed God’s own love in the Messiah Jesus to make him what Paul today calls “the firstborn within a large family” of people who are being conformed to the image and likeness of Jesus.
In that first-century world, the fast-growing religion was the Caesar-cult that claimed the emperor’s divinity, winning people to that belief by sending into all communities images of Caesar and building temples to house those images. Bishop N. T. Wright comments on this: “Paul states that God’s purpose is for Christians to be ‘conformed to the image of God’s Son.’ They are to be image-bearers, forming the Temple of the living God, the people through whom in the present as well as in the future it is to be made known that the God of Abraham is the only God, that Jesus, God’s Son, is the world’s true Lord, and that one day the world will be liberated from its present slaveries, as Israel was from Egypt, to be the true Empire in which justice, peace, and freedom will make their home.”
Knowing how to bring all this about might be an emperor’s way to proceed, but God, says Paul, is prepared to work with our not knowing even how to pray for all this to come about. Bishop Wright says, “Paul holds together… the intimate prayer that knows exactly what to call God (Abba, Father—we may wish to add Mama, or its Aramaic equivalent) and the groaning prayer that has no idea what to ask for or even what words to use. Prayer itself is a matter of both knowing and not knowing, of security and insecurity, of ‘having nothing yet possessing all things (2 Corinthians 6:10).”
In Paul’s words, God is the heart-searcher. Out of God’s heart comes that Spirit that unites us to God by working deep within the human heart, and there we learn not so much how to pray, but to love God. Once more, Bishop Wright: “This hints at something deeper than merely praying in the way God wants or approves; God’s own life, love, and energy are involved in the process. The Christian, precisely at the point of weakness and uncertainty, of inability and struggle, becomes the place at which the triune God is revealed in person.”
This knowing, this loving of God, engages us (mind and heart and will and senses) in what Paul calls the working-together for good of all things. Bishop Wright insists that our New Revised Standard Version of the Bible gets it wrong in translating, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God…” as if this were a law of the universe. The New International Version, he says, has it right: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…” I take that to mean that if we are willing to engage with God on terms of love, then we will discover God working with the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage of our lives in ways we could not know apart from God’s covenant love and faithfulness.
Paul asks and answers five questions, starting with, “If God is for us, who is against us?” “No one” is the apostle’s answer to that and to each question. Typical of these questions is the third, “Who is to condemn the people of God?” The answer is again, “No one.” But if the words are not read carefully, they can be misleading: “It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” Not “It is Christ Jesus who will condemn us,” but “he in particular will not condemn, for he has perfectly embodied the love of God.”
For many years, a very dear and feisty lady, Fran Chaffee, taught Sunday School here. She taught all her children to memorize the closing words of Paul today: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nor shall we be separated from the call of God to embody that love in the world.
Our medical missioners will return from Bolivia in two weeks freshly convinced of that.
Doctors Without Borders and other NGO workers aiding Somalian famine victims in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia embody that love, whether or not they ascribe it to God.
Interfaith volunteers here in the North County do also, as they help people suffering from food insecurity.
And in more ways than we can count, including the intimate orbits of families and friendships, God’s people are privileged to embody that love which is the ongoing work of the Messiah to liberate the creation from its slaveries.
(Bishop N. T. Wright's commentary is found in Volume X of "The New Interpreter's Bible", Abingdon Press, 2002.)
Though I won’t spend much time on the adventures of our friend Jacob today, how can I let that first reading go by without making a few observations?
Jacob the deceiver, Jacob the trickster, has been outclassed, outgunned, by his Uncle Laban, the brother of Jacob’s mother Rebekah. Jacob has fallen head-over-sandals for Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel. Jacob agrees to seven years’ labor (oh, what love will make a fellow do) as a kind of dowry for Rachel. Those years seemed but a few days because of his love for her.
Meanwhile, on a lower plane of life, Laban has spun a web of deceit. First, he gets Jacob drunk at the wedding feast. Add some poor lighting and the strategic use of a veil, and when morning comes and Jacob rolls over in the marriage bed, he finds it was Leah he had married!
When Jacob objects, Laban plays his final hand by claiming that local custom prevents marrying the younger before the older.
“Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” Doesn’t it make you want to scream? Imagine Jacob’s outrage… and helplessness. “Completing the week” means staying the course with Leah, making her his wife by honoring the customary bridal week of celebrations. So Jacob agrees, and at the end of that week Laban gave Jacob Rachel in betrothal—in essence Jacob emerges with two wives, though it will cost him a second term of seven years’ service to Uncle Laban.
The story has a preposterous side, doesn’t it? Remember that these Genesis stories have two levels. One is the surface story about the legendary individuals of Israel’s past, a family album of the chosen people. The other level is rather like a survey course: these stories help explain Israel’s becoming a nation. In that larger story, Jacob will be renamed Israel (stay tuned, next Sunday) and will be the progenitor of twelve children, twelve tribes, eventually clustered in two geographical units, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. Today’s installment can be seen as explaining that two-state division: Jacob had two wives (not to mention their handmaids, who also bore him children… but that’s best left for another day).
What makes us want to scream is how Leah is violated by her father’s elaborate deception. She knows she is not loved by Jacob in the way that he loves her sister, but she is consigned to that loveless future. In the full story, God will hear her lament and, while Rachel remains childless for some time, Leah bears several children, establishing her security and her influence. The point of God’s blessing her with children appears to be that God is also peeved with her male oppressors.
