Monday, August 30, 2010

Can We Take a Joke?

Luke 14:1,7-14
August 29, 2010

It’s a dinner party. People are arriving, they are probably greeting each other with small talk, and some have started to make their way over to the table to sit down. As they do, they look for the seat that best matches their position or status within the family of faith that has gathered. When Jewish people of antiquity came together for meals, the closer you were to the head of the table – to the host – the more important you were within that social system. I suspect sometimes it was absolutely clear where a person was to sit, but probably other times they were sort of guessing. I’ve experienced enough social awkwardness in my lifetime that I can imagine the anxiety some people must have felt as they turned all the intricacies and nuances of the unwritten rules over and over in their heads to make sure they chose neither too low nor to high of a position.

Of course all of this was automatic for them. Anxiety-provoking as it may have been, it was their culture. They didn’t question whether or not they should engage in the seating ritual. Culture is the beliefs and values we share which make up the bases of society. We don’t think about it, even when it causes us stress or hurt. It just is what it is, and it usually takes a jolt to get us to examine these things we take completely for granted.

I think this passage is about Jesus giving folks a little jolt. He’s is watching this whole dinner party scene unfold. When we first read this passage, it might seem like the parable Jesus tells us is a bunch of strategic advice for playing the seating game better - as if he’s saying to each person who walks in, “Now listen, I’ve been watching this all and I think I’ve got it figured out. Don’t choose too highly…being demoted is worse than sitting too far from the host. Plus, if you are promoted, that looks really good, so choose as low as you can possibly stomach.”

It seems like he accepts the system and its rules, he’s just teaching people to be better at it. But that’s not how parables worked for Jesus. We know Jesus was the quintessential critic of his culture. He often stood on the outside and told parables that challenged the status quo. I don’t think when you read this as a parable he was offering advice – I think he was being funny; satirical to be more precise.

Now, I need to be honest: I admit, here and now, that I like John Stewart; I like the Daily Show because I like satire. Satire exposes the folly and absurdity of things. But the best part about satire, when done well, is it’s funny. It allows us the chance to laugh at ourselves, and I think laughing at ourselves is one of the best ways to loosen us up from the grip of culture.. Stewart plays clips – largely from the news – that show us ourselves. And when we see them we laugh because we see how foolish our beliefs can be, how crazy our systems can operate. He reveals how silly we often look in our serious attempts to maintain our culture, our beliefs and our assumptions.

Jesus, the John Stewart of antiquity, is holding up a mirror for folks. In the parable, he is verbalizing the anxious conversations people are having in their heads. He’s showing them what it looks like when you play the game out loud. Because once these beliefs, behaviors and assumptions are out there – explicit – they can’t help but stand in comparison with what the people say they believe; and the contradiction is obvious. These are Jewish people who profess the Torah as their guide. But, culture had taken over, set in so much, that they couldn’t even see the conflict between their actions and the scriptures they genuinely thought they were following, until Jesus laid it all out there. And I like to think that pointing out how silly the two things look next to each other may have given a chance for them to laugh at themselves.

When I was in Jr. High, the girls had this “thing” called “Big Sis/Little Sis”. Now for those of you who are familiar with the wonderful Big Brother, Big Sister program, let me assure you, this was not that. Big Sis/Little Sis was an informal social system – and it had its own culture. The way it worked was girls in the older grades would ask the younger girls to be their “little sis”. Once the relationship was established it pretty much consisted of passing notes to each other. And if I remember correctly, the notes were mostly about boys and how sweet the other person was.

“Dear Carrie, I’m so glad you are my little sis; you’re so sweet. And you should totally go for Chad. I think he likes you and you guys would be so cute together…and he’s so sweet.”

As you can imagine, there were many, many unwritten rules that maintained this not-so-sweet social network. First and foremost, you only asked someone to be your little sis if they were of the same popularity level in their grade as you in yours. Obviously, there were no official designations of these levels, but you kind of knew who fit where. There was a chance of an older girl of a higher popularity level might ask you to be her little sis, and you would gloriously move up the ladder a rung or two, but this was fairly rare.

There was no keeper of this game – no official enforcer of the unwritten rules. But everyone knew them, and everyone followed them, and I can tell you that in general it was really stressful trying to make sure you were judging the popularity level of yourself and others correctly. Of course, this whole popularity culture was silly; it was also, and anyone who ever went to Jr. High knows, enormously hurtful.

