21When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. 22Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet 23and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”
24So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. 25Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” 29Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32He looked all around to see who had done it. 33But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
35While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” 36But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” 37He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. 38When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. 39When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” 40And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” 42And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. 43He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
The little mom & pop convenience store around the corner from our house sells lottery tickets. They try to encourage sales by posting proof of the winning tickets that were sold there, taping them up to the bullet proof glass at the cash register.
When you sit down and do the math, its plain to see that the odds of winning are slim, very very slim, and yet, as my friend used to say – you can’t win if you don’t play.
In today’s gospel, Mark is encouraging us to get in the game, to play and he teaches that God runs the lottery differently than the state of California.
Mark tells us that Jesus comes to town and everyone wants a piece of him. They want to know what he is about, who he is, and what he can do for them …
Like the early months of Obama’s presidency. Sure he promised a lot of nice things on the campaign trail, but now that he is in the Whitehouse, who is he really? What is he going to do for us? We look closely at what he’s acting on, what projects he tackles first, wanting to see what promises he makes good on first. By watching what he does, we expect to learn who he really is.
Jesus and the disciples step off the boat, back into Jewish territory, and there’s a crowd waiting for him, watching to see who he seeks out, what he’ll do first- will he have lunch with the mayor or the bishop? Will he head to city hall or stay on the posh Westside? Who is going to be on the inside of the new administration and who is going to be left behind? News of his miracles must have traveled ahead of him, because at least two people in the crowd that morning were there, hoping for their own miracles of healing.
So where are you this day that Jesus came to town, his boat scraping sand on the shore, the disciples holding it steady as Jesus steps out – did you get up early to be there? Are you secretly working your way to the front – your head ducked so that the neighbors won’t recognize you? Maybe you’re the synagogue leader, standing in the front row with the other VIP’s, forcing a pleasant smile on your face trying to cover up the desperate question burning in your heart. Did you buy your lotto ticket? Are you holding it in your pocket, waiting for the numbers to be read?
Jairus, the synagogue leader has left his dying daughter’s bedside to seek Jesus’ help. It’s desperate to be helpless at the bedside of a loved one who is slipping away from you, no matter what you tried, no matter how hard you prayed. Rounds of chemo and radiation had failed, acupuncture had done nothing, nasty herb teas and medications left her even more sick.
That morning Jairus put aside his dignity and social position, fell to the sand at Jesus’ feet and begged him to come and heal his beloved daughter. Apparently what ever lunch plans Jesus had made could wait and the two of them (and the crowd of disciples and people) headed to Jairus’ home.
Time is clearly of the essence, Like an ambulance with sirens flashing, dashing across town, I imagine they were moving at brisk pace when Jesus stopped suddenly and started asking about who had touched him.
Everyone feels derailed by his distraction, the disciples give voice to it, barely cloaking their irritation, “obviously the crowd is pressing in on you, of course someone touched you”, and Jairus is silently screaming at Jesus to get moving again.
Who touched me?
The crowd parts and a woman comes forward, now she falls at Jesus’ feet, the whole story pouring out, 12 years of bleeding, endless visits to specialist, medical bills that emptied her savings, the religious authorities declaring her “unclean” being forced into isolation so as not to contaminate her family, hearing the stories about him, she had waited at the shore since dawn, hoping to get close to Jesus, hoping he could heal her, she was willing to buy one more ticket, take one more chance and she won, as her finger tips touched the edge of his jacket, she felt the bleeding stop.
Jairus’ heart must have sunk even lower, every second that slipped by, his daughter slipped closer to death, but now, this woman had touched Jesus, I bet Jairus recognized her, after all it was the religious laws that had judged her unclean.
And the way that everyone in the crowd understood cleanliness, religious cleanliness meant that this woman with her 12 years of bleeding, in touching her Jesus, even if it was just the hem of his jacket, now Jesus was unclean and unfit for ministry. Jairus, knew, as did everyone in the crowd, what Jesus was required to do to restore his own cleanliness – a ceremonial bath, a change of clothes, off by himself until sundown – then he’d be ready to go and heal Jairus’ daughter. By then, Jairus knew it would be too late. He let go of the worthless lottery ticket in his pocket.
And it appeared that Jesus was going to have a long conversation with this woman – Jesus listened as she laid it all out. And then Jesus said the most surprising thing, instead of condemning her for breaking the purity laws, instead of shaming her for making him, a rabbi, unclean, breaking the barriers that have kept her in the margins - Jesus calls her daughter – he names her as part of God’s family. No longer excluded, he gives her a place in the circle, daughter, and he blesses her, go, your faith has made you well.
Shocking really, because in the eyes of that community, she was of very little consequence – why would Jesus waste his time, his healing energy on her? Her condition – the “bleeding” is really code for vaginal bleeding, which meant if she’s bleeding for 12 years, she’s not able to bear children, which was the accepted sign of God’s approval of a woman. Its inferred that she has met with God’s disapproval) So Jesus comes into contact with her, and heals her bleeding, but then he places her directly in God’s embrace – Daughter, he calls her – this was code for child of the covenant, daughter of Abraham, Daughter he calls her, this makes her part of the family of faith again. Jesus demonstrates that God’s love goes out as far as there are people wanting to receive it. Any one can win God’s love.
A miracle for her and instructive for us. We can know that God’s love extends to us. There is no longer such a thing as being beyond redemption.
SO we can sit back in our comfy philosopher chair, with a nice cappacino and imagine the most dramatic situation in which this Gospel truth would apply – would Jesus reach out to someone of no consequence? A murderer? the serial killer on death row? sure, of course…God’s love goes to the ends of the earth.
But perhaps God’s radical reach is needed closer to our homes than we think. An more common experience for us is to be broken and marginalized by everyday life – to be broken by the familiar economic struggles and social marginalization that is so much of the air we breath that we don’t even see its face or sense its power to keep people on the edges, unable to find the healing they need.
We don’t even realize that we are just going through the motions of life
–crushed slowly by low grade depression, without energy or conviction to get what we need
– consistently passed over for promotion because we don’t work like our euro-American male co-workers.
– Its like the high school student’s I talk with, who tell me about teachers who expect little of them, who tell them they aren’t smart enough to pass, and pretty soon, these students believe what they are being told, and they drop out of school.
God’s love and God’s healing break through the margins and reach us here too, God reaches out to us, even when we are only a shell of our former self and restores us to a place at the table.
In Mark’s action-packed style, just as Jesus is turning from the formerly-bleeding woman, the people come from Jairus’s home with the terrible news, Jesus is too late, she has died. They dismiss Jesus, free him to return to his original plans for the day. We’ve learned from playing the lottery, where there is a winner, there is always the losers.
The street starts to spin out from under Jairus’s feet, his heart explodes with grief, Jesus catches him by the elbow and speaks calmly into the blur, “do not fear, only believe”.
So Jesus, now an unclean healer, dripping with impurity, heads to the home of the man charged with the responsibility of keeping the whole community clean and pure in God’s eyes. Jairus is desperate, he’s way beyond hope purchased by keeping the rules and he is clinging with all his might to a very small ticket of belief that God’s love could transform even this.
Jesus orders the crowd to stay put, and Jairus and Jesus and three of the disciples turn the corner to Jairus’ home. The women were already wailing and mourning, they laugh at Jesus when he tells them the girl is only asleep. With Jairus and his wife in the room, Jesus breaks the cleanliness law for the second time that day and touches the dead child, “get up little girl”. And again there is enough of God in the person of Jesus to go around. Its not some parlor trick, Jesus urges the parents to give the girl something to eat.
A gift of life from death is almost too big to receive, too big to grasp in the moment, winning millions after working for pennies each day. In the aftermath of the miracle, the everyday task of making a sandwich becomes a welcome refuge. But I imagine Jairus’ heart opened in a new way, maybe months later as he sang happy birthday to his daughter at her 13th birthday, his daughter now crossing into womanhood, maybe entering into marriage, now able to fulfill what society understood as God’s desire for woman.
There was enough love that day, Mark is teaching us, in God’s love, everyone can win. I imagine the bullet proof glass thick with tape and lotto tickets, every ticket purchased has won the jackpot! the multitude of winners declaring God’s kingdom has arrived.
Mark teaches us about God’s love – there is enough of God’s love for everyone. But just like the chaos at the convenience store where every lottery ticket is a winner, chaos accompanies God’s love as it breaks in. The world as we’ve understood it, a world where there is room for only one winner, the rules that keep that world in place get broken.
Being an overly obedient person, I find this a bit unsettling. I find comfort in knowing what the rules are, knowing what is expected of me, knowing how to function within a system to get what I want, knowing how to earn the “A”, the approval, the blessing. Even when the rules work against me, I still rely on them to understand the lay of the land.
But when God’s love breaks in, God doesn’t follow the rules – the bleeding woman didn’t stay obediently at home, hoping that Jesus would come calling – no, she went out, she sought him out, her hunger for healing, for inclusion in God’s family was a part of the equation.
And Jairus, he didn’t wait for Jesus to appear at the synagogue reception area. He didn’t wait for the official meet and greet cocktail hour to talk with Jesus – no, he was on his knees in the sand as Jesus stepped out of the boat.
Jesus didn’t stick to the agenda or the religious structure of the day. He poured out God’s love to those in need of it. And they were transformed by the experience – sickness to health, death to life, outsider to daughter.
We need to be clear on what Mark is NOT teaching us.
This is no domesticated Gospel. Jesus isn’t a puppet on the strings of our desires and agendas. There is no secret formula of prayer & desperation that will turn God’s hand.
I need to tell you that I’ve played the lottery, and never won the jackpot.
I’ve prayed for healing until my heart was broken open – for my own healing and for loved ones. Sometimes my prayers were answered. Sometimes they weren’t.
My guess is you’ve prayed similar prayers with similar results. My guess is the people following Jesus and Jairus around that day did too. For every woman who’s bleeding stopped, another’s continues. For every daughter restored to life, another succumbs to sickness.
The take away from today’s text isn’t about trying to touch the hem of Jesus’s jacket in the same spot or to get Jesus to kneel at the bedside in just the same way.
There’s no formula. There’s no guarantees. There’s no way even to calculate the odds. We learn from the text that God remains God – mysterious, powerful, and in the person of Jesus, ready to break into the whole of humanity in the most surprising way.
What Mark gives us is a glimpse of God breaking into the world in the person of Jesus. Reaching out in love and healing where healing was unimaginable. We see that God’s love knows no bounds. On that day and today Jesus comes to town and the reach of God’s love transforms with healing everything in its path.
Amen.
Showing posts with label EGZ (Eng). Show all posts
Showing posts with label EGZ (Eng). Show all posts
June 9, 2009
November 24, 2008
November 9, 2008 + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
MP3 File
The differences between our lives and the lives of people described in the bible can trip us up. Today’s text assumes that we understand the wedding traditions of 1st century Palestine. It seems as though they did weddings very differently that we do.
For example, Tim and I got married here at Immanuel. Mary Ann Weaver, the wedding director, not coordinator mind you, director, worked with us for the ceremony and reception. From the bridesmaid lunch the day before the wedding to the cutting of the cake at the reception – every moment was clocked out. Mary Ann kept all of us doing what we were supposed to do when we were supposed to do it.
Weddings in New Testament times had a different rhythm. The groom would show up to the bride’s family’s home at an unappointed time and that’s when the wedding would begin. The bridesmaids were in charge of welcoming the groom. It could be any hour of the day or night, hence the importance of having lanterns ready.
As I read this text, I feel sad that there isn’t more sharing going on here – shouldn’t those who have oil share with those in need? You know, in the spirit of if you have two coats give one to your neighbor who doesn’t have one….
But no, it turns out that the sharing of lamp oil is not the point of this text. Maybe it’s more like gas in the car – I remember Sara Erickson telling me about her work for Obama’s campaign. He was attending a fundraiser in LA and Sara’s friend was recruiting people to help out with transporting Obama and his staff to the airport. She had lined up enough drivers and cars, Sara was one of them. They waited until the event was over, and then Obama and his staff climbed aboard and the motorcade headed for LAX. Obviously Sara didn’t show up at the fundraiser with her gas gauge on empty. She wouldn’t ask the driver of the car next to hers if she could siphon some gas out of their tank…She wouldn’t wait for the moment when they were getting in the car to say “oh, mind if I stop by the gas station, I’m running on fumes.” Sara showed up prepared for the role she had promised to play.
So, yes, it was silly of half of the bridesmaids not to come prepared. Maybe they had expected the groom sooner, like before it got dark, maybe they hadn’t imagined that they would be waiting so long, maybe they hadn’t thought it through, but there they were without what was needed, and their last minute shopping trip cost them their admission to the wedding celebration.
In his Gospel, Matthew layouts out stories about characteristics of God’s kingdom. The Kingdom of God is like… a mustard seed…its like yeast that we use for making bread….its like treasure hidden in a field…., but here, Matthew shifts verb tense from present to future– This is how its going to turn out in God’s new world, this is how its going to be …it’s a reference to a future event – one that is coming for certain, but its not scheduled. It gets us in an advent mood a little early.
I’ve shared with you all before, my experiences in advent of 2005. I was very pregnant with Naomi – the doctors had given us a due date of mid-December, but I was feeling like she was coming sooner! Every kick and cramp made me stop and wonder – was it now? It was so hard for me not to be able to know when she would be born, when should I ask my mom to fly out? when should I start my maternity leave, how could I pull together Christmas for Eva? All I could know is that she was going to be born, but the day? The hour? Who knew?
At the same time John, my father-in-law’s health was failing. He had been battling cancer for three years and the tide, it seemed, had turned decisively against him. It was obvious that his strength and vigor were draining from him, but how much longer did we have with him? Would he live to meet his grandchild? It was clear his death was near, but the day? The hour?
And it was advent, so along with all of the world, I was waiting for Jesus to return. Another event that had been promised and immanent, but not calendared. Bursting with Naomi and grieving John’s decline, I found myself attentive to the textures of waiting for Jesus’ return in a whole new way. It was suddenly profoundly relevant to me that something so important could be happening without a published timetable.