But, as we saw last Sunday, all this deceit and violation is in the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage God gets to work with, and it does not diminish God’s covenant love and faithfulness towards God’s people. Redemption works its way across the years and generations. Jacob, for instance, finally gets a taste of what he dished out to his brother Esau. Now he knows, with a wounded heart.
And God is the heart-seeker. That is how St. Paul describes God in today’s second reading, and that I would like to explore.
There is knowing, and there is knowing. Jacob’s saga teaches us this. He knows what he wants (a wife and family), so he sets out on a journey to get what he wants. That journey requires him to know himself, to know the full complexity of human nature, to know an intimate struggle with God, and, rising out of all these intimate knowings, to return to his alienated brother Esau with a new capacity for knowing him.
In St. Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome, he teaches that all we need to know about the Church—its God-given nature and mission—is learned by knowing Jesus, the Messiah sent by the love of God to liberate creation from the bondage, corruption, misery, and injustice that were known to characterize the world in that first century. That these traits still describe the world is evident from reading the morning’s news… which tells us that the Messiah’s work is still underway, or, to put that another way, Paul tells us in his letter that in the resurrection life that believers are given in Christ, those who share the glory of the Messiah will have the world entrusted to their care. The Messiah’s work is still underway through God’s people.
To know the Messiah is to know the Church, and the Church is charged with knowing the world. That’s an awful lot of knowing. Refreshing to me is the opening verse from Paul today: We do not know how to pray. We see and feel the suffering of the world and what Paul told us last Sunday is so true: the creation seems subjected to futility and in bondage to decay. Then he said, The creation is groaning, yes--but groaning in labor pains, for God has enfleshed God’s own love in the Messiah Jesus to make him what Paul today calls “the firstborn within a large family” of people who are being conformed to the image and likeness of Jesus.
In that first-century world, the fast-growing religion was the Caesar-cult that claimed the emperor’s divinity, winning people to that belief by sending into all communities images of Caesar and building temples to house those images. Bishop N. T. Wright comments on this: “Paul states that God’s purpose is for Christians to be ‘conformed to the image of God’s Son.’ They are to be image-bearers, forming the Temple of the living God, the people through whom in the present as well as in the future it is to be made known that the God of Abraham is the only God, that Jesus, God’s Son, is the world’s true Lord, and that one day the world will be liberated from its present slaveries, as Israel was from Egypt, to be the true Empire in which justice, peace, and freedom will make their home.”
Knowing how to bring all this about might be an emperor’s way to proceed, but God, says Paul, is prepared to work with our not knowing even how to pray for all this to come about. Bishop Wright says, “Paul holds together… the intimate prayer that knows exactly what to call God (Abba, Father—we may wish to add Mama, or its Aramaic equivalent) and the groaning prayer that has no idea what to ask for or even what words to use. Prayer itself is a matter of both knowing and not knowing, of security and insecurity, of ‘having nothing yet possessing all things (2 Corinthians 6:10).”
In Paul’s words, God is the heart-searcher. Out of God’s heart comes that Spirit that unites us to God by working deep within the human heart, and there we learn not so much how to pray, but to love God. Once more, Bishop Wright: “This hints at something deeper than merely praying in the way God wants or approves; God’s own life, love, and energy are involved in the process. The Christian, precisely at the point of weakness and uncertainty, of inability and struggle, becomes the place at which the triune God is revealed in person.”
This knowing, this loving of God, engages us (mind and heart and will and senses) in what Paul calls the working-together for good of all things. Bishop Wright insists that our New Revised Standard Version of the Bible gets it wrong in translating, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God…” as if this were a law of the universe. The New International Version, he says, has it right: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…” I take that to mean that if we are willing to engage with God on terms of love, then we will discover God working with the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage of our lives in ways we could not know apart from God’s covenant love and faithfulness.
Paul asks and answers five questions, starting with, “If God is for us, who is against us?” “No one” is the apostle’s answer to that and to each question. Typical of these questions is the third, “Who is to condemn the people of God?” The answer is again, “No one.” But if the words are not read carefully, they can be misleading: “It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” Not “It is Christ Jesus who will condemn us,” but “he in particular will not condemn, for he has perfectly embodied the love of God.”
For many years, a very dear and feisty lady, Fran Chaffee, taught Sunday School here. She taught all her children to memorize the closing words of Paul today: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nor shall we be separated from the call of God to embody that love in the world.
Our medical missioners will return from Bolivia in two weeks freshly convinced of that.
Doctors Without Borders and other NGO workers aiding Somalian famine victims in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia embody that love, whether or not they ascribe it to God.
Interfaith volunteers here in the North County do also, as they help people suffering from food insecurity.
And in more ways than we can count, including the intimate orbits of families and friendships, God’s people are privileged to embody that love which is the ongoing work of the Messiah to liberate the creation from its slaveries.
(Bishop N. T. Wright's commentary is found in Volume X of "The New Interpreter's Bible", Abingdon Press, 2002.)
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
God Counts on that Rat Jacob
Scripture for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; and Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Here’s another parable about seeds. Last week’s was tame. Turn this one into a movie, and call it “Seeds of Wrath”. Give it an R rating for faith-based violence. And we think the Qur’an condones violence?
