Seeing the Light: Anxiety and Abundance – 1/22/12 – Stewardship Sunday – 2 Kings 4:1-7; Matthew 6:19-34

In 2 Kings chapter 4, we are given a story that goes something like this:  There is a woman whose husband had been a member of the company of the prophets, something like a guild of the up and coming Israelite prophets that would have trained and traveled together, and shared similar concerns.  And this woman’s husband, the bread winner, dies, leaving her a widow and single parent, with no means of income.  This woman appeals to Elisha, the current dean of the prophets.  She says, “Your servant my husband is dead; and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but a creditor has come to take my two children as slaves.”  The woman has experienced a tragic loss, and, on top of that, the bank is now breathing down her neck threatening to seize her assets to repay loans that she and her husband had taken out.  Apparently there wasn’t much money in the prophetic business, so the family had needed to go into debt at some point to get by.  And since they were poor, the only assets they had were the labor abilities of their children, who could be sold as slaves so that bank could recoup some of the loan.

Elisha is up against some pretty powerful forces.  He asks her: “What shall I do for you?”  A prophet himself, he most likely didn’t have much by way of cash reserves.  But, then he asks her another question: “Tell me, what do you have in the house?”  Let’s get a list of your assets and see what we can do.  The woman replies, “Your servant has nothing in the house…except a jar of oil.”

Elisha has no cash, but he does have faith.  Having discovered that one asset that she has, he instructs her to go outside and borrow all the vessels she can find that her neighbors might have.  All the barrels, all the jars, and the cooking pots, whatever can hold liquid inside of it – to ask her neighbors for as many as they’re willing to lend her.  And then she’s to go inside, with her children, and start pouring.  Pour out that one jar of oil into these vessels.  She and her children do this, and her neighbors give her lots of different vessels, and they go inside, and pour out the oil, and the oil keeps pouring until they’ve brought the last vessel.  And as soon as that last vessel is full, the oil runs out in that original jar.

The extent of the abundance of her own meager resource, extends as far as the generosity of her neighbors in lending her their vessels.  Or, to put it another way, these collective acts of neighborly sharing, add up to a miracle which creates wealth where before there was scarcity.  And, when she and her children are in their house, surrounded by these borrowed vessels full of oil, Elisha tells her – rather than having to sell off your children, sell off the oil, use the proceeds to pay off the loan, and keep the change for you and your children, who will not be sold into slavery but will live with you.

I spent the first half of this past week at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Virginia at their annual School for Leadership Training.  The speaker was Walter Brueggemann – Bible scholar, author, Cincinnati resident, and general provocative presence – speaking on the theme: “God and Mammon: Reframing Stewardship Amidst Abundance, Scarcity, and Conflict.”  There were about 200 people attending this event which also included a number of workshops on the same theme of stewardship.

As you can imagine, there is much to process after a week like this.  Worship committee’s call to have a stewardship focus on this Sunday gives an opportunity to do some of this in an initial kind of way.  I am not going to try to compact three days of Walter Brueggemann into a 20 minute sermon, but do want to try and pass along some of the challenges of this past week in regards to the kind of Christian stewardship that is asked of us in these times.  What I’d like to do is to put this under three different headings and think out loud with you about these three different areas.  The first is directly from the ideas that Brueggmann presented.  This is The Narrative of Accumulation vs. The Narrative of Abundance and Generosity.  The second has more do to with some of the material presented in the workshops, which appeared in many ways to address the kind of attitude we have toward money – a money negative attitude, or money positive attitude.  The third area wasn’t addressed specifically this past week, but is a reflection coming out of one of the key stewardship passages in the New Testament – from the Sermon on the Mount, which addresses anxiety, and how we live in relation to today and tomorrow.

I should also say that personal stewardship is often divided into three different areas, which can be remembered as three T’s – time, talent, and treasure.  How we care for and share our time; our talent, our skills and gifts and abilities; and our treasure, our money, our liquid and material assets.  We are stewards of all these.  All three of these aspects of personal stewardship pertain to these other three areas, but the emphasis will be on money.

So the first area we can think about briefly is what Walter Brueggemann calls The Narrative of Accumulation vs. The Narrative of Generosity and Abundance.

If we have the eyes to see it, Brueggemann teaches, we can imagine the entire story of scripture as being a Narrative of Abundance which is told over and against the Narrative of Accumulation.  We are creatures who think in terms of stories, who make sense of the world by fitting small scattered experiences, into larger, coherent stories, which give us meaning and guiding principles about what is normal and what is good.  The standard narrative for the last 5,000 has been The Narrative of Accumulation, which says you aquire, and preserve, and defend, because there’s not enough for everyone, and the safest way to save yourself and your people is to accumulate.  It is a narrative which begins with the assumption of scarcity, functions on the energy of anxiety, and leads to violence.

Brueggemann says: “How we regard our money depends on the narrative in which we lay our money down.”

In the Bible it is Pharaoh who is the quintessential figure head of the Narrative of Accumulation, running a pyramid scheme, imagine that, where he is at the top, and the purpose of the slaves at the bottom is to funnel up wealth, in the form of buildings and gold, and food, which gets put in bigger and bigger storehouses.

For the Hebrews on the bottom side of the narrative of accumulation, the demands of Pharaoh come to them in the form of the commands: make more bricks, make more bricks, find your own straw to make the bricks and make more bricks.

When the Hebrew slaves cry out, they are heard by Yahweh, who not only challenges Pharaoh, but challenges the entire Narrative of Accumulation, by delivering a people to live out a different narrative – The Narrative of Abundance and Generosity.  This is what the Hebrews learn in the wilderness – the desert, a place with no viable life support systems.  A place of apparent extreme scarcity.  When they are given manna in the desert, they are told to collect only what they need for that day.  They are explicitly banned from accumulation, in order to unlearn the patterns of Pharaoh that had been engrained in their psyche, the only way they’d ever known.  Even if they try and accumulate, it doesn’t work, because the manna has a use by date of 24 hours, and spoils the next morning.  And so the Hebrews are called to become a people who are a light to the world, having been delivered out of the Narrative of Accumulation and having been presented with the possibility of another story, another way of making sense of the world.  A new story, of contentment and abundance, and daily bread.

The story from 2 Kings of the widow and Elisha is an example of this narrative of abundance in full play, which depends on neighborliness, which transforms scarcity into abundance, turning a small asset into a source of great wealth.  The same dynamic is at play in the feeding of the 5000 in the gospels.  A small gift is multiplied to provide for all that is needed, with change left over.  It is a gospel dynamic that gets played out time and again among those with faith in the possibility of generosity and gratitude and abundance.

Brueggemann suggests that the narrative of accumulation continues to be the predominant story by which our culture operates, and notes how easily the church is coopted by such a story.

A quote from him: “I think church people are terribly innocent about systemic matters.”  We do a fairly good job at being generous people, extending charity to poor people, within a system that keeps chewing up and spitting out victims.

We have a long ways to go before we live out fully the narrative of abundance as an alternative story in history, which presents alternative structures which give life.

Another Brueggmann quote: “We must be more truth telling about the deathliness of the normative system.”

Christianity has a wonderful word for our transition from accumulation to generosity.  We call it conversion, and this is a lifelong process that we undergo as we live out our baptismal vows.

OK, now that we got the light weight stuff out of the way, we can dive right in to the second area: Money negative vs. money positive attitude.

This was not a specific theme addressed at any point throughout the week, but was something that seemed to be more an underlying current of several of the workshops.

There is an inherent tension in how we view money.  One side is probably expressed best in the brief statement by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”  You cannot serve God and Wealth, God and Money.  You can’t have it both ways.  Money is like God in that it promises security, safety, and protection, calling for allegiance, having authority in our lives.  It is, perhaps, our greatest temptation into idolatry.  Letting something take the place of God which is not God.  When the church, or, at least preachers, talk about money, we often highlight this negative aspect of money.  It’s powerful, it’s dangerous, it is subtly seductive, especially when it works for us.  When it does give us security, safety, and protection, we are further tempted to lose touch with those for whom money simply hasn’t worked.  Those on the bottom of the pyramid.  The Bible’s loud cries of justice for the poor, the widow, those who, through tragedy or life circumstance have lost the means of meeting their own needs – these continuous cries make for many a sermon which colors our attitudes toward money in a negative light.

The other side of this is the more neutral, or positive possibilities that money presents.  How was Jesus, a wondering itinerant preacher, able to do what he did without any recorded instances of having to beg for money or getting some temp jobs doing carpentry work?  It turns out, as best we can tell, he had some investors in his ministry.  The beginning of Luke 8 tells about various women who followed Jesus, saying that these women “provided for the disciples out of their own resources.”  This provides potential for a much more money positive attitude.

There is a lively conversation going on in the church between business leaders – people who manage, invest, and create wealth – and pastors and theologians.

I find this conversation very hopeful.  Wealthy people do not find it particularly inspiring or consistent when they hear wealth condemned in church, and then are the first ones that the church comes to when funds are needed for a mission or building project.  All of a sudden, all this money is fantastic with endless potential for good!

Business and faith values are converging as businesses commit to a triple bottom line – profit, being one, but also people and planet.   Success is defined by enhancing and serving all three.  These things seem to always come in threes and be alliterated – time, talent, and treasure; people, planet, and profits.

It’s one thing to choose simplicity and minimal involvement with the systems of money that we have, it’s another thing to walk down a vocational path where one does have a fair amount of money.  Is it harder to be faithful with little or to be faithful with a lot?  I think one of the things the conversation helps point out is that faithfulness takes the form of many different lives engaging the world at every level, each having its own set of challenges to use money with a spirit of generosity and abundance and not get caught up in the narrative of accumulation.

A final area I want to address gets more at this inner attitude and orientation toward stewardship:

Maybe we could call it Today vs. Tomorrow

Humans are remarkable beings because of the way our level of consciousness allows us to experience time.  Moreso than any other animal, we have the ability to imagine and plan for tomorrow.  We are not restricted to present moment consciousness.  We can tell stories about the past, which illuminate the meaning of the present, and we can project needs, desires, wishes, into the future, to set a trajectory toward a desired outcome.  This is a powerful, precious, gift.  When we do it well, we are not stuck in the confines of the present, seeing only a few inches past our nose on the trail of time, but are able to look out on the broad horizon of expectation and possibility.

This is a gift that not everyone gets to experience.  At this last Community Meal I was in conversation with a woman and her partner who had been homeless for the last several months, out on the streets after he lost his job.  They were almost out of money, exhausted from being on the move, catching sleep when they could in 24 landromats or wherever they could find a place to rest for a few hours.  From our church Love Fund we gave them a bit of money for a hotel room that night.  When I was talking with the woman I asked her what her hopes were for the next several months, thinking this might be a way to help her see a light at the end of these troubles.  But as soon as I asked it, even before she responded, I knew it was the wrong question.  She answered by saying the only thing you can say when you’re poor, homeless, hungry, and exhausted.  That she can’t even think ahead a few days, let alone a few months.  For her right now, it’s all about where the next meal is coming from and where the next warm spot is going to be to catch a few hours of sleep.

When you’re poor, you’ve got all you can handle, plus some, in the present.  The widow comes to Elisha and needs funds to pay her creditor now, because tomorrow her two kids are sold into slavery.

To be able to see and live into tomorrow is a great gift, except that this practice, this gift of time consciousness, gets contaminated – by anxiety.  Jesus says, “Do not worry, do not have anxiety, about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.”  Even when we have enough, when we are seduced by the narrative of accumulation, we project anxiety forward and create a future in our minds that is characterized by scarcity.  In fact, counter to what we might think, there’s pretty good evidence that the more we have, the more we have accumulated in the present, the more temptation there is to live in a state of anxiety, to believe that the future is a place of scarcity which must be remedied by frantic activity in the present.

Do you have more or less worries than when you had less stuff?

Only when we accept the present as a place of abundance do we know how to live with tomorrow in sight.  Our planning doesn’t need to be just for ourselves, but for the community, for the neighborhood.

