Psalm 126; 1 Timothy 2:1-8; Matthew 6:25-34
Pledge Sunday: November 22, 2009
I kept a journal of my time in Vietnam when I went to pick up Lydia. Toward the end of our stay I was wondering whether we would be home in time for Thanksgiving. As I was writing about that, I engaged in what I thought was humor. Mostly I was trying to amuse myself, but I thought others who knew me and were reading the blog would chuckle a little. I was, by the way, pretty much wrong about that.
“Who knows,” I wrote, “we may be spending Thanksgiving in Vietnam. A bummer to be sure, but we will find some tofurkey somewhere. Even if we’re not home we’ll tell Kim all about this wonderful American celebration …when we gather as family and friends and remember all we are grateful for, celebrating a historic event wrapped in a pall of conquest and slaughter that we rarely mention in the midst of "pass the gravy".”
Now because it apparently was not obvious, here’s what I thought was funny – besides the notion of talking to a 3 ½ month old about conquest and slaughter. I found some dark humor in the irony of it all. The irony is that what I say is of course true, and some day Lydia will have to deal with such complex truths about her adoptive country. Yet even as I wrote, looking at her I gave thanks for the most amazing gift I have ever received. There was no way for me not to be only thankful and unaware at that moment of all that was wrong in the world. I was completely wrapped up in a time of pure thanksgiving. It all struck me as funny – that I could be both purely thankful and still write about Lydia having to deal with the complexities of her first American holiday. Okay, I admit I have a very strange – or maybe just bad – sense of humor.
We’re all too aware of the complexities of how this holiday was born, or more accurately what the larger context was of that famous meal recounted in thousands of children’s plays each year. The pilgrims were sitting around the table with their new found friends who had arrived in this new world long ago – all the while storms were brewing and erupting with violence between these two peoples that would claim a staggering number of lives on both sides, and set a course for the forced displacement of the indigenous people, the effects of which we still see today. This was violence instigated by the very thing the people were grateful for – their having come to this new place. I don’t think we can escape the fact that that makes celebrating thanksgiving complicated.
And it doesn’t stop there. It has always made me uneasy to say a prayer praising God for the goodness we are about to receive right before our family thanksgiving meal, something I have in recent years declined to do. We will have way more than we can possibly eat and we will eat way more than we should. All the while, so many tables around the world and right here in Grinnell are empty. In such prayer, exactly what are we saying we’re thankful for? Are we thanking God that we’re lucky enough to have been born into a family and country of abundance, and for not making us like those who are living hungry?
And the complexities just keep on coming when we turn to our texts. They seem to be about giving thanks in exactly the way most of us do on this holiday – celebrating God’s abundance which provides practical things – like food and clothing as we see in Matthew, and the big gift of Jesus Christ as we see in Timothy.
But when we stop and think about these passages a bit more critically, we are faced with even more problems with what it means for us to be thankful. In Matthew Jesus tells the people not to worry or ask about what they eat and what they will drink. We read this and it’s pretty easy to not worry about such things, because we don’t really have to worry about them ever. But consider those to whom these passages were originally addressed. They were basically poor people – being sucked dry by the king, who, by the way, is exactly the person they should be giving thanks to God for – according to the author of Timothy.
These texts must have sounded so different to those living under persecution and oppression at that time than to us living in a free country about to have our Harvest Dinner. We may not always agree with our elected officials, but we can give thanks for them and for the fact that they are accountable to the people and for the freedom to vote and affect our own government. That was so not the case for the people living when these passages were written. And how can we happily read this text from Matthew knowing it must have been a difficult thing for that early audience to hear and believe given their circumstances. Shouldn’t we feel a little bit guilty about celebrating Thanksgiving with abandon? And if so, doesn’t that ruin Thanksgiving completely?
Most of us have an instinct to ignore these complexities on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, we argue, is a time to focus on – well – giving thanks. And spiritually speaking, the argument continues, it is essential that we set aside time to think about all that we are grateful for and to raise our hands toward the heavens and praise God, the source of it all. If we always made sure we included time to talk about and think about all of these complexities – for which we are absolutely not grateful – not only would it affect our enjoyment of the day, it would affect our spirits as well. And though I have resisted it in the past, after our readings today, I think this is a good instinct. I think it is biblical. It’s an idea right out of the Psalms.
If we didn’t know better, we would think this collection of hymns and poems was put together by a schizophrenic people; one minute they’re yelling at God for abandoning them, in the next they’re asking God to smite their enemies, and then they sing praises to God more eloquent and more extravagant than any we can imagine in a church today.
“Our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy!” our Psalmist recounts. Presumably something good had happened to the nation of Israel and they were giving thanks to God- the one who made it happen. Compare that to the Psalm right before ours: “Those who turn aside to their own crooked ways the Lord will lead away with evildoers.” Not exactly something to praise God for. In yet another Psalm we get, “O God of vengeance…how long shall the wicked exult?” And still another; “O God, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me? I suffer your terrors; I am desperate. Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me.” God is absent and the Psalmist makes no attempt to resolve that. Yet the very next Psalm beings, “I will sing of your steadfast love, O Yahweh, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.”
These divergent psalms, when read together, are almost painful. It mirrors for me the painful tension I feel on thanksgiving. How is this possible? How can both be honest? “How long must I wait, how long must I suffer?” “My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.” “O God, why do you cast us off forever?” “Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth. Say “how awesome are your deeds!” I truly could go on and on.
Let’s be honest: There’s no such thing as “pure” thanksgiving. It’s always a mixed bag. But what we see in the Psalms is there are times to give God our pure thanks for all God has done in creation. Just as there are times to give God our pure laments for all that has gone awry and in our moments of greatest doubts about God’s presence. If we trust the Psalms we see that one does not diminish the other. And both are necessary for our spiritual lives – for our relationship with God.