This exchange is said to have been between Jesus and his disciples who have gathered with him after another of his public appearances before a large crowd. The disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable he used in speaking to the crowds, a parable that does not, on the face of it, sound as violent and raging as the explanation he proceeds to give the twelve. Maybe this is like the coach and team meeting in their locker room at half-time in a high-stakes game where the score is tied, venting together over the tactics of the other team and fanning the flames that will burn that other team right off the field.
Maybe. And we need to hear it… why? It helps us in our spiritual practice… how?
In our summer education series, Sundays @ 9, we’ve started identifying a few edgy questions relating to our spiritual practice, and we hope to share with one another what we’re learning on those raw edges. For example, I named a question today that I struggle with: How to read the morning paper with an open heart, not shutting down in horror as my eyes move from the dismemberment of a child to the murder of a family by a step-son, to the discovery of fresh mass graves in South Sudan, to the latest installment of the saga of budget politics in Washington. How do I pray through a reading of the news of the day?
Or do I react to what I cannot control, and lapse into an old narrow range of emotions, retreating from a world evidently divided sharply between bad people and good people? Is my experience of the morning news preparing me to be the publican in the temple (Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men…) or to find common ground with the troubles of others? Am I secretly finding solace of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-variety, or can I find a way to pray the news as I read it, recognizing how grace is needed, is already at work, and may call me to care, not retreat?
I’m not proposing to talk more about that today. Come to Sundays @ 9 if that question interests you, but notice how the question itself may relate to today’s Gospel. Reacting to current events can bring a person to see the world in black and white terms, sharply cast between good people and evil people, and evidently can tempt even the religious to imagine horrific final solutions.
Sometimes we can understand why. Christians were being brutally persecuted near the end of the first century, when Matthew wrote. Hungering for justice, the early Christians were powerless to achieve it. But they could take a grim comfort in the conviction that God would have the final word, some day. In the meantime, their words were laced with fire and brimstone in the language of apocalypse and Armageddon.
By contrast to that black and white view comes today’s portion of the Jacob saga in the Book of Genesis. This is what I would like to talk about, because in Jacob we see how it simply doesn ‘t work to divide the human race into categories of good and bad. As we saw last Sunday, Jacob is a rat, a deceiver, a trickster—and yet there he is in the Mount Rushmore of Hebrew patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His twin brother, Esau, you will not find so remembered and celebrated. Yet it was by cutting in line, taking advantage of the gullibility of his brother and the vulnerability of his aging father, that Jacob gained his prominence.
It was also by being his mother’s favorite, which may tell us how matriarchal a society these forebears actually had. She favored Jacob because of her two sons he was the refined one, the reflective one, the man who would maintain home and family, the thinker, the creative one, the artist. Her husband Isaac favored their son Esau, a skillful hunter, the son who could lead by the strength of his arm and be in charge of homeland security.
Remember that these great Genesis stories are allegedly about individuals, but certainly about the nation Israel. By the time we are done with Jacob’s saga this summer, we will see that he is renamed Israel, showing that all the struggles we see him pass through constitute what it means to be Israel, the nation. But that’s yet to be revealed. Stay tuned.
Today’s installment sets Jacob on a long journey. It will last twenty years. What prompts it? Dread of his brother, Esau; recognition that Esau’s strong arm will come down on him if he stays in town. But also Jacob knows it’s time to do the patriarchal thing and find a wife and raise a family. By the time we complete his saga, he will have had tricks played on him resulting in his having two wives, and a correspondingly large number of children, but again I’m fast-forwarding…
Now, running away from much, so much that he is truly a divided man, and one who frankly doesn’t call much upon God but tends to create his own solutions (as we have seen), now Jacob stops in a certain place to camp for the night. There was something about this place that suggested a good campsite, but there was nothing noticeable to suggest it might be holy ground, no stone pillars erected as was done in those days, no sign advertising divine worship at 8:00 am and 10:00 am.
Or pm, as in this case. God comes to Jacob in a dream. Elie Wiesel, writing about this story, poses the question, Why is it that often the Bible tells stories in which God appears to a person, often a man, in his dreams? Because that is when a person is completely alone. And if that person has a Type A personality, it is in the liminal state of sleep that God might have a fighting chance to be noticed.
That Jacob’s dream is so rich and full may witness to what his mother Rebekah knew, that he was a reflective person, receptive not just to things seen and touched, but to their inner spiritual meaning.
And is there a hint that Jacob, on the lam, needs to be alert even in sleep, perhaps explaining why he’d lay his head on a stone?
But on to the dream: a ladder is set up on the earth, reaching to heaven. A stairway, a ramp, would be better translations, says a commentator. A dramatic message is given: we on earth can count on the resources of heaven. And they flow to us not because we earn them or even know enough to ask for them. They come because God wants them to come. They come as gift.
Gift and grace are therefore the foundation of the covenant love binding humanity to God and binding God to the human race. And that whole historic monumental relationship depends, at this juncture, on God’s trusting a deceptive and tricky man, Jacob. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you,” says God to Jacob.
Jacob may not expect it to take twenty years for that return. He thinks he’s going to Haran, his grandfather’s homeland, to find a wife from among the extended family. Nothing about this will be simple, as we shall hear next Sunday and the Sunday after. And it will all contribute to the birthing of the nation Israel, called by God (according to the Genesis story) to settle in the land of Canaan that has been gradually claimed by the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, one settlement at a time.
