rude sermons

2009-11-29T15:12:00.000-05:00

What to expect when you're expecting: a sermon for the first week of Advent

....If you’re someone who has experienced pregnancy and birth, then you’ve experienced something uniquely your own—something that no one, not even another woman who has given birth, can really know. It’s an odd, in-between experience: your baby is here already—and yet, not yet. The little flickers you feel (which later turn into full-on thumps on your ribcage that make you regret ever seeing Alien because you’re pretty sure that any more force and that kid will bust right on through, completely bypassing the birth canal) are the assurances that the forthcoming reality of babe-in-arms is already begun, already gathering life and strength, and all you have to do is wait for it. Expecting.

Did I say all you have to do is wait for it? Have I suddenly lost my mind, blanked out the fact that “all you have to do” is actually a huge amount of preparation and work and worry??? Don’t eat fish. Avoid soft cheeses, unless you’ve got solid proof they’ve been pasteurized. Don’t forget the prenatal vitamins. Eat lots of leafy greens, they’re a great source of folic acid. Take up prenatal yoga and start practicing that weird breathing. Don’t let anyone know you have the occasional sip of wine, and for sure, don’t get caught in the liquor store buying wine for communion because someone will give you the stink-eye. Brave the chaos that is Babies-r-Us and register: strollers, rattles, bibs, bathtub, swing—and do your best to avoid the rampant gendering of blue and pink themed objects. Research diapers—breastfeeding—birth. Read Girlfriend’s Guide, What to Expect, Smart Woman’s Guide to Better Birth. Write up a birth plan. Fend off all the unsolicited advice and uninvited belly pats. Try not gain any more or less than the recommended 25-35 pounds, then try not to worry about the fact you gained over 45 and weigh more than your own dad instead.

And worry. Is that kid all right in there? Fingers, toes, brain. Diaphragm.

And then, those last days counting up to—and then beyond—the “due date.” You thought the 40 weeks leading up to that date were long but now, time telescopes into a neverending stretch of expectation that eventually leaves you convinced that nope, you’re gonna be pregnant forever. This baby is not coming out. Other women have babies, but not you. The day you’re waiting for, the baby you’re expecting, is never, ever going to appear.

I’m serious about this. At post-date 15 days, after countless hours of yoga squats, massage, evening primrose oil, castor oil, and other things best left unmentioned in a sermon—nothing, and nothing, and nothing. As silly as it sounds, the same signs that once gave you hope that your expectation would become reality, start to convince that nothing will ever change. You are doomed to be pregnant forever. And all your work, all your preparation, all your hoping, all your expectation, is in vain.

This is what to expect, when you’re expecting.

This is Advent.

We are living in that time of post-date expectation, that time in which all the signs, all the flickers of life, that used to give us hope of fulfillment now just make us sigh because we’re having trouble believing that anything will ever change. All the signs, all the flickers of hope, are less comforting than they are frustrating—because we want to hold the full reality of squirming baby in our arms.

This is what to expect, while we’re expecting.

This is Advent. The re-telling, the re-living, of the post-date expectation of the world for the birth of its Messiah. And as we re-tell and re-live this agonizing wait, we are at the same time describing our own present struggle for hopefulness and expectation—we are, indeed, waiting for this Savior to come back. We are a people of perpetual expectation.

And we may, some of us, be stuck in that moment before the onset of labor, where the stubbornness of our material reality in its resistance to that transformational moment of birth has us convinced that there’s really nothing at all that we’re waiting for. That our expectation is in vain. That all our work is in vain. That nothing we do, not even—most regrettably—the castor oil, is going to make our expectations come to life.

If this is you, if you, like me, have been stuck in that moment of lost expectations, pause. And look around you.

Look at Clare, at Annalise, at Emmett Adu: expectations, come to life. As indeed, we believe the world witnessed two thousand years ago, in the expectation-come-to-life in the birth of another child, a child whose coming was expected from the very beginning of time itself.

And take hope. Expectation will be fulfilled, in glory. We do not wait in vain. Soon, very soon, the baby we’re all waiting for, the Messiah we are expecting, will arrive. Maranatha; come quickly, Lord Jesus.

2009-06-15T11:08:00.001-04:00

Who are we?: A theological musing on the Restoration of Christian Unity, Identity, and Love

I’m not going to pretend that this is really a sermon. This is straight-up theology, so go refill your coffee mugs.

Alexander Campbell’s Restoration plea: “Christians only…” Those of you who are CofC will recognize that that’s not the whole statement, but we’re going to stop there for the moment. Those of you who didn’t grow CofC may well be wondering, what does C-of-C stand for, who the heck is Alexander Campbell, and why should we care. And this very thing highlights the issue of CCfB collective identity, doesn’t it? It splits us into two distinct groups: the insiders who get the CofC lingo, and the “outsiders” who don’t. And the question is, “who are we?”

Like the church in Acts, which convened the council in Jerusalem to discern the answer to this question, we too face it (and let’s face it, we’ll never settle definitively, but simply continue to negotiate it). In Jerusalem the question of insiders and outsiders took the form of whether or not the outsiders, Gentiles, were required to become insiders, Jews (by way of circumcision and keeping the Law of Moses) in order to be Christian. As Joe reminded us in a sermon just a few weeks ago, the council at Jerusalem decided: no.

Likewise, this church decided “no” to this question as well—long before CCfB was the community it is today. We are Christ’s Church for Brooklyn, and not the Brooklyn Church of Christ, for a reason: we don’t require nor expect everyone in this community to be, or become, CofC, in order to be part of this Christian community.

One might interpret our generic choice of name (well, it is specifically Christian, but denominationally generic) as a return to Campbell’s original plea for unity. Here, in this community, we are “Christians only.”

And yet, Campbell’s vision of restoration and Christian unity is problematic. Campbell believed that unity would inevitably result if only people could get away from denomination creeds and start reading their bibles. If everyone would just read and follow the Bible, we would all be “Christians only.” So Campbell founded a movement based on this premise—a new, “non-denominational” movement, in which denominational identities would be renounced in order to achieve a new and solely Christian identity.

The problem with this strategy is—well, it didn’t work. There’s the obvious (to us) problem of biblical interpretation and hermeneutics, the fact that everyone just doesn’t sit down and come up with the same reading of the Bible as everyone else. But beyond that, which is itself a seriously fatal flaw, there’s an issue with the idea of identity. Check your denominational identity at the door, and then join our church and be Christian. Or in other words, you can only start being “Christian only” by dumping your former Christian identity. If you want to be generically Christian, you can’t be specifically Christian. And if you want to be inclusively Christian, unified with other Christians, you must be generically Christian. Unity is the result of a new, generic category of identity.

What’s the problem with this? Simply that our identities aren’t categorical in this way. This is a common sense point. Think about how you might describe yourself to another person—how many categories appear in your laundry list? I’m willing to bet you can amass a dozen or more in about 10 seconds. My facebook page lists mine: “mother, feminist, homemaker, writer, spouse, eternal student, theologian, JTB, believer, doubter, CofC'er, sister, daughter, cyborg, goddess. In no particular order.” Do I inhabit any one of these categories of identity at expense of the others? Am I no longer a mother while I’m the eternal student? No longer a feminist when I’m a homemaker? Am I no longer a believer while I’m a doubter?

No. I am all of these things, simultaneously, just as you inhabit multiple categories of identity simultaneously. Categorical identities are not mutually exclusive.

At the same time, I—and you—are not reducible to any one of those categories on the list. The categories are simultaneous and they are also partial. I am always a mother—but I am also not a mother only.

Campbell’s mistake was to assume that Christian identities were indeed whole and mutually exclusive, and that it would therefore take a whole new generic category in order to create Christian unity. Christians only.

But (as we CofC’ers know): the end of the slogan is, “…but not the only Christians.” So even while Campbell founded his plea for Christian unity on the foundation of a generic Christianity built upon a universal doctrinal agreement from a particular biblical hermeneutic (so problematic!), he sowed the seeds for his own deconstruction in that very slogan. “Not the only Christians.” Later in his life indeed his theological emphasis would shift to this second clause, making ecumenical unity a focal point (a legacy continued strongly in the branch of the Restoration movement known as the Disciples of Christ). Built into this second half of the slogan is the recognition that particular Christian identities are indeed Christian, and there is no necessity to surrender them in the name of Christian unity.

This church began as part of this Restoration Movement, a church plant sponsored by Manhattan Church of Christ. And yet, we have not chosen to require that those joining this community become Church of Christ (that would indeed be laying a burden on you that we ourselves cannot carry—to paraphrase Peter’s words to the council at Jerusalem). Nor, I want to say, do we require that you check your identities at the door in order to become “generically Christian.” Not all of us in this room grew up “CofC”: some Catholic, some Baptist, some Presbyterian, some Pentecostal...and I continue to claim and negotiate my own (sometimes problematic) CofC identity. We bring these identities together, and it is the very differences that make the collective identity of this community the beautiful example of Christian unity that it is. I don’t have to deny my past or my identity to enter this Christian community. Neither do you.

So who are we? Can we answer that question? Is there such a thing as “CCfB identity” or must we just shrug and say, “well, we’re all different so good luck on figuring it out. We’re really nice though, and everyone is welcome.” Honestly, I think we can do a little better than that. The fact that we can’t make a universal checklist of Christian beliefs that describes everyone in this room, and call that our CCfB identity, is a blessing, not a problem. We CofCer’s ought to know that better than anyone—we’ve been there and done that, and watched it fall apart, again and again. Alexander Campbell saw it fall apart even in his lifetime. Christian unity is not the product of doctrinal agreement; Christian identity is not the product of a checklist of beliefs.

So who are we?

Hear the words of the prophet Micah: what does God require of us? The right sacrifices, done in the all the right ways? A checklist of right beliefs, identity and membership in the right group? No. We’re not required to get all that right. Just, do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. Who are we, Christ’s Church for Brooklyn? We are those who seek to do what God requires: to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God.

It’s not that it doesn’t matter what we believe. It matters, because beliefs inform actions. But God knows—God knows!—we’re not going to get it all right. If we’re honest, we know it too. On our own, we will never get it right. On my own, I will persist in my theological mistakes, my hang-ups, my idiosyncratic interpretations, my individual blindnesses. On my own, I will never get it right. And this is part of the reason we need each other; part of the reason we are a “we,” why we come together, why we hang out on Sundays and talk about these things, pray about these things, read and study and learn about these things. On our own, we will never get it right. We can bang our heads in frustration and despair over it, like that old Sesame Street piano player guy, or we can accept it, as part of what it means to be Christian. Not getting it right. Not necessarily needing to, because in the meantime, we know, that what God truly requires of us is simple: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. Who are we, CCfB? Christians, not getting it all right, but seeking to do God’s work anyhow. Christians—of all sorts, walking humbly with God, together.

***

When God comes to us—and God comes to us, not we to God—when God comes to us, God does not require that we negate who we are. Again: God does not require that we negate who we are. Sure, there’s language of transformation all over the NT. Images of rebirth, language of the old man and the new man, language of “new creation,” even images of baptismal death and burial and rising to new life. Very dramatic. Nonetheless, I say to you: God does not require that you negate who you are.

Listen: God loves you. How many of us, during our engagement to be married or during the course of a relationship, have been tiresomely reminded of the truism, “don’t marry someone and then expect to change him.” Yes? I was told that. God doesn’t marry us, and then seek to remake us into the different person God secretly wants us to be. God marries us, because God loves us. God does not seek to make you someone else—some other person you theoretically should be. God loves you, and seeks to let you be who you are. And the language of transformation, of rebirth and new creation and the old and the new, is not the negation of your identity, but its fulfillment. This ritual, this sacred meal, invites us again and again into the powerful mystery of God’s love for us, a love that simultaneously celebrates, and transforms us into, who we truly are.

So we don’t check our identities at the door here. We seek to express God’s love to each other, and that means being who we are, with each other. Let yourself be known today, and loved.

***

2008-05-18T22:57:00.003-04:00

The Call of God and Professional Ministry, or “Vocation within the Priesthood of All Believers”
presented at the 2008 Women in Ministry Conference, at Manhattan Church of Christ
May 13, 2008

In 1998, after graduating from Harding with a degree in English literature, I went to China to teach conversational English and do mission work. I did not use the language of calling at that time. I did not know the language of vocation. When people asked me why I was going, the best answer I could come up with was, “I couldn’t think of anything else better to do.” I meant that. There wasn’t anything else better to do. Still reeling from a bitter breakup in which my hopes to become a missionary’s wife were dashed upon the rocks, I thought that I had found an alternative way to go about the most important thing of which I was capable, despite the inherent handicaps of being young, single, and female. But I did not consider myself to be called. I just didn’t want to waste my time doing things I thought were less important.

The first year in China was instructive. I experienced firsthand the theological dilemma of the Church of Christ doctrine of vocation. Yes, we are all “ministers”; even I, as young and inexperienced and confused as I was then. I had raised money from churches and family and friends who believed enough in this to put their money where their faith was. I got on a plane funded by the strength of their faith in me and in a doctrine that everyone, even the most unlikely, are called to ministry in God’s church.

The dilemma I experienced in China was no different than what I had grown up with my whole life in the States; but like so many other things, this aspect of my heritage of Christian belief and practice was invisible to me until placed in that new context where all sorts of things came to light. What I experienced was simply the inevitable result of an ambiguity in our tradition regarding the nature of ministry and ministers, an ambiguity I had lived with without noticing it…until the question of my own vocation made it obvious.

Vocation: broad and narrow senses

Pause to define our terms here. “Vocation” itself, the word, is used in two distinct ways. We can call them “broad” and “narrow.” Broadly, of course, vocation is used to mean the calling to God’s work for any and all Christians, in whatever situation and in whatever line of work is their own. Used in this way, the doctrine of vocation is an affirmation that all people experience a call, have a task and a purpose and a function within God’s people and in the world. This kind of call has a corporate dimension—we are called as the church, as the body of Christ in the world; it may also have an individual dimension to it—we are called according to our specific gifts, to specific ways of being Christ in this world. Narrowly, vocation means a call to what we might label “professional ministry” and what other traditions would call “ordained ministry,” a call to work within the church, to take up specific tasks in the service of the church and God’s people within the church.

We see both meanings at work throughout all the theological dimensions of a doctrine of vocation: God calls Israel (broad); God calls prophets (narrow). Christ calls people to become his disciples; Christ calls the Twelve apostles. The gift of the Holy Spirit in baptism; Pentecost and the laying on of hands. The call of the church; the calling of elders, deacons, apostles, prophets…and so on.

Later on this evening, our focus will shift from the narrow meaning of vocation as “professional ministry” into the broader sense, as we seek to understand not just what vocation means for us as ministers but for everyone—ourselves, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and how we can identify and help each other identify our Christian vocation in this world. This is a pressing question, in many ways a very practical and pastoral question…and therefore, something which I must leave in Regan and Charme’s capable hands, as I am completely impractical and non-pastoral myself, being a theologian. For now, the sense of vocation I am concerned with is the narrow one—vocation as being called into the service of the church in a way that demands your full time, your full energy, your whole heart.

Priesthood of all Believers: Campbell on vocation and ordination

Back to my dilemma. Where did it come from? We might instinctively want to equate our doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” with the broad sense of vocation, but these things are not quite the same. The broad sense of vocation carries us outside the walls of the church building into the world; the doctrine of priesthood of all believers refers to our practices within the church, our concepts of ministry and ministers and ministerial authority. And so our concern at the moment is with the narrow sense of vocation, and how this has been articulated in our tradition through the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

We inherit this, of course, from Martin Luther, though we probably don’t admit that often enough to make our Lutheran brothers and sisters happy.
But our doctrine is distinctively our own, a radical interpretation we have inherited from Alexander Campbell.

The Protestant understanding of “priesthood of all believers” was radicalized in the thought of Campbell, due especially to the influence of democratic politics in nineteenth century America.[1] The radicality of Campbell’s doctrine can be seen in his allowance of laypeople to perform rites typically reserved for clergy in other denominations. While he generally thought that the leaders should lead for the sake of good order, Campbell wrote,

“we concede that in certain cases it is the privilege of all the citizens of
Christ’s kingdom to preach, baptize, and teach. Every citizen of Christ’s
kingdom has, in virtue of his citizenship, equal rights, privileges, and
immunities. So has every citizen of the United States…. [A Christian] may of
right preach, baptize, and dispense the supper, as well as pray for all men,
when circumstances demand it (emphasis original).”[2]

According to Campbell, ordination was not required to preach or baptize or preside over the Lord’s Supper. Ordination was helpful merely to create order in a community that had been organized. But every Christian had the right to do these things.

