Delighting In The Law – 3/15/09 – Psalm 19, Exodus 20:1-17

There’s a scene in the movie Philadelphia that takes place in a courtroom, where Denzel Washington’s character, Joe, is questioning Tom Hank’s character, Andrew, on the witness stand.  Both Joe and Andrew are lawyers, but in this case Andrew has hired Joe to represent him against his own law firm, as he believes he has been wrongfully fired because he has AIDS.  Throughout the movie we get to know both of these characters and what has brought them to this point of working together.  Andrew is a senior associate of the top law firm in Philadelphia.  He lives with his partner Miguel, had contracted AIDS right at the time the disease was coming to be known, and had not told his law firm that he is gay or that he has AIDS.  Soon after a colleague sees a lesion on Andrew’s forehead, signaling that he may have AIDS, the law firm made claims that Andrew was incompetent in his work and fired him.  Andrew seeks to hire a number of lawyers to represent him in a workplace discrimination case, including Joe Miller, Denzel Washington’s character.  Joe is a self-described homophobe, doesn’t know anything about AIDS, and initially refuses to work for Andrew; but he eventually comes around to approaching Andrew and decides to take on the case.  Throughout the film, as Joe learns more from the life of his client, he becomes more sympathetic to Andrew.   Toward the end of the movie when Andrew is testifying, he and Joe have this exchange:         

 

Joe: Are you a good lawyer?

Andrew: I’m an excellent lawyer.

Joe:  What makes you an excellent lawyer?

Andrew: I love the law.  I know the law.  I excel at practicing it.  It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

Joe: What do you love about it?

Andrew:   Well….many things.  But I think the thing I love the most, is that every once in a while, not that often, but occasionally….you get to be part of justice being done.  It’s really quite a thrill when that happens.

 

When I watched this movie for the first time a number of years ago I remember this dialogue standing out to me.  The reason it caught my attention, I think, is because without having given it much thought, I had taken on certain biases about law and rules and judgment as carrying mostly negative connotations.  Most of my experience of hearing about law at that point had been through the Protestant Christian lens of law being something that has to do with rigid structures and unnecessary legalism.  Law was old school, and something the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther didn’t much care for.  This was the era of grace and freedom.

So at that time I was especially drawn into this idea that Tom Hank’s character voices: “I love the law” and I love working with the law because occasionally “you get to be a part of justice being one.”  What a thrill. 

If anyone carries any of those same lingering kinds of negative biases about the nature of law, then Psalm 19 will stand out with the same kind of unexpected dissonance. 

Psalm 19, like Psalm 1 and Psalm 119 is a hymn of praise to the God who creates and gives teachings, precepts, commandments.  It is an ode to law.  Within the psalm, the poet waxes eloquent about the wonders and life-giving beauty of torah, God’s ways.  “The law of the Lord is completely perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart…more desirable are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.”  For those who have had the privilege of tasting some of Matt and Jeanne’s Bye’s homespun honey, just imagine some of that sweetness dripping onto your tongue and sliding smoothly into your belly.  The commandments of God are like that, the Psalmist says, only sweeter.  They are better than much fine gold.  Bank on the commandments of God, and you’re sure to get a generous return on your investment, no matter what that state of the market.

Within three verses the Psalmist gives six different synonyms for God’s ways – law, decrees, precepts, commandments, fear of the Lord, ordinances.  Each one is coupled with its own descriptor – perfect, sure, right, clear, pure, true and altogether righteous.  Reading Psalm 19 gives one the sense that the poet is speaking of something they find to be utterly beautiful, impossible to capture with just one metaphor, needing to paint various images in order to communicate the depth and the richness of that which is being praised.  Psalm 119 goes even further.  It is the longest chapter in the Bible, focused specifically on the glories of God’s law, using 176 verses to speak of the soul-feast that torah provides.

Looking at the scriptures this week, and remembering that scene from Philadelphia, made me curious about what the lawyers among us see in the law that they work so closely with every day.  What was it about the practice of law that attracted them in the first place?  What is it that they love about the ways that laws function in society?  Joe Luken and Ed Diller were kind enough to do some reflecting on this and write up brief responses to these questions.     

To the question: “What was it that most attracted you to being a lawyer?”  Joe said, “There has been lots of water under the bridge since those days.  I had witnessed dramatic changes in society before entering law school in 1974.  The extension of civil rights, economic fairness, the many instead of the few making political decisions. The law seemed to be an important part of those changes.  I wanted to be part of the force that was driving those changes.  Sounds pretty naïve but that certainly was the attraction.”

Ed said:    “I always tell new recruits that some lawyers intellectually ”love the law and its intricacies.”  I love being a lawyer because it connects me with so many people and a variety of problems.  I get to work with them to accomplish specific results.  During that time I get to know them and get to know a little about their lives and their business, all the while working on elaborate puzzles.  In addition, the type of work I do involves “building for the future” which is right up my alley.  That is why I chose the type of law that I practice.”   

And to the question “What do you most love about the way that laws function in society?”   Joe said:  “It turned out that the law was much bigger than social change, which is good because after the mid-70’s the legal community was not the incubator for social change.  The law is an essential glue for society.  (But not the only one.)  If every person is a book then it is a fascinating library.  It is still the place where people search for redress, (or try to keep others from seeking redress from them.)  Who is right? What is fair? Is there a way to fix this for everyone?  It is interesting.  But I still love it most when, as it sometimes does, it acts to protect people who without it wouldn’t stand a chance.” 

 

Ed said:  Laws function in a variety of ways in society.  Fundamentally, they help us try to order complex relationships, some of which deal with right and justice and many of which simply deal with appropriate ways to order relationships.  In essence, laws provide the basic infrastructure in which people of very different backgrounds, experience, understanding and intentions can work with one another. 

