There Will Be Signs… – 11/29/09 – Luke 21:25-36

I’m often amazed what different people are able to see or notice in things that often completely escape my own attention.  This happens all the time, but one instance that stands out in my mind was a time while we were living in Elkhart when we spent a day up at Camp Friedenswald.  A fellow seminary student, who also worked part time at the camp, offered to take a group for a hike and as were we walking he would narrate what it was we were looking at in the woods – the types of trees, the types of wildlife that lived there, the natural history of this particular part of the state.  It struck me during this hike how much depth and texture and detail he was able to notice in these woods and how much there was there to see and notice that I was completely blind to.   

What to me and my untrained eyes was just a pleasant, but rather generic, walk in the woods, was to him an experience of being bombarded with signs and insight and messages.  When I looked at the trees and plants on our walk they mostly stared back in silence.  When he walked the same path, he saw a text that he was able to read, full of interesting signs, signifying, full of significance.  He saw how an area of the forest had progressed from one type of tree to another, pointing out why these trees thrive at this particular stage in the life of the woods.  He saw a glimpse into the future with the young saplings that were growing under the current canopy that would be the next trees in line to inherit the forest.      He saw the signs of threat and danger that the invasive garlic mustard was presenting to the landscape, taking over and choking out other plant life. 

I think one of the reasons that this particular experience left an impression on me was that it was during a time when I was being taught by professors how to be a careful reader of text — in this case, the biblical text.  I was starting to learn how to treat a text with respect and patience — to approach it expecting to find more there than what I had previously known, paying attention to how one part relates to another, to take into account the different layers of history behind the text, becoming sensitive to nuances which help inform interpretation.   

And during this hike it became very clear that these kinds of skills, or this ability to read and pay attention to signs, was transferable to just about any context.  If the Bible was a world of text to be studied and interpreted carefully, then so was a forest.  So here he was, Matt, my fellow seminary student, minister of the woods, reading and interpreting the forest of Camp Friedenswald to us, his congregation.  The world is full of signs, there to be seen, there to be interpreted, and we are just learning to know how to read.  

Somehow I managed to grow up on a farm without becoming very sensitized to these sorts of details in the world that surrounded me – and now I’m trying to play catch up.    But I did manage to pick up a thing or two.  In the summers of my jr. high and high school years I would bale hay for my Uncle Wes, my dad’s brother.  I remember walking out to the field with my uncle in those mornings after the hay was mown and raked and had been sitting under the sun for several hours.  He would go to a windrow, grab a handful of hay from the bottom of the row — the part that was the most sheltered from the sun and would have the most moisture.  He would run his hands through the stalks, grip them in his hands and quickly give his read.  “One more hour and it should be ready to go,” or, “Don’t think it’s going to go today,” or “Feels good.  Let’s get started.”  I got to the point where I could pretty well gauge how ready a field of hay was for baling.  You want to start as soon as you can so you don’t lose too much of the day, but too much moisture in the hay and it’s heavy, too tough, and won’t store well in the barn.

Noticing and paying attention to signs are a theme that each of the Gospels treat in a little different way.  Mark’s gospel is the most sign averse.  In the middle of the gospel, Mark reports, “The Pharisees came and began to argue with (Jesus), asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him.  And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, ‘why does this generation ask for a sign?  Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.’”  Jesus then promptly leaves the scene by getting in a boat and going to the other side of the lake.  No sign, conversation over, see you later.  Later in Mark, chapter 13, when the disciples ask what will be the sign of apocalyptic events, Jesus tells them to beware and be on their guard because all the expected signs of earthquakes and wars and people claiming to have all the answers carry no significance in relation to the reign of God, the realization of God’s dream for the world.  Don’t allow the things which others credit as carrying divine significance – wars, social unrest, natural disasters – to distract you from the signs of the presence of God.   

John uses the giving of signs in a different way and actually structures his gospel around different signs.  After the wedding in Cana where Jesus changes the water into wine, cranking up the party to a whole new level, John notes, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory.”  When Jesus heals the son of a royal official, John says, “now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee.”  (4:54).  John continues to record signs that Jesus performs, each serving as a microcosm for the kind of fullness of abundant life that Jesus came to bring.  John starts to wrap up his gospel by saying, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life.” (20:30-31)   

Matthew and Luke are both somewhere in between the minimalist, cautionary approach to signs found in Mark and the celebration of signs in John.  Today’s reading from Luke 21 starts by saying, “There will be signs…” 

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  Then they will see ‘The Son of Man, (the Human One), coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.  Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

If you were here two weeks ago then these words will sounds familiar.  They are Luke’s telling of the words of Mark 13, the passage where Jesus uses the apocalyptic images and language prevalent in his day in order to help bring new meaning into the words.  Mark goes on to interpret Jesus’ death as the ultimate apocalyptic moment, the end of the old order.  Luke speaks more directly to another apocalyptic earth shaking event that would have been a key source of all this fear and foreboding.  The take over of Jerusalem and the temple destruction by the Romans in AD 70 would be a catastrophic collapse of the Jewish world.  A little earlier Jesus had said, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.”  It would have been perplexing, massively disorienting, world shattering for this to take place.  What does this mean?  What now?  What kind of sign is this?      

Right after this passage, Luke mentions, “Every day (Jesus) was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives, as it was called.  And all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple.”  Consider what might be behind this motivation to get up early, this hunger to hear Jesus’ teaching.  To hear him give one more piece of commentary that would shed light on their circumstances, present and soon to come.  This desire to decode the signs of the times.  To be given just one more metaphor that brings all this into clearer view.    

I wonder if it may have been the same kind of hunger and motivation I felt when the financial system collapsed last year.  Like others, I found myself scrambling to understand what in the world was going on.  To decode these signs.  I was a part of a system I didn’t understand and it was apparently crashing all around me.  Who can explain this?  I listened to excellent episodes of NPR’s This American Life that chronicled the development of the sub-prime lending culture.  I found helpful videos online like one called “Money as Debt,” (Click HERE to watch) which helped describe how our economic system works and how banks create new money through loans.  All of this still sounded like a parable to me, speaking in the code language of credit-default swaps, leverage, fractional reserve banking.  I don’t remember getting up early for any of this, but I did have some late nights on the internet. What is going on?  Decode for me the signs of the times.  What is behind all this?

Jesus said, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.  For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth… Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.”

Dick Cheney went on the talk shows, giving the official commentary on life in the apocalypse.  He wasn’t in office anymore but felt compelled to assure the nation that this is not the fault of any leadership or administration that could have somehow prevented it from happening.  “Nobody saw this coming,” he said to the host and to America.  Nobody?  Really?  It’s not true, of course, upsetting that he has the gall to say that, but he’s right in a way.  We missed the signs.  Were too caught up with the drunkenness and exaltation in our own prosperity, in ever rising home values, in watching our stock  grow magically, miraculously, with so little effort of our own.  We didn’t see it coming.  It caught us like a trap and, sadly, tragically, has also come upon so many others who live in the face of the whole earth.  This generation will surely not pass away until all these things have taken place…. 

Eugene Peterson, in The Message translation has a rather pointed way of phrasing the above words of Jesus:  “But be on your guard.  Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and drinking and shopping.  Otherwise, that Day is going to take you by complete surprise, spring on you suddenly like a trap, for it’s going to come on everyone, everywhere, at once.”

In case we think we should be looking primarily for signs of disaster, Jesus helps direct us where to look.

In the middle of his apocalyptic discourse, Jesus tells this parable.  “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.  So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”  Look at the fig tree and all the trees…Now I know I’m in trouble, because I’ve been looking at the trees my whole life and have barely noticed a thing.  Can’t hardly understand a word they say.  But this is where Jesus asks us to focus our attention. 

Given the context here, this request seems to be out of scale with the rest of what is going on.  On one hand we have the cosmic bodies of the sun and the moon and the stars, being shaken, falling down.  Huge political and economic structures above us in danger of collapse.  And on the other hand, the signs we are to watch for are happening in the trees, these little shoots of life that come out of the ground beneath us.  Watch for when they sprout leaves.  Watch for little signs of life.  Signs of humanity being human to each other.  Signs of love, signs of community, signs of healing, signs of neighbors treating each other neighborly, signs of water becoming wine and enhancing our little party of life – then you know that your redemption is near.    

It still feels a little tentative and off scale to me – getting excited about little blooms of life.  If the sun collapses, trees don’t stand a chance.  How can life thrive in such desolate conditions?

If you got a chance to see the movie Wall-E then you recall that it takes place during an apocalyptic time when the humans have utterly destroyed the earth and are sort of floating above it in outer space.  The robot wall-e is the lone creature remaining, still crushing and collecting trash which covers the face of the earth.  But then another robot shows up, sent from the orbiting humans.  Her purpose, it turns out, is to seek out any form of natural life that decides to start growing – any process of photosynthesis that gets resurrected from the trash dump of the world.  When she finds it, this little green shoot that starts to grow, it becomes the center of the whole story and eventually is cause for the humans to come back to earth and re-inhabit a post-apocalypse planet. 

This may be one of the few times when the theology of the Disney Corporation coincides with the theology of Jesus, but I’m willing to at least consider that their messages are similar in this case.    

What we consider powerful and indestructible, the systems of politics and economy that have so much control in our lives, are actually much more frail than they may appear.  And what appears to be fragile and threatened with extinction carries a resilience and liveliness that shows up in unexpected places and helps re-center our lives on what really matters.  Life, abundant life, the hope of God for the world.

It’s the season of Advent, and we’re looking for signs.  We know that our generation faces challenges of apocalyptic proportions, but we also know that if we train our eyes to look in the right place that we will discover the kingdom of God already taking root right in our midst.  We start with our own hearts.  We long for God to break into our lives in new ways, to give us eyes to see and hearts to love.  We long for this.  We look for it.  We watch and pray.  And we pray that as we do this we may be instruments of peace and ourselves a sign of God’s goodness which endures through all generations.

 

Life in the Apocalypse – 11/15/09 – Daniel 7, Mark 13

Tuesday’s Enquirer carried a number of letters to the editor regarding people’s responses to the health care bill passed just a few days before by the House of Representatives.  Here are some voices of those who spoke out against bill:    

“If the government takes over health care with everything else it now controls, the free market will not be able to compete (and) the government (will make) us taxpayers pay for its follies and mistakes.  Our Constitution is stealthily being eroded.”

“So the House has passed legislation called health care reform.  This is a 2000 page misnomer.  The real name should be health care control.  Wake up America!  Your freedoms are being stolen right under your noses.” 

“This is just the sort of big government our Founding Fathers sought to avoid.  Today they would, like I, fear for our rights and our Republic.”

Several weeks from now, on December 6^th, world leaders will gather for the United Nations Climate Summit, in Copenhagen, to discuss how nations can better address issues of climate change.    

Here is a quote from a person speaking on behalf of the Global Climate Campaign which is organizing to urge world leaders to act quickly on this matter:  “The current financial crisis does not absolve world leaders from their responsibility towards the literally billions of people, mainly from the world’s poorest communities, who are likely to perish if climate change remains unchecked. Frustration is boiling over at the years of failure to achieve meaningful international action on climate even as the evidence that we are on the brink of an unprecedented and irreversible catastrophe mounts.  On Saturday December 5^th, people from all around the world will be saying that the time is now for world leaders to take decisive action to avert a global calamity” Link HERE

I’m going on a hunch here, but my guess is that if these global warming activists and the health care protesters were to get in the same room that they wouldn’t agree on a whole lot.  In fact, it could get ugly, fast.  But from their comments on these two separate important issues, there is a common thread that at least brings them together on a most basic agreement.  Did you hear it?  Our Constitution is being eroded, I fear for our Republic, must take action to avert a global calamity.  There is a shared sense that the world as they know it and love it, is in grave danger.  A sense that the fabric of society, or even creation, is stretched to the point of almost tearing, perhaps holding on by just a thread which could break any minute.  If we listen to both deeply enough, we’ll find a common conviction that we are on the brink of disaster and that there must be an intervention to stop the whole thing from falling apart.        