Throughout this part of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus repeatedly says, “Do not worry.”  “Do not be run by anxiety.”  Instead, look at these birds, and these lilies, completely caught up in the glory of today.  God is providing for them out of the abundance of creation.  It’s something of a reversal of the drive toward accumulation.  Rather than the perception of scarcity, which produces anxiety, which leads to violence, there is the perception of abundance, which produces gratitude, which leads to generosity and celebration and building up the community.

So sandwiched right in all this talk about our treasure, and anxiety, and today and tomorrow.  Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body.”  If the eye is good, you have light, if the eye is bad you have darkness.”  We are invited to allow our eyes to undergo conversion, to perceive the abundance among us – all of these vessels that surround us that are ready to be filled, through the miracle of generosity and neighborliness, which produces just what we need, plus some more left over.  This is our gospel faith, which makes very little sense unless you have the eyes to see.

 

Hospitality – 1/15/12 – World Fellowship Sunday – Genesis 18:1-8

Call to mind, if you would, a time when you have experienced extravagant hospitality.

Rod and Mary have already shared about their time in China being characterized by the generous, warm hospitality of their hosts.

A time when I experienced extravagant hospitality came in the Fall of 2000 during my semester of studying in the Middle East.  We had been in Cairo, Egypt for most of the time, but spent the last three weeks traveling through the region.  One of the members of our class had a relative who had married a Syrian, and so she had extended family in Syria.  She had worked it out with the program director that we would visit the family and eat a meal with them.

We took a bus out to their very rural home.  We spent time walking around the area, trying to pet the goats and chickens wondering around, playing with the young children, trying out all the Arabic we had been able to learn over the last three months, thoroughly pleased with ourselves that we were able to impress these children with a few intelligible sentences of their language.

When it was supper time we were invited into the small home, where, in the center, on the floor of the main room, was spread an amazing feast of hummus, pita, chicken, and all the best of Middle Eastern food.  We sat around the food in a large circle, the family formally welcomed us, and we feasted in the tent of these strangers.  There was not a supermarket within driving distance and it was pretty clear that the chicken we were eating meant there were a few less chickens roaming around with the goats.  For us it was one in a series of amazing Middle Eastern meals we experienced on the trip, but our director informed us that this was probably one of, if not the biggest feast that this family would eat all year, and that was this part of a genuine culture of hospitality that has existed for centuries in the area.  When guests come, that’s when you slaughter the animals, that’s when you spread a full table, or floor in this case, and give your best, whatever that may be.  Extravagant hospitality.

Another, very different experience, came while at Gethsemani Abbey this past summer.  Being a place of prayer and silence, there were no verbal exchanges that one might associate with hosts being welcoming and hospitable.  But, with every part of the experience, there was an abiding sense of great hospitality to us, the guests.  Simple, private rooms contained everything we needed for a comfortable, pleasant stay.  Meals were served at regular times, just walk through, get what you want, take a seat, eat, and return the trays.  All seven times of daily prayer were open to us, with prayer books provided.  Around the grounds there were chairs placed under trees, along walking paths; spaces prepared to sit, to walk, to pray, to breathe in peace.  And there was no charge.  Just a jar with a sign that said donations of whatever amount were appreciated.  It was the gift of silence.  The gift of space.  The gift of time set to the rhythm of prayer.  Extravagant hospitality.

If we were to collect the stories of similar experiences of hospitality that are represented among us I’m confident it would be a rich collection indeed.

On January 21, 1525, in Zurich, Switzerland, a dozen or so people gathered in the home of Felix Manz for Bible Study, as they had come to do regularly.  On this night they especially felt God’s presence with them and one of those present, George Blaurock, asked another, Conrad Grebel, to baptize him.  Baptism was an act reserved for infants by a priest.  Blaurock was not an infant and Grebel was not a priest, but Blaurock was baptized, and in turn baptized all the others present, who committed themselves to being true disciples of Christ.

This is the birth story, the creation story, of the Anabaptist movement – the re-baptizers.  Since that time it has spread around the world.  There are currently over 1.6 million persons affiliated with Anabaptist congregations world wide, members of Mennonite World Conference;  the continent with the largest representation being Africa.  North America is second.  The continent with the smallest representation being Europe, the birthplace.  Just a few months ago, Mennonite World Conference received its 100^th member, the Mennonite Church of Chile, which has 14 congregations and 1,200 members.

Every year, Anabaptist congregations are invited to celebrate World Fellowship Sunday close to the date of our beginnings, sometime around January 21.  We are a part of a world wide fellowship of disciples of Jesus who share a common story and a common emphasis on seeking to live as disciples of Jesus.

The suggested theme for this year, which should be rather obvious by now, is hospitality.

Genesis 18 is a story of extravagant hospitality that Abraham extends to three visitors, who turn out to be the very presence of God.  It begins: “Yahweh appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.  He looked up and saw three men standing near him.”

From the start, the narrator tells us something that Abraham will only discover in time – that this visitation is from none other than Yahweh.  It’s odd that we are told this, and then told that Abraham saw three men.  Why are they called men?  Why are there three?  Later, two of them are referred to as angels.  Is one of them supposed to be Yahweh, or are they all equally divine?  It was, perhaps, irresistible, for Christians to see in this an Old Testament Trinity, but that’s not what’s in view here in its original telling.

The passage reminds me of Jacob’s wrestling partner in Genesis 32.  First we’re told that Jacob wrestles with a man, then this man says, “you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”  Then Jacob proclaims, “I have seen God face-to-face.”  The following day when Jacob is reconciled to his estranged brother, Esau, he tells him, “to see your face is like seeing the face of God.”  Is Jacob’ wrestling partner a human or God?  Who’s visiting Abraham?  Yahweh, angel, human?  Does it matter?  On the road to Emmaus the stranger is recognized as Christ only after his fellow travelers invite him in for a meal, an act of hospitality.  Who’s that knocking at your door?  It’s God, of course.

The text in Genesis 18 is sure to show the zeal with which Abraham greets his visitors and goes about extending hospitality.  When he sees them, he runs to greet them.  After convincing them not to pass through but to stay and be refreshed, he hastens to find his wife Sarah who hastens to make cakes from the best flour on hand.  Abraham then runs to get a young servant to slaughter a young, tender, choice calf.  This is the heat of the day, remember, and everyone is running and hastening.  This is a mad frenzy of hospitality in full motion.  The servant hastens to prepare the calf, Abraham gathers all these things together, and brings them to the three visitors who have washed their dirty travel-weary feet and have been relaxing under the shade of a tree this whole time.

A few years ago Diana Butler Bass wrote a book called Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith.  Her original project was to research why large US evangelical churches are thriving and mainline Protestant congregations are dying, herself having been formed in two mainline Protestant traditions, United Methodist and Episcopal.  But as she got into her research she kept coming across all of these mainline Protestant congregations, many of them well over 100 years old, that were thriving.  So she decided to visit a number of these congregations around the country and discover what it was that kept them so vital and alive.  She came up with ten different areas, ten practices, that these congregations are doing, in varying degrees, and the book, Christianity for the Rest of Us  goes through these ten practices and stories from the congregations she visited.  The very first practice that she talks about, and one that she names as always being at the heart of vital Christian spirituality, is the practice of hospitality.  Here is a quote from the book in which she references some of the writings of Henri Nouwen, who wrote about hospitality in the 70’s:

“With the old patterns of village broken down, the Christian practice of hospitality has reemerged as foundational to the spiritual life.  Contemporary Americans are nomads, what Catholic writer Henri Nouwen once called ‘a world of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God.’  In such a ‘world of strangers,’ where fear, anger, and hostility build walls between people and chip away at the communal soulfulness, Nouwen proposed that ‘if there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality.’  For Nouwen, hospitality is the ‘creation of a free space’ where strangers become friends.  ‘Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place’” (Christianity for the Rest of Us, p. 79).

I love that final quote.  Hospitality is not to change people, but creates space where change can take place.

Hospitality is at the top of the list of vital Christian practices.  The other nine, in case you’re curious, are discernment, healing, contemplation, testimony, diversity, justice, worship, reflection, and beauty.  It’s quite a list.

Genesis 18 is part of a literary unit that extends through Genesis 19.  After Abraham extends hospitality to these visitors they repay him and Sarah with a great gift.  Within the next year, the elderly couple will give birth to a son, Sarah’s firstborn.  The elderly Sarah overhears this outrageous promise and laughs out loud, more an incredulous smirk than a laugh of joyful faith.  The vistor hears the laughter and says, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”  The child is born within the year and bears the irony of this encounter his whole life.  He is named, “laughter,” which in Hebrew, is Isaac.  Genesis 19 continues the theme of divine visitation and hospitality, only this time things work out in an almost completely opposite manner.

Two of the men, now called angels, leave the refreshing tents of Abraham and Sarah and walk into the city of Sodom and are met by Abraham’s nephew Lot, who lives there.  Lot insists that they stay with him for the night, extending hospitality.  The rest of the city, famously, is the epitome of unhospitality.  They bang on Lot’s door and demand that he send his guests out so they can abuse and rape them.  Lot refuses and the visitors are protected.  The visitors also leave a ‘gift’ for these un-hosts.  The next thing we know, Sodom, along with its sister city Gomorrah, is being destroyed, Lot and his family the only ones who are spared.

So here’s what we have:   Abraham and Sarah extend hospitality and it leads to the gift of life, to a miracle of a new generation that receives the covenant of God.  Sodom extends rabid un-hospitality and it leads to death, the entire city destroyed, never to be inhabited again.  The sin of Sodom has very little to do with homosexuality and very much to do with a lack of hospitality to strangers.  The juxtaposition in Genesis of these two very different situations that these divine visitors encounter is quite intentional.  The contrast could not be starker.  God is wandering through the land, through the streets, like a nomad.  Hospitality leads to the unexpected laughter of new life.  The absence of hospitality leads to disintegration and destruction.

Putting this in the light of World Fellowship Sunday, a global context, for us as Anabaptist Christians, we can think of hospitality as one of the most powerful, least complicated, acts of peacemaking that we can possibly participate in.  Welcome the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant.  It’s an act of acknowledging God’s presence in the other, however different they are from us.  When we have received hospitality from another, when we are the foreigner and wonderer, we know that we have been given a gift that we can never pay back.  We can only pay it forward.  When we extend hospitality to another, we extend it not only to the other, but to God’s own self, who always inhabits the life of the other.  And it grows and multiplies, like life itself.

We’re a little ways into the new year now,  but it’s not too late to make a new year’s resolution.  How about if our congregation resolves to be a place of extravagant hospitality.  That welcomes all those who come to us, because they are the very presence of God.  Fortunately, we’re going to have a lot of practice very soon, with Mennonite Arts Weekend right around the corner.  That will be a fantastic, and pretty fun, way to get practicing.  May laughter and joy abound.

 

The Children of God – 1/8/12 – Psalm 29,82; Mark 1:4-11

Good morning.  A belated Happy New Year to you.  We arrived back from our time in Kansas early this week and have been getting resettled into our regular routine.  We celebrated Eve’s birthday out in Kansas, and it’s getting a little harder each day to remind her that she is 6 years old and not 16; so the earrings, the cell phone, and driving are not going to happen this year.  Meanwhile, Abbie’s dad had a birthday recently and he informed us that his best birthday present was that he had spent all year thinking that he was 56 getting ready to turn 57, only to realize on his birthday that he is just now turning 56.  So, I guess, depending on what stage of life you’re in, those additional years are either really exciting to gain, or to lose.  But we’re all pulled along into this new year, and we look forward to what it holds for us and for our congregation.

One of the highlights of the Kansas trip was getting to visit for the first time the Sternberg Museum in Hays, Kansas, not too far from where Abbie grew up.  As hard as it is to imagine going to Kansas to find really big fish, much of the museum is dedicated to the fossils that have been found throughout the state when the area was an inland sea during the time of the dinosaurs, between 65 and 100 million years ago.  Their most famous fossil is called fish within a fish, an almost perfectly preserved skeleton of a predator fish, about six feet long, with a smaller, almost perfectly preserved fish skeleton, right in its belly.  The big fish had just had a big meal and somehow got buried alive, where it stayed put, for 65 million years, waiting to be discovered by the Sternberg family.  It’s worth seeing if you’re passing through Kansas on I-70 – and your Cincinnati Museum Center membership will get you in free.