In Exodus 20, the giving of the law, the Ten Commandments, is an occasion of awe and wonder.  Smoke poured off of the mountain that the people were gathered around.  Thunder and lightning crash and earthquakes rumble.  The people are not allowed to get too close to the mountain.  We get the sense that what is happening here is a matter of life and death.  The untamed, wild responses of the natural world help illustrate just what is happening.  The Sinai event, in its own way, is a story of creation.  Sinai marks the creation of a people who are called to emerge out of the chaos of injustice, and live according to the just and right teachings of God. 

Most of the torah, teachings, of the law book were believed to have come from God to Moses, with Moses then sharing the words with the people.  But at the giving of these foundational commandments, the voice of God is heard by everyone.  There’s something direct and fundamental about these teachings that is accessible, perhaps even morally intuitive to all who are willing to listen.

One way of understanding the ten commandments is by looking at how they open and how they end.  The statements that frame everything in between give a sense of what these teachings are all about. 

The opening statement, the headline at the top of the ten commandments press release is one that we often pass over too quickly.  It serves to set the tone for all of the words to follow.

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”  The power, the spirit, the energy, that is giving these commandments, is the same power that brought the Israelites out of slavery, out of the house of Egypt.  That act of deliverance, and this act of creation, are made for the purpose of freedom.  It’s been said that it took one night for God to get the Israelites out of Egypt, but it took much longer to get Egypt out of the Israelites.  These commandments are the path by which the Egypt is delivered out of the Israelites.  The dominating, controlling, oppressive ways of the empire, are met with the life-giving ways of the one who delivers people from bondage.

Every commandment that follows, then, is an invitation into freedom.  “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”  Don’t create false gods, don’t swear falsely, don’t murder.  We’re not used to thinking of observance of a certain kind of code as having to do with freedom.  Our notions of freedom are much more aligned with the idea of the ability to do anything we want to do as individuals.  The freedom to buy what we want to buy.  The freedom to spend our time the way we want to spend our time.  Freedom of choice.  Joe and Ed’s comments, along with this passage, speak of freedom being something that happens in community.  In relationship.  We are commanded to shape our behavior in such a way that brings about good conditions for society.  Paradoxically, binding ourselves to the wellbeing of others, which can involve a limitation to our own personal freedoms, can bring about the greatest amount of freedom for all.

The final word of these commandments is a strange one to have in a law code.  It would be extremely hard to prosecute.  Previous statements talk about actions that should or should not be done.  Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t swear falsely, don’t commit adultery, remember the Sabbath, honor your parents.  The last commandment has to do with an inner state of being, what we do with our desires.  Don’t direct your desires toward your neighbor’s house, or spouse, or any of their possessions.  Don’t covet.  This is the inner law.

One of the books I come back to continually is The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser.  He talks about how being human means to be charged with desire.  We have all sorts of desires that direct our energies and propel us into the world.  We are charged with the desire to discover the world, the desire to have influence in the world, sexual desire, desire for intimacy, passion to be successful in life, to care for our loved ones.  The question is not whether or not we have desire, but what we do with those desires. How we channel them, how we discipline them and shape them are focus them.  His simple definition of spirituality is what we do with our desires.

The final commandment teaches that misdirected desire is a root of all kinds of problems.  Distorted desire is to covet.  Our desires become scattered and focused on that which is not ours to have.  Rightly directly desire is the love of God.  To love God with all our being is the fulfillment and the aim of the law.  The torah teaches this.  The apostle Paul doesn’t dislike the law, he just emphasizes that the essence of the law is the love of God, which in turn provides us with great freedom. 

Lent is sometimes a season where people choose not to eat sweet things, but these scriptures ask us to consider something we may find counter-intuitive.  By disciplining our lives, by reigning in our frantic desires scattered here and there, and focusing them on love for God, by freely submitting ourselves to the laws that bring freedom, we will taste sweetness.  Sweet like honey.

The delightful obligations, the commands, to follow the right path, are themselves acts of grace, leading us into the way of peace.

 

Glimpsing God’s Back – 10/19/08 – Exodus 33:12-23

There’s a spiritual practice called the daily consciousness examen that comes out of the Jesuit tradition.  It’s a fairly simple practice and may be something that each of us already do in some form already from time to time.  The examen is typically done at the end of the day and involves looking back over the events of  the day.  The first thing to call to mind is that God has been present with you throughout all that has happened, whether the presence has been felt or not.  You then go on to express gratitude for the gifts that the day has brought.  There is a chance to go more in depth and consider some of the specific attitudes that you carried throughout the day, how you acted out of love or out of fear, how you accepted or denied an opportunity to take stand on a principle, ways that you were present to God’s love and ways that you were blind to it.  The examen ends with a prayer of gratitude and desire to be attentive to the Spirit the following day.  The purpose is to find the movement of the Spirit in one’s life throughout the day and to pay attention to the ways one is being shaped and led by one’s experiences.  A simplified version of this involves reflecting on one item of the day that has been a blessing and giving thanks.  And one item from the day that has presented a challenge or a grief and acknowledging it as such. 