Arab peoples have a very different narrative to tell, one that explains their claim to the land. The current events we agonize over, thousands of years later, still swirl around the collision of these stories.
Whether it may be Palestinians and Israelis facing their future, or Democrats and Republicans negotiating fiscal responsibility, it does not work to vilify opponents and paint the world black and white. God counts on Jacob. Jacob must face Esau. It is in face of the full complexity of human nature that our baptismal vows require us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving each as we love ourselves, respecting the dignity and worth of each person. We do not get to consign people to hell for their treachery, because we answer to a God who can utilize even treachery to achieve evolution towards a high global purpose.
We don’t have to like that, but it is part of the biblical message.
It is the revelation of Jacob’s dream, Jacob’s ladder, and Jacob’s God: that right where we are, the raging waters of current events eddying around us and the day’s news being what it is, right there (not just right here) is holy ground where God is to be recognized, known, loved, and obeyed. And our calling is, like Jacob’s, to take each stone on which we fitfully sleep and set it up as a monument to grace and pardon, a reminder that God is in the place with us and calls us to a miracle: the turning of stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
Here’s another parable about seeds. Last week’s was tame. Turn this one into a movie, and call it “Seeds of Wrath”. Give it an R rating for faith-based violence. And we think the Qur’an condones violence?
This exchange is said to have been between Jesus and his disciples who have gathered with him after another of his public appearances before a large crowd. The disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable he used in speaking to the crowds, a parable that does not, on the face of it, sound as violent and raging as the explanation he proceeds to give the twelve. Maybe this is like the coach and team meeting in their locker room at half-time in a high-stakes game where the score is tied, venting together over the tactics of the other team and fanning the flames that will burn that other team right off the field.
Maybe. And we need to hear it… why? It helps us in our spiritual practice… how?
In our summer education series, Sundays @ 9, we’ve started identifying a few edgy questions relating to our spiritual practice, and we hope to share with one another what we’re learning on those raw edges. For example, I named a question today that I struggle with: How to read the morning paper with an open heart, not shutting down in horror as my eyes move from the dismemberment of a child to the murder of a family by a step-son, to the discovery of fresh mass graves in South Sudan, to the latest installment of the saga of budget politics in Washington. How do I pray through a reading of the news of the day?
Or do I react to what I cannot control, and lapse into an old narrow range of emotions, retreating from a world evidently divided sharply between bad people and good people? Is my experience of the morning news preparing me to be the publican in the temple (Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men…) or to find common ground with the troubles of others? Am I secretly finding solace of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-variety, or can I find a way to pray the news as I read it, recognizing how grace is needed, is already at work, and may call me to care, not retreat?
I’m not proposing to talk more about that today. Come to Sundays @ 9 if that question interests you, but notice how the question itself may relate to today’s Gospel. Reacting to current events can bring a person to see the world in black and white terms, sharply cast between good people and evil people, and evidently can tempt even the religious to imagine horrific final solutions.
Sometimes we can understand why. Christians were being brutally persecuted near the end of the first century, when Matthew wrote. Hungering for justice, the early Christians were powerless to achieve it. But they could take a grim comfort in the conviction that God would have the final word, some day. In the meantime, their words were laced with fire and brimstone in the language of apocalypse and Armageddon.
By contrast to that black and white view comes today’s portion of the Jacob saga in the Book of Genesis. This is what I would like to talk about, because in Jacob we see how it simply doesn ‘t work to divide the human race into categories of good and bad. As we saw last Sunday, Jacob is a rat, a deceiver, a trickster—and yet there he is in the Mount Rushmore of Hebrew patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His twin brother, Esau, you will not find so remembered and celebrated. Yet it was by cutting in line, taking advantage of the gullibility of his brother and the vulnerability of his aging father, that Jacob gained his prominence.
It was also by being his mother’s favorite, which may tell us how matriarchal a society these forebears actually had. She favored Jacob because of her two sons he was the refined one, the reflective one, the man who would maintain home and family, the thinker, the creative one, the artist. Her husband Isaac favored their son Esau, a skillful hunter, the son who could lead by the strength of his arm and be in charge of homeland security.
Remember that these great Genesis stories are allegedly about individuals, but certainly about the nation Israel. By the time we are done with Jacob’s saga this summer, we will see that he is renamed Israel, showing that all the struggles we see him pass through constitute what it means to be Israel, the nation. But that’s yet to be revealed. Stay tuned.
Today’s installment sets Jacob on a long journey. It will last twenty years. What prompts it? Dread of his brother, Esau; recognition that Esau’s strong arm will come down on him if he stays in town. But also Jacob knows it’s time to do the patriarchal thing and find a wife and raise a family. By the time we complete his saga, he will have had tricks played on him resulting in his having two wives, and a correspondingly large number of children, but again I’m fast-forwarding…
Now, running away from much, so much that he is truly a divided man, and one who frankly doesn’t call much upon God but tends to create his own solutions (as we have seen), now Jacob stops in a certain place to camp for the night. There was something about this place that suggested a good campsite, but there was nothing noticeable to suggest it might be holy ground, no stone pillars erected as was done in those days, no sign advertising divine worship at 8:00 am and 10:00 am.
Or pm, as in this case. God comes to Jacob in a dream. Elie Wiesel, writing about this story, poses the question, Why is it that often the Bible tells stories in which God appears to a person, often a man, in his dreams? Because that is when a person is completely alone. And if that person has a Type A personality, it is in the liminal state of sleep that God might have a fighting chance to be noticed.