Our lives should not be a muddled mess of half laments that never move us to action and halfhearted thanksgivings that never truly connect us to all that God makes possible in creation. There is much to truly lament, and when we do we weep with God…we are connected to God who yearns for suffering to end, and so then do we. But there is so much to truly give thanks for, and when we do – fully, loudly, with songs and dance and beauty and celebration – well we know how good God is, how amazing creation is and we feel the power of that – the hope in that, which compels us to make those blessings real for all people for all time.
We act out of our pain when we have compassion for the suffering around us, but just as often act out of joy and thanksgiving. We know this. Think about what we will do later when we dedicate the pledges. We give to the church because were immensely grateful to God for all we have. And we’re grateful that we can share what we have with others, which becomes a witness to the fact that God does indeed provide for all when all are generous with what they have been given. This is a joyful time – we are giving out of our joy and thanksgiving.
Just like the Psalmists, Matthew insists on fully experiencing the joys of life and the suffering of others. In this passage, Jesus paints this beautiful picture of the lilies and the birds and all that God has given…maybe for a moment the people who legitimately worried every day about food and water were able to bask in that picture. Maybe they had a moment of pure thanksgiving – believing that God will provide when things are set right in the world. The birds and lilies are a sign of what is possible – possible only because God makes it so.
But this does not minimize the reality of suffering all around Jesus. Think about the whole gospel. This passage is not all Jesus had to say to people. He also insists on pure lament at times – “the poor will always be with you,” he says with deep sorrow. “God you have forsaken me,” he yells. “We have traded God’s house for a den of thieves,” he says in anger. But in this passage, in this moment he celebrates the goodness and abundance of God without qualification or equivocation. Don’t worry about tomorrow, he says, because tomorrow will bring back to us all that we do worry about. But today – this day – right now, consider the lilies of the fields and the birds of the air and how much God cares for you…how much God loves you. Rejoice in that!
This year, I’m doing thanksgiving…really doing it. No reminding my family of why it’s too hard for me to pray before the meal of extravagance. No thinking about the complexities that dampen my joy. Instead I will spend a day lavishing in the things I am most grateful for – my friends and family and the fact that we can and do gather in one place. Those are incredible gifts from God. Just as those first moments with my new daughter were filled with untempered joy, so can these moments with the people I hold most dear.
Today we will bring forward our pledges and boldly proclaim our abundance. We know that the reality is far more complicated, but for now let’s celebrate God who gives us all enough – all of humanity – if we joyfully share what we have. In this moment, with everything we have, we can look around and say “Wow! Look at all we are blessed with”. And then we can raise our voices “Praise GOD from whom ALL blessings flow”. Tomorrow will bring enough worries – even appropriate ones. Tomorrow or next week or whenever, we will lift our cries of lament. But not today. Today is our Psalm of thanksgiving!!! Pure thanksgiving!!! Amen.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Stir One Another
1 Samuel 1:4-20 ; Hebrews 10:19-25
November 15, 2009
At first glance, this reading from the book of Samuel appears to be a very personal, spiritual story about Hannah and her quest for a son. And it makes sense that we would read it that way. We read it that way because we are used to spiritual narratives being personal, even private, in nature. We read it that way because there is always a natural tendency to empathize with the protagonist in any story. But most importantly, we read it that way because we are not the nation of Israel living in exile in Babylon in 6th century BCE.
If we are to “get” this passage, we have to step back from our way of reading it and put ourselves in the shoes of those who wrote it. First, let’s begin with a quick review of the larger story in which this narrative sits. The story of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings is the story of four main characters: Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon. These four men, one prophet and three kings, occupy the majority of these books, even though they occupy a short period of time in history relative to all the other kings mentioned in these books of the bible. Obviously, the point is these are the guys who defined the nation of Israel. They built it and ruled it, giving the people an identity that still had a hold on those in exile 400 years later – which is amazing because not only are these characters long gone at that point, the Jewish people had lost their status as a nation. They had no land, no king, nothing…except their identity that was formed and shaped during the time of Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon.
Now the stories of the kings were written and read long before the fall of Jerusalem and displacement of the Jews. However, they were heavily edited into their final form during the exilic period. Which makes sense when you think about it. The experience of exile was so different from the experiences of those who first chronicled the history of the Israelite kings – the ones who originally wrote these stories down. They didn’t have to make sense of the painful experience of exile. They didn’t have to wonder why God would allow such a horrible event. Conversely, those in exile wondered just that, and so they went back to their history and recreated the stories in a way that helped them understand who their God was and how that God acted in relationship to the people throughout the generations. In other words, these “finishers” of the story made significant changes to the original in order to make sense of their current predicament.
Because of this we are to read the story of Hanna through the eyes of those living in exile so many years after Hannah lived. Her seemingly private tale is actually to be read as the story of the Hebrew people, of the nation of Israel, of God’s chosen people. Her barrenness is the barrenness of exile. Her embryo is the promise of God to the people in exile, and Samuel becomes the symbol of the future hope of Israel.
One thing we know about the experience of these editors of our text is that it’s hard to understand God in the midst of exile. We understand because exile is not an experience limited to the Jews in 586 BCE. Exile is any experience of feeling disconnected from God. It’s those times when we might even feel abandoned by God. And sometimes it almost feels as if God is responsible for the situation because God chooses absence over presence. These are the “why?” moments. “Why would God allow this to happen? Why, if God loves us and forgives us would God not swoop in and stop the suffering? Why would God create a world where such experiences of exile are possible?” In these moments, these questions hang heavy in the air, and in order to lighten the load, we struggle to answer them as best we can.
