Bible
MATINS 3: PRAYING WITH THE PSALMS
artwork from the collection of the British Museum
WHAT SORT OF BIRTHDAY GREETING IS THS!?
WHAT SORT OF BIRTHDAY GREETING IS THS!?
Sermon preached by Bill Countryman for the 138th Anniversary of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley
13th Sunday after Pentecost, August 14, 2016
Proper 15c: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56
Today, we at Good Shepherd are celebrating the 138th anniversary of this congregation. Here in California, it seems like a quite an advanced age for a church, though some of our fellow Christians in Asia, Africa, and Europe—or even on the East Coast—might still place us in the category of youngsters.
Of course, as is the way with living communities, we are both old and young. Some of us go back four decades and more and many of us have been a part of this congregation for less than ten years. So it’s worthwhile to retell a bit of the story,
138 years ago, the city of Berkeley was just coming into being. The older settlement of Ocean View (now known as West Berkeley) was being combined with a newer one, near the College of California (now the university) plus a lot of empty land between the two. People over here wanted an Episcopal Church, perhaps partly to help consolidate their local identity. The women of the congregation had spent several years raising money for this building with bake sales and ice cream socials (back in a day when there were few commercial entertainments available), and they persuaded a San Francisco architect to donate the plans for this beautiful space.
Since then, an ever-changing array of faithful people persevered here through thick and thin (some of it very thin) and major demographic changes, often pioneering new ways of serving the local community. More recently, this building, as you know, was badly damaged by fire and the congregation rallied to rebuild it. We crowded our life together into our already busy and somewhat decrepit parish hall, and still found the energy to expand our ministries in the neighborhood, feeding the hungry and opposing gun violence.
It’s a story worth celebrating—a story of faithful people who have given much, over almost fourteen decades, to sustain our life together here. It’s also a story about the love of God, who has supplied people here with trust and hope and love when we didn’t have much left in our own reserves. This is a time for thanksgiving and for taking stock, a time for renewing our hopes for the future and our commitment to God and to one another.
Now, I don’t want to take anything away from all this celebratory spirit. But I do sort of have to ask, “Those readings from scripture today—what sort of birthday greeting was that?” Now, of course, they weren’t chosen for this occasion. They’re just the readings assigned for this Sunday in the lectionary. But, at first hearing anyway, they all sounded like real downers.
We have Jesus saying, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Now, we can’t take that to mean that Jesus wanted division. He said too much about love and forgiveness for us to read the passage as a command to pick quarrels with one another.
But as prophecy, these words have been right on target. Jesus was saying that his teaching—the teaching about God’s love—would touch an unwelcome nerve in our humanity, would wind up provoking people to division and even violence. He was proven right in the early years of Christianity when outsiders came to hate Christians enough to kill them. In fact, some of that has come back to the world in our own day. But we have to admit, too, that the same effect shows up even among us, even in churches. Christianity, in our day, is full of division—we seem at times to delight in divisiveness. There is even a history, still alive today, of Christians persecuting one another as well as outsiders we dislike.
And I can’t think of all this on this occasion without being reminded, of how, some years ago, an interim vicar took a serious look at our history at Good Shepherd—right back to the beginnings—and said to us, “You know, you have a history of internal conflict in this congregation.” It’s only one part of our history. But, as with pretty much every human community, it’s there and we do well to remember that and watch out for it.
But, you know, leave it to Jesus to tell the truth. He would do that. I think it’s partly because he didn’t want it to take us by surprise. He wanted to let us know, right off the bat, that we aren’t delivered from human weakness and sinfulness—our own or anybody else’s—just by being faithful church-goers. He wants us to know that we are a community of love in the making, not yet in complete fulfillment. We have further to go, more to understand, more growing to do.
What’s more, we need one another, even in our disagreements, if we want to learn and grow in love. We had two readings this morning that centered on the image of The Vine, of Israel as God’s vine or vineyard. Christians have always applied that image to the church, too. I don’t know how obvious it was, as they zipped past, but they’re basically saying opposite things about that image. Isaiah says, “God planted you and is sick and tired of your producing nothing but sour grapes. He’s out of here. You’re toast.” The Psalm takes the other side, saying to God, “Hey, wait a minute. We’ve done nothing all that bad, but you’ve left us wide open to the deer and the wild boar and every passerby. If you expect a harvest, we need some help here!” It’s the age-old argument between the gardener and the garden, each blaming the other for the current mess. Is the gardener right or the garden? The only possible answer is “Yes.” Both need each other in order for the garden to bear fruit.
We sometimes forget that the Bible contains such fierce internal arguments. But that’s what it’s for. It contains our internal tensions, the ones that will keep coming back to us again and again. It doesn’t paper them over. It supplies all the different voices and invites us into the conversation—the only way to begin understanding what God is doing in and with and for us.