But the fact is these girls were nice for the most part. They enjoyed having their little or big sis, they really liked making their sis feel good about herself. The folly that lay behind it went unnoticed, unexamined for the most part, so they didn’t really see it. They weren’t, most of the time, malicious. It usually took someone getting hurt or seeing someone in pain because they were left out to give the system a little “jolt”. Then there was a chance to see what their cultural assumptions were doing to other people. Unfortunately, this jolt contained no humor whatsoever and things usually resumed as before.

And, of course, it’s not just Jr. High. Think about the culture of lawn keeping in this country. We’ve adopted a whole world of unwritten rules and standards about what lawns should look like, and then we stress out about keeping our lawns up to those standards. We have created our own aesthetic, and now that aesthetic is so deeply ingrained, we don’t examine what costs there might be when we furiously try to live up to that fabricated aesthetic. We mow, we spray, we displace natural plants and grasses, even though none of that is great for the environment.

And, our adherence to lawn culture sets up class differences we are largely unaware of. Cultural norms – when they are the dominant ones – are often inherently exclusionary. They assume people have a certain amount of resources. Lawns that look bad can make us see the people inside the houses as bad – as not keeping up the neighborhood, not caring about their house, etc., even though they may not have the time or money to keep a lawn up to these completely random standards.

I can just see Jesus coming and standing on my porch while I mow and making suggestions for how I can make my lawn look better, giving more and more suggestions down to tending each blade of grass separately, until I have my John Stewart moment. I realize how silly it all is.

Of course, not everyone likes satire, especially when it is at their expense, and especially if it makes them feel at all exposed, humiliated or vulnerable. Satire also implies a need for change. If something is silly, the implication is things need to change. And change is hard. Changing culturally embedded things is really hard. Fact is, I’m still going to mow my lawn . No one at the time thought the culture at dinner gatherings was odd, and in fact they took very seriously. When people ate in the wrong place, there was no telling what might happen (think lunch counters and the civil rights movement). Most of them probably didn’t take the satire well. In fact, in general we know the Pharisees responded to Jesus’ parables antagonistically – whether they were funny or not.

But, can we take a joke? Can we can choose differently from the Pharisees; to laugh at ourselves, and then turn that laughing into wisdom and courage to change things that seriously need to be changed. It’s certainly hard. These things are ingrained, and upsetting them will upset many. And of course it’s harder to take a joke when you are really serious about something. And, as we see at the end of the parable, Jesus holds up the mirror to show them their foolishness in order to make a very serious point. The laughter is just a way-station meant to loosen us up so we can make the serious changes we need to make.

Maybe a current issue closer than the lawns to the table manners of Jesus’ day is the incessant debate over where things can and can’t be located relative to ground zero. The issue seems to be laying down rules for who gets to be closest to this very important site and who is relegated to the absolute lowest end of the table. The thinking around the Islamic Center is folly:

Christians can be close, Jews maybe a few blocks away, movie theaters seem fine anywhere, but Muslims should know their place at the table. It’s crazy.

How did this become an “us” against “them”? Who got to decide who are the “americans” – the “us” – and who are the outsiders threatening Americans – the “them”, when we’re all, by the way, Americans. We quibble over whether it’s called a mosque or Islamic center, as if one would be worse than the other. It’s all folly at its height. We should step back, laugh at ourselves – at how much we look like the people Jesus was poking fun at – and try again. And when we do, the message is clear – the ones we thought belonged in the Netherreaches should be invited to have the highest place of honor.

In the end, Jesus turns these Jewish people back to their own roots – their own scriptures. He reminds them of the centrality of hospitality in their sacred texts – especially hospitality to the “other” and the “least”. He reminds them that eating together – at God’s banquet – should always be an act of reconciliation and invitation…never an occasion to make divisions or to exclude.

So I want to turn to a Muslim man that beautifully points us back to our scriptures. In commenting on the Christian scriptures from a Muslim point of view, Rashied Omar argues that the biblical teachings of hospitality – which are in the Koran, Hebrew bible, and New Testament – are a great place to start in healing our world. Omar, like Jesus, used the meal…the table…to turn people from hurtful cultural norms to the world of God’s banquet table. He writes:

“the sharing of meals, which is at the heart of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is seen as the way in which God speaks to people through and beyond any barriers that they set up. Can we Jews, Christians, and Muslims work together,” he asks, “to recover this aspect of our traditions for the feeding and healing of the world?”