This question of how to detect God’s presence in a day is not one with any kind of straightforward answer.  We rarely, if ever, experience God in the form of a distinct Presence, like we may experience a person.  The actor and writer Woody Allen has made a number of observations about this.  ““If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”  He also said, “God is silent.  Now if we could only get people to shut up.” (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1171)

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel takes a slightly different route.  He said this: “In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time.  Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.”  (Heschel, God in Search of Man,  p. 174)        

Moses’ encounter with God in the cleft of the rock speaks a similar message.  The context for this story in the book of Exodus is the time when Moses and the Israelites are camped out around Mt. Sinai.  They have only recently left Egypt and are in the desert between their old home of slavery and their new home of promise.  At Sinai they are in the process of receiving the set of commandments that will shape who they will be as a liberated people.  The particular question hanging around the chapters before and after this story is “How will we be led?”  Or, more specifically, “Who, or what is it that is leading us?”  This is the time when the Israelites were waiting for Moses up on top of the mountain and decided to ask his brother Aaron to help them make a calf out of gold that would be their stand-in leader for this guy who disappeared up onto a mountain and this God who didn’t have any concrete form.  This story becomes sort of the archetypal picture of the meaning of idolatry and speaks to the deep need within the human psyche to have a visible, knowable object toward which to direct our trust and faith.   We need something solid.   When Moses comes down he asks Aaron for an explanation of what has happened.  I love Aaron’s response:  “(The people) said to me, ‘make us a god to lead us; for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt – we do not know what has happened to him.’  So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold take it off.’  They gave it to me and I hurled it into the fire and out came this calf.”  (Exodus 32:23-24) I don’t know how it got here, it just sort of appeared!  And so it’s always been with the human tendency toward grasping onto things, or institutions, or ideas that give us a sense of security and sureness about where we are headed.  The nation-state, the market, just appear on the scene and fulfill our needs to know that our lives are being guided by a powerful hand.

After Moses grinds the calf up into powder, throws it in the water, and makes the Israelites drink it, he confronts his own need to know just what or who it is that is leading them in their journey.  This brings us right up to chapter 33, verses 12-23.  I’m going to look at certain parts of that and you’re free to turn there if you’d like to look around in it yourself.        

There are some key words that keep recurring in this passage that help give it shape.  One of the first words is “to know.”  Moses begins by saying to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.  Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’  Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I know you and find favor in your sight.”  Moses finds himself in the position of being known by one who is unknown to him.  He does not comprehend that which has comprehended him and put a calling on his life.  He had received a strong calling with his earlier experience of the encounter with the burning bush, but is again seeking to know just what is this one that had taken ahold of his life.  His longing for knowledge is made explicit in verse 18.  “Moses said, ‘Show me your presence, I pray.’”

Another key word that keeps recurring throughout is “face.”  The word doesn’t show up in the English translation as much as it does in the Hebrew.  Where the NRSV translates verse 14 as the Lord saying, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest,” a literal translation would read, “My face will go ahead of you and I will give you rest.”  Moses then answers, “Unless your face goes with us, do not carry us from here.”  So Moses wants God’s face to go with them and also wants to see God’s presence.  The crux comes in verse 20 after the Lord agrees to go with them, but says, “But you cannot see my face.  For no one shall see me and live.”  So this is the Lord’s solution: “See, there is a place with me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” 

The metaphors here give God very human like characteristics.  Not only does God have a face, but God has a hand and a back.  We can almost picture Moses down in the rock with a big hand covering him and then being removed to get a glimpse of what has just passed over him.  This anthropomorphic language about God helps illustrate something that we may not be able to imagine otherwise.  The face, the part or aspect that defines one’s personality and reveals who one truly is, that part is not something that we get to see of God.  The irony of God’s face going in the lead in front of Moses and the people is that the only part of God they ever to see is God’s back.  It’s as if God is saying, “you’ll never see me in the moment I’m actually there, you’ll only see where I’ve been after I’m already gone.  While you’re still living out that moment I’m already creating the next one, and when you step into that space, I’m out in front of you again.  You’ll never see my leading edge, only my back.”        

From where we stand, we have a partial vision of how God’s presence is leading us.  This is where I come back to the line from Heschel.  “In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time.  Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.”  If all we get is a syllable from time to time, then the best way to start making sense of what we may be seeing or hearing is look back over where we’ve been.  To see the ways that God has been present to us even when we weren’t aware of it at the time.     

Recently I’ve been rereading a novel by Marilynne Robinson called Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago.  The whole story is a reflection by an aged pastor from Gilead, Iowa, writing a long letter to his young son.  The Reverend John Ames’ health is failing and he anticipates dying in the next number of months.  He had his son late in life and his purpose in writing is “to tell you things I would have told you if you had grown up with me, things I believe it becomes me as a father to teach you” (p. 133).  The writing is full of his memory of his father, also a pastor, who was a pacifist, and his grandfather, also a pastor, who had fought in the Civil War, and also his own mostly solitary life as a pastor in the small Midwest town where he grew up.  At one point he had been referring to his obstinate grandfather who would often have conversations with the Lord as if they were right there in the room together.  A young John Ames had been in the room once when his grandfather and father were in one of their many arguments and the older Reverend accusing the younger Reverend of never having been truly visited by the Lord, of never having the seraphim touch a coal to your lips.  After describing this, John Ames writes this to his son.  “I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be.  He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experiences to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.  Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you.  Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.  For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature.  I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.  That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth” (p. 91).

We read these stories in Exodus that talk about God said this and God did that and The Lord told Moses to do this and that and it’s fairly easy to feel a big gap from that kind of world.  It seems like God was constantly having conversations with people as if God were right there beside them.  We might wonder if we’re somehow missing the boat if we’re not having a similar kind of experience.  Why can’t we see as clearly?  Why can’t we hear the way they heard?  But this story being told in Exodus and throughout the Bible isn’t like listening to a live broadcast, as if we’re experiencing it at the same time that those in the story are.  This story is being told by a people who are looking back on their own experience and seeing that they have indeed been led and taught and spoken to by this guiding Spirit.  Not that there were never any moments of that when it was actually happening, but it wasn’t always so clear to them.  That’s what this story about Moses in the cleft of the rock seems to be illustrating.  Moses wants to see God’s face and he realizes he is going to have to be content to only see God’s back.  That’s what things look like in the present moment.  It’s only in looking back over the broad scope of the experience that they are able to recognize that God had been with them the whole time, and that things fit together in a meaningful way, and that’s what we get in the way these stories are told alongside each other.   