That Jacob’s dream is so rich and full may witness to what his mother Rebekah knew, that he was a reflective person, receptive not just to things seen and touched, but to their inner spiritual meaning.
And is there a hint that Jacob, on the lam, needs to be alert even in sleep, perhaps explaining why he’d lay his head on a stone?
But on to the dream: a ladder is set up on the earth, reaching to heaven. A stairway, a ramp, would be better translations, says a commentator. A dramatic message is given: we on earth can count on the resources of heaven. And they flow to us not because we earn them or even know enough to ask for them. They come because God wants them to come. They come as gift.
Gift and grace are therefore the foundation of the covenant love binding humanity to God and binding God to the human race. And that whole historic monumental relationship depends, at this juncture, on God’s trusting a deceptive and tricky man, Jacob. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you,” says God to Jacob.
Jacob may not expect it to take twenty years for that return. He thinks he’s going to Haran, his grandfather’s homeland, to find a wife from among the extended family. Nothing about this will be simple, as we shall hear next Sunday and the Sunday after. And it will all contribute to the birthing of the nation Israel, called by God (according to the Genesis story) to settle in the land of Canaan that has been gradually claimed by the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, one settlement at a time.
Arab peoples have a very different narrative to tell, one that explains their claim to the land. The current events we agonize over, thousands of years later, still swirl around the collision of these stories.
Whether it may be Palestinians and Israelis facing their future, or Democrats and Republicans negotiating fiscal responsibility, it does not work to vilify opponents and paint the world black and white. God counts on Jacob. Jacob must face Esau. It is in face of the full complexity of human nature that our baptismal vows require us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving each as we love ourselves, respecting the dignity and worth of each person. We do not get to consign people to hell for their treachery, because we answer to a God who can utilize even treachery to achieve evolution towards a high global purpose.
We don’t have to like that, but it is part of the biblical message.
It is the revelation of Jacob’s dream, Jacob’s ladder, and Jacob’s God: that right where we are, the raging waters of current events eddying around us and the day’s news being what it is, right there (not just right here) is holy ground where God is to be recognized, known, loved, and obeyed. And our calling is, like Jacob’s, to take each stone on which we fitfully sleep and set it up as a monument to grace and pardon, a reminder that God is in the place with us and calls us to a miracle: the turning of stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Who Will Lead?
Scripture for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
In reading the Gospels, context is everything. Matthew sets his familiar parable of the sower and the seed in the context of a sharp question: Who will lead the people of God in the next generation?
Jesus is surrounded by great crowds. He is a celebrity, admired by many, fascinating to many, magnetic in appeal. His parable takes a needle and pops that bubble, revealing that flashy popularity has little bearing on his question. Many will turn out to hear him and have their hearts warmed. Many will flock to him to experience the thrill of a movement, an event, something happening. But who will understand? Who will bear fruit? Who will last? Who will lead?
Our Lord’s short public ministry heightens the drama of this question. He’s on the radar screen of Israel just a short three years at most: it’s a brief run because of all the toes and clay feet he stepped on in that career of his. The Gospels dwell on the question What will happen when the religious hierarchy sets him up and imperial Rome snuffs him out?
You can say that this critical question is the Church’s question. Matthew’s Gospel dates from the period 90-110 in the Common Era, let’s say 60 years after the events it narrates. Some three generations separate today’s seaside sermon and its passing through pen and ink onto the parchment of Matthew’s Gospel. Still a burning question is Who will lead the Church into its future? The early Church attracted sizeable numbers to its community, both Jews and pagan souls of one stripe or another who found something admirable, something appealing, in the message and mission of Jesus Christ, his sacramental presence in the believing community, and his spiritual presence in believers.
But it takes many Christians to change the light bulb of leadership, to pass the torch to the next generation, to lead a movement that depends not just on the waters of baptism and prevenient amazing grace but also on blood, sweat, and tears for inspiring and overseeing the hard work of being the church in the world.
And let’s update this profile. Ask the nominating committee of this (and any) parish, and you’ll find the same critical question being asked, nearly two millennia later: Who will our leaders be?
It’s a question that can be asked in anxiety or in faith.
Matthew and Mark and Luke, three out of the four Gospel writers, make it clear that this question has been urgent and central to Christianity from the start, and answering it in faith essential. As any nominating committee labors over its task, let them hear this Gospel and recognize what powerful company they’re in! He too confronted the leadership question, revealed it to be central to, not antithetical to, the spiritual life, and did so by telling a parable, The Sower and the Seed.
We’ve essentially heard it twice today, once on its own and a second time by explanation. The same seed (the Good News of the reign of God on earth) fell on four different patches of earth. Some fell on a path, and if human feet didn’t crush it, birds came and ate it. Some fell on rocky ground (this must have been in New England) and while this seed sprouted quickly, that rocky ground dried out fast when the sun rose and, roots being shallow, these seedlings withered. Some seed fell among thorns, and you can picture what happened there: choked. Other seeds fell on good soil—and in a basically desert climate, good soil couldn’t have been easy to come by, must have required work and sacrifice to irrigate and cultivate—and behold, payday: these seeds brought forth grain (“…first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear; grant, O harvest Lord, that we, wholesome grain and pure may be…”), in varying degrees of bounty.