The Jews in exile who edited the stories of the great prophets and kings of Israel reveal their answers through stories like Hannah’s. In her barrenness they give voice to what they truly feel – they refuse to deny their own painful experience. Remember, Hannah is not just barren, she is barren because God closed her womb. They blame God for their own experiences of barrenness – for the lack of hope and serious doubt in God’s promises to them. It’s God’s fault, they say, that we are weeping by the rivers of Babylon. For them, God had closed the womb of promise.
But of course, the story does not stop there. Even in their weeping, they go on to tell the rest of the story. They know God is not finished; the relationship is not forever severed. They know it, and they find an expression of that in Hannah. We read that because she is barren she weeps, she can’t eat, she suffers ridicule and cruelty; yet she gets up and goes to the temple. She gets up. As hard as that must have been, believing it was God who closed her womb, she gets up and goes straight to God to pray.
This is not an unusual move for biblical characters who suffer and feel like it’s God’s fault. Many people in our scdriptures decide from their place of suffering that it’s time for a little “chat” with God. Some demand answers, some pray for relief, some get angry, some bargain with God. Hannah, Sarah, Jacob, Job the prophets, Paul, the disciples, even Jesus – remember my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And time after time, God is there to listen, to explain, sometimes to chastise and sometimes, amazingly, God changes God’s mind because of these “chats” - these prayers. Hannah’s vow was convincing to God – her vow to bring her child back to the temple and dedicate his life to God. While I recognize I could never know what God would do, I can’t help but wonder what the response would have been if Hannah had begged for a son in order to alleviate her own suffering. Giving Samuel to the church was not going to solve her problems. She didn’t know if she would have other kids. One Samuel is gone the ridicule might continue and her security in the household will remain compromised. Nothing in her life would change – yet she prays for a son in order to give him to God admitting that God’s plans were far more important than hers.
In her actions – in her vow to God – the Israelites in exile find their instructions. They need to change their prayers from requests that sound more like complaining to prayers where they offer their lives to God, knowing, or rather somehow believing God would fulfill God’s promises if given a chance. And in Hannah’s case God does – Hannah becomes pregnant not just with a son for her, but with Samuel – the future of Israel. Samuel is the one who would eventually raise up David as a king who unites the people and makes of them a great nation. In Samuel was proof that God fulfills promises. Or, maybe another way to understand it, is that the people suffering in exile told the story of Samuel in order to defiantly proclaim from the depths of a time of barrenness their complete trust in God and their hope for the future.
Likewise, the author of Hebrews was writing from an experience of exile, only this time it was the Jews and Christians in the years following the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. It was their Babylon time. And this author calls the people to the same kind of hope that their ancestors found in the stories of Samuel.
And where would the Christians find that hope? Where was their Samuel? It was the church – the gathered body. For the author of Hebrews, hope was not in one person, but in the gathering. He says “meet together”; don’t neglect this important – actually necessary – step lest you remain in the world of barrenness, of separation from God.
Polls show there is a growing number of people today who describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” Often that grows out of legitimate, tragic experiences of the religious institutions hurting people in some way. Sometimes it’s because of the legitimate, tragic truth that religious institutions too often show themselves to be something other than God’s realm and so turn people off who believe it should be better than that. But I think there are also a lot of people who are spiritual but not religious because, quite frankly, it is difficult to be religious. As one author says, “The inconvenient thing about religion is it asks you to do stuff; like worship with other people, love other people, and do good things for other people. And to do it all regardless of how you feel about any of it.” Without religion, one can become focused on their own personal growth, but have no faith that the gathered body does have the ability to offer hope not just for individuals, but for humanity.
The author of Hebrews wasn’t saying our hope is found in a personal salvation through individual belief in God or Jesus. Our author would be baffled by the idea that someone could be spiritual but not religious. He writes, “Meet together, stir one another to love and good works.” I love this idea of “stirring” one another to love and good works. For me it conjures up images of our hearts being stirred like a stew – waking them up, moving them to compassion through each other’s experiences and convictions.
We too live in exile. I truly believe this, although many would argue otherwise. But here we are, living as a nation, united just as the nation of Israel was united before the Babylonians changed all that. And I think the writing is on the wall – not in the 2012, end-of-the-world-hollywood-apocalypse sense, but in the “we’ve lost our way” sense. We are at war; we use our economic might and power to get others to do what we want; and the gap between the rich and the poor actually does approach the cataclysmic. We can’t count on God to be on our side – that isn’t how it works. We are given the freedom to move away from God, and suffer the consequences. We are the creators of our own barrenness and separation…exile.
Even the church is in exile at times. There are times that we lose our center, looking to someone or something other than God to guide us in what we do. I see it when churches look to be “trendy” to attract members, making church growth the God and contemporary culture the means of salvation. I see it when individual salvation becomes the mark of success for pastors and congregations – “winning people for Christ”, it is called, in a gross misuse of that phrase of Paul’s.
I read an article that was comparing some of our current churches to the early church. The author pointed out that the many challenges of the early church never, ever included a lack of growth. Instead, they made a point of staying distinct from contemporary culture, of continuing the Hebrew understanding of being set apart as a people by and for God.
The task the early church set for itself was not to resemble the surrounding culture and be popular with ordinary folks; the task was to radically challenge and change the surrounding culture. “The struggle for the church,” she writes, “has always been how to be faithful to God.”
The good news here at First Pres is that we do gather – we come together every week and many other times, and we do stir one another to love and good works. It is our defiant answer to exile, our proclamation of faith, our confession of hope in a sometimes hopeless world.
I want to give you just one example of this is something we have recently started. Our church has made two micro loans to people in the Grinnell community. In each case, one event – like losing a job – caused them to get behind a little bit. These loans make it possible for them to get caught up and then have reasonable monthly payments that won’t over burden them. And here’s the thing about our loans: they are interest free, they are given freely with ultimately no expectation of repayment – as the bible directs us. And they are made with compassion as the basis, allowing for renegotiating terms of repayment if that ever becomes necessary. Not exactly like the culture around us, is it?