All of this gives us some hint of our future at Good Shepherd, for us and for our successors who may one day celebrate its 237th birthday. It tells us there will be divisions. It tells us that our life together will make sense only as we are challenging and being challenged by God and by one another. The conversation will be life-giving if we let it.
And the passage we heard from Hebrews adds another part of the picture—the power that sustains faithful people through difficult times. There is a long celebration of faith in Hebrews; we read the first half last week and this week we concluded it, hearing the message that God’s people have always faced challenges and difficulties and even disasters. But they have come through it all by virtue of faith.
Or, to choose a better term, trust. “Faith” can be a problematic word in English: it too easily evokes connotations of creeds and confessions or maybe “faith”-healing. Sometimes it sounds like denial: “Everything will be fine!” Sometimes it sounds like abdication: “Well, God will have to take care of it.” We think of faith in terms of “faith that“: faith that God will do things the way we want.
But, as Susan Mills pointed out in her sermon last week, Abram didn’t have any very clear notion of what, exactly, he was expecting from God. Rather, he trusted God, trusted God’s ongoing commitment to him and to their friendship. It was trust that sustained these other saints listed in Hebrews through all their troubles. What will sustain us, too, through all our times, through division and peace alike, is trust in God’s , whose good purpose toward us never fails.
We come here week after week for a variety of reasons. Of course. That’s how human beings work. We come perhaps to spend time with friends, perhaps for the chance to sing, perhaps sometimes out of habit, perhaps looking for a way to minister to the world around us, perhaps hoping to find some solace and strength in distress. All this is good, all of it is welcome. But the central reason we come—what pulls all the rest of it together—is the opportunity to be in the presence of God, to worship, to give thanks, to share with God our sense of need, to receive whatever grace from God we are capable of handling at this moment in our lives.
We come, in other words, for the chance to renew our trust in God. We know that life isn’t going to become instantly easy. We know we won’t always agree with one another. But together, we are learning trust in God’s good purpose.
And we are aided in all this by this beautiful church, created 178 years ago and recreated by the efforts of the faithful here today. We are aided by the liturgy with its beautiful order and words. By the word of scripture, even perhaps when it is a bit off-putting as this morning. By the music. By the sacrament we are about to celebrate, this tangible and yet utterly mysterious sign of God’s love.
And for all this we give thanks: to God, to our forebears in this place, to one another.
Happy Birthday to us!
THE SPIRIT OF HATRED AND THE SPIRIT OF LIFE
Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley
SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JUNE 26, 2016
Proper 8C: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Ps. 77:1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62
THE SPIRIT OF HATRED AND THE SPIRIT OF LIFE
We find ourselves today pulled in very different directions. It’s the day of the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, celebrating a revolutionary increase of freedom that has happened in the last few decades—and it’s also just the second week after the massacre in Orlando. We can’t escape a certain bewilderment and disorientation and, inevitably, anxiety as to what might come next.
Obviously, we’re not yet completely through this great process of change. We’re still caught between celebrating of the freedom of a long-oppressed group and the reality that there are some people who will go to great lengths in their effort to suppress the change.
You don’t need anyone to tell you that people fly the banners of religion on both sides of this tension. Indeed, it goes deeper that that. Some of us quote the Bible in behalf of gay liberation. Some quote the Bible in behalf of fostering hatred. What, one wonders, will God say to us here today through these same scriptures? Obviously, they weren’t chosen for just such an occasion as this; they couldn’t be. Yet, read in the light of our present experience, they seem to have a remarkable bearing on it.
Let me start with the words of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel. It’s a difficult passage. In the first part of it, Jesus behaves exactly as we would wish. His disciples want to call fire down on the Samaritans who turned him away, and he rebukes them. But, in the second part, he is curt and off-putting. To people who want to become disciples, Jesus says things like: “Let the dead bury their own dead” or “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Isn’t he, in his own way, as hostile as his disciples had just been?
Well, no. However off-putting he may seem, he is not rejecting these would-be disciples. He is confronting them with the necessity of making decisions. I think many LGBT people can recognize themselves in these stories. There comes a point at which you realize “This is the person I am.” And you have to begin living as that person, even if it might mean estrangement from your family. I was struck by a story in the NY Times about young gay men who came out to their families after the Orlando shooting. They realized that it would be wrong to “spare” their parents now only to have them find out something so important about their sons in the aftermath of a tragedy. They realized that it was an either/or moment in their lives; they had to respond now.
Jesus, in this gospel reading is telling all of us that that we will come up against decisive moments like these, times when postponement becomes betrayal. You can’t put the response off by claiming other obligations. No, you have to live the life God has given you now.
We also heard Paul’s eloquent passage, from Galatians, about the fruits of the Spirit. This, he says, is how we recognize life lived authentically with God—from the presence of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Not much of that to be seen in the assassin of Orlando or his predecessors in San Bernardino or Charleston or Paris or hundreds of places in the Near East, was there? Obviously no kindness, generosity, or gentleness. But also, and perhaps more deeply, no love, joy, peace, patience, self-control.