The radical theological claim being made by Campbell’s permission of laypeople to preside over the Lord’s Supper may be lost on us, for whom it has become the weekly norm. In most churches, however, the Lord’s Supper is presided over and administered only by ordained ministers or priests; the significance of this lies in the belief that these are the representatives of Christ to the people in this moment of the sacrament, and that the elements of bread and wine—being Christ’s body and blood—are holy, and require handling by these holy representatives. My husband was instructed, by the priest who taught his liturgy class, that in speaking the words of institution, which are Christ’s words (“this is my body…this is my blood”), he indeed becomes Christ to the church at that moment. Campbell’s claim, then, is that all Christians are representative of Christ in this way, without the necessity of ordination to set them apart.

This explains, then, why we in the Churches of Christ have no practice of formal ordination in the sense that most churches do. Campbell’s understanding of leadership grew out of his radical view of the priesthood of all believers and was governed by the following principles: congregationalism, plurality of leaders, a tripartite ministry structure, and an aversion to “ministerial hirelings.” Many of these principles we are familiar with from long association: congregational autonomy, a plurality of elders, a basic three-fold division of church leadership into elders and deacons and what Campbell called “evangelists,” a role we would most likely identify today as “pulpit minister.” But the identification of Campbell’s “evangelist” with “pulpit minister” shows a drift into exactly the kind of practice Campbell was opposed to, the “ministerial hireling.”

What Campbell was reacting against was what he called the “hireling” system in which a certain Christian felt a “call,” went to seminary in order to train for a profession, then went to compete for a ministry job. Campbell in typical satirical tone says,

A hireling is one who prepares himself for the office of a ‘preacher’ or
‘minister,’ as a mechanic learns a trade, and who obtains a license from a
congregation, convention, presbytery, pope, or diocesan bishop, as a preacher or
minister, and agrees by the day or sermon, month or year for a stipulated
reward…. He learns the art and mystery of making a sermon, or a prayer, as a man
learns the art of making a boot or a shoe. He intends to make his living in
whole, or in part, by making sermons and prayers, and he sets himself up to the
highest bidder. He agrees for so much a sermon, or for fifty-two in the
wholesale way, and for a certain sum he undertakes to furnish so many; but if a
better offer is made him when his first contract is out, (and sometimes before
it expires,) he will agree to accept a better price. Such a preacher or
minister, by all the rules of grammar, logic, and arithmetic, is a hireling in
the full sense of the word.[3]

Ministry for Campbell was not a profession in which its practitioners competed for jobs. Rather, a congregation chose its leaders based on qualifications they already possessed.

Now, of course, our current practices have diverged significantly from Campbell’s doctrine; the historical ins and outs are too much to go into but we are all aware not only that we hire full-time paid ministers in our churches, but that most of these have received training and education at either our universities or preaching schools and increasing numbers even hold the same professional degree, the Master of Divinity, required for formal ordination in those churches that do have formal ordination processes. And I would venture to say that I am not alone, or atypical, in having grown up perceiving the minister of my church as a person holding a special kind of authority and status (that is, of course, until my dad became a minister when I was 14; that dispelled the glamour a bit…a prophet has no honor in his home after all).

So there’s a tension, as I see it, between our doctrine, inherited from Campbell, and our practice. We are all ministers; but the minister is a particular person, identified and chosen and hired and supported by the congregation. This person is called the minister because they are set apart to do these certain things, like preach on Sundays and teach Bible classes and counsel people and visit the sick in the hospital. The minister holds an authority in teaching that is distinct from the authority of other church leaders, for other church leaders, even elders, are lay leaders, chosen from among the congregation on the basis of qualifications they already possess. Early on, some followers of Campbell—like James A. Harding—resisted wholeheartedly the practice of “located ministers” seeing that this was exactly what Campbell meant by “hirelings.”

We could, at this point, follow this thread into a discussion of professionalization and debate the merits and need for education and training. But it is enough to sketch out the dilemma; by resisting the professionalization of ministry, Campbell also undermined a specific doctrine of vocation into the ministry.

As women, when we step out in faith to answer the call to ministry within our churches, not only do we run into the obvious issues stemming from the uncertain and ambiguous status of women in our churches, but we also wake up the old antagonism toward professional ministry. Campbell’s radically democratic priesthood of all believers does, in a very real sense, open the door for anyone to answer the call to ministry within the church. But it does so by saying no to the professionalization of ministry. And so, as women, we may have also seen this radically democratic doctrine work against the recognition of our calls to ministry. Everyone is a minister; you are already a minister; if you want a ministry, go pick something and do it; there’s nothing professional about it. There’s nothing special about it. And if you want recognition of your vocation, your call into the ministry of a church…well. Counterintuitively, the doctrine that opens the door for anyone who feels called to ministry often slams the door on women. This is, in essence, what I experienced that first eye-opening year in China.

This leaves us here at this conference for women-in-ministry squarely in the middle of this inherited ambiguity, with the task not only of remaining faithful to the call of God that we experience and of doing the ministry we are called to do, but of articulating our sense of vocation in a way which makes sense within our tradition and to the people we seek to serve as ministers in our churches. And that is no small theological task.

Constructing a doctrine of vocation within the priesthood of all believers.

To that end, I’d like to spend the rest of our time beginning the constructive work of articulating a theology of vocation for this priesthood of all believers.

To begin with, as I’m sure you may have reflected on, language of call and vocation is a bit of an ill fit within our Church of Christ heritage. It’s a little too touchy-feely for the hardheaded Scottish common sense realism woven into our tradition from its forefathers. If, for instance, you attempt to look up the word “vocation” in the Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, you won’t find it in there. And if you look for “ordination,” you’ll be sent to the article on “ministry.”

So perhaps the first question we pause to ask is really, is there a reason to start to using this language of vocation, seeing as how it is so utterly foreign to our theological heritage that it’s literally not even in our dictionary? What does language of vocation do for us that language of ministry doesn’t? I’d like to suggest that the language of vocation is an important recovery, particularly for women, but also generally within the context of our theology of ministry, for it gives us a way of connecting the pragmatic realities of defining, locating and practicing ministry to the very life of God. Ministry is indeed a human endeavor, but it is also service undertaken as response to God’s work in us; the language of vocation, the language of a calling, reminds us of that divine dimension even as it is worked out in the mundane processes of job hunting and resumes and answering ads and interviewing and disappointments. Particularly within Churches of Christ, with our historic lack of formal ordination at any level—institutional and congregational—the need to reconnect the largely mundane realities of finding work as a minister is an urgent one. This is exactly what a theology of vocation does.

But because of the nature of theology, when we borrow the language of calling and vocation from other Christians, we are in a sense taking on a great deal more than just language of calling. We are also taking on a foreign pneumatology, a doctrine of providence, a theology of prayer, even some different ecclesiology, at the same time; and without stopping to think about what it means to claim our calling, we cannot really expect this language to do more than alarm and alienate people within our churches who are aware that at some level, their settled and cherished beliefs about the Spirit, the church, even the nature and working of God is being challenged.

So what I’d like to do is address some of this, to help us sort out together just what some of these systematic implications of a doctrine of vocation are. What does a doctrine of vocation say about God? About Christ? About the Spirit? About the church?

Theology: seeing God in the process

In our theme text from Isaiah, we read that God calls both Israel as a nation and specific individuals. Again and again the OT we read fantastic stories of God’s call of the prophets and leaders of Israel: visions, and conversations, and fleeces dry and wet. There seems to be no particular pattern to be discerned. It’s hard to determine what “a call” is when God never seems to do it the same way twice. There’s no formula given we can use to measure it by. Did this happen? Check. Did that happen? Check. Okay, then, call verified. God just doesn’t really work that way.

Sometimes God chooses the obvious people, like Miriam, a member of a great family of leaders; and sometimes God chooses the unlikely: prostitutes, like Rahab, or unwed mothers, like Mary. Sometimes God chooses the prepared, like Samuel, dedicated to the priesthood prior to conception by his mother Hannah. Sometimes God chooses the unwilling, like Moses, who protested, “I don’t talk real well, you probably want someone else.”

What the Bible leaves no doubt about whatsoever is that God does call. A theology of vocation is unavoidable in the biblical testimony of God’s work in the world. God is at work, and God works through people.

This hopefully comes as no surprise to us, but think for a moment about the profundity of this assertion. God is at work in the world. Our God is alive. Our God is active. Our God is involved. Our God initiates. Our God is invested, tangled up in human lives and history, concerned with the task of making it come out right in the end, of reconciliation. Our God is not independent and autocratic and detached but is constantly bringing you and me and as many people as will come into this task—a mutual task, a collaboration of the human and the divine. This is a God who calls. This is what vocation means for our theology, our notions of who God is, and what God is like. Our God is a God who constantly invites us into the mutual task of reconciliation.

(as an afterthought: I think too that there is some work to be done in reworking our notions of theological authority and therefore ministerial authority. Campbell utterly rejected the formal hierarchies evident in other churches’ organization, and in the priesthood of all believers, he sought to articulate a doctrine of ministry that ended the distinction between clergy and laity. Yet there remains in our practice a belief in a kind of authority that remains stubbornly hierarchical. It is this that I believe is at the heart of disputes about the authority to teach, and who does and does not have it. When we consider that our God, who holds all authority in heaven and on earth, chose to share that full authority in Jesus Christ, who in turn chose other human beings to share his authority, who in turn chose other human beings…the concept of authority as hierarchical begins to become absurd. Authority that is shared is not hierarchical.)

Pneumatology: talking about the Spirit without scaring their pants off

How does this invitation take place? Connecting vocation and Spirit is perhaps the easiest systematic connection to make. Pentecost (celebrated just this last Sunday) makes the Spirit’s role in inaugurating the apostle’s ministry evident in tongues of flame and rushing wind and miracles. No less clear is the connection between the experiential aspect of vocation and the role of the Spirit. And it is exactly this, I suspect, that makes us the most uncomfortable about talk of callings. This language directly implies the kind of Spirit action in the world that we have traditionally sought to contain and reduce to the reading of the words of the biblical text; there and nowhere else did the Spirit move.[4] In our context it is also relevant to note that the Spirit has always been a leveling force with regard to limitations set for ministry; from the 4th century Montanists, a sect whose heresy included public leadership of women inspired by the Spirit, to the Pentecostal and Holiness movements in our own country, churches who have taught an active doctrine of the Holy Spirit have also historically seen the connection between the Spirit’s authority and the breakdown of barriers to ministry. For the Spirit blows where it (She) wills. Introducing language of vocation, constructing a theology of vocation, challenges a traditional Church of Christ pneumatology. There’s just no way around that.

This is, of course, a good thing. But it is also an uncomfortable thing.

There are two things to be said here. First, women ministers in our churches are inevitably faced with a burden of justifying their presence. Theologically, we need a doctrine of vocation as the answer to the question—implicit or explicit—of just what it is we think we’re doing, and why we should be doing it. But we cannot use language of calling as some kind of theological trump card. Spirit beats hermeneutics. That kind of theological stalemate is unconvincing, and ultimately damaging. It’s unconvincing because what it says is, experience trumps text; and “experience” is not generally recognized as a valid source for theological reflection by most members of our churches. For most of us, experience is subject to biblical correction, not the other way around.

Yet the second thing that must be said is that vocation is undeniably experiential in some way. These biblical stories, both OT and NT, tell us about experiences. Visions. Encounters. While this is not likely to make a compelling or persuasive case to others, I do not think there is anything to be gained by denying that we can experience, and have indeed experienced, the call of the Spirit in our lives. As my advisor at PTS puts it, rather academically, “one’s own experience is always rationally compelling.” We cannot expect these experiences to conform to a pattern any more than God’s calling of the prophets or Jesus’ calling of the disciples did. Neither can we deny that these experiences happen, without courting the dangers of self-deception and a denial of God’s initiative, God’s action, God’s presence, in this world.

Ecclesiology: the Call of the Church…or not.

The NT practice of the laying on of hands to impart the Spirit in preparation for the designation of individuals for specific tasks makes the connections between vocation, pneumatology and ecclesiology abundantly clear. We see in the NT that the Spirit is imparted both by the orderly mechanism of laying on of hands, and appears in places and people clearly outside-the-box—whereupon the response of the church was to accept this de facto vocation and lay hands on these Spirit filled persons in retrospect.

The role of the church in the vocation to professional ministry is clear in many denominations; for my husband, the formal process of ordination includes many committees composed of laypersons as well as clergy, the purpose of which is to, on behalf of the church, confirm or deny the presence of God’s call to service in the church. The church is seen, theologically, as Christ’s body and the dwelling place of the Spirit; so that it becomes the location where the work of the Spirit confirms itself. Vocation in these processes is therefore neither solely the individual’s experience nor the church’s prerogative; it is a combination of the two, both being seen as locations of the Spirit at work in the world.

Lacking such a process, we in the Churches of Christ have a much harder task in discerning the role of the church in vocation. The church is active in discerning vocation only occasionally, in the congregation’s process of hiring a minister, and each process is presumably somewhat unique to each congregation (though no doubt sharing significant similarity). The question under consideration in these processes is somewhat different; it is not, is this individual called to be a minister, but is this individual called to this ministry here. A local question, rather than a global one.

This process also takes place after the individual in question has had to wrestle with the question of vocation on their own, in deciding whether to pursue education and training and in deciding when and where to seek out employment as a minister. By the time our churches are involved in the discernment of vocation, the question has been settled by the individual for some time already. This means that, practically speaking, our churches play little to no role in the discernment of vocation to ministry. It is the burden of the individual to seek out confirmation of their call. It is my hope that you have found, as my husband and I did, people willing to serve this necessary function of the church for you; elders, professors, parents or friends willing to listen, advise, pray, and discern with you.

But our churches do play a role in affirming, or not, an individual’s discernment of their vocation by the simple and practical expedient of hiring or not hiring them. As women, we are perhaps more keenly aware than our male counterparts about this role of the church in affirming vocation to ministry because we cannot take that affirmation for granted. The number of churches in our fellowship willing to recognize the vocation of women to ministry is growing, but not faster than the number of women willing to answer the call to ministry. This brings us face-to-face with a theological dilemma: what do you do with a vocation to serve the church refuses to affirm?

I put this question bluntly because I think we need to be straightforward about it. It’s a problem. It’s a thorny problem without a clear answer. Does the lack of affirmation mean that we should doubt the veracity of our calling? No, not necessarily. Consider Jeremiah: called by God so undoubtedly that he experienced his call as a burning fire in his bones, but utterly unrecognized as called by the people he served; mocked, scorned, plotted against, thrown in prison…non-affirmed is a nice understatement. Yet neither we nor Jeremiah can doubt that he was truly called by God, and that he answered that call by serving the people who refused to recognize his ministry.

There are further questions to be asked, and practical, personal dimensions to this dilemma. How do you insist on your own calling by God without sounding arrogant, and self-serving? How do you balance the need to make a living and feed your kids and pay your school loans with the imperative to answer the call of God in your life, when you can’t find paid work in the ministry you feel called to?

I can’t answer these questions. But I want to return to the example of the NT church’s response to the presence of the Spirit in unexpected persons and places. The response of the church, once it was clear that the Spirit was present, was to accept and confirm the vocation of those people through baptism and the laying on of hands. Interestingly, though perhaps not too surprisingly, Campbell recognized the laying on of hands as a necessary ritual and even provided a short service format for it. As women, at this time, we are the unexpected. Part of our task, I believe strongly, is to make the fact of our vocation obvious, as obvious as was the calling of Nicodemus in the NT, as obvious as the vocation of Paul on the road to Damascus. The task of the church, I believe strongly, is to take notice; accept the presence of the Spirit in these unexpected persons and to confirm the work of God in us, through the laying on of hands and the affirmation of our calling. And the provision of work for hands that cannot remain idle.

Christology: imago Dei, imago Christi means women too

Finally: Christ, of course, is our example of what it means to answer the call into this mutual divine-human collaboration in the task of reconciling the world to God. This call is an inclusive one; this vocation is for everyone. This is what it means to be Christ-like, to put on Christ, and this is every Christian’s new identity through the rebirth of baptism. And what I want us to understand is that the vocation to be Christ-like is not the “broad” vocation out of which some special new vocation to professional ministry comes, as a different kind of vocation altogether, but that the calling to professional ministry is one particular form of being Christ-like. It is one way to enact the reconciling love of God to one another, within the context of the church, which is God’s people, the body of Christ, the community of the Spirit. Once we understand this, it is clear that those who receive this particular call must be free to follow it, for to not do so means not being the Christ-like Christian that we are all called to be.

I believe that this is the theological connection that we need to be making most strongly when we talk about vocation in our churches. If we can indeed show persuasively, not simply in our words but in our conduct and our determination, that our vocation is the vocation to faithfully follow Christ’s example, wherever it leads us—whether overseas into mission fields, into women's shelters, into classrooms, into our churches, our altars and our pulpits—then we can humbly persist in the audacious claim that we too are called, and we have no choice but to respond. And someday, I trust, our churches will respond with a recognition of our de facto vocation through the laying on of hands, and a blessing of our work.