Lots of people can agree that we’re living in apocalyptic times, we just have different thoughts about what are the signs of the apocalypse.

What I’d like to do is to start from the assumption that this intuition is a correct one and that we are indeed living in apocalyptic times.  What if these times, our generation, this point in history, is an apocalyptic moment and we find ourselves right in the middle of it all?  I want to try it out and see what things look like if we 1) accept that we are living in apocalyptic times, and 2) let go of what we think that may mean and open ourselves to rereading scripture to listen for what in the world it may say about such a time and such a life.  This will be a theme that keeps coming up as we move into Advent and the texts that prepare us for the coming of Christ into the world and the apocalyptic preaching of John the Baptist, so today can be an introduction into life in the apocalypse! 

Apocalypse has come to be another way of saying the end of the world, the end of life as we know it, by some cataclysmic event of nature or human initiated war and destruction.  I looked up some recent movies that have apocalyptic themes like The Matrix, Deep Impact, and Armageddon and realized that they were all released in the late 90’s, so maybe the apocalypse already happened ten years ago on a Hollywood stage set and we somehow missed it.  Although it looks like this new movie 2012 is reviving the theme, so maybe we’re just a little over two years away from apocalypse.

The shaking of the heavens and earth is a part of where apocalyptic thinking has come from, but involves quite a bit more than that.

Between the years 200 BCE and 300 CE, approximately, the Jewish world produced various documents that we now call apocalyptic literature.  What this literature holds in common is that it is being written by a minority group experiencing persecution, to the point of being overwhelmed by the forces arrayed against them.  The experience of oppression and was so strong that the only hope for salvation was a divine intervention that would overturn the order of the present world and set things in order as they should be.  General historical progress toward a better world was no longer an imaginable possibility.  Evil would be defeated, unjust kings would be destroyed, and the righteous would be justified in their faithfulness to the ways of justice and the right path.  The mind of the ancient imagination connected the great power of kingdoms and tyrants with the power of the stars and the sun, the social order mirrored in the cosmic order, so the shaking of the thrones of the powerful also meant the shaking of the heavenly bodies.  Isaiah 24 has apocalyptic words, “On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven, and on earth the kings of the earth…Then the moon will be abashed, and the sun ashamed; for the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.”

One of the early apocalyptic writings, the book of Daniel, rose out of Jewish persecution under the 2^nd century BCE Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes who desecrated the temple.  By this time the Jews had lived under the reign of the Babylonians, who exiled them, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks.  It was not a short, temporary loss of national sovereignty as had been hoped for.  It was centuries.  Generation after generation.  In a dream, in chapter 7 of Daniel, Daniel sees four beasts, each corresponding to one of these empires.  Each beast is stronger than the one before it and each more destructive.  After seeing the beasts, the text says this: “As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being (a son of man) coming with the clouds of heaven, and he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him.  To this one was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.  His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”  So right in the midst of his apocalyptic times, which had been ruled by beasts, Daniel envisions one like a human being who is given the thrown – coming with the clouds of heaven.  Sounds sort of like thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.  The beasts are defeated, God intervenes by raising up one with a human heart, who humanizes the systems that had been oppressing people, and this is the one who reigns for ever and ever.  And soon after, in the same chapter, Daniel identifies this Human One as the righteous of Israel, the holy ones.  In the midst of empire ruled by beasts, Daniel assures the people that the Human One, the son of man, is coming.    

Writings like this continued on up to and beyond the life of Jesus.  If you want to know more about apocalyptic literature you should take John Kampen out for breakfast sometime and ask him what all he has learned in his studies of this!  Jesus was living in apocalyptic times, only this time the hope of Daniel had been delayed and yet another empire, another beast, had risen up, this time the Roman Empire.  And again Jews found themselves as a persecuted minority.  The book of Revelation is part of this apocalyptic literature and kind of picks up where Daniel left off in some ways and talks about this new beast of Rome that is now the source of so much hardship for the people of God. 

Mark 13 is an apocalyptic chapter and is one of the key places where we can take our cues for how Jesus interprets apocalypse not only with his words, but also with his life.  Because apocalyptic consciousness was there in Jesus time, he’s not inventing this language, it’s already part of the day’s lingo.  So he uses the language of the day to tweek and alter and shape perception of life in the apocalypse, taking it as a given that that generation was living in apocalyptic times – that there were powerful forces working to the harm of the people – forces that needed to be overthrown, or stopped, or defeated in some way.  And like anyone trying to wade through the troubled waters of apocalypse, Jesus enters into this conversation carefully but also purposefully and with direction.

He approaches apocalypse in a way that lines up with the root meaning of the world.  Apocalypse, apocalypsis in Greek, means to unveil, to reveal.  To peak behind the curtain, in a sense, and see things as they really are.  Who’s really running the show.  So Dorothy and the scarecrow and the tin man and the lion are on an apocalyptic journey in their encounter with the Wizard of Oz.  And it’s not as they or anyone supposed.

Mark 13 begins this way: “As he (Jesus) came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’  Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”

Ever since entering Jerusalem on the back of a colt, back in chapter 11, Jesus had been teaching in the temple.  His interaction with the scribe about the greatest commandment, and his words about the scribes and the widow that Dustin spoke to last week all happened in the temple.  The temple and the area around it had undergone a massive construction project, sort of the economic stimulus of the day, by Herod the Great.  It was built to impress and produce awe.  Some of those stones from the retaining wall of the temple are still there in Jerusalem at the Western wall, the wailing wall, and they are indeed massive and impressive.  We might think of walking through Times Square in Manhattan and being in awe of the lights and towering buildings rising all around us.  So when the disciples walk out with Jesus, they comment on the massive stones and buildings all around them.

Jesus then speaks with apocalyptic language.  Do you see all this?  All this which looks so powerful and dominating and secure?  Don’t be so mesmerized.  All of these buildings will be thrown down.  One gift of apocalyptic knowledge is that we are given the gift of disillusionment.  Herod’s temple, Herod’s city, the rule of Rome, the iron fist of the emperor, carried with it an air of immortality and invincibility.  This is the potential illusion for anyone living in apocalyptic times.  That the system will hold us fast forever, that the structure is too big to fail, that these stones which we carried and formed and set in place with our own hands and our own technology can never be moved or shaken.  Worship and faith are energies that we can often direct at things which are not God, and Jesus seems to be saying ‘don’t do it.’   The order of the world is much more fragile than you think.  Don’t live under the illusion and the hypnotic trance of such things.  I have a better place for you to focus your energy.

Well, since Jesus brings up an apocalyptic kind of conversation the disciples seem all of a sudden eager to go in this direction.  OK, Jesus, since you brought it up, when is it all going to go down?  When is the fire going to burn it all up, the colliding comet going to blow it all to smithereens, the revolution going to topple the king?

Here’s how this is put in the rest of the Mark 13 passage that was read: “When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’  Then Jesus began to say to them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray.  Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and will lead many astray.  When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”      

It’s more than a little unfortunate that these words have been taken to mean pretty much the opposite of what Jesus is trying to communicate here.  The disciples asked “when” and “what are the signs.”  Jesus lists typical apocalyptic imagery and expectations – the wars, the famines, the earthquakes – and basically says “these aren’t the signs.”  Do not be alarmed.  These things aren’t the end of the world, this is more like the beginning of birth pains than the actual birth of anything.  Beware.  Don’t be led astray.  This isn’t what you’re to be watching for.  Stop being mesmerized by the massive buildings, because they’re not invincible.  And stop thinking that wars and earthquakes mean it’s the end of the world – that they have some kind of sacred meaning.  Let me teach you where to look, Jesus seems to be saying.

This is actually the last Sunday that I’ll be preaching on the Year B lectionary cycle, the Year of the Gospel of Mark.  Next Sunday will be Thanksgiving Sunday and people will be sharing their gratitude and the Sunday after that begins Advent, the beginning of a new church year, Year C and Luke’s gospel.

So since we’re finishing up with Mark, I feel compelled to go out with a bang and mention that according to Mark, the world has already come to an end.  Mark narrates the apocalypse and its not to be missed.  Later in chapter 13 Jesus echoes the words of Daniel – that the sun will be darkened and the stars will be falling from the heavens, and then you will see ‘the Son of Man, the Human One, coming in the clouds with great power and glory.’  And Jesus says to his generation “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” and he ends the apocalyptic discourse by saying “Therefore keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn…Keep awake.”  And Mark goes on to narrate the end of the world, the coming of the Human One, the master of the house, “in the evening” when Jesus eats with his disciples and gives them the new covenant of bread and cup, and the disciples fails to keep awake in Gethsemane, “at midnight,” when he is betrayed by Judas, “at cockcrow,” when he is denied by Peter, and “at dawn” when he is tried and crucified, and when the sun is darkened over the whole land, and Jesus dies on the cross.

It’s the end of the world, the apocalyptic moment unveils, reveals everything, and the curtain (of the temple) is torn down the middle and we get to glimpse behind.

So if the world has ended, what exactly is it we’re doing now?  If the apocalypse has been fulfilled and the veil has been removed, what is it we’re supposed to see?  The nonviolent defeat of evil?  The coming of the Human One?  Where is it?  Do you see it?  Are we keeping awake?

In these apocalyptic times, when the structures are teetering, when creation is groaning, we can fix our eyes not just on what appears to be fragile and threatening to collapse, but also on the Coming of the Human One.  On the new world that is already coming into being.  On resurrection.  On ways that the Human One is already coming to life around us, already reigning from the throne.  In this generation in these apocalyptic times, already seeing signs of the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven.     

Thanks be to God.

 

 

Communing With The Saints (Mennonite Heritage Sunday) – 11/1/09 – Mark 12:28-34

When Jesus is teaching in the temple in Mark’s gospel, a scribe comes to him with what would have been a common question of the day.  He asks Jesus to weigh in on what he believed to be the centerpiece of the Torah.  “Which commandment is first of all?” he asks.  Jesus begins by saying that the first and greatest is “Hear O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”  Jesus draws from words found in Deuteronomy, known as the Shema, which Jews would have already known by heart, repeating for morning and evening prayers.  

Had Jesus continued quoting this passage from Deuteronomy, it would have gone like this: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Just a little further in the same chapter, it says, “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.  The Lord displayed before our eyes great and awesome signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his household.  God brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land that God promised on oath to our ancestors.  Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our lasting good, so as to keep us alive, as in now the case.” 

There is a recognition here that what has been learned and what has been experienced is to be passed on to future generations – to remember the past, so as to make it present.  When the children ask “Why?” we have a story to tell them.

One of our ways of doing this is by having this Mennonite Heritage Sunday.  It’s a chance to remember some of the stories of the Mennonite experience and to get a little better sense of “Why” we are who we are and how that affects how we live.  This year Mennonite Heritage Sunday also coincides with another church observance, All Saints Day, and those who have designed the worship theme for the day have asked us to consider combining these two ways of remembering.  Heritage, the stories of a people, and saints, those who have lived faithful lives and whose witness continues long after their death.

In the ancient tradition of Celtic Christianity, there are three categories of saints.  The first is the Red Saint – those who have suffered for their faith and witnessed to the love of God with their blood, through martyrdom.  The Anabaptist movement out of which the Mennonites formed is in many ways a martyr tradition, and we have the book of the Martyr’s Mirror which tells many stories of Red Saints.  I’ve talked about the story of Dirk Willems who was fleeing his captor and who escaped over a frozen pond only to look back and realize that the person chasing him had fallen through the ice.  Dirk turned back, rescued his pursuer and saved his life.  The man wanted to let Dirk go free, but his authority had him rearrest Dirk who was tried as an Anabaptist and sentenced to burn at the stake. 