Mark 1.  This should all be becoming quite familiar by now.  John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, baptizing people in the waters of the Jordan River, as people confess their sins and undergo initiation into a new life, a baptismal identity.  Jesus also comes from Galilee to the Jordan, is baptized by John, and, as he is coming up out of the waters, sees the heaven torn open, the Spirit descending in bird form as a dove, and hears the voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

Parts of this passage were read during the second week of Advent which focused on John’s role as a repairer and preparer for the coming of Jesus.  This was also the passage that I chose to reflect on as a hope for what the summer Sabbatical could be, as Jesus begins in Galilee, undergoes baptism and wilderness transformation, and returns to Galilee, ready to begin his ministry.  A full circle kind of journey; in the words of TS Eliot, arriving at the place where he started, and knowing the place for the first time.

And this passage comes around again the Sunday after Epiphany, which commemorates the Baptism of Christ.  Our new year commences with water, with Spirit, with the Divine voice naming us as Beloved Children of God.

I want to come at this passage of the baptism of Christ by way of the back door, so to speak.  I’d like to do something of a biblical treasure hunt which starts in a place apparently far away from this scene by the Jordan, and leads us, eventually, back to baptism and its significance in Christian meaning-making of our lives, which is the treasure that we are going to be after.

We will start with the Psalm that is paired up with this gospel for this Sunday, Psalm 29.  If you want to take a look at these treasure hunt clues yourself, you can feel free to turn to these passages in your Bible.  That way you can tell me if I’m leading you astray!

Very early into Psalm 29 we can recognize that we are in a world very different than one we are accustomed to.  “Ascribe to the Lord (to Yahweh), O heavenly beings, ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.  Ascribe to Yahweh the glory of his name, worship Yahweh in holy splendor.  The voice of Yahweh is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, Yahweh, over mighty waters.”  The Psalm is addressed, not to us, but to the heavenly beings, literally the “sons of God,” bney elohim, the children of God, the gods.  And these sons of God, heavenly beings, are instructed to give glory to Yahweh, the god of the people of Israel.  This is one of the number of passages in the Hebrew scriptures which describe something of a heavenly divine council made up of divine beings, gods, with Yahweh the supreme God, holding court.  This shows up in the book of Job where Yahweh and the bney elohim are visted by the Satan, the accuser, who has a case to make against the righteous Job.  Various prophets like Micaiah and Isaiah and Jeremiah are depicted as paying a visit to the divine council and getting a speaking role among the gods.  These children of god in the divine council also show up throughout the Psalms.

These occasions carry strong connections to the ancient Canaanite culture in which the early Israelite community was formed.  We know through texts uncovered in the last hundred years that the divine council was a common motif during the time.  Baal, the storm god, is often depicted as holding council with the children of god, the other heavenly beings, in the courts of El, the high god of the Canaanites.  Baal, we may recall, doesn’t come across so favorably in the Bible.  Some scholars believe that Psalm 29 is based on a hymn to Baal, remixed and remastered as a song of praise to Yahweh, who is the true power in the thunderstorm, whose voice is over the waters and thunders in glory.  Who, as verse 10 proclaims, “sits enthroned over the flood; who sits enthroned forever.”

The Psalm is used on baptism Sunday because of its continued reference to the waters.  It points back to the ancient waters of chaos at the beginning of the creation stories of the ancient near east.  It’s a reminder to us clean-tap-water-on-demand-at-the-temperature-of-my-desire people that water, the very substance that enables life, carries a strong element of wildness and chaos.  How do you get from chaos to life?  From raw nature to grace?  In the early days of the earth life forms out of no life in the warm waters.  Contained within the oceans, life multiplies and thrives.  Eventually, life learns how to contain the oceans within itself and comes onto the dusty land.  Lands and oceans shift boundaries with the passage of time.  Kansas gets baptized, and emerges from the waters with a new calling, a prairie.  We humans, late-comers on the scene, are still 60% ocean, mostly water, still stumbling around on land, trying to find our footing and breathe freely in this air.  In Genesis God’s Spirit hovers patiently, over the watery chaos, and speaks creation into being.  We are spoken into being.  Water, dust, and Spirit.

I admit that Psalm 29, in itself, is difficult for me to adopt as a personal hymn of praise.  Seeing Yahweh, the God of the storm, enthroned in the heavens over the other divine beings is not the first thing I think of when I experience a thunderstorm.  Quite the contrary, we wince at statements that attribute the will of God to natural disasters that cause damage to people and places.  Unless it’s our own house or car, in which case we bank on the insurance company categorizing it as an Act of God!  In many ways the Psalm feels more like a fossil, some odd and ancient creation, miraculously preserved for us to ponder and wonder about.  A council of heavenly beings?  Really?  So much for monotheism.  The Psalm is a creature from a different world.

But the biblical witness is a little more creative than relegating itself to a collection of fossils.  What seems dead and gone always has a way of coming back to life, of being re-presented in a whole new light.

The next step in this treasure hunt is Psalm 82.

“God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.”  OK, this sounds familiar.  We’ve got that same picture of the ancient pantheon with Israel’s God at the top.  But all is not well in the divine council.  These gods, many of them representing the nations of the earth, are not carrying out the job descriptions that Yahweh would have for them.  So, in the verses that follow, God addresses them all collectively:

“How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?  Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.  Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”  This is the job description of those that would be called “the children of god” and Yahweh is calling them all to task.  So in verse five we have an exasperated Yahweh bemoaning these failing gods, these collective personalities of the peoples they represent: “They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.”  We have a full system failure here, and creation is teetering on self-destruction.  So, what is Yahweh’s solution?  Vv. 6&7: “I say, ‘You are gods, children of the Most High’” – there’s the b’ney elohim again – “You are gods, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.”

My friends, the gods have just been demoted.  In the Hebrew imagination, the gods were not living up to their calling of protecting the most vulnerable of society, the weak, the orphan, the destitute, and so Yahweh pulls a Donald Trump and says to all of them, “you’re fired.”  You’re getting demoted to the same mortal status as human beings.  So Baal of the Canaanites, and Ra of Egypt, and Marduk of Babylon, and all the others, you will not live forever.  You’re mortal.  You are not carrying out the calling of justice and righteousness.

And in verse 8 we have a heavens emptied of the gods.  Downsized to a company of one.  “Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you.”

The danger here is that we come to think of God, Yahweh, the Holy One, as being just a bigger, better, kinder version of the gods.  The last man standing.  And God is nothing of the sort.  God is much closer to being no-thing rather than some-thing since God is not an object or a collective personality or a projection of ours.  God is not a god.  God is the ground of being, the well-spring out of which existence flows.  And the ground of being arcs toward justice and pours out belovedness on creation, all the nations.

One more link to bring us to the backdoor of the Jordan River.

Jesus quotes Psalm 82, this Psalm we just looked at, in John chapter 10, beginning in verse 30.  He cites those words, “You are all gods,” and does so in such a way as to give them new meaning.

Jesus has just said, “The Father and I are one,” which does not go over well with his listeners.  So verse 31 says, “The Jews took up stones again to stone him.  Jesus replied, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father.  For which of these are you going to stone me?’  So Jesus’ statement refers to the good things he is doing which points to his oneness, his common life, with God.  “The Jews answered, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.’”  So this is another case in John where Jesus and his conversation partners are wildly, almost comically, misunderstanding each other.  Jesus says, “I’m doing the kinds of things that God does, God and I are one.”  The religious people are saying, “You’re a human, you can’t make yourself out to be God.”  To which Jesus quotes Psalm 82. “Is it not written in your law, your scriptures, ‘I said, you are gods’? (There’s the Psalm 82 quote – “you are gods”)  If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’ – and the scripture cannot be annulled – can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, “I am God’s Son?”  So Jesus, in good rabbinic argumentation fashion, pulls out a quote originally speaking about the heavenly beings, who are demoted to human status, to now be remixed to be a statement about humanity, now promoted to the status of gods.  I’m saying God and I are one.  Scriptures say, “you are all gods.”  But how does one live as one of the children of God?  What does a b’ney elohim look like?  Jesus says in verse 37, “’If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me.  But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.’ Then they tried to arrest him again, but he escaped from their hands.”  What does it look like to be God’s Son, God’s daughter?  You accept the job description.  You love the weak, the orphan, the destitute.  You do what Psalm 82 calls for and what Jesus actually did.  The b-ney elohim of the ancient pantheon get demoted to mortal status, but Jesus begins a process whereby the human mortals accept the invitation to live out their calling as the b-ney elohim.  The children of God.  Those who become one with God by allowing their lives to become channels of the divine overflowing love.

Where does Jesus go after this exchange that nearly results in his arrest and pushes the accepted norms of the human relationship with God?

V. 40.  “He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing earlier, and he remained there.”

Jesus returns to the place of his baptism.  The place where he symbolically passed through the primordial chaotic waters and received his identity – where he heard the words, “You are my Son, the Beloved.”  Where the Spirit fell, bird-like, from the skies and rested on him.

If you got lost on this treasure hunt somewhere back in the old Canaanite pantheon, or somewhere in Jesus’ rabbinic reworking of Psalm 82, then don’t worry about it, and come over to these welcoming waters.  The point is this:  Our new year begins with us being named as children of God.  With us receiving the title: Beloved.  With the Spirit gently hovering over the chaos that is our lives and landing to create it anew.  God is in you, and you are in God.  The whole world is being baptized and the new creation is opening up and Jesus, our elder brother, is leading the way.

 

Rachel Smith – A Dream of 2012 – 1/1/12 – 1 Samuel 1-2

This sermon was given by Rachel Smith at Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship January 1, 2012

My Friends we made it. We are here…. January 1, 2012.  While looking over the worship materials it was suggested that theme for this week be “Embracing a wide body.” While I am certain that many of us can identify with that statement after all of the holiday eating; I am inviting you into a different sort of expanse.  (While Keith Lehman is not here this morning, I want to compliment him on his dedication to the widening of our church body by promising to buy me chocolates if I presented today) So here goes…

 

I decided to title my thoughts “A Dream of 2012.” I wanted the title to call out to you the nature of my relationship with what I am about to say. My words are work I have not accomplished. They are a dream. They are a prayer for the parts of my existence that seem well… cracked.

2012 is going to be different right? Right?

Hey, let’s not wish the year away already! After all, it’s only the first day!  There is plenty of time to lose 20lbs, calculate our taxes, and learn that elusive 2^nd language we have promised ourselves for years we were going to master.  Certainly the things that slipped through the cracks last year can be remedied in the next 365-day cycle.  January 1^st, it’s the great do-over, the mulligan, another chance, the promise of more time to get it right.

Humans have been feeling this way a very long time.  Something I stumbled across in my readings this week was a description of the Roman god Janus, January’s namesake.  Janus is depicted as a two-headed man. His silhouettes are facing right and left with shared headspace connecting them in the middle. Picture him in your mind. We are going to need this image as we journey through the past, present and future today.

Janus is the god of gates and doors. He represents beginnings and endings. He was celebrated in harvest and planting, marriage, birth, and other important beginnings.  He is considered a transitional figure between childhood and adulthood, war and peace, the country and the city, primal and civil life.

Appropriate for January is it not?   A superpower that will help us get from point A to point B with success certainly sounds appealing to me.

For Christians, Epiphany is the great beginning. God has become man and is here among us to save us. What has long been promised has finally come.

But I would like to start far away from the epiphany; far away from the realization that the word had become flesh.  I want us to hold the Luke scriptures of the Magi’s visit in our mind’s eye and travel back in time to 1 Samuel 1, to Hannah, the first pray-er of Mary’s famous song which was just read in chapter 2.

Growing up I have realized that women in the Bible may not have been exactly like they were portrayed to me by my teachers. Likely, they were much more complicated characters.  In my childhood I accepted a sort of Edith Bunker portrayal of Hannah. “Oh Elkanah!” she would lament to her husband “Do you love me as much as you do that Barbie home-wrecker Peninah?”  Elkanah in his Archie-style would shoe her away saying “Geez Hannah, ain’t I a better husband than ten sons any day? Shut your mouth already I’m trying to watch my show!”