[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 71-73. Nathan O. Hatch, church historian at the University of Notre Dame, in his watershed book The Democratization of American Christianity uses Campbell’s movement as a prime example of democracy’s influence on American religion. He says that Campbell’s movement emphasized three aspects in this regard: 1) an exalted conscience of the individual over church organization, 2) a rejection of traditions of learned theology, and 3) a populist hermeneutic emphasizing individualistic interpretation of the New Testament.

[2] Alexander Campbell, The Christian System, in Reference to the Union of Christians, and a Restoration of Primitive Christianity, as Plead in the Current Reformation, 4th ed. (Cincinnati: H. S. Bosworth, 1866), 81-82.

[3] Alexander Campbell, “A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things. No. XII. The Bishop’s Office.—No. 1.” The Christian Baptist 3, no. 9 (April 3, 1826): 232-33.

[4] Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 403ff.

2008-03-10T20:32:00.002-04:00

This past Sunday I again shared the privilege of preaching at Christ's Church for Brooklyn. Since CCfB podcasts sermons, I will not post the text here unless a) something went wrong with our technology or b) I decide I hated the delivery and would rather just have you read the text...

And check out Joe's sermons while you're at it!

2008-02-25T13:09:00.002-05:00

just a quick sermon-related news flash: a revised version of the Canaanite woman sermon, first preached at West Islip Church of Christ in August 2005, is now published in Leaven with the title "Perfect Righteousness."

I can't help but add that I feel quite honored, not simply to have these words published, but to be included alongside women I have long admired, Katie Hays among them. It is a humbling privilege to be in such company.

2007-11-13T19:06:00.000-05:00

The Cup of Water

preached Sunday, November 11, 2007 at Christ's Church for Brooklyn

“It’s Getting Better All the Time.” The first sermon series Joe preached asked the question, Melvin Udall’s question, “Is this as good as it gets?” And of course this second sermon series is a sort of answer…No! It’s not as good as it gets…it’s getting better, getting better all the time.

Which is why it’s weird, today, to preach a sermon on justice. Sermons on justice tend to be prophetic. They tend to be a little angry. They tend to be expressions of the kind of “holy discontent” Joe talked about in his first sermon here, expressions of the “I know this cannot be as good as it gets because this sucks!” variety. In fact, my confession for today is that—on this matter—I don’t see how “it’s getting better all the time,” at least, not if “better” means “getting more just.”

So why “justice,” now? It took me awhile to get my mind around this and what I finally realized was that I wasn’t supposed to preach a sermon on justice.

I was supposed to preach a sermon on being just.

What’s the difference, you might say. Just this: that talking about justice, as a concept, however powerfully and prophetically done, is talking about a final state of affairs that is so beyond us, so vastly different from what we know and expect of ourselves and each other, that we automatically talk about it passively. We wait for it. The day of the Lord, when everything will be made right. We wait for it, because the job is too big and too complicated and too difficult for us to understand or accomplish. The eschaton, the end of the ages, the Judgment Day, when Jesus comes back to judge the righteous and the wicked, and the righteous will be rewarded and all tears will be wiped away, and justice will reign. We wait for it, because it’s God’s job to come down and establish the justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom on earth.

But is it?

[Read text: Matt 25.31-36; unison, 37-39; 40-43; unison, 44; 45-6.]

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory…” Here we are, then, at the Judgment Day: and Jesus, who’s the Son of Man and who’s also a shepherd and also a king, Matthew got a little mixed with his metaphors here but it’s all good, is putting some people or maybe sheep over here on his right, some people or maybe goats over here on his left. And we all know what that means: the good people get what they deserve, and the bad people get what they deserve…now that’s “justice.” Praise God for the Judgment Day when finally everyone gets what they really deserve! When God finally gets around to sorting it all out properly! It was a long wait, but this was worth waiting for!

Is this God’s justice? Is this what this story’s all about?

I gotta tell you, I don’t think so. And it’s not just that I’m theologically uncomfortable with traditional doctrines of hell and eternal punishment (although, I confess, I am). No, there’s a lot about justice in this story, but it’s not located at the end. God’s justice is present, but it’s not about the end result. It’s not about who goes to eternal this or that. God’s justice is present, or absent, in the words and actions and lives of all those people gathered there in front of the throne of glory. It’s about who’s been just and who hasn’t…and no one in the story understands that.

No one gets it. Not even the good people on the right, and certainly not the bad people on the left. Not anyone. And not us either—who read this story and hear a parable of judgment and hellfire and brimstone and consider that God’s justice done. God’s justice is not the separating of the sheep from the goats, is not the reward of eternal life or eternal punishment. God’s justice is not about the judgment day, the end result, the tallying up.

God’s justice in this story is the cup of water.

And God’s justice is being done by people who don’t even know that that’s what they’re doing. Because they’re not concerned with “justice.” They’re not concerned with the final tally, the end result, with making sure that everyone gets exactly what they deserve in the end. They’re too busy being just, right now, in the moment.

They’re too busy meeting the needs they see all around them—those concrete, nonnegotiable, universal human needs that so heartbreakingly often go unmet. Food. Clean water. Shelter. Health care. Human sympathy and contact. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison?” Never. They never did. And every single time they encountered another human being in need. That’s Jesus’ answer, of course. “Just as you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.”

I’ve often heard this answer used to teach the lesson that we should strive to see Jesus in every person we meet. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t. It would probably mean a great deal of improvement in our social relations with a great many people if we could really do that. But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on in this exchange between the righteous and Jesus here. Jesus doesn’t say, “gotcha! that was just me in disguise, there.” No; instead, Jesus calls them “the least” in the world. Not the powerful Son of God, the king, in disguise. They really are the “least.” But these righteous cared for them anyway. Not because they saw Jesus, but because they saw need.

And what I hear in Jesus’ answer is that it doesn’t matter that they never saw Jesus in those hungry, thirsty, naked sick imprisoned people. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t see what they were doing as a service to God. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t think of themselves as God’s agents of divine justice and righteousness on earth. In fact, it seems to be to their credit that they didn’t, that they weren’t caught up in these questions. It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to bother with questions about God’s justice, and who deserves help and who doesn’t, (and what in the end, will I deserve?) It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to worry about when God’s justice will finally arrive, when everything will be finally made right, when they will finally get their reward, how long they will have to wait.

Me, I worry about these questions. Why? Because I’m a theologian. It’s my job to ask these questions and try to answer them. I ask these questions about justice and injustice, sitting in my office chair, in my home—my comfy, comfy Manhattan apartment. I think about all the injustice I have witnessed, heard about, read about. I think about the year I lived in Changsha, China, an American foreign teacher with a cushy job, a good salary, a travel allowance and a brand-new apartment provided with heat and A/C and a washing machine and no utility bill to pay…and how, from my kitchen window, I could see the construction workers from the countryside camping out under a tarp to sleep and washing themselves under a water spigot outside in the mornings, outside that nice new apartment they’d built for me. I remember how overwhelming that sight was, and how helpless it made me feel. What could I do for them? How could I even figure out what they really needed? How could I talk to people about how unjust it was that people would consider such a job good luck—coming into the city for months at a time, camping out in the heat and the cold away from their families, enduring cold and loneliness and, who knows what, for their lives were a mystery to me. How could I talk to people about the reasons behind such a situation? And what were those reasons? I wonder, why? Why are things this way? How did they get so messed up? How did we human beings make such a mess? And I wonder, how do we fix it? And what am I supposed to do?

Everything I see leads me to this sense of how immense the task is. Of how many people, in so many places, in Brooklyn and beyond, are squeezed and gripped and crushed by these systems and forces that I don’t understand, that seem to require the sacrifice of others on the altar of success and productivity and getting ahead in the world. And I freeze. Where do I start. What do I do. How do I do it. It’s too big for me. I don’t even understand how it all works really, so how can I act? Some people can’t see the forest for the trees; me, I can’t see the trees for the forest. I get lost in the hugeness of the problems I see. And I want to cry out, God, where are you? Why don’t you get down here and do your job already? There are hungry people here, thirsty people, lonely and sick and dying people, we need justice! How long do we have to wait?

I used to think that, somewhere out there, there were amazing and heroic people who understood these difficult things; these people knew what was going on, understood the big picture, understood the history and the politics and the economics and the red tape and knew the answers, and how to cut through the red tape to get stuff done. I used to think that my best shot would be to find those people, and learn from them, learn what they knew that I didn’t. And what happened is that I did find some of them. I found them here. Some of them are here today and some of them would be here, except that they’re off elsewhere, being just…

But what they know, that I’m still learning, is that in some sense being just is simple. It’s as simple as handing a cup of water to a thirsty person. And even though they’re completely aware of the enormous systems of injustice we human beings have somehow woven together, that seem so impervious to our tiny actions, these amazing heroic people, these righteous people, are out there handing out cups of water anyway.

Talk to these people. Learn what they do. If you don’t know what to do, ask them. They can tell you, not because they understand things so much better, but because they have learned that no matter how small you feel, or how little you think you know, you can do something. Because being just is sometimes as simple as a cup of water.

Casey’s blog used to have a quote from Ghandi up at the top. She’s changed it now, to something disappointingly philosophical by Kant, but it used to read, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” A cup of water. It’s not the cure for all the injustice of this world. In that sense, it’s insignificant. But it is very important that you give it.

This kind of action takes faith. It takes faith because we don’t see how these cups of water make a dent in the injustice that grips our world. There’s no end to the needs that cry out to be met. The list is long. Just listen to the text: hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, lonely, imprisoned people. That’s a lot of need. It takes faith because we don’t get to see that big picture, we don’t see how that Day, when all needs will be met and all injustices righted, can possibly come. We don’t see how it’s getting better all the time.

Maybe you’ve felt, as I have this week, that this effort for the H2O project is small, insignificant in the face of all the need, all the injustices facing us. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have occasionally this week, that giving up coffee, or whatever it is you’ve given up, is just purely symbolic. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have, frustrated and a bit angry by all of this sacrifice, suspicious that in the end, it just isn’t enough. But Jesus says to us: I was thirsty, and you gave me water. We won’t see the thirsty people who receive the water our dollars help provide. We won’t be there in person to hand them that cup of water. We have to act in faith. That’s what being just requires.

It takes faith to believe that no matter how insignificant our acts of justice may seem to be, they are important. That no matter how small they are, they do have an effect. That what we do for the least of these, counts. That when we go about the daily, godly business of being just, those cups of water mean something. And they do. For the people who receive them, they mean life triumphs over death. For the people who receive them, they mean good triumphs over evil. For the people who receive them, they mean justice. They mean God’s righteousness.

We forget that. I forget that, when I sit in my apartment and think about injustice, asking my theological questions, feeling overwhelmed by the realities outside my window. I forget that no matter how enormous the problem of systemic human injustice is, each cup of water is a victory over it. Not total. Not once and for all. But real. For those who receive that cup of water, it is the triumph of God’s justice and righteousness—a taste, a foretaste, of what that ultimate day of triumph will be.

That’s what we learn from Jesus here. Justice doesn’t wait for the Judgment Day. Justice isn’t the business of the king. Justice is not meted out on brass scales at the end of the age. Justice is not something we receive. It’s something we do: not justice, but being just. In ways big, sometimes, but mostly, small. Being just is meted out in cups of water, in canned goods, in donated coats and hand-knitted caps for newborn babies, in long hours at hospitals and ESL classrooms and support groups. And in skipped sodas and caffe lattes and gallons of milk and beers, and coins collected in a blue plastic cup: all to give that insignificant, all-important cup of water to the least of these, who need it so badly.

And maybe, just maybe, that cup of water will enable someone to say, yes, Lord: things are getting better. Getting better, one person at a time.

2007-07-15T16:00:00.000-04:00

"Who is the neighbor?"

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied,

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

“Who is my neighbor?” This question belongs on the Bible’s list of The Worst Questions Ever Asked in the History of the World. Alongside, “how many times must I forgive my brother?” and “when you come into your kingdom, can we sit at your right hand?” and “am I my brother’s keeper?”, this question lives in biblical infamy.

But this isn’t the only bad question that's asked in our text. The first question is, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well, what’s wrong with this question? Maybe nothing, as far as it goes. But notice, it’s not, what do I have to do to be a good person, or to please God, or what have you. It’s, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What do I have to do to get the reward? But even before the man opens his mouth to ask his first wrong question, we know it’s bound to be grim. The story, after all, identifies the man as “a lawyer.”

At first, Jesus plays the lawyer’s game. He knows the man is just asking to test him. But even so, he answers the man on his own grounds, asking his counterquestion in terms that a lawyer will understand. “What is written in the Law?” Jesus asks him. And the man of course knows the answer, as do we all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, etc., etc., and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s right, Jesus tells him. A gold star for the lawyer boy. Now all you have to do is go do it: “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

And it is here of course that the story really gets going. Because in answering the lawyer on his own grounds, by accepting the premises of the lawyer’s wrong question, Jesus leads him straight into the point at which his question and assumptions are all wrong. The lawyer knows the answer to his question. The lawyer knows the Law, knows the Good. The lawyer knows what Jesus will answer, even. The lawyer knows a whole lot. But what Jesus knows, that the lawyer doesn’t, is that knowledge isn’t enough. Knowing the answer is not really the answer. The real answer, to the right question, is not about knowing the Good. It’s about doing it. “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

The lawyer knows he’s caught. As are we all. You may have heard, perhaps, of the “famous seminary experiment of the Good Samaritans.” The experiment was designed to test whether or not people thinking “helpful, religious” type thoughts would be any more likely to stop and offer assistance to someone who needed it. So the researchers recruited seminary students, told them to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, and made them late for it. Then they said, “hey, you’re late—you better get going” and placed a slumped-over man, coughing and moaning, in their way. Less than half of the students stopped to offer any help…and apparently some of them literally stepped over the man in the alley in order to get to their destination and give their talk on the Good Samaritan.

This appalling truth about humanness is why Jesus corners the lawyer with his simple and indisputable pronouncement: “Do this and you will live.” Know this, and only know it, and you’ll know what it is you lack, the exact dimensions of your failure. But do this, and you will live.

The lawyer, the seminary students in a hurry, all of us, we’re all caught, we’re all cornered. And so the lawyer, advocating for himself (or perhaps all of us), wanting, as the Bible tells us, to justify himself (or all of us), hastens to ask that desperate, infamous follow-up question.

“And who is my neighbor?”

We all know the parable Jesus tells in reply; we know it by heart. A wounded man, a priest and a Levite (the seminary students of their day, if you will), and a Samaritan ( perhaps today's devout Muslim?). Jesus’ strategy in reaching the lawyer changes with the telling of the parable. At first, he accepted the legalistic question, leading the questioner straight into the absurdity of the divorce of knowledge and action. But the lawyer pushes on, even further into the absurd--preferring, apparently, to be absurd rather than wrong. He’d rather be silly than stupid, rather be ridiculous than repent. And so Jesus tells a story, and at the end, as he so often does, instead of answering the wrong question asked of him, he asks his interrogator a right question instead. Not “who is my neighbor?” but “which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man?”*

The difference between these two questions is vast. “Who is my neighbor” can only be answered in one way, with a list of who is not: not Samaritans, not wounded men on the sides of roads, not homeless people with a hacking cough, not people in Africa dying of AIDS, not people I don't know, not those people who need so much help that I don’t have time in my busy schedule to give, or any idea how to really help them. But “who was a neighbor to the wounded man?” is not answered that way. And the lawyer--smart man!--gets this answer right, too: he answers, “the one who showed him mercy.” Who is the neighbor? Not the wounded man; the Samaritan! Because the answer to Jesus’ question is that one makes oneself a neighbor—not somebody else.

And how? By being a neighbor to that person. The answer to the right question is not an identity; it is an action. This is why it is no accident that the neighbor in Jesus’ story is a Samaritan, a despised person, a reject, an outcast. It’s not identity that makes a neighbor.

Making oneself a neighbor is active. No, more than that—it is proactive, a preemptive strike of neighborliness. The wounded man does nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. He just lies there, wounded. It is the Samaritan who acts: who approaches, binds his wounds, takes him to the inn and provides for further care. The Samaritan makes himself the neighbor to the wounded man through his actions. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus concludes: Go and make yourself a neighbor to the wounded.

But—like the lawyer—I have a follow-up question to ask. What if this were a different story, one we don't know by heart, one where there was no good Samaritan to stop and help—just a priest and a Levite who walk by, and a wounded, abandoned, dying man on the road? Were there no good Samaritan in the story, what would we say? That the wounded man had no neighbor because no one made himself a neighbor to the man? Maybe that would be true, but it’s also only partially true, which means of course that it’s also a lie. Because, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” is that all three travelers should be neighbors to the wounded man; that all three are neighbors to the man, even if only one of them acted like it.

The truth is, the wounded man does not just do nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. Sure, he doesn't do much. He just lies there, wounded. But that's exactly it. It is his woundedness that makes the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan his neighbor. It is his need that puts these passers-by under obligation to respond to it. Were he not wounded, they would have passed on the road with a nod and a smile, or perhaps less than that. But he is wounded. He is in need. And the neighbor must answer.