I think we can. Let’s step back, laugh at our folly, and then reach out to invite those we have been excluding for a long time. Amen.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Law That Heals

Luke 13:10-17
August 22, 2010

Church: Week after week after week we come. I assume that all of us must get something out of church at some point, or we wouldn’t be here. In this day and age, the societal pressure to be a church go-er isn’t as strong as it used to be. It used to be that the societal pressure was enough to bring people to church week after week after week – even if it did absolutely nothing for them. Now, if we are getting nothing out of church – or worse, if we are being hurt by the church – we’re pretty much free to leave without much consequence. But even though we’re here by choice, I suspect that sometimes coming to church feels much more like an obligation than a joy. And at those times, we can probably relate to the crowd of people sitting in the synagogue when Jesus came in to preach.

They were there because they were supposed to be – not because they wanted to be. To not attend was to break Jewish law – and one of the top 10 laws at that: if you didn’t come, you were not keeping Sabbath. And breaking Jewish law had major consequences: it got you kicked out of the community. You became isolated, vulnerable – an outcast. You were no longer cared for or protected like those on the inside. So the people went week after week after week to synagogue whether or not the worship service helped them, hurt them or bored them silly.

Then, one week, they came to the synagogue as usual, and Jesus was the preacher. This was not going to be the same ole, same ole. In the middle of his sermon, a woman appears at the back of the sanctuary. Imagine how odd it must have been for people to have Jesus stop mid-sermon, point to the back of the sanctuary, and call for this woman to come forward. Imagine how terrifying it must have been for the woman. All eyes were on her. But, brave soul that she was, she walked forward. Well, actually, she hobbled forward because she couldn’t stand up straight. She had been crippled for 18 years. Eventually, she made her way down the aisle to the center of the sanctuary, where Jesus was standing.

The number of Jewish laws that were broken at this point already must have brought forth a collective gasp from everyone there. She was a woman and she was ill – both qualities that kept you banned from the sanctuary. Jesus was talking to her, male to female, in the sanctuary – a big no-no. And Jesus hadn’t even done the biggest sin of them all yet. After she came to him, he healed her…on the Sabbath. He did work on the Sabbath – a top ten violation. And he did it right in front of the religious authorities! He knew this went against their rules. He knew he was going against the current interpretations of the laws. He knew exactly what he was doing.

And the people sitting there that day watched the whole thing unfold. As they did, something happened to them that rarely – if ever – happened when they came to worship. They were freed. They were healed. But why? What happened? They weren’t the ones Jesus called to – Jesus didn’t lay his hands on them.

The Jewish faith at that time meant laws – lots of them. And for most people it was literally impossible to follow all of them. They lived constantly in fear of the law – a law they truly believed in and wanted to live up to because they loved Yahweh and wanted to please God. But the law had betrayed them – or rather the keepers and enforcers of the law had betrayed them.

The law as it was used weighed so heavy on most people, it probably felt like they could barely stand up. They saw what Jesus did literally for the woman, and somehow realized he was doing the same thing metaphorically for them. Somehow Jesus lifted the weight off their shoulders that had been there since they were children, and they felt like they could finally stand up straight. They rejoiced, it says in Luke. They rejoiced because they realized that the law didn’t have to be a burden. The law, the way Jesus practiced it, could heal them – it could free them.

When Moses lived, right after the people had been freed from slavery in Egypt, God gave them their first laws – the 10 commandments. And it was a pretty good place to start. These laws were founded on freedom – they were meant to keep the people from building their own Egypt – from finding themselves as either slaves or slave owners. But somehow, over time, those 10 relatively general laws became 613 laws. Each new law undoubtedly had a good purpose at the time. Each one was likely the best possible interpretation of the 10 commandments they could make for a given issue in a given moment. But what started out as well intentioned interpretations became strait jackets that just created new kinds of slavery for the people, who had only recently been led by God out of Egypt.

Eventually, the laws were more about control than freedom. They were more about maintaining institutions and power than caring for one another. They were tools of oppression for some and a heavy, heavy burden for others. This is what Jesus undermined when he healed the woman on the Sabbath. He put the spirit of the law ahead of the letter, and all of a sudden, the people there saw a cloud disappear; they felt weighty, painful laws lift from their shoulders.

The truth is mostly we like rules – they are clean, clear and enforceable. They keep us safe and keep society ordered. We need them to live well in community with one another. I think this spills over into our religious lives as well. We like the bible to tell us exactly what is okay and what isn’t. We like Paul’s lists of rules for the church because they are clear. They can order our lives and communities because they tell us exactly what’s acceptable and what’s not in the community of faith.