And it all started with one person who was moved by the suffering of another human being. And that one person came to his church – his gathering place, and started stirring. He stirred the session with an idea, and it got the juices flowing and creative solutions began to emerge. Then the session stirred the congregation, and you let your hearts be stirred and generously supported the program. And it has made a real difference. I’ve had the blessing of seeing it first hand in these two situations.
In addition now we, along with others, are stirring our community to love and good works. A number of organizations in Grinnell are working together to try and establish a microfinancing program for the whole community that could serve far more people than we can alone. And finally, you can’t imagine how many new, creative ideas have begun to grow out of this.
What could have been a bleak situation, a situation where someone asked “Why does God let this person suffer so unfairly?” turned into an opportunity for hope to be born; the gathered body of Christ is responding in a way that would be difficult for any of us individually, and so far is not how the contemporary culture responds. And in this way, we are proclaiming that God’s promises still live in us – in our church. No matter how barren things seem, there is always something brewing in our hearts. They just need to be stirred up a bit by one another so the ideas become actions – actions of love and good works. So, let’s keep stirring one another. Amen.
November 15, 2009
At first glance, this reading from the book of Samuel appears to be a very personal, spiritual story about Hannah and her quest for a son. And it makes sense that we would read it that way. We read it that way because we are used to spiritual narratives being personal, even private, in nature. We read it that way because there is always a natural tendency to empathize with the protagonist in any story. But most importantly, we read it that way because we are not the nation of Israel living in exile in Babylon in 6th century BCE.
If we are to “get” this passage, we have to step back from our way of reading it and put ourselves in the shoes of those who wrote it. First, let’s begin with a quick review of the larger story in which this narrative sits. The story of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings is the story of four main characters: Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon. These four men, one prophet and three kings, occupy the majority of these books, even though they occupy a short period of time in history relative to all the other kings mentioned in these books of the bible. Obviously, the point is these are the guys who defined the nation of Israel. They built it and ruled it, giving the people an identity that still had a hold on those in exile 400 years later – which is amazing because not only are these characters long gone at that point, the Jewish people had lost their status as a nation. They had no land, no king, nothing…except their identity that was formed and shaped during the time of Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon.
Now the stories of the kings were written and read long before the fall of Jerusalem and displacement of the Jews. However, they were heavily edited into their final form during the exilic period. Which makes sense when you think about it. The experience of exile was so different from the experiences of those who first chronicled the history of the Israelite kings – the ones who originally wrote these stories down. They didn’t have to make sense of the painful experience of exile. They didn’t have to wonder why God would allow such a horrible event. Conversely, those in exile wondered just that, and so they went back to their history and recreated the stories in a way that helped them understand who their God was and how that God acted in relationship to the people throughout the generations. In other words, these “finishers” of the story made significant changes to the original in order to make sense of their current predicament.
Because of this we are to read the story of Hanna through the eyes of those living in exile so many years after Hannah lived. Her seemingly private tale is actually to be read as the story of the Hebrew people, of the nation of Israel, of God’s chosen people. Her barrenness is the barrenness of exile. Her embryo is the promise of God to the people in exile, and Samuel becomes the symbol of the future hope of Israel.
One thing we know about the experience of these editors of our text is that it’s hard to understand God in the midst of exile. We understand because exile is not an experience limited to the Jews in 586 BCE. Exile is any experience of feeling disconnected from God. It’s those times when we might even feel abandoned by God. And sometimes it almost feels as if God is responsible for the situation because God chooses absence over presence. These are the “why?” moments. “Why would God allow this to happen? Why, if God loves us and forgives us would God not swoop in and stop the suffering? Why would God create a world where such experiences of exile are possible?” In these moments, these questions hang heavy in the air, and in order to lighten the load, we struggle to answer them as best we can.
The Jews in exile who edited the stories of the great prophets and kings of Israel reveal their answers through stories like Hannah’s. In her barrenness they give voice to what they truly feel – they refuse to deny their own painful experience. Remember, Hannah is not just barren, she is barren because God closed her womb. They blame God for their own experiences of barrenness – for the lack of hope and serious doubt in God’s promises to them. It’s God’s fault, they say, that we are weeping by the rivers of Babylon. For them, God had closed the womb of promise.
But of course, the story does not stop there. Even in their weeping, they go on to tell the rest of the story. They know God is not finished; the relationship is not forever severed. They know it, and they find an expression of that in Hannah. We read that because she is barren she weeps, she can’t eat, she suffers ridicule and cruelty; yet she gets up and goes to the temple. She gets up. As hard as that must have been, believing it was God who closed her womb, she gets up and goes straight to God to pray.
This is not an unusual move for biblical characters who suffer and feel like it’s God’s fault. Many people in our scdriptures decide from their place of suffering that it’s time for a little “chat” with God. Some demand answers, some pray for relief, some get angry, some bargain with God. Hannah, Sarah, Jacob, Job the prophets, Paul, the disciples, even Jesus – remember my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And time after time, God is there to listen, to explain, sometimes to chastise and sometimes, amazingly, God changes God’s mind because of these “chats” - these prayers. Hannah’s vow was convincing to God – her vow to bring her child back to the temple and dedicate his life to God. While I recognize I could never know what God would do, I can’t help but wonder what the response would have been if Hannah had begged for a son in order to alleviate her own suffering. Giving Samuel to the church was not going to solve her problems. She didn’t know if she would have other kids. One Samuel is gone the ridicule might continue and her security in the household will remain compromised. Nothing in her life would change – yet she prays for a son in order to give him to God admitting that God’s plans were far more important than hers.