We observed at “Sundays @ 9” this morning that while the poor soils get described by a long list of words or phrases (rocky, thorny, no depth, shallow roots), just two words apply uniquely to the good soil: understanding and bearing.
I hadn’t noticed that before. Nor that the parable throws us a few surprises. Seed sown on the path in the parable is sown, according to the explanation, “in the heart.” Seed sown on rocky ground is when the hearer receives the message joyfully. Come again? Don’t those sound like successful landings?
But no. The heart is apparently such an open place that birds of the air can swoop down and snatch what the heart holds (paradoxically, perhaps especially what the heart tries to hold onto too tightly).
And that rocky ground can resound with joy (aren’t we told somewhere that if we forget our Savior’s praise, the stones themselves will sing?), but even joy doesn’t cut the mustard, doesn’t sink our roots into the nourishing depth of understanding and bearing—and doesn’t weather the storms of trouble and persecution that have uncanny ability to disillusion people of faith and make us anxious skeptics.
This parable rises out of an urgent question. What critical question might the parable, in turn, inspire you to ask regarding your own spiritual practice?
I hope it’s how do you cultivate a receptive place within yourself to accept the seed, the message, the knowing of God, the transformative opportunities God presents. Without openness to God in the present moment, the seed does not sprout and mature to understanding and bearing.
You may want a more practical answer to that question, now in this sermon. But while I’m going to disappoint you on that score, I can suggest you come to “Sundays @ 9” this summer, where we’ll be considering just that kind of question: how to cultivate within our lives receptive places for the seed.
And until you arrive at your own answer to that question, I recommend treasuring the insight of St. Paul, shared with us today in his Letter to the Romans: “To let your mind be preoccupied with the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” He reminds us that, despite all the media messaging that barrages us, we who are baptized into Christ are not only in the flesh; we are also in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in us.
There is the rich deep ground of our being that we may cultivate, work, turn over, sink roots into, depend on, and rest upon.
And there is our baptismal birthright, not to be traded away for anything.
In reading the Gospels, context is everything. Matthew sets his familiar parable of the sower and the seed in the context of a sharp question: Who will lead the people of God in the next generation?
Jesus is surrounded by great crowds. He is a celebrity, admired by many, fascinating to many, magnetic in appeal. His parable takes a needle and pops that bubble, revealing that flashy popularity has little bearing on his question. Many will turn out to hear him and have their hearts warmed. Many will flock to him to experience the thrill of a movement, an event, something happening. But who will understand? Who will bear fruit? Who will last? Who will lead?
Our Lord’s short public ministry heightens the drama of this question. He’s on the radar screen of Israel just a short three years at most: it’s a brief run because of all the toes and clay feet he stepped on in that career of his. The Gospels dwell on the question What will happen when the religious hierarchy sets him up and imperial Rome snuffs him out?
You can say that this critical question is the Church’s question. Matthew’s Gospel dates from the period 90-110 in the Common Era, let’s say 60 years after the events it narrates. Some three generations separate today’s seaside sermon and its passing through pen and ink onto the parchment of Matthew’s Gospel. Still a burning question is Who will lead the Church into its future? The early Church attracted sizeable numbers to its community, both Jews and pagan souls of one stripe or another who found something admirable, something appealing, in the message and mission of Jesus Christ, his sacramental presence in the believing community, and his spiritual presence in believers.
But it takes many Christians to change the light bulb of leadership, to pass the torch to the next generation, to lead a movement that depends not just on the waters of baptism and prevenient amazing grace but also on blood, sweat, and tears for inspiring and overseeing the hard work of being the church in the world.
And let’s update this profile. Ask the nominating committee of this (and any) parish, and you’ll find the same critical question being asked, nearly two millennia later: Who will our leaders be?
It’s a question that can be asked in anxiety or in faith.
Matthew and Mark and Luke, three out of the four Gospel writers, make it clear that this question has been urgent and central to Christianity from the start, and answering it in faith essential. As any nominating committee labors over its task, let them hear this Gospel and recognize what powerful company they’re in! He too confronted the leadership question, revealed it to be central to, not antithetical to, the spiritual life, and did so by telling a parable, The Sower and the Seed.
We’ve essentially heard it twice today, once on its own and a second time by explanation. The same seed (the Good News of the reign of God on earth) fell on four different patches of earth. Some fell on a path, and if human feet didn’t crush it, birds came and ate it. Some fell on rocky ground (this must have been in New England) and while this seed sprouted quickly, that rocky ground dried out fast when the sun rose and, roots being shallow, these seedlings withered. Some seed fell among thorns, and you can picture what happened there: choked. Other seeds fell on good soil—and in a basically desert climate, good soil couldn’t have been easy to come by, must have required work and sacrifice to irrigate and cultivate—and behold, payday: these seeds brought forth grain (“…first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear; grant, O harvest Lord, that we, wholesome grain and pure may be…”), in varying degrees of bounty.
We observed at “Sundays @ 9” this morning that while the poor soils get described by a long list of words or phrases (rocky, thorny, no depth, shallow roots), just two words apply uniquely to the good soil: understanding and bearing.
I hadn’t noticed that before. Nor that the parable throws us a few surprises. Seed sown on the path in the parable is sown, according to the explanation, “in the heart.” Seed sown on rocky ground is when the hearer receives the message joyfully. Come again? Don’t those sound like successful landings?