But our love of laws and order has taken Paul’s lists and turned them from well-intentioned interpretations of the law into the laws themselves. And once they become laws, breaking them means you find yourself outside the community of faith. And we’ve done this with not just Paul’s lists either. We – human beings through time – have made more and more rules and regulations until it is impossible for any of us to follow them all. That leads not only to hurt and exclusion of others, but to our own self-loathing and sense of distance from faith and God. The irony is, the laws we thought would help us live good, faithful, Christian lives actually distance us from authentic faith in God.

Jesus was a spirt of the law guy – and that spirit healed and freed many people. He didn’t completely do away with the law; certainly not the big 10. Sabbath was still holy. Sabbath was to be observed faithfully. But the intent of Sabbath – the Spirit- had been obscured by details about what could and couldn’t happen, down to the minutia of life. That day, Jesus reminded them of the intent of Sabbath. Sabbath was made for the people, Jesus says elsewhere, not the other way around.

Sabbath was made by God to give rest, to allow inequalities to straighten themselves out, to free the slaves and laborers from the burden of constant work. Of course he healed on the Sabbath because of course you would love and care for someone who appeared before you who had not had rest from disease in 18 years. In fact, what he did was offer Sabbath to this woman who no matter how hard she tired could not have truly experienced God’s Sabbath day while she was in so much pain and while she had been completely isolated from the community because of her deformity. That’s the spirit of Sabbath.

It’s easy to get bogged down in laws. It’s easy to build up rules based on trying to be faithful to what God commands. It happens all the time. An issue arises that we aren’t sure about, so we do our best to interpret the bible – to apply what we see in Jesus’ life. Then, because it’s human nature, we forget that it’s an interpretation and it becomes immutable truth. Women are subordinate to men. Blacks are subordinate to whites. Christianity is the only true religion. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Christians don’t smoke. Christians vote this way or that.

When I was interviewing with churches five years ago, the thing I heard people say most often was, “I want to know what the bible means for my life and what I should be doing today.” We want to live well, please God, be faithful. But the only way to do this – the only way to truly follow God’s law – is to let go of the minute instructions and rules and be guided by the spirit, not the letter.

When we get bogged down, when we pile the law upon other people, when the letter of the law becomes the law of the land, Jesus teaches us how to live by the spirit – he gives us a way back to the intention. He takes the whole law and sums it up for us. He reminds us of the greatest commandment – the one all laws should reflect. And we all remember the greatest commandment: Love god, love your neighbors, love your enemies. That’s how we measure what we’re doing. That’s how we break free of those things that no longer serve us and only weigh us down. And most importantly, that’s how we free others who have become victims of our laws and teachings.

So…how does our sanctuary compare to the one Jesus was preaching in the day the woman appeared? How are we doing on spirit verse the letter of the law. If we are following Jesus’ lead, this place should be a place where we are freed from drudgery and misinterpretations. When someone appears at our door who has been bent over by the weight of the world, hurt by the systems and laws that they can’t get out from under, can we invite them in to find the freedom and healing we know in Christ? Do we live by the spirit or the letter of the law? The spirit or the letter of the bible? The spirit or the letter of our creeds, liturgies, prayers and hymns?

When you think of church, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Is it dull sermons, the bible, old songs, long prayers, early morning. Is it obligation, boredom, pain? Or is it warmth, light, rest, hope, engagement, energy, purpose, meaning? We have a choice. We can be a place where people come and experience a very nice, well-articulated, letter of the law – or we can be a place filled with the spirit of God’s law. A place where when someone enters, they know immediately they’ve come to a holy place – a healing place. We can tell people how to live – or we can tell people life is waiting for them here…life in Christ where grace speaks louder than judgment, where normal distinctions break down and community is ordered not by how good (or rich, or talented, or clean) you are, but by the radical love of God.

We have a choice. But let’s be clear. Being a place like this doesn’t mean we will be liked by everyone. It’s pretty darn clear that Jesus was not liked by everyone. The crowds rejoiced that day. But those who thought they had a handle on the law, who thought they knew who was in and who was out, who thought they knew what church should look like – they didn’t like this spirit-of-the-law way of Jesus. It let in the wrong people.

When we live by the spirit, we will be loved by those others judge. When we become a spirit of the law place, the ones rejoicing will be the ones who get a bad rap everywhere else. The outcasts, the heathens, the heretics, the disgusting. A spirit filled place is filled with all the wrong kinds of people. I don’t know about you, but that makes me rejoice. Because when I try to measure up to my and others’ expectations, I often feel like the wrong kind of person.