This is not a difference of Christian and Muslim. These are gifts esteemed the world over. And Paul is suggesting that they are not just a polite list of social accomplishments. The great sorrows of our day are not simply a battle between one political position and another or one religion and another. They are a world-shaking confrontation between the Spirit of God, trying to bring true humanity into being among us and another motivating principle that prompts us, in Paul’s metaphor, to “bite and devour one another.”
He calls that principle “flesh.” But don’t think, as modern Americans immediately do, “sex.” It’s not about sex as such. It’s about the frightened little finite thing inside each of us that is afraid to take chances, that wants to grab everything and control everything and lock everything down so that it can’t escape or offend us. It’s the quality that prompts us to “bite and devour one another.”
This biting and devouring isn’t all on the big stage. We know it from our daily lives. Remember: Paul was writing to a church congregation. (We all know it’s there. We even make jokes about it.) This may seem like something completely different from killing people in a gay bar. And it is. But the difference is one of degree, not of kind. We who would never commit a great bloody crime still know where some of the motivation comes from. We still have further to go in putting on the generous, hope-filled life of the Spirit.
This will involve the same difficult process of learning and growing that Jesus’ first disciples stumbled over. They were so ready to bring down fire on those inhospitable Samaritans. And that pastor in Sacramento—the one whose sermon about Orlando was so unloving, so devoid of joy, so belligerent rather than peaceful, so unkind, so ungenerous, so faithless, so without gentleness and self-control—that pastor still, like the disciples who wanted to summon hellfire from the heavens, has a long way to go in learning the gift of the Spirit. With God’s help, perhaps he, too, will yet succeed.
Jesus, in today’s readings, told us we must choose. Paul is telling us what we must choose. However great and even justified our anger may be, it will not by itself give rise to anything but more anger. To move forward in a truly human and humane life means learning to live by the fruits of the Spirit, to live out of a principle radically opposed to the one that warps people into biters and devourers.
And what of our first reading, the one about Elisha receiving the fallen mantle, the two-fold spirit, of Elijah? You know, these two men are both deeply troubling figures. In some ways, they might rather seem like suitable patron saints of modern religious brutality. Elijah slaughtered the rival priests of Baal. And, worse than that, he called down a devastating drought and famine in his day. He killed far more Israelites, far more of his own people, than he did outsiders. Even modern military communiques might have trouble excusing all those deaths as “collateral damage.”
St. Romanos, in the fifth century, explained it this way: Elijah was completely devoted to God, but failed to understand that God loves humanity even with all its faults, that God was deeply grieved by all those deaths. And so, says Romanos, God—unwilling to shame Elijah publicly—finally tricked him into bringing the drought to an end. (A story for another time.) But Elijah wasn’t really satisfied and later on, as he began to get restive again, God sent the fiery chariot and took him up to heaven mainly to get him off the earth where he was doing so much harm.
And so his mantle fell to Elisha. In some ways, it was more of the same. His world was a bloody one. He left some corpses behind, too. But most of the stories about Elisha are very different. The first thing he did after the passage we heard today was to cure a village’s spring of some toxic substance that was causing miscarriage. And he healed childlessness and leprosy. He provided food and water in times of need. When he found himself surrounded by enemy soldiers, he did not, like Elijah, call fire down on them, but visited them with temporary blindness, took them captive, handed them over to the Israelite king, and told him to send them home.
It’s astonishing to find the inheritor of Elijah’s mantle beginning to walk the way of peace—and that in an age that saw little value in it. It means that we do not have to get stuck in an age of hatred and retaliation. It will not be easy to emerge, but it can happen by the grace of God and by the willingness of human beings to make the hard decisions and to embrace the Spirit and her gifts.
“Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” We know them all. Where do you see them around you? Where do you see them in yourself? I’m not just talking about heroic examples. The ordinariness of daily life is their seedbed. And they have the power to change not just the passing moment, but the whole world in which we and our neighbors live.
This would be good for Orlando. This would be good for the United States, so riven just now by anger and hatred . This would be good for desperate places like Syria. This would be good for the world. This would be good for our own lives. What stands in the way? Whatever it is, leave those dead to bury their own dead. Take on this other life of “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
ENCOUNTERING GOD
A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
22nd Sunday After Pentecost, October 25, 2015
Proper 25B: Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8 (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52
We’ve heard two strange and difficult stories in our readings this morning, both centering around an encounter with the power of God. It’s a good thing we have stories like this because there’s really no other good way of talking about our encounters with God. As soon as the great mystics start trying to find other language, they start sounding, well, mystical and, for most of us, confusing.
These two stories are very different in some ways—and very much alike in others. And they both deserve closer examination.