Inwardly she fretted and suffered while outwardly she did her best to sing at the piano. She was a stand by your man, make lemonade, and suffer in mostly-silence kind of gal.  And why wouldn’t she be? As a next-to worthless barren woman she should be glad she had a kind husband who was willing to overlook her inadequacies and lavish her with affection and extra cuts of beef on sacrifice days.

Desperate to know she has any worth in the world. Hannah cries out to God in front of the Eli.  She is such an emotional wreck that Eli assumes she is drunk. She prays for a son to fulfill the desperate, empty eternal longing that only a child could fulfill in her. The want is so great she bargains with God that should she conceive, the child will be returned as God’s servant.

As an adult, I now wonder if Hannah’s prayers extended far beyond the simplistic female stereotypes. Did her feelings go deeper than inadequacy, deeper than want or embarrassments? Did they extend into an indescribable longing, a spiritual groan? A longing I suspect resides in each of us; one that begs to hear “This too shall be made right.”  Whatever our “this’s” may be.

A friend once told me something that has stuck with me. “Wanting things to be different is a part of grief.”

In Hannah’s community the Jews were wanting their lives to look very different. They were searching for a leader. They were looking for a king. The priests who were guiding them were corrupted. And Eli their father who sat outside the place of worship assuming Hannah was drunk, tells us more about what the community was like than how insane Hannah may have seemed.

I now see Hannah as a person who’s individual, family, and community troubles have aligned.  She is not delusional and emotional. She sees the situation clearly.  The vessel holding life together is cracked and it is going to burst.  There are cracks in her body, her family, and her community.

A favorite song of mine chimes, “Little cracks they escalate, before you know it it’s too late.” Hannah bargains with God for the impossible. A child where there can be none, but not just a child, a son, and not just a son, a servant who can be given to God to come and make things right.

I want to think of Hannah’s anguish as an outpouring of an informed woman.  One whose sees and knows herself in light of the greater spiritual world.  “It’s me, it’s my family, it’s all of us. Come and fill our cracks. Breathe of heaven hold us together. Save us.”  I want to think she prayed the prayers of the feminine, the prayers of a mother, and the prayers of a peace seeker.

Return with me to the present (If you’re thinking of our picture we are somewhere in Janus’s neck area).  Did you know there are cracks in everything?  Well not exactly cracks but spaces, holes. These holes have a special name: wormholes.  Some of you science geeks may be well aquatinted with this term.  A recent article I read by physicist Steven Hawking called “How to build a time machine” points out that nothing is flat or solid. All matter has height, width, depth, holes, and wrinkles.  It’s a principle of physics.

Now let’s jump to Janus’s other head: the future.  In the future many scientists hope that time travel will not be a ridiculous premise on which countless sci-fi movies are fashioned.  Scientists hope that in the future we can turn our attention towards “the fourth dimension” that is the measurement of time we consume in space. So now we will have height, width, depth, and length of time in space.  (Not good news as most of us are not getting taller, are getting wider, trying to keep any depth we had, and good news/bad news taking up more space in time).

If time gets to be measured that means it has height width and depth. And if it has dimension it has wormholes. And if it has worm holes maybe we could get inside one and travel from one side of time to the other side of time. This would be time travel.   In case I lost you, picture something that looks a lot like Janus.  This time instead of heads imagine a line on the right and a line on the left.  The line on the left represents the past. The line on the right represents the future.  The lines are filled with tiny holes we cannot see. A tunnel connects a hole in the past and a hole in the future.  If we were small enough we could walk through the hole into the tunnel and out the other hole, landing in the future, or the reverse landing in the past.

We have one big problem though. We are not small enough.  You would have to be smaller than a molecule or an atom. You would have to be something so small it doesn’t even appear to be solid. It’s called quantum foam.   And here is the thing everyone is trying to figure out… How do we get small enough to get into a crack that size and make it bigger so we can travel through time?

Wait a minute. We are not small enough? Who wants to be small? We are the 99%. Power in numbers!  Being big enough to overcome our enemies is the solution isn’t it?  If it’s not somebody ought to call Occupy Wall Street! If we can only just stuff ourselves with more of something we will be satisfied…right?

After reading Hannah’s story I have some new advice for Occupy Wall Street.  Let’s try this: a national invitation of all the nation’s barren men and women, all of the longers, all of the impotent, the oppressed, the fed up, the exhausted, the un-noticed, the over-noticed, the poor, the sick with wealth, the unsatisfied, the longers who yearn for something small enough to get in our cracks and make right everything that has gone wrong.  And we will cease from fighting and police raids and politics and pray.  We will pray for someone and something that can infiltrate the smallest cracks and the widest oceans. We cry out with a mother’s anguish for someone who can navigate our holes and walk us out of the tunnel and to a place where the proud are fallen, the humble are lifted, and the hungry are filled; where we are right with ourselves, our loved ones, and our neighbors in Cincinnati and in every place in the world. . Can I get an Amen?

Last week Joel pointed out a funny image of Mary as the holy mother.  It was T-shirt depicting Mary that stated “Abstinence is 99.99% effective.”  If we follow the logic, Jesus is a bet on .01%. That’s pretty small. And who knows how far those 9’s extend?  It might be even smaller. The chances don’t look good for a pregnancy.  But epiphany is where the upside-down kingdom comes roaring in and Janus’s two heads spin.  It is the point in time when we say “You know what, my money is on the baby.”

Perhaps this is why after Hannah prayed Mary sang.  In right step she transformed the ancient words of longing and anguish into the chorus of the hope filled. Joel has been reminded us of this song all throughout this advent season: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” My soul makes bigger the place for the .01, the quantum foam, the only being able to enter the largest and tiniest of holes of our broken and cracked places.

And so this is my story and this is my song for 2012: That I pay close attention to my longings that I don’t dismiss them or hide them.  But that I see them as spaces for something so much smaller and more powerful than I to fill.  The one who enlarges and makes right: the one whose breath is life.

 

Christmas Meditations – 12/25/11

Luke 2:1-20

The evangelist Luke begins his account of the birth of Jesus by embedding the story in the imperial world of Rome and their occupation of the land of Palestine.  There is an emperor – Augustus, a name meaning “Revered,” given to Gaius Octavius who ruled during this time.  There is a governor – Quirinius whose territory was that of Syria.  And there is a census, a decree that all the world should be registered.  The purpose of such a census was not to see how many families had fallen below the poverty line so the Romans would know how far to extend any kind of social safety net.  The purpose was for that of taxation and military conscription, and it was a way of extending control over peoples, who were counted, head by head, reminding them who was in charge.

These are the opening statements of the story, which propel a peasant couple, Joseph and Mary, to leave their current residence of Nazareth and go to Bethlehem.  To have their heads counted.  To get their names on the list of the subjects of the kingdom.

It is here, in Bethlehem, where Mary gives birth to her firstborn, a son, and wraps him up in bands of cloth, and places him in a feed trough for animals, a manger, because all the hotels in town were at capacity limit, no vacancy.

When Mary’s son grows up, he will speak often of a kingdom.  He will tell stories about “The kingdom of God,” say that it is already coming into the world.  He will present a different way of being that contrasts with the ways of the kingdom of Rome.  Rather than strict accounting of subjects, he will speak of seeds, extravagantly flung across the landscape, which grow and multiply who-knows how many times – 30, 60, 100 fold.  He will tell a story about a disobedient son, whose father does not exile or punish, but who waits longingly and runs to greet the son and showers on him kisses and gifts and a grand scale party.  He will say, “Love your enemies.”  He will say, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  He will say, “Follow me.”

The gospel presents the nearly-impossible-to-believe idea that the scene of the barn in Bethlehem carries with it more lasting significance, more power, more of the Real, than any scene in the courts of Rome.  Who could believe such a thing?  Probably not someone like the emperor.  Perhaps not even someone like you or me.  So the people who get the first birth announcement, who are the first to bear witness to this possibility, are those who themselves knew a thing or two about hanging out with animals, sleeping on the ground, insignificant religiously and politically, unable to fulfill any of their people’s purity laws, perhaps not even noteworthy enough to be counted in the census.  The angels come to the shepherds and give the heavenly counter decree which will be for all the world: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior…Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, goodwill among people.”

 

Luke 2:21-40

In 2007 Nelson Mandela founded an organization called The Elders.  The group’s self-description is this: “The Elders is an independent group of global leaders who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity” (www.theelders.org)  Some of its members along with Mandela include Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and a leader of empowerment for women in India, Ela Bhatt.  There are others whose names I do not recognize.  The elders are old people, who no longer hold any official public office, but who use their moral and spiritual influence, and the wisdom of their life experiences, to promote harmony among the human family.  I love that I, we, have these global elders watching out for us, working for something that they themselves will not see come to full fruition in their lifetime.

Simeon and Anna are the elders of the Christmas story.  Simeon, whom Luke describes as “righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel,” one on whom the Holy Spirit rested; as the Lullaby poem says: “Old Simeon waits in the temple, mostly blind now from overlong watching.”  Simeon is led by the Spirit to an encounter with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, and he recognizes something he’s been looking for.  In a beautiful picture that begs to be painted, sculpted, drawn, etched, whatever, Simeon takes baby Jesus in his arms and praises God: “my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the presence of all peoples.”  And then he blesses the parents.

Anna, widow, prophet woman, temple dweller night and day, comes upon the child and she too praises God, much to the amazement of those around her.

The elders are watching, waiting, praying, blessing; now gently influencing, now boldly proclaiming.  Like the father of the prodigal son; watching, gazing out as the days pass and the son does not yet return home, the elders are gazing, looking, keeping watch, over a prodigal world, gone astray.  Yet now, a flash of hope.  The elders call for a grand celebration, extend their blessing, and in doing so, extend their vision, their holy longing, to the next generation.

 

Isaiah 61:10 – 62:3 ; Galatians 4:4-7

We are sharing in Communion this morning.  Today we celebrate Jesus’ birth, the first night of his life, but our Communion liturgy always points to the last night of his life.  “On the night he was to be betrayed, the final night of his life, Jesus gathered around the table with his closest companions.  He took the bread.  He took wine.  He said eat, drink.”  Communion means many things to us.  Its primary connection to Christmas, however, is the reality of incarnation – spirit and matter as one, pointing us to God.  In the words of John’s Gospel, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”

The church writers go to great lengths to emphasize that the physical body of Jesus which was born through Mary was an ordinary human body.  It was not an angelic body that only seemed human.  It was not a superior heavenly body that temporarily put on the cloak of inferior flesh.  Many of the “heresies” of the early church were actually trying to make Jesus less human and more other-worldly.  Jesus, the Apostle Paul says, was born of a woman, born under the law, just like the readers of the letter to the Galatians.  Jesus’ body, like ours, was a coming together of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs, physical matter that ages and dies, or, in Jesus’ case, was tortured, and died.  It was a normal human body, and atoms cycled through his body just like ours, so it’s kind of a cool thought that there are some atoms and molecules out there somewhere that actually were a part of Jesus’ body for a short time in their life.

The bread and the wine of Communion were one of Jesus’ primary strategies for communicating his ongoing presence with his followers, and the reality of incarnation.  “This is my body.”  “This (bread) is your body, Jesus?”  “Yes, this is my body, which is broken for you.”  Whoever eats of this bread, takes the body of Christ into their own body, and becomes part of the body of Christ.

Amy Jill Levine is a biblical scholar who believes that Luke’s imagery of placing the baby Jesus in a manger, a feed trough, is intentionally foreshadowing that Jesus’ body is food.  If this is the case, I like that it’s not just human food, as if we’re the only ones in need of salvation, but it’s food for the animals, for all of creation.  The prophet Isaiah compares God’s righteousness growing up to that of a garden, which causes what is sown in it to spring up.   All of creation groans for redemption.

It brings us around to what that first liturgy that we recited together calls, “the point of it all.”  This is a story that involves observation and seeing, it involves remembrance and retelling, but it is primarily a story that involves participation, the point of it all.