If week after week our church offers only the letter of the law, it will feel like drudgery, it will feel like an obligation, it will feel like a prison to us and anyone who dares to come in our doors. But if week after week we remember and practice the spirit of God’s law, we will be a place where people are healed and transformed. We will be a place where all can feel, taste, touch and see the love of God all around us. Amen.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Justice Indicator

Luke 12:49-56
August 15, 2010


Summer time is when the livin’ is supposed to be easy. But here, in the church on Sunday mornings this summer, it feels like we’ve come across our fair share of biblical passages that are anything but easy. For weeks we’ve waded through prophets who, speaking on behalf of God, were railing against the people using language of violence and destruction. And just when we thought we could chalk it up to the Old Testament being the Old Testament, this week we have one of those difficult New Testament passages; the Prince of Peace claiming he did not, in fact, come to bring peace, but rather division.

In fact, this passage is chalk full of difficult things. Besides the Jesus not bringing peace thing, we have Jesus’ animosity toward families, the fire he seems to want to bring into our world, and his harsh words to the “hypocrites”, as he calls them, and as many of us know ourselves to be at times. Oh how I wish I could explain these away. Jesus sounds so angry and I don’t want Jesus to be angry.

But remember – Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and as he goes he is claiming an authority that is upsetting more and more people. Whatever we understand the Prince of Peace to mean, we can’t deny that Jesus’ life was upsetting to some – if not most. And he sparked a major conflict between himself and the religious and political authorities. They do, after all, end up killing him. Discord was undoubtedly a part of Jesus’ life – Prince of Peace or not.

In this passage, Jesus tells us discord is a part of what happens when the love of God enters this world. But it seems counter-intuitive. Love is good, right? The realm of God, the one Jesus brought near, is what we strive for because of the visions we have of what it would be like: everyone equal – war no more – garland instead of ashes. So why does Jesus say he came not to bring peace, but division? Why does he talk about coming to bring fire to the earth? That doesn’t sound very loving to me; that doesn’t sound very realm-of-God-like to me.

But the problem is God’s love looks so different from what generally passes for love in our world. God’s realm looks so different from the realms human beings have created. We think we know love because we love our families and friends. We know how strong that feeling is. And we know both the joy of that love and the pain such love can bring when these relationships are severed for any reason.

Families are the home base for what we know of love. It’s really the basis we have for trying to understand God’s love. We call God Mother and Father – we call churches families – our brothers and sisters in Christ. Idealized, romanticized family love, whether it reflects the reality of our families or not, is the standard for what we imagine of God’s love, the love that exists in God’s realm and the love God wants for this world. But our definitions of and expectations of family maybe don’t look like how Jesus imagined family.

The given-ness of the goodness of families was even stronger in Jesus’ day. We talk these days about the social fabric being dependent on good healthy families raising good healthy children. But in their day, they were even more dependent on this. It wasn’t just about loving your children and spouses making compromises. Families were the basis for the economy – for survival. When a son left the family, the family suffered not just the loss of someone they loved, but economic loss and vulnerability as well. That’s what makes Jesus’ statement about how he came to divide families so shocking. Why would he want that – to cause such loss and vulnerability?

Well, what he wanted was to completely upset the systems based on power and hierarchy – and family was one such system in his day. The relationships he names that will be disrupted are the ones of power – parent over child. I don’t think Jesus was wanting every family to fight – he was speaking in terms people understood in order to talk about how he came to upset power systems of the day. Jesus had a different definition of power – a different understanding of how power works and who should benefit from power. Power that brings injustice is what Jesus sought to dismantle – and dismantling that kind of power does not happen without great resistance.

I read an editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday. The author, Amy Bach, was arguing for an index that would rank local judicial systems in a similar way colleges are ranked in our country. She called it the “justice indicator.” There would be various criteria and the judicial system would get rated on each one; Things like recidivism rate, civil protections, bail figures, crime reduction and the like. The idea is once the justice systems in various cities across the nation were ranked, you would have another thing to look at as you choose where you want to live. In some ways, I found it an amusing article. While the issue of how well judicial systems do or don’t work is a serious one, Bach was positing that creating a “justice indicator” would be easy:

“A justice index,” she writes, “would be relatively straightforward to create… A panel of lawyers, community representatives, statisticians and law professors would establish standards for the measurements.”

Sure – no problem. Get those folks together in a room and I’m sure they would all easily agree on what criteria to use to determine whether a justice system was working well or not.