The first, from the Book of Job, is really just the tail end of a very long story. Some of you will have heard Bill Trego say more about it last Sunday. In very brief summary, Job is God’s devoted friend. But Satan, the celestial Attorney General, challenges Job’s sincerity and God allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him to test him. Job’s old friends gather around. They intend to comfort him, but they wind up in a theological argument about what he must have done to deserve such suffering. They want him to ‘fess up. He insists that he’s done nothing wrong. But he has no explanation for what has happened to him. The one thing he keeps insisting on is that he wants to meet the God who used to be his friend and now seems to be acting like an enemy.
At the end of the book, Job finally gets the meeting he asked for. God unveils for him something of God’s inexhaustible creative power and says, in effect, “Do you really want to go head to head with me?” Then, in today’s reading, we heard Job’s response:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.
This overwhelming encounter with God leaves no room for questions and theological arguments. Job understands who he’s up against and gives in. And yet . . . and yet, he still dares to speak: to address God, the God whom he has known both as friend and, so it seemed, enemy. His words are filled with awe. But they have the ring of authentic faith. God and Job are divided by absolute difference—the distance between the One who is all-powerful and the mortal two-legged creature that is humanity. And still, they speak here to one another; they commune with one another. The Job who can say, in effect, “I see now that I am, by comparison, nothing,” still knows that he has been given the privilege of speaking with God as friend, face to face.
Our other story comes from the Gospel of Mark, at the time when Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem. Jericho was the last city on the pilgrim road that led there, the last real chance to turn back and avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. There is a sense of gathering danger even in the opening words of the story: “As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho. . .” Aah! that large crowd that will play such a big part in the events to come, sometimes cheering him on, sometimes calling for his death. Events are taking on a momentum of their own. Room for maneuver is shrinking.
And then Jesus hears a lone voice calling for him—as persistent and obnoxious as the voice of Job demanding an interview with God. Many other voices, like the voices of Job’s comforters, “sternly ordered [the man] to be quiet, but he cried out” ever more loudly. And Jesus halts the whole unwieldy parade to respond: “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabboni, let me see again.” “Go, your faith has made you well.” This brief conversation with the blind man seems almost incidental. But it was, for the blind beggar, just as unpredictable, just as improbable, just as overwhelming as God’s much longer conversation with Job.
There’s something odd in the way Mark tells the story—a signal to us to pay attention. We learn the blind beggar’s name: Bartimaeus. (Mark seldom gives a name to any of the people who have brief interactions with Jesus in his Gospel.) And then Mark explains the name for us: Bartimaeus means “Son of Timaeus.” Well that doesn’t help much, does it? Let’s put it all into into English: “Son of Worthyman.” (For that is what timaeus means in Greek.) This man didn’t deserve to be blind any more than Job deserved his sufferings. Like Job, he is suffering without cause. Like Job, he utters an insistent demand for God’s attention. And like Job, he gets it.
It seems we have two figures here who are both worthy people, whose sufferings in this world are undeserved. And both of them have a strong enough hope in God that they will go on calling out for some meeting, some understanding, some conversation. The people around them tell them they’ve been cast off, but that doesn’t stop them.
This is, I think, a widespread human experience. Maybe we don’t consider ourselves worthy, much less sinless. But what human being has deserved every last misfortune and difficulty that befalls us? Perhaps we have to be pushed pretty hard before we call God to account. But here, in these stories, are two figures who did that and who are held up to us as models. They are models of real, honest prayer: direct, straightforward, insistent.
And in both these cases, the people who called on God received good things. Bartimaeus received his sight. Job got his wealth back and received a new family in place of the old. Is that the point? Just pray the right way and God will take care of everything? No. There are too many examples to the contrary in scripture to think that it’s that simple. God does work miracles in our world—things that cause us to marvel and fill us with hope and new life. But God is not under contract. Miracles are not something guaranteed to follow on the correct execution of the right sort of prayer.
The real point of these stories comes in what follows—not in the miracles of healing and restoration, but in the change that comes over these human interlocutors with God. Bartimaeus, at Jesus’ word, “immediately regained his sight,” Mark tells us, “and followed him on the way.” He joined the disciples and the crowd going up to Jerusalem. If we had asked him before what he would do if he should regain his sight, he would probably have said, “I’ll go home and get back to work at my business—and maybe read a book.” Instead, he launched himself into a dangerous adventure—a new, bigger, more challenging kind of life than he had ever imagined. That can happen to us when we face up to God. He could tell that danger might lie ahead. He went anyway.
The change may be a little harder to see in Job because Job’s world was so different from ours. But you may have noticed how oddly the story ended. God restores Job to wealth and family. And then we’re told that Job does something new and different with what has been given to him:
He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.
Seven sons and three daughters—the same kind of family as before. But two things have changed. First, we’re told the names of Job’s daughters—something that rarely happens in the Scriptures of Israel. It implies that Job’s perspective has changed. Before the disaster, he valued his sons. Now, it is his children he values. The daughters are specifically noted, even though the sons are never named.