Another image that all this calls to mind is one of those computer generated images of all the small pictures of faces that actually make up one big face together.  When you stand close enough you can see the individual faces, but you can’t see how they have any meaningful relationship to each other.  As you move away from it the individual faces start to fade away and a bigger picture starts to take shape.  If you stand far enough back you can see is a single image clearly. 

This could be something like our experience of God’s presence.  Even if we do the consciousness examen each day, reflecting on the ways that we experienced grace and peace, we’re still only getting a small picture of what is really going on.  Even if the day was one of those rare days when everything in the world seemed to make sense, we still don’t know where to place it in the broader picture of days that we experience.  It’s a sliver, a tiny part of the big picture, just a syllable of speech.  The syllables that we have don’t form any coherent thought.  But if we are fortunate to have enough days alongside each other, accumulated together, there are times when we can step back far enough to see that there is a bigger picture that is being formed.  Something that holds together all the fragments to form a single image.   Learning to spell the meaning of life backwards.  Something that brings together and arranges all the syllables to form a single phrase.  This might be the closest we get in this lifetime to seeing the face of God.      

 

Exploring Sabbath as a Cathedral in Time – 8/24/08 – Ex. 20:8-11, Deut. 5:12-15

During Eat we passed around plates of food and shared in communion together.  During Work different people brought up objects from their places of work for display on the communion table.  For Play there was a children’s story that involved different toys and games.  Last Sunday with Pray we walked through the process of centering prayer and spent time in silence.  So what happens during Rest?  Are you supposed to bring a pillow to church?  Should it be my goal to make the sermon as boring as possible so you can get in a little nap before lunch?  Now that the Olympics are over should we make it a goal to get back to a more reasonable sleeping pattern? 

Rest, of course, is about much more than sleeping, although certainly involves this.  For us rest is connected to the richness and depth of what the Scriptures speak of as Sabbath.  It’s a word that means to cease or rest, and is an experience deemed so important in the Hebrew tradition that it gets its own day.  An entire 24 hour period, beginning with sundown Friday evening and continuing through sundown Saturday evening, the seventh and final day of the week, is dedicated to nothing other than Sabbath – a time of ceasing from work, enjoying relationships, healing wounds, and celebrating life.  In the Christian tradition, what we think of as the Sabbath day has shifted to being Sunday, ever since those early Christians gathered on the first day of the week, after the Sabbath day, to celebrate the resurrection and share in communion.  Sunday gradually came to take on more significance than Saturday and become our day of worship and rest. 

It would be an exercise in stating the obvious if I were to begin naming the many challenges we face in having an entire day set aside for Sabbath.  Dairy farmers have always known that you can’t have a day when you completely cease from work, but our generation has seen an incredible shift in overall norms in our society around this day.  There is much activity that goes on, and many demands on our time.  

Rather than focus on what’s new in the challenges of Sabbath keeping, I’m offering now that we shift our gaze toward something very ancient.  And rather than assuming that I or we even know what we’re talking about when we refer to Sabbath, I have found it helpful to think of Sabbath as something quite unfamiliar.  Something strange and unknown, like a large building that we see from a distance but have yet to explore inside.  Maybe it’s a building that we’ve been in once or twice, but the memory is foggy enough in our minds that we forget the layout, don’t recognize the architecture, and don’t know our way around.   So let’s approach this strange, ancient structure with a sense of curiosity and exploration and see what there is we may discover.

The entrance to this building happens in the opening scene of Genesis.  Sabbath has the unique characteristic of being the first thing in Scripture that is referred to as holy.  We may like the think of the creation of humanity as being the climax of creation — everything points to us and is made to support us — but in the imagination of the Hebrew creation myth, this is not the case.  Humanity is created on the sixth day and declared to be very good, but there are seven days of creation.  And Genesis 2:3 says “And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that God had done.”  The Sabbath is the pinnacle of creation, God’s greatest wonder.  The cycle of seven days lays out how we have come to experience time.   As we move through each week, we create for six days, and then enter into the blessing and holiness of Sabbath rest.        

Maybe the part of this odd building that we know we’ve seen before is the reality of Sabbath as commandment.  We know that the Sabbath commandment is there as one of the big ten for shaping life.  The ten commandments show up in Exodus, in the middle of the narrative of the Israelites gathered at Sinai with Moses receiving the gift of the law.  And show up again in the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses is giving a recap of what the Israelites need to remember as they approach the promised land.  I’m going to refer briefly to both the Exodus and Deuteronomy accounts, so you’re welcome to open your bibles to Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 if you’d like to do some flipping back and forth.  The page numbers are printed in the bulletin. 

The first several of the ten commandments are those having to do with our relationship to God – no other gods, don’t create an image for god, don’t misuse god’s name.  The second grouping has to do with our relationship with each other – honor your parents, don’t murder, commit adultery,  steal, give false testimony, covet.  The hinge between these two groupings, the one that links them together and has to do with both, the vertical and the horizontal, is the command to keep the Sabbath.  In this way it is a holistic commandment.  There are some interesting differences between the Exodus account and the Deuteronomy account.  A minor difference is the first word.  Exodus says to “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” and Deuteronomy says, “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”  I love some of the creativity that comes with Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures.  There is a teaching in Judaism that says that what takes God one word to say can take humanity two words.  So the Sabbath is to be remembered and observed, with the fullness that both of those words bring.  They both go on to say that you shall labor for six days and the seventh is a Sabbath of the Lord.  Not only is this a rest for people – free or slaves, but also for animals.  Later parts of the law give a Sabbath rest also for the land.  Sabbath is for all of creation.  The most notable difference in the accounts comes in the reason given for Sabbath.  Exodus refers back to the creation account and the holiness of the day, the climax of creation.  We observe Sabbath as creators because God observes Sabbath as a creator.  In Deuteronomy the reason for Sabbath is different.  The reason that you observe Sabbath, and cease from your labor, and allow your servants and animals to rest is because you remember that you were slaves in Egypt and God delivered you out of slavery.  There’s no reference to creation here.  The definition of slavery is that you are forced to work against your own will for an extended amount of time.  There’s no Sabbath for slaves, just a continuous undifferentiated stream of labor.  So why, now that one is free, would one keep living as if one is a slave?  Sabbath is an expression of freedom and a celebration of salvation.  It’s a gift.          