When I was in Paraguay this summer for the Mennonite World Conference I attended a Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) seminar that was reviewing the first 25 years of CPT and someone there suggested that we should think of Tom Fox as a person who should be included in a modern day Martyr’s Mirror.  Tom was one of the four CPT members who was captured in Iraq several years ago and held in captivity several months.  The other three made it out alive but Tom was found dead.  He was a witness to the nonviolent peaceful reign of God and he spent his final days trying to befriend his enemy captors who were caught up in this war on terror that had pitted their people against ours. 

We have many Red Saints to talk about.

The Celtic Christians also consider there to be White Saints.  These were the saints who had crossed the whitecaps, and had gone over the waters to be missionaries beyond their homeland.  In looking at the map of what Mennonite World Conference looks like today it would no doubt be quite a different picture without this type of saint.  One of the stories of the Paraguayan Mennonites is how they were aided in their early days by Bob and Myrtle Unruh.  Bob was from Montana and Myrtle was from Kansas, and they were both raised in rural Mennonite congregations and met and graduated together from Bethel College in Kansas.  They were newly married and began an assignment to travel down to Paraguay to help the Mennonites who were barely making it in the desert-like region called the Chaco.  On the first night they arrived, Myrtle was remembered to have said, “Thank goodness.  There remain just 1,756 days before we can return home.”  But this ended up being a life-long calling for the Unruhs.  They came to help them develop farming practices that would be productive in the Chaco and they soon had a successful experiment with importing Buffelgrass which grew like nothing else in the sandy soil.  The community then decided that they needed better livestock for their better grass.  This is how the story is described in the book Like a Mustard Seed, which is a telling of the Mennonite experience in Paraguay.  “Mennonite farmers in Lancaster, PA, learned about the need for improved livestock (in Paraguay).  They selected some of the best from their cows and pigs and in 1961 chartered a plane that became a kind of flying Noah’s ark.  More followed.  Holstein bulls…were crossed with Zebu cows, more than doubling milk production while retaining the hardiness needed to survive the Chaco.  Bob and Myrtle Unruh closed their first term, which by most standards had been wildly successful, with these words: ‘We persist with a prayer in our hearts that also through our modest efforts the love of Christ may be made visible.’ The Unruhs were more than respected; they were loved and became one with the people.  They became Chaquenos (Chaco dwellers) and devoted most of their adult lives to making the Chaco productive.” (pp. 159-160)  More of their story is told in this book along with many other stories of the Mennonites in Paraguay. 

Red saints and white saints are probably the easiest to idealize, and they make for excellent stories which are good to tell, but Celtic Christians, and hopefully also Mennonite Christians, also recognize Green Saints.  For the Celts, Green Saints were those who stayed in Ireland and committed their lives to God’s work right there on the Emerald Isle. 

I think that last week Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove helped us think some about green saints.  He told some stories about his small community there in Durham, North Carolian that has committed to the wellbeing of their neighborhood and how their neighborhood is becoming a place where people care for each other.  And he quoted Mother Teresa who said we can do no great things, but only small things with great love.  I think he quoted her on Sunday…. 

And so we also remember those who have found this area, this land where we live, to be the place where they have been called to love God with all their heart and soul and mind.

One of the stories of Mennonite Green Saints are those who served in alternative service during World War II through CPS, Civilian Public Service.  Many Mennonite young people wanted to serve their country but couldn’t reconcile taking another life with their baptismal vows of being Christians, so they entered into CPS as conscientious objectors and served in different positions all over the country.  Service in CPS had the effect of taking many Mennonites off of their farms and more isolated communities and putting them in touch with many of the social problems of the nation.  One of the places where Mennonite young people served was in the nation’s mental hospitals.  Here are some brief anecdotes of that work that comes out of the book Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in America by Perry Bush who teaches at Bluffton University:

  “Young objectors faced innumerable challenges to their convictions in mental hospital work.  There rough supervisors often informed the Cos by word and example to handle the patients overly firmly, to ‘whip them, or they will whip you.’  Usually Cos learned how to deal with potentially violent situations with their convictions intact.  At one hospital for the violently insane, orderlies had sequestered a crazed inmate in a padded cell, but he still waved a razor blade.  They called two Cos to ‘take care of him.’  The two went into the cell, carrying a mattress for protection in from of them, and calmed the inmate down.  Another CO found himself confronted by a huge inmate (nicknamed ‘Evil’ by the orderlies) towering above him and holding aloft a heavy oaken chair.  Although the usual response from an orderly thus threatened would have been to deliver a swift kick in the groin, this CO asked the inmate, ‘How do you expect to sit down on that when you hold it up like that?’  The inmate merely laughed, put it down, and walked away.” (pp. 109-110)

During the war and especially after the war Mennonites had a significant influence on reforming the way that mental health care happens in our country and they have helped to humanize the system in many ways.  So these are some of our Green Saints.     

I want to talk specifically to our youth and young people now and mention that we hope you have a chance to see a lot of the world and get a big picture of what all is going on around the globe, and also what is going on right here in the US.  And so as you think about being a Mennonite Christian in your young adulthood that is coming to you so quickly, we want to encourage you to consider this heritage of service and mission that we have not just around the world, but also here at home.  We want to encourage you to consider giving several years of your life to Voluntary Service (VS), or serving with MCC.  These will be important years that will help shape how you incorporate service and mission into all the rest of your life.  And you may end up being in a situation like Myrtle Unruh where she thought she was just serving a place for a limited term and in the process discovered that this was really what her life was going to be all about.  We want you to look seriously into all the different service opportunities that are out there, and we’ll encourage you as you step out and do that.    

When the scribe came to Jesus and asked him about the greatest Commandment, Jesus quoted to him the words of the Shema from Deuteronomy as the first commandment and then he said that the second is very much like it, that we should love our neighbor as ourself.  This was the core of all the Law and all the Prophets, better than all burnt offerings and sacrifices, which were happening all around them as they had this conversation in the temple. 

One of the things about loving God and loving our neighbor is that we don’t need to go anywhere special to do this or have anything dramatic happen to us in order to carry it out.  Anywhere we plant ourselves, there will be God and there will be neighbors.

When the Apostle Paul wrote to his little congregations that he had helped start around the Roman Empire he would often call them the saints.  The first words to the Ephesians: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.”  The first words to the Philippians: “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi..grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

And so in the last words of this sermon, as we prepare to move into Communion I invite you, the saints who are in Cincinnati, who are working and serving throughout our home area and who have decided to seek the welfare of this place where we live, I invite you to continue in this story in which we have been joined.  To tell it to our children, to tell it to our neighbors who may be looking for a faith community to join.  When I look at you, I see a congregation of green saints — which maybe in our time can have a dual meaning.  A Celtic meaning and a simple living meaning of trying to green our own lives these days.     

We prepare now for the table.

Whenever we gather around this table, we do so as a part of the communion of saints.  This is how we remember.  This is how the past becomes present.  Christ comes to us in the form of bread, an open table of invitation and grace.  In joining together in communion we join in the communion of saints living and dead who all look to the great feast that has been prepared for us, as we inherit the kingdom of God.

 

Job’s God: The Gallows and the Whirlwind – 10/18/09 – Job 38-42

Elie Wiesel is a Jew who survived the Holocaust and has since written numerous books, the first of which is called Night.  He writes about how in 1944, at the age of 14, he and fellow Jews of his community were taken to the death camps – three days travel, 80 people in each cattle truck.  When they arrived men and women were separated and it was the last time he ever saw his mother and sister.  He writes this: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.  Never shall I forget that smoke….Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever…..Never shall I forget those flames which murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams into dust (p. 45). 

One time, Wiesel was one of thousands in the camp to witness a young boy who was first tortured and then hanged by the Nazi guards.  As it was happening he heard someone behind him whisper.  “Where is God?  Where is He?”  It took the boy a half hour to die and then everyone was forced to march past him and look directly into the face of the corpse and Elie heard the same voice ask again “Where is God now?” Wiesel records his response this way: ‘And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is he? Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows.’” (pp. 75-77)

I hesitate in some ways to introduce an image like this.  It comes from one of the darkest chapters of human history and evokes some of the deepest questions of the human soul regarding the power, or goodness, or existence of God.  We were not there in the death camps, but a writing like this makes us a witness to these events in a way that forces us to deal with the realities that it presents.

This is the third week now that we have been reflecting on the book of Job.  The first week I mentioned that the story of Job is high stakes.  At stake is not only the question of why the innocent suffer, or why bad things happen to good people, but also the survival of faith in God.  Because the innocent do suffer, as Job affirms, as our life experience tells us, and as Night makes brutally clear, we are left with particular questions about God that are unsettling.  Two of the most classical assertions about God are that God is powerful and that God is loving, and we are left wondering if we must choose between these.  If God is both powerful, able to deliver, and loving, desiring what is best for creation, then surely Holocaust does not happen.  So perhaps God is powerful, but not loving in the sense that we have made God out to be.  Or perhaps God is loving, but not powerful in the sense that we have made God out to be.  Or perhaps, there’s another way of framing this question that is not yet clear to us.       

Socrates said that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and so it can also be true that “The unexamined god is not worth believing in.” 

From studying Job so far we know that Job is a text that is speaking to a time of transition for the Jews’ journey with God.  When the trials of exile were posing questions such that the dominant meaning structure could no longer hold.  That punishment for sin was the primary reason for their hardship.  Job, and much of the Bible, is what Rene Girard has called a “text in travail.”  A text where the grit of experience and the unknowing of the spirit are on full display and the emergence of a new understanding is coming into being.  And the book of Job lets us be a witness to that process.  And that’s what is visualized so beautifully in the wall hanging.  A text of travail, from top to bottom.  We looked first at the experience of Job, then the perspective of the friends, who are trying like mad to represent the rigid formulation that is crumbling in front of them, and now we come to God’s response. 

So what I would like to do is this:  I would like to make two observations about the way God responds to Job – two different, fairly broad things that are worth noticing in how this story draws toward its conclusion.  Then I would like to make a few tentative personal responses about what I see when we hold up the Job story next to Elie Wiesel’s Night story.  Then I would like to allow time for some silence.  And then give a chance if there are any responses or reflections or further questions that any one of you would like to offer.  And that will go for anything that has come up during the study of Job in the last three weeks. 

So, remember the one picture of God on the gallows in Night, and now let’s look at two observations for how God responds to Job.

1)  After the initial encounter with God and the heavenly beings, with The Satan, the Adversary, the Accuser, which is what The Satan means…after this initial conversation regarding the righteous person of Job and allowing him to suffer for a while, God is silent.  Until chapter 38.  And when God does finally speak, it says, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.”  That’s the first observation.  That when God speaks, it is out of the whirlwind.  The JPS, the Jewish Publication Society translates this as tempest, and the NIV translates this as storm, but I like the way the NRSV and the King James have it as whirlwind.  It’s this wild, untamed, energy of wind and storm and whirling that contains the voice of God.

This is a new word in Job.  We haven’t encountered a whirlwind yet in the story, even though Job’s whole experience appears to be rather whirlwind like.  It is the same word that show up when the prophet Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11).  This was also the way that the prophet Ezekiel had a heavenly vision when he was in exile in Babylon.  Ezekiel says he was sitting by the river Chebar among the exiles and had a vision, “As I looked, a stormy wind (that’s the whirlwind) came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. “  A powerful, overwhelming kind of encounter with something like a stormy, mighty wind.  It even brings to mind some allusions to Pentecost in the upper room of Acts 2.

God coming in a storm reminds me of a scene from the movie Forest Gump.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film so I’m a little sketchy on the details, but there is a scene where he and Lt. Dan are in their shrimp boat, and Lt. Dan is still working through a lot of rage and anger and disgust with his war experience and losing both of his legs and so he screaming out to God to listen to him.  And then pretty quickly there’s a storm that blows up in the gulf there where they’re boating and Lt. Dan climbs on top of the mast and it’s pouring down rain and lightning and thunder and he’s kind of duking it out with God.