But no. The heart is apparently such an open place that birds of the air can swoop down and snatch what the heart holds (paradoxically, perhaps especially what the heart tries to hold onto too tightly).
And that rocky ground can resound with joy (aren’t we told somewhere that if we forget our Savior’s praise, the stones themselves will sing?), but even joy doesn’t cut the mustard, doesn’t sink our roots into the nourishing depth of understanding and bearing—and doesn’t weather the storms of trouble and persecution that have uncanny ability to disillusion people of faith and make us anxious skeptics.
This parable rises out of an urgent question. What critical question might the parable, in turn, inspire you to ask regarding your own spiritual practice?
I hope it’s how do you cultivate a receptive place within yourself to accept the seed, the message, the knowing of God, the transformative opportunities God presents. Without openness to God in the present moment, the seed does not sprout and mature to understanding and bearing.
You may want a more practical answer to that question, now in this sermon. But while I’m going to disappoint you on that score, I can suggest you come to “Sundays @ 9” this summer, where we’ll be considering just that kind of question: how to cultivate within our lives receptive places for the seed.
And until you arrive at your own answer to that question, I recommend treasuring the insight of St. Paul, shared with us today in his Letter to the Romans: “To let your mind be preoccupied with the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” He reminds us that, despite all the media messaging that barrages us, we who are baptized into Christ are not only in the flesh; we are also in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in us.
There is the rich deep ground of our being that we may cultivate, work, turn over, sink roots into, depend on, and rest upon.
And there is our baptismal birthright, not to be traded away for anything.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Pulling Together
Scripture for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
It’s good to see young Isaac in a much better place in life than he was last week. Amazing, really, what the passing of a week will do. Or, in the Book of Genesis, the passing of a few patriarchal chapters. Last Sunday, he was bound and strapped to a crude altar on a mountaintop in the land of Moriah, and his father, Abraham, was poised with a dagger ready to offer his son’s life in sacrifice to God. From young Isaac’s victimized viewpoint, this was not going to be one of those mountaintop experiences you get to narrate in your spiritual autobiography. However one tells last Sunday’s Isaac story, it’s Abraham who gains the insight (namely, that the chosen people he will lead must not let their values be shaped by the old prevailing cultures around them, but will listen to and obey the mind and will of God)—but as important as that sounds, Isaac must nonetheless have been traumatized on that mountain.
So it’s good today to hear about Isaac welcoming Rebekah into his life, thanks to social networking of an ancient type. A trusted servant had been sent back to the ancestral homeland to find a wife for Isaac. This servant returned with Rebekah, a relative of Isaac, and it was clear that she was everyone’s idea of a perfect choice. The portion we heard today, part of a longer spinning of the story, is meant to witness to the fact that when the key players listen to and obey the mind and will of God, great choices get made: the choosing God does is implemented by the choosing that the key players do.
These Genesis stories are telling the story of the founding of a nation, Israel, and of its being chosen out of the many nations to be a light to all nations, its covenant relationship with God having formed and shaped the nation’s heart and mind and will to listen to and obey God. That was the vision.
The reality, as Matthew reminds us, is that wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. The Hebrew Bible presents an archive or scrapbook of the many times Israel’s actions modeled her high calling, and the many times when she failed.
A son of Israel, the apostle Paul, commenting on his own failures to demonstrate faithful covenant love, said that he could delight in the law of God in his inmost self, but simultaneously see in his makeup, in his own little constellation of human contradictions, another law at war with the law of his mind, making him captive to the law of sin, and therefore a wretched man.
I can’t read his words on this Independence Day weekend without hearing them offer a wrenching description of what may happen to a nation, as well as to an individual. St. Paul’s fearless self-exposure was meant, I expect, to suggest that this law of internal contradiction can land a nation in the same pickle that he found himself in: stuck, caught in the quicksand of willing what is right but not doing it.
That’s an apt description of what’s befalling our own nation. Our two-party system is paralyzed. We can will what is right but we cannot do it. We can elect leaders whose will we agree with, but we then watch them sink in the quicksand of that partisan war in our members that runs concertina wire down the center aisle of Congress.
Our Gospel portion today ends with words meant to be heard by the fed-up and the burned-out.
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
For me, that’s the Christian Gospel in a paragraph. It conveys wisdom hidden from the wise and intelligent and revealed to infants, and I take that to mean that we should consider sending our elected leaders to kindergarten for revelation of what they most need to know. Like why that center aisle in Congress is the most important spot in the house, the frontier of the promised land, the negotiating space where we need there to be a rush from both sides to tear down that wall… and stay there, in the aisle, not returning to those seats of power until the real work is done.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” The yoke is an invention that harnessed one easily-defeatable ox to another ox, creating the collaborative strength needed for carrying heavy burdens. That yoke is what is symbolized by the stole wrapped around the neck and shoulders of clergy, a constant reminder that it takes teamwork to pull-together for the good of the Church and for the good of the world.
And where the good news dwells in that metaphor of the yoke is in the identity of the one to whom you are yoked: Jesus Christ himself is the burden-bearer right next to you, alongside you, closer to you than breath itself. Even if it’s ox-breath.
Weary leaders, weary voters, all who are weary need to learn the lesson that our yokemate is gentle and humble in heart. To truly work in tandem with Christ, in tandem with Lady Wisdom if you prefer to see it, our pace and manner and style will require new discipline, new ways of acting, and new ways of resting.