After being a little amused by this, I started thinking about what it would be like to have a justice indicator for our lives, our churches, our country. And even more, I wonder what it would be like if Jesus were the one coming up with the criteria. We’d like to think that Jesus’ standards would be pretty similar to the criteria we middle class Americans use to decide whether or not we’re “good” – whether or not we’re “just”. But I’m afraid that probably isn’t so. Jesus’ definitions of “good” and “just” were different from the conventional definitions of his day, and they would be different now – and that’s where the divisions and disruptions come in.

Jesus was not a twenty-first-century, university-educated, landowning husband and father; small wonder, then, that he frequently doesn't talk or act like a twenty-first century, university-educated, landowning husband and father. That can make it hard sometimes to listen to and really hear the things he says. We all spend a lot of time trying to be good and respectable. We try to fit in and be “good guys and gals.”
But Jesus wasn’t a “good guy”, at least not in most people’s eyes. Not by the standards of his day.

A "good son" would have stayed home and worked at the family's trade to care for his mother until her death; he wouldn't have gone off gallivanting around the countryside. A "good man" would defend the family name and honor if challenged or attacked – yet Jesus spoke harshly of his own family. And as if all of this isn't bad enough, Jesus actually encourages other people to leave their homes and families, to allow their family name and honor to be dismantled by others in order to follow him and to follow his example.

Following Jesus won't make you a "good guy" or "good gal" by most conventional standards. As Sarah Dylan writes, “How it came to be that so many people would think of Christianity as a ticket to respectability and an affirmation of the "core values" of a society with a vast and growing gap between rich and poor, insiders and outsiders, powerful and marginal, is one of history's most astonishing tricks to me.”

If our world were nothing but a place of created goodness and profound beauty, a space of flourishing for all, just and life-giving for all in God’s creation, then Jesus’ words about bringing division would be deeply troubling. If, on the other hand, our world is deeply marred and scarred, death-dealing for many life forms, with systems that are exploitative and nonsustainable, then redemption can come only when those systems are shattered and consumed by fire.

This is the basis of the conflict Jesus envisions. He comes not to disturb a nice world, but to shatter the disturbing and death-dealing systems that stifle life. And in our passage, he’s basically saying to those of us in such systems, we can choose to follow him or we can stay where we are, but if we stay we will be divided against him and those who follow him. The truth is, if we are going to choose Jesus as our authority – if we are going to follow Jesus – we will need to extricate ourselves from systems and institutions that don’t meet Jesus’ criteria of justice.

I think when Jesus said he did not come to bring peace – he meant he did not come to bring peace as those in power around him understood it. The peace of Rome – the peace of a well-run temple – the peace of a family where everyone is in their rightful place – the peace of stability at all costs – the peace that comes from suppression of legitimate dissent. These types of peace leave injustice firmly in place. They are not the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. The peace of this world might meet our standards, but it won’t always measure up to Jesus’ justice indicators.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace – Jesus did come to bring the realm of God near and show us how to make it visible even now, in this world. But that will be hard for some, and it will probably require us to make choices others will reject and judge. We might even have to make choices that will distance us from people we love who choose to remain in the systems of power Jesus wants us to dismantle.


At the end of worship today, we will be singing the familiar hymn, “Take My Life.” It is heavy with 19th century, male centered language. It also makes many illusions to Jesus as king, as the one sitting on the throne. Because of this, too often we think of Jesus’ authority looking like royal, regal authority. But I think Frances Havergal, the one who wrote this hymn, in his 19th century way, was trying to make the point that when we follow Jesus, when we give our lives to Jesus, Jesus replaces those kinds of authority with the authority he brought. His power comes through weakness. His justice serves the last first. He brings good news to the sinners and those stuck under the weight of systems ruled by those we traditionally think of as “in power.”

This is good news for those who suffer under the systems of power today, but let’s be honest…it does not sound like good news to the people who depend on those systems and institutions for their safety and comfort. In this fiery passage Jesus is claiming authority – authority to define what matters in our lives and the world. He’s reminding us that if we choose him – choose him as our only authority – we’re rejecting other people, other authorities, other systems, other ways of life that do not reflect the realm of God. With so many people and systems trying to claim authority for our lives the choice is often difficult. But when you compare the realm of God to the systems of oppression and injustice today, is there really any other choice? Amen.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Faith: The Third Way

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16
August 8, 2010

This verse from Hebrews is so often quoted: Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen. And for good reason. It’s really beautiful. It seems to say so much, such profound things, in one sentence.