In her actions – in her vow to God – the Israelites in exile find their instructions. They need to change their prayers from requests that sound more like complaining to prayers where they offer their lives to God, knowing, or rather somehow believing God would fulfill God’s promises if given a chance. And in Hannah’s case God does – Hannah becomes pregnant not just with a son for her, but with Samuel – the future of Israel. Samuel is the one who would eventually raise up David as a king who unites the people and makes of them a great nation. In Samuel was proof that God fulfills promises. Or, maybe another way to understand it, is that the people suffering in exile told the story of Samuel in order to defiantly proclaim from the depths of a time of barrenness their complete trust in God and their hope for the future.
Likewise, the author of Hebrews was writing from an experience of exile, only this time it was the Jews and Christians in the years following the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. It was their Babylon time. And this author calls the people to the same kind of hope that their ancestors found in the stories of Samuel.
And where would the Christians find that hope? Where was their Samuel? It was the church – the gathered body. For the author of Hebrews, hope was not in one person, but in the gathering. He says “meet together”; don’t neglect this important – actually necessary – step lest you remain in the world of barrenness, of separation from God.
Polls show there is a growing number of people today who describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” Often that grows out of legitimate, tragic experiences of the religious institutions hurting people in some way. Sometimes it’s because of the legitimate, tragic truth that religious institutions too often show themselves to be something other than God’s realm and so turn people off who believe it should be better than that. But I think there are also a lot of people who are spiritual but not religious because, quite frankly, it is difficult to be religious. As one author says, “The inconvenient thing about religion is it asks you to do stuff; like worship with other people, love other people, and do good things for other people. And to do it all regardless of how you feel about any of it.” Without religion, one can become focused on their own personal growth, but have no faith that the gathered body does have the ability to offer hope not just for individuals, but for humanity.
The author of Hebrews wasn’t saying our hope is found in a personal salvation through individual belief in God or Jesus. Our author would be baffled by the idea that someone could be spiritual but not religious. He writes, “Meet together, stir one another to love and good works.” I love this idea of “stirring” one another to love and good works. For me it conjures up images of our hearts being stirred like a stew – waking them up, moving them to compassion through each other’s experiences and convictions.
We too live in exile. I truly believe this, although many would argue otherwise. But here we are, living as a nation, united just as the nation of Israel was united before the Babylonians changed all that. And I think the writing is on the wall – not in the 2012, end-of-the-world-hollywood-apocalypse sense, but in the “we’ve lost our way” sense. We are at war; we use our economic might and power to get others to do what we want; and the gap between the rich and the poor actually does approach the cataclysmic. We can’t count on God to be on our side – that isn’t how it works. We are given the freedom to move away from God, and suffer the consequences. We are the creators of our own barrenness and separation…exile.
Even the church is in exile at times. There are times that we lose our center, looking to someone or something other than God to guide us in what we do. I see it when churches look to be “trendy” to attract members, making church growth the God and contemporary culture the means of salvation. I see it when individual salvation becomes the mark of success for pastors and congregations – “winning people for Christ”, it is called, in a gross misuse of that phrase of Paul’s.
I read an article that was comparing some of our current churches to the early church. The author pointed out that the many challenges of the early church never, ever included a lack of growth. Instead, they made a point of staying distinct from contemporary culture, of continuing the Hebrew understanding of being set apart as a people by and for God.
The task the early church set for itself was not to resemble the surrounding culture and be popular with ordinary folks; the task was to radically challenge and change the surrounding culture. “The struggle for the church,” she writes, “has always been how to be faithful to God.”
The good news here at First Pres is that we do gather – we come together every week and many other times, and we do stir one another to love and good works. It is our defiant answer to exile, our proclamation of faith, our confession of hope in a sometimes hopeless world.
I want to give you just one example of this is something we have recently started. Our church has made two micro loans to people in the Grinnell community. In each case, one event – like losing a job – caused them to get behind a little bit. These loans make it possible for them to get caught up and then have reasonable monthly payments that won’t over burden them. And here’s the thing about our loans: they are interest free, they are given freely with ultimately no expectation of repayment – as the bible directs us. And they are made with compassion as the basis, allowing for renegotiating terms of repayment if that ever becomes necessary. Not exactly like the culture around us, is it?
And it all started with one person who was moved by the suffering of another human being. And that one person came to his church – his gathering place, and started stirring. He stirred the session with an idea, and it got the juices flowing and creative solutions began to emerge. Then the session stirred the congregation, and you let your hearts be stirred and generously supported the program. And it has made a real difference. I’ve had the blessing of seeing it first hand in these two situations.
In addition now we, along with others, are stirring our community to love and good works. A number of organizations in Grinnell are working together to try and establish a microfinancing program for the whole community that could serve far more people than we can alone. And finally, you can’t imagine how many new, creative ideas have begun to grow out of this.
What could have been a bleak situation, a situation where someone asked “Why does God let this person suffer so unfairly?” turned into an opportunity for hope to be born; the gathered body of Christ is responding in a way that would be difficult for any of us individually, and so far is not how the contemporary culture responds. And in this way, we are proclaiming that God’s promises still live in us – in our church. No matter how barren things seem, there is always something brewing in our hearts. They just need to be stirred up a bit by one another so the ideas become actions – actions of love and good works. So, let’s keep stirring one another. Amen.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Relocate. Redistribute. Reconcile.
Mark 12:38-44
November 8, 2009
We look at her with such great admiration…the widow who gave her last mite to support the church. But, I am fairly confident “admiration” was not the first word that came to the disciples’ minds that day when Jesus had them observe her at the treasury box. She must have looked weird. I mean really weird. Jesus had just told them how the church leaders “devour widows’ houses.” He was talking about the practices of taking the land – and all the income from that land – away from women after their husbands died under the pretext that the church would then care for the widows as the husband did. Knowing this, now they’re sitting on the curb looking across the street at a widow giving everything she has to the very organization that took her land and left her destitute. It must have seemed odd, to say the least.