The priest and the Levite pass by on the far side of the road. That is their answer. But the Samaritan, Jesus says, “came near” the wounded man and “when he saw him he was moved with pity.” I imagine that he saw the man’s face, and that the wounded man’s glance was one of both supplication and demand. Begging: please help me. And commanding: you must help me! The wounded man has the right to make this demand, simply because of his need.**

Who is the neighbor? Does the Samaritan make himself the neighbor through his neighborly act, or does the wounded man make the Samaritan his neighbor through the fact of his need?

Like all either-ors, to pose the question this way is to present a false dilemma. Yes, the woundedness of the wounded man makes the Samaritan his neighbor; yes, the action of the Samaritan in being neighbor to the wounded man makes him his true neighbor. What we learn from this parable is both of these things. What we learn is not just that the Samaritan comes through as the true neighbor, the one who showed mercy, but that the priest and the Levite fail, utterly, because they refuse to recognize their obligation to the wounded man’s need.

Do we understand their failure? If we’re honest with ourselves: yes. We are too often the priest and the Levite of the story who pass by on the other side of the road, the seminary students of the experiment, who step over the fallen man in the alley. We are stuffed full of knowledge of the Good and so preoccupied with it that we have forgotten that Good is not something you know, it’s something you do. Or perhaps we might even say, God is not something you know; God is something you do.

We live in a wounded world. It’s a world full of wounded people on the sides of roads full of busy people walking by them. We are the neighbor, with the power to help and to heal. Those wounds make us the neighbor. The only question left is, do we act like it. Do we?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." We, too, can give the right answer. And Jesus tells us: "Do this, and you will live."

Let us pray together the Prayer of Confession:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name. Amen.

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that we may both know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

*from Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: “The parable of the Good Samaritan ends with the famous inversion which Christ makes of the original question. They asked him, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and when everything seemed to point to the wounded man in the ditch on the side of the road, Christ asked, ‘which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor” (198).

**from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity : “The gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches in a dimension of height” (75).

2007-06-03T08:32:00.000-04:00

Who is She, and how do we know Her?: A sermon for Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
"To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth--
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

I know a lot of smart people. Really, really smart people. People who intimidate me with their wit, their vocabularies, their incredible breadth of knowledge. I’ve sat with them in class, I’ve learned from their lectures, I’ve read their blogs, Igo to church with them. But wise people? I don’t even know if I know anyone I would call “wise.”

The thing is, we don’t really talk about wisdom much so to tell the truth I don’t really know exactly what it is, or at least, I don’t really know exactly what it is we mean we say wisdom nowadays. I have a vague idea that wisdom is a special kind of knowledge, different from ordinary knowledge, or book-learning, or just being smart or quick-witted. When I think of a wise person, I think of somebody old: wisdom being something acquired through years of first-hand experience of the trials of life—something that, therefore, is undefinable, personal, non-transferable, and cannot be hurried, or achieved simply through effort or desire, or even anticipated. It’s sort of a compensation, maybe, for the wrinkles and the gray hair and the achy joints, and perhaps the reason why old people generally think the world—now being run by the upstart youngsters in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s and 50’s—is going to hell in a handbasket. But that’s it—that’s all I can really say about wisdom. It’s something vague and undefinable that sometimes old people get, if they’re lucky, if they live well and long and pay attention to stuff, and process their life’s experiences in the right way.

That isn’t what “wisdom” means in our text for today.

To begin with, unlike us, the Israelites thought a lot about wisdom. In fact, there’s a whole genre of OT literature called “wisdom literature.” Proverbs is “wisdom literature” along with Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations.

But that’s not all. We think of wisdom generically, as just a sort of way of thinking or living that is attained by a few people by living well. But wisdom in the wisdom literature of the OT is altogether different. It is not something that human beings achieve by living a long time, or even by living well. The wisdom of the wisdom literature in the OT is not human at all. It is God’s wisdom.

But even in saying this we may be tempted to think of this as simply a way of saying that God is really wise: God knows a lot more stuff than we do and even knows a lot more than we do about what is good for us. Sure, God knows a lot of stuff. Maybe even everything. But this isn’t what God’s wisdom is, either. It is not an attribute of God, like omniscience, or a way of saying what God is like. The wisdom of God is itself divine. The wisdom of God is God.

This is why Wisdom is personified in our text today, because to talk about Wisdom is to talk about God. Wisdom in this sense is one of God’s ways of being present and active in the world.

And Wisdom is a woman: divine Sophia.

In our text today, Wisdom speaks directly to us. She makes a lot of claims for herself, as divine Sophia, God’s own wisdom. She claims that she was there at the very beginning, at God’s side during the very act of Creation itself. She is “the first of God’s acts,” and witnessed the establishment of the heavens and the seas and the foundation of the earth. She was, she says, “beside God like a master-worker,” suggesting that perhaps she even participated in God’s act of creation.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God. He was there from the beginning, and through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Of course, John's prologue is a lot more familiar to us than Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs 8. We have all heard it before, many times. Probably a lot of us could recite it from memory without ever having tried to really memorize it. And of course we all know who it is about, right?

But the amazing parallels between Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs and the prologue of the gospel of John are not accidental. They are, rather, extremely deliberate. Wisdom, divine Sophia, is used as a way of describing God’s action and presence in the world. And of course, nowhere is God more present than in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. As articulated by John’s gospel, then, Jesus, like Sophia, is God’s presence and action with us in the world: there from the beginning, involved intimately in the act of creation. The claims made by Sophia in Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs become, in John’s gospel, Christological claims.

But Wisdom is a woman.

Perhaps the fact that God can be seen and spoken of not only with masculine images and metaphor like Father and Son but also with female images and metaphors is not surprising. We're familiar with Jesus' statement about Jerusalem, how he longed to gather her home like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings. We know that God is not male, or female. Perhaps both, or neither, or more than, or utterly other than; but never simply, only, male, or female. Nevertheless, I was told once during an especially vulnerable period of my Christian faith, “isn’t God a man?” Unable to respond at the time—unsure if my instinct to yell, “no!” was even faithful—I kept silent. Is God a man? I wondered...Jesus was a man. And Jesus was God incarnate. Does this mean God is a man?

Since then, my question has been not “is God a man,” but “how could anyone believe God is a man?” Of course this is a complicated matter. But on one level, this belief is possible because the Christian tradition, on the whole, speaks of God almost entirely in masculine language. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trinitarian language, which has been so sanctified over the years that it has become really the way to talk about who God is. Who God is in God’s self, and who God is to us. We theologian types call these the immanent and economic trinities. We talk about God in three persons, triunity, the one-in-three, perichoresis, aseity. We talk about social trinitarianism and discuss what works belong to which person, or if all three persons are present whenever God acts. Believe me, it’s complicated and wearying, and it’s been going on for nearly two thousand years.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a.k.a., "the first Sunday after Pentecost." Pentecost, of course, is a day with which we are all reasonably familiar, though sadly none of us remembered to wear the traditional red. But Trinity Sunday I would bet most of us have never heard of. Perhaps you, like me, did not even hear the word “trinity” in church growing up. Those of us from the Church of Christ don’t use that word much; Alexander Campbell, one of our founding fathers, didn’t like it: it isn’t biblical. "Bible things by Bible names!" So while we talk comfortably about God the Father, and Jesus the Son of God, and rather uncomfortably (I mean, let’s be honest) about the Spirit, we do accept the idea of God in three persons…we just don’t call them a trinity.

Why bother with the Trinity? Basically, Trinitarian talk is just our attempt to hold together two essential affirmations about the God we believe in: that God became human, and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ; and that God is, and has been, and will be the same God who has acted in the history of the people of Israel, and who moves among us today as Holy Spirit. How do we talk about a God who is so diversely present to us, and yet the same? The best solution the theologians of the third and fourth centuries could come up with was to talk about Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the three-in-one.

So on this Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate God the Father, who sent the Son, who sent the Spirit, our Comforter—what does it mean to talk about Wisdom, the female symbol of God’s presence and action in the world, divine Sophia, and Christ the Son as the new manifestation of Sophia?

I don’t really want to advocate straight up heresy. Not really. Not here, anyway…if you want heresy, go read my blog. So I’m not suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity is a bad doctrine, that we need to dump it or revise it or ignore it. I’m certainly not trying to add a fourth member to the Trinity. No, what I'm saying is radical--but radically orthodox: We must be careful about assuming that any human formulation—no matter how old, how venerable, how traditional, how carefully worked out—captures the essence of God, definitively. God is so much more than any human way of naming or describing can capture. God cannot be captured. C.S. Lewis told us this: he’s not a tame lion. (And he’s not really a lion, either.)

God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is Wisdom, divine Sophia. God is Mother, a jilted lover, a fire, a wind. God is all these and none of these. God is Mystery that cannot be contained in any one image, any one metaphor.

Each way of imaging God and speaking of God teaches us something unique, and something new, I believe. The triune God of traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine teaches us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son; a son who died for the sake of God’s beloved creation, and who promised us the Spirit in his absence. But this does not exhaust what can be said of God. So the question to ask, as we read this text on Trinity Sunday, is, what unique and new thing does Proverbs teach us about God through the voice of divine Wisdom?

Let’s look at our text again with this question in mind. It begins with Wisdom telling us that she cries out to us, and that she cries “to all that live.” This inclusive mission does not take heed of boundaries like nationality or gender or class or ability, or require that one be faithful before she’ll call. Her call is to us and to all that live. That’s everyone.

But that’s not all. When God, as Wisdom, calls out to all who live, it means not just that God wants everyone to hear but that everyone can hear Wisdom’s call. These days, I hear a lot about how Reason is untrustworthy, compromised because of the Fall, and how we have to be suspicious of human wisdom in order to be faithful to God’s Wisdom. Some of this I think is true. Obviously human knowledge is limited—we don’t know everything, and can’t know everything. Often we don’t even know or want what is good for us.

But if Wisdom’s call goes out to all who live then it reaches everyone, even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit; and if Wisdom’s call is meant for all who live, then it means even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit can hear Wisdom’s call. And unless Wisdom calls in vain, it means that all who live can respond to her. Human beings are not “ruined” when it comes to Wisdom; instead, we were created to be able to respond to Wisdom’s call when he hear it.

And now it makes sense that Wisdom’s speech turns into a poetic description of Creation itself: Wisdom was there from the beginning, observing and celebrating and participating in the creation of all things, including human beings; and thus we are in some sense creatures of Wisdom. We can hear her call and know Wisdom for who She is. Not just some of us; but all who live.

And so our text ends with God’s Wisdom “rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” People, God loves us. And not just like a disappointed father loves a wayward and prodigal son. God delights in the human race! God beams down at us, smiles, laughs, rejoices in us humans very much, I think, the way I watch Clare as she laughs, eats, says “Hi Da!” and “CAT!” while maniacally giggling at our poor patient cat, as she takes her wobbly first steps and grows those funny looking front teeth. I’m shameless—she has her own blog now just because one blog couldn’t contain the immensity of maternal delight! God is rejoicing in this inhabited world and delighting in the human race—children of God, children of Wisdom!

Yes, Wisdom is a woman. And what we see in this text is that Wisdom is God present and active in this world: God loving and delighting in his creation, God calling out to us and to all who live. God the Father sent his Son and his Holy Spirit to us; and God as divine Sophia calls us all home, delighting in us as a woman does her child. God is all these, and none of these. God is mystery that cannot be contained, contained in all things, in the Wisdom that created all.

2007-02-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

"Unready"

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"

Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

Today is the fifth Sunday of Epiphany. The Season of Epiphany is all about discovering who Jesus really is. The scriptures and stories we read during this season are stories of miracles, of healings, of teachings that show us that Jesus is not just some guy from Galilee, but someone special; someone touched by the divine, someone who—by the time we get to the story of the Transfiguration—is divine.

Of course, our perspective, as readers and hearers of these biblical stories, preserved and canonized and handed down through generations, is one that takes the outcome for granted. And we know, of course, that this perspective is exactly what is not taken for granted by those in the stories themselves. The crowds, the disciples—sometimes I think even Jesus himself—did not share our automatic certainty that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. They are always on the cusp of grasping this astonishing revelation...and then, most often, losing it. They are always in the middle of the epiphany, while we are ages past it.

It is of course nearly impossible for us to recreate the mindset of the people who lived these things, who walked and talked and watched and learned from the man Jesus, the man who occasionally is revealed to them as Someone Divine. We can’t forget that these things have happened. Even when we try to place ourselves within the narrative, as one of the disciples, or one of the crowd, or one of the many healed, our knowledge of Jesus’ identity—the very thing at issue in the stories—is a matter taken to some extent for granted, shaping how we imagine our participation in the event that reveals it. It is for this reason that we find ourselves with the easy conviction that we would have known, we would have followed, we would have said thank you, we never would have crucified, or mocked, or doubted, or denied.

So I will not ask you to imagine being there. I honestly don’t think that we can forget who Jesus is to us long enough for imagination to do the work we ask it to do.

Instead, let’s consider what these stories have in common. Sometimes, especially during ordinary or green time, the texts in the lectionary seem rather arbitrary and unrelated. This week, however, the experiences of Isaiah, Peter and Paul all seem to follow a pattern, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance that distinguish them. And because that is so, I believe the lesson we learn from the commonality of their experiences, recorded for us, is one that we can best learn not by reaching backwards with our imaginations to try to picture what it must have been like for them, but to scrutinize our own present to discern where the pattern of these experiences repeats itself in our lives, in its own unique permutation, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance between us and Isaiah, Peter and Paul.

Isaiah tells us that in the year King Uzziah died, he had a vision. He saw the Lord: as if God were a king, on a throne, with a court of seraphs as attendants. I had a professor at Harding, Mr. Eddins, who referred to such as “heavenly critters”—to emphasize the fact that we don’t really know what “seraphs” are, or what the word really means or even how to translate it, as seraph is really just an Anglicized version of the Greek-icized version of the original Hebrew word. But the symbolic point of the throne, the robe, and the heavenly critters is clear: this is a powerful and singular God Isaiah sees. And Isaiah is filled with a sense of God’s power and holiness. And because Isaiah sees just how powerful and holy this God is, the more acute his sense of his own human vulnerability and un-holiness becomes. Instead of joining with the heavenly critters in their chorus of praise, instead of proclaiming joyfully the holiness and glory of God, Isaiah voices instead his sense of his own unworthiness and fear. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,” he cries out.

Likewise, we see Peter protest in response to Jesus. Jesus asks a favor of Simon, later to be called Peter, which he seems happy enough to do. To get away from the pressing of the crowds, Jesus hops in his boat and asks him to put out a little way from the shore, so that Jesus can continue teaching. When he finishes, he tells Peter to go catch some fish. And here, I can’t help imagining a bit, that Peter’s reaction was in reality a little more dubious than what we get recorded in the text. Perhaps even a little miffed. After all, what does a religious teacher know about catching fish, and why would someone clearly not an expert presume to instruct someone who does it for a living? Just because he’s so smart, doesn’t mean he knows everything. But Peter does it anyway, though a little less than graciously. And when Jesus is proved right despite all expectation, Peter is amazed. But the expression of his amazement does not take the form of simple astonishment, or praise, or even a declaration of allegiance. Instead he falls down at Jesus’ feet and says, “Go away!” Why? Because, Peter says, he is a “sinful man.” Like Isaiah, Peter’s experience of the divine prompts, not acceptance or glad recognition or relief, but fear and a sense of being unworthy.

It is in Acts that we get an account of the story of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. Unlike Isaiah’s vision, we get a third-person rather than a first-person account: Luke’s version of Paul’s story. But in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers back to that experience: “Last of all, he appeared to me, as to one untimely born; for I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” In Paul, even in retrospect, we see the same reaction repeated. The stark difference between himself and Jesus is not softened by the passage of time. The vision of the divine, even the remembrance of that vision, prompts a recognition of unworthiness.

I want to ask you now to think about yourself; not to ask you how you would feel or what you would say if you suddenly had a vision in the night of God on a throne surrounded by heavenly critters, or if Jesus appeared to you in the middle of the subway. But to ask you, do you, as I do, understand exactly what that feeling of vulnerability, fear, inability and unworthiness feels like? To be facing up to a task, and think, I cannot possibly do this? To be facing a person, and know yourself to be completely inadequate to give them what they need? To be facing the future, and worry helplessly because you have no idea what will happen to you? And dare I ask you, what manifestation of the divine was it, in those instances of fear and self-doubt, that you were reacting to? Did you see God there? Do you see God there now, in retrospect?

God doesn’t wait for us to be ready for a vision. He doesn’t require preparation for a call. God simply breaks into the mundane, unpredictably and unaccountably, and—there it is. And you have to deal. And of course, our first moment, no matter who we are, Isaiahs and Moseses and Peters and Pauls (or even Jesuses?) notwithstanding, our first instinct is to refuse. To say no. To say, I am not ready. I am a man of unclean lips. I am a sinful man. I am unfit to be called an apostle.