As much as I love this Gospel text, I stumble on its final promises, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I sometimes recite this Gospel when I administer communion in a crisis, like in a hospital CCU or some other tough setting where I’m traveling light. How can I dare to speak of an easy yoke or a light burden when life itself may be in the balance? The person in that bed may be facing a long rehab period and many demanding changes…
Just the right moment to hear that the burden-bearer in the other half of the yoke is going to do the heavy lifting that will lighten the burden, and to hear the Christ claim the whole of the relationship by calling it “my yoke.”
May the grace that we can hear in a pastoral application of this great Gospel text become clear to all who could benefit from its political potential: the good news that cooperation across the most surprising lines and divides may bring exponential easing of burdens, even what St. Paul yearns for: rescue from this body of death, freeing the body for new life.
It’s good to see young Isaac in a much better place in life than he was last week. Amazing, really, what the passing of a week will do. Or, in the Book of Genesis, the passing of a few patriarchal chapters. Last Sunday, he was bound and strapped to a crude altar on a mountaintop in the land of Moriah, and his father, Abraham, was poised with a dagger ready to offer his son’s life in sacrifice to God. From young Isaac’s victimized viewpoint, this was not going to be one of those mountaintop experiences you get to narrate in your spiritual autobiography. However one tells last Sunday’s Isaac story, it’s Abraham who gains the insight (namely, that the chosen people he will lead must not let their values be shaped by the old prevailing cultures around them, but will listen to and obey the mind and will of God)—but as important as that sounds, Isaac must nonetheless have been traumatized on that mountain.
So it’s good today to hear about Isaac welcoming Rebekah into his life, thanks to social networking of an ancient type. A trusted servant had been sent back to the ancestral homeland to find a wife for Isaac. This servant returned with Rebekah, a relative of Isaac, and it was clear that she was everyone’s idea of a perfect choice. The portion we heard today, part of a longer spinning of the story, is meant to witness to the fact that when the key players listen to and obey the mind and will of God, great choices get made: the choosing God does is implemented by the choosing that the key players do.
These Genesis stories are telling the story of the founding of a nation, Israel, and of its being chosen out of the many nations to be a light to all nations, its covenant relationship with God having formed and shaped the nation’s heart and mind and will to listen to and obey God. That was the vision.
The reality, as Matthew reminds us, is that wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. The Hebrew Bible presents an archive or scrapbook of the many times Israel’s actions modeled her high calling, and the many times when she failed.
A son of Israel, the apostle Paul, commenting on his own failures to demonstrate faithful covenant love, said that he could delight in the law of God in his inmost self, but simultaneously see in his makeup, in his own little constellation of human contradictions, another law at war with the law of his mind, making him captive to the law of sin, and therefore a wretched man.
I can’t read his words on this Independence Day weekend without hearing them offer a wrenching description of what may happen to a nation, as well as to an individual. St. Paul’s fearless self-exposure was meant, I expect, to suggest that this law of internal contradiction can land a nation in the same pickle that he found himself in: stuck, caught in the quicksand of willing what is right but not doing it.
That’s an apt description of what’s befalling our own nation. Our two-party system is paralyzed. We can will what is right but we cannot do it. We can elect leaders whose will we agree with, but we then watch them sink in the quicksand of that partisan war in our members that runs concertina wire down the center aisle of Congress.
Our Gospel portion today ends with words meant to be heard by the fed-up and the burned-out.
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
For me, that’s the Christian Gospel in a paragraph. It conveys wisdom hidden from the wise and intelligent and revealed to infants, and I take that to mean that we should consider sending our elected leaders to kindergarten for revelation of what they most need to know. Like why that center aisle in Congress is the most important spot in the house, the frontier of the promised land, the negotiating space where we need there to be a rush from both sides to tear down that wall… and stay there, in the aisle, not returning to those seats of power until the real work is done.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” The yoke is an invention that harnessed one easily-defeatable ox to another ox, creating the collaborative strength needed for carrying heavy burdens. That yoke is what is symbolized by the stole wrapped around the neck and shoulders of clergy, a constant reminder that it takes teamwork to pull-together for the good of the Church and for the good of the world.
And where the good news dwells in that metaphor of the yoke is in the identity of the one to whom you are yoked: Jesus Christ himself is the burden-bearer right next to you, alongside you, closer to you than breath itself. Even if it’s ox-breath.
Weary leaders, weary voters, all who are weary need to learn the lesson that our yokemate is gentle and humble in heart. To truly work in tandem with Christ, in tandem with Lady Wisdom if you prefer to see it, our pace and manner and style will require new discipline, new ways of acting, and new ways of resting.
As much as I love this Gospel text, I stumble on its final promises, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I sometimes recite this Gospel when I administer communion in a crisis, like in a hospital CCU or some other tough setting where I’m traveling light. How can I dare to speak of an easy yoke or a light burden when life itself may be in the balance? The person in that bed may be facing a long rehab period and many demanding changes…
Just the right moment to hear that the burden-bearer in the other half of the yoke is going to do the heavy lifting that will lighten the burden, and to hear the Christ claim the whole of the relationship by calling it “my yoke.”
May the grace that we can hear in a pastoral application of this great Gospel text become clear to all who could benefit from its political potential: the good news that cooperation across the most surprising lines and divides may bring exponential easing of burdens, even what St. Paul yearns for: rescue from this body of death, freeing the body for new life.
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