Recognizing God’s presence in this Bethlehem scene is a call, to ourselves be participants in incarnation – matter and spirit, as one, pointing to God.  To allow the atoms and cells and organs of our bodies to become animated by the same Spirit, breath, energy that animated Jesus.  The Apostle Paul puts it this way: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent the Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba!  Father!”  In other words, we get adopted in on the incarnation because the same Spirit of Jesus is available to us.

The Apostle Paul, at times, comes across as a bit heady, heavy on theological language, but it comes down to this.  Bread and cup, and the invitation to partake, to participate.  How much more simple could it be?

Taste blessing, chew on grace, ingest humility, metabolize love.  Experience the incarnation of Divine Love.  Be nourished.  And then, become food that nourishes others.

We live in the fullness of time.  The Spirit that makes us sons and daughters of God is loose in the world, and seeks bodies to inhabit and animate.

We are moving slow motion toward Communion because we have a couple things we want to do before that…

 

Picturing Mary, Welcoming Mystery – 12/18/11 – Advent IV – Luke 1:26-55

^NRSV Luke 1:26-30 In the sixth month (of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John) the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷ to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” ²⁹ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰ The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”

Last week we brought Mary to the front and center of our Advent meditations, a move encouraged by the December issue of The Mennonite magazine which featured different essays on the place of Mary in Anabaptist spirituality.  We lifted one word from Mary’s Magnificat and allowed it to focus our thoughts.  Magnify.  My soul magnifies the Lord.  Literally, my soul makes the Lord bigger.  What does Advent look like?  It looks like making space for the divine presence, which wants to become bigger through our lives.

This week the scriptures tell more of Mary’s story, a rather brief story actually, barely a snapshot.  But it is one that is dense and rich and layered.  A picture, that has produced thousands upon thousands of words over the two thousand year history of the church.  It is a picture that has also produced, understandably, more pictures – depictions of Mary at different key moments in this story.

So what I’d like for us to do is to use three different pictures of Mary to guide our meditation.  I have copied these onto papers and will hand them out.  Color copies at Kinko’s aren’t cheap, so hopefully I’ve printed enough for there to be one for every two people.

There was another picture of Mary that I came across these last couple weeks that I decided not to include.  It was an image of her holding baby Jesus and it said, “Abstinence: 99.99% effective.”  You can actually go online and buy a T-shirt with this picture and text on it if you have some last minute Christmas shopping to do.

So hopefully everyone is close enough to a paper that you can see it pretty clearly.  I’m going to talk about each of the three images and I’d invite you to look at them throughout the time.  If you don’t want to make eye contact with me during the whole sermon, that’s fine.  Let these pictures speak their own words to you.  And feel free to follow the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, who said “church is a place where we daydream about God.”  Let these images cause you to daydream about God.

 

“Young Madonna,” Juarez, Mexico. CAC archives

This first image is one that has been used this season by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr in his daily meditation email.  Clearly I don’t have the digital editorial skills to edit out the text “Richard’s daily meditations.”  He didn’t specify this in his writing, but I have come to look at this as being a “before” picture.  Before the angel swept in unannounced.  Before the perplexing words, “Greetings, favored one.  The Lord is with you.” And, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son.”  Before Mary’s obvious question: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  Before Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit.  Before her Yes to the unknown.  And before she declared, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

Here are some words and phrases that come to mind when I look at this picture.

Young.  Smile brilliant and slightly mischievous.  Covered.  Innocent.  Confident.  Skin not white.  Care free.  She already knows something I don’t.

In one of his daily meditations, Richard Rohr wrote: “Mary is a woman who is profoundly self-possessed. She can hold her power comfortably because she knows it is from Beyond. She can also give it away. Power, dignity, and blessedness is hers to hold, offer back, and proudly acclaim in her great Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

This woman knows her boundaries, her ground, and her gift. Her dignity is not earned or attained. It is. (December 8, 2011)

This picture helps me imagine a soul that would say Yes to the invitation to bear Christ in her womb.  To how many women did the angel appear before someone said Yes?  She is wide eyed and open to the world, and the Spirit.

If only she knew.  Maybe, in some small way, she did.

This is a picture of one who, without knowing what she’s prepared for, is prepared.  Receptive to what comes her way, even an angel.

 

Fra Angelico, “Virgin of the Annunciation,” 15th century

 

This next piece is from the Early Italian Renaissance.  I have to admit that I’d never seen it until a couple weeks ago when Isaac Villegas, pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, posted it on his Facebook status.  This was Isaac’s accompanying comment: “One of my favorite depictions of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Stunned, tired, perhaps a little nauseous, overwhelmed: definitely pregnant.”

If the previous picture was “before,” this is definitely an “after.”  After the initial Yes, at least.  The facial expression is noticeably different.  What is that expression?  Isaac named some of the possibilities.  Stunned, tired, overwhelmed.  And some nausea that isn’t going to go away overnight.  A word that Luke uses would fit here as well.  “Perplexed.”  I don’t see someone quite yet ready to declare the bold words of the Magnificat.  “For the Holy One has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”  How did that favor feel initially, Mary?  It becomes a little more clear why the angel was compelled to say, “Do not be afraid.”

As complex and mysterious as this facial expression is, we can’t stay there for too long.  Our eyes, quickly, go down to the place Mary also is focusing.  Her gut.  If this were a picture of a guy, you’d think someone had just punched him in his gut.  If we didn’t know who this was – didn’t have a title or a context, or, maybe, the halo, it could even be a picture of any of the many Hebrew women who were barren, praying in their barrenness.  Sara, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth.  For those who long for children, but cannot have them, this pose, this physical gut prayer of hands on womb, is very real.  Their cry joins those of others across the generations.  They too shall be the mothers of many, even if the prayer for a biological child goes unanswered.

But Mary is pregnant before she ever anticipated.  Overshadowed by the Holy Spirit?  She has caught the Spirit in her gut and it is starting to take on a life of its own.

I wonder if Mary felt like a leaf feels when it catches the sun.  Billions of photons bombard our planet, reflected, refracted, transmitted, diffused.  But leaves have learned to catch the sun.  To receive something traveling at them at the speed of light in such a way that it is a creative act.  They photosynthesize their way into a leading role in Mother Earth’s mothering of its creatures – giving of themselves, even as they nurture and fully provide for themselves with rich food produced with the sun in their gut.

The Spirit bombards the human race, but Mary, receptive, perceptive, leaf woman, has caught the Spirit, and it is beginning to do its work within her.  And she looks like she might throw up!

Or, this is a glimpse of Mary the ponderer.  “But she was perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”  And a little later in Luke, “Mary pondered all these things in her heart” (2:51).

Pondering how her life has changed forever with one Yes.  Pondering blessing.  Pondering the salvation of her people.  Pondering, in a pre-sonogram world, the shape and face of this child.  Pondering the law code of Moses and what it had to say about unwed pregnant girls and stoning.  Pondering who, if anyone, to tell.  Pondering, in the solitude of that room, that she had to leave, had to, in the words of Luke, “set out and go with haste,” to pay a long visit and confide with elder relative Elizabeth, herself also unexpectedly pregnant.

Mary ponders.  Then she runs, keeping one hand on her gut the whole way.

 

Betsy Shank, “Magnificat,”  http://www.artbybetsy.com 

 

And then let’s look at this final image.  Mary, the ponderer, has gone to a whole new level.

This is another piece discovered just in the last couple of weeks.  It accompanied a short article on Mary on the web and the link went to the site for an artist named Betsy Shank who lives in Georgia.  I had a couple email exchanges with her and she was gracious enough to give us permission to print this for free, as long as we cited her and included the website.  So if you have some extra Christmas money and like Betsy’s work and don’t want the Abstinence T-shirt, I’m sure she’d be glad to do some business with you and ship an original piece your way.  She calls this “Magnificat.”

As central as Mary has been to spirituality, we actually don’t have that much material on her.  We are given just little snap shots.  She was called favored. She was perplexed.  She pondered.  “How can this be?”  “Here I am.  Let it be to me according to your word.”  “My soul magnifies the Lord.”  How much can really be made of one gesture, of one expression?  As this final picture suggests, there are whole worlds behind single words.  There are whole realms of possibility behind one “Yes.”  The divine initiative is accepted, and a new world begins.  And, for a while, Mary carries that world within her body, barely-containable life force that it is.  God is kicking at her rib cage.

It spills out of her in the words of the Magnificat.  She has become larger and she declares that her soul has also made the Lord larger.  “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.  For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

This past week we had our monthly pastor peer meeting up on Pandora at Grace Mennonite Church and we opened the time with reflecting on the Magnificat.  One pastor wondered what an elder, wise Mennonite would think about these words that Mary declares.  What do you think?

Mary’s Mennonite grandfather overhears her declaring the words of the Magnificat and he comes up behind her, gently places his hands on her shoulder, and asks, “Is this really what we want, Mary?”  Sending the rich away empty?  With nothing?  Are you vengeful Mary?  Are you able to forgive?

Mary wheels around, fire in her eyes.  Grandfather smiles.  They both put their hands on her belly and feel the squirm of a life beyond the edges of their ability to comprehend.  Mystery.

In another place outside of these Advent daily meditations, Richard Rohr describes mystery as “that which is endlessly knowable.”  It’s different than mystery as the unknowable. It’s unknowable in the sense that it can never be fully known, but it is endlessly knowable in that there is always more that we are coming to know.  If we sit with it long enough.  If we follow after this life of the Galilean peasant girl and her uncontainable child, there is always more to know.

Greet it with an innocent, mischievous smile, and it will pay you a visit.  Sit there with it, stunned, perplexed and sick to your stomach, and it will send you out to a place where you are greeted with words of blessing.  Treasure it, ponder it, bask in its glow, and it could very well overturn the social order of the world, and also overturn the carefully arranged order of your soul.

Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord, but it’s about to get messy.  Contractions and labor pains, labored breathing, pushing, blood and more blood, cries, sleepless nights, exhaustion, post pardum depression, and fleeing like a refugee to Egypt from Herod’s megalomaniac impulses to destroy this life.

Happy Advent.

Merry Christmas.

May the mystery come to inhabit your life and never let you go.

 

 

 

Magnifying God – 12/11/11 – Advent 3 – Isa 61:1-4,8-11; John 1:1-14; Luke 1:46-55

The December issue of The Mennonite magazine has an image of Mary and the baby Jesus on the cover with the question: “Mary, model and mother?”  This is posed in the form of a question rather than a statement because, admittedly, us Mennonite Anabaptist types have not yet worked out what the place of Mary is in our story.  We know that Catholics have always held Mary up as the Blessed Mother, and we know that the early Anabaptists differed from the Roman Catholic Church in a number of their understandings of faith.  We have emphasized Jesus as a model for our lives, but what about Mary?  This is part of what the essays in this most recent Mennonite issue address.  One essay examines the notions of justice and mercy contained in Mary’s Magnificat, the text Brianne read this morning.  Another is a spiritual autobiography of a man who learned to sing for joy like Mary, having rediscovered his Anabaptist faith at grad school in the halls of Notre Dame, where Catholic classmates befriended him and enabled him to encounter faith in a new way.  The lead article is by Laurie Oswald Robinson who grew up Mennonite but who, after a long spiritual and emotional journey, converted to Roman Catholicism.  She writes, “On Easter Vigil 2009, I entered the Catholic Church and finally rested in the arms of Mother Church and its Mother (Mary), who I now recognized as my spiritual mother, too.”  Another essay is titled “Mary: Rejoice with the lowly,” and begins: “What happens when you are filled with Jesus, when Jesus grows inside your life?  When you are full of Jesus, what do you say?”

The words from this essay help focus the significance that Mary has especially in this season of Advent.  During this season, we are all, in a sense, pregnant with expectation, with longing, filled with the seed of Christ that is becoming born through us.  No matter what significance Mary has throughout the rest of the year, Mary is the lead character of this drama of Advent – a model and a mother.  She teaches us how to yield to God in such a way that Christ is brought into the world through an otherwise ordinary and unspectacular life.

So for this week and next, as we work our way toward Christmas, we will allow Mary to be our primary guide.

For today I would like to do this by way of focusing our thoughts around one word from the Magnificat, the song of praise that Mary sings upon learning of her unlikely pregnancy and confiding in her older relative Elizabeth, who calls her blessed.