In today’s reading and in the preceding chapter, Matthew reminds us that no one knows the day or hour of the arrival of the kingdom of heaven. There’s speculation that Matthew included that emphasis because the faith community was really wrestling with Jesus’ apparent delay. Those who had been eyewitnesses to Jesus and his ministry were passing away, the stories were being shared 2nd and 3rd hand. Given the economic and political turbulence of the times, people of faith had banked on Jesus coming back soon and setting everything right. And yet the years continued to roll by. So Matthew is reminding them (and us) that Jesus said “no one knows the day or hour – not the angels not me, only God in heaven knows” So keep awake, be prepared.
Alright – be prepared, so I can get a pretty good handle on how to prepare for a baby to be born – go to the doctor, come up with a birth plan, get a crib, wash some baby clothes
…And it’s different every time, but we know a bit about how to prepare to loose someone who we love – we have those important conversations, we make sure we know their wishes about cremation or burial, we learn about where safe deposit keys are.
…but God’s New World? how do we prepare for God’s Kingdom to arrive?
Sarah Dylan Breuer suggests, We prepare for God’s kingdom by seeking it – by pursuing the things that God pursues. We prepare for the fulfillment of Christ's purposes on earth by doing what he did. We prepare for God's kingdom by seeking it, and God's justice first.
Mary, the teenage girl, who found herself unexpectedly pregnant, sang a song when she recognized the connection between the child in her womb and the coming of God’s Kingdom. She doesn’t mention much about baby clothes and cribs, rather she prepares herself for what lies ahead by describing what God is about in the world –
Bringing down rulers from their thrones, lifting up the humble, filling the hungry with good things. She gives voice to the radical upheaval that accompanies the in-breaking of God’s New World. She aligns herself with who she knows God to be.
So what is our song, Immanuel? What is on our to do list as we seek to live prepared?
How about starting with….
* Ending poverty and hunger
* Promoting gender equality and empowering women
* justice for immigrants
* economic justice
* Combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
* Caring for God's Creation
You might notice these aren’t easy tasks – there is no quick fix for world hunger – people have poured their whole lives into working for these changes and progress is almost imperceptible.
There are breakthroughs – did you hear, we elected a fine man to be our next president, and his father was Kenyan and his mother American! But there are set backs – that same day Californian’s voted to bar gay and lesbian people from being able to get married.
If we are looking to the results of our labor to motivate us, then we will surely grow weary as the wait grows long, we’ll get distracted and discouraged, we’ll let our oil run out and be found unprepared.
What we thought was a short wait has turned into a long one, if we are to live prepared, if we are to stay engaged in the things that God is engaged in, then our motivation needs to be rooted in who we know God to be. We work for justice because God loves justice. We give our time to feeding the hungry because God wants every child to be well fed. We protect and promote life, because God is the God of life. As we heed Jesus’ charge “keep your wits about you, you don’t know how long the waiting is going to be.” We seek to stay engaged in the things that Jesus was engaged in.
Maybe there’s a reason why there isn’t a fixed date on the calendar…it’d be just like us to let ourselves off the hook until the day before – like putting off studying until the night before the final exam. With a date on the calendar we could fool ourselves into thinking that we were in control of the whole event. We could have some gauge of knowing how to prepare just enough to get by. Just enough oil in our lantern to get in the door of the party.
But God’s not a professor handing out grades. God’s not interested in our heroic all-night study sessions. It’s the whole of our life that God wants – each day that unfolds, each breath that we take.
If we knew the day or hour, we’d be all about planning, scheduling, we’d carve out just enough time for God and we’d stay in control of our lives, juggling all the other things that keep us busy and distracted. It's so not the point.
God’s not interested in the parcels of time that we carve out for “God work”. God isn’t interested in being the first priority among many. And when we step back, we see that we are kidding ourselves if we imagine we would control the arrival of God’s kingdom.
God’s desire is for the whole of our being to be in communion with the whole of God.
Doing and attending to the things that God loves, that’s how we prepare ourselves,
that’s how we “stay awake”
that’s how we find ourselves there,
ready to celebrate the wedding feast with joy,
Our lanterns ablaze against the night sky.
October 7, 2008
September 28, 2008 + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Matthew 21:23-32
MP3 File
So basically, Jesus is getting carded by the chief priests and the elders. They want to know how to make sense of him, what to do with him, the want to figure out who exactly he is and what he is calling the community of faith to…
Its human nature to want a reliable way to identify someone. In Stillman Valley, Illinois, where my Dad grew up, back then it had a population 350 – Saaalute! people were known by name, or at least by face or family – you know, that’s Russ, Tom Gibbs’ boy.
But here in LA it’s a different story. I don’t even bristle when I am asked for a form of identification. I automatically dig out my and fish out the requested card – I know that that stack of cards doesn’t really capture the whole of who I am, at best, they are just slices…
The state of California has issued me a driver’s license – photo id
My Financial resources define me to some extent – money, valid credit cards, checks.
I do have more say in my identity around the affiliation cards, – LACMA, VONS, car insurance, - I even have a card issued by the Presbytery that declares that I am a member minister in good standing.
Even though we know it is a shallow, and inherently limited way of identifying someone, we find it comforting. We like to feel like we can “KNOW” who someone is…. find some points of connection and extrapolate an understanding of who they are – Oh, I belong to LAcma too – so you must value making fine art accessible and relevant to the community….
You can hear it played out on the daily news reports of the presidential candidates – It doesn’t matter if it’s an Obama report or McCain report – they leave my head spinning, trying to cast a particularly flattering impression in my mind that is fairly disconnected that what was done. We participate in that dance just as much as the candidates and their speech writing staff – We assume that people are knowable and predictable – we assume that if we could just say, oh, that’s Ann Dunham’s son, Barack or he’s Roberta’s boy, John – then we would be able to identify them, we would be able to know the truth of who they are.
It’s a common pitfall to confuse our experience of someone with the totality of their being – the longer we know them, the more we expect them to remain as we know them, the more we over-estimate our understanding of who they are.
This happened to me with my Granddad. We grew up with him and my grandmother in the same town, then they moved away to Missouri when he retired, I was just finishing 7th grade, after that we saw them twice a year or so, and in those visits, I guess, I so longed for the close connection I had had before, that I carried forward things from the past that weren’t so much present in his life any more – like coin collecting – my granddad is meticulous and he was passionate about coins which rendered boxes and boxes of heavy binders filled with sheets of coins suspended in plastic holders with hand printed labels. He especially liked the wheat-head pennies – which were rare, but still in circulation back then. Every time I got change, I would flip the pennies over, looking for the wheat motif. I’d bundle them up and send them to him.
Of course a lot of life transpired after they moved to Missouri – my Grandmother’s health declined and then she passed away suddenly, he fell and broke his leg, another wonderful woman entered his heart and they married and moved a few times and created a new life together. I’m not sure when he stopped collecting coins, I never stopped sending them, until about 10 years ago, when he gently mentioned that he wasn’t really interested in them any more. I was crushed, I felt like one of the few connections that I still had with him had been severed. It called into question all the things I thought that I knew him to be and I felt at a loss, like I didn’t know him anymore…and yet, why would I expect him to continue a hobby he started in his 50’s now 40 years later????
We do the same thing with God, we assume that God’s identity is fixed and knowable and mapable. We have authentic encounters with God of course! But then we go on to claim these encounters as an exhaustive description of whom God is. We hold on so tightly to who we knew God to be in a seminal mountain top experience and then we don’t let life go on from there. Just like the chief priests in today’s passage, they didn’t have a category for such an unconvential Messiah; therefore, Jesus’ identity was in question.
We confuse our image of God with GOD (that by the way is the definition of idolatry) Its idolatry when we look to the image, when we look to the ID cards in the wallet as the exhaustive definition of the person of God.
The thing is, God is always, always going to be more than the sum of our encounters and experiences with God.
It’s like my friend driving with 2005 Pilot with GPS. In LA it works great, she lives and works near the city center, nothing much changes with the street layout – its logical to rely on the driving directions the car gives. – But she took the car down to Irvine and the GPS went crazy – warning her she was “_____off road” when she was driving down a paved street lined with Targets, Applebee’s and Starbucks. The GPS wasn’t able to recognize the new reality, so it rejected it and shouted out a misplaced warning. Well obviously she knew that she wasn’t off roading it, but how do we know when we are dealing with an imposter when it comes to our God? How do we know the real McCoy when it comes to our faith community?
We can try and “map” God, but God’s very nature is mystery – what do we do with that? Do we push back and try even harder to make our experience of God manageable? Over the years, the church has employed the strategy of creating lists of core attributes of God and then see who measures up in terms of religious leaders and faith communities. Do we attempt to minimize the chaos by creating a matrix of rules about who is “in” with God and who is “out”?
No, that is not so helpful. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility that the identity of God will continue to unfold
– that God will be true to our encounter with the holy that we had in Mrs. Johnson’s 3rd grade Sunday School class
– AND God is still in that moment in college when our heart broke with God’s when we learned how many “good” people looked the other way during the holocaust
– AND that God is probably going to surprise us with something new next week….
In today’s text Jesus throws out a scenario – The dad asks his kids to do something, one kids says no, I won’t, then does it. The other kid says yes, yes, of course and then doesn’t do it.
Obviously that plays against the backdrop of the ideal when the child would say yes and then do it, but we all know that is rare in real life and Jesus is a real life kind of guy so he goes for the murkiness of real life…
He asks the religious leaders, which of these two kids is just carrying their God card in their wallet? And which of these kids is living out what God desires?
It’s a deceptively easy answer – a slam dunk, really
The one who said no at first and then got up and did what was asked – There’s the kid who is doing what his father asked of him.
Exactly, says Jesus. And then he pulls two rugs out from under their self-righteous feet.
The first rug has to do with God’s People: Jesus pushes them hard –
The people who you have labeled as living out of bounds, the people who you have identified as being beyond redemption – these are the people who are in. Not because they carry a magic id card, not because they are passing them selves off as saints but they are in because of what they do – they are responding with action to God’s call on their life!
And you, you who thought you had Platinum Gold Medallion status, free upgrades to first class and priority boarding for life, put your card back in your wallet and step aside, these other folks are boarding ahead of you. Your ID cards mean nothing if they aren’t validated by your action.
This makes me uncomfortable, because as I translate myself into this passage – I find myself loosing my balance like the rest of the religious leaders. I had thought I was in – Have you seen my religious resume? I have that card from the stated clerk of the presbytery?
Jesus is pointed out the difference between faith affiliation and faith community.
This is the edge that we must continue to seek no matter how extensive our church resume is.
The best of knives get dull and require sharpening, so too does our understanding of how we gather as God’s people.
Words come so easily – Especially once we learn the politically correct vocabulary – we have our own lexicon here at Immanuel – struggling for justice, marginalized, inclusive, diversity, peace, Our Father-Mother God who art in heaven….
So if we can say the prayer that Jesus taught without stumbling over the 1st phrase does that mean we are truly a member of the faith community? NOPE
Jesus is teaching here that we must live out those words, we must act out those words…are we doing that? Are we just saying “oh yes, I am committed to caring for the environment – but we power through bottled water as if there is no tomorrow – do we declare our concern for violence against women – but we don’t make sure the near by domestic violence shelter has enough funding…. Are we doing what God is asking us?
We are a political people, and when faced with that question, we know how to spin our response, we know how to build our case – but this isn’t about convincing a jaded electorate, Jesus reminds us…the question comes from God – God in whom all is known, nothing is hidden. God in who love and grace abound. God who like a loving parent asks of us these things that will transform us, experiences that will call forth the fullness of who we are.
In this context we are free to be fully honest with God and ourselves.
We can ask God to open our eyes so that we can see our actions more clearly.
We can ask God to animate our desire, to ruffle our complacency.
Maybe we tumble to the floor with the rest of the religious establishment when Jesus pulls the rug out, but in God’s grace we can get up and open ourselves to the possibility that God is more than what we have experienced before….
So that takes us to Rug number 2.
Rug number 2 is definitely a subtext in this discourse between Jesus and the chief priests. They are going back and forth about who God sends – John the Baptist, Jesus and who God welcomes into the kingdom – prostitutes and tax collectors ahead of the chief priests and elders…. clarity on who God sends and who God welcomes bring clarity to who exactly God is.
What Jesus laid out in his story about the two sons is as unsettling to us as it was to the chief priests because we thought we knew who God is. But come to find out, God isn’t setting up a bouncer to check for Presbyterian id’s in the narthex. God’s going around to the alley, inviting the woman who’s slept in the doorway to come get a good seat upfront.
Jesus is challenging us to take another look at who we assume God to be – maybe God has given up coin collecting. Maybe the terrain has changed and our GPS is out of date.
I’m not saying that the character of God is inconsistent. I am not saying that God’s waffling on the issues – voting for the war, now against the war….
We need to keep a hold of our experiences with God – AND we need to cultivate openness to new experiences with God.
MP3 File
So basically, Jesus is getting carded by the chief priests and the elders. They want to know how to make sense of him, what to do with him, the want to figure out who exactly he is and what he is calling the community of faith to…
Its human nature to want a reliable way to identify someone. In Stillman Valley, Illinois, where my Dad grew up, back then it had a population 350 – Saaalute! people were known by name, or at least by face or family – you know, that’s Russ, Tom Gibbs’ boy.
But here in LA it’s a different story. I don’t even bristle when I am asked for a form of identification. I automatically dig out my and fish out the requested card – I know that that stack of cards doesn’t really capture the whole of who I am, at best, they are just slices…
The state of California has issued me a driver’s license – photo id
My Financial resources define me to some extent – money, valid credit cards, checks.
I do have more say in my identity around the affiliation cards, – LACMA, VONS, car insurance, - I even have a card issued by the Presbytery that declares that I am a member minister in good standing.