And, a further step, Job makes his daughters heirs alongside their brothers. This goes far beyond the norm of familial justice assumed in the rest of the Old Testament. Sons inherit; daughters get married off. But Job, after his encounter with God, is actually building a new kind of world. Having seen the splendor of God face to face and confronted his own human weakness and mortality, he responds with a kind of humanity and generosity he never conceived before.
Job saw and conversed with God and then gave up trying to figure things out. Instead of explanations, he chose a new life of generosity. Bartimaeus received his sight from Jesus. Instead of going back to his old life, he embarked on a new life of uncertainty and daring, following the one who had communicated God’s power in healing him. There is the heart of both stories. To encounter God won’t give us any explanations, won’t settle any questions, won’t solve all our future problems. But it will give us a new and bigger life—one that we probably could not have imagined without it.
We could put it all in more theoretical terms. But the stories say it better. Meeting God makes the world new. And sooner or later, it will be given to those who seek it.
SONNETS ON CREATION, 1—Let there be light
CREATION AS EVOLUTION
The hostility of modern Evangelicals (and their Fundamentalist forebears) to the science of evolution is founded less on scripture than on an ancient cosmology from the Hellenistic Era that drew a sharp distinction between the eternal unchangeability of God and the chaotic, unpredictable character of human life and of the world around us. (Think earthquakes and hurricanes, for example.)
This cosmology (often referred to as “Ptolemaic” because it was codified by the astronomer Ptolemy) held good for a couple of thousand years before Copernicus upset it. It envisaged Earth at the center of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres that carried the celestial bodies around us. The closest of these spheres to earth was the one that carried the moon and it served as the demarcation line between the perfection of the heavens above, where all the stars and planets were seen as obeying regular laws, and the radical imperfection of life here below—the sublunary regions of earth, air and sea.
There was a tendency to associate the perfection of the heavens with God’s perfect and unchanging creation and to attribute the chaos of life on earth to some other cause. Among Christians, it could be seen as related to the Fall of Humanity that forced us out of Eden according to Genesis 3. Paul, for example, seems to suggest that humanity’s failure forced the whole sublunary region into its existing distressed and chaotic state (Romans 8:18-25 ).
The Seven Days of Creation, as narrated in Genesis 1, could perhaps be seen as presupposing the idea of a cosmos perfect as it left its Creator’s hand. God did, after all, pronounce it “very good.” One might still ask, of course, whether “very good” necessarily equates to “perfect” in the sense of “beyond alteration or improvement” or whether it just means what it says: “very good.”
The Eden narrative, in Genesis 2-3, however, contains within itself, alongside the possibility of immortal perfection, the possibility of defection, of falling away, of death. Evangelical rejection of biological evolution rests largely on a presupposition that the perfect original creation could not have allowed for such dramatic subsequent change. But the Eden narrative (Genesis 2) actually suggests just the opposite. It says that God did not create the full reality we know as humanity in one moment, but began with the singularity of Adam and only afterward came to recognize that for one such creature to be genuinely human there had to be more than one.
The God of Eden, like other gardeners, seems to work in part by plan and in part by trial and error. Just read the text carefully—literally, in fact. It was such a reading that led to the Four Sonnets on Eden that appeared on this website in recent weeks. They emerged from paying attention to the strong element of change and uncertainty in Genesis 2-3.
It may, of course, have been possible for humans to grow in relationship to one another and to God while still remaining in Eden. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, there are some who did. But we can barely imagine what that would be like, so far is it from our own experience. Perhaps we can get a hint of it from those moments of human joy when we are most filled with love and delight in the creation—including the human creation. That’s the closest we get to Eden.
Christians in the seventeenth century found it difficult to abandon the ancient cosmology with its clear separation of unchanging celestial perfection from our human sublunary floundering. Poets like John Donne and George Herbert could not quite let it go, deeply embedded as it was in the Christian imagination. But, with Galileo and Newton, their successors learned to shift to a different perspective, displacing earth from the center of the universe and losing the orderly symmetry of the old model.
Darwin took this shift to a deeper level, a more concrete and embodied one. This did not prevent the mainstream of Christian theologians from acknowledging the weight of Darwin’s scientific work and that of his followers. Only in Fundamentalism and its progeny did evolution come to be treated as a stand-or-fall challenge to Christian faith. But if Evangelicals would take their direction from the Eden narrative, they might as easily come to a position friendlier to Darwin and to modern evolutionary biology. Here God creates in a less tidy fashion, with an element of the unforeseen and unpredictable. It is not “evolution” in the Darwinian sense, but it leaves ample room for a process like natural selection.
What is more, human and Christian life in this world is an extension of the same reality. We may represent a falling away from one kind of human perfection—that of Eden—but we also represent a new kind of human possibility, that of coming to know good and evil. Whatever humanity may become beyond and with this knowledge will be different from what we could have become before or without it.