The Magnificat begins: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

The word magnify is exactly the right English word to use here.  The Greek word it translates is megalunei.  To enlarge, to make bigger.  Megalunei.  To mega-size.

Magnify.  To make bigger.  Like a magnifying glass.  “My soul makes the Lord bigger,” Mary proclaims.

This is a pretty remarkable expression.  If we stick with it, that in bearing Christ in her womb Mary’s soul is magnifying the Lord, it seems to put God in a rather awkward position.  Of being larger as a result of Mary’s willingness.  Of being in need of a soul that will magnify the divine presence.  Is God in need of magnificantion?  If you want to find God, break out the microscope.

It raises the bigger question of whether or not God needs people to accomplish God’s purposes at all.  Is the Divine creative spirit/energy of the universe so helpless that it/he/she is in need of people to magnify its Presence?  In need of us to lend a hand to the redeption of the world?

For most of the story of existence, it’s pretty clear that God indeed does not need us.  We weren’t needed to trigger the initial flaring forth of the universe from a single point of possibility to an expanding field of actuality.  We weren’t needed to turn on the lights in the young universe when the hydrogen atoms congregated together in billions of different gravitational centers, rushing toward each other and reaching temperatures hot enough to kick start fusion, whose waste product is light.  “Let there be light,” and the stars obeyed.  We weren’t needed when other waste products from stars started bashing into each other to form different planets, hard rocky globes in a sea of empty space.  We weren’t needed to call forth the initial life forms in the warm bubbling seas of water of this rocky globe.

God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind: “Where we you when I laid the earth’s foundations?”  The obvious implied answer that Job need not even voice is – nowhere.  We were not involved.  Not needed.  Wouldn’t have been able to stand the heat even if we had been needed.  Job seeks redemption in the midst of his personal suffering, and all he gets is a lesson in the vastness of the universe and the miniscule scale of his own life.  It’s we who are the microscopic ones.  You don’t have to zoom out too far into deep space before we’re less than a speck of dust.  Barely a blip on the map of time and space.  We’re the ones in need of being magnified.

This impulse to start at the beginning, to keep in mind the broad scope of where we come from is the path taken by the Gospel of John, whose Christmas story is like no other.  He begins, Genesis like, by stating: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  It was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  This is the Christmas story for mystics.  The word, the light, has always been present.  Has always been bringing new things into being.  It does this on its own power.  And the darkness has not overcome it.

But, lest we get caught up in mystical detachment, in abstract ideas of creation and redemption, justice and mercy, we are quickly brought back down to earth.  John soon says: “And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.”  Flesh means biology.  Flesh means a body.  Flesh means personhood embedded in family and culture.  For as long as bodies have been available, the Word has always been looking for willing bodies through which to express itself.  The Word wants, needs, loves, willing persons, to make itself greater.

The peasant teenage Jewish girl declares: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.  For the Holy One has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant.  The Mighty One has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Within this magnificat is a keen awareness that what is happening through Mary is one in a series of magnifications of God’s name which have happened through the people of Israel, the children of Abraham.  Abraham and Sara were two of the bodies of long ago that the Word sought to inhabit, extending the call and the promise of being a blessing to all nations.  Their descendants are delivered from slavery in Egypt and called to be a community that lives as free people, free from the external and internal bonds of enslavement.  The Hebrew prophets kept alive this vision of Israel as a body of holiness, which magnifies God’s justice and mercy.

Does God need such bodies?  The prophet Isaiah says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”  Perhaps, when Isaiah was first pondering this, he thought: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me?  Me?  To bind up the brokenhearted?  To proclaim liberty, and release to the prisoners?  The same Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation and spoke the world into being is now hovering over the prophet, over the people of Israel, over all willing persons, to speak new worlds into being.  Worlds where the laws of gravity and thermodynamics and accompanied with the laws of justice and mercy.  This is the vocation of the people of Israel.  Of Mary.  “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

It’s interesting to think about different peoples and cultures as having different gifts of magnification.  Different traditions and communities magnify different aspects of God’s being, different facets of reality.  Surely one of the vocations of CMF is to magnify the arts, to make them larger, to gather and celebrate Mennonite artists of all kinds.  I’m pretty sure we’ll all have opportunity to soon participate in whatever capacity we are able in this work of magnification.

One tradition that we could all benefit from about this time of year is Zen.  This is a season when we cram our lives full of many things, but Zen reminds us of the vitality of emptiness.  It is a tradition that over the centuries has developed practices of magnifying empty, sacred space.  This universe in which we live, we are becoming aware, is mostly empty space.  There are vast stretches of space between our planets, light years between stars, and many more light years between galaxies.  Emptiness is the case whether you scale up or scale down.  Go down into the atom, start looking for something physical, and you again encounter a bunch of empty space.  The electrons and nucleus make up a tiny percentage of the space in the atoms.  Break out the microscope, or the telescope, and what you’re going to see is a whole bunch of emptiness.  So, if existence is made up mostly of empty space, how did my life get so cluttered?!

A few millennia ago, even before Christ, the Buddha was able to magnify within himself the reality of empty space.  This was part of his great enlightenment.  Emptiness waits, is receptive, gives no resistance, is spontaneously ready to accept what comes its way.  The Buddha magnified emptiness for the benefit of all humanity, and we do well to carry out some of these practices of meditation to allow that emptiness, that sacred spaciousness, to open up within us.  It might even change the way we experience Christ and Christmas.

So the next time someone tells you to keep the Christ in Christmas, maybe you could suggest that we also need to keep the Buddha in Christmas, and see how that goes over.  They can live together as brothers, I’m pretty convinced.

These bodies of ours are instruments of magnification.  What we magnify is what becomes larger because of our lives.

My soul magnifies anxiety.  My soul magnifies pain.  Our soul magnifies the beauty of art.  My soul magnifies empty sacred space.  My soul magnifies the Lord.

Lest we think this is primarily something of our own doing, it’s worth remembering that these are the words of a woman who is pregnant, whose body is undergoing processes over which she has very little control.  I’ve not had this experience, but from what I gather, no pregnant woman feels that what is happening inside of her is completely a result of pure willpower and doing on her part.  It’s much more a matter of being in awe of what this body is doing.  Of what is happening, despite one’s ability or inability to make it all turn out right.  It is this perfect combination of emptiness and will.  It is a surrender to this greater force at work through you.  It is mostly learning to be an awe-struck companion to this life that is forming inside you.  Like Mary – the model and mother of all who are willing to allow God to be magnified through them.  To become so willing is a significant part of our Advent journey.

 

Preparing and Repairing the Way – 12/4/11 – Advent II – Isa. 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

In many ways, the two readings for this second Sunday of Advent seem to be in conflict with each other.  The text from the prophet Isaiah speaks of gentleness and tenderness.  “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”  Here the prophet’s task is to offer words of comfort and solace to a people in deep pain, a people long traumatized by exile and alienation from the homeland.  Longing for a gentle word to heal an ancient wound.

But in the New Testament reading we meet up with John the baptizer, a man for whom the words gentle and comforter do not exactly apply.

If John the Baptist were a tree, I’m pretty sure he’d be a honey locust.  Although it’s a strange coincidence, this has nothing to do with the fact that John ate honey and locusts in his wilderness habitat.  The honey locust tree is a force of nature not much related to honey or locusts, as far as I know.

Before I knew they were called honey locust trees, I knew them as thorn trees.  This is an appropriate name since the prominent feature of these trees is that they are absolutely covered with thorns.  The trunk is covered with thorns, the branches are covered with thorns.  Even the thorns are covered with thorns.  This is a tree that you can know by site even if you don’t know by name, and there’s no other kind that grows in our part of the world quite this thorny.  This is not the kind of tree you want growing in your backyard.  Not the kind of tree for kids to be building tree houses in.  It’s not a tree farmers are all that fond of either.  If you walk around a honey locust tree you’ve got to watch your step.  I have a distinct memory from my childhood of walking through the pasture with boots on and stepping on a thorn from a fallen branch that went through the bottom of my boot up into the middle of my foot.  I remember it being a not-so-pleasant kind of feeling.  If you’re driving a tractor around a honey locust tree it better be a cab tractor, or a low hanging branch could take out an eye, or tear a shirt.  Even if you have a cab protecting you, a long hard thorn could end up in a tractor tire.  This is not a particularly friendly tree.  Beware the honey locust.

Mark begins his gospel sensibly enough, with a statement about the beginning of the gospel.  He writes, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’’”  These words in Isaiah appear alongside the call to “Comfort, o comfort my people, says you God.”  Then In Mark we get this, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins… Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and honey.”

For Mark, the beginning of the good news looks like an eccentric man, with questionable hygienic practices, living on the edge of society, calling on people to do a complete about face in the way they are going about their lives.  Do you find this comforting?  If this is the beginning of the good news, one shudders to think what the beginning of the bad news might look like.

From the other gospels we are told more details about this John character.  To say that he had a bit of an abrasive personality would be kind.  In Matthew and Luke his first words to the Pharisees involve calling them a “brood of vipers.”  John seems upset these Pharisees have even made the effort to come all the way out into the wilderness to hear him preach.  He tells them they get no free pass just because they are children of Abraham, have the right progeny or family line.  They must bear good fruit, or risk getting thrown in the fire as worthless brush.  John isn’t all that much softer on the common people.  They ask him what they must do to repent, and he tells them, “whoever has two coats must give to the one who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”  This is entirely too clear and practical and difficult to be comforting in any way.  John the baptizer even rubs the political leaders the wrong way, and soon he is placed in prison by Herod.

There are a number of puns that would be all too easy to make the connection between John and the honey locust tree.  There are plenty of signs he has a thorny personality, and that he was a thorn in the side of just about anyone who came near him.  But there are other connections that are much more interesting and illustrative of just what the Spirit of God was accomplishing through the message of John.

Walk a little ways into any healthy, mature forest and you will not find a single honey locust tree.  Keep walking down the trail and you still won’t find any.  The further you get into the forest, the more assured you can be that there will not be a honey locust tree around you.  To find a honey locust tree, you have to go to the edges of the forest, or in a fence row, or in an open field.  The tree only grows where the forest has been disturbed, where there is a major gouge in the natural canopy, where the forest has been cleared away for farmland.  Honey locust is known as one of the succession trees, and from the forest’s perspective, it is one of those trees whose mission it is to reclaim lost, disturbed, even injured land.

The honey locust grows fast.  If a farmer around here doesn’t mow a field for a year, there’s a decent chance there will be a number of honey locusts already waist high or taller, beginning to reestablish the native forest.  Wait another few years, and you’ll have to take a chain saw with you before you run the mower over the area.  The tree can grow in compacted soil, alkaline and salty soil, and is heat and drought tolerant.

Honey locust is a repairer and a preparer.  With soil susceptible to erosion, it sends down its roots to better hold it all together.  It is in the legume family, and, although there is some debate about how much it does this, like other legumes, it helps put nitrogen back in the soil, something few other trees do.  Legumes enter into a communal dance with soil microbes to pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil, making it available for other plants to use.  It replenishes what has been depleted.  The thorns of the honey locust might be a way of the tree telling us, “Hey, stay away for a while, would you?  I’ve got some work to do here.”

As the tree grows it enables slower growing, more shade tolerant trees, more “pleasant” trees, to grow around it – the oaks and hickories, the beech and maple.  And once those trees get established, the honey locust has done its job.  It can’t survive in the shade itself, so won’t grow in the midst of these other trees, can’t be found in the middle of a healthy, mature forest.  The honey locust tree grows fast and tall, and dies away as the forest comes back to an area.

“Prepare the way for Lord.”  Eventually John the Baptist says, “I must decrease, so that he may increase.”