Even though we know it is a shallow, and inherently limited way of identifying someone, we find it comforting. We like to feel like we can “KNOW” who someone is…. find some points of connection and extrapolate an understanding of who they are – Oh, I belong to LAcma too – so you must value making fine art accessible and relevant to the community….
You can hear it played out on the daily news reports of the presidential candidates – It doesn’t matter if it’s an Obama report or McCain report – they leave my head spinning, trying to cast a particularly flattering impression in my mind that is fairly disconnected that what was done. We participate in that dance just as much as the candidates and their speech writing staff – We assume that people are knowable and predictable – we assume that if we could just say, oh, that’s Ann Dunham’s son, Barack or he’s Roberta’s boy, John – then we would be able to identify them, we would be able to know the truth of who they are.
It’s a common pitfall to confuse our experience of someone with the totality of their being – the longer we know them, the more we expect them to remain as we know them, the more we over-estimate our understanding of who they are.
This happened to me with my Granddad. We grew up with him and my grandmother in the same town, then they moved away to Missouri when he retired, I was just finishing 7th grade, after that we saw them twice a year or so, and in those visits, I guess, I so longed for the close connection I had had before, that I carried forward things from the past that weren’t so much present in his life any more – like coin collecting – my granddad is meticulous and he was passionate about coins which rendered boxes and boxes of heavy binders filled with sheets of coins suspended in plastic holders with hand printed labels. He especially liked the wheat-head pennies – which were rare, but still in circulation back then. Every time I got change, I would flip the pennies over, looking for the wheat motif. I’d bundle them up and send them to him.
Of course a lot of life transpired after they moved to Missouri – my Grandmother’s health declined and then she passed away suddenly, he fell and broke his leg, another wonderful woman entered his heart and they married and moved a few times and created a new life together. I’m not sure when he stopped collecting coins, I never stopped sending them, until about 10 years ago, when he gently mentioned that he wasn’t really interested in them any more. I was crushed, I felt like one of the few connections that I still had with him had been severed. It called into question all the things I thought that I knew him to be and I felt at a loss, like I didn’t know him anymore…and yet, why would I expect him to continue a hobby he started in his 50’s now 40 years later????
We do the same thing with God, we assume that God’s identity is fixed and knowable and mapable. We have authentic encounters with God of course! But then we go on to claim these encounters as an exhaustive description of whom God is. We hold on so tightly to who we knew God to be in a seminal mountain top experience and then we don’t let life go on from there. Just like the chief priests in today’s passage, they didn’t have a category for such an unconvential Messiah; therefore, Jesus’ identity was in question.
We confuse our image of God with GOD (that by the way is the definition of idolatry) Its idolatry when we look to the image, when we look to the ID cards in the wallet as the exhaustive definition of the person of God.
The thing is, God is always, always going to be more than the sum of our encounters and experiences with God.
It’s like my friend driving with 2005 Pilot with GPS. In LA it works great, she lives and works near the city center, nothing much changes with the street layout – its logical to rely on the driving directions the car gives. – But she took the car down to Irvine and the GPS went crazy – warning her she was “_____off road” when she was driving down a paved street lined with Targets, Applebee’s and Starbucks. The GPS wasn’t able to recognize the new reality, so it rejected it and shouted out a misplaced warning. Well obviously she knew that she wasn’t off roading it, but how do we know when we are dealing with an imposter when it comes to our God? How do we know the real McCoy when it comes to our faith community?
We can try and “map” God, but God’s very nature is mystery – what do we do with that? Do we push back and try even harder to make our experience of God manageable? Over the years, the church has employed the strategy of creating lists of core attributes of God and then see who measures up in terms of religious leaders and faith communities. Do we attempt to minimize the chaos by creating a matrix of rules about who is “in” with God and who is “out”?
No, that is not so helpful. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility that the identity of God will continue to unfold
– that God will be true to our encounter with the holy that we had in Mrs. Johnson’s 3rd grade Sunday School class
– AND God is still in that moment in college when our heart broke with God’s when we learned how many “good” people looked the other way during the holocaust
– AND that God is probably going to surprise us with something new next week….
In today’s text Jesus throws out a scenario – The dad asks his kids to do something, one kids says no, I won’t, then does it. The other kid says yes, yes, of course and then doesn’t do it.
Obviously that plays against the backdrop of the ideal when the child would say yes and then do it, but we all know that is rare in real life and Jesus is a real life kind of guy so he goes for the murkiness of real life…
He asks the religious leaders, which of these two kids is just carrying their God card in their wallet? And which of these kids is living out what God desires?
It’s a deceptively easy answer – a slam dunk, really
The one who said no at first and then got up and did what was asked – There’s the kid who is doing what his father asked of him.
Exactly, says Jesus. And then he pulls two rugs out from under their self-righteous feet.
The first rug has to do with God’s People: Jesus pushes them hard –
The people who you have labeled as living out of bounds, the people who you have identified as being beyond redemption – these are the people who are in. Not because they carry a magic id card, not because they are passing them selves off as saints but they are in because of what they do – they are responding with action to God’s call on their life!
And you, you who thought you had Platinum Gold Medallion status, free upgrades to first class and priority boarding for life, put your card back in your wallet and step aside, these other folks are boarding ahead of you. Your ID cards mean nothing if they aren’t validated by your action.
This makes me uncomfortable, because as I translate myself into this passage – I find myself loosing my balance like the rest of the religious leaders. I had thought I was in – Have you seen my religious resume? I have that card from the stated clerk of the presbytery?
Jesus is pointed out the difference between faith affiliation and faith community.
This is the edge that we must continue to seek no matter how extensive our church resume is.
The best of knives get dull and require sharpening, so too does our understanding of how we gather as God’s people.
Words come so easily – Especially once we learn the politically correct vocabulary – we have our own lexicon here at Immanuel – struggling for justice, marginalized, inclusive, diversity, peace, Our Father-Mother God who art in heaven….
So if we can say the prayer that Jesus taught without stumbling over the 1st phrase does that mean we are truly a member of the faith community? NOPE
Jesus is teaching here that we must live out those words, we must act out those words…are we doing that? Are we just saying “oh yes, I am committed to caring for the environment – but we power through bottled water as if there is no tomorrow – do we declare our concern for violence against women – but we don’t make sure the near by domestic violence shelter has enough funding…. Are we doing what God is asking us?
We are a political people, and when faced with that question, we know how to spin our response, we know how to build our case – but this isn’t about convincing a jaded electorate, Jesus reminds us…the question comes from God – God in whom all is known, nothing is hidden. God in who love and grace abound. God who like a loving parent asks of us these things that will transform us, experiences that will call forth the fullness of who we are.
In this context we are free to be fully honest with God and ourselves.
We can ask God to open our eyes so that we can see our actions more clearly.
We can ask God to animate our desire, to ruffle our complacency.
Maybe we tumble to the floor with the rest of the religious establishment when Jesus pulls the rug out, but in God’s grace we can get up and open ourselves to the possibility that God is more than what we have experienced before….
So that takes us to Rug number 2.
Rug number 2 is definitely a subtext in this discourse between Jesus and the chief priests. They are going back and forth about who God sends – John the Baptist, Jesus and who God welcomes into the kingdom – prostitutes and tax collectors ahead of the chief priests and elders…. clarity on who God sends and who God welcomes bring clarity to who exactly God is.
What Jesus laid out in his story about the two sons is as unsettling to us as it was to the chief priests because we thought we knew who God is. But come to find out, God isn’t setting up a bouncer to check for Presbyterian id’s in the narthex. God’s going around to the alley, inviting the woman who’s slept in the doorway to come get a good seat upfront.
Jesus is challenging us to take another look at who we assume God to be – maybe God has given up coin collecting. Maybe the terrain has changed and our GPS is out of date.
I’m not saying that the character of God is inconsistent. I am not saying that God’s waffling on the issues – voting for the war, now against the war….
We need to keep a hold of our experiences with God – AND we need to cultivate openness to new experiences with God.
September 21, 2008
August 24, 2008 + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Matthew 16:13-20
MP3 File
Since the third grade I have wrestled with allergies. Every time the Santa Ana winds blow my eyes turn red and swell, my throat itches and my chest tightens. I feel like my symptoms have been well documented and I know most of what triggers my allergies, but my search for relief has taken me into uncharted territory.
I’ve taken all kinds of medication – Allerest, Sudafed, Claritin. I’ve swallowed handsfull of horsepills at prescribed intervals, eaten raw horseradish with lemon, drank evil smelling juices. I’ve done yoga, acupressure, sputtered through endless attempts at neti pot washes. Each potential cure has its own point of view on the root of my symptoms and the treatment I need.
I find myself guarded when people ask me about them. I feel vulnerable wrapping words around my search for a healing that has proved to be so elusive. I’d rather not stumble through explaining myself why I think Claritin has failed me and why I’m exploring my blocked energy channels. I’d rather wait until its over, until I can assess privately my success or failure.
I think the disciples were in a similar position. They were living out a hope by following Jesus that had never been successfully done before. Sure there had been other itinerant teachers and prophets anointed by God with sizeable followings, but there had also been hustlers and frauds and who was to say which group Jesus belonged to. Every time it seemed clear that Jesus was sent from God, he would break outside the bounds of religious decorum and his identity was again questionable.
The disciples struggled to keep up with Jesus – to understand what was really going on. Of course they are not going to understand everything the first time around. The Bible gives us many instances of the disciples asking for clarification, in private, for what exactly Jesus meant by a particular parable. Sometimes it seems ridiculous, like in the verses before today’s reading in Matthew, Jesus gives an extended discourse on warning the disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and they walk away thinking that Jesus was frustrated because someone forgot to bring the bread.
So I imagine that the disciples were relieved in this particular Q & A time with Jesus that he is just requesting the latest results from the polls – Who do people say that I am?
You can hear the collective sigh of relief, this is easy. The disciples were eager and perky, glad to contribute what they had heard – the answers came like popcorn popping - some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, one of the prophets….the disciples didn’t have to analyze what was being said, they only were being called upon to report it. This is a good thing, because, as I read it, I don’t think that the disciples really knew who Jesus was – of course they were committed to Jesus, they had left home, work, families to follow him. And I imagine what had transpired during the course of their three years together was the closest thing to God that they had ever experienced – and yet, Jesus was so outside any categories that had ever been created – how can you put words to that? It was too soon for a systematic messianic Christology.
Just about every culture yearns for a Messiah. We long for someone to rescue us from the human condition. We pin our hopes on so many disappointing characters. There isn’t much reliable information about how exactly to identify a true Messiah. There is no bank of Messiah fingerprints to match, no DNA samples to compare.
In his book the Yiddish Policemans Union, Michael Chabon plays with a Jewish concept of messiah –the tzaddik Ha-Dor. The idea is that in each generation God sends a potential messiah – a righteous one, but it is a function of the fullness of time, whether or not that person is called out to fulfill the job description. Mendel, the alleged messiah character leads a life of contradiction – intellectually brilliant, addicted to heroin, able to heal others, but not himself. The other characters in the book see in Mendel what they are looking for – the sick see a healer, politicians see a leader the people will embrace. People project onto the messiah the ability to save them from what they fear the most. Messiah is an illusive category, easily hijacked by those with misdirected agendas.
So the disciples are all about giving the latest poll results and Jesus turns the tables on them – and in verse 15 asks - “so who do you say that I am?”
– Now there is a small space before verse 16 starts with Simon Peter’s answer, but in the actual moment, I feel certain that there was a long, tension filled silence. Eyes scanned the floor for lost paper clips, shoes are inspected for scuffs and signs of wear.
Who do you say that I am?
Jesus always set the bar high for the disciples, and with all of his being, Simon Peter wanted to meet Jesus’ expectations. He knew that there were many wrong answers to Jesus’ question and very few correct ones. He desperately wanted to say the right thing and yet he didn’t know how to put words around what he knew to be true.
How do you condense this life time of living he had experienced in the short months he had been with Jesus ?– the twisted limbs miraculously straightened, his heart so burning with life in those conversations that trailed late into the night under the canopy of stars, the tense encounters with religious leaders and the way Jesus had of making a way when nothing seemed to be possible, bread multiplied to feed a crowd of hungry people – how do you boil that down into a simple answer – who do you say that I am? Its not like the air conditioned calm of choosing between "a" or "c" on the SAT exam.
Its more like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. That scene when he’s in the cave with all of the chalices and the challenge is that he has to choose the true “holy grail”, the cup that Jesus had used in the last supper (go with me, I know that this is fiction –but this really gets at the emotional truth). The stakes are high, If he chooses wrong, he dies, if he chooses right he will live forever. So his eyes are drawn to the bejeweled cups, the elaborate ones fit for a King, God’s anointed one, the messiah …but he’s unsure and a the wrong choice will cost him is life...and then at the last minute he remembers Jesus’ humble roots and he guesses the unlikely common cup and in the same instant he reaches for it and lives.
So that’s where Peter is, in that small space between verse 15 and verse 16. He’s on the edge of the precipice, his sandals scattering small stones tumbling into nothingness. His heart pounding. The vacant wind sweeping across the blank canvass of his mind as he desperately searches for words. And then the response comes to him, the wild hope takes on flesh, dry scattered bones leap from the valley floor alive and well. – Who do you say that I am? you are the Messiah!
In that moment an eternity of joy and understanding opened up between Peter and Jesus and the Kingdom of God broke in and Peter could see the exquisite fullness of God’s love and sorrow.
"Blessed are you Simon Peter! You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church."
We need a little help to get in on the play on words that Matthew renders in the Greek. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book The Seeds of Heaven, lays it out quite nicely. You are Petros and on this petra I will build my church. It’s the same word that he uses twice, the masculine and then the feminine form of the word for “rock” – but there is a subtle difference in the two – Petros – the name that Jesus gives Peter, means stone or pebble, a small piece of a larger rock, while petra means a boulder, a great big rock. So that makes Peter a chip off the old block, a piece of the rock, against which the powers of death shall not prevail.