But God doesn’t care. Our unreadiness is a fact; it is an aspect of being human. But God doesn’t care. God calls us anyway, in the very situations and circumstances that define the nature and shape of our unreadiness.

Did I say God doesn’t care? Of course God cares. To our first, instinctive, utter refusal of God’s call, God answers: but yes. To Isaiah, the man of unclean lips, God sends a heavenly critter to clean those lips, with the message, “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” To Simon Peter, Jesus responds, “Do not be afraid.” And Paul, reflecting on his Damascus road experience, can say, despite his unfitness, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

Do not be afraid. Your guilt has departed and your sin blotted out. By the grace of God you are what you are, and God’s grace is not in vain.

And now what?

Isaiah: “here am I, send me.” Peter, who left everything and followed. Paul, who writes the church in Corinth, “I have handed on to you what I received.” Let me suggest to you that these three unready—unclean, sinful, unfit—human beings together model for us three steps in answering our own call from God. Isaiah’s simple declaration gives us the first: acceptance. No more protesting or arguing, but acceptance that even this powerful, mighty God is asking us, you, me, for help; asking us to be God’s presence in this world. Peter’s action gives us the second: leave it and follow. I don’t know what form this may take in your life. It took a radical one in Peter’s—not just a job change, but an apparently complete forsaking of material goods and any prospect of security. Paul, finally, gives us the third: handing on what has been given to us, making “brothers and sisters” of all whom we encounter, proclaiming to them the good news through which we are being saved and through which all may be saved.

“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

Amen.

2006-02-27T10:11:00.000-05:00

Mark 9.2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

2 Corinthians 4.3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6 For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Of all the questions this astonishing text raises, this is the real question, the question that must have confronted Peter, James and John as they stood there on that mountaintop, afraid and confused, beholding a scene utterly out of this world. And, I think, it is the question the text forces us to confront today as we read it. Who is Jesus? There are many who believe Jesus to have been a good man, a great man, a prophet, a wise teacher, perhaps even a healer or miracle-worker, and nothing more. Certainly he was these things. But the Christian witness wants to claim something more, something else, something entirely different. Christians also claim that Jesus is God: and here we touch on the very core of the gospel proclamation, the heart of Christian belief, the mystery at the center of the Christian promise of salvation—that God would become flesh, and dwell among us, and this is who Jesus is.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, to believe this. It’s not easy for us. There’s a lot we don’t understand about it, and in some ways, we have the advantage over those who walked and talked and sat and ate with Jesus. We’re the lucky ones; we have a testimony which we can pore over, memorize, read again and again until it sinks into our very bones and forms the structure of our life so deeply that we become unconscious of the startling impossibilities embedded in it, the impossibilities that consistently tripped up the disciples. We see Jesus truly from the very beginning, aided by the story of the virgin birth and the shepherds and the angels and the wise kings from the East. We see Jesus in the temple as a boy, and later, teaching with authority. We see the miracles and the healings and the penetrating insights of Jesus’ ministry, and we understand them from the start in the context of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus, the Word made flesh which has come and dwelt among us. We have a chance to see Jesus truly from beginning to end, in a way that those who traveled alongside him could not; they could only piece together the clues as they came, not understanding them at all, really, until they understood the resurrection.

Imagine, then, how hard it must have been for Peter, James and John as they stood on that mountaintop. They ascended the mountain with their friend and teacher, expecting, perhaps, an intense small-group tutoring session, or special instructions, or perhaps just a quiet day to hang out and rest from the frenetic activity so often pressed on them all by the demands of the crowds that follow Jesus around. They expect the familiar. And instead, they receive the completely unfamiliar; they witness an incomprehensible transformation.

Mark 9 describes a break into routine, humdrum reality with a metamorphosis, a transformation, a moment for Peter and James and John when their friend, Jesus, is transfigured from the familiar buddy they’ve traveled around with into an exalted figure, at his ease with other exalted figures of Israel’s past. Peter responds wildly, a little stupidly, in an attempt to somehow make this out-of-the-world experience fit within his idea of reality. “Wow, it’s great to be here. Let’s, ah, make you guys a little more comfortable…”

But their fear and confusion is evident. Nothing about this experience squares with “reality.” And it’s not over yet! Even more, Jesus is elevated beyond the status of the exalted figures of Elijah and Moses, identified by a voice from a cloud: “this is my son whom I love.” How do they reconcile the friend they know with the Lord they see transfigured before them? How can the fellow human being they know and love also be, as the voice from the cloud tells them, God’s own beloved Son? Gone is their friend, with whom they have walked and talked and eaten in easy familiarity; and in his place is…who? Or even, what?

And then suddenly, this swift, passing glimpse into a truth that surpasses the mundane has vanished. They look around and everything is “back to normal.” No more Moses, no more Elijah. No more cloud, no more voice. Surely they must have staggered a bit at the abrupt transition, and wondered if anything had really happened at all. Maybe they even hoped nothing had happened. Maybe they didn’t look at each other or mention it for fear that they were the only crazy one there. Maybe being crazy by oneself would be preferable to the kind of reality-shaking alternative! But as they come down from the mountain, Jesus tells them, “don’t tell anyone what you saw.” Confirmation: so they really did truly see it, they think.

It’s interesting, from a literary point of view, to note the rich number of allusions in this short text from Mark 9. Echoes of the story of Moses’ shining face as he descended from the mountain with the stone tablets; the presence of Elijah, who was swept up to heaven in a fiery chariot; the voice from heaven identifying Jesus as God’s beloved son, in much the same way as the account of Jesus’ baptism in the first chapter of Mark. All of these echoes are echoes of earlier signs, earlier actions of God in the lives of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus which functioned to set them apart, mark them as special, specially favored and specially called. Throughout the season of Epiphany, which concludes with this Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, the lectionary texts describe sign after sign of Jesus’ specialness, Jesus’ uniqueness. The miracle at the wedding at Cana; stories of special knowledge and authority; stories of miraculous healing, all culminating in this moment on the mountaintop with Peter, James, and John.

Today we see the climactic moment in this slow process of figuring out who Jesus really is. Mark 9: 2-9 describes for us a moment, a brief, still, shining moment in which three clueless human beings are given a glimpse into something beyond the mundane, quotidian, routine process of seeing their way through daily life.

They must have asked themselves: am I seeing truly? Who is the real Jesus—the friend with dusty feet who gets tired and hungry, the Jesus we thought we knew—or this shining Jesus, conversing easily with the great prophets, Elijah and Moses, and of whom God says, “this is my beloved son?” What does it mean to see Jesus truly in this moment of transfiguration? What does it mean to see truly?

This is not really an easy question. Seeing isn’t always believing; or at least, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I’m apt to take the skeptical view that the senses cannot always be trusted: why? Because a blob of mustard or an undigested piece of beef or bad gruel can affect them. “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge tells the ghost of Jacob Marley. (I’m a sucker for puns.) How do we know when we’re seeing truly? It’s not that easy.

Human beings have a great capacity for self-deception, for seeing falsely. Sometimes we see falsely because it’s easy, or comfortable. We imagine the world to be as we would like it to be, and in the process, convince ourselves that that’s how it “really” is. This happens all the time. Although some people may lose perspective altogether, I don’t think that this tendency is “crazy”—rather, I think it’s universal. Here’s an example of what I mean. In one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels, he coins the term “granfalloon.” A granfalloon is an illusory sense of camaraderie or belonging to a group based on some superficial connection, some casual evaluation of external characteristics. Vonnegut’s example in the novel is “Hoosiers.” One character meets another, quite randomly, on a plane. They find out through some small talk that both of them are from Indiana. “Call me MOM!” one character gushes to the other. “He’s a HOOSIER!” she excitedly announces to her husband.

I’m a part of the great granfalloon, the “Class of ’94.” We celebrate that particular granfalloon with regularly scheduled high school class reunions. We imagine some lasting connection between us—despite more and more intervening years, total lack of contact and the fact that the only thing we really shared with each other when we were together was complete indifference to each other. There’s nothing real there. There’s nothing about who I am that is represented or touched by the concept of “Class of ’94.” There’s simply the bare fact that I am a certain age, graduated a certain year, lived in a certain place, went to a particular high school, with about 400 other people. There’s nothing about who I truly am captured in any of that. But somehow, it’s comforting to rewrite history, to imagine a connection to these people I barely know from a past that gets, thankfully, dimmer and dimmer.

Maybe this seems harmless. But seeing falsely can take more pernicious forms. Convincing oneself to stay in an abusive relationship, for example, by claiming it’s not that bad, or that he’s really trying this time, he’s really sorry, surely this is the last time... This kind of seeing falsely leads to dire consequences. It’s my suspicion that this capacity, more than anything else, describes theologically what “original sin” or general “fallenness” might mean: this human tendency to see ourselves, others, and the world around us falsely, to our own harm and others’.

There’s another way to miss the boat on “seeing truly,” and it’s not necessarily seeing falsely. It’s simply seeing routinely or mundanely, seeing habitually. This isn’t necessarily sinful, in my opinion. It’s a matter of navigating the world we’re in efficiently. We train ourselves, or others train us, in how to “see” as a way of coping. Recently in the “Film and Theology” class I am TA for this semester, we were put to the test in this matter. We were shown several film clips which were exercises to make us more aware of how techniques in film use our habits of seeing. In one clip, we were shown a man at a desk working, and hearing a telephone out of sight ring, in one frame; in the next frame, a man answered the telephone out in the hall. It took the class—60 people—three viewings and a clue from the professor (“watch the shirt” he said) to realize that the man in the second frame was a completely different man from the man at the desk. Different hair. Different shirt. Different glasses. Different facial features. Completely different person! We were seeing habitually; because it made sense to assume that it would be the same man, we simply didn’t see any different.

As I said, I don’t think this is “sinful,” or even stupid or dim-witted, really. I have to say this, right, because it took me three tries and a clue before I could see the film clip “truly.” I think it’s simply how the human mind works as it processes information.

There’s a sense, however, in which seeing routinely slides very easily into seeing falsely, in how we view each other and the people we encounter day to day as we go about the business of our lives. We don’t know everyone we encounter during the course of a day. And so we size people up on the basis of those external characteristics that are most obvious to us. Sometimes, we do so and end up making a granfalloon-ish connection; sometimes we do so to draw conclusions about how to best interact, how to best avoid, how to best protect ourselves from the others we encounter. In doing so we see other people not as who they truly are—this is invisible to us. We see them as obstacles or annoyances or even dangers; but we do not see them for who they truly are.

It takes something breaking in from outside, something startling and undeniable, to shake us out of the routine, the habitual mode of seeing only what we already know and expect to see. Sometimes it takes more than one try and more than one clue to get us to see truly. Once we do, though, we wonder how we could ever have been so blind…

This is, in a sense, what I think the season of Epiphany is all about. Multiple tries and multiple clues, to show us how to see the person of Jesus truly. To show us that Jesus is special. To show us that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, or in Mark’s phrase, the Son of Man. The transfiguration is the Big Clue for Peter, James and John. It is the Big Clue that pushes them to finally see Jesus truly.

But in the end, after things are “back to normal,” descending from the mountain, we see that they don’t really fully get it. They understand that something has happened, but not what it really means. They know they witnessed something miraculous, but they haven’t yet grasped the fullness of who Jesus has been revealed to be. Jesus tells them, as they come down from the mountain, not to tell anyone what they saw until “the son of man has risen from the dead.” Maybe Peter, James and John were relieved at this instruction from Jesus. Maybe not to tell would have been their first instinct anyhow. But why would Jesus ask them not to tell?

I think Jesus knew that even this clue was not fully understood, and wouldn’t be, until the time of his resurrection. Peter, James and John get a sneak peek at the true identity of Jesus in this moment of transfiguration, an identity which is declared openly to all the disciples, and indeed, to all people, in the event of the resurrection. It is at this point that Peter and James and John’s witness of this startling transformation will, perhaps, make sense to people. Perhaps by itself it remains unbelievable, and incomprehensible, even to those three who saw it; but in the light of the resurrection, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop in front of astonished human eyes takes on its real significance, as one moment among many in which Jesus’ identity as Christ, Son of man, Son of God, even God Himself, is revealed.

Of course, the disciples don’t understand all this, not now, not at this point. The gospel of Mark is unrelentingly honest in its portrayal of Jesus’ disciples, even these closest to him, as completely clueless. As they descend the mountain they ask themselves, “what does he mean, ‘rise from the dead?’ And they ask Jesus, “what’s all this about Elijah anyway?” Even Peter, James, and John, the three disciples closest to Jesus, don’t really understand what they just saw and who Jesus truly is; and perhaps, this is the reason for Jesus’ instruction to keep quiet about it. Like their potential audience, Peter and James and John need the resurrection in order to understand the transfiguration; but they don’t comprehend the possibility of resurrection, not yet. The difficulty of seeing beyond the ordinary, seeing beyond the expected, the everyday, the normal is so great that even this revelatory moment of transfiguration on the mountaintop goes only partially comprehended, by Jesus’ closest friends and disciples.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-6, the epistle text for today, Paul, too, acknowledges the difficulty of seeing truly: for some, he says, the gospel is “veiled.” It is veiled to those “who are perishing.” This image or metaphor of the veil is introduced in chapter 3, where Paul alludes to the veil over Moses’ face when Moses descends from the mountain with the stone tablets, a veil which Moses wears because of the unbearable brightness of his face, a reflection of having seen God’s own glory. This veil becomes an image, for Paul, of the inability to comprehend God’s message, or, in other words, the inability to see truly.

In acknowledging that the gospel can be “veiled,” Paul is acknowledging the difficulty of seeing truly. “The god of this world,” Paul says in 4:4, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light.” I think what Paul is talking about here is the inability to break out of our habitual, routine ways of seeing the world, an inability that closes us off to the new, novel, redeeming message of the gospel, which is, as always for Paul, the simple declaration that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those mired in the world, stuck in the rut, have no eyes to see this; it is veiled. It’s not impossible to see it. But it requires something huge and startling, and the openness to consider the seemingly incomprehensible. It is not something we can produce ourselves, from our own resources or our own habits of seeing. It comes to us from outside; as a grace, from God: “For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

A little further on in 2 Corinthians, Paul goes on to pen a verse which has intrigued me for years: 5:16. “From now on, therefore we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.” It’s a strange verse, in some ways. What does it mean to “regard Christ from a human point of view?” What does Paul mean by that? It is easy enough to guess that Paul is referring to his way of seeing Jesus prior to his Damascus road experience: an inadequate, partial view of Jesus based only on externals and completely missing the reality of who Jesus truly was, and is. And it is clear enough that now Paul understands that this “human point of view” completely misses the point. Seeing Jesus from a “human” point of view means not understanding who he truly is: Jesus Christ as Lord.

What do we do with this knowledge, given to us by God, testified to through the witness of Peter, James and John on the mountain beholding the transfigured Jesus, through the witness of the women at the empty tomb, through the witness of Paul, who beheld an ascended Christ on the road to Damascus? Is it enough to give our assent, and go home? To stand up and acknowledge Christ as Lord as a truth in which we believe and sit back down again? Is this something we can “get right” simply by saying it is so, or “get wrong” by denying it? What difference does this make for us, this belief in Jesus Christ as Lord?

For Paul, this revelation of who Jesus Christ truly is is bound up intimately with the revelation of who and what human beings truly are. Just as Paul tell us that he once regarded Christ from “a human point of view” but no longer, so, he says, we no longer regard anyone from this inadequate, partial, external “human point of view.” Seeing Jesus truly means that we understand the necessity of seeing all other human beings “truly” in this sense as well. Seeing truly means being prepared to see beyond the immediately visible, the surface obvious. It means seeing the true holiness inherent in what we behold: the divinity of Christ; the sharing of that divinity of all who are in Christ, and the sharing of that divinity which is common to all human beings, having been created in the image of God. Past the appearances, the trappings and the stations, the signals we send out consciously and unconsciously in dress, hair, mannerisms, patterns of speech—beyond all of that, to a true vision of the Other as both Christ-to-us and in-need-of-Christ. Seeing truly means being prepared to be, ourselves, the startling, unexpected sign from outside to others, to be the transfiguring event in their lives, as astonishing and unexpected as Jesus' transformation on the mountaintop was to Peter, James, and John, and just as reality-changing, changing how others see themselves, each other, the world. May we all be granted this transfiguring vision, vision that enables us to see, and serve, each other truly.

2005-08-14T11:00:00.000-04:00

Matthew 15.21-28

And Jesus left there, withdrew into the area of Tyre and Sidon. And, would you believe it, a Canaanite woman from that region came and cried out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Son of David! My daughter is evilly possessed.” And he answered her not one word. And the disciples coming to him asked him, saying, “Send her away, because she’s making a scene.” And he answered, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered and said, “It is not right to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord; but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Then Jesus answered, “Woman, great is your faith! May it be as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that hour (Jen's Translation).