One of the people I’ve found to be a trustworthy and insightful tour guide for the Sabbath is Abraham Joshua Heschel. (All quotes are taken from his book, The Sabbath.)  Like any guide, he does well at pointing out things that one may not know were there otherwise.  Rabbi Heschel talks about how throughout the ancient world different cultures treated various objects as holy.  Certain mountains or forests or trees or stones were seen as being the place where the deity resides.  Sometimes special poles and altars were made and treated as sacred objects.  The gods were seen as inhabiting a certain land, a certain temple of worship. 

The first thing God declares holy in the Hebrew tradition is not space, but time.  “God blessed the seventh day, and declared it holy.”  The entire thrust of the Jewish tradition is the calling of experiencing God in time and making time holy.  Certain impulses have led people to give reverence toward some thing or some things, but the story of the Jews, and hopefully Christians also, is one of refusing to give worship to any object or image or place.  God is encountered in history, in time, in story, in the calling of Abraham and Sara, in the giving of the Torah, in the Exodus when slaves were delivered from Egypt.  Jews remember the event of the Exodus, and each generation is taught to claim it as their own experience.  We were slaves in Egypt, and God delivered us with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.    The keeping of Sabbath and the experience of Exodus are directly linked in the commandments as a way of remembering the sacredness of moments in time. 

Heschel doesn’t see anything wrong with objects and things, but sees modern technical society as continuing to elevate the important of objects over the holiness of time.  Heschel has some strong words here:  “In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch.  Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space.  Even God is conceived by most of us as a thing…Indeed, we know what to do with space, but do not know what to do about time, except make it subservient to space.  Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space.  As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. ..Shrinking therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space.” (p. 5)

I give this metaphor of exploring Sabbath as if it’s a building that we’re unfamiliar with because Heschel calls the Sabbath a sanctuary in time.  “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn.” (p.8)  So what we’re walking around in here is this sheltering cathedral that draws us up into holiness, kind of like the way the inside of St. Cecelia just across Madison Rd. does the same thing in a physical way.

So the challenge of the spiritual life is the challenge of learning how to occupy time as a sacred cathedral.  I’m not sure what this means but I find it to ring true, or at least to spark my curiousity.  I think of these different areas of focus we’ve had this summer and how this is a way that everyone occupies time.  We all eat and work and play and pray in some way.  They’re all basic to what it means to be a human being.  But just because we do them doesn’t mean we experience them as holy.  Any one of these can become an addiction that gets out of control, or, maybe just as bad, can become just plain boring and meaningless.  Food loses its flavor, work loses its joy, play loses the ability to be an act of re-creation and prayer loses any sense of connection to something beyond ourselves.  So if I would be offered a gift that has the ability to make all these things holy and meaningful, my ears are perked up. 

What I think I hear scripture and Rabbi Heschel saying is that Sabbath is this very gift.  Through Sabbath God makes not only Sabbath holy, but all things, or, all moments.  Recovering Sabbath is recovering our place in creation.

When Jesus says that “the Sabbath is created for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath,” he is being a good rabbi and interpreting the purpose of the law.    The commandment is a gift to serve our well-being, not a rigid set of regulations meant to restrict our experience of life.  This is a place where certain Christian interpretation of the Old Testament has not served us all that well – or interpretation of the New Testament, for that matter.  We sometimes have a sense that the law has nothing to say to us since Jesus showed us a different way.  We see Jesus breaking Sabbath code by performing healings and gathering food to feed his hungry disciples and we may think that Sabbath becomes minimized since Jesus sets us free from the burden of strict observance.  It’s true that we have tremendous freedom in Christ, but the message of Jesus was one of recovering the true meaning of Sabbath, not discarding it altogether.  This is something that Heschel was also working at and he quotes a rabbi who said nearly the exact same words as Jesus – that “the Sabbath is given unto you, not you unto the Sabbath.” (p. 17)  This is an area where we can learn much from our Jewish brothers and sisters who have developed the keeping of Sabbath over the centuries.        

Learning Sabbath is learning to celebrate time rather than things in space.  It involves the non-action of ceasing from our work, and also the positive action of rejoicing in life.  There will be no physical objects placed on the table during these two weeks of focus on Sabbath because what we are exploring is not a thing, but time.  Next week will be the last week of this summer series and we’ll end with a couple of you sharing about your experiences with, your struggles with, your thoughts on Sabbath.  How do we work at making room for Sabbath?  What are the challenges?  How have you experienced Sabbath differently at different points in your life?  What have been some of the blessings of your Sabbath keeping?

I don’t feel the need to outline any sharp rules about Sabbath keeping here because I’m confident that the keeping of Sabbath carries with it its own rewards.  I’m asking that we be willing to crack open a small space, at any point in any day, to begin to enter into this great cathedral in time.  I’m guessing that the experience of beauty and spaciousness and holiness that we find could be so appealing, that it will keep us coming back often.