This is just pure guess on my part, having some fun with the text, but I wonder if God appearing in the whirlwind can also have some connections to the way Job and his friends have been going about their conversation.  Because they keep telling each other how full of wind the other is.  Like they’re blowing smoke, or full of hot air, or whatever the modern equivalent phrase would be.  Bildad tells Job, “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a great wind?” (8:2)  And Eliphaz tells Job, “Should the wise answer with windy knowledge, and fill themselves with the east wind? (15:2)  And so of course Job comes back with “I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all.  Have windy words no limit?” (16:2,3).  So here are these guys, all full of hot air in each other’s minds, and then out of this futile windiness that they are creating, somehow the voice of God emerges from the great wind.  Not sure if there’s intended to be a connection there, but there could be one to be made.

So this first observation is that the chaos and unpredictability of Job’s circumstances are met with this powerful and even more unpredictable whirlwind that contains the voice of God.

2) The second observation comes from the words that come out of the whirlwind.  All along Job has been questioning God.  Been bombarding God with questions, his friends have been trying to answer those questions in traditional kinds of ways that Job finds completely unsatisfactory.  Ultimately God finds Job’s prayers filled with questions more righteous than the friends responses full of answers.  But when God does speak, there are no alternative answers given to Job’s questions.  Instead, God, the one who has been questioned, turns around and addresses Job in the form of questions.  The questioned One becomes the questioner.  I went through chapters 38-41 which contain God’s speech and I counted 61 question marks.  I very well could have missed a few and there are a lot more questions than that actually being asked because most of them are double barreled questions.  So God asks, “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?  One question mark, two questions.  Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?  Two questions.  It’s the Hebrew poetry format of saying something one way and then another way.

God does not even address Job’s questions.  God’s questions to Job aren’t even about the human situation of suffering.  In one sense, one has to wonder how much God was paying attention to the previous conversation that just happened because these questions God is putting out there don’t exactly follow…  It’s been observed that the first set of questions (38:4-21) have to do with cosmology, the ways of the heavens and cosmos, and the next group of questions (38:22-38) has to do with meteorology, rain, and snow and lightning and all that good stuff, and the next set of questions (3:39-39:30 has to do with zoology, lions and deer, wild ox, and horses and other animals.  And the basic question being asked to Job through all these questions is do you have control over any of this stuff around you?  Do you have any idea how this whole economy of creation works?  Do you recognize that there is a massive world teeming with life and energy beyond your ability to fathom? 

There’s nothing about human beings.  There’s nothing about our predicament.  About our sense of what is right and just and fair.  God talks for 34 verses about the Leviathan creature, which we don’t even know what it is for sure, but there’s no mention of us.  People. 

The implied answer to the questions God asks Job is “No.”  Either “No” or “I don’t know.”  “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds so that a flood of waters may cover you?” No.  Do you give the horse its might? No.  Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? I don’t know.

First observation from Job: When God speaks, it is in a voice from the whirlwind.  Second observation: When God speaks, it is in the form of questions.

Holding Job alongside Elie Wiesel’s Night, gives us two texts that give different pictures of God in a world where suffering is very real and persistent.  For Wiesel, God has become as weak and powerless as a youth whose life has ended and thus, perhaps, has ceased to be god, murdered in the death camps.  For Job, God has become beyond human knowing, an eruptive, creative force in a universe in which the human creature is but a speck. 

A tentative response:  I don’t know how to reconcile these two images, but I have an intuition that they both hold truth – however literal or metaphorical that truth might be.  I feel challenged to listen to each one more closely and to try and hold them both together, despite the paradoxical, almost contradictory nature of doing so.  I find both of them troubling and disturbing in some ways, and also find both insightful and revelatory. 

I feel the book of Job saying that this is ultimately not about Job or his friends, or any of their theology, or about us humans in general, but about God and about our being humbled before the God of the whirlwind.  But I feel the book of Night saying that this ultimately is about humanity and how we find meaning and how we treat each other ethically.

Job puts me in awe of the power of the universe.  Night puts me in awe of the power of humans to do evil.  Through Job I see a love from God that sustains us even in our smallness, is patient with us even in our bickering, and restores friends and foe alike to health.  Through Elie Wiesel I see a writer’s love for his people that insists that their story must be told and remembered, no matter how disturbing and unsettling it is. 

In both stories there is a responsibility that comes back onto the main character.  Job must pray for his friends before he is restored.  Elie Wiesel must write in order to keep his humanity.

I don’t want to be too quick to overlay a Christian theology of crucifixion and resurrection to either of these stories, but I do see glimpses of Christ both in the suffering and in the rising again that happens in both.   

I don’t say any of these things to try and derail or unravel anyone’s faith in God.  My intention through the study of Job has been to try and be faithful to the spirit of the story, which, I believe, is to disturb us from easy assumptions about ourselves and God and to invite us into this conversation as friends.  Hopefully good friends who listen to each other and who receive a grace from God in whatever way that would come.

In that spirit, I would like to invite us into a brief time of silence, followed by a chance for anyone to share any reflections you have had over these last three weeks that this study has brought about.  Anecdotes, brief insights, further questions, all these would be welcome.  I think this is something that we all think about from time to time, so soon there will be a chance for us to think out loud in the presence of a safe community of inquiry, if we wish.

 

Job’s Friends – 10/11/09 – Job

“Miserable comforters.” (16:2)  Those who speak “empty nothings,” (21:34) and who tell “proverbs of ashes,” (13:12).  “Worthless physicians.”  (13:4)  These are some of the names that Job calls his friends after each of them try and speak to him in his suffering.    

It’s been seven days and seven nights since we were last here together in this place, worshiping and reflecting on the troubles of Job.  Plenty has happened, I’m sure, over the course of these days.  School projects and activities, developments at work, meals, conversations, sleep, alarm clock, sleep alarm, clock, maybe some time to relax yesterday.  Seven days and seven nights is also the length of time covered during the first period that Job’s friends are with him.  It gets mentioned very briefly in the narrative, but it is a pretty expansive time.  Three of Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, meet together, and come to see Job, and when they come to him he’s in such bad shape that they barely even recognize him.  “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”  So whatever has happened this past week, imagine that rather than doing that, you sat in complete silence all week long.  That’s the span of time covered in this initial encounter of Job and his friends.

This long silence, between Job and his friends, is at an important shift in the story.  Before the friends’ arrival, before the silence, Job has taken more the path of the patient sufferer.   When Job had lost all his wealth and his children, he had cried out to God in this humble, vulnerable voice saying, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”  His initial response is to be brought to humility and release all these losses to God.  But now that he is absolutely miserable and can find no comfort, he is emboldened.  He gives up, at least temporarily, on crying out to God, and instead cries out against God.  He says that he wishes he never would have come at all from his mother’s womb.  That the day of his birth should be cursed.  That God has basically tricked him by letting him live and is holding him hostage in this body racked with pain.  From one side of this silence to the other, the patient Job has become the rebel Job, the renegade who has given up on divine justice and will voice his complaint freely to whoever will listen.  Job is the first to break the silence, and what he has to say is not pretty.  

It’s been said that sitting there in silence with Job was the best decision these friends made during the whole story.  As soon as they open their mouths, things start to go downhill fast.   

On one level, I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for these friends.  Anyone who has ever tried to offer words of comfort knows that this is not an easy thing to do.  Because what do you say?  It’s great to be present and to spend time in silence together and recognize that there really aren’t words that can capture what’s going on here, but when it comes time to speak, what do you say?  What do you write on that card?  How does one express care through words?  It’s not all that easy. 

Eliphaz is the first friend to muster the courage to speak and he starts out almost apologetically, but soon moves into the lecturing kind of tone that will characterize the rest of these comments from there on out.  After Job’s first tirade, Eliphaz says, “If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended?”  He’s kind of wading in slowly to this conversation.  He sticks his toe in the water, but then pretty soon just goes ahead and takes the plunge.    “If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended?  But who can keep from speaking?”  So he goes on and speaks for quite a while.  He would like for Job to consider the wisdom that he feels is pretty well established.  “Think, now, who that was innocent ever perished?  Or where were the upright cut off?  As I have seen, those who plow iniquity, and sow trouble reap the same.”  He uses this common metaphor of reaping what you sow and thinks that Job should consider what he has sown to reap such disaster.  This would be one of those statements that Job now considers a proverb of ashes.

As it’s structured, this is a fairly orderly conversation that’s going on.  Job speaks first, followed by Eliphaz, then Job gets a response, then Bildad chimes in, then Job has a response to him, then Zophar speaks and Job comes back to him, then the cycle starts over again.  This pattern continues with each friend again speaking and Job responding.  It cycles through three times, although Zophar does not speak on the third round.  Whether he gave up on Job, or whether he decided silence might be the rest route after all, or whether part of the original manuscript has been lost, we can’t be sure.   

The tensions do escalate as things go on.  Job refuses to yield to his friend’s counsel, and his friends become more and more upset with his brazen defiance of conventional wisdom and his rejection of their image of God.  They are essentially talking past each other.  Eliphaz accuses Job of undermining the very basis of religion.  In chapter 15 he says, “But you are doing away with the fear of God, and hindering meditation before God.”  Job says, “those who withhold kindness from a friend forsake the fear of the Almighty.  My companions are treacherous.”  Plus they use very poetic statements to basically tell each other to shut up.  Bildad says to Job, “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a great wind?  Does God pervert justice?  Or does the Almighty pervert the right?”  And Job says a little bit later, “As for you, you whitewash with lies; all of you are worthless physicians.  If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom.”      

One thing that Job’s friends do so poorly, is that they are unable to really listen to Job.  They bring their own understandings and explanations to Job without truly considering his experience and his authentic anguish of body and spirit.

The element of being heard, of having a witness to one’s sufferings is an important part of what is going on here.  In a statement that is full of both excruciating pain, and some humor, Job cries out, “O that my words were written down!  O that they were inscribed in a book!  O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever.”  (19:23-24) The funny part is, of course, that Job’s words are written down.  In the midst of his suffering, Job has a deep longing for his words, his thoughts, his experience, his pain, to be recorded permanently.  For it to never to be forgotten.  For it to be written in a book or engraved into the side of a granite mountain for everyone to see and remember.  For people to see, to take note, to enter with him into this experience. 

This desire to be heard and to share one’s experience has some interesting outlets these days with the onset of blogs.  We had the opportunity to follow Jared Hess’ Caring Bridge blog and keep up with some of the medical things going on with him as well as his reflections on what was happening to him.  I went to the front page of the blog this week and saw a tally on the right column that said it has received 62,437 visits to date.  I’m sure each of those visits, and each of the comments that were left were a significant way for Jared’s experience to be shared, and for his voice to be heard and remembered, engraved somehow on our hearts.

And now Margaret Penner, another child of this congregation, another young adult with cancer, is sharing her experience through her blog – Getting Rid of Grazelda.  I had some interaction with Margaret recently and I told her that I wanted to quote her blog in the sermon and that her entries sounded a lot different than those of Job, which was maybe a point in itself.  I asked her if she had ever asked the question WWJB…What Would Job Blog?  She seems to carry a lot less theological angst than Job, but the theme of companionship does show up throughout.  This past week she blogged about getting a visit from a friend from St. Louis and making vegetable korma together; kids from a Sunday school class at Shalom Mennonite in Tucson gave her a sweet collection of cards, and another friend managed to have the Accordian Club of Tucson lend out a beginners accordion for Margaret to learn to play, which Margaret felt was very very cool.  Because accordions, are, quote, “awesome.”  In the About Me section of her blog, Margaret says this: “Grazelda is the accursed (and utterly doomed) ovarian cancer that I was diagnosed with in August 2009 – dude, I’m only 25! This is my chronicle of surgeries, chemo, and other fun cancer-y stuff, so people know how I’m doing and so I don’t go nutso.”

Jared and Margaret have had strong companionship.  It’s hard to know how to be an electronic comforter from a distance through these blogs, but my guess is that even the very act of reading what is being written from time to time is a much appreciated act of companionship.