What good news! I love that Jesus says that he will build the church on that earnest, big hearted, bumbling, impulsive disciple. Reading snatches of the bible each Sunday its easy to miss out on the character development within the text. Peter is a piece of work – what ever he does he does with gusto, but he gets it right about half the time …
Remember he’s the one that when the disciples were adrift in the stormy sea and Jesus comes walking on the water, Peter’s the one who steps out of the boat to walk toward Jesus – notice he’s the only disciple willing to leave the boat. Then he takes his eyes off of Jesus and then falters and starts to sink.
Peter’s the one who later boasts that he would never deny Jesus and then finds himself by the fire trying to stay close to Jesus (again we need to note that the other disciples are long gone) but there he is saying he doesn’t know the first thing about this man Jesus.
One thing you can say about Peter is that he is in the game; granted his execution of the details is sketchy, but his heart is 100% engaged. That is the person Jesus calls out as the foundation of the church; now if you read ahead to next week's text, you’ll find Peter going off in the wrong direction and Jesus calling him a stumbling block (a nickname can really turn against a person!). But even for his inconsistency, Peter is not discarded. He has pushed past what he knows for sure and is willing to step into the hope that Jesus has ignited in his heart.
We should take note that Jesus celebrates Peter for his response, but Jesus names the fact that it didn’t come out of Peter, but that it was “revealed by God in heaven”. Jesus knows that Peter didn’t give his answer out of what he knew for sure – like me filling out the forms in the doctor's office. Allergies? Well that is easy to answer from my experience, I know that list by heart - cats, dogs, pollen dust mold… Peter didn’t say – “You are the messiah” because that was what he had learned to say in Sunday School. No, when he said “you’re the Messiah", Peter, beyond what he knew for certain, was giving voice to the hope that he held, he gave voice to the truth he had received in his spirit.
As a church, Peter’s response to Jesus is our heritage, its our faith community’s DNA. And yet, sitting in this cathedral dripping of established religion, gathered in this space where the architecture suggested that faith in God is manageable and that the ways to God are well charted and known – look around at the stories of our faith laid out in tidy outlines of colored glass, what could be more predictable and knowable? Here in this place Peter’s legacy strikes a dissonant chord.
Ironically, today’s passage in Matthew is in a similar juxtaposition. Its preceded by Matthew’s account of Jesus railing against the Sadducees and Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day. In Luke, Jesus had said that these religious leaders were actually hindering people who were seeking to enter the Kingdom of God because of the way that they taught God’s laws. Jesus was accusing them of being gatekeepers who were mis-using the law to keep people out.
So after critiquing the religious establishment, Jesus says that Peter is now going to be holding the keys to the kingdom. That’s the kind of gatekeeper that I would hope for. Some one who has tried and gotten it all wrong and tried again would certainly be the one I would want to meet at the pearly gates.
Jesus’ declaration that Peter will be living out heaven’s desire speaks volumes. It underscores that Jesus’s church is built on a foundation of a willingness to push past what is known for certain and reach out to what is hoped for.
Before living in LA, I was working in youth ministry with Young Life. Each summer we would take teens to camp and there would always be a ropes course, (Launa Prince knows all about these). This particular one at a camp called Windy Gap, was set about 30 feet up in the air, a series of platforms attached to the tall trunks of pine trees, connected by a variety of rope webs, tight ropes, rope ladders. The hardest part for me was always the exit – you come to the last platform, 30 feet up and there was no apparent way down. Just a trapeze hanging about 6 feet away from the platform. The idea was to jump, catch the trapeze with your hands and then hanging from the trapeze you’d get lowered to the ground (before anyone calls Young Life to protest, it wasn’t possible to free fall to the ground, there was a safety rope on each person’s harness that would keep them from falling) Somehow that safety line information was not helpful as I would stand, year after year on that platform, terrified. Knowing in my head the way down was to leap out over the emptiness to grab the bar, all the while my feet craving contact with the platform. It was terrifying.
Being a fairly short person, I never was able to reach the trapeze. Year after year, my fingertips would brush the bar and I’d fall a few feet before the safety line jerked me to a stop. I’d bask in the rush of grace of that safety line as they slowly let me down to the forest floor.
Fifteen years later, its not so much the leap that I’ve taken away as my faith lesson, but the safety line. That’s where I know God’s grace with all of my being – and there are plenty of times, aside from the foolish proposition of jumping off of platforms 30 feet up in trees, times when I stumble, or am tackled, or when I try to do too much at once, there are plenty of times when I fall, but that safety line of grace is always there. And just like Peter, who was never rejected for his mis-steps, but always, that line of grace came through for him. Remember, how the Gospel of John tells us about Jesus and Peter, in that morning on the other side of the resurrection, sharing breakfast on the beach, Peter saturated with the shame of his denial and Jesus offering restoration and grace?
That’s the foundation that Jesus declares the church will have.
Not the foundation of the Sadducees and Pharisees, with a multiplicity of rules and laws that keep people out of the kingdom.
Rather a foundation of living out of a center of love, of action, of falling short, of receiving instruction and guidance, of trying again and again and again. A foundation that doesn’t require having all the answers, but does require a willingness to receive an unexpected answer.
So as we take our inheritance and try to live out the fullness of our DNA – as we seek to be the gathered people of God, a chip off the old block – how do we make sure that we have it right? How do we make sure that we aren’t so busy trying to find a messiah that fits our need of the moment that we follow the wrong one? How do leave enough room for God’s spirit to guide us in our uncertainty without opening ourselves up to the possibility that we get it all wrong? How do we keep an open mind without having our brain fall out?
We are right up on that platform, 30 feet up. Six feet of open space and that trapeze bar swinging gently in the breeze. Our body craves the solid platform, we crave the clear delineation of the stained glass – right and wrong, holy and profane, messiah and false prophet. And yet….
Our heart knows what Peter felt that day, we feel the surge of God’s truth, but it's never manageable enough to put in categories, it's never solid enough to grab onto. We know that the only way to keep going is to leap off the platform, to receive the spirit’s prompt, to act on what we hope for. Maybe we’ll miss the bar, well, we’ll probably miss the bar. But hear the Good News, God’s grace abounds, God’s grace will catch us, nourish us, and guide us. Like Peter we need to keep our hearts 100% in the game, guided by the hope and the love that walking with Jesus has kindled in our hearts. Amen.
MP3 File
Since the third grade I have wrestled with allergies. Every time the Santa Ana winds blow my eyes turn red and swell, my throat itches and my chest tightens. I feel like my symptoms have been well documented and I know most of what triggers my allergies, but my search for relief has taken me into uncharted territory.
I’ve taken all kinds of medication – Allerest, Sudafed, Claritin. I’ve swallowed handsfull of horsepills at prescribed intervals, eaten raw horseradish with lemon, drank evil smelling juices. I’ve done yoga, acupressure, sputtered through endless attempts at neti pot washes. Each potential cure has its own point of view on the root of my symptoms and the treatment I need.
I find myself guarded when people ask me about them. I feel vulnerable wrapping words around my search for a healing that has proved to be so elusive. I’d rather not stumble through explaining myself why I think Claritin has failed me and why I’m exploring my blocked energy channels. I’d rather wait until its over, until I can assess privately my success or failure.
I think the disciples were in a similar position. They were living out a hope by following Jesus that had never been successfully done before. Sure there had been other itinerant teachers and prophets anointed by God with sizeable followings, but there had also been hustlers and frauds and who was to say which group Jesus belonged to. Every time it seemed clear that Jesus was sent from God, he would break outside the bounds of religious decorum and his identity was again questionable.
The disciples struggled to keep up with Jesus – to understand what was really going on. Of course they are not going to understand everything the first time around. The Bible gives us many instances of the disciples asking for clarification, in private, for what exactly Jesus meant by a particular parable. Sometimes it seems ridiculous, like in the verses before today’s reading in Matthew, Jesus gives an extended discourse on warning the disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and they walk away thinking that Jesus was frustrated because someone forgot to bring the bread.
So I imagine that the disciples were relieved in this particular Q & A time with Jesus that he is just requesting the latest results from the polls – Who do people say that I am?
You can hear the collective sigh of relief, this is easy. The disciples were eager and perky, glad to contribute what they had heard – the answers came like popcorn popping - some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, one of the prophets….the disciples didn’t have to analyze what was being said, they only were being called upon to report it. This is a good thing, because, as I read it, I don’t think that the disciples really knew who Jesus was – of course they were committed to Jesus, they had left home, work, families to follow him. And I imagine what had transpired during the course of their three years together was the closest thing to God that they had ever experienced – and yet, Jesus was so outside any categories that had ever been created – how can you put words to that? It was too soon for a systematic messianic Christology.
Just about every culture yearns for a Messiah. We long for someone to rescue us from the human condition. We pin our hopes on so many disappointing characters. There isn’t much reliable information about how exactly to identify a true Messiah. There is no bank of Messiah fingerprints to match, no DNA samples to compare.
In his book the Yiddish Policemans Union, Michael Chabon plays with a Jewish concept of messiah –the tzaddik Ha-Dor. The idea is that in each generation God sends a potential messiah – a righteous one, but it is a function of the fullness of time, whether or not that person is called out to fulfill the job description. Mendel, the alleged messiah character leads a life of contradiction – intellectually brilliant, addicted to heroin, able to heal others, but not himself. The other characters in the book see in Mendel what they are looking for – the sick see a healer, politicians see a leader the people will embrace. People project onto the messiah the ability to save them from what they fear the most. Messiah is an illusive category, easily hijacked by those with misdirected agendas.
So the disciples are all about giving the latest poll results and Jesus turns the tables on them – and in verse 15 asks - “so who do you say that I am?”
– Now there is a small space before verse 16 starts with Simon Peter’s answer, but in the actual moment, I feel certain that there was a long, tension filled silence. Eyes scanned the floor for lost paper clips, shoes are inspected for scuffs and signs of wear.
Who do you say that I am?
Jesus always set the bar high for the disciples, and with all of his being, Simon Peter wanted to meet Jesus’ expectations. He knew that there were many wrong answers to Jesus’ question and very few correct ones. He desperately wanted to say the right thing and yet he didn’t know how to put words around what he knew to be true.
How do you condense this life time of living he had experienced in the short months he had been with Jesus ?– the twisted limbs miraculously straightened, his heart so burning with life in those conversations that trailed late into the night under the canopy of stars, the tense encounters with religious leaders and the way Jesus had of making a way when nothing seemed to be possible, bread multiplied to feed a crowd of hungry people – how do you boil that down into a simple answer – who do you say that I am? Its not like the air conditioned calm of choosing between "a" or "c" on the SAT exam.
Its more like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. That scene when he’s in the cave with all of the chalices and the challenge is that he has to choose the true “holy grail”, the cup that Jesus had used in the last supper (go with me, I know that this is fiction –but this really gets at the emotional truth). The stakes are high, If he chooses wrong, he dies, if he chooses right he will live forever. So his eyes are drawn to the bejeweled cups, the elaborate ones fit for a King, God’s anointed one, the messiah …but he’s unsure and a the wrong choice will cost him is life...and then at the last minute he remembers Jesus’ humble roots and he guesses the unlikely common cup and in the same instant he reaches for it and lives.
So that’s where Peter is, in that small space between verse 15 and verse 16. He’s on the edge of the precipice, his sandals scattering small stones tumbling into nothingness. His heart pounding. The vacant wind sweeping across the blank canvass of his mind as he desperately searches for words. And then the response comes to him, the wild hope takes on flesh, dry scattered bones leap from the valley floor alive and well. – Who do you say that I am? you are the Messiah!
In that moment an eternity of joy and understanding opened up between Peter and Jesus and the Kingdom of God broke in and Peter could see the exquisite fullness of God’s love and sorrow.
"Blessed are you Simon Peter! You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church."
We need a little help to get in on the play on words that Matthew renders in the Greek. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book The Seeds of Heaven, lays it out quite nicely. You are Petros and on this petra I will build my church. It’s the same word that he uses twice, the masculine and then the feminine form of the word for “rock” – but there is a subtle difference in the two – Petros – the name that Jesus gives Peter, means stone or pebble, a small piece of a larger rock, while petra means a boulder, a great big rock. So that makes Peter a chip off the old block, a piece of the rock, against which the powers of death shall not prevail.
What good news! I love that Jesus says that he will build the church on that earnest, big hearted, bumbling, impulsive disciple. Reading snatches of the bible each Sunday its easy to miss out on the character development within the text. Peter is a piece of work – what ever he does he does with gusto, but he gets it right about half the time …
Remember he’s the one that when the disciples were adrift in the stormy sea and Jesus comes walking on the water, Peter’s the one who steps out of the boat to walk toward Jesus – notice he’s the only disciple willing to leave the boat. Then he takes his eyes off of Jesus and then falters and starts to sink.
Peter’s the one who later boasts that he would never deny Jesus and then finds himself by the fire trying to stay close to Jesus (again we need to note that the other disciples are long gone) but there he is saying he doesn’t know the first thing about this man Jesus.
One thing you can say about Peter is that he is in the game; granted his execution of the details is sketchy, but his heart is 100% engaged. That is the person Jesus calls out as the foundation of the church; now if you read ahead to next week's text, you’ll find Peter going off in the wrong direction and Jesus calling him a stumbling block (a nickname can really turn against a person!). But even for his inconsistency, Peter is not discarded. He has pushed past what he knows for sure and is willing to step into the hope that Jesus has ignited in his heart.
We should take note that Jesus celebrates Peter for his response, but Jesus names the fact that it didn’t come out of Peter, but that it was “revealed by God in heaven”. Jesus knows that Peter didn’t give his answer out of what he knew for sure – like me filling out the forms in the doctor's office. Allergies? Well that is easy to answer from my experience, I know that list by heart - cats, dogs, pollen dust mold… Peter didn’t say – “You are the messiah” because that was what he had learned to say in Sunday School. No, when he said “you’re the Messiah", Peter, beyond what he knew for certain, was giving voice to the hope that he held, he gave voice to the truth he had received in his spirit.