Abbie and I recently watched the movie The Tree of Life – which, as far as I could tell, was not aimed at a particular species of tree.  It’s a pretty ambitious film, placing the story of a struggling 1950’s suburban American family in the broad context of the history of the universe, past and future.  Early in the film the mother and father receive the devastating news that their 19 year old son has died.  Not too long after this there are scenes of cosmic explosions in deep space, water and wind spraying and whipping on the primordial planet earth, the formation of microbes and early life forms, and scenes of dinosaurs roaming around a river basin.  We then see scenes of the young family, through the memory of the older brother, playing, fighting, rebelling, growing up.  Very early the mother’s voice says that she is aware that there are two paths in this life.  The path of nature, and the path of grace.  I don’t remember the exact words, so I’m paraphrasing here and probably embellishing a bit, but this is about how I remember it.  Nature, she says, is unyielding, blind to the pain of others, undiscriminating.  All things die, and cycle, endlessly.  Grace is forgiving, overcomes wrongs with mercy, offers love even when it is not given in return.  It travels, somehow, outside of that endless cycle.  There are two paths- nature, and grace.  With the loss of her son, she has confronted the power of nature.  She says she wants her life to follow the path of grace, but in her family the forces of nature and the forces of grace are both seeking to claim the same territory.

I’m not sure what to think of this split between nature and grace, especially in light of a tree like the honey locust that might appear to represent only the qualities of nature, but also has grace built into it, even if most of it happens underground.  But I like thinking of Advent, and today’s scriptures in particular, as being a territory where these forces of nature and grace are working themselves out.

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says the Lord.”  The deep pain of our species endures, cycles, through the centuries.  The trauma of exile and alienation from home persists in our psyche.  The ancient wound awaits a healing presence, to guide us into the way of peace, to extend grace to our parts too long disturbed and disrupted from reaching mature growth.  To baptize us with Holy Spirit.

If John the baptizer, in all his thorniness, was trying to tell people to stay away while he did his work, it clearly didn’t work.  People flocked out to him.

Mark reports that “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”  In their pilgrimage to see and hear this baptizer, there was no doubt a sense, a persistent hope, that he represented more than just sharp words and challenging speech.  There was, perhaps, a Spirit inspired intuition that this path of repentance and forgiveness was the beginning of their healing.  A path of grace.  The beginning of mending what had been broken, re-enlivening within them the ability to thrive.

People from the country side and Jerusalem go out into the wilderness to seek God’s transforming power.  The country side and Jerusalem are both places of human cultivation – the country and the city.  Each place, in its own way, shaped by the will and desire of its inhabitants.  The countryside farmers would plow the land, plant seeds of choice to grow grains and crops for food.  Care for animals that had been domesticated for human use.  The city dwellers shaped their buildings and their streetscapes for function and beauty, a cosmopolitan mix of language and culture.  Both are arenas where humans have gained some power over nature.  But in their pilgrimage, both groups head out to the wilderness, on the edge, even beyond the edge, of their carefully cultivated worlds.  This is a place of wildness, a place untamed by the human imagination.  A place that could kill you if you weren’t careful.  Nature in its fierce, naked glory.  It’s not a safe place.

For the people to open themselves up to transformation, it took this literal change of geography.  Now they stood, timid, in a place over which they had no power.  What happens in a place you don’t fully understand?  What happens when you submit yourself to the powers of a place you had no hand in planning, producing, or maintaining?  What happens when you heed the words of a prophet whose untamed words are sharp enough to make you bleed?

Those who heeded the words placed themselves under the hand of the baptizer, as he lowered them down into the waters.  Nature and wildness in one of its most primordial forms.  Held underneath the water, there are two paths.  Either you stay under and you die, or you are lifted up and are given your life back again.  Each pilgrim held their breath, took the plunge, and, through no power of their own, found themselves lifted up, baby wet, onto the Jordan banks.  Free, forgiven, grace filled.

This was the beginning of the good news.  But it wasn’t the end.  John told the people, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with Holy Spirit.”

 

Paying Attention: Seeing the Forest for the Trees – 11/27/11 – Advent I – Mark 13, Isaiah 64

 

Given at Columbus Mennonite Church through a pulpit exchange with Pastor Steve Goering.

 

A little over five years ago, fresh out of seminary, beginning work as a pastor, our conference ministers were looking to match me up with a mentoring pastor for those first two years of ministry leading up to ordination.  And they rounded up this guy by the name of Steve Goering, thought we might get along alright and have a few things in common.  So Steve and I began meeting and talking and getting to know one another, and what began as a mentoring relationship has grown into a wonderful friendship. And we have continued to meet semiregularly after those first two years, and, speaking for myself at least, it has been a rich relationship for which I am most grateful.  I’ve also enjoyed getting to know Susan in this time.  And I will miss them both dearly as they move on, and I know that you all will as well.

Over the course of conversations it’s become pretty clear that our two congregations, Columbus and Cincinnati Mennonite have a lot in common, both in some history and in general approach to the life of faith, so we thought it would be good and kind of fun if we could start to build this relationship and make some more intentional connections between our congregations.  I do bring you greetings from Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship and hopefully today can be a step in a deepening of our connections.  And, by way of shameless promotion, another way you might wish to further this relationship would be to come to our Mennonite Arts Weekend in Cincinnati the first weekend of February.  We have a wonderful line up of Mennonite artists of all kinds who will be showing their work and teaching us about what they do.  And we’d love to have a contingent from Columbus come down and spend the weekend with us enjoying good art.

The poet Mary Oliver writes:

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Mark chapter 13 contains two different angles, two different viewpoints, for paying attention.  The chapter begins with Jesus and his disciples walking out of the massive temple complex in the heart of Jerusalem.  This temple was Herod the Great’s crowning achievement of his extensive public works projects that he had undertaken throughout Jerusalem and Palestine.  During his lifetime he had built a new palace on the western side of the city protected by three towers.  He had also built the Antonia fortress on the north side of the temple with its distinct towers.  He constructed an aqueduct system that increased the city’s water supply by bringing it from the Bethlehem region six to seven miles south, into the city.  The ancient historian Josephus records that Herod also built a theater, an arena for horse and chariot races, and a stadium.  The building program served something like a first century economic stimulus package, a jobs bill, so to speak.  It brought prosperity to certain parts of the population.  But the jobs created through the construction process were slave labor wages and the massive budget for the projects resulted in an increased tax burden on those who could least afford it, resulting in indebtedness, and losses of ancestral land to pay off debt.  On the surface these structures looked like great civic accomplishments, the Jerusalem temple being the greatest of all, but underneath there were political and economic tensions mounting, and growing resentment against the ruling class, the clients of Rome.  (This info taken from Holman Bible Atlas, 1998.)

Jesus had been teaching in the temple, and as he and his disciples are leaving, one of the disciples makes the comment, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  Down on street level, surrounded by the busyness of the city and the looming structures that make up the urban landscape, they can’t help but be in awe of what they see.  The disciples are having a similar experience that any of us have when we walk through the downtown of any major city.  Standing in Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati and being surrounded by shops and hotels and office buildings.  Or on the streets of downtown Columbus.  Walking along the Lakeshore Path in Chicago and looking over at the downtown loop where the modern skyscraper was born.  Or anywhere in Manhattan where it feels like you have to look straight up in order to see any piece of sky peeking through.  These buildings are huge, massive, beautiful for their sheer size and strength, astonishing, even overwhelming.    This is the first angle in Mark chapter 13.  On the ground, looking up.  The view from below.  In response to the disciple’s exclamation, “Look Teacher, what large buildings,” Jesus answers: “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

The second perspective in this text comes immediately afterward.  V. 3-4: “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?’”  The temple sat on a high hill in Jerusalem.  But it wasn’t the highest point around.  The area east of the temple sloped down steeply to the Kidron Valley and then rose up again on a slope known as the Mount of Olives.  The ridge of the Mount of Olives was significantly higher than the temple mount, and from this perch one could see the whole city.  This view from the east is the one that we often see in photographs of modern Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in the foreground on the old temple mount, and the sprawling city in the background.  So, rather than being down in the traffic of the sidewalks and streets, imagine yourself in the Rhodes Tower observation deck, overlooking your city and its neighborhoods.  Or picture yourself up in the Gateway Arch with the Mississippi River directly below you and the city of St. Louis at your feet.  I get occasional emails from the ONE campaign, most of them requesting joining a petition to address some aspect of global hunger.  I usually sign and then delete the email, but I received one a while back that I saved because of the unique perspective from which it spoke:  The email read, “My name is Lt. Colonel Shane Kimbrough and I am on the International Space Station orbiting 200 miles above the earth.  During the 90 minutes it takes us to circle the earth, we do not see borders or boundaries. From up here, the task of solving the world’s biggest problems seems less daunting. But when our shuttle lands…, we will return to a world where border disputes and financial crises lead the nightly news. Those challenges define our world and their solutions will define our future.”

This bird’s eye view, from above the city, overlooking the temple and the many structures around it, is the perspective from which Jesus speaks for the rest of this chapter in Mark’s gospel.  Up here things look a little different.    There’s a bigger landscape that’s visible, more than just what’s in front of your eye on the other side of the street.  One can get an idea of how one part relates to another, a big picture view of what lies beyond one’s immediate surroundings.  The structures are still magnificent, but less imposing, less absolute, perhaps even appearing somewhat fragile and vulnerable compared to the massive scale of the rest of creation that is in sight.

The season of Advent begins from this high perch overlooking our world.

Rather than getting too caught up in the things that are just in front of our face, we are invited to zoom out and take a fresh view.  Consider what there is to be seen when the powers that seem to dominate our lives are placed in their proper context.  Re-orient our sense of space to the broad scope of the heavens and the earth.  Re-orient our sense of time to the broad sweep of history, which includes God’s dreams for the future of the world.  And, maybe most importantly, re-orient our sense of what gives us awe, of what causes us to be astonished, of what draws us toward itself in a worshipful gaze, of what lays claim to the energy of our souls.

When Jesus speaks from this high up view, he uses a form of speech that had become common in his day.  Apocalyptic language.  The language of apocalypse was a way of talking about how the world as we now experience it would not be this way forever.  It resonated especially with those for whom the evils of the world seemed so overwhelming, so larger than life, that their defeat called for a divine intervention that would turn the order of the world upside down, shake the powerful down from their thrones, and restore order and justice for the faithful.  We begin to see signs of apocalyptic language in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and parts of Isaiah, like that passage that Austin read, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil – to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence.”

Apocalyptic is the language of exiles, the language of dispossessed peasants, the language of African slaves in the Americas.  By Jesus’ time this was a full blown genre of literature.  Apocalyptic often used cosmic symbols to speak of earthly realities.  So Jesus is drawing from the language of the day when he says, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”  The picture is one of a great unraveling of the known order, the order that felt so solid and unwavering, something that will shake the cosmos to its foundations.  This cry of Jesus would have been especially pertinent for the first readers of Mark as the gospel would have been written right around the time that the Jewish national loyalists were taking up arms against the Romans and the Romans were preparing to march on Jerusalem where they would soon destroy the temple and topple Jerusalem.  The world as they knew it was ending.  Not one stone left on another.

These last few years the language of apocalypse may hit a little closer to home with our national and international economy on the verge, it seems, of coming undone.  We’ve watched over the last three years as our system of finance and credit has wavered, and revealed itself as vulnerable to collapse.  What once felt unshakeable is all of a sudden fragile.  Whether or not any divine intervention is on the way, there’s plenty of room for debate about how much government intervention is necessary in these cases to create the conditions to avoid a collapse of apocalyptic proportions.

This fall, on the final week of a three month Sabbatical, I encountered apocalyptic speech in an unexpected place – in the middle of a forest.  I had the privilege of taking a weeklong tree recognition and forest history class in south central Ohio through the Arc of Appalachia.  This class was led by Nancy Stranahan, who I suppose there’s an outside chance some of you might know.  I believe she lived in Victorian Village for a while and ran Benevolence Café, which I don’t think is open anymore.

Nancy knows more about trees than anyone I’ve ever met and led us amateurs in learning the native trees of the broadleaf forest which used to populate the entire eastern half of our country and which still flourish in the southern part of our state.  We spent much of the week out among the trees, walking on trails, looking up.

“Look teacher, what large trees.”