Job must voice his chaotic thoughts and have them written down so he doesn’t go nutso, and one of his  major criticisms of his friends is that they aren’t really listening, not really looking at him.  They are, according to Job, afraid.  Job says, “You see my calamity, and are afraid.” (6:21)  He says a little bit later, “Look at me, and be appalled, and lay your hand upon your mouth.” (21:5)

What would happen if Job’s friends were to actually look at him?  To hold their gaze on him, and to tune their ears to him long enough to hear what is going on in front of them?  My hunch is that they actually have good cause to be afraid.  Job’s experience of suffering without cause poses a threat to their very way of making sense of the world.  They have a particular notion of God and a particular notion of the way things are supposed to work and their friend Job doesn’t fit into any of those categories.  And so rather than being able to comfort Job, what they are really trying to do is to comfort themselves.  Whenever Job says things that challenge their certitude of how it all is supposed to go down, they come back a little more forceful and a little more convinced in their own minds that they must keep repeating what they hold to be true in order for their worlds not to also fall apart.  They are miserable comforters, as Job calls them, in part, because they refuse to enter into the pain of another and be changed by that pain.  They don’t quite know what to do with this (the chaos in the middle of the wall hanging).  They are much more comfortable with this (the more orderly, predictable notion of God above). 

And we can most likely sympathize with Job’s friends on this account also.  Because it’s hard to know what to do with this.  And when we see things we don’t understand happening to others, we often look for ways to console ourselves primarily.       

Last week we noted that in the end God considers Job’s words to be more right than those of his friends, and the friends are to ask Job to pray for them.  Job becomes the priest for his friends.  Henri Nouwen would call this the wounded healer.  The one who has experienced pain actually takes on the spiritual task of helping others work through their pain and mediating God’s presence to them.  The book of Hebrews talks about Jesus as the great high priest in this way. 

Job becomes a priest, but he also can become a rabbi, a teacher.  Should Job’s friends choose to listen, Job and his experience are able to teach them something.  Should they be able to hold their gaze long enough to look on Job, to let this reality soak in, they will be changed, softened perhaps.  Humbled certainly.  Taken into the same kind of journey on which Job himself has been traveling.         

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

 

Job – 10/4/09 – Job

If one were to look at the very beginning and ending of Job and squeeze out the middle, one could get the sense that this is a fairly simple and tidy story about a righteous individual who went through great suffering and came out triumphant on the other side.  It would go something like this: There once was a man, named Job, who lived in a far off land.  He was righteous, blameless, and wealthy.  God tested him by allowing him to suffer.  Job lost all his children, all his wealth, and spent weeks lying on his bed in physical agony, crying out to God and against God, surrounded by friends who made things even worse.  But Job passed the test and ended up with his health and his wealth fully restored, with children as well.  It’s a hard story, with a happy ending, so it’s all good. 

But I don’t buy it, and neither should you.  That Job survives and is able to re-accumulate riches and have another child for each of the children he lost before is not the point of the story.  That God always rescues those who offer the right prayers for healing is definitely not the point of the story. 

Job is one of those books of the Bible that can be called a counter-text.  The biblical tradition can be understood as a sustained conversation over time about humanity’s relationship with God, and within this conversation, differences of thought and experience are given a place.  In this case one of the voices in the conversation, present especially in Deuteronomy and parts of the wisdom literature, taught that if you do right, if you follow God’s commands, if you seek wisdom, that you will be blessed.  Do good, and it will go well with you.  Live a righteous life and you will fulfill the Vulcan salute of Spock, you will live long and prosper. 

But Job, among other writings, Ecclesiastes, some of the Psalms, is a counter-text to this prevailing theology.  Job, the ideal man of righteousness and prosperity (…which really go together…), undergoes great suffering, great agony, without cause.  It doesn’t line up at all with standard wisdom.  Job is sometimes called the Old Testament Jesus because he suffers unjustly to the point of it appearing that he has been abandoned even by God.

Job is high stakes.  At stake is not only the question ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’, but also the question of survival itself.  And not just Job’s survival, but God’s survival.  If God is one who we depend on to keep us safe in life, to protect us from all harm, to carry out punishment against the wicked and to reward the righteous, then can this image of God survive such an ordeal of suffering experienced by Job, or any of us?  After the battle with cancer, after the great war, after the holocaust, after Job, can we still believe in such a God?  And if this image of God doesn’t survive, then what do we have left?  Those are the questions that are addressed in between the beginning and the ending of the story.

For the next three weeks we’re going to be looking at Job, each week from a different perspective within the story.  Today we’ll consider the perspective of Job himself.  Next week we’ll look at his three friends, who come in and offer their thoughts to Job.  “Friends” here should really be in quotes because they are pretty lousy friends.  And then we’ll look at the way that God enters the picture.

So as we consider this story you are invited to be asking yourself what is your own understanding of suffering.  How do you hold together faith in God with the reality of suffering and injustice that you see?  What continuing questions do you have about this? 

I’m really pleased that we have been able to get this wall hanging that we’ll be able to look at these three weeks.  This was made by a friend of mine, Myrna Miller Dyck, who is now pastor of Steinman Mennonite Church in Ontario, Canada.  And she calls this piece Job and his God.  And it basically tells the story of Job’s experience with God and how this develops over time.  Myrna made this after an intensive study of Job during seminary.  Rather than assigning a lengthy research paper on Job, the professor allowed students to make some kind of visual representation of the studies, so after some thought, Myrna made this wall hanging.  Myrna wrote this about her choice of colors: “Black was chosen to signify Job’s understanding of God as his enemy.  I decided to use heavy, textured black fabrics rather than simple cottons to show some of the heaviness and chaos that Job felt.  I chose yellow and gold to depict God as (trustworthy)… I needed to begin with yellow and gold fabric to show Job’s original understanding of God.  These blocks would be neatly squared away, in straight lines, to depict Job’s understanding that Yahweh was a predictable God.”  So Job’s story goes from top to bottom, with most of the picture being filled with these conflicted squares, and then reaching some kind of transformation at the end, but nothing quite like what he began with.      

The readers gave a nice taste of some of the ways that Job is crying out.  If anyone ever thought that their prayers should be filtered or self-censored or edited to conform to theological orthodoxy, then Job is the shocking news, hopefully good news, that this need not be the case.  Job voices despair, cynicism, thoughts of suicide, satire, and utter disgust with God.  Here’s some more of what is on Job’s mind.

Here is a Job prayer (6:8,9,11-13): “O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to crush me, that he would loose his hand and cut me off!  What is my strength, that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient?  In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me.”  Please God, end my life.  I’m done.

Here is a response to a friend who is trying to comfort him: Job’s friend Bildad is speaking poetically about the glory and majesty of God and how Job really can’t be righteous like he claims since no mortal can be pure before God.  So, Job shouldn’t feel like he is exempt from suffering.  This summarizes a lot of what Job’s friends have to say.  Job is claiming that he has done nothing to deserve this, and Job’s friends keep spouting this understanding, text and counter-text, that God will protect those who do right so surely Job messed up somewhere along the way, and surely Job shouldn’t speak so rudely to God.  Bildad, who’s not all that skilled of a comforter, says that we mortals are like maggots and worms compared to God’s righteousness.  So Job says, “How you have helped one who has no power!  How you have assisted the arm that has no strength!  How you have counseled one who has no wisdom, and given much good advice.  With whose help have you uttered words, and whose spirit has come forth from you.”  You know, you’re freakin’ brilliant Bildad.  I’m so glad you’re my friend.  You are the voice of divine inspiration.  I don’t know what I would do without you, you lousy excuse for a friend.  This is how Job responds to his friends, who have taken lots of time off of work to be by his side.

Here is Job’s meditation on scripture.  Psalm 8 is this psalm about looking up into the night sky and being in awe at the vastness of the universe and that God cares for us small human beings.  It says, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet, you have made them just a little lower than the gods, and crowned them with glory and honor.”  It’s a beautiful Psalm.  So Job, who apparently is aware of this Psalm, you know, he’s doing his daily Bible study.  It was a really small Bible at that point.  And he says, “What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?  Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?  If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?  Why have you made me your target?”  Sounds like a nice morning devotion with his Bible. 

One of the other aspects of this wall hanging is that Myrna has tied in images that are present in Job’s outcries.  So Job calls God this watcher of humanity, and she has made some pieces with these two triangles like God’s eyes watching.  And Job feels like he is God’s target, that he has a big bull’s eye on his back and God is using him for target practice for sickness and pain, so there is this square with the target.  Often the hands of God are understood as being a place of safety and comfort, but Job talks about feeling like he is under the hand of God and no one can get him out of it, so there are these squares with five lines which are like the hand of God on Job.  These are troubling images.          

This past week Job on his bed came in the form of Jan Abel in her closing days of living with cervical cancer.  I had several chances to be with Jan this week as well as her husband Stan who has worshiped with us from time to time these last couple years.  Jan didn’t have a whole lot to say this last week, she was in and out of consciousness.  But I remember the first time I ever met Jan, a couple years ago, before we knew she had cancer.  I had seen her around the church collecting cans around the neighborhood and she came into my office and told me a condensed version of her life story.  She had been through a lot.  Her life had its share of agony before this final stretch.  Sometimes we get to be in this priestly roll and standing in for God and hearing somebody’s pain poured out in front of us.  And we get to witness those unorthodox and unpolished prayers of frustration and desire for healing.

A remarkable thing happens at the end of Job, and it has nothing to do with Job getting his stuff back.  After Job has said all he has to say, God speaks to his friends who have been trying all along to keep Job on the straight and narrow and convince him that his prayers should fit a little more nicely into the theological paradigm of the day.  God tells Job’s friends that they should go to Job, and take with them seven bulls and seven rams for a burnt offering so that Job can pray for them.  Usually it’s the ones who are well who are supposed to be praying for the one who is ill, but God tells Job’s healthy friends to go have Job pray for them.  God says, “for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.”

Job’s prayers, his words of frustration and cynicism and agony and even accusation toward God for being unjust, are considered to be more right in God’s eyes than those of his friends.  Job ends up being the priest for his friends.

I don’t know about you, but I find this to be very freeing.  Because it means that when it comes to our relationship with God, our prayers, our desires, our deepest longings, that nothing is out of bounds.  There are no thoughts, no words, no outcries of spirit that are unwelcome or muted or rejected.  Because they’re real.  They’re genuine.  They come from a place that can’t be accessed except through some experience of pain and they put us in a place where all of our pretenses and sense of having it together are so stripped away that we encounter the divine in this raw, mysterious way.  

So if your prayers ever look something like this (the middle part of the wall hanging), or your thoughts toward God become this dark or angry, or conflicted, then that’s alright.  There’s a place for that.  You  may very well have a good case to make and those who try to polish over pain too quickly may be missing something key in the spiritual journey.   

Job survives and God survives, but because of this, things look different and will never be quite the same.

The night before Jesus was to enter into his suffering, he gathered together his friends all in one place, and he shared a meal with them.  And during the meal he lifted up the bread and he compared it to his body that was soon to be broken.  Unjustly, wrongly, with no right cause accused and injured and crucified.  And he also took the cup, the wine, and spoke of it like it was his blood, his very life, and his death, that would soon be poured out.  And around this table, their unofficial priest who had mediated God’s presence to them so many times, Jesus, called into being a community, a new covenant, that was to be all about to the bread and the cup.  The suffering, and the joyous life of table fellowship.  They were to share in this bread and cup often and it was to be a sign of their communion.  A community at the same time celebrating the feast of the kingdom, God’s party where are all invited, and remembering, being attentive to the presence of suffering.  A family where all are priests for one another and where the hurting are recognized as having an open pathway to the ear of God.  That God is not only aware of the suffering, but that God is somehow, mysteriously, present within the suffering, somehow within that image of the cross, there with Job. 