Is one kind of existence better than the other? I would not venture to judge in a case where I know only one of the sides being compared. But there is an old Christian tradition that says our fallen and raised humanity will prove the better of the two. It is the tradition of felix culpa, the “fortunate fall,” which brought about the new and unforeseen wonder of Mary’s motherhood and the union of God and humanity in Jesus.
Thus God will gain some lovers who abide
and some who come back wiser to God’s side.
ODDS AND ENDS OF SCRIPTURE
Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, August 9, 2015
Readings: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6: 35, 41-51
It’s hard to imagine a more oddly assorted set of readings than the ones we’ve just heard: a bit of family tragedy from the story of David, a Psalm making a desperate plea for help, some sober moral advice from Ephesians, and a very obscure speech about bread from John’s Gospel. My usual approach to preaching from texts like these is to pick one, develop some of its meaning and implications, and bypass the others.
Today, though, I want to look at all four readings. One reason for that is just to underline the fact that this is what the Scriptures are really like. They’re not organized by topic. One passage differs dramatically from another. There’s no single theological thread that ties everything together.
The one thing that does tie it all together is that God is for ever trying to speak to real human beings in the worlds where we live. And given how different our worlds can be and how different we can be, Scripture is bound to use a variety of voices. Sometimes, it plays poet, sometimes story-teller, sometimes advice columnist, sometimes teacher of spiritual mysteries.
How, then. does Scripture address us in this morning’s readings? Probably the most powerful of them, the one we all immediately relate to in some way, is Psalm 130. When we’re really in a bind, really at the end of our rope, this is the go-to passage:
Out of the depths have I called to you;
O God, hear my voice. . .
It says just about everything you need in a desperate situation. It admits that we’re not perfect and appeals to God anyway. More than that, it expects God to help—even insists on it:
I wait for you, O God; my soul waits for you;
in your word is my hope.
My soul waits for you,
more than sentries for the morning,
more than sentries for the morning.
And notice here how the perspective has subtly shifted. It starts in the pit, the depths, the place you can’t see out of. It winds up on the city wall, watching for the dawn with the sentries. Up here, we can see out again—and see forward into a future that we weren’t sure would come to pass when we were trapped down there in the depths.
We’ve turned from desperation to hope, from being trapped by the immediate danger to seeing future possibility. It doesn’t preach hope, or command us to hope. It embodies it—and invites us to express it even before we can quite feel it.
The story from Second Samuel, by contrast, is drenched in grief. Absalom is David’s favorite son, despite having been a lifelong problem. And now, he’s rebelled and is actually trying to kill his father so that he can be king himself. Despite that, David can’t bring himself to hate him—even tries to protect him. He puts his commanders under specific, public orders not to harm him. But Joab, who was a brutal man but a clear-eyed politician, knows better and has his bodyguard kill ill him when they find him hanging in the tree. David is completely overwhelmed by his grief. The scene where he cries out for Absalom is as devastating as anything in Greek tragedy. And it’s almost as well-known as our Psalm this morning—maybe because it allows us to revisit our own griefs in that of David.
But there’s more to this story—a part that doesn’t get read in church, but is equally important: Joab gives David a while to grieve, but then he goes to him and reminds him that, however deep his distress, he is still the king: “Today you have covered with shame the faces of all your officers who have saved your life today and the lives of your sons and your daughters, and the lives of your wives and your concubines, for love of those who hate you and for hatred of those who love you. . . . So go out at once and speak kindly to your servants; for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night.” (2 sam. 19:5,7)
It was brutal, but Joab was right. He forced David out of his despair by confronting him with the needs of his kingdom, of the people for whom he was responsible. In our Psalm, we experienced a turning from despair to hope, from past to future. In this story there is another, related kind of turning, a turning outward. David leaves his private grief because his community needs him. And this turning brings a certain hope. I would guess that it saved not only David’s kingship but probably his sanity as well.
It’s a shock, after the story of David and Psalm 130, to turn the pages of the Bible over and get a little moral pep talk from the author of Ephesians. Pep talks like this were a standard feature of ancient letter writing—so much so that ancient rhetoric had a technical term for them, parainesis. Almost every New Testament letter has a section like this near the end. You can almost see the finger wagging while you listen, but much of the advice was standardized and is actually pretty good: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger. . . ” Well, yeah!
Still, it runs the risk of making religion sound like just a matter of following rules—or at least of feeling guilty for not following them. The first Christians, we think, must have been goody-two-shoes. But look again. What is this bit about? “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.” Wait a minute! There are thieves in the Christian audience? They weren’t all perfect? They didn’t all come to church justs to show how good they were? That’s surprise number one.
Surprise number two: the author doesn’t rake them over the coals, doesn’t say “Bad! No! Stop that!” Instead, he says, “There are people who need your help. Figure out how to make a steady income so that you can give it.”