 

Water Meditations and Prayers – 2/24/08 – Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:1-26

– To read a companion piece with more practical suggestions on how to save water in the home, click here.

1. Scarcity

In 1995, the Vice President of the World bank made a rather prophetic sounding statement: “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Now, nearly a decade into that “next century” that he was referring to, there are plenty of signs that these were not the words of a false prophet.

The numbers are so staggering that, even though I’d seen them before, I had to do some double and triple takes in looking at them again. The World Health Organization reports that in 2002 2.6 billion people, about 40% of the earth’s population, had no access to basic sanitation, and 1.1 billion people had no access to any form of what’s called “improved” drinking water, water that has been filtered or processed to rid it of harmful bacteria. (reference here)

This results in millions of deaths a year due to treatable diseases, and it also fuels conflicts between people and nations struggling for limited resources. Again from the World Bank: “More than a dozen nations receive most of their water from rivers that cross borders of neighboring countries viewed as hostile. These include Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Congo, Gambia, the Sudan, and Syria, all of whom receive 75 percent or more of their fresh water from the river flow of often hostile upstream neighbors.” (reference here)

In the area of the world outside the US that I’m most familiar with, the Middle East, water is one of the main points of contention between the nation of Israel and the Palestinian population. In keeping with the Oslo agreements of the early 90’s, Israel uses 80% of the water in the aquifers that lie under the Palestinian West Bank territory. Israel also controls the area upstream of the Jordan River. (reference here)

For those Palestinians who live close to Israeli West Bank settlers there is a continual sense of injustice and bitterness toward settlers who are able to water their lawns and fill their swimming pools while Palestinians buy expensive imported water for their basic needs and are banned from drilling their own wells without permits, which are rarely given. The situation for Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip is even worse. As one of the most densely populated areas of the world, Gazans are over-extracting water from the aquifer beneath them, about double the amount that can be replenished each year through rainfall. Being next to the sea, over-pumping has already led to 70% of the water in this aquifer being mixed with sea water that is now leaking in. Having such few options for alternative water, Gazans are drinking this brackish water and experiencing the health problems that this brings. (reference here)

The story of the Hebrews in the desert is an example of how a water shortage has potential to quickly lead to disaster. After leaving their slavery in Egypt where they were constantly under the threat of abuse and punishment, the Israelites are suddenly faced with another kind of threat to their community. No water. A human can tolerate perhaps a few years of forced labor, but a human can’t live for more than a few days without water. Given the urgency of the situation, the Hebrews look quickly for someone to blame, and a natural target is their leadership, Moses, and ultimately, God. They say, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” A fair question, I’d say in light of the circumstances. Faced with their own death, the community borders on mutiny and chaos. Moses knows the urgency of the situation and expresses in a prayer that the people are ready to break out in violence by stoning him.

Consider water. The common need of all of life. Consider its potential for giving life and the threat to life when there is a scarcity. Consider our dependence on good, clean water, and the many who are struggling to stay alive without predictable access to such water.

Prayer:

Leader: God of life,help us to remember,
that, for some, the earth is parched.

We lift to you
those for whom clean water is
not a basic right but a luxury,
We cry out, O God,
against conflict and violence
that leaves crops to wither
and drives families from their homes
to lands where fresh, clean water is only a dream.

All: In this season of rebirth,
may we heed your call
to hunger and thirst
for righteousness —
and may your justice and righteousness
roll down as an ever-flowing stream.

(This prayer taken from the MCC website)

2. Stewardship and Miracle

We’ve talked about Lent as a time of exploring what it means to be human, but water takes us even deeper than that. Water is what makes any life possible. Ever since however many millions of years ago when those two little H’s and that one little O decided that three’s a company, joined hands, and became transformed into the first water molecule, our planet has been a place where it is possible for life to happen. Where there is water, there is life. Where there is no water, no life.

For us humans, water has miraculous qualities. We drink it in to the inside of our bodies and somehow our body adopts that water as part of itself, or at least 2/3rds of itself. Water cleans us on the outside, cleans our dishes, our cars, and carries away our waste. Water plus gravity can equal electricity. Water causes of agricultural plants and our industrial plants to grow.

Given the amount of miraculous water that we depend on to make life work, I couldn’t help thinking about my Grandma Lehman and her own relationship to water and miracle.

I remember the few times when Grandma Lehman would come over to spend the night with us kids that she would put the largest of our cooking pots underneath the faucet in our kitchen that had a slow drip. By morning the pot would be most of the way full and she’d use it to clean the breakfast dishes. This was the same grandma who would save the water from a washer cycle to either use on another cycle or water the plants if it was too dirty to get anything clean.

On one level, these are perhaps the predictable actions of someone who would have had memories of depression era shortages. Accompanied with an inbred Mennonite frugality, you can almost guarantee that the smallest amount of water possible would actually find its way down the drains into the sewage.

On another level, there is an element of mindfulness and respect for creation that went along with her water habits that feels crucial for the kind of spirituality required for living sustainable, healthy lives in the 21^st century: A spirituality of responsibility and duty to involve ourselves, in however small ways, in being good stewards of what we are given; a spirituality that sees water for the wonder that it is, a miracle, and desires to see that all of creation can experience that same miracle.

Water and miracle are closely linked in the story of the Hebrews in the desert. We’re not told how the water ended up flowing from the rock, but we are told that this was God’s doing. We’re also told that in order for the water to flow, Moses couldn’t perform the miracle in isolation, but had to take the elders of the people with him to that rock. After Moses and the elders arrived together, they found both God and water, where before there was just a dry rock. And the people had all they needed to drink.

There is good work being done to address the global water crisis. Mennonite Central Committee is working with villagers in Kenya to build sand damns to catch and purify water, with farmers in Cambodia to improve irrigation practices, and with leaders in Palestine to install wastewater treatment systems. On a larger scale, the United Nations has established the Millennium Development Goals to halve global poverty by 2015, with water access being a key element.