Ever embarrassed to admit that you’re a church-going, Bible-believing Christian? Let me just say that there are days when I’d really rather keep quiet about this occasionally embarrassing fact.

Lately I have become addicted to blogging. For those of you who do not suffer from this virtual addiction, here’s a definition: “blog” is short for “web log,” a kind of website where a person can record their thoughts, observations, and comments on whatever strikes their fancy, and then “publish” them on the Internet, where anyone can visit the site and read what they’ve written. Almost like an on-line diary of sorts. I collaborate with three others in writing a blog called "A Few Voices,” the purpose of which is to comment on things cultural and political from a religious point of view; the idea motivating this blog is that the dreadful caricature of American Christianity commonly promoted—without reflection or serious examination or challenge—is one that doesn’t fit us, the few voices behind afewvoices.com. I also write a personal blog, the sole purpose of which is to provide a semi-anonymous forum where I can rant and rave about things that drive me crazy or tick me off. And I am addicted to reading blogs. I read about a dozen regularly, and by regularly I mean daily. All of them are religious, specifically Christian, and most are Church of Christ blogs by other seminarians who are addicted to wondering obsessively about the same things I do. And I keep up with the latest appearances of religious news by checking The Revealer, “a daily review of religion and the press.”

It’s here, at The Revealer, that some of the most truly embarrassing things about being a Christian in America today can be found, exhibited for general amusement and, possibly, to shame the rest of us into letting these good brothers and sisters get away with such shenanigans. The most recent headline at The Revealer tells you where you can go to order your very own copy of the 16-cassette tape series, “Patriarchy Made Simple.” Scroll down the screen for a link to an article with information about how prayer helps you shed pounds [editor's note: you can read the whole article here, if you're desperate, ahem, faithful enough to try it].

Yes, I have my moments of excruciating embarrassment about being a Christian.

Matthew’s story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman sounds like something you might read on The Revealer, about a TV evangelist/healer who walks around the streets of NYC, tight-lipped and clench-jawed, ignoring the bag lady shouting desperately after him, “Help me! Help me!” Not a stellar moment for Christianity. Not a stellar moment for Jesus, either.

It’s one thing to be embarrassed by a TV preacher shouting some nonsense about prayer hankies. It’s quite another to be embarrassed by your very own Lord, the Son of God, Jesus himself. And we’re presented with an embarrassment in this text. Suppose this were you, walking down the street with a woman shouting “help me” following after you. You’d say to yourself, “What would Jesus do? Jesus would help this woman.” But forget it! Not even Jesus is doing What Jesus Would Do—all of a sudden, Jesus is acting like he’s his own Evil Twin. Jesus ignores this woman. And the disciples aren’t any better; their only concern is to plead with Jesus to shut her up, because she’s making a scene. They don’t ask him to stop and help her—they just want her gone, this very embarrassing, ultra-inappropriate Canaanite female person. They’re not doing What Jesus Would Do anymore than Jesus is.

This text burdens us with its demand that we rationalize Jesus’ inexplicable behavior. We feel obligated to find ways of reading it that make it look less un-Jesus-like. Jesus can’t come off bad, after all, so we have to find some way to understand this so that Jesus comes off all right. But it’s not that easy. Jesus calls this woman a dog! Such is our collective desperation to understand this in a “nice” way that some commentaries suggest—in all seriousness, now—that what Jesus actually called her was something more like “nice little puppy.”

So what’s going on here? Well, here are some possibilities: 1) Jesus really was sent to the Jews first and foremost, and he’s not being rude or cruel, just telling the uncomfortable truth; in salvation-history terms, Israel is first, Gentiles are second. 2) Jesus is expressing a deep truth about all ministry: human beings are finite and ministry must always be done locally if it is to be effective; hence, he emphasizes that he must minister to those among whom he finds himself, that is, Israel. Others will just have to wait. 3) Jesus is concerned with teaching his disciples a lesson about who’s in and who’s not out and therefore employs some irony and dramatic roleplay as an attention-grabbing teaching technique.

Let’s consider Door #1. Perhaps it is true to say that Jesus was sent to the Jews first; Jesus is, after all, the “Messiah,” a figure that Israel had been waiting on for years, a word which would have no meaning at all outside of Israel’s history. But is this really what Jesus says, when he finally speaks? He says, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Perhaps your Bible reads simply, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The more literal double negative—“I was not sent except to Israel”—comes across a little stronger, a little more emphatic; in effect, Jesus says, if not for Israel, I wouldn’t be here at all. To read this as a claim of mere chronological precedence—Israel happens to be the people God deals with first, and therefore to whom Jesus is sent—doesn’t capture the full sense of this statement. Even to read this as a claim of pecking order within the kingdom of God doesn’t go far enough. What Jesus says sounds like an exclusive statement without exception. Plus, is a pecking order within the kingdom of God really something that sounds consistent with Jesus’ teaching? Perhaps Door #1 only opens onto an empty room after all.

Maybe Door #2 offers us a better explanation. Maybe Jesus was simply trying to say, “Look, I was sent to do a thing and I was sent to a particular place at a particular time, and I have to be about this, and I’m sorry, but this is simply outside my purview.” After all, Jesus was human, too; he needed to rest and eat and he had only two hands and two feet and 24 hours in a day like the rest of us. There’s simply a limit to what can be done, and you have to do what you can where you are. Maybe Jesus is just trying to say, I have to do my ministry where God put me in the first place.

Tom Long, homiletics prof at Emory, makes sense of this encounter by comparing Jesus to the founder of a battered woman’s shelter. If a homeless man shows up on the doorstep of a battered woman’s shelter begging for help, Long points out, the founder of the shelter may feel a great deal of compassion and yet still have to say no to his plea. Can she, should she, hand over the resources, finite and limited as they are, that she had worked so hard to gather for the women whose need is great, to someone who isn’t a part of the group she ministers to? (Long, Matthew, 176).

As tempting as this explanation is, I find two things unsatisfactory about it. First, Jesus has withdrawn into the area of Tyre and Sidon, and is hanging out in the iffy border-lands between Israel and Gentile territory. It seems that he is looking for some R & R, but this bothersome and loud Canaanite woman has somehow heard about him, and seeks him out. If the issue is localized, specific ministry to those whom you happen to come across—well, this woman fits the bill as well as anyone else who has ever sought Jesus out. Second, we’re not talking about disbursing funds, or even some kind of ministry which seems to involve belabored effort; while it is true that Jesus is human and therefore is subject to the same kinds of physical demands as everyone else who has ever lived, Jesus’ healing ministry has always been a sign of the divine side of Jesus. It’s certainly something outside of normal human capacity; something which, as a budding theologian interested in religion & science questions, I’ll just shrug and mumble “I dunno” if you ask me how he did it. The analogy to the women’s shelter, then, falls apart right at the point where it is supposed to illuminate. Jesus isn’t going to run out of healing juice in the same way that the women’s shelter is likely to run out of money.

So perhaps we’ll opt for Door #3. Maybe Jesus just doesn’t really mean it. At least, not in a straightforward, literal way. Perhaps he’s being ironic! Jesus can be tricky sometimes, as well we know. Maybe he makes this statement so strongly so that everyone will understand that he can’t possibly mean what it sounds like. Certainly, the woman doesn’t seem put off; she, at least, seems to think that, no matter how final that first statement sounded, that there is room for her in Jesus’ ministry.

So maybe it goes something like this: Jesus has been hanging out with these disciples of his for awhile, and he knows that there are some things they’re just having trouble getting their minds around. So Jesus decides to play it out. Here’s the perfect opportunity for a little bit of dramatic lesson-teaching. So first, Jesus ignores the woman—just like any righteous Teacher of Israel would do. The reaction of his disciples, though, is a little disappointing: instead of saying, “Rabbi, don’t you hear this woman crying to you for help? Why won’t you stop and heal her daughter?” No, they say, “Jesus, can’t you deal with this? Shut this woman up, she’s embarrassing us, GOSH!” So Jesus says, to everyone, still playing his ironic role, “I was not sent but to Israel.” The disciples apparently have no objection to this statement, but the woman knows better. Instead of leaving, she comes and kneels at Jesus’ feet and says, simply, “Lord, help me.” Maybe the disciples were grimacing and muttering amongst themselves, and Jesus saw that they still weren’t getting it—this woman’s demonstration of faith and trust was still not yet enough to soften their arrogance and self-assurance regarding their own guaranteed places in the kingdom, and the woman’s obvious out-of-placeness. So he plays it out even further, telling her, “It’s not right to take the children’s food and give it to dogs.” Maybe the disciples “Amen-ed” and nodded. But the woman knows better. Certain that the Jesus she has heard of, and trusted enough to follow after, would be willing and even eager to help her—no matter who she is, or isn't—she replies, “even the dogs have a place, under the table, eating what the children don’t want.” Maybe the humility of this reply startles some of the disciples out of their self-satisfied stupor. Maybe Jesus is so happy that this woman is so certain of him and so trusting that he can no longer bear to continue in his ironic stance toward her, and now turns to her, eager to heal, eager to show her and the disciples that she and her daughter, too, no matter how “inappropriate” they are, are equally a part of God’s kingdom.

I like this one—you can probably tell. This ironic interpretation makes sense of everything: Jesus’ weird behavior, the disciple’s teenage-like angst over their image, the woman’s persistence, Jesus’ eventual change of heart.

What’s missing, though, is any indication that the disciples got Jesus’ message. If this was the whole point, if Jesus went to such lengths to teach this lesson, well, there’s no indication that anyone ever got it. There’s no verse to follow the healing of the woman’s daughter that tells us anything about the disciples, whether they continued to be embarrassed by this woman’s presence, whether they were happy or annoyed by the fact that Jesus paid attention to her request, whether they repented of their juvenile obsession over image.

And even in this interpretation there is a lingering sense that Jesus was somehow a little unkind to this poor and desperate woman. She has no idea that she is the occasion for an inventive and ironic episode designed for the disciples’ benefit. Certainly whatever callousness Jesus displays in using her this way is a great deal less disturbing than his unkindness in a straightforward interpretation in which Jesus calls her a dog and tells her she has no part in the good news he is preaching to Israel. But still, a little uneasiness remains: does Jesus really use people in this way? Are we comfortable with this idea, and should we be?

So I want to propose yet another possibility—one which doesn’t get a door, because there’s never any “Door #4” on game shows. Certainly there is a lesson being taught here. But perhaps Jesus isn’t the all-knowing Teacher in this story. Maybe Jesus, just like all the rest of us, has something to learn from life; maybe what happens in this exchange is that Jesus, too, is a learner, and the Teacher in the story—unwittingly—is this fragile and yet courageous Canaanite woman, whose persistence teaches even Jesus something new about the nature of the kingdom. Perhaps Jesus was stunned at the prospect that the Good News he was preaching to Israel communicated itself even to those outside its borders, to people who had no preparation, no ongoing relationship with Yahweh, no idea of what it meant—but who somehow grasped the essence of the limitless grace of the kingdom of God anyhow, somehow grasped that this kingdom, unlike any other kingdom they’d ever known, has no borders to defend, knows no outsiders. Perhaps it took a moment for Jesus to absorb this stunning truth. Perhaps even Jesus was dazzled by the unbounded grace of God, kneeling before him the figure of this inappropriate woman, humbly yet persistently asserting that she and her daughter, too, had a place in God’s kingdom, as even the dogs have a place under the kitchen table. Gently and obstinately, the woman keeps insisting, we belong here, too.

Isaiah tells us, in the Old Testament reading for today, that God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, will “gather others to them, besides those already gathered.” Jesus knew the outcasts of Israel. He ate with them, talked with them, touched them and healed them, and ignored the protests and slander of the “righteous.” But this outcast is not an outcast of Israel; she is another…but one who will gathered as well, to those who are already gathered.

Perhaps it makes us a little uncomfortable to contemplate a picture of Jesus who’s not in complete control, who isn’t omniscient—who doesn’t know the future, who doesn’t necessarily know the intimate details and thoughts of everyone he encounters, who might have to learn along the way just what it means to be the Son of God. Maybe Jesus seems a little less righteous this way, a little less perfect. But righteousness doesn’t have to mean getting things right automatically, without having to think about it; perhaps righteousness, even in Jesus, includes being able to listen to the outcast and learn what righteousness is all over again.

We have to ask ourselves, now, where are we in this story. And it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that we stand with the disciples--the ones who, no matter which door you choose, which interpretation you choose, come off badly every time. Because it’s human nature, isn’t it, to think of ourselves and others in terms of what we are and what we aren’t, in terms of who is in and who is out of a particular group. It’s nearly impossible to describe yourself without employing these kinds of descriptors. And we experience a kind of natural affinity for those whom we can see are like us in some way. I gravitate to fellow students when I socialize at church; we have something to talk about (or more accurately complain about) that others don’t. In China, I experienced a sort of affinity-on-steroids for my fellow Americans; if I was walking down the street and saw a foreign face that I didn’t know, I would shout “Lao wai!” [“Foreigner!”] and accost the person, pathetic in my eagerness to connect.

But the flip side of this natural tendency of all of us human beings is that seeking out people who aren’t like us is then “unnatural.” It’s not that we can’t do it. It’s just that we don’t tend to, and it’s harder for us. No matter how much you want to break these barriers down, or deny that they exist, they are there, challenging your “unnatural” desire to live in a kingdom that doesn’t defend its borders.

And the church is by no means immune to this way of thinking, this who’s in, who’s out mentality. We know this, to our shame. It’s not just a Church of Christ problem, or an American Christianity problem. It’s been the church’s problem since the very beginning, when the Jews and the Gentiles were trying to figure out what to do with each other. It’s the problem Paul addresses in Romans, taking turns bashing the Gentiles and then the Jews, telling each group, “you’re not ‘in’ and they’re not ‘out’. God has called all of you, and God doesn’t make mistakes.”

In this world, where we have to learn from each other how to be righteous all over again, all the time, in every encounter, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman gives us a picture of profound righteousness. Jesus, the Son of God, allows himself to be corrected by a loudmouthed, embarrassing female who insists on making a scene. This is righteousness at its truest and most humble. May we all find the strength to follow Christ’s example.

2005-07-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and [hid in] three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value he went and sold all that he had and bought it. Again, the kindgom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (NRSV).

Today’s text, found in Matthew 13, isn’t really “a” text at all, it seems to me. It is a little collection of multiple texts, very short little sayings of Jesus, all of which seem to be fairly freestanding, independent, and, let’s face it, completely obvious. As a kid I always thought it was funny that we would study these in a class, or that a preacher would preach on one. I mean, “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grew into a tree.” So … the kingdom of heaven starts small, and then it gets really really big. There doesn’t seem to be much else to say about it. It’s pretty clear … so clear, in fact, even the disciples seem to understand these parables, although earlier in the chapter Matthew recounts that they had to ask for an explanation of the Parable of the Sower—not an especially difficult one there, either. But the disciples, not always altogether that swift, do seem to get the short, sweet ones with the really obvious point. These are about their speed. And, I’ll be honest, if the other option is the Parable of the Unjust Steward, I’ll take these any day of the week. Especially Sunday.

This is the first time, in Matthew’s account, that Jesus has spoken to the people following him in parables. And here, for the first time, all of a sudden, everything is a parable; if it’s not a parable, then it’s an explanation of a parable, or an comment on why, suddenly, Jesus has decided to only speak in parables. The Sermon on the Mount, while not exactly easy, is pretty direct; but Jesus has decided to switch strategies here in the middle of Matthew, to change in midstream and start teaching indirectly through the use of parables. Why do this? Jesus’ comments here in chapter 13, just before he relates the various kingdom of heaven parables, seem to say that he does this because people aren’t really getting what he’s been saying all along. But they don't really get the parables either. Perhaps some of them were shrugging and muttering to their neighbor, “so you sow seed on good soil, and it grows, who doesn’t know that?” Perhaps some of them were furrowing their brows and thinking, “this sounds so obvious…but I know there’s gotta be something profound here…” And probably in the back row there were a few troublemakers throwing spit-balls at each other and telling jokes…or maybe now I’m just projecting…

Like anyone else, when I read the gospels, I like to mentally place myself cozily in Jesus’ immediate ring of followers, his closest disciples, the people who were always there, who heard every word, who understood everything. But the gospels themselves often challenge this easy assumption. We realize with unease, embarrassment, maybe horror, that we are the Pharisee, or the hypocrite, or the scribe attempting to trip up Jesus in a legalistic conundrum; this time, I realized I was the anonymous clueless listener who thought to herself, uh, so what?