As a church, Peter’s response to Jesus is our heritage, its our faith community’s DNA. And yet, sitting in this cathedral dripping of established religion, gathered in this space where the architecture suggested that faith in God is manageable and that the ways to God are well charted and known – look around at the stories of our faith laid out in tidy outlines of colored glass, what could be more predictable and knowable? Here in this place Peter’s legacy strikes a dissonant chord.
Ironically, today’s passage in Matthew is in a similar juxtaposition. Its preceded by Matthew’s account of Jesus railing against the Sadducees and Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day. In Luke, Jesus had said that these religious leaders were actually hindering people who were seeking to enter the Kingdom of God because of the way that they taught God’s laws. Jesus was accusing them of being gatekeepers who were mis-using the law to keep people out.
So after critiquing the religious establishment, Jesus says that Peter is now going to be holding the keys to the kingdom. That’s the kind of gatekeeper that I would hope for. Some one who has tried and gotten it all wrong and tried again would certainly be the one I would want to meet at the pearly gates.
Jesus’ declaration that Peter will be living out heaven’s desire speaks volumes. It underscores that Jesus’s church is built on a foundation of a willingness to push past what is known for certain and reach out to what is hoped for.
Before living in LA, I was working in youth ministry with Young Life. Each summer we would take teens to camp and there would always be a ropes course, (Launa Prince knows all about these). This particular one at a camp called Windy Gap, was set about 30 feet up in the air, a series of platforms attached to the tall trunks of pine trees, connected by a variety of rope webs, tight ropes, rope ladders. The hardest part for me was always the exit – you come to the last platform, 30 feet up and there was no apparent way down. Just a trapeze hanging about 6 feet away from the platform. The idea was to jump, catch the trapeze with your hands and then hanging from the trapeze you’d get lowered to the ground (before anyone calls Young Life to protest, it wasn’t possible to free fall to the ground, there was a safety rope on each person’s harness that would keep them from falling) Somehow that safety line information was not helpful as I would stand, year after year on that platform, terrified. Knowing in my head the way down was to leap out over the emptiness to grab the bar, all the while my feet craving contact with the platform. It was terrifying.
Being a fairly short person, I never was able to reach the trapeze. Year after year, my fingertips would brush the bar and I’d fall a few feet before the safety line jerked me to a stop. I’d bask in the rush of grace of that safety line as they slowly let me down to the forest floor.
Fifteen years later, its not so much the leap that I’ve taken away as my faith lesson, but the safety line. That’s where I know God’s grace with all of my being – and there are plenty of times, aside from the foolish proposition of jumping off of platforms 30 feet up in trees, times when I stumble, or am tackled, or when I try to do too much at once, there are plenty of times when I fall, but that safety line of grace is always there. And just like Peter, who was never rejected for his mis-steps, but always, that line of grace came through for him. Remember, how the Gospel of John tells us about Jesus and Peter, in that morning on the other side of the resurrection, sharing breakfast on the beach, Peter saturated with the shame of his denial and Jesus offering restoration and grace?
That’s the foundation that Jesus declares the church will have.
Not the foundation of the Sadducees and Pharisees, with a multiplicity of rules and laws that keep people out of the kingdom.
Rather a foundation of living out of a center of love, of action, of falling short, of receiving instruction and guidance, of trying again and again and again. A foundation that doesn’t require having all the answers, but does require a willingness to receive an unexpected answer.
So as we take our inheritance and try to live out the fullness of our DNA – as we seek to be the gathered people of God, a chip off the old block – how do we make sure that we have it right? How do we make sure that we aren’t so busy trying to find a messiah that fits our need of the moment that we follow the wrong one? How do leave enough room for God’s spirit to guide us in our uncertainty without opening ourselves up to the possibility that we get it all wrong? How do we keep an open mind without having our brain fall out?
We are right up on that platform, 30 feet up. Six feet of open space and that trapeze bar swinging gently in the breeze. Our body craves the solid platform, we crave the clear delineation of the stained glass – right and wrong, holy and profane, messiah and false prophet. And yet….
Our heart knows what Peter felt that day, we feel the surge of God’s truth, but it's never manageable enough to put in categories, it's never solid enough to grab onto. We know that the only way to keep going is to leap off the platform, to receive the spirit’s prompt, to act on what we hope for. Maybe we’ll miss the bar, well, we’ll probably miss the bar. But hear the Good News, God’s grace abounds, God’s grace will catch us, nourish us, and guide us. Like Peter we need to keep our hearts 100% in the game, guided by the hope and the love that walking with Jesus has kindled in our hearts. Amen.
August 18, 2008
June 25, 2008
June 8, 2008 + Infectious Holiness + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
MP3 File
In this text we get a series of rapid fire vignettes – each one is nice on its own – Jesus calling Matthew the disciple, Jesus healing the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, and Jesus restoring life to a 12 year old girl. Each encounter is worthy of its own sermon – yet today I want us to look at what they mean as they sit together in the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Because as we take them as a whole, a theme emerges. Matthew is teaching us about Jesus’ understanding of holiness.
So in this sermon about holiness – I want to start with infection – disease – this will come in very helpful in just a bit,
How do you feel when the person before you in line at the buffet sneezes over the food? Or the person behind you in line coughs so hard that your hair moves and you feel the mist of it on the back of your neck? Or when your co-worker’s eyes are red and weeping puss and she says, oh this pink eye again! Can I borrow your cell phone?
As a society we have some common understandings about how illness is transferred. Germs thriving on a door handle, bacteria suspended in the air from a sneeze. Usually our response to curtail the spread of the disease is quarantine. Our strategy is to isolate the infection to stem the spread. So you miss a day of work or your kid stays home from school. As we order our life together in community, we agree that the inconvenience of the individual is better than the pandemic sweeping through the whole collective.
Over the years different communities have believed different things about what exactly is contagious. In hindsight they might seem so silly, but when its our strategy that we believe to be true we know it on every level of our being.
At one point the night air was thought to be responsible for malaria – so mothers closed the windows at night, and only a few years ago, it was believed that HIV/AIDS could be caught from just being close to some one with the disease, so those who were stricken with it were shunned. Fear of illness and sickness works at more than just the rational level – I remember when my brother-in-law was in his last round battling cancer. He was swollen and his skin had turned yellow, he was coughing for breath and it was all because of the cancer in his body, but I still felt a catch in my stomach about letting my kids draw near to him. Death was hovering so close, it frightened me and I wanted to protect my kids.
Keep this body awareness with you as we enter today’s text.
In Jesus’ day, the prevailing attitude about holiness was that it was in need of constant protection – like the boy in a bubble with out an immune system - holiness was forever using hand sanitizer, opening bathroom doors with her elbows, never eating out in restaurants, keeping her toothbrush six feet from the toilet. There were all kinds of laws and customs that sought to protect personal and corporate holiness. These laws didn’t hover on the edge of life, they saturated every aspect – what people ate, how they prepared food, who they ate with, where they worked what they did, who they were friends with, who they spoke to, bought from, sold to….
So Matthew gives us these three pictures of Jesus in action and together they give us the heart of how Jesus understood holiness - the power and person of God. To the early readers of the Gospel – people who had internalized the myriad of holiness laws, as they read today’s text, its as though Jesus is licking the hand rail on the subway stairs.
In the first story, Jesus is calling Matthew, the tax collector to be a disciple. We know the story so well it can be hard to feel the shock of it – Jesus is not at the Harvard Divinity School Job Fair looking for fresh, spiritual leaders for his movement. No! Jesus is trolling for disciples at the tollbooth?
In the Bible tax collectors are often grouped with sinners and prostitutes and gentiles – not the best of company, certainly not the holiest. The reason was that they were the front line of the Roman occupation – they occupied the place in daily life where people were regularly confronted with the humiliation and burden of the Roman occupation. Already in Israel, there was a temple tax on basically everything. When Rome invaded and occupied Israel, they added another layer of tax on basically everything and then some. The tax collectors worked in sort of a franchise arrangement, where they had to pay Rome the basic taxes they collected, but anything that they could get over and above was theirs to keep. Obviously this created a system rife with corruption and extortion. So as the average working person came up to the toll booth and had to surrender another 10% of the value of the goods they were bringing to market, they had a fair amount of bitterness and suspicion that they were getting robbed, sort of like how we’re feeling these days at the gas pump. A tax collector was considered unclean because they represented the political power that was recklessly disregarding the Temple, the law, and in fact God.
So Jesus befriends this Tax collector, calls him to be a disciple, and again, take note, Jesus is NOT taking Matthew as a diamond in the rough, he is not saying, oh Matthew, you’ve got so much spiritual potential, let me take you away from this terrible life and get you cleaned up and holy-ed up. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, putting it all behind her. Jesus and the other disciples actually go to Matthew’s house and attend a dinner party – eating and drinking with all of Mathew’s tax collector, sinner friends, laughing at their irreverent jokes. They get to see Matthew close up – noting his quirky taste for expensive Merlot and his extensive collection of Bionic Man posters, his love for life and his generous heart. Jesus is embracing the whole of who Matthew is…
The next two pictures Matthew gives us are interwoven. The leader of the local synagogue comes to Jesus and tells him that his daughter has just died, and asks Jesus to bring her back to life.
That’s a big ask! – not only in the bring back from death respect, but in Jewish law, to touch the dead was a HUGE breach of the purity code. Holy people didn’t rub shoulders with the dead and dying. By touching a dead person, Jesus would be putting his own cleanliness, his own holiness at risk.
So the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and asks him to go lay hands on his daughter it’s a very bold request. And Jesus doesn’t dodge it – let’s go! He says. Its pretty shocking that he said yes and a group of people went along to see what would happen.
In the middle of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman worked her way up to Jesus and touched the tassel of his cloak. Again, a HUGE breach of the purity code. Women who were bleeding – menstruating or hemorrhaging, were not supposed to circulate socially. Her move to get close to Jesus was also very bold. And again Jesus doesn’t dodge her - he stops right there in the street (he could have just chalked it up to someone stealing a healing from him) – who touched me? And then Go my daughter! Your faith has made you well.
Have you seen the man with the oozing wound in his leg, and he’s sitting by the side of the off ramp at Crenshaw? He’s older, clearly in need of medical care – so we give him some change and then go when the light turns green. Or we write a check to help AIDS orphans in Africa or we cast a vote for immigrant rights. All good things, all good, AND that is not what Jesus is doing here – he is not saying you are healed now go back to where ever it was you said that you came from and let me get on with my holy man agenda – he is saying My Daughter – he sees her as a beloved child of God, not an outcast.
Here is the big reveal that Matthew has for us – Jesus’ understanding of holiness runs counter to the prevailing attitude. For Jesus it’s not the sin that is contagious, its holiness that is contagious. He understood that holiness possesses a transforming power over uncleanliness.
When he is answering the Pharisee’s critique for his affiliation with Matthew, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea as he describes what God is after “I want mercy not sacrifice”. This is a bit cryptic to our ears
On one hand we have sacrifice - Sacrifice was the means of restoring relationship under the purity laws. Once holiness had been threatened, sacrifice was what was done to remedy the situation – like antibiotics getting pumped in by an IV.
Sacrifice was the prescribed way of maintaining holiness and purity. A system of tithes and offerings that prescribed how to right a wrong and restore the purity. Like every system, it could become an end in and of it self and could be hijacked to perpetuate the very wrongs it was supposed to condemn.
Mercy, “hesed” on the other hand, which is also translated, compassion, comes from the Hebrew root for womb – The mercy and compassion, the love that I have for the one in my womb. Mercy is what God desires.
Because God is compassionate, forgiving, accepting, nourishing of both the righteous and the sinner – the rain falls and the sun shines on everyone, because God accepted them, God’s people were supposed to go and do likewise.
Jesus understood that holiness and purity were infectious, contagious and transformative - this freed him up to include those people who had been excluded and quarantined under the purity laws.
So he goes to the home of the dead child and touches her and restores her to life. And the bleeding woman touches him and is healed and ends 12 years of isolation and he takes the disciples over to Matthew the tax collector’s house and they get to meet his tax collector friends.
So you’re thinking the take away from this morning’s sermon is – let bleeding women touch you, its ok to touch dead people, and have a tax collector over for dinner. Pretty manageable and pretty irrelevant, I don’t know any tax collectors, and honestly, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about them.
As we seek to live into this passage, the edge comes when we start to dig around to find out who our modern day our tax collectors are. Who are the people that we as a society marginalize for the good of all concerned? I imagine that there might be some general categories of people that would be hard to bring into our community – people who kill, people to harm others. Ed was telling me that smokers get a fair amount of hazing across the board…The edge comes into stark focus when we factor in our individual experiences.
– So a person who has been falsely charged, arrested, and thrown in jail reaching out to a police officer?
– Or a person who grew up with a father who abused alcohol and sent the family into financial crisis reaching out to a drunk who was doing the same to their family?
How to we embrace those people who represent the things and people who have wounded us the most?? How do we extend “hesed”/ compassion?
At one level it is beyond complicated how we work through our own wounds to reach out to others – it takes all the wisdom and strength God can give us.
At another level – it is the most straightforward thing. We know we need to do it, so we start by doing what we can – we put a coin in the man’s cup, we hold our tongue instead of lashing out with venomous words, we beg God to change our heart, change the situation, to and then we come back the next day and see what it is that is in our power to do.
Matthew is telling us that Jesus operated as though holiness was contagious and in its embrace what was broken is transformed and made whole. Jesus didn’t huddle inside his holy apartment with the security bars on the windows and six deadbolts on the door. He opened it all up – with reckless, divine love.
Jesus is saying, I am going to embrace sin when I find it with a bear hug of holiness. I am going to surround it with the transforming power of God’s purity.
So when Jesus walks up to us as we are sitting at the tax collector booth, and he strikes up a conversation with us – we can trust that he isn’t the kind of guy who is going to date with an agenda to change who we are, he’s not going to constantly be nagging and fixated on all the ways that we fall short.