So on this World Communion Sunday, let us come to the meal with great hope.  Let us bring our doubts, our fears, our frustrations, our cynicism, and maybe even our outrage toward God, and let us receive this gift.  The bread of life, the cup of life, the feast that sustains our body and spirit and keeps inviting us back for more.

 

Journey Toward Wisdom – 9/27/09 – Matthew 11:25-30

Week four on this Wisdom theme.  I’m not sure how much wiser everyone is feeling, but hopefully this has been a chance to ponder a little more deeply the way of wisdom and the important place it is given in the scriptures.  Wisdom as the first of all God’s creations, calling out to us.  I wasn’t here last Sunday but had the chance to listen to John’s sermon and Thanks to John for bringing in his perspective into the mix.

The question I’m still asking has to do with how do we actually become wise?  What does a person becoming wise look like?  I want to know.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest who has done a lot of work on spirituality and wisdom and lived right here in Cincinnati for quite a while before moving out to Albequerque New Mexico to start the Center for Action and Contemplation.  He addresses this question of the journey toward wisdom and I’d like to use an outline that he has created that speaks to this that I’ve found pretty helpful. 

So this outline in the bulletin insert are the points that he lays out.  He calls these the Stages of Consciousness, and I’ve written beside that the Journey Toward Wisdom. 

We’re starting these Journey Groups up this fall, meeting together and focusing on spiritual journey, so maybe this can be suggestive of where that journey is taking all of us.

So let’s look at this together, try this on for size, and feel free to make your own notes in the space provided if you find that helpful.  This is one way of talking about what a movement into wisdom looks like.

1. INFORMATION STAGE

So the first here is the information stage.  This is where we all start.  This has to do with the gathering and accumulating of facts and data and formulas, and this is a process that keeps going through all of life.  So small children begin to learn their native language and alphabet and start to know names for things.  And adults continue to learn names for things, and we study about things that interest us like foreign countries and world history and sports and recipes and the things that make life interesting and exciting for us.

This is what our era of history has become so incredibly efficient at recording and detailing.  We have amazing access to all sorts of information.  We turn on the news and we get information.  We open the newspaper and we get information.  We go to the library or jump on the internet and we have access to worlds of information.  And if we have a decent memory or if we are just skilled at knowing how to access this information when we need it, we can use information for all sorts of things. 

In our religious development this starts with learning Bible stories, memorizing scripture passages, maybe studying church history a little bit.  Muslims memorize whole chunks of the Qur’an and the 99 names of God.  We start with faith as an accumulation of information about God and following certain formulas. 

And this is a starting point.  Learning information is important for growth, but in itself it is fragmented, incomplete, and if we focus just on accumulating information it can inflate the ego.  The apostle Paul says that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  We are right or righteous because we have gathered the most facts or Bible verses or whatever it may be.  We have to move beyond just information.           

 

2. KNOWLEDGE STAGE

And this is what Richard Rohr calls the Knowledge stage.  Out of the raw material of information that we are bombarded with daily, knowledge comes when we start to connect pieces and bits of information into larger wholes.  We start to see patterns and make judgments about how different parts relate to each other.  We’re starting to build something, starting to construct something that makes sense and has meaning.  So the amateur engineer within us starts to help things work together in a coordinated kind of way. 

We get little glimpses of how things relate to the big whole, but we’re still working on a small scale.  Information takes on a context and is no longer as scattered and fragmented.  And we begin to interpret information based on the context that we’re able to read it coming from.

With knowledge, we start to be able to tell a narrative, to fit things together into a story that makes sense and to see other pieces of information through this lens.  Faith begins to incorporate lived experience and not just propositions. 

Knowledge puts us on a path toward what is referred to here as Intelligence which is divided into two parts and is where an important crossover happens.

3. ANALYTIC INTELLIGENCE

So this moves into analytic intelligence, which is a deeper and more filled out form of knowledge.  Analytic intelligence is when we make bigger connections and see bigger patterns.  The great scientist or the great thinker or artist who can synthesize experience and knowledge into beautiful theories or inventions or pieces of art that communicate new insights.  This includes an ability to think outside the box or to question the patterns that others assume as the only way there is.  One can grasp and sometimes create systems and analyze them for their effectiveness. 

Up to this point it looks like this journey could just be a matter of getting smarter.  We move from information to the ability to piece it together to the ability to assemble massive constructs of meaning and to manipulate the natural world for our own needs.  So if this is what it’s all about then the higher ones IQ, or the more degrees one has, then the closer one is to wisdom. – this heavy left brained activity of the logical, linear mind.  And Rohr points out that the use of analytic intelligence can still be ego based and doesn’t imply any integration of heart, ethics, communion with God, or sense of awe and wonder with the world.  He says that this will still emphasize form too much because one has not yet experienced the formless, or confronted mystery.         

So this is really a crossover point, when one becomes open to this next kind of intelligence.

This is a good place to bring in the words of Jesus from Matthew 11.  “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”    So the crossover happens through this other kind of intelligence, which brings one back to the mind of the child.

3.5 INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Intuitive intelligence, the intelligence of the heart, happens when one begins to meet reality rather than just measuring it or observing it.  There is a sense of being able to feel the whole and to have some initial experience of unitive consciousness where one encounters God in the other.  Non-dual thinking begins to happen when head and heart start to work together.

This is where spirituality comes to life.  Meeting reality rather than just measuring it.   

A good analogy here, I think, would be the difference between looking at a map or a postcard of a place and actually visiting that place, or, even better, becoming native to that place.  So one can know lots of facts about a place, but until one has been there and been shaped by that place, one can only have a limited type of knowledge about it.

In our family this comes into play with the expansiveness of the skies of Western Kansas.  Most people just see Western Kansas as a place to drive through on their way to the mountains, but if you grew up there like Abbie did, and when you go back to visit, there is this identification with the open expansiveness of the land.  The external has become, in a very real way, part of the internal landscape.  And one can feel this in one’s being.  This recognition when the inner resonates with the outer.  At least, that’s sort of how Abbie describes it.  It’s intuitive.  It’s sensed, it’s felt, it’s known in one’s soul.    

There are two more stages here that Rohr talks about and I guess I might as well say that anywhere beyond this point don’t be fooled too much if I sound like I know what I’m talking about.  It’s kind of difficult to wax eloquent about the upper stages of spiritual consciousness when one is still trying to learn the basics of love, joy, and peace.  So try and imagine with me just what it might look like for a person, or a community, to be moving toward wisdom.    

4. UNDERSTANDING

With understanding, one is now connecting the smaller wholes into The Whole, and holding together the fragments of experience and intuition into an integrated worldview.  We “begin to be part of the entire ‘great chain of being’, visible and invisible, inner and outer, form and formlessness, matter and spirit, which are seen as one.”

We develop the contemplative mind, which produces in us kinship and affinity instead of distance and otherness.  Rohr calls this co-naturality. We are of the same nature with reality and meet it on its own terms, “without a need to categorize it, control it, explain it, or even understand it.” ‘It is what it is.’  We understand it not just intellectually, but because it has become a part of us.  We understand that God is grace because we have come to experience and to practice that grace, and we become more childlike in how we receive grace.

And we become more comfortable with accepting God on God’s terms, the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. “I am who I am.” 

And when we live the teachings of Christ, like spending time with the poor, or working toward forgiveness for those who have harmed us, then our consciousness expands into understanding.  We start to know the gospel and actually start to be the gospel.  Co-naturality, of the same nature.    

5. WISDOM

So what is wisdom?  Wisdom is what you get when all of these previous parts of the journey can be included, honored, held together into a unitive whole, and, we also come to completely relax into the acceptance of mystery, grace, paradox, and seeming contradictions.  There is room for all this and we recognize that it is not so much us holding it all together, but we who are being held together.  Everything has a place.  There is room for suffering, room for celebration, room for deep sadness and joy.  Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (3:1) We let go of cynicism, and we approach everything and everyone as a teacher, an opportunity to learn.  We become humble.  The mind of the child and the mind of the mature adult.  We finally know that we don’t know, and we are OK with just being known.   As my dad has said, “I used to know a lot more than I do now.”

This is also a return in many ways to simplicity.  Ronald Rolheiser, who is another priest, not to be confused with Richard Rohr, talks about the difference between himself and Mother Teresa talking about God’s love.  He knew Mother Teresa and he says that when she would get up to speak in front of people all she would have to do is to say “God loves you,” and people who begin to cry.  He said when he talks about the love of God he has to talk for 20 minutes, and have this complicated outline and different examples and stories and metaphors and scriptures.  She just radiated love and her presence and few words were all that was needed for this to be communicated.  And maybe this is one of the best ways to think about wisdom.  Rather than lots of words and examples and a nice outline…. wisdom is communicated from the presence of those who continually allow God to have God’sway with them, and over time love, humility, and wisdom become who they are.  That sounds like a beautiful journey to me.    

** Outline and quotes taken from a handout given by Richard Rohr distributed in York, UK, “On the Edge” conference, 1-3 June 2007), posted HERE on the web.

 

In the Classroom with Wisdom and The Teacher – 9/13/09 – James 3:1-12, Ecclesiastes 1:1-18

On this first day of the Sunday school year, after much work has gone into recruiting teachers, planning for the year ahead, and teachers have begun their work, I guess it’s OK if we finally break out the fine print.  The New Testament reading for the day just so happens to be James chapter three, whose opening words are most likely not a part of any pitch that Christian Education committees around the world give for potential teachers.  “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”  For those who have already signed the dotted line, we thank you sincerely.  But there’s no going back now.

A little further down in the fine print are the words from the Hebrew Wisdom tradition which open the book of Ecclesiastes.  In contrast to the exalted form of Woman Wisdom that we find in Proverbs, the Teacher, as he calls himself, of Ecclesiastes, is not taken by the mystical union with God that learning and the pursuit of Wisdom can bring about.  “I, the Teacher, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.  I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.  What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted….  For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”  Inspirational words from “The Teacher.” 

Who still wants to teach?  These readings are full of warnings and caution signs, putting doubt on the value of wisdom, and calling into question the work of teaching.  Reading further in James chapter three, about the destructive power of the tongue, one could get the sense that any kind of speech, whether it be from a teacher to a student or a friend to a friend, is risky business.  Reading further in Ecclesiastes one can get the impression that after all of his life studies, the one thing that this Teacher has learned to pass on to students would go something like this: Life is hard, and then you die.  Sounds like a short class.

When we decided to carry this Wisdom theme for the month I hadn’t been planning on going in this direction today, but I want to talk some about the connections and tensions between Wisdom and teaching.  Wisdom being this ever present, active and engaged teacher who, as Proverbs says, calls out from the streets and the gates of the city, and who is present in the little things of creation.  And teaching being our difficult work of trying to listen to Wisdom, and passing along what we hear to others.

Those of you who have done this for a living know better than the rest of us the challenges and rewards of attempting to teach.  I imagine you’ve experienced James’ words of being “judged with greater strictness” by parents or students who aren’t all that excited about how you are going about your work.  And that you also judge yourselves with a fair amount of strictness in trying to figure out how to do your work well.  And I imagine that there are time when you can sympathize with the words of The Teacher whose opening words are “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity.…A generation goes, and a generation comes.”        

There is a fairly simple diagram that I have found helpful that illustrates the elements of the life of the church.  It’s a Venn Diagram, and there are three circles.  One circle is worship – the ways that we express awe and wonder and lament and praise with God.  Another circle is Community – the ways that we share life together.  And the other circle is Mission – how we reach beyond ourselves with good news.  Worship, Community, Mission.  And the center point, where all these circles intersect, is Formation/Transformation.  All of these things working together for this central reality of the church.  Forming and Transforming people and communities is the central activity of the church.  And the act of teaching, education, that we do, is right at that center.  This is a key place where formation happens.  Teaching is a great gift, and one of the titles of Jesus was the Great Teacher.  We are formed by those who teach us. 