But don’t a lot of people look odd to us? Aren’t there times when we see what choices someone makes and think, “Why in the world would they choose that?”
At the church I worked at during seminary, there was a man with whom I became quite acquainted. He had needs. Lots of them. And they were constant and urgent; he lived from crisis to crisis. And it really did seem like he had the luck of a pig in a giant hog confinement. Sometimes he came by to talk; sometimes he wanted help with this or that; and sometimes he didn’t show up for quite a while. And over my three years there we helped him a lot, though not every time he asked because our resources were limited as a small church.
One day he came and explained to me he needed $100 to pay the landlord to keep from being evicted. I knew the church didn’t have enough for that, so I gave him the money myself. The agreement was that he would pay it back. My feelings were incredibly mixed doing this, but, I told myself, I had $100 and he didn’t. I was not facing eviction, he was. So, I gave him the money.
Not too much later, he stopped by again and said he had been evicted. “Really?” I asked. “Yeah. I had to give the $100 you gave me to my friend who was really in trouble.” The mixed feelings turned into feelings of resentment. I didn’t get it. He, on the other hand, had no sense whatsoever that I would have a problem with this.
I felt like what I imagine the disciples felt like watching that poor widow – utter disbelief. He had a chance to help himself get through a crisis and keep housing – something one clearly must do to make it in this world. And he blew it. He acted in a completely self-destructive way – with my money. Not only was he evicted, but frankly he was not likely to see another dime from me any time soon. Sometimes I just don’t understand the decisions people make.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference as a part of my continuing education. The conference was put on by an organization called CCDA: Christian Community Development Association. One workshop was called, “Tear Down the Walls: Why the Poor Stay Poor”. One of the biggest walls this person talked about that kept the poor poor was a wall of misunderstanding. There is a socioeconomic cultural divide in our country, she explained, and without some understanding of it we will forever be misguided in our attempts to help people.
Now as is true whenever we talk about cultures, one must over generalize. That is always a dangerous thing to do, but I think there are some insights for us – those of us generally from the middle class culture of America – that might be helpful if we want to alleviate poverty. So, knowing we are dealing in generalizations, here are some cultural differences our workshop leader pointed out between the middle class and poor:
In terms of how one understands the future, most poor people believe in fate, while the middle class believes choice changes the future. Most of us believe you can directly affect your future with good choices. Many poor people, however, truly believe that no matter how good one’s choices are, you can’t really change your future.
Another related difference is in how we view time. For many people who live in poverty, the present is the most important. Whatever is happening at the moment has the highest priority. Everything is a crisis. If someone has a doctor’s appointment but on their way they get a call from a friend who needs a ride, the immediate crisis takes precedence over something that can be done another time.
Middle class culture is future oriented, and so time is to be managed. If we have a doctor’s appointment and a friend calls needing a ride, we realize that missing the doctor’s appointment will have future ramifications and so we don’t drop everything to go pick up the friend. We’re more likely to ask the friend to see if they can find another ride, or if they can wait an hour, or to simply say we can’t because we have a previous commitment.
With these differences in mind, think about my friend who had different ideas about how to use the money I gave him. I now realize that being evicted wasn’t the end of the world for him as it would be for me. He had friends who were used to people coming in and out during bouts of homelessness. I’m sure he had often had friends on his couch after they had failed to make rent. However, to not give a friend $100 when they are in crisis would violate a cultural value and would have put him at great odds with the community he depends on for survival. I suspect this is why he saw absolutely nothing wrong with it, and would have wondered why in the world I did.
There are many more examples. And I have, over the years, come to experience and appreciate many of these cultural differences. But here’s the important thing to remember: middle class cultural is normative. All of our institutions and systems assume it. We don’t even know it’s there, or even call it culture. Consequently, middle class culture is privileged. We judge negatively anything that deviates from this norm. We assume (without really even thinking about it) that our cultural values are better than others.
But that’s just not true. There is good and bad in all cultures – ALL. We could stand some critique from the cultural of some of our poorer brothers and sisters. Our culture is much more likely to breed conformity and lack of spontaneity. Our culture tends to build relationships based on contracts and obligations, not on support and sacrifice. We tend to prize self-sufficiency more than interdependence.
The big mistake we – well intentioned, middle class church goers – make is thinking that helping someone means helping them move from the culture of poverty to the culture of middle class. This expectation completely invalidates what someone values. It asks someone to leave what they know and become something they are not. The answer to poverty is not to make everyone who is poor into someone who looks like us. It’s not fair. It’s not good. It’s not Christian. It’s not what Jesus did.
So what did Jesus do? First and foremost, he makes people see. He opens their eyes to both the cultural differences and the arrogance of cultural exceptionalism by having some people sit down on the side of the road and watch what happens at the temple. Jesus points out to the disciples the stark and embarrassing reality: the widow is being exploited by the very same people who think they are trying to help her. The cultural critique is not of the widow, that’s for sure. He is exposing the problems with the normative culture.
Jesus lays it all out and makes us stare at the bare naked truth – and it’s uncomfortable. It was undoubtedly uncomfortable for the disciples to see their institutions exposed that way, and it is uncomfortable for us. We are reminded that even though we give our money and our time to help others, we rarely stop and look at how so much of what we do in our day to day lives actually contributes to keeping people poor. We rarely think about the fact that we judge the values of the people we try to help, and we believe they would be better off if they were more like us. That part’s not so fun to see.
When Jesus says to the disciples about the wealthy, “all of them contributed out of their abundance,” the disciples and we are to still have ringing in our ears the truth about the source of that abundance: they devoured the widows’ houses. They took back the land, and then doled out help to the widows as they saw fit, now that the widows were completely dependent on the church.