But I often also feel, reading parables like these, that perhaps I think they’re so obvious because I’m just not reading carefully enough, or thinking hard enough, or being faithful enough, to see the real profundity of them. There has to be something there, right? After all, this is the Bible. This is Jesus talking. It has to be profound … and if I can’t see it, the problem’s gotta be me. This feeling gets even worse when I’m surrounded by very faithful and intelligent people who all seem to be getting something I don’t, or at the very least, taking it for granted that something is there that I’m having trouble seeing.

But I’m not alone in this feeling, either. Other Christians through the years have struggled with the suspicion that these short, sweet little obvious sayings have to mean more than the obvious, have to be more than they appear to be, and they’ve struggled really hard to find the deeper meaning in them. This often led to allegorical interpretation, in which each element of the parable becomes a symbol for something else. Take, for example, Hilary of Poitier, a 4th century bishop, on the parable of the leaven, who claimed that the yeast represents Christ, the woman represents the synagogue, and the three measures of flour, the law, the prophets and the gospel, and also the unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and also, possibly, the calling of the three nations out of Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Hilary is a little doubtful about this last one, actually, you’ll be relieved to know.) But lest you think Hilary’s the only one looking a little too hard, Jerome—the very learned man who first translated the Bible into Latin, giving us the Vulgate—interpreted the yeast as knowledge of the Scriptures, and found the significance of the three measures of flour to be that “the spirit, the soul and the body” which are then blended into one.

Perhaps this seems very clearly ridiculous. All of this from a parable a single sentence long, which, in my Bible, doesn’t even get its own heading but tags along after the mustard tree like a little kid after his big brother. Certainly the point seems pretty obvious: again, something really small gets really big—the kingdom of heaven is like that.

Not too long ago, the Youngish-Professionalish-Adultish class at my church started studying the parables. Our first discussion centered on this very problem: do the parables have one meaning, or many possible meanings? Do they make one point, or lots of different points all at the same time? I’m sorry to report to you that we didn’t really settle this question. But I left with an interesting image to keep in mind as we read the parables: one way of thinking about the meaning is as a centripetal force, drawing everything into the center, into a single point. Another way of thinking about a parable’s meaning is as a centrifugal force, where meanings spin off, flying away in multiple directions. Some parables seem to draw everything to a distinct, single point; others seem to offer all kinds of possibilities, perhaps so many that we can’t sift through all of them.

Today I want to do a little of both. I think these short, sweet, obvious parables do make a single, overwhelming point, one that is easy to grasp, though, perhaps, not always easy to implement. But I also found, as I read through them again and again, that when read “against each other,” so to speak, that the meanings start coalescing in new ways, offering something new in addition to the single points the parables make on their own.

I’d like to spend the rest our time looking at the three parables in verses 44-50. Like the mustard seed and the leaven, their meaning seems plain, although the message is a different one. In both the parable of the treasure and the parable of the pearl, a single object is found that is of such great value that the person goes and sells everything in order to buy it. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, is like that treasure, or that pearl: it is of such great value that everything else you have is worth nothing compared to it.

--What is, exactly, the kingdom of heaven? Well, as my husband pointed out to me, whole books have been written on that … and what we have here is not so much a definition as it is a handful of hints, which as disciples, we must put together into a coherent picture, learning inductively what the kingdom of heaven means as we go along. Perhaps this is part of why Jesus turns to parables at this point; each parable gives us another hint, another piece of the picture, in a way that demands further synthesis, further thought. Jesus’ comments to the disciples on why parables may be getting at just this truth: people have been hearing him without understanding, Jesus tells them, and so now he will speak in parables—not because they’re easier to understand, but because they require something different of the listener, a participation in putting together the meaning. The kingdom of heaven isn’t something that we can take notes on as Jesus outlines its main features for us. It’s something to be grasped, bit by bit, along the way.

So far, Jesus has told his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard tree, leaven, treasure in a field, and a pearl. A handful of clues, if you will. The stories of the growing mustard seed and the leaven hidden in the flour give us a picture of something small, humble, insignificant, which—by doing what it does naturally—turns into something large, strong, and mature. It accomplishes this silently, simply growing, perhaps unnoticed until the final result is accomplished. The parables of the treasure and the pearl give us a glimpse into how important the kingdom of heaven truly is; more important than anything else in the world. Taken as single clues, they tell us that the kingdom of God is both humble, hidden, and yet at the same time great and important.

But these parables also, I think, tell us something else, when read all together. What I want to say here is that in all of these parables, the kingdom of heaven has been likened to something singular: one object, a tree, a treasure, a single shining pearl. The kingdom of heaven has been described in its unity, its wholeness and integrity assumed. The kingdom is one. The kingdom of heaven acts as a single unit: it grows, like a tree; it leavens, like yeast; it is possessed in whole or not at all, like the treasure or the pearl. The kingdom does not come in halves or quarters. It is, essentially, one.

And doesn’t this, too, tell us something significant about the kingdom of heaven? When we discover the kingdom of heaven, we do find it to be essentially one; despite the signs on our buildings, despite doctrinal quibbling, deep down, I think, we all recognize that the kingdom of heaven itself is undivided. Are we not all one in Christ Jesus? Doesn’t Jesus himself pray for unity for his followers, in John 17?

And yet Jesus has one more parable for us, in this 13th chapter of Matthew. He tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like a net full of every kind of fish. Every kind of fish. We’ve gone straight from the kingdom of heaven is like a single shining pearl to, the kingdom of heaven is like a net full of every kind of floppy, stinky fish. All of a sudden, unity is suddenly pushed into the background as Jesus presents with a startlingly different description of the kingdom, a kingdom which encompasses the very outer limits of diversity, represented by not just different kinds but every different kind of fish that there is. Apparently, whoever’s throwing the net into the sea doesn’t really care what kind of fish the net drags in—all this fisherman cares about is if it’s full. When it is full, the net is drawn ashore…and then the sorting begins. But we’re not sorting one kind from another, here. We’re not sorting trout from striped bass or catfish from dogfish or red fish from blue fish—just sorting good from bad. And here, Jesus helps us out a bit more, by telling us that this sorting of the fish is like the angels separating the righteous from the evil at “the close of the age.” The only relevant sorting is good from bad; not light fish from dark fish, or rich fish from poor fish, or smart fish from dumb fish, or even religious fish from secular fish; just good from bad, righteous from unrighteous. The point is, I think, pretty clear: within the kingdom of heaven there is amazing diversity. All kinds of fish get dragged in. All kinds of fish get sorted. The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of every different kind of fish.

And now we have a great contrast, don’t we, between the essential unity of the kingdom of heaven, and the essential diversity of it; and what are we to make of this?

There are, I think, two thoughts to follow here. One is, Matthew is clearly building the train of thought which will climax in his recounting of the Great Commission, in which the risen Jesus instructs the disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations. Matthew’s gospel was most probably written for an original audience of predominantly Jewish Christians, people who would be struggling with reconciling their Jewish identity and heritage with the implications of Jesus’ teaching for Gentiles. Here in this parable, we see Matthew stressing the universality of Jesus’ teaching: it’s not just for Jewish fish, Matthew tells his original readers, it’s for every kind of fish in the sea. In fact, being one kind or the other makes no difference at all in the end; when you’re sorted, it’s just about being good or bad that counts.

This brings us to the second thought: the only distinction to be made with regard to the kingdom of heaven is essentially ethical—one is righteous or unrighteous. A few weeks ago, reading the end of the Sermon on the Mount together, we noted Matthew’s emphasis on action as a necessary component of righteousness; simple knowledge of what is good is not enough—this knowledge must be acted on. Here, again, this theme in Matthew makes itself felt. In the end, Matthew tells us, the kingdom of heaven is about righteousness.

Bearing these things in mind, I want to look again at the two parables that precede the parable of the fish. The main point, the obvious point, still stands: the worth of the kingdom of heaven exceeds all else. But with an eye toward the idea of the simultaneous diversity and unity of the kingdom, what else might this pair of deceptively simple stories tell us? In the first, a man “finds” a hidden treasure. He’s not, apparently, looking for it. He just finds it, stumbles over it, seemingly. He just happens to be in the right place at the right time, tripping over the right rock, falling face flat on X-marks-the-spot while no one else is looking. In his joy, the text says, he sells all he has to buy the field. In the second, a merchant is in search of fine pearls; and he finds one. Unlike the man in the field, the merchant spends his time looking for what he finds. It’s his livelihood—his whole life, in a sense, is organized around this search for fine pearls. When he finds one, the one, he’s not surprised, but he knows what he must do to get it, and he does it.

One stumbles into the kingdom seemingly by accident; one searches it out deliberately. And yet they both respond to the evident worth of the kingdom; they both understand that though it means giving up everything else, the kingdom is worth it.

Maybe Matthew wants to tell us that the first man is like the Gentile; unprepared, without Israel’s long history and relationship with God, the Gentile stumbles onto the gospel without really knowing what it is that he’s looking for. But he knows, after he finds it, the worth of what he’s found. Maybe Matthew wants to tell us that the merchant is like the Jewish Christian: he knows what it is he seeks, he organizes his whole life around the pursuit, and when he finds it, he knows what to do.

Perhaps in our own context we can read these different ways of coming to the kingdom with a different emphasis. Perhaps the man who stumbles over the treasure is like those of us who were lucky enough to be born in a place where we can, without design, without intent, without even meaning to, stumble into the gospel. Some of us are born into families who have hidden the gospel all around us just so that we can stumble onto it before we even know we should be looking for it. There it is, hidden in the illustrated Children’s Book of Bible Stories on the bedside table, or in the prayer Grandpa says before meals. But some of us, like the merchant, search long and hard, knowing what we’re missing in our lives but not quite knowing where to find it, before we finally catch sight of it. I think about the difference between my own story, my own faith journey, and those of the Christians I met in China. I stumbled into the kingdom before I even knew what it was. My friend Anya waited out every other student after my first English class to ask, when everyone was gone and it was safe, “can you teach me the Bible?”

And yet, as the parable of the fish tells us, it doesn’t matter which way we come to find the kingdom; whether we know what we’re looking for or don’t, whether we’re searching high and low or never even had to search at all, we land in the same place. We are all brought onto shore together in the same net. Anya and I discovered the same kingdom, were brought into the same kingdom.

And, regardless of how we come to find the kingdom, we’re all called to the same response; we’re all asked to give up the same thing: all that we have, whatever it is. It’s not simply that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much more than anything else we might happen to possess; in these parables, the only way to get hold of the kingdom is to sell all you have. Certainly there are echoes here of the story Matthew will tell in chapter 19 of “the rich young ruler,” the young man who walks away from Jesus sorrowfully because he cannot do this very thing. But I think here the intent may include rather more than simply the idea of material wealth—although the context of the parable makes this the most obvious and perhaps the first meaning. There is also a hint of the revolutionary quality of the kingdom of heaven—this amazing thing that turns your whole life inside out, makes you re-evaluate everything, re-order, re-prioritize, perhaps even throw it all out and start from scratch.

At the conclusion of these parables, Jesus asks his disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And they tell him, “yes.” Now, if this were Mark telling the story, Mark would tell us, uh, no, the disciples never really got anything Jesus tried to tell them until much, much later. But Matthew is more optimistic in his portrayal of the disciples’ ability to understand. Matthew tells us that they do get it. And Jesus responds to them with what is, at least to us, a somewhat enigmatic statement, almost another parable in itself: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Maybe this is Jesus’ way of telling them they get an A in their first parables class. It seems clear, at any rate, that Jesus is counting the disciples as “scribes being trained for the kingdom of heaven,” and, anyway, what better training for the kingdom of heaven could there be than following Jesus around? But what does Jesus mean by the comparison of the disciples to a householder who brings out new and old treasure?

I want to suggest that here, again, we have an echo of the unity and diversity of the kingdom of heaven. The old treasure is the old wisdom, the law, the prophets, the history of Israel’s long relationship with God; the new is Jesus’ own teaching, the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven, or perhaps even Jesus himself! As “scholars trained for the kingdom of heaven,” the disciples are to bring out both the new and the old; both witness to the reality of the kingdom of heaven. Some will find the kingdom of heaven as they traverse from the old to the new; some will find the kingdom of heaven in the new, and rejoice then to discover the old.

So, finally, I think, the question of the unity and diversity of the kingdom of heaven becomes clear. Anyone may find the kingdom. The ways in which we here today have found the kingdom are, I’m sure, as diverse as the number of people here today. And yet when we find it, we are all called to the same response. We are all faced with the same necessity. We are all asked, what will you do with your find?

2005-05-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

Matthew 7.21-29

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’

"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.

We take our text this morning from the end of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount,” a long collection of various sayings of Jesus found in Matthew chapters 5 through 7. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t, of course, a “sermon” like we think of them today. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have a structure, or coherence, or an overall point. We will keep this in mind as we think about the text for today, the conclusion of the sermon. Our text comes in 2 parts: first we have Jesus’ warning that not all those who say to him, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the kingdom of heaven; and second, we have the very familiar story of the wise man who built his house on the rock, and his foolish counterpart who built his house on the sand. We will be looking at both parts, but in reverse order.

“The wise man built his house upon the rock.” How many of you inadvertently already have the old VBS song running through your head right now? This was one of my favorite songs as a kid. You just can’t beat the songs with the hand movements. This song also holds a special place for me because it happens to be, surprisingly, one of the favorite songs of the Chinese Christians in Wuhan, China. My first job out of college was teaching English there, 1998-99. I remember singing it first one night because we happened to be talking about this text, and it seemed like a good way to introduce the lesson. It surprised all of us American types when it caught on. The next week I found myself typing up the words and printing them out for Ladies’ Bible Study because it wasn’t in any of our songbooks, Chinese or English. I remember a couple of people volunteering to translate the song. I remember all of us being astonished that so many grown people would like a children’s song that much, but they did. (Their other favorite song was “Paradise Valley”—don’t ask me why.) I think part of the reason they liked the song so much is that it so clearly follows the Bible. These Christians were all new to Christianity, new to the Bible, and I’m sure that a lot of the songs we regularly sang in church didn’t make any sense to them, didn’t seem to have any connection to the Bible. They were always learning, always trying to learn, always trying to suck every little bit of knowledge out of everything... This song must have been a treasure trove to them, finally, a song that they could understand and learn from.

And we know that’s what songs do. Songs teach us. Why else would we sing our ABC’s, instead of reciting them? Why else do we all have this song in our heads still, at 30 years old, 50 years old? And why is it that every child here can tell us the story of the wise man who built his house upon the rock?

So what does this song teach us? Well, it follows the story pretty exactly, for the most part. It does, of course, make an interpretive move from Jesus’ “and great was its fall” to SMASH!, but I think we can agree that’s pretty minor, quite possibly an improvement, and definitely called for in the structure of the song. The really notable thing about the song is its last verse, the third verse. The conclusion of the song tells us: “So build your life on the Lord Jesus Christ…and the blessings come tumbling down; oh, the blessings come down as the prayers go up…”

So today, we have the problem of overcoming this familiarity. Like so many other wonderful passages in the Bible, familiarity can obscure the message sometimes, rather than reveal it. The song not only recounts Jesus’ story of the wise and the foolish man, but it gives us an interpretation as well. It’s not that interpretation is bad. On the contrary, we all know that interpretation is a necessary part of understanding the words that have been handed down to us in the Bible. But sometimes, certain interpretations become so normal, so authoritative, so embedded in our consciousness and our thoughts, that we can’t see where the text ends and the interpretation begins. An interpretation can become so familiar that we just don’t notice it any more, and we start to think that it’s just obvious that this is the right way to understand the text. In a small way, I think the song has interpreted these verses for me nearly my whole life. So now we have a chance to take a step back, look at this interpretation we’ve been given, and see what we think about it.

First, I want to note that some friends of mine have amended the third verse in the following way: “the blessings come down and the praise goes up”—they didn’t like the sort of “health and wealth” gospel in the original. I’m on board with this amendment, although I find it difficult to remember to sing the new version. When we sang this at church a couple of weeks ago I kept missing the changes. But my friends have noticed something profound here. Does the Bible tell us that the wise man had “blessings come tumbling down” because he built his house on the rock, because he built his life on Jesus Christ? It certainly does not. Rains came, floods came, winds came. These aren’t blessings. In fact, water and flood and storm often serve as symbols of chaos in the Bible, representing elements of the universe ranged against human beings and human life. And, you’ll notice if you read on, they’re the exact same thing the foolish man got, too. Rain and flood and wind come to both men in our story; there’s no special “get out of jail free card” that comes floating down from heaven for the wise man. He has to weather the storm and the chaos, too.

But still we tend to think that the point of the story is that the wise man gets something better out of life than the foolish man. And this doesn’t seem to be completely wrong; after all, the wise man still has his house! But we have figure out what this really means. Because it’s pretty clear now that the song oversimplifies things a bit. That’s fine for children. But most of us aren’t children anymore. We need something more, as Paul tells us.

Let me put before you a question to consider: What is a good life? Do we know what would make a life good? Do we know what would make our own lives good?