For those who have ever found themselves in a teaching role, whether formally or informally, I’m going to offer that in the act of teaching, we always have two companions with us who don’t exactly see eye to eye, but who help us mature as teachers.  One companion is Wisdom, this personified presence that speaks of that which is good and true and beautiful in the world.  The other is The Teacher, the voice behind the book of Ecclesiastes, who through a lifetime of observation and reflection on all the facets of life, often reverts to a single word that seems to characterize the whole blasted thing: Vanity, Meaningless.  Hevel, in Hebrew, which literally means a vapor, a mist, something without real substance.  The Hebrew Wisdom tradition itself contains both of these voices, and they both continue to speak to those of us who have the gumption to put ourselves in the position of teachers.      

Last week I tried to introduce the first of these companions.  Wisdom has a life of its own and is imagined to be like a woman who has built a house and invites all who wish to enter to come in and learn.  Proverbs 8:22 is the voice of Wisdom speaking and it says, “The Lord created me at the beginning of God’s work, the first of God’s acts of long ago.”  She was the first of all God’s creations, there before anything else existed, and everything that follows in creation, every creative act of God, we could say every cluster of energy that exploded out of the Big Bang, has in it some form of wisdom.             

 The Wisdom of Solomon is one of these books that make up the apocrypha – not a part of the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament but still considered to represent the biblical tradition in many ways.  It’s one of the books of Wisdom Literature and has the beautiful poem to wisdom in chapter 7 – “For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of God’s goodness.  Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls, and makes them friends of God, and prophets, for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.” 

So Wisdom is this wonderful companion for the teacher.  Or a better way of putting it would probably be that we are Wisdom’s companion.  Wisdom is the great Teacher, already present in all things – already present in the creativity of our children, already present in the subject matter that we try and present, ready to bring us along in becoming friends of God and prophets.  And we as the teacher are the ones who get to help this process along and be a partner with Wisdom. 

That’s one companion, Wisdom, and then the other companion is this tricky booger that Ecclesiastes, also a part of the Wisdom tradition, calls The Teacher.  Because The Teacher has been looking for Wisdom his whole life, been trying to pay attention and be observant and be one of those holy souls that Wisdom passes through, and he’s just not feeling it.  It’s not coming together for him and he’s not going to pretend that he can understand any of this or that creation fits together in one beautiful cosmic work of art.  So The Teacher says things like “I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.  I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.  For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”  And he says things like “When  I applied my mind to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how one’s eyes see sleep neither day nor night, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun.  However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out.”   In an attempt to know deeply, and to pass on what he has learned to others, The Teacher confronts his own limitations, and often becomes bogged down in frustration, even, at times, despair.  Some of the most constructive teaching he can offer is named in chapter 9, verses 7-10, where he basically says, that we should enjoy life while we can — eat, drink, wear nice clothes, and work hard at what you enjoy, because that’s about the best we can do in life.

One of the teachers I’ve had who reminds me of The Teacher of Ecclesiastes was a history professor at Eastern University.  He was a brilliant guy, knew all sorts of things about history and had been teaching for quite a while, but it was pretty clear that at some point in his career he had become fairly disinterested in his subject.  Somewhere along the way he seemed to have concluded that the more you know about history, the more bleak the future looks.  One of the ways this showed up in the classroom was that he taught with a cynical, although rather humorous tone throughout all the lectures.  Another way this showed up was that he was easily diverted from talking about history to talking about his favorite subject: cheeseburgers.  He loved cheeseburgers and would describe in detail different cheeseburgers he had eaten at different places.  He also had a way of connecting the telling of history with cheeseburgers.  For example, in the 16^th century Martin Luther and the Catholic Bishops could have gotten along a lot better together if they just could have sat down and talked things through while eating cheeseburgers.  They both would have been a lot happier.  Cheeseburgers, and the pleasure that they bring, were the bright light of hope in an otherwise tragic story.

There’s more nuance to Ecclesiastes, but it points toward something that Parker Palmer emphasizes.  He’s a teacher himself, and works to train other teachers, and one of his books is called “The Courage to Teach.”  And he says that every teacher must confront the tangles they run into with 1) their subject matter, and 2) their students.  Both of these containing more complexity and challenges than any teacher can every completely figure out.  He says, ““We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits but also to serve our students well” (p. 2)

And then he goes on to say, which is really his main point and then what the rest of the book is about, that the third tangle confronting teachers is really themselves.  The self of teacher.  That teachers, ultimately, are offering themselves to their students and their subject matter, and that the journey of the teacher is really an inward journey, to maintain one’s interest in teaching, and ultimately, to nurture love.  To let love triumph in us so that our love for our students and our love for our subjects, and, we could say, our love for God, becomes what we teach.  He doesn’t put it this way, but we could say that these two companions of Wisdom and The Teacher also are about our own soul work.  Our desire to become wise people, and the way that we deal with our limitations.

I want to come back to something that I think holds all these different pieces together and close with this – and that is this picture of Wisdom being present at the beginning of creation.  As God creates, Wisdom is there.  This place of creation is also the place where the one who teachers finds herself.  It’s this Genesis One picture of hovering over the unformed stuff of the world, and then being there when formation begins to happen.  Confronting the chaos of the deep waters, and partnering with God as the subject matter begins to take shape.  And using language, the creative instrument of God, Let there be light, as a tool in this creative process.  James three warns that language can be destructive, but we also know it can be constructive and a teacher looks for ways to communicate constructively, in a way that brings to life.  And teaching becomes a partnership with God, a partnership with Wisdom in the ongoing process of creation.

We are grateful for those with the courage to teach.  Here, and in the schools in our city, and a few that teach at home.  We believe this is a great gift you are giving to us and an important way that you are letting God move through you.  May you find companionship with Wisdom and The Teacher, and may you know God’s grace, extended to you, in your own formation.

 

The House That Wisdom Built – 9/6/09 – Proverbs 9:1-12, James 2:1-17

Proverbs 30:24-25 says: “(There are) things on earth (that) are small, yet they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people without strength, yet they provide their food in the summer.”

I have to admit I’ve never really paid much attention to ants.  I haven’t studied their living patterns as an adult and I wasn’t one of those kids who went out looking for ant hills to poke around at or try and fry one with a magnifying glass held up to the sun.  One of my more recent experiences with ants came when we were having a problem with some ants coming in our house through the side door.  We got a spray that we sprayed across the threshold that has pretty much kept them out ever since.  Usually they keep to their world and I keep to mine.  In the last few weeks I’ve come across a couple different statements about ants that have caught my attention. 

One of them came from the book Cradle to Cradle.  It’s a book about how we can shift our focus in how we design everything from buildings to cars to shoes in a way that imitates the rest of nature where waste always equals food, a nutrient to help other things live, rather than waste equals toxic garbage dumps.  The authors give the example of the ant as a creature that is well adapted to its local environment.  Wherever ants show up, in all their 8 thousand different kinds, they enrich their environment and adapt to its peculiar features.  Their food economy allows them to store food them themselves, even as they recycle nutrients and by taking them deeper into the soil so plants and microorganisms can process them.  In their transportation economy they aerate soil around plant roots which lets water better penetrate the ground, helping plant life and reducing erosion.  To the argument that ants are too small to make a negative impact on the planet while humans are a massive, industrial species, the authors point out that it is estimated that all of the ants on the planet are equal to the body mass of all the humans on the planet, and yet they not only do no harm, but improve the systems they live in.  (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, McDonough and Braungart, 2002)

The other statement I heard included ants but was about all insects.  If all insects were to die, or disappear, within 50 years, all the rest of life would die.  Or, at least, life as we know it, the complex life of plants and animals, would utterly collapse.

And if humans were to disappear, within 50 years, all of the rest of life would flourish.  Kind of sobering. 

The Proverb says that there are things on earth that are small, yet exceedingly wise.  Among these things being the ant.

This is not a sermon about ants.  I’ve already mentioned pretty much everything I know about them.  This is a message about wisdom, and the month of September will keep this common theme.  Wisdom as the art of living well.  Wisdom in action.  Wisdom in speech.  Wisdom in thought.  Wisdom as involving, at least in its most basic form, the reality of living a balanced life in this created order, one of the most urgent issues of our time.  But also, in its exalted form, Wisdom as something that exists for itself, something that is a direct emanation of God, the first of all God’s creations as Proverbs says (8:22).  Wisdom as the radiance of God that shines in every feature of creation, if we would just pay attention and look closer.  The practical and the mystical dimensions of wisdom.  So we’ll be dwelling on some Wisdom texts and pondering Wisdom together. 

Wisdom is actually a category of biblical literature.  It includes the book of Proverbs, but also includes Ecclesiastes, and Job and the apocryphal books of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon.  One reason for the designation of these books is that – surprise – they use the word wisdom a lot.  Of the 318 times that the Hebrew root for wisdom mkx (chakam) shows up in the Hebrew Bible, over half are in the Wisdom books.  Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon are associated with Solomon, the king who, when given the choice to ask God for anything in the world, chose wisdom and a discerning mind.  Solomon would not have written all of these himself, but the wisdom tradition connects itself to this one, who, at that one point in his life, chose the highest good of all, the most beautiful of God’s creations, Wisdom.                

Proverbs 9 is one of several texts where Wisdom is personified as this dynamic woman who calls out to people.  “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.  She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table.  She has sent out her servant girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, ‘You that are simple, turn in here!’  To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” 

I like here how Wisdom is portrayed as an active recruiter for her cause.  Wisdom is not just something for which we must search high and low, turn over rocks, and sniff out.  Wisdom has built a house, she has set this luxurious table of food and drink, a meal fit for a king and a queen, and she is the one who has the search party going out and searching for people who will come and feast.  Her servant girls are going to the most public, most visible areas, the highest places in the town, and are calling out multiple times, repeatedly, for people to come and sit down with Wisdom.  To learn her ways.  To make her house our house.  It sounds to me kind of like the parable that Jesus told in Luke where the master of the house has set out this great banquet, but nobody comes, so the master sends the servants out to “the highways and the hedges”, as the King James translates it, to bring in the poor and anyone, anyone who will come to this feast to fill the house of the master. 

Scholars propose that the reference to Wisdom having built her house and hewn her seven pillars is a reference to the ancient understanding of the pillars of creation that held up the universe.  Wisdom is closely linked to creation in Proverbs 8. “The Lord created me at the beginning of God’s work, the first of the acts of long ago.  Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs about with water.  Before the mountains has been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when God had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil.  When God established the heavens, I was there…then I was beside God, like a master worker; and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” (8:22-27a, 30-31)

Wisdom has built her house, with its pillars, and it is the entire cosmos.  We’re already inside the house, and yet she calls us to wake up and take a look around and eat the feast.

Along with mentioning Wisdom a lot, there’s another feature of Wisdom literature that I find particularly interesting for what it doesn’t mention.  Unlike so much of the rest of the Bible, the books of Wisdom do not speak much of the typical salvation history of the people of Israel.  The patriarchs and matriarchs of Abraham and Sara, Isaac, and Jacob aren’t prominent.  Moses isn’t featured.  The history of the kings isn’t held up.  Covenant isn’t as prominent, or following the particular parts of the law.  The temple and the ritual system of worship isn’t there.  All of those features that we usually think of making up the religion of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the people of Israel, aren’t center stage.  Instead, Wisdom comes from a different place.  Wisdom is just out there; it’s what we get when we pay attention to things.  It even has a secular nature.  It is completely accessible to everyone, those inside the covenant, those outside the covenant, those who know the faith stories, those who don’t.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs 9 goes on to say.  So anyone who begins to have a sense of awe and wonder with Being, with that which is, has already cracked the door of the house of wisdom.  Like Jesus’ parables, which were these secular fictions, non-religious stories that pointed to a deep spiritual truth, Wisdom presents itself in all arenas of life.  In the farmer’s field.  In the marketplace.   In the business office.  In the seed of the plant.  In the classrooms of the academy, the streets of the city, the domestic chores of the home.  It’s all in the house of Wisdom.             