So Moses and the elders and God are hard at work. During this time of Lent, when we consider how our daily attitudes and actions connect with the work of God, it is appropriate that we ask ourselves how we are a part of this work. How our prayers, our habits, our financial giving, our conversations, our voting, are joining in with this good work. We just may find ourselves a part of a miracle.

Prayer:

Leader: Source of all Being,

Who brought water from the stone,

Giver of life,

In whom all things live and move and have their being,

All: Give us the miracle of gratitude,

For how our lives are sustained in your care.

Give us the miracle of courage and creativity

To find new habits for ourselves, our country, and our world,

In sharing your resources.

AMEN

3. Springs of Living Water

It’s a small detail, but it speaks volumes. Sort of like in chapter three where John notes that Nicodemus came to Jesus “by night.” Easy to skip over, but highly significant for how it sets up the story and what it tells us about the nature of the conversation. Here, in chapter four, we’re given another small detail, also about the time of day, that orients us to this encounter. Jesus, tired out by his journey and thirsty, was sitting by this well called Jacob’s well when a Samaritan woman came to draw water. “It was about noon”. Noon, the heat of the day, was not the time to come and draw water. This is something that happened first thing in the morning, and sometimes in the evening. The women of the village, in a way similar to many women villagers around the world today, would have gone out together early in the morning to get water for the cooking and washing of the day. Although it was work, it would have been a time to socialize with other women and exchange family news. For this woman to be coming to the well alone, when no one else would have been there, tips us off that she is something of a social outcast – not being welcome, and intentionally avoiding being with the other women.

There was a long history of animosity between Jews and Samaritans and Jews often went out of their way to avoid even walking through Samaritan territory on their way in between Jerusalem and Galilee. So in relationship to Jesus, this woman is really an outcast of outcasts. Isolated from her own community which was in turn isolated from its surrounding community of which Jesus was a part. Jesus will later ask her about her husband and reveal that she has been a part of five failed marriages. With the man having so much of the power over marriage and divorce, it is likely that, for whatever reason, she would have been rejected by each of these men. Cut off from women and men. When she comes to the well where Jesus is sitting, she is thirsty in ways that a jar of water is not going to quench.

John’s gospel is all about incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, and here, when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman, the Word becomes a well. Jesus, who knew that humans do not live on bread or water alone, but are just as much in need of the water of the spirit, takes on the role of the water source that offers her streams of life.

Jesus has his own policies when it comes to water politics. Everyone – no matter how rejected they are by village or outside community, has access to the water of life. This is not a well with a limited supply that gets divvied up on a first come first serve basis, with everyone else left fending for the few puddles that remain. This is an overflowing, effervescent spring. A bottomless serving of life-giving, soul-satisfy, spirit-renewing living water. There is no single destination where one must go to gain access to this well. As the conversation between Jesus and the woman continues they manage to highlight the fact that their peoples have different notions of where the proper place is to worship God – Mt. Gerizim for the Samaritans and Mt. Zion for the Jews. But Jesus notes that neither of them have it right if they are willing to narrow down worship to a matter of geography. Communion with God has to do with spirit and truth, which are both highly portable, non-location specific. The fountain of life is utterly accessibile, wherever the spirit is thirsty and wherever the truth is being sought. And Jesus becomes this fountain for this woman at that place at that time. And she drinks him in deeply, deep enough to start becoming a well herself, as she runs to bring other villagers to meet Jesus.

The thirst for water runs deep within our spirits, our bodies, and our world. Where there is isolation, this water brings community. Where there is injury, this water brings healing. Your and I are thirsty people, needing regular, daily, hourly, this gift of living water. Drink frequently and deeply from the well of God’s peace, God’s joy, God’s grace, and you will become a well of life for a thirsty world.

Prayer:

Leader: God of all who thirst,

our hearts are parched from wandering in deserts

far from your life-giving springs.

Call us to your well.

All: May we drink often from your stream.

Fill our cups with your grace.

Let your love overflow in our hearts,

and make us fully alive.

Amen.

 

– To read a companion piece with more practical suggestions on how to save water in the home, click here.

 

Returning to the Broken Ice – 10,29,06

What’s in a name?  Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship.  Well the Cincinnati part is easy enough to figure out.  Members of this group live and work in and around this city.   And the city of Cincinnati is an important part of this church’s identity.  Fellowship, well, I suppose it could be Cincinnati Mennonite Church, but a church can be a building or a group of people and this congregation existed quite a few years without owning its own building.  Fellowship indicates that this is about the people, about the relationships, about being a community together wherever.  Mennonite.  Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship.  If you’ve ever told someone that you go to a Mennonite church maybe you’ve had the experience of having to explain that no you don’t drive a horse and buggy, that you’re allowed to wear typical American clothing, and that yes, you do have electricity in your house.  Anyone?  These are parts of the Mennonite tradition that this congregation has chosen not to emphasize.  So what is a Mennonite and why is that an important part of the identity of this fellowship?   

 

Mennonites don’t have saints, but if we did we would be sure to include Dirk Willems among them.  You know, maybe it’s good that we don’t have saints.  Saint Dirk just doesn’t quite have that ring to it.

Mennonites don’t have icons, but if we did, perhaps our premier icon would be this image printed on the front of your bulletins – Dirk Willems turning back from escaping his pursuer to pull him out of the broken ice.  There are a couple different versions of this story.  One version, the one presented in the reader’s theater, has Dirk escaping from prison where he was being held for trial for being an Anabaptist.  The other version has Dirk escaping from his home when an official arrives at his door to arrest him.  Either way the key feature of the story is portrayed in this etching which was made by a Dutch artist around 1685.  At some point in his escape, Dirk successfully crossed a frozen pond, making it to the other side.  The man pursuing him was not so fortunate, he fell through the ice.