But he comes to us, celebrating who we are – a child of God, and in his genuine embrace what is broken in us becomes healed, what is unclean is made pure, and we become more fully who God created us to be. And we move from our place on the edges to a seat at the table, a place in God’s family.
MP3 File
In this text we get a series of rapid fire vignettes – each one is nice on its own – Jesus calling Matthew the disciple, Jesus healing the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, and Jesus restoring life to a 12 year old girl. Each encounter is worthy of its own sermon – yet today I want us to look at what they mean as they sit together in the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Because as we take them as a whole, a theme emerges. Matthew is teaching us about Jesus’ understanding of holiness.
So in this sermon about holiness – I want to start with infection – disease – this will come in very helpful in just a bit,
How do you feel when the person before you in line at the buffet sneezes over the food? Or the person behind you in line coughs so hard that your hair moves and you feel the mist of it on the back of your neck? Or when your co-worker’s eyes are red and weeping puss and she says, oh this pink eye again! Can I borrow your cell phone?
As a society we have some common understandings about how illness is transferred. Germs thriving on a door handle, bacteria suspended in the air from a sneeze. Usually our response to curtail the spread of the disease is quarantine. Our strategy is to isolate the infection to stem the spread. So you miss a day of work or your kid stays home from school. As we order our life together in community, we agree that the inconvenience of the individual is better than the pandemic sweeping through the whole collective.
Over the years different communities have believed different things about what exactly is contagious. In hindsight they might seem so silly, but when its our strategy that we believe to be true we know it on every level of our being.
At one point the night air was thought to be responsible for malaria – so mothers closed the windows at night, and only a few years ago, it was believed that HIV/AIDS could be caught from just being close to some one with the disease, so those who were stricken with it were shunned. Fear of illness and sickness works at more than just the rational level – I remember when my brother-in-law was in his last round battling cancer. He was swollen and his skin had turned yellow, he was coughing for breath and it was all because of the cancer in his body, but I still felt a catch in my stomach about letting my kids draw near to him. Death was hovering so close, it frightened me and I wanted to protect my kids.
Keep this body awareness with you as we enter today’s text.
In Jesus’ day, the prevailing attitude about holiness was that it was in need of constant protection – like the boy in a bubble with out an immune system - holiness was forever using hand sanitizer, opening bathroom doors with her elbows, never eating out in restaurants, keeping her toothbrush six feet from the toilet. There were all kinds of laws and customs that sought to protect personal and corporate holiness. These laws didn’t hover on the edge of life, they saturated every aspect – what people ate, how they prepared food, who they ate with, where they worked what they did, who they were friends with, who they spoke to, bought from, sold to….
So Matthew gives us these three pictures of Jesus in action and together they give us the heart of how Jesus understood holiness - the power and person of God. To the early readers of the Gospel – people who had internalized the myriad of holiness laws, as they read today’s text, its as though Jesus is licking the hand rail on the subway stairs.
In the first story, Jesus is calling Matthew, the tax collector to be a disciple. We know the story so well it can be hard to feel the shock of it – Jesus is not at the Harvard Divinity School Job Fair looking for fresh, spiritual leaders for his movement. No! Jesus is trolling for disciples at the tollbooth?
In the Bible tax collectors are often grouped with sinners and prostitutes and gentiles – not the best of company, certainly not the holiest. The reason was that they were the front line of the Roman occupation – they occupied the place in daily life where people were regularly confronted with the humiliation and burden of the Roman occupation. Already in Israel, there was a temple tax on basically everything. When Rome invaded and occupied Israel, they added another layer of tax on basically everything and then some. The tax collectors worked in sort of a franchise arrangement, where they had to pay Rome the basic taxes they collected, but anything that they could get over and above was theirs to keep. Obviously this created a system rife with corruption and extortion. So as the average working person came up to the toll booth and had to surrender another 10% of the value of the goods they were bringing to market, they had a fair amount of bitterness and suspicion that they were getting robbed, sort of like how we’re feeling these days at the gas pump. A tax collector was considered unclean because they represented the political power that was recklessly disregarding the Temple, the law, and in fact God.
So Jesus befriends this Tax collector, calls him to be a disciple, and again, take note, Jesus is NOT taking Matthew as a diamond in the rough, he is not saying, oh Matthew, you’ve got so much spiritual potential, let me take you away from this terrible life and get you cleaned up and holy-ed up. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, putting it all behind her. Jesus and the other disciples actually go to Matthew’s house and attend a dinner party – eating and drinking with all of Mathew’s tax collector, sinner friends, laughing at their irreverent jokes. They get to see Matthew close up – noting his quirky taste for expensive Merlot and his extensive collection of Bionic Man posters, his love for life and his generous heart. Jesus is embracing the whole of who Matthew is…
The next two pictures Matthew gives us are interwoven. The leader of the local synagogue comes to Jesus and tells him that his daughter has just died, and asks Jesus to bring her back to life.
That’s a big ask! – not only in the bring back from death respect, but in Jewish law, to touch the dead was a HUGE breach of the purity code. Holy people didn’t rub shoulders with the dead and dying. By touching a dead person, Jesus would be putting his own cleanliness, his own holiness at risk.
So the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and asks him to go lay hands on his daughter it’s a very bold request. And Jesus doesn’t dodge it – let’s go! He says. Its pretty shocking that he said yes and a group of people went along to see what would happen.
In the middle of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman worked her way up to Jesus and touched the tassel of his cloak. Again, a HUGE breach of the purity code. Women who were bleeding – menstruating or hemorrhaging, were not supposed to circulate socially. Her move to get close to Jesus was also very bold. And again Jesus doesn’t dodge her - he stops right there in the street (he could have just chalked it up to someone stealing a healing from him) – who touched me? And then Go my daughter! Your faith has made you well.
Have you seen the man with the oozing wound in his leg, and he’s sitting by the side of the off ramp at Crenshaw? He’s older, clearly in need of medical care – so we give him some change and then go when the light turns green. Or we write a check to help AIDS orphans in Africa or we cast a vote for immigrant rights. All good things, all good, AND that is not what Jesus is doing here – he is not saying you are healed now go back to where ever it was you said that you came from and let me get on with my holy man agenda – he is saying My Daughter – he sees her as a beloved child of God, not an outcast.
Here is the big reveal that Matthew has for us – Jesus’ understanding of holiness runs counter to the prevailing attitude. For Jesus it’s not the sin that is contagious, its holiness that is contagious. He understood that holiness possesses a transforming power over uncleanliness.
When he is answering the Pharisee’s critique for his affiliation with Matthew, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea as he describes what God is after “I want mercy not sacrifice”. This is a bit cryptic to our ears
On one hand we have sacrifice - Sacrifice was the means of restoring relationship under the purity laws. Once holiness had been threatened, sacrifice was what was done to remedy the situation – like antibiotics getting pumped in by an IV.
Sacrifice was the prescribed way of maintaining holiness and purity. A system of tithes and offerings that prescribed how to right a wrong and restore the purity. Like every system, it could become an end in and of it self and could be hijacked to perpetuate the very wrongs it was supposed to condemn.
Mercy, “hesed” on the other hand, which is also translated, compassion, comes from the Hebrew root for womb – The mercy and compassion, the love that I have for the one in my womb. Mercy is what God desires.
Because God is compassionate, forgiving, accepting, nourishing of both the righteous and the sinner – the rain falls and the sun shines on everyone, because God accepted them, God’s people were supposed to go and do likewise.
Jesus understood that holiness and purity were infectious, contagious and transformative - this freed him up to include those people who had been excluded and quarantined under the purity laws.
So he goes to the home of the dead child and touches her and restores her to life. And the bleeding woman touches him and is healed and ends 12 years of isolation and he takes the disciples over to Matthew the tax collector’s house and they get to meet his tax collector friends.
So you’re thinking the take away from this morning’s sermon is – let bleeding women touch you, its ok to touch dead people, and have a tax collector over for dinner. Pretty manageable and pretty irrelevant, I don’t know any tax collectors, and honestly, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about them.
As we seek to live into this passage, the edge comes when we start to dig around to find out who our modern day our tax collectors are. Who are the people that we as a society marginalize for the good of all concerned? I imagine that there might be some general categories of people that would be hard to bring into our community – people who kill, people to harm others. Ed was telling me that smokers get a fair amount of hazing across the board…The edge comes into stark focus when we factor in our individual experiences.
– So a person who has been falsely charged, arrested, and thrown in jail reaching out to a police officer?
– Or a person who grew up with a father who abused alcohol and sent the family into financial crisis reaching out to a drunk who was doing the same to their family?
How to we embrace those people who represent the things and people who have wounded us the most?? How do we extend “hesed”/ compassion?
At one level it is beyond complicated how we work through our own wounds to reach out to others – it takes all the wisdom and strength God can give us.
At another level – it is the most straightforward thing. We know we need to do it, so we start by doing what we can – we put a coin in the man’s cup, we hold our tongue instead of lashing out with venomous words, we beg God to change our heart, change the situation, to and then we come back the next day and see what it is that is in our power to do.
Matthew is telling us that Jesus operated as though holiness was contagious and in its embrace what was broken is transformed and made whole. Jesus didn’t huddle inside his holy apartment with the security bars on the windows and six deadbolts on the door. He opened it all up – with reckless, divine love.
Jesus is saying, I am going to embrace sin when I find it with a bear hug of holiness. I am going to surround it with the transforming power of God’s purity.
So when Jesus walks up to us as we are sitting at the tax collector booth, and he strikes up a conversation with us – we can trust that he isn’t the kind of guy who is going to date with an agenda to change who we are, he’s not going to constantly be nagging and fixated on all the ways that we fall short.
But he comes to us, celebrating who we are – a child of God, and in his genuine embrace what is broken in us becomes healed, what is unclean is made pure, and we become more fully who God created us to be. And we move from our place on the edges to a seat at the table, a place in God’s family.
April 28, 2008
April 13, 2008 - Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Acts 2:42-47
MP3 File
I want to give you some context for today’s scripture reading. Its from the Book of Acts. We understand Acts to have been written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. In the opening verses of both books the author dedicates the work to Theophilus – “Lover of God” – scholars speculate that this was a believer who wanted to know more about the first hand accounts of Jesus’ life and the life of the early church. In Luke we learn about Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection and in Acts we get the next installment about what comes after the resurrection - how a minority religion from a tiny outpost in the empire, crossed the sea to Rome, the capitol.
In the opening chapters of Acts come a flurry of snapshots: I picture the dramatic vignettes rendered by the master oil painters in 16th century Europe
When I lived in Florida I belonged to a ministry called Single Purpose which was all about faith in action. This passage reminds me of the earnest and dreamy reports that team members would give upon returning home from Single Purpose mission trips. I participated in one such trip to a deaf school in Port au Prince, Haiti. On the trip we had rearranged our selves considerably, leaving behind our suburban north American lifestyle (more or less) and for the 10 days of the trip we ate rice and beans for every meal, took cold water showers, we wore what we thought were more culturally sensitive clothes (looking at the pictures it was an unfortunate combination of madras plaid and peasant dresses)- but all of these “inconveniences” went uncounted, because the joy of what we were doing and sharing with the people that we met was intoxicating.
I would say that today’s reading very closely describes the experience in the community that was created for those 10 days when we lived with the students at the deaf school in Port au Prince.
Now, almost 19 years later, the glow has faded. And when it does – it calls into question the veracity of the experience – was that just a phase? – just my visit-the developing-world-wearing-frumpy-cotton-dresses phase? – or was that the moment watershed moment, walking barefoot on the Haitian beach, when my whole world shifted on its axis and I was awash in freedom to live life in a way that mattered to God?
Coming to this passage so many years after it was written, we push past the words on the page and try to read between the lines – we ask the author in a private whisper, so what are you really saying? To include this description of what the community of faith was like in the early days makes me wonder if this was different that what the community of faith was like for Theophilus and his friends, the first readers of Acts. Were they reading this passage saying – “oh, that’s just like how we do it! That must be why we share everything” ? or were they like us. Hmmm, that’s pretty intense. Nice.
The scene that is described is lovely and it would make a nice painting. And if we want to leave it there we can. But If we are taking the bible as the LIVING word of God, then we need to push past nice art. We need to discern where the invitation for change and growth is. In light of that, we should get our gut reactions out on the table.
One part of us LOVES it. We love the adrenalin rush of the mountain top! We want our life to be saturated with meaning and purpose and purity of intent. We want to be a part of a community where wonders and signs regularly proclaim God’s presence and love, we want to be open and generous with our resources, we want to have a glad and generous heart, we want to be in on such an exciting thing that God would do.
Remember the TV show, Fantasy Island. The premise was that this man Mr. Rourke had the ability to allow people to live out their fantasies. So they would take a little prop plane to his tropical island and he would insert them into a “real life” experience of their fantasy and then at the end of each episode pretty much everyone came out of their fantasy and was glad to go home to real life, with the benefit of insights gleaned from learning that they didn’t really want that fantasy after all.
So if I was going to Fantasy Island, I’d write the check to Mr. Rourke and have him send me into that exquisite moment in time. Set the dial or what ever he did to Acts 2:42-47. Living with the apostles, signs and wonders, sharing what I had, getting what I needed. But then, like everyone who ever went to Fantasy Island, I imagine that I would come to know that its not being born at the wrong time that blocks my membership in the early church, its resistance within me….so here’s something else that I need to put on the table.
When I read this passage, a part of me pulls back.
I like my stuff. I like having control of my resources. 10% tithing is fine, but I resist giving up the other 90%
So, we’ve got some reactions out on the table, let’s check in with the text – what was the author of Acts trying to tell us about the early community of faith? is this meant as descriptive or prescriptive?
Descriptive?
Like a postcard from vacationing grandparents – the weather has been lovely, we visited this church, they have sold their possessions and share the proceeds with the people who need it, they have glad and generous hearts, the church is growing, wish you were here, love gramps and gran.