It’s all laid out for us too. The bare naked truth. We give money to the poor, but why are they poor? And do we really give money, or do we send them cultural expectations tied to dollar bills? Most of us are pretty critical of the decisions people make when we give them our money. Most of us have pretty clear expectations of what “good life skills” look like and expect some display of effort on the part of the person we give money to.
This all leaves us with complicated questions and no simple solutions. How do we, as individuals and as a church, really help the poor? No one is disputing how violent and horrible poverty can be. Valuing the culture of people living in poverty should never be the same as valuing or over-romanticizing poverty itself. We need to do something.
The CCDA has three words that guide what they do: Relocate. Redistribute. Reconcile. First and foremost, they say, you have to move from what you know to what someone else knows. For many in the organization that has literally meant moving to another neighborhood, into the culture of poverty. It has meant being neighbors with people before being their benefactors. It has meant listening, being wildly uncomfortable, being humbled, being angered, and loving. It is the necessary first step. Until we have lived a week as a widow with three children, no land or income, in a country where women can’t go out on their own we are probably not going to have any idea why the widow put every last cent she had into the church coffers. It may have been magnificently generous, and it may have been monumentally stupid. We can’t know without really knowing her.
Redistribute. The bottom line of poverty requires a redistribution of wealth. I know Cal Thomas would jump all over me for that. But poverty is, by definition, a lack of necessary resources. And that is caused by an unjust distribution of resources – not just money, but fertile land, health care, education, access to power, and on and on. And it’s a redistribution, so YES, that means people with more will – after redistributing – have less. To give out of wealth and expect to always still be wealthy is probably not a long term strategy to end poverty.
Reconcile. The truth is, real reconciliation can only happen after we relocate and redistribute. We have to value our differences and stop our efforts to change people just because we think something works for us. Only then – only when we accept the validity of other cultures and reduce the disparity between people can we truly help each other cultivate the good things in our lives and cultures and change the things that keep us from flourishing – as individuals and communities.
It’s time for us to sit on the curb and watch the widow at the temple; to sit with the tension we feel as people who want to help, try to help, but often share more blame than we would like to admit for the realities of poverty in the first place. We have to be honest – name both our genuine desires to help and our inherent complicity. We have to own our judgments based on cultural exceptionalism. Then in humility, we can go up to the widow and ask her, quite simply, “Why are you giving that money? It’s all you have.” Maybe in her answer we will hear how to better live out our obligation to protect the vulnerable and marginalized. Maybe, once we are honest about who and where we are and once we have risked to be in true relationship with people who live in a different cultural reality, the sophisticated answers to the complicated questions will begin to emerge. Maybe together we can find ways to truly help not just this poor person and that widow, but help end the cycles of poverty without destroying the culture of others. Amen.
November 8, 2009
We look at her with such great admiration…the widow who gave her last mite to support the church. But, I am fairly confident “admiration” was not the first word that came to the disciples’ minds that day when Jesus had them observe her at the treasury box. She must have looked weird. I mean really weird. Jesus had just told them how the church leaders “devour widows’ houses.” He was talking about the practices of taking the land – and all the income from that land – away from women after their husbands died under the pretext that the church would then care for the widows as the husband did. Knowing this, now they’re sitting on the curb looking across the street at a widow giving everything she has to the very organization that took her land and left her destitute. It must have seemed odd, to say the least.
But don’t a lot of people look odd to us? Aren’t there times when we see what choices someone makes and think, “Why in the world would they choose that?”
At the church I worked at during seminary, there was a man with whom I became quite acquainted. He had needs. Lots of them. And they were constant and urgent; he lived from crisis to crisis. And it really did seem like he had the luck of a pig in a giant hog confinement. Sometimes he came by to talk; sometimes he wanted help with this or that; and sometimes he didn’t show up for quite a while. And over my three years there we helped him a lot, though not every time he asked because our resources were limited as a small church.
One day he came and explained to me he needed $100 to pay the landlord to keep from being evicted. I knew the church didn’t have enough for that, so I gave him the money myself. The agreement was that he would pay it back. My feelings were incredibly mixed doing this, but, I told myself, I had $100 and he didn’t. I was not facing eviction, he was. So, I gave him the money.
Not too much later, he stopped by again and said he had been evicted. “Really?” I asked. “Yeah. I had to give the $100 you gave me to my friend who was really in trouble.” The mixed feelings turned into feelings of resentment. I didn’t get it. He, on the other hand, had no sense whatsoever that I would have a problem with this.
I felt like what I imagine the disciples felt like watching that poor widow – utter disbelief. He had a chance to help himself get through a crisis and keep housing – something one clearly must do to make it in this world. And he blew it. He acted in a completely self-destructive way – with my money. Not only was he evicted, but frankly he was not likely to see another dime from me any time soon. Sometimes I just don’t understand the decisions people make.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference as a part of my continuing education. The conference was put on by an organization called CCDA: Christian Community Development Association. One workshop was called, “Tear Down the Walls: Why the Poor Stay Poor”. One of the biggest walls this person talked about that kept the poor poor was a wall of misunderstanding. There is a socioeconomic cultural divide in our country, she explained, and without some understanding of it we will forever be misguided in our attempts to help people.
Now as is true whenever we talk about cultures, one must over generalize. That is always a dangerous thing to do, but I think there are some insights for us – those of us generally from the middle class culture of America – that might be helpful if we want to alleviate poverty. So, knowing we are dealing in generalizations, here are some cultural differences our workshop leader pointed out between the middle class and poor:
In terms of how one understands the future, most poor people believe in fate, while the middle class believes choice changes the future. Most of us believe you can directly affect your future with good choices. Many poor people, however, truly believe that no matter how good one’s choices are, you can’t really change your future.
Another related difference is in how we view time. For many people who live in poverty, the present is the most important. Whatever is happening at the moment has the highest priority. Everything is a crisis. If someone has a doctor’s appointment but on their way they get a call from a friend who needs a ride, the immediate crisis takes precedence over something that can be done another time.