Earlier we heard Deuteronomy 11:18 and following read. Here, God is telling God’s people to put these words in their heart and soul, to remember them and teach them to their children. And God tells them, if you obey my commandments, you will be blessed; and if you do not obey, you will be cursed. Why? Because God is a hypersensitive and vengeful God, whose feelings get hurt when we don’t obey? I don’t think so. The text says, “See, I am setting before you a blessing and a curse; the blessing, if you obey…and the curse, if you do not…” God sets this before us as a truth about life. I think God is trying to explain to the people that his commandments are intended for their good; they are not arbitrary and set up for God’s sake or satisfaction, but for the people’s sake, to show them how to live a good life. The result of disobeying or ignoring God’s commandments is a curse, not because God gets angry and smites you, but because you are ignoring what makes life good. And that itself is a curse, and brings about disastrous consequences.

I think Jesus is giving us the same message in this story of the wise and the foolish man. In fact, I think this basic message can be seen as the point of the whole Sermon on the Mount. What makes us wise? What counts as foolish? Now we can reconsider this story and ask ourselves, what is it about this man that makes him wise? And what is wisdom?

We don’t talk about wisdom much. Knowledge, yes, intelligence, yes, but not wisdom. But it shows up quite a bit in the Bible. In the proverbs we often encounter descriptions of the wise and the foolish, and wisdom is even personified here and there (interestingly, as a woman). It crops up in the New Testament quite often as well. Clearly the idea of wisdom was central to the ancient worldview in a way that it isn’t for us today. Quite simply, wisdom is about knowing what’s good: what’s good for you, what’s good for others, what’s good for life. It’s about knowing what a good life is and what a good life looks like and requires. It’s knowing the difference between right and wrong, but it’s more than simple ethics or rulekeeping. It’s different from book knowledge or the ability to think abstractly or contemplate abstract concepts. It’s different from cleverness with your hands and knowing how to build or fix things. This kind of wisdom is a whole different kind of knowledge. And it is the glue that holds these other kinds of knowledge together, in the right way. Or perhaps we can call wisdom the bridge between these kinds of knowledge, between contemplative knowledge and technical know-how. The gap between knowing what is good…and doing what is good.

I think it’s this kind of wisdom that we so often miss in our own lives, and it is this kind of wisdom that Jesus is describing in the character of the wise man in the story. What is it that makes this man wise, and the other man foolish? The wise man knows where to build his house: on the rock. The story doesn’t tell us whether he built the house well or not, except for this one detail, that he chose the site of its foundation wisely. What makes this man wise is that he knows to put into action the knowledge he has gained in contemplating life. The wise man knows that rain and flood and storms are bound to come. He knows what is required in order to withstand the chaos. And he goes into action. His knowledge guides and motivates action.

Why is the foolish man foolish? It could be that he has no idea what’s coming; that’s one form of foolishness. But it seems more likely to me that he does know, and perhaps he even knows that a foundation of rock is required for a house to stand through the storm. But he acts otherwise. His knowledge does not inform or motivate his action. There is a disconnect somewhere. His action is guided by something else—perhaps laziness, perhaps cheapness, perhaps indifference or unmerited optimism. And his house does not stand. It fell, Jesus tells us, and great was its fall. It fell with a smash.

What was this story supposed to mean for its hearers, the crowds and the disciples gathered around Jesus? Jesus begins the story by saying, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.” What words? Remember, this is the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has talked for two whole chapters at this point, explaining to people why their religion must be more than simple rulekeeping; why they must transcend “common sense” and love their enemy, walk the second mile, lend their cloak, give to everyone who asks; why it is better to pray a simple prayer in secret, rather than show off on the street corner; why, in everything that they do, they should do to others as they would have them do for them. These words of Jesus are the rock in the story: they are what is required to withstand the chaos that is bound to come. But it is only wisdom for those who hear Jesus’ words, if the hearers act on them—not simply understand them, remember them, or contemplate them. For the essence of wisdom is to bridge the gap between knowing and doing what is good.

It’s not too hard to think of examples of this kind of foolishness today. It’s an easy kind of foolishness, this separation of knowledge of what is good and necessary and beneficial for life, and acting upon that knowledge. Don’t we all know that eating a spinach salad is better than eating a McDonald’s BigMac? So why is MacDonald’s still in business? Don’t we know that recycling our paper and plastics and glass jars and soup cans is better than throwing them away? Why don’t more people do it? Maybe these seem like trivial examples. What does spinach and recycling have to do with God? Well, nothing on the face of it, for sure. But God knows what is good for us, on all levels—socially, physically, emotionally—and God desires that we have a good life, I believe, on all these levels.

Let’s look now at the verses right before Jesus tells the story of the wise man and the foolish man. In Matthew 7, verse 21 Jesus warns his disciples and the crowds, “Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” Again, there is an emphasis placed on action, on doing the will of God, on building the house on the rock. But what is the response in verse 22? Jesus tells us, on that day many will say, “but Lord! We did do stuff! Look at all we did! We prophesied in your name, and we cast out demons in your name, and we did all kinds of cool powerful stuff in your name!” And Jesus tells us that he will declare to them, “I never knew you.” Here we have very active people, very busy people. People busy doing the wrong things, or perhaps people doing right things for the wrong reasons. I find it interesting that their protest takes the form of doing deeds “in Jesus’ name.” They did things in Jesus’ name, but not for Jesus himself. His name is a badge, a code for power, a means to accomplish their deeds. But it is unconnected with Jesus himself; for he says, “I never knew you.” These people are also foolish, but their mistake is not the mistake of the foolish man who builds his house on sand, who neglects to put his knowledge of what is good into action. These people lack wisdom because they have neglected to contemplate first what is good; they have sprung into action feverishly, doing whatever they can, assuming that feverish action will be pleasing to God…without first finding out who God is, and what God wants. How can we go about the business of God, without knowing who God is?

This semester I was given the privilege of acting as teaching assistant for the first-year introductory theology course at the seminary. The students read five theologians throughout the semester, each of whom had their own distinctive ways of doing theology. It was, I admit, a pretty rough way to be introduced to the discipline. Most of them seemed to survive relatively unscathed. One of the theologians we read is a Roman Catholic South American theologian by the name of Gustavo Gutierrez. He is famous for his “liberation theology,” a Christian theology that emphasizes the necessity of the love of neighbor and taking action to show this love by helping the poor in concrete ways. For Gutierrez, theology is reflection on practice; it is thinking about, later, what it is that Christians do; why Christians do what they do. Practice, action, is first; reflection, theology, is second. But, astonishingly, he describes the doing, as “contemplation and practice together.” For Gutierrez has learned the wisdom that these supposed followers of Jesus lack; Gutierrez realizes that in order for our actions to be right, in order to do good, first we must truly know what the good is. And this comes from contemplating God, from knowing God, from listening to God. Let me read this short passage from this wise theologian to you:

“Contemplation and practice feed each other; the two together make up the stage of silence before God. In prayer we remain speechless, we simply place ourselves before the Lord. To a degree, we remain silent in our practice as well, for in our involvements, in our daily work, we do not talk about God all the time; we do indeed live in God, but not by discoursing on God…Silence, the time of quiet, is first and the necessary meditation for the time of speaking about the Lord” (On Job, xiv).

How do we know what is good? How do we know what to do? How do we know what to say? First, we must contemplate the Lord. Then, we let this knowledge inform our actions. This is wisdom. Action without knowledge is futile, and leads us nowhere. Perhaps we are greatly impressed with our deeds of power done in Jesus’ name, but that doesn’t mean Jesus will be. And knowledge of the good, if it does not lead us to act, is equally futile. Perhaps we feel that simply knowing the right belief is sufficient to save us from coming chaos, but we will soon find out differently. Learning to know the good by contemplating and listening to God, contemplating and listening to the words of Jesus, and putting this contemplation into action: this is wisdom. This is our house, built on rock.

2004-09-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

Luke 16.1-13

Then Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, 'What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' He answered, 'A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' Then he asked another, 'And how much do you owe?' He replied, 'A hundred containers of wheat.' He said to him, 'Take your bill and make it eighty.' And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

"Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (NRSV).

This past week my husband and I attended a small reception to meet the entering students this year at Princeton Theological Seminary. This was also the first time I was able to see friends and classmates from last year, and as we were catching up on each other’s summers, I mentioned to a friend in homiletics that I was preaching my first sermon on the coming Sunday. He asked what I would be preaching on, and when I answered, "well, the text is the parable of the unjust steward," his reaction was classic—jaw dropped, eyes wide, he said, for your first sermon, you’re doing that parable? I have to admit, to see my own reaction mirrored by a practiced homiletician was a little comforting. Well, sort of. I’ve considered titling this sermon “The Weirdest Story Ever Told.”

This time last summer, Brent and I were teaching summer school. It was the first time I had ever taught theology at a university level. Like all new teachers, I was a little over-ambitious. But I was at least aware of it, and so I attempted to balance my over-ambitious reading assignments with some advice on the first day of class. “Practice ambiguity tolerance,” I said, telling my hapless students that not panicking when they read something difficult is the key. Just keep going. If you keep going, you will gather up enough clues to come to some level of understanding, even if it’s incomplete. (I’m not ashamed to say this is how I get through school.) But I’ve discovered, in the course of reading this parable, that sometimes it’s a lot more difficult to take your own advice than it is to give it. Ambiguity tolerance, indeed.

I mean, this text is full of ambiguity, isn’t it? Is the master good or bad? And what about the steward? Surely he’s a bad guy—he’s labelled unjust, after all. But then why does the master praise him, and why oh why are we instructed to follow his unrighteous example? This is one weird story. I can take it on faith that there’s something to be learned here…but what?

What’s the basic story? A rich man, let’s just call him “the Donald,” shall we?, has a rotten investment banker or stockbroker or something. So he calls the guy in and says, “You’re fired! …Oh, and I want to see all the books for the past year.” So the guy says to himself, “Now what do I do? He’s turning me out on the streets, and no one will hire me to supervise their portfolio now, and I’m too lazy to get a real job and too proud to beg…Got it! I’ll make sure that everyone owes me big, and then I can mooch off them for awhile.” So he fixes the books and reduces the debt of each debtor, intending to call on them to return the favor later. And the boss finds out, of course. But despite the loss he takes, instead of suing him, he shakes his head and says to himself, “well, that was pretty smart, darn it all.”

Let’s stop here. What is it that the boss praises in this guy? The verse says “shrewdness,” a word which is unpleasantly close to “cunning,” which really does sound pretty bad. I like the word “prudence” here best myself. There is something admirable in the way the steward takes stock of his hopeless situation and ingeniously comes out on top. There’s a kind of wisdom here that the boss has to acknowledge and praise, despite the fact that he himself is taken advantage of yet again.

You may have guessed already that I have watched a couple episodes of “The Apprentice.” I find this show both fascinating and repellent at the same time. It holds a kind of sick fascination for me. Here you have 16 or so well-dressed, attractive, successful, intelligent people competing with one another for the respect of Donald Trump, with the ultimate goal of securing a future for themselves. Through all the tasks and teams and boardrooms, these people backstab, badmouth and betray each other as they strategically vie for favor. And the smartest one wins. The smartest one becomes “the Apprentice.” And while the others may not like losing, there’s a grudging admiration of the winner. I love watching the losers in their taxis. I love hearing what they have to say. More often than not, they have something complimentary to say about the person who beat them—after all, if that person was smart enough to outwit them, they must be pretty darn smart, right?

This is the kind of praise the steward earns from his master. This is the kind of prudence the steward possesses—the kind of intelligent self-interest that has as its goal the securing of one’s physical existence and future. The master may have lost this round, but he can tip his hat to the prudence the steward displays in providing for his uncertain future. “For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”

And what about the “children of light?” It seems that the children of light don’t operate this way—we’re a little less wise in the ways of the world, a little less savvy to the necessity of providing for our futures by strategizing and backstabbing and fixing the books. As it should be, right? Until we read the next verse and encounter the very puzzling instructions there: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations.” This is where it gets really weird. I mean, surely Jesus isn’t telling us, “buy people off with other people’s money.” Surely Jesus isn’t promoting strategic intelligent self-interest among the children of light?

It all turns on what it means to “make friends” for ourselves “by means of unrighteous mammon.” Are we to “make friends” in the way that the steward did, by means of trickery with someone else’s money, with the purpose of currying favor to ensure our survival? There is an obvious parallel at work here in the story: just as the steward reduces debts in order that people will receive him into their houses, the instruction in verse 9 is to make friends so that we will be received into eternal habitations. But within this parallel there are 2 important contrasts: first, the steward cheats with someone else’s money, whereas the instruction in v 9 is simply an ambiguous “make friends”; second, the steward acts with his own survival in mind, to be received into physical homes, whereas v 9 speaks of “eternal dwellings.”

I can’t help but consider the difference between “making friends” and making people indebted to us for services rendered. The steward has made people indebted to him—a situation which he fully intends to exploit. In his culture, it would be understood that “one good turn deserves another.” The debtors would understand that they would be expected to reciprocate in some way. The same kind of cultural tradition exists in a modern form today in some cultures. My first job out of college was as a “foreign teacher” in Wuhan, China. I was young, dumb, and spectacularly unprepared for the kind of cultural differences involved, and learned everything the hard way—including this concept of gift-giving. I received gifts from students all over the place. I just thought they really liked me…Until the end of the first semester, when a student walked into my classroom for the first time at the next-to-last class meeting, presented me with a nicely wrapped gift, and announced, “I hope that I can pass.” I did not feel befriended. This is the difference: gifts given in expectation of returned favors is not the same as “making friends for yourselves.”

So what can it possibly mean, this curious instruction to “make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon?” Well, taken by itself, without the consideration of motive, the steward’s action can be seen as generous. Reducing large debt is a generous move, a merciful action. Without the expectation of return, this is the kind of act that might indeed lead to friendship.

We find a clue here in the adjective “unrighteous” applied to “mammon,” a thought that is developed further in verses 10-13. We all know that “mammon” is an ancient word meaning “wealth.” Mammon is not always negative in meaning; it can also just be the routine word for money, or possessions. But there may also be a sense of meaning as “that in which you place your trust.” This is why, I think, it is important that the word “unrighteous” describes mammon in these verses. Here, Jesus is describing two competing sources of security: God and mammon. This fits in nicely with his story about the steward, for the steward has obviously chosen mammon as the means to security. His own wit, his own prudence in the ways of the world by means of mammon secures his future.

But Jesus has something to say about the way in which the steward has accomplished this goal. Though the master grudgingly admires the prudence with which the steward has acted, on the contrary Jesus says: “He who is faithful in little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?” The steward has been prudent, but not faithful. The standard expectation of the children of this age may be prudence; but for children of light, it is faithfulness.

This constitutes the difference between the steward’s action and the instruction “make friends for yourselves.” I don’t think Jesus is instructing us to buy people off with other people’s money…rather, Jesus is pointing out stewardship of even “unrighteous mammon” is an area in which the children of light are called to be faithful followers of God, and faithful ministers to others. “So that when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal habitations.” The reward for this faithfulness is not financial security—mammon is bound to fail. It is not being set up for life. It is not achieving Donald Trump’s apprenticeship. It is the reward of the faithful. It is eternal dwellings with God.

Jesus ends this parable with a warning. After the ambiguity of the story itself, the warning seems all the more stark and clear. “No servant can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” What happens when we forget ourselves? When we forget that we are called to be “children of light,” in the midst of a dark age? What happens when the habits of the world kick in and we find ourselves scrambling along with everyone else to look out for #1?

Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe “children of light” are immune to such things. We don’t have relapses. We don’t ever forget who we are and what we should be doing. Well, maybe…but then again, as I think about the words of Amos that were read for us this morning, maybe not. “hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, when will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” Looking out for #1 always means at the same time looking away from others. In this land of opportunity, where we celebrate our uniqueness as a place where everyone can work hard and make good, this so easily slides into a comfortableness with the intelligent self-interest seen in the steward. We too find ourselves appreciating the wisdom of the steward. We find ourselves cheering when someone gets away with something really slick. It’s cool, isn’t it? The steward sticks it to the rich man. This is just the kind of story that we’re conditioned to love. But looking out for #1 means looking away from others. Maybe, for the children of this age, it’s true that “you gotta look out for #1, ‘cause ain’t nobody else gonna do it.” But we aren’t the “children of this age,” not anymore. We aren’t called to look out for #1; instead we’re called to “make friends by means of mammon,” to look out for others. Amos isn’t just preaching to Israel. He’s preaching to us, too, warning us about the consequences of falling back into the trap of looking out for #1. When that happens, the poor are trampled. We worship a God who “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;” this God doesn’t ask us to look out for #1. He asks us to look out for the “least of these.” He asks us to devote our lives in their entirety, even our “unrighteous mammon,” to his use. In return, may both we and the friends we’ve made for ourselves along the way may find ourselves in “eternal habitations.”