Descriptive in that this is how they worked it out – loving God, living a life that created space for growth, that gave witness to that love in their life. Descriptive - it's helpful for you to know how someone else did it so you can work it out in your own way.
OR instead of descriptive is this text meant as a prescriptive?
This is how they did it and therefore if you want to be authentic Christians, this is what you should do too. Prescribing a formula: X+Y+share your processions + pray and break bread with hearts full of gladness = authentic Christian community.
This can hook us in a bit, because as North Americans we are charmed with the idea of an authentic original pure experience. We’ll pay a premium for “Heirloom” varieties of tomatoes, jeans that are new, but distressed to appear worn. We think that if we can just get back to the bedrock experience, we can grasp with uncluttered purity the truest essence. We elevate and romanticize the past, thinking we need to check out of who we are in order to get back to who be who we were created to be.
So there’s our tension. We can trust that God created and called us to live in LA in 2008. AND when we read this text we can identify how our experience is different. In that tension is where we can experience the Living in the Bible is the Living word of God. Life, growth, movement are all predicated on tension – tension between what is and what could be, what should be, what might be.
Navigating the tension, navigating the living word of God takes the wisdom of the whole community. For me, the most powerful GPS system is the narratives of the faith community. It’s the stories of our life together that guide us, that remind us of who we are and where we want to go and how to get there.
When we reflect on the past, we can press our hands onto the touchstones of where God has been close as our every breath. I’m sure you each have your own vignettes that pop up in your minds eye – I see the faces aglow in the circle of candles as we gathered at 7th and Berendo to mourn the death of the man who shot. Lucy offering the weary thanksgiving basket team quesadillas giving them energy receive the hungry families who had come, Naomi taking on paramedic when he tried to treat a member of Immanuel like a stray dog. These stories from our past stretch all the way back to the dreamy account in Acts. We too are part of that conversation, we too are a part of that community. These stories guide us and pull and push us along to be the gathered people of God that we aspire to be.
We are not only who we have been in the past, we are also very much in the present. When pause to narrate our present, we have the opportunity to see where we stand. Have you ever caught your reflection and been surprised at what you see. You didn’t know about the brocolli caught in your teeth or hadn’t realized the weight that you’ve lost? The reflection gives us the opportunity to see ourselves from another’s perspective - we gain a sense of where we stand. Narrative theory calls this creating a reflecting surface – laying out the experiences of our present life, and as we narrate them to each other around our community, these stories become a reflecting surface in which we better know who we are.
Again, living things can’t stay locked in the past or frozen in the present, to live means to grow and stretch and change. Yet its when we tell the stories about what is yet to come, we can get a little wacky. Sometimes what we say we want and what we choose in our daily life diverge so significantly that the narrative around the future is just fiction. Yet, narrating what we as a community want the future to hold can move us closer to it being reality.
Now, I have what might be the world’s tightest hip joints. I can wiggle my way into most yoga postures. BUT the ones that require any flexibility in the hip/hamstring area, FORGET it! The instructor will be inviting people to rest their foreheads on the floor and I am just able to get my nose out over my thighs. Keep breathing and hold your intention, the instructor tells me, just by intending to fold my body out over my knees, my hips release a bit. Its like that with our future. If we see that we aren’t living the reality of the Act’s community and we see that that is where God is calling us, then holding that intention can open up all kinds of possible movement. Our intentions are born from the narratives that emerge when we gather to imagine who we are becoming as God’s people. Immanuel, like every faith community that is seeking to live into God’s call, is stretching to understand, to embrace, to be authentic. We are pushing our selves, what does it mean to welcome everyone – not just on paper, but in our life together? So we breath, we hold our intentions and we see where God opens up new possibility, new understanding, in short, new life.
So if the author of Luke and Acts wanted to go for a trilogy, what would get communicated to dear Theophilus about us? Would the description be glowing and dewy? What would an outsider see in us? What do we know to be true about ourselves? What has kept us from being our fullest expression of God’s love?
Its hard work to have these conversations – to share the stories with candor and compassion. And yet, once we have been to the mountaintop, or walked on the beach and felt our world shift on its axis, even when the glow fades, there really is no turning back.
MP3 File
I want to give you some context for today’s scripture reading. Its from the Book of Acts. We understand Acts to have been written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. In the opening verses of both books the author dedicates the work to Theophilus – “Lover of God” – scholars speculate that this was a believer who wanted to know more about the first hand accounts of Jesus’ life and the life of the early church. In Luke we learn about Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection and in Acts we get the next installment about what comes after the resurrection - how a minority religion from a tiny outpost in the empire, crossed the sea to Rome, the capitol.
In the opening chapters of Acts come a flurry of snapshots: I picture the dramatic vignettes rendered by the master oil painters in 16th century Europe
· the disciples huddling to draw lots to decide who to choose to replace JudasThen, in today’s reading, we come to this account of life in the early days of the church describing how people who had been drawn to the message that Jesus had carried to the disciples were living. The passage carries a fresh dewy innocence. "they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. They were together and had all things in common." This passage is an account of the early, earnest uncertain days after Jesus’ death and resurrection. So many things had been turned upside down, people couldn’t imagine what God would do next.
· the Holy Spirit rushing through the house where the disciples have been hiding out and tongues of fire resting on them and then the cacophony as the whole place erupted with languages from around the world,
· Peter's speech to the skeptical crowd, and the turning of their hearts and the explosive growth in the disciples' community.
When I lived in Florida I belonged to a ministry called Single Purpose which was all about faith in action. This passage reminds me of the earnest and dreamy reports that team members would give upon returning home from Single Purpose mission trips. I participated in one such trip to a deaf school in Port au Prince, Haiti. On the trip we had rearranged our selves considerably, leaving behind our suburban north American lifestyle (more or less) and for the 10 days of the trip we ate rice and beans for every meal, took cold water showers, we wore what we thought were more culturally sensitive clothes (looking at the pictures it was an unfortunate combination of madras plaid and peasant dresses)- but all of these “inconveniences” went uncounted, because the joy of what we were doing and sharing with the people that we met was intoxicating.
I would say that today’s reading very closely describes the experience in the community that was created for those 10 days when we lived with the students at the deaf school in Port au Prince.
Now, almost 19 years later, the glow has faded. And when it does – it calls into question the veracity of the experience – was that just a phase? – just my visit-the developing-world-wearing-frumpy-cotton-dresses phase? – or was that the moment watershed moment, walking barefoot on the Haitian beach, when my whole world shifted on its axis and I was awash in freedom to live life in a way that mattered to God?
Coming to this passage so many years after it was written, we push past the words on the page and try to read between the lines – we ask the author in a private whisper, so what are you really saying? To include this description of what the community of faith was like in the early days makes me wonder if this was different that what the community of faith was like for Theophilus and his friends, the first readers of Acts. Were they reading this passage saying – “oh, that’s just like how we do it! That must be why we share everything” ? or were they like us. Hmmm, that’s pretty intense. Nice.
The scene that is described is lovely and it would make a nice painting. And if we want to leave it there we can. But If we are taking the bible as the LIVING word of God, then we need to push past nice art. We need to discern where the invitation for change and growth is. In light of that, we should get our gut reactions out on the table.
One part of us LOVES it. We love the adrenalin rush of the mountain top! We want our life to be saturated with meaning and purpose and purity of intent. We want to be a part of a community where wonders and signs regularly proclaim God’s presence and love, we want to be open and generous with our resources, we want to have a glad and generous heart, we want to be in on such an exciting thing that God would do.
Remember the TV show, Fantasy Island. The premise was that this man Mr. Rourke had the ability to allow people to live out their fantasies. So they would take a little prop plane to his tropical island and he would insert them into a “real life” experience of their fantasy and then at the end of each episode pretty much everyone came out of their fantasy and was glad to go home to real life, with the benefit of insights gleaned from learning that they didn’t really want that fantasy after all.
So if I was going to Fantasy Island, I’d write the check to Mr. Rourke and have him send me into that exquisite moment in time. Set the dial or what ever he did to Acts 2:42-47. Living with the apostles, signs and wonders, sharing what I had, getting what I needed. But then, like everyone who ever went to Fantasy Island, I imagine that I would come to know that its not being born at the wrong time that blocks my membership in the early church, its resistance within me….so here’s something else that I need to put on the table.
When I read this passage, a part of me pulls back.
I like my stuff. I like having control of my resources. 10% tithing is fine, but I resist giving up the other 90%
So, we’ve got some reactions out on the table, let’s check in with the text – what was the author of Acts trying to tell us about the early community of faith? is this meant as descriptive or prescriptive?
Descriptive?
Like a postcard from vacationing grandparents – the weather has been lovely, we visited this church, they have sold their possessions and share the proceeds with the people who need it, they have glad and generous hearts, the church is growing, wish you were here, love gramps and gran.
Descriptive in that this is how they worked it out – loving God, living a life that created space for growth, that gave witness to that love in their life. Descriptive - it's helpful for you to know how someone else did it so you can work it out in your own way.
OR instead of descriptive is this text meant as a prescriptive?
This is how they did it and therefore if you want to be authentic Christians, this is what you should do too. Prescribing a formula: X+Y+share your processions + pray and break bread with hearts full of gladness = authentic Christian community.
This can hook us in a bit, because as North Americans we are charmed with the idea of an authentic original pure experience. We’ll pay a premium for “Heirloom” varieties of tomatoes, jeans that are new, but distressed to appear worn. We think that if we can just get back to the bedrock experience, we can grasp with uncluttered purity the truest essence. We elevate and romanticize the past, thinking we need to check out of who we are in order to get back to who be who we were created to be.
So there’s our tension. We can trust that God created and called us to live in LA in 2008. AND when we read this text we can identify how our experience is different. In that tension is where we can experience the Living in the Bible is the Living word of God. Life, growth, movement are all predicated on tension – tension between what is and what could be, what should be, what might be.
Navigating the tension, navigating the living word of God takes the wisdom of the whole community. For me, the most powerful GPS system is the narratives of the faith community. It’s the stories of our life together that guide us, that remind us of who we are and where we want to go and how to get there.
When we reflect on the past, we can press our hands onto the touchstones of where God has been close as our every breath. I’m sure you each have your own vignettes that pop up in your minds eye – I see the faces aglow in the circle of candles as we gathered at 7th and Berendo to mourn the death of the man who shot. Lucy offering the weary thanksgiving basket team quesadillas giving them energy receive the hungry families who had come, Naomi taking on paramedic when he tried to treat a member of Immanuel like a stray dog. These stories from our past stretch all the way back to the dreamy account in Acts. We too are part of that conversation, we too are a part of that community. These stories guide us and pull and push us along to be the gathered people of God that we aspire to be.
We are not only who we have been in the past, we are also very much in the present. When pause to narrate our present, we have the opportunity to see where we stand. Have you ever caught your reflection and been surprised at what you see. You didn’t know about the brocolli caught in your teeth or hadn’t realized the weight that you’ve lost? The reflection gives us the opportunity to see ourselves from another’s perspective - we gain a sense of where we stand. Narrative theory calls this creating a reflecting surface – laying out the experiences of our present life, and as we narrate them to each other around our community, these stories become a reflecting surface in which we better know who we are.
Again, living things can’t stay locked in the past or frozen in the present, to live means to grow and stretch and change. Yet its when we tell the stories about what is yet to come, we can get a little wacky. Sometimes what we say we want and what we choose in our daily life diverge so significantly that the narrative around the future is just fiction. Yet, narrating what we as a community want the future to hold can move us closer to it being reality.
Now, I have what might be the world’s tightest hip joints. I can wiggle my way into most yoga postures. BUT the ones that require any flexibility in the hip/hamstring area, FORGET it! The instructor will be inviting people to rest their foreheads on the floor and I am just able to get my nose out over my thighs. Keep breathing and hold your intention, the instructor tells me, just by intending to fold my body out over my knees, my hips release a bit. Its like that with our future. If we see that we aren’t living the reality of the Act’s community and we see that that is where God is calling us, then holding that intention can open up all kinds of possible movement. Our intentions are born from the narratives that emerge when we gather to imagine who we are becoming as God’s people. Immanuel, like every faith community that is seeking to live into God’s call, is stretching to understand, to embrace, to be authentic. We are pushing our selves, what does it mean to welcome everyone – not just on paper, but in our life together? So we breath, we hold our intentions and we see where God opens up new possibility, new understanding, in short, new life.
So if the author of Luke and Acts wanted to go for a trilogy, what would get communicated to dear Theophilus about us? Would the description be glowing and dewy? What would an outsider see in us? What do we know to be true about ourselves? What has kept us from being our fullest expression of God’s love?
Its hard work to have these conversations – to share the stories with candor and compassion. And yet, once we have been to the mountaintop, or walked on the beach and felt our world shift on its axis, even when the glow fades, there really is no turning back.
April 1, 2008
February 17, 2008 - Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
John 3:1-16
MP3 File
We meet Nicodemus the Pharisee at night and he is so the crusty rigid character from the romantic comedy stock plots that I love so much. Just think Harrison Ford as the stoic older brother in the remake of Sabrina or Meg Ryan as the rigid heroine in French Kiss…Nicodemus comes to call on Jesus cloaked in formality, reeking of the good ole boy network. He knows the rules of the religious game, he’s invested is whole life into living and promoting them. He is comfortably ensconced in the establishment.
But we should be careful here, because John is intentional in telling us that Nicodemus is not just a stiff suit. While he has certainly become entrenched in his worldview, at his core, he loves the God he worships. As he sat in his place of privilege and power, he has seen the healings, he has reviewed Jesus’ teachings, and his heart has caught scent of the God who had knit him together in his mother’s womb.
He wanted to know more, but it’s embarrassing when you are the expert witness to admit that need, so he came under the cover of darkness. And again to give Nic the respect that he deserves, he addresses Jesus as a peer – Rabbi; we know that you are a teacher from God.