But in my experience, these days often people think this passage means we have faith in God even though we can’t see God. It’s a kind of answer to atheists who insist they can’t believe something you can’t see or prove. We say, “We agree that we can’t see God or ultimately, scientifically prove God exists. But we have faith.” But that’s not very concrete – to just assert something, give a faith “statement” doesn’t tell us anything about what faith means in our every day, practical decisions and challenges.

I don’t think the early Christians or Hebrews would have defined faith as a belief in an unseen God. For them, God’s existence was a given. Faith for them wasn’t about whether or not you believed in God. It was much more concrete than that. Having faith was about how you made choices – what you did – asking whether or not it was faithful to God’s will for your life and for creation. Seen this way, faith is much, much harder then asserting some doctrine or belief. Faith is giving your whole life over to something, specifically God, and then acting accordingly in every aspect of what you do. It seems the unseen part is the goal of being faithful to God. We don’t always know whether or not being faithful will move us and creation any closer to God’s realm.

We see this when we read Hebrews and Isaiah.

Now I need to stop here and to admit something. I am terrible with names. I am terrible at remembering them. It’s embarrassing and I try to compensate, but it’s true. And this absolutely spills over into what I remember in the bible. Because I struggle with names, I tend to skip over all the complicated, hard to pronounce names in the bible – all those kings, all those people who were begat, all those places. I remember the big ones – Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Canaan, Jesus and the like. But when we get down to all the kings of Israel and Judah, the kings of Assyria and Babylon, I’m pretty much a lost cause.

But here’s the problem with that. The names matter. They help us understand what these authors and prophets were trying to say. In fact, it’s why it was important that John read the first verse of Isaiah, even though it seems like we’re just being hard on him making him read that list of names. The names remind us that there is a context to everything Isaiah says. The list tells us who Isaiah is speaking to. On behalf of Yahweh, he is speaking to real, live people who are doing real, live things. It is as concrete as you can get. He is telling them what to do in the face of some of the most difficult choices you can imagine. He’s telling them how to be faithful – and if we’re to understand what Isaiah is saying, we need to know something of those to whom he’s speaking.

The first verse tells us that two of the kings Isaiah was speaking to are Ahaz and Hezekiah; two kings of Judah in the 8th century BCE. These kings talked to Isaiah. He was a prophet of God. They asked for his opinion, and, quite often, they got his opinion even when they didn’t ask. What they asked about couldn’t get more practical in the case of a king. They asked him about foreign affairs, about how to govern, about what to do when faced with impossible decisions. Isaiah would tell them how to be faithful.

Of course when Isaiah gave them very specific instructions – which he was happy to do – some kings listened and some kings didn’t. So, Isaiah spoke to both Ahaz and Hezekiah, and if we remember those names from all those times we’ve read through the books of 1 and 2 kings :-), we realize that they represent the two extremes. One never listened and one listened all the time.

Both Ahaz and Hezekiah faced the same situation. They were kings of this small country that was basically, at that time, a sitting duck. Assyria – the lone super-power of the day – was making its way across the known world, taking small country after small country as it went. Currently they were moving in on the country to the north of Judah; Israel, the 2nd half of the once united kingdom under King David. As Assyria was moving in on Israel, Israel started to invade Judah in order to get them to join forces against Assyria. Such a suggestion wasn’t completely without merit. Ahaz knew, if Assyria conquered Israel, they were, without a doubt, next.

In the face of all this, Ahaz saw two choices if he was to avoid the inevitable bloodshed, and downfall of his nation at the hands of Assyria: Give into Israel and hope with forces joined they could defeat the Assyrians, or try to cozy up to Assyria in order prevent the worst from happening. He chose the latter. He chose to bribe Assyria. He chose to ingratiate himself to the king. And in doing that he chose the religions of Assyria, he built altars that mirrored theirs and then made offerings to their gods. He dismantled the altar to Yahweh in Jerusalem, took all the most beautiful pieces and gave them to the king of Assyria. In other words, he chose to place all his faith in the king of Assyria to save them from destruction. It was, you might say, faith only in what he could see.

When we turn to our prophet, we see that Isaiah’s evaluation of this choice was swift and unequivocal: wrong choice. Speaking for Yahweh, Isaiah says, “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood”. Yahweh was not happy with the new forms of worship that came along with Ahaz’s decisions. God did not like the worshiping of other gods. God did not like that Ahaz had swapped faith in Yahweh for faith in the Assyrian king to save him. He made the wrong choice.