To my surprise, Nancy said, on multiple occasions, that this was all going to look different when the apocalypse comes.  I was intrigued and asked her specifically what she meant by “apocalypse.”  For her, and for our forests, the apocalypse is a combination of invasive species, global warming, and diseases and pests that threaten certain species.  Nancy told us that even if we didn’t consider ourselves tree huggers, we’d better hug an ash tree while we had the chance – to feel it, get to know it, learn to love it, because our children may never know an ash tree.  The emerald ash borer is slowly spreading through the country and wiping out the ash trees.  The ash borer originated, in all places, in Michigan.  They’re coming down on us!

These trees and our forests have been a part of God’s economic stimulus plan for the last several millions of years, each being fully employed in the glorious work of photosynthesizing water and carbon dioxide.  These trees are spectacular ancient and enduring factories that produce energy for themselves and oxygen for us animals to breath, and they run on the free and abundant power of the sun.

The love and passion with which Nancy approaches her relationship with the forest helps illuminate the kind of tone of voice we can imagine Jesus using in his apocalyptic statements.  It is not so much a voice of judgment as it is one of overflowing love and astonishment.  And sorrow for all that brings us to the brink of apocalypse.

But Jesus’ words are not only ones of destruction.

From his view on the Mount of Olives, in the middle of his apocalyptic discourse, Jesus steers a different course than the typical end of the world scenario.  He says that just as the cosmos are shaking and conditions have become inhuman, then the Child of Humanity will appear.  The Son of Man.  One who gathers together those who are lost and scattered over face of the earth.  It’s an image from the apocalyptic writing of the book of Daniel, where the Child of Humanity, the Son of Man, is a whole community that lives righteously.  This Human One is God’s answer to the inhuman powers.  After evoking the coming of the Child of Humanity, Jesus, interestingly enough, then points to the trees.  He tells his disciples to learn the lesson of the fig tree.  In watching the fig tree the disciples will notice that the winter doesn’t last forever — the tree surges back to life, and sends out leaves, and then you know that summer is near.  Something is flowering.  A new way is being born.  The new creation rises up out of the old one.  Be watchful.  Pay attention, Jesus says.  Don’t fall asleep.  Be attentive to where this flowering is happening in the world.  Anticipate its coming.  It could happen anytime, anywhere.  No one knows where and when these kinds of new creations shoot up.  Jesus says it could happen in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn.  It calls for around the clock alertness.

Whenever we get around to this time of year I’m always a little shocked that we begin the season of anticipating Jesus birth with a passage like this.  What do apocalypse and Jesus’ birth have in common?  It’s a reminder that the manger scene we know will come is more than just meek and mild.  There is something in that picture that will shake us and the world down to our foundations.  Something that calls for a complete overturning of our souls, a revolution of our consciousness.  In Christ’s coming, we believe that the old order has already whithered.  The powers have already been shaken and are stripped of their power over us.  A new order is beginning.  It comes to us in the form of a peasant child who will teach us how to be real human beings.  If we are able to step back far enough, zoom out from our short sighted perspective, and see a bigger picture, then we can re-enter the picture with a more clear focus of where to pay attention. Where to be watchful.  When to be alert.  This humble child draws our gaze away from our failing idols and draws us into a state of astonishment and wonder, and we are captured by a different power – the humility and vulnerability and love that overthrows the old order of the world and raises up a community, a child of humanity, who lives humanly.

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

 

Walls – 11/13/11 (Peace Sunday) – Ephesians 2:11-22

The creators of the worship materials for Peace Sunday this year invite us to ponder walls, under the theme:  Destroying the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.

Walls shape lives in dramatic ways.  Some walls are built to keep out and some walls are built to keep in.  The Great Wall of China was built over a period of centuries to keep out nomadic invaders from the north.  The wall along the US border with Mexico is a series of literal walls, fences, and vehicle barriers which have been recently constructed with the expressed purpose of keeping illegal immigrants out of our country.  This fence currently spans about 650 of the 2000 miles of the US/Mexican border (citation HERE).  There are also hundreds of miles of desert that act as a natural barrier for immigrants.

The Berlin wall was put up by the government of East Germany to keep the communists of East Berlin in, from fleeing over into West Berlin.  The walls of prisons around our nation are intended to keep prisoners in.  This year the number of African American males in prison in the US rose to be a higher number than the total of African American males who were slaves in the US in 1850, before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  (citation HERE)  Let that one sink in for a bit.  I also saw an article (HERE) this week that one year at Princeton costs $37,000 and one year at a New Jersey state prison costs $44,000.  College and prison are two exact opposite life paths, and prison is the more costly of the two is so many ways.

In talking about walls I’m struck that even a short description of what a wall is causes one to start making interpretations about the wall.  It depends, no doubt, which side of a wall one is on.  Are these walls for security?  Are they an injustice?  Do they divide, or protect?  Does the wall being built by Israel in Palestinian territory make Israel safer from terrorists?  Is it a prison for Palestinians?  If the answer is ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, is that something we’re willing to live with?

A famous wall in poetry is the one spoken of by Robert Frost in his poem, Mending Wall.  It begins, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  He goes on to describe the annual ritual he and his neighbor have of mending the wall in the field and woods between their two properties, placing the fallen stones back in a place, “to each the boulders that have fallen to each.”  The neighbor says, “good fences make good neighbors,” but the poet wonders out loud if this is really the case.  He muses:  “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.”

One of my favorite walls in the world is the south facing wall in the house where Abbie grew up and where her parents still live.  Abbie’s dad designed and built the house when he was in his mid 20’s, an impressive feat in itself.  This wall is made up mostly of windows, and overlooks the yard, and the field beyond.  The south facing glass gives a great view of the outdoors, but what’s really spectacular about it is the way it relates to the sun.  In the summer, the sun is high enough in the sky that the roof overhang shades it from shining directly into the house, but in the winter, when the sun is low in that clear Kansas sky, the light, and heat, pour into the house.  I have been in this house in the dead of winter for a week straight without the furnace ever kicking on during the day.  You know you’ve got a sweet wall when it’s ten degrees and windy outside, and you’re opening up a window because it’s too hot in the house from all the free solar heat.  I’d like to have me one of those kinds of walls some day.

David Korten, one of the founders of YES! Magazine, gives another perspective on walls.  He calls it “The Principle of Permeable Boundaries”  (The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, p. 293 ff.).  He observes that one of the great innovations of life is the development of an outer membrane, a wall, a skin, that is both protective and permeable.  For any living thing to maintain its strength and integrity it must have this outer surface which gives it definition and allows certain things in and certain things out.  A cell wall protects it from pathogens in the body.  The biosphere over time has developed “boundaries provided by oceans, mountains, and climatic zones to exclude invasive species not acculturated to the established community.”  We’ve got some honeysuckle growing all over the fences in our backyard that has breached that wall and is wreaking havoc on the forests in our part of the country.  These living walls/skin have this protective aspect, but every cell, every organ, every body, every house, every organization or political structure also has porous, permeable skin that allows it to make use of energy flows and maintain its own health.  We breath, we eat, we exchange ideas, we don’t shut ourselves off completely from the world.  We let the sun come through to warm up the place.  These organic walls serve not to isolate us from the world and others from us, but to help regulate healthy relationships.  David Korten says, “Successful living entities protect their borders not out of selfishness but out of a need to maintain their internal integrity and coherence and to assure that exchanges with their neighbors are balanced and mutually beneficial.” (p. 293)

This kind of thinking can be helpful to us if we think about it in terms of our current immigration situation in our country.  Over the last couple decades our country has pursued a series of free trade agreements, which essentially is a removal of walls, a removal of regulations, and making more porous of the economic skin between us and other nations.  With these trade agreements, each nation, each unique living political body, has less control over its internal decision making in how it manages exchanges that are mutually beneficial.  OK.  So some walls are brought down, fair enough, but then we get troubled when people seek to cross borders through immigration to seek the wellbeing of their families.  So we put up walls to keep them out and protect our own internal integrity.  It’s a contradictory in many ways.  We tear down certain walls, but put up other walls, and the living organism which is our relationship with our global neighbors gets drained of its vitality, losing its integrity.  And we enter a state of spiritual poverty.  One could argue that we should have many walls for economic exchange and many walls for immigrants, or one could argue that we should have very few walls for economic exchange and very few walls for immigrants, but it’s hard to make a just argument for no trade walls and high immigrant walls.

The biblical witness gives stories where walls are celebrated and stories where the destruction of walls are celebrated.  The walls of Jericho pose the first major obstacle to the Israelite people as they head out of their time of desert wondering, into the promised land.  It took a serendipitous encounter with a helpful prostitute, a seven day march around the city, and a final blow of the trumpets and loud shout from the people, but those walls of Jericho famously came a tumblin’ down.

When the Jews were returning to Judah from their Babylonian and Persian exile, they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem under the leadership of Nehemiah.  Nehemiah had been living in a Persian capital city of Susa and receives word from Jews who had escaped back to Jerusalem.  The message was: “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire” (Nehemiah 1:3).  After weeping and mourning this fact, Nehemiah prays for his people, and receives permission from the Persian king to return to Jerusalem to lead the project of rebuilding the wall.  The rebuilding of the wall is also a rebuilding of the morale and faith of the Jewish people in Jerusalem, leading to a greater influx of exiles into the restored city.  At the rededication of the wall, the book of Nehemiah records: “They offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women and children also rejoiced.  The joy of Jerusalem was heard far away” (12:43).  In their zeal to restore their culture and worship and stake out a clear identity as a people, Nehemiah also records that they separated out from themselves all those of foreign descent, and that the sons and daughters were forbidden from marrying a foreigner, and even those men who had married foreign wives while in captivity had to send those wives and their children away.  And so as one wall is built and celebrated, we are given a picture of other, less visible walls also being set up, less worthy of celebration.

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians speaks of another kind of less visible wall.  He calls it “the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”  The us to which he refers are those two groups which make up the primary us/them hostility in the biblical story, Jews and Gentiles.  The people of God and the outsiders.  The good news that this writer is preaching is that this wall of hostility and alienation, the entire edifice of the us/them divide of humanity – Jew/Gentile, native/immigrant, patriot/enemy – has been utterly destroyed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

The mechanism by which we have continually built and maintained this wall is to create a “them” and therefore give “us” an identity.  We have trouble understanding who we are if we don’t have the “other” to define ourselves over and against.  It is a mechanism where each side actually needs the other to be other in order to keep going on.  If we have no enemy to pursue, if we have no other to condemn, if we have no outsider to exclude, we don’t have any way of making sense of the world.

Jesus the Christ is conscious of this mechanism, this wall, this rut that has kept humanity divided against itself and therefore divided from God.  And so he does something rather unexpected, even by his closest followers.  He chooses to occupy the place of the other, the outcast, the condemned, the crucified, and in doing so, reveals the whole system as a sham.  Now rather than Jew and Gentile casting each other out and making the other be on the outside, both Jew and Gentile are on the inside together, looking out on the crucified Christ, who is occupying the place of shame.  And the foolishness of the mechanism of hostility and the us/them divide falls apart.  And in the gospel story, rather than the outsider, the crucified one, seeking vengeance, this other seeks peace.  “Peace be with you” are the words of the risen Christ.  The endless cycle of hostility has been broken.  The writer of Ephesians says, “So Christ came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him, we have access in one Spirit to the Holy One.”  Our spiritual captivity to perpetual hostility has been broken.  In Christ, the dividing walls have come down and Jew and Gentile are, as Ephesians says, “one new humanity.”

The writer of Ephesians begins by focusing on the negative aspect of walls and proclaims that Christ has removed the dividing wall of hostility and created a new humanity of which the church is a sign.  No more walls.  But then, he returns to the image of a wall, giving it a positive, redeemed quality.  He writes, “So then, you are…members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.  In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”

Here is an entirely different kind of wall.  A wall made up of people, members of the new humanity, being built, linked together, on top of the foundation of the apostles and Christ himself, as a spiritual household.  A building.  A protective, sheltering, structure.  A safehouse.  A home of hospitality and warmth.  The ideal permeable boundary of loving relationships, letting in hope and mercy, letting out justice and reconciliation.  And who dwells inside this house, whose walls are made up of us?

God.

We are a part of the holy temple of God, who inhabits our relationships, and dances in the mortar joints of the house of peace.