            Being an Anabaptist in Dirk’s time was dangerous because it meant you had made a decision which shifted your primary allegiance away from the state which was closely aligned with the church.  In a time when infant baptism was like filling out a birth certificate to register you as a citizen and future tax payer of the state, Anabaptists had the boldness to believe that baptism had much more to do with an adult decision to become a citizen in a different sort of kingdom, the new creation of God’s peaceful reign.  So, beginning in the first half of the 16^th century, these people began privately rebaptizing each other and declaring themselves as servants of Christ, not servants of the political authorities.  They were first called Anabaptists, re-baptizers, by their enemies as a term of contempt, much like early followers of Jesus were first called Christians, little Christs, by their enemies.  And much like the early Christians, Anabaptists were hunted down, arrested, and executed because of the perceived threat they posed to those in power. 

            Dirk Willems was not going to passively accept his fate as a martyr.  He valued his life.  He tried to escape capture.  But over the course of his escape he made what was probably a split second decision that ultimately led to his death.  He had crossed the frozen pond safely, but his pursuer had not.  Maybe Dirk looked over his back to see how much distance he had established between himself and his pursuer.  Maybe it was the sound of the ice breaking or the sudden cry that made him look around. 

            Standing back from the situation I have the tendency to try and judge the decision made here.  I have plenty of time to sort through all the pros and cons for Dirk to keep running away or for him to do what he did.  But for Dirk it was most likely more like a reflex, an impulse to turn around and attempt to help this man.  A reflex for indiscriminate love.  Somehow Dirk was able to pull him out of the pond without himself getting dragged into the freezing water.  Then the guard, bound under his legal duty, hauled Dirk away to prison.  A little while later, the courts pronounced this sentence against him: “Whereas Dirk Willems, born at Asperen, at present a prisoner has…confessed, that at the age of fifteen…he was rebaptized in Rotterdam, at the house on one Pieter Willems, and that he, further, in Asperen, at his house, at diverse hours…permitted several persons to be rebaptized…therefore, we the aforesaid judges…do condemn the aforesaid Dirk Willems that he shall be executed with fire, until death ensues.”          

 

            The apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5, wrote this: “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to Godself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.”

            An ambassador is someone who represents a certain nation to another nation, someone who speaks on behalf of her country to another country.  Mennonites have believed that the New Testament teaches that our primary citizenship is in the Kingdom of God.  Our baptism gives us a different sort of birth certificate to live under a new authority.  Ambassadors speak not just for themselves, but for the ones they represent.  They act as agents, crossing a bridge between two different lands.

            This isn’t a matter of heaven and earth, as in after life and during life.  This is a matter of living in the ways of God in the present moment.  Paul goes on to say just a few verses later: “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!”  We may not feel like we are living in the middle of salvation, but that is exactly what Jesus has invited us to do.  There is something new that can happen here with us.  There is reconciliation that can happen.  We are reconciled to God when we see God present in the loving face of Jesus, and we are reconciled to each other as we begin to represent this loving face to one another.

 

Mennonites are direct descendants of the early Anabaptists.  We take our name from Menno Simons who was an influential leader early on in the movement.  And we have always felt that we should stand out in some way from the dominant culture.  We have always felt the tension between being a citizen of the reign of God and a citizen of the reign of Caesar.  Menno and others believed that the New Testament offers us a reasonable way of living and that this way will often make us seem odd, perhaps even foolish to many people. 

We are in a very different context than Dirk and Menno and the early Anabaptists.  We are no longer a persecuted minority.    We may feel like we’re in the minority with our convictions about peace.  We may feel out of place in this hyper-materialistic militaristic society.  But if we’re to be honest with ourselves, we have to admit that quite a bit has changed since the time of our Anabaptist ancestors.  If we look behind our backs, there’s no one chasing us.  We have citizenship in a democracy. And we have access to a wide range of economic and educational resources.  Put simply.  We have power.   

And I think that’s one of the reasons I am so drawn to this image of Dirk Willems and feel that it can give us some guidance for who we can continue to be as Mennonite, Anabaptist Christians.  I gazed at this image quite a bit this past week.  It has a way of growing on you, working its way inside you.  Of all the situations Anabaptists have found themselves in, here is one where they held some power, at least temporarily.  Look at the picture again.  Dirk was not seeking power for himself.  He was in the process of seeking safety, simply trying to get away harm.  The only power he thought he had was his power to move quicker than his enemy.  And then, without asking for it, he suddenly found himself with a great deal of power.  His pursuer is in the icy cold water.  Dirk is safe on the other side.  And that’s the point where I am most easily able to enter the story – just a few seconds before the scene portrayed in the etching.  Finding myself on solid ground but recognizing that someone has fallen through the ice behind me. 

So here we are, 21^st century urban and suburban American Mennonites, with a certain degree of power.  Finding ourselves on solid ground, yet aware that all is not well.  What does it mean to be an ambassador of God’s reconciliation?  What does it mean to represent the new creation?  What does it mean to continue living in our Mennonite heritage? 

How about this as one possible answer?  To be a Mennonite is to be one who returns to the broken ice – to extend the hand of compassion to whoever has fallen through.  There is always the choice of going away to safety, of leaving the troubled scene and blending in with the scenery.  But if we are children of Dirk Willems we carry with us this reflex for turning back.  I see Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship as living this out, committed to returning to the broken ice, reaching out as an ambassador of peace to a hurting world.  This is who you have been, and by God’s grace, this is who we will continue to be.

 

Response

Congregational Reading from Menno Simons: “True evangelical faith…”