Middle class culture is future oriented, and so time is to be managed. If we have a doctor’s appointment and a friend calls needing a ride, we realize that missing the doctor’s appointment will have future ramifications and so we don’t drop everything to go pick up the friend. We’re more likely to ask the friend to see if they can find another ride, or if they can wait an hour, or to simply say we can’t because we have a previous commitment.
With these differences in mind, think about my friend who had different ideas about how to use the money I gave him. I now realize that being evicted wasn’t the end of the world for him as it would be for me. He had friends who were used to people coming in and out during bouts of homelessness. I’m sure he had often had friends on his couch after they had failed to make rent. However, to not give a friend $100 when they are in crisis would violate a cultural value and would have put him at great odds with the community he depends on for survival. I suspect this is why he saw absolutely nothing wrong with it, and would have wondered why in the world I did.
There are many more examples. And I have, over the years, come to experience and appreciate many of these cultural differences. But here’s the important thing to remember: middle class cultural is normative. All of our institutions and systems assume it. We don’t even know it’s there, or even call it culture. Consequently, middle class culture is privileged. We judge negatively anything that deviates from this norm. We assume (without really even thinking about it) that our cultural values are better than others.
But that’s just not true. There is good and bad in all cultures – ALL. We could stand some critique from the cultural of some of our poorer brothers and sisters. Our culture is much more likely to breed conformity and lack of spontaneity. Our culture tends to build relationships based on contracts and obligations, not on support and sacrifice. We tend to prize self-sufficiency more than interdependence.
The big mistake we – well intentioned, middle class church goers – make is thinking that helping someone means helping them move from the culture of poverty to the culture of middle class. This expectation completely invalidates what someone values. It asks someone to leave what they know and become something they are not. The answer to poverty is not to make everyone who is poor into someone who looks like us. It’s not fair. It’s not good. It’s not Christian. It’s not what Jesus did.
So what did Jesus do? First and foremost, he makes people see. He opens their eyes to both the cultural differences and the arrogance of cultural exceptionalism by having some people sit down on the side of the road and watch what happens at the temple. Jesus points out to the disciples the stark and embarrassing reality: the widow is being exploited by the very same people who think they are trying to help her. The cultural critique is not of the widow, that’s for sure. He is exposing the problems with the normative culture.
Jesus lays it all out and makes us stare at the bare naked truth – and it’s uncomfortable. It was undoubtedly uncomfortable for the disciples to see their institutions exposed that way, and it is uncomfortable for us. We are reminded that even though we give our money and our time to help others, we rarely stop and look at how so much of what we do in our day to day lives actually contributes to keeping people poor. We rarely think about the fact that we judge the values of the people we try to help, and we believe they would be better off if they were more like us. That part’s not so fun to see.
When Jesus says to the disciples about the wealthy, “all of them contributed out of their abundance,” the disciples and we are to still have ringing in our ears the truth about the source of that abundance: they devoured the widows’ houses. They took back the land, and then doled out help to the widows as they saw fit, now that the widows were completely dependent on the church.
It’s all laid out for us too. The bare naked truth. We give money to the poor, but why are they poor? And do we really give money, or do we send them cultural expectations tied to dollar bills? Most of us are pretty critical of the decisions people make when we give them our money. Most of us have pretty clear expectations of what “good life skills” look like and expect some display of effort on the part of the person we give money to.
This all leaves us with complicated questions and no simple solutions. How do we, as individuals and as a church, really help the poor? No one is disputing how violent and horrible poverty can be. Valuing the culture of people living in poverty should never be the same as valuing or over-romanticizing poverty itself. We need to do something.
The CCDA has three words that guide what they do: Relocate. Redistribute. Reconcile. First and foremost, they say, you have to move from what you know to what someone else knows. For many in the organization that has literally meant moving to another neighborhood, into the culture of poverty. It has meant being neighbors with people before being their benefactors. It has meant listening, being wildly uncomfortable, being humbled, being angered, and loving. It is the necessary first step. Until we have lived a week as a widow with three children, no land or income, in a country where women can’t go out on their own we are probably not going to have any idea why the widow put every last cent she had into the church coffers. It may have been magnificently generous, and it may have been monumentally stupid. We can’t know without really knowing her.
Redistribute. The bottom line of poverty requires a redistribution of wealth. I know Cal Thomas would jump all over me for that. But poverty is, by definition, a lack of necessary resources. And that is caused by an unjust distribution of resources – not just money, but fertile land, health care, education, access to power, and on and on. And it’s a redistribution, so YES, that means people with more will – after redistributing – have less. To give out of wealth and expect to always still be wealthy is probably not a long term strategy to end poverty.
Reconcile. The truth is, real reconciliation can only happen after we relocate and redistribute. We have to value our differences and stop our efforts to change people just because we think something works for us. Only then – only when we accept the validity of other cultures and reduce the disparity between people can we truly help each other cultivate the good things in our lives and cultures and change the things that keep us from flourishing – as individuals and communities.
It’s time for us to sit on the curb and watch the widow at the temple; to sit with the tension we feel as people who want to help, try to help, but often share more blame than we would like to admit for the realities of poverty in the first place. We have to be honest – name both our genuine desires to help and our inherent complicity. We have to own our judgments based on cultural exceptionalism. Then in humility, we can go up to the widow and ask her, quite simply, “Why are you giving that money? It’s all you have.” Maybe in her answer we will hear how to better live out our obligation to protect the vulnerable and marginalized. Maybe, once we are honest about who and where we are and once we have risked to be in true relationship with people who live in a different cultural reality, the sophisticated answers to the complicated questions will begin to emerge. Maybe together we can find ways to truly help not just this poor person and that widow, but help end the cycles of poverty without destroying the culture of others. Amen.
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