Of course, the truth is, we learn as we read on in Isaiah, we know that either choice would have been the wrong choice. Isaiah had already told him, ignore the nations to the north, they will be of no consequence. Ignore Assyria, it will be of no consequence. Very clear, very concrete: Isaiah said do neither. Ahaz, like most of us I suspect, did not trust a prophet or a god who would give such bad advice. Ignore them??!! They were closing in and killing as they went. So of course Ahaz chose to ignore Isaiah, ignore God. He did not trust Yahweh could save him. He did not trust there was an option that he couldn’t yet see.

On the other end of the spectrum is Hezekiah. Hezekiah, serving as king shortly after Ahaz, faced the exact same situation. But the difference between he and Ahaz, the difference that affected the course of history for the people of Judah, was that he saw not two, but three options. He saw the third way of faith. He chose to listen to Isaiah, every word. He chose to trust – even when his and his people’s entire lives were at stake – He chose to trust that Yahweh would show him a third way.

And what was the third way Yahweh showed him? He and his people were to worship God, and God alone. And when you worship God and God alone, you do not offer sacrifices at the altars of other gods. You do not build altars that look the Assyrian altars. You do not gather for religious festivals that have nothing to do with Yahweh and the covenant you have made with Yahweh. But most important, as Isaiah points out, worshiping Yahweh and Yahweh alone means caring for the poor, the oppressed, the orphan and the widow. Isaiah said God hated how king Ahaz was worshiping – not because they were gathering to worship, but because they did not worship Yahweh. Isaiah knows this because they did not care for those God most wants us to care for. Ahaz left the poor destitute and the orphans abandoned.

Isaiah, speaking for God, says these words to Ahaz: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” And that was exactly what Hezekiah did. That was his choice. Crazy, actually. To respond to very real threats from the super-power of his day by caring for the least in his kingdom. But indeed, what Isaiah prophesied was realized. Yahweh came through for Hezekiah. The threats from both Israel and Assyria dissipated. Yahweh kept the promise even though any rational person would see that this third way could never lead to such an outcome.

Faith in Yahweh – the crazy faith of Hezekiah – is presented in the prophetic tradition as a third alternative that is always choosable. But it’s always a choice the world would think foolish. Faith is a conviction – to get back to Hebrews – that God and God alone offers a guarantee of a future we can’t see, but we trust it is the only future where all of humanity will flourish.

Which brings us to Abraham and Sarah – the models of faith for the author of Hebrews. The examples that show us what he meant when he said “faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.” God gave them a guarantee of a future – one that was literally laughable to them because it was so improbable, so unimaginable: descendants when they were too old and childless; a promised land; a whole new world than what they knew. But God’s guarantee was all they needed to set out, do what no sane people would do. They somehow trusted this crazy God and so were faithful in their actions.

Looking at Abraham and Sarah we see that this faith – this ability to choose the 3rd way, the ability to do the crazy, hard things – requires three things. First, we have to trust that the city of God exists and it’s better than where we are. To actually believe it is possible, as Isaiah says, for wolves and lambs to lie down together even when we can’t see the way this could ever happen. Second, to trust that it’s worth the risk to set out toward that city, even though we can’t be positively, scientifically, see-it-with-our-own-eyes, sure it exists. And third faith requires the conviction that it’s still worth it even if we know we will not reach the city of God in our lifetime. Abraham and Sarah didn’t get to the promised land – they knew they wouldn’t get there, but they set out anyway – simply because the God they had chosen to trust above all else had told them to go. That is faith. And remember, the third option never seems viable in a pragmatic world. That’s the craziness of faith – not just that we claim to believe in a God we can’t see, but that based on who that God is, we do crazy things that make no sense in an either/or world.

This is certainly a different way in our world. Faith like this leads us to impractical acts in the face of real and difficult choices. But that’s what life in God is about – believing in and trusting in possibilities beyond ourselves, beyond our lives and dedicating ourselves to that without ever really getting to see exactly what it is.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a beautiful prayer that I think describes the life of faith so well. He writes,

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

We’re not queens or kings, we’re not Sarah or Abraham. But we are real people with real lives and we come here because we want to be more faithful. And so here, we allow the prophets and Jesus to paint a vision of God’s realm and tell us how to move in that direction. Here we speak in visions and hope of what can be. Here we claim there is something better, and even though we can’t see it and may never reach it, that’s enough to take the risk. Here we declare the way forward is found in serving the least, the lost, the broken and the hopeless. Here we seek the third way of faith. It’s crazy. It’s not pragmatic. But that’s faith. Amen.