If we look deeply into something, whatever it may be, there is wisdom there.  We are following the trail of the tracings of the finger of God.  This is Wisdom as the mystical invitation into awe and wonder that calls out to us from everywhere.

James helps bring us back around to the practical, to the ants.  James is the closest thing we have to New Testament wisdom literature.  Like the older Wisdom texts, James doesn’t give much space to typical religious topics.  He doesn’t theologize about the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  He doesn’t talk about communion.  He only mentions the church once, right at the end.  James knows that religion and the practice and language of religion can become a self-justifying system.  The sacred shell that religion can create for us can just as easily cut us off from wisdom as connect us to wisdom.  This sacred shell can sometimes have us locked up in a closet in the house of wisdom rather than free to walk around.  More blind to God’s beauty than enlightened by it.  So James is pretty direct about these sort of things.  For James, Wisdom is wisdom in action.  Wisdom in how we speak and how we live.  1:26 says, “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.” Ouch.  “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  He also connects this to the relationship between faith and works.  “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith, but do not have works?  So faith, by itself, if it has not works, is dead.”    

If I knew more about ants, this is the place where I would tell another story or two about how they are an example of wisdom.  About how, by the very way they order their lives, by the way they relate to their own kind and their neighboring environment, they are an example of wisdom in action.  And how much we can learn from that.  And how our religion is always subject to this kind of scrutiny.  About how this helps us see that religion is in the house of wisdom, not the other way around.  Wisdom is not contained within the house of religion.  Our religious expressions are our attempt, the attempt of our tradition, to live faithfully in the house of Wisdom.  To play joyfully with all the other creatures in God’s playhouse.     

An important function of healthy religion is to unplug our ears so that we can hear the call of Wisdom coming from the little creatures and big creatures and the creation that is our home. 

But since I don’t know any more ant stories, I’ll just add this observation.  Wisdom has built her house, and unlike us and our anti-ant spray over our threshold, she apparently is totally cool with ants and bees and birds and trees and oceans and religions and all sorts of people living inside.  If fact, she’s doing all she can to convince us all to come in through her doors.  To settle in to the architecture of her ways.  To learn to live at peace with all the others she’s invited, feasting around that table.

 

If The Armor Fits, Wear It: Waging Peace In God’s Army? – 8/23/09 – Ephesians 6:10-20

I like the way that two contrasting ideas, or two very different pictures, sometimes show up alongside each other and give either a fresh insight into a reality or make us ask some questions about the nature of things. 

Earlier this week we spontaneously decided that I could take a vacation day mid-week so we could go up to my folks and process some garden produce that was ripe and ready to be done.  So I did a little rearranging of schedule and we headed up and had a great day working under the shade of Mom and Dad’s big maple tree cutting up and bagging sweet corn and green peppers to freeze for the winter.  The sharp contrast came toward the end of the day.  Throughout the day we had been talking some with my cousin who is my folks’ age.  She has been staying with Mom and Dad and is soon to move in with her sister in out West.  These last number of years she’s had some difficult health problems, hasn’t been able to work, has had some financial struggles (connected to not having health insurance), some depression, and is now having to whittle down her belongings to just the basics so she can move in with her sister.  This was being extremely heavy for her this week.  And then at the end of the day as we were saying goodbye to her it started pouring down rain and Eve and Lily stripped off all their clothes and startedfrolicking around out in the yard in the middle of the downpour.  So we were hugging our late-middle aged cousin who had the weight of the world of her shoulders, and we were looking at this perfect picture of carefree bliss with our laughing naked daughters.  This is life.      

I think putting unexpected images alongside each other or trying to merge them together is also a strategy that works well in visual art.  I visit the Red Tree Art Gallery and Coffee shop here in Oakley fairly regularly.  They change their displays about once a month and this past month they had the theme of superheroes.  So all of the art had something to do with superheroes.  The painting that caught my attention the most was one of a person from the waist on down, she’s wearing a kitchen apron, with the words beside it, “I wear my cape around my waist.”  Common apron as domestic super hero.  I liked it so much I had this scheme to buy it and surprise Abbie with it on her birthday.  I got as far as getting it down from the wall and handing the manager my credit card with painting in hand until I realized that I had completely mis-read the price tag.  I think my brain wanted it enough that it imagined it as being affordable.  Oh well, the idea is still valuable. 

We’re at the end of Ephesians, and at the end of this series of “Being the Church,” and I think Ephesians 6 is another good example of contrasting, or unexpected images held together in a way that might give some fresh insight.  You can turn there if you’d like, and I’ll read verses 10-15:

^NRS Ephesians 6:10-15 “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. ¹¹ Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. ¹² For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹³ Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. ¹⁴ Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. ¹⁵ As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.”

It goes on to mention taking up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.  So, this is the gospel of peace, coming at you in full battle armor.  I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling the contrast.

I can’t remember what it was exactly, but last week there was some point where I caught myself using a violent metaphor in a conversation.  It was just regular conversational language and a common metaphor, but after I said it I mentioned out loud that I had just realized what I’d done and I tried to find another way to say what I was trying to say.  This was before I read this passage this week, so it was interesting to see here how living out the gospel of peace is spoken about in the language of warfare. 

I was kind of curious about how we sometimes use language with violent images without really realizing it, so I did a Google search on “violent metaphors” and came up with some interesting things. 

One link was a description of a workshop called “The language of peace: constructing non-violent metaphors”  given at the University of Florida.  The website gave this opening example of how violent metaphors can be contradictory or send the wrong signals: “Johnny don’t fight at school. Your mother is helping the war on cancer. Your father has his battles everyday at work. Your sister has to attack her studies. We just can’t have you fighting at school.”

It goes on to list alternative metaphors for different common phrases.  http://at.ufl.edu/~hardman-grove/peace.html

Another site said, “The first way in which we make war an ‘appropriate’ response to problems, is that we metaphorize the non-violent as war, as in the following examples.  We wage war on cancer / war on drugs / war on crime.  In medicine we attack, treat aggressively, use ammunition from a pharmacological arsenal stocked with big gun antibiotics. In the end we conquer disease.  We try to conquer someone we love by dressing to kill, by fighting for love, by winning someone’s love.”  http://www.iheu.org/node/1140 

One site warned: “Caution: violent metaphors can blow up in your face” http://www.metafilter.com/21966/Violent-metaphors

Well, OK, I get the point, and agree in many ways.  Looking through scripture, though, it’s hard to escape violent metaphors and I wonder if there isn’t something more going on to pay attention to.  Instead of doing away with the contrast of the gospel of peace and engaging in battle, what happens when we let them stand right beside each other? 

Ephesians 6 is explicit both about a great struggle in which we are engaged, and also that the enemy is never another human being.  Verse 12 says “For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood.”  The armor of God’s righteousness, and salvation and faith is a nonviolent, yet aggressive movement against the cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil, personified as the devil. 

Some commentators have speculated that Paul, in writing this passage, is looking over his shoulder at a Roman guard and imagining ways that these weapons of war could be used for advancing the peaceful kingdom of God.  Sounds possible.  Others have claimed that Paul is taking these images directly from Isaiah, who would portray God as a warrior dressed for battle. 

If this is the case, then Isaiah 59 would be one of these: “God put on righteousness like a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on God’s head.”  Isaiah 11 is another.  This is the passage about the shoot that “shall come out from the stump of Jesse, the spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding.”  It also gives the image of the peaceable kingdom – the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.  But right in the middle of this, we get “with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked”.  And then the armor imagery.  Righteousness shall be the belt around his waste, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.”  This has the appearance of violent imagery, but what is the weapon?  It’s the rod coming out of his mouth.  It’s speech.  It’s the power of words.  It’s that rich Hebrew understanding of the nonviolent creative power of spoken language, the very power by which God created the universe.  God spoke, and it came to be.  The stump of Jesse, the leader who reflects God’s ways, slays wickedness through the rod of his mouth.

All throughout the story of Scripture God is working to overturn the aggressive violent forces of evil with the equally aggressive forces of peace and reconciliation.  It’s hard to imagine the Gospel narratives of Jesus without this kind of framework.  Jesus confronts the devil in the wilderness, casts out demons from people, talks about the Satan as a strong man whose house he’s going to plunder.  First, you must tie up the strong man, then take over his house Jesus says in Mark 4.  The drama of the cross is portrayed as a confrontation with the forces of death themselves.  Colossians says that Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities, and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross.  Jesus willingly, without retaliation or calls for vengeance, goes to his death and it’s treated as a victory over the forces of death.  How bizarre and wonderful is that? 

The book of Revelation takes this battle imagery to a whole other level and, because of this has inspired some pretty bizarre and troubling literature about end of the world scenarios involving great physical battle scenes.  One of the culminating scenes in Revelation is the rider on the white horse, who judges and makes war, whose eyes are like flames of fire.  The armies of heaven are following him, and it says, “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.”  This is Christ, the one who used to ride on the donkey, now on a war horse.  Unfortunately people miss the punch line that it is a lamb who is the one doing battle, and that he is referred to as the Word of God, the word warrior whose truth slays an enemy not of flesh and blood.

It may be easier to swallow some of this imagery if you consider 20^th century folk singer Woody Guthrie.  He believed that his greatest weapon against the evils of his time, including fascism, was through his music.  Imagine a picture of Woody Guthrie with his guitar, which said on it, “This machine kills fascists.”  Then reread the line from Revelation “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations.”  (I’d love to take credit for this juxtapostion, but saw this very image HERE: http://www.culture-voice.com/Home/Olorin/WhenMetaphorsAttack/tabid/273/Default.aspx    Jesus confronts and overcomes evil on a completely different plane than evil itself.  He lives life with a completely different set of weapons – in the words of Ephesians, weapons of truth, righteousness, faith, salvation.  That’s the song Jesus sings and it undermines the very foundations of the droning powers of death.  It’s such a different way of being in the world that we’re still trying to let it convert our imaginations which have been so taken up by physical violence. 

I have to admit I still have mixed feelings about violent metaphors, but if we are going to wear this armor, then for the church to be the church, it means that we are engaged in an active and pro-active process.  Pacifism is not passive.  Nonviolence is not noninvolved.  We are challenged to be fearless in doing our own soul work.  The internal battle.  In confronting the demons in our own lives, our own inner struggle to let the gospel of peace be planted firmly within us. 

And as we do this we become strong in prayer and word and deed.  In the manner of 21^st century warfare, maybe we need to think of ourselves as going around and dropping cluster bombs of joy.  Or we should get in the driver’s seat of the Humvee of reconciliation.  Or we could learn the techniques for rigging up IED’s of forgiveness.  Sounds like explosive stuff. 

Twenty five years ago, at the Mennonite World Conference held in Stasbourg, France, Ron Sider gave a speech that still gets talked about.  He challenged Anabaptists to consider all of the resources, and energy, and commitment and loyalty that go into physically fighting for peace.  He observes that “Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die. Proudly, courageously, they gave their lives. Again and again, they sacrificed bright futures to the tragic illusion that one more righteous crusade would bring peace in their time. For their loved ones, for justice, and for peace, they have laid down their lives by the millions.”  He then had some extremely challenging words.  In short, he called on the church to approach its mission with the same energy, passion, and willingness to give one’s life for the way of peace that we proclaim.  He called on the church to form and train peacemakers who would be willing to develop and implement nonviolent means to intervening in conflicts around the world.  In many ways, this is a vision that is yet to be fulfilled.  From this speech did come the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who continue to serve in various conflict areas, not nearly on the scale of what Sider was calling for, but they have done amazing work.

Not all of us will serve on a Christian Peacemaker Team, but the thrust of the speech brings home the point.  The church, to be the church, is a church in mission.  And that mission happens wherever God has placed us.  For example, right here in the Cincinnati area.  A church actively engaging the world through the same Spirit, singing the same subversive song, as Christ.  To know this call as a church but to be not engaged in this way, would be setting up two of the most bizarre, most disjointed, contrast of images yet.