There’s actually an echo here of our story about David. This passage is also calling for that turn outward, to the larger world. David was interested only in his grief. The thief is interested only in oneself. David had to do turn outward because he was king. We Christians have to do it because we’re part of a community where everybody has gifts to share. Our author wants the thief not just to “stop doing that” but to turn around and become part of this community of gifts.
So what do we have so far? Three turnings. From despair to hope. From devastating private grief to renewed kingship. From a life concerned only with self to a life that embraces others. These are all turnings toward fuller human life, toward a future that can still bring good, despite past sufferings and losses and wrong-doing.
And the reading from John’s Gospel is also about turning forward and outward. It has often been misread as something else—as a doctrinal pronouncement that Jesus has founded the one true religion and that everyone must agree with Christianity and receive its sacraments. Otherwise, too bad for you.
But that’s wrong. The Jesus of John’s Gospel isn’t talking about Christian doctrine here. He’s talking about his own life and the kind of turning that he wants to bring about in our lives s well: a turn from defensiveness and fear and self-justification to a life seen as the gift of God. I believe the whole Gospel of John is about this turning, as I argued years ago in a The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel.
When Jesus says things like “I am the bread of life” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he isn’t speaking literally. His audience is quite right to say that this makes no sense on the literal level. He’s saying rather that the kind of freedom with which he lived—even to the point of risking and losing his life—can make us free, can sustain our life, can help us claim the full gift of the humanity God has willed for us. His life offers us a turn forward into the future, a turn outward into human community—a turn toward hope, toward kingship, toward generosity, toward life itself.
None of these texts, on the surface, seems to have much to do with the others. But sometimes the Scriptures show a deeper level of coherence underneath their surface. Here it takes the form of a call to turn toward new hope and trust and love. That turning is not made in a single moment of human life, but over and over again. And probably the greatest gift that God gives us in the Scriptures is the repeated reminder of it in so many different forms.
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR III: THE GOSPEL OF MARK
The Gospel of Mark is something of a riddle. Lacking the narrative polish of Luke, the theological coherence of John, or the judiciousness of Matthew, it gives us few clues as to the perspective of the author. I think one such clue has gone largely unnoticed. It is found in what seems like a great contradiction at the heart of the work.
Early in his ministry, Jesus says to his chosen disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand. . . .'” (4:11-12, quoting Isaiah 6:9, NRSV) And yet, from this point on, the disciples never really get anything right while a succession of outsiders, mostly nameless, show themselves to be people of great clarity, understanding and faith.
Mark gives the disciples a bad press, and some scholars take this as evidence that he distrusted them. Yet, his Gospel depends for its existence on the tradition they represent. It is primarily a story about what Jesus did with them and it ends—at least in the oldest ending we have for it (16:1-8)—with the angel sending them a message to meet Jesus in Galilee, as if they were about to begin the story all over again. Yet, the Gospel’s final words assert that the women who found the empty tomb and heard this message “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A book that is hardly intelligible except on the assumption that its intended audience already knew the story of the resurrection winds up with yet another failure to grasp the message.
Mark’s book is addressed to a particular community, that of Christians, and narrates a tradition of Jesus’ teaching that lived on in that community. And, at the same time, he tells us that the disciples who preserved it did not understand it. Peter, for example, recognized Jesus as Messiah, only to rebuke him for predicting his own death at the hands of the authorities (8:27-33). And despite Jesus’ sayings about the necessity of his followers’ taking up the cross and their need for humility, the disciples are found arguing among themselves as to which of them was the greatest. At his arrest, one betrays, one denies him, and the rest disappear.
By contrast, we meet quite all these perceptive outsiders: people who had the faith to be healed by him and even the courage to be insistent with him (the Syro-Phoenician woman, 7:24-30; the father of the epileptic boy, 9:94), people who used his name to cast out demons and whom he defended against his disciples’ criticism (9:38-41), a blind beggar who dared to interrupt Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem (10:46-52), a scribe (part of a group usually seen as enemies in the narrative) whom Jesus described as “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:28-34), a poor widow whose piety Jesus held up as model (12:41-44). At the end, it was another outsider, Joseph of Arimathea, who did the pious deed of burying Jesus’ body after the disciples had fled and left the women without other help.
In this short series of posts on the scriptural witness to the tension between the universal and particular, Mark has a particularly important place. The Gospel is clearly focused on the Christian community and narrates a compendium of its tradition. This is specifically a Christian book. It belongs, one would think, pretty far toward the “particular” end of the tension. It is about how God has become the God of this particular community through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
At the same time, it undercuts any Christian effort to claim unfailing wisdom, understanding, or insight, much less unique possession of God’s truth—the ever-present danger whenever we claim God as our own. Even though the first disciples were given the mystery (or “secret”) of the kingdom of God, they never, at least within the confines of this narrative, understand it. Nor does Mark imply that he or his generation of Christians possesses such understanding. What he hands on is the mystery itself. There remains for the faithful a lifelong journey into understanding it. And they may well meet some people along the way who have the kind of inexplicable insight that the Syro-Phoenician woman or the blind beggar had.
To put it another way, the God who works through the particular revelation of Jesus or the particular people of the church, always remains free to work with any human being and in the world at large. Even if we are steeped in the mystery, the tradition, the faith of our particular group, we remain quite good at getting its real meaning wrong and we may be found in fact less faithful and less perceptive than some outsider with no credentials at all.
This doesn’t mean that the particular is of no value. Without it, there is no story of God’s dealing with us to hand on, to learn, to interpret. But it does mean that scripture directs us to embrace both sides of the tension—both the God who has created all the world and the God who has called particular communities—wants us to lay hold on this God without trying to short-circuit the tensions involved. We find it easier to be either universalists or narrow particularists. Scripture keeps pressing us to be both at once.
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: AMOS
Amos was the first Hebrew prophet we know of who wrote a book. We can even date his work to a particular time—the decade between 760 and 750 BCE. This was a period of great success and prosperity for the sister kingdoms of Israel and Judah, mainly because the dominant imperial powers of the Near East were all in disarray, allowing the two of them (with Israel as the senior partner) to dominate the weaker states around them and garner immense wealth in tribute and trade.
The rich and powerful people of the two kingdoms responded much like the “1%” of the US in the last few decades—amassing great fortunes, spending extravagantly on themselves, and refusing to take any responsibility for the effects of their behavior on the public at large or, more specifically, the poor. Religion was very much bound up with the nation’s prosperity, since people attributed it to the favor of their God (with much the same enthusiasm as Americans attribute ours to the favors of capitalism). The Temples were well endowed, the festivals well attended, the clergy as well satisfied as the plutocrats.
In the midst of this, Amos appeared unexpectedly at Israel’s royal sanctuary in Bethel with a message of judgement and destruction. He insisted that he was not a prophet at all—not, that is, part of one of the regular guilds of prophets at the temples. Some understand him to have been a poor shepherd; others see him as a stockman, owning herds and groves of the sycamore figs used as cattle feed. However he made his living, he was a brilliant poet. And he made a particular point of the tension we’ve already noted in Genesis between God as the universal God and God as the God of a particular nation.
The opening oracle of the book (chaps. 1-2) makes a tour of surrounding nations, denouncing each for its sins and promising due punishment. This implies that God is the God of the whole world, able to punish anyone at all. But the Israelite audience will also have heard Amos as saying that this was the work of their God, the one who favored them. Then, at 2:4, things start going wrong. The seventh nation condemned is not the enemy, but Israel’s sister kingdom and ally, Judah. And rather than quitting, as expected, after the seventh oracle, Amos keeps right on into an eighth, directed now at Israel itself.
Amos denounces the surrounding nations not for their paganism, but for violence and cruelty toward their enemies. He denounces Israel and Judah primarily for cruelty toward their own poor and for betrayal of their relationship with their God. In other words, Amos catches them up short by turning their assumption of religious advantage into a threat. Further on, God will say to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” They expected “the day of the Lord” as their time of vindication. Amos says it will be not light and salvation, but darkness, judgement, and destruction (5:18-20). God will punish every nation for its inhumanity—Israel and Judah above all.
Amos’s God is indeed God of the whole world, as he declares in a short, but exalted poem that crashes into the sequence of oracles like a meteor:
The one who made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning,
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is his name,
who makes destruction flash out against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress. (5:8-9, NRSV)
There is no hint here of a God who is merely Israel’s God.
Amos repeats the point in another short cosmic poem:
The Lord, God of hosts,
he who touches the earth and it melts,
and all who live in it mourn,
and all of it rises like the Nile,
and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt;
who builds his upper chambers in the heavens,
and founds his vault upon the earth;
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out upon the surface of the earth—
the Lord is his name. (9:5-6 NRSV)
And then, Amos takes the matter still further as God tells the Israelites that they are no more special than any other nation, even the people furthest from them, even their enemies:
Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,
O people of Israel? says the Lord.
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,
and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir? ((9:7 NRSV)
The prophet resolutely adheres to both ends of the impossible tension. God will destroy Israel because God is the universal God of justice and God will destroy them because God is their own God whom they have betrayed by their cruelty to the poor.
Christians, over the centuries, have repeatedly lost our grasp on this necessary tension. This is what has allowed people of faith to be seduced into unquestioning support for violence against enemies and for oppression of people who have been marginalized in our own society. We suppose that God is ours and will judge us more favorably. No. Violence, inhumanity, trampling on the poor and weak—all will be judged wherever they are found. And we who think ourselves particularly favored will be judged, if anything, more severely.
The point is that we can claim the particular love of God for ourselves only insofar as we allow it to be extended to the whole world. It is a hard notion to hang onto and we keep losing our grip on it. The scriptures have no purpose more fundamental or more valuable than this: to hold us to this tension and bring us back to it when we abandon it.