Now, I imagine that Nic was expecting Jesus to return the collegial favor, to acknowledge with respect, the Pharisaic tradition and commitment to living a life that pleased God and I imagine that Nic expected Jesus to invite him to sip some brandy and smoke a cigar have a seat in the leather armchairs by a crackling fire, engage in a lively debate about the intricacies of the law and what God desires from us. He knew that as a leader of the Pharisees he was already driving the Lexus SUV of spirituality, but he was hoping that Jesus would bestow on him a sticker for the carpool lane.
Well that whole fantasy screeched to a stop when Jesus replies to Nic’s amiable greeting by questioning Nic’s credentials – your Pharisee Club card means nothing, -no one has eyes to see the presence of God if they haven’t been “born from above”.
Now, just an exegetical note here. The original Greek in the Gospel of John is deceptively simple. Grammatically its pretty straightforward, but John is a poet who loves drama and he works in overarching themes of light and dark, he uses words loaded with double meaning…A lot of it gets squished out in the translation. For example, here, born from above also means born a second time. When reading John it’s a good policy to keep all the meanings in the mix as we seek to understand the text.
So Nic is probably sputtering a bit, but he’s come this far and he knows that he can spar with the best of them, so he takes the bait, but only half of it, Born again? To crawl back in to my mother’s womb? Is that the only way someone can come into God’s presence? Impossible – physically impossible!
Jesus pushes back, he puts both aspects back on the table, yes, a rebirth at every level – no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.
Another double meaning from John, Spirit, which could be understood as the wind on a blustery day or spirit/breath of God.
Nic is on to Jesus by this point, so which do you mean - spirit like wind? Or spirit like holy Spirit of God?
Jesus says, yes that’s exactly what I mean.
God is utterly out of your sphere of influence. There is no way to earn a place in God’s presence. There is not a sacrifice that buys God’s good will. There isn’t even a map for how to get to God. It’s only a birth that can bring you into God’s presence.
It’s fascinating to me that Jesus invokes the birth image – we begin life in such comfort. Our mother’s womb providing all the warmth, nourishment, and safety that we need. And then when our growth is completed, violent contractions break the waters of our little world and thrust us through a very small opening into a cold, hostile place. Yet until we leave our mother’s womb we are unable to grow into the beings that God created us to be. So at all of the levels of the meaning for ‘water’ – the water of the semen, or the water of the amniotic fluid or the waters of our baptism – to be born of water is a transformation that ushers in the possibility of new life and growth.
By definition, we pass through the birth canal with nothing, everything is stripped away and we enter the world a pure and concentrated version of the whole of who we were created to be. Nicodemus has come to Jesus that night with his hands and heart gripping the security of his title, his spiritual accomplishments, and his position of privilege with God and people.
You’ve got to surrender it all, Jesus is telling him, because those things that you are holding on to do nothing to help you know God. It’s all about surrendering your self to the unpredictable, dependable love of God. The wind blows where it chooses.
By this time its dawning on Nic that the brandy and cigars aren’t going to materialize and his curiosity has been worn a bit threadbare by Jesus’ declarations. “How can this be?”
“How can it not be? Replies Jesus, you are a teacher of Israel, you should know this!"
Then the fire lit room fades and Jesus turns to face the wider community (I told you that John was a poet) “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
For the earlier readers of the Gospel of John, this was something less of a jump than it is for us. They were all familiar with the Old Testament story recorded in the book of Numbers when the Israelites had been out wandering in the dessert, they were frustrated about the delayed entry into the promised land, they were sick and tired of manna, manna, manna. They started whining to Moses, whining to God about the lack of water and no good food and God sent poisonous snakes and the Bible tells us that the snakes bit the people and many of them died. So, they came to their senses and repented – “we were wrong to speak against God, and against you.” Please pray that God will take the snakes away.
So it's interesting, God didn’t take away the snakes, but instead God instructed Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, and anyone who got a snake bite, could look at the bronze snake and they would live. Jewish tradition reflected extensively on this passage and come to understand it to mean that the bronze snake didn’t have a venom-warding magic in and of itself, rather, the bronze snake reminded the people of God’s presence with them and that presence is what brought them healing and life.
Jesus is explaining how he fits in to the picture. He too will be lifted up as a reminder of God’s grace filled presence. And in looking to him, we will find our salvation – we will find our healing.
So, to play out the parallel, Jesus is not saying that all will be predictable and manageable once we are born again/from above, once we are born of water, wind and spirit. God didn’t take away the poisonous snakes and God isn’t going to sort out the dangers and challenges in life on this side of the womb. But, Jesus says, I am the living proof that God has come to dwell among you. When you lay your eyes on me, you can remember that God is walking with you and will come into your life with zero % predictability but 100% reliability.
It’s just like the movie genre I love so dearly. The crusty older brother in Sabrina and the rigid obsessive girlfriend in French Kiss find themselves with an invitation to live their lives with a new freedom. The rules and structure, which they clung to for protection and guidance, are rendered useless in the face of the turbulent birth canal of love. So they chose to take the uncharted path, setting aside the map, they are guided by a new sense of who they were created to be.
We’re right there with good ole’ Nicodemus, expecting a “well done, old chap” from Jesus. True, we are less locked in to the religious laws of the Pharisees, but we cling (maybe unconsciously) to our own rules about what wins God’s love and gets us a back stage pass. We’re pretty sure about whom God wants in the White House. We know what vocabulary to use to be sure that we are registered as “good people”. We go to church, we know where to sit and when to stand – we are so much on the inside, we can’t imagine being on the outside.
It’s a surprise when Jesus discounts our credibility and says that we need to set it all aside and be transformed by the love that created us. And that it’s all beyond our ability to control or manipulate it.
Getting born isn’t something that babies seek, they just know its time, and certainly the mother doesn’t have the final word in the birth process either. As people seeking God, how do we get reborn?
It’s entering into the process where what we see as protecting us gets stripped away and in that new vulnerability we find our selves securely rooted in God.
It’s a little like going through security at LAX. In the roped off line waiting to go through, you snake back and forth through the line, some people in suits with matching bags, tourists in flip flops shockingly underdressed for the winter weather, snowbirds with passport pouches around their necks. But then, right before the metal detector, everyone casts off their baggage, shoes, coats, laptops, their identity. Everyone passes through the narrow arch with socking feet and empty hands. Just who they are. A little like being born.
The Gospel of John doesn’t tell us what Nic decided to do. We don’t know if he went back to his life as usual, or if he left his encounter with Jesus and lived differently? It’s an open question.
Jesus is telling us in this morning’s text that it is all out of our control (the wind blows were it chooses). Yet, that doesn’t mean that we are off the hook. To be born again, to be born from above, to be born of water, spirit, wind…takes some intentionality. how do we seek God’s presence? How do we receive new birth? What are we clinging to so tightly that we can’t fit through the birth canal? It parses out differently for each of us, but with reflection we can begin to name those things that we grasp so tightly imagining that they will entitle us to a place with God. And after we name them, we can work on setting them aside.
Those are all questions to take home with us. In the meantime,
Seek out those who are recently born. Gaze into their little newborn faces and see their trust in you, the wholeness of who they are wrapped up in a little bundle. Know that when God’s eyes fall upon your face, God receives you into God’s heart of infinite love.
Amen.
MP3 File
We meet Nicodemus the Pharisee at night and he is so the crusty rigid character from the romantic comedy stock plots that I love so much. Just think Harrison Ford as the stoic older brother in the remake of Sabrina or Meg Ryan as the rigid heroine in French Kiss…Nicodemus comes to call on Jesus cloaked in formality, reeking of the good ole boy network. He knows the rules of the religious game, he’s invested is whole life into living and promoting them. He is comfortably ensconced in the establishment.
But we should be careful here, because John is intentional in telling us that Nicodemus is not just a stiff suit. While he has certainly become entrenched in his worldview, at his core, he loves the God he worships. As he sat in his place of privilege and power, he has seen the healings, he has reviewed Jesus’ teachings, and his heart has caught scent of the God who had knit him together in his mother’s womb.
He wanted to know more, but it’s embarrassing when you are the expert witness to admit that need, so he came under the cover of darkness. And again to give Nic the respect that he deserves, he addresses Jesus as a peer – Rabbi; we know that you are a teacher from God.
Now, I imagine that Nic was expecting Jesus to return the collegial favor, to acknowledge with respect, the Pharisaic tradition and commitment to living a life that pleased God and I imagine that Nic expected Jesus to invite him to sip some brandy and smoke a cigar have a seat in the leather armchairs by a crackling fire, engage in a lively debate about the intricacies of the law and what God desires from us. He knew that as a leader of the Pharisees he was already driving the Lexus SUV of spirituality, but he was hoping that Jesus would bestow on him a sticker for the carpool lane.
Well that whole fantasy screeched to a stop when Jesus replies to Nic’s amiable greeting by questioning Nic’s credentials – your Pharisee Club card means nothing, -no one has eyes to see the presence of God if they haven’t been “born from above”.
Now, just an exegetical note here. The original Greek in the Gospel of John is deceptively simple. Grammatically its pretty straightforward, but John is a poet who loves drama and he works in overarching themes of light and dark, he uses words loaded with double meaning…A lot of it gets squished out in the translation. For example, here, born from above also means born a second time. When reading John it’s a good policy to keep all the meanings in the mix as we seek to understand the text.
So Nic is probably sputtering a bit, but he’s come this far and he knows that he can spar with the best of them, so he takes the bait, but only half of it, Born again? To crawl back in to my mother’s womb? Is that the only way someone can come into God’s presence? Impossible – physically impossible!
Jesus pushes back, he puts both aspects back on the table, yes, a rebirth at every level – no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.
Another double meaning from John, Spirit, which could be understood as the wind on a blustery day or spirit/breath of God.
Nic is on to Jesus by this point, so which do you mean - spirit like wind? Or spirit like holy Spirit of God?
Jesus says, yes that’s exactly what I mean.
God is utterly out of your sphere of influence. There is no way to earn a place in God’s presence. There is not a sacrifice that buys God’s good will. There isn’t even a map for how to get to God. It’s only a birth that can bring you into God’s presence.
It’s fascinating to me that Jesus invokes the birth image – we begin life in such comfort. Our mother’s womb providing all the warmth, nourishment, and safety that we need. And then when our growth is completed, violent contractions break the waters of our little world and thrust us through a very small opening into a cold, hostile place. Yet until we leave our mother’s womb we are unable to grow into the beings that God created us to be. So at all of the levels of the meaning for ‘water’ – the water of the semen, or the water of the amniotic fluid or the waters of our baptism – to be born of water is a transformation that ushers in the possibility of new life and growth.
By definition, we pass through the birth canal with nothing, everything is stripped away and we enter the world a pure and concentrated version of the whole of who we were created to be. Nicodemus has come to Jesus that night with his hands and heart gripping the security of his title, his spiritual accomplishments, and his position of privilege with God and people.
You’ve got to surrender it all, Jesus is telling him, because those things that you are holding on to do nothing to help you know God. It’s all about surrendering your self to the unpredictable, dependable love of God. The wind blows where it chooses.
By this time its dawning on Nic that the brandy and cigars aren’t going to materialize and his curiosity has been worn a bit threadbare by Jesus’ declarations. “How can this be?”
“How can it not be? Replies Jesus, you are a teacher of Israel, you should know this!"
Then the fire lit room fades and Jesus turns to face the wider community (I told you that John was a poet) “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
For the earlier readers of the Gospel of John, this was something less of a jump than it is for us. They were all familiar with the Old Testament story recorded in the book of Numbers when the Israelites had been out wandering in the dessert, they were frustrated about the delayed entry into the promised land, they were sick and tired of manna, manna, manna. They started whining to Moses, whining to God about the lack of water and no good food and God sent poisonous snakes and the Bible tells us that the snakes bit the people and many of them died. So, they came to their senses and repented – “we were wrong to speak against God, and against you.” Please pray that God will take the snakes away.
So it's interesting, God didn’t take away the snakes, but instead God instructed Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, and anyone who got a snake bite, could look at the bronze snake and they would live. Jewish tradition reflected extensively on this passage and come to understand it to mean that the bronze snake didn’t have a venom-warding magic in and of itself, rather, the bronze snake reminded the people of God’s presence with them and that presence is what brought them healing and life.
Jesus is explaining how he fits in to the picture. He too will be lifted up as a reminder of God’s grace filled presence. And in looking to him, we will find our salvation – we will find our healing.
So, to play out the parallel, Jesus is not saying that all will be predictable and manageable once we are born again/from above, once we are born of water, wind and spirit. God didn’t take away the poisonous snakes and God isn’t going to sort out the dangers and challenges in life on this side of the womb. But, Jesus says, I am the living proof that God has come to dwell among you. When you lay your eyes on me, you can remember that God is walking with you and will come into your life with zero % predictability but 100% reliability.
It’s just like the movie genre I love so dearly. The crusty older brother in Sabrina and the rigid obsessive girlfriend in French Kiss find themselves with an invitation to live their lives with a new freedom. The rules and structure, which they clung to for protection and guidance, are rendered useless in the face of the turbulent birth canal of love. So they chose to take the uncharted path, setting aside the map, they are guided by a new sense of who they were created to be.
We’re right there with good ole’ Nicodemus, expecting a “well done, old chap” from Jesus. True, we are less locked in to the religious laws of the Pharisees, but we cling (maybe unconsciously) to our own rules about what wins God’s love and gets us a back stage pass. We’re pretty sure about whom God wants in the White House. We know what vocabulary to use to be sure that we are registered as “good people”. We go to church, we know where to sit and when to stand – we are so much on the inside, we can’t imagine being on the outside.
It’s a surprise when Jesus discounts our credibility and says that we need to set it all aside and be transformed by the love that created us. And that it’s all beyond our ability to control or manipulate it.
Getting born isn’t something that babies seek, they just know its time, and certainly the mother doesn’t have the final word in the birth process either. As people seeking God, how do we get reborn?
It’s entering into the process where what we see as protecting us gets stripped away and in that new vulnerability we find our selves securely rooted in God.
It’s a little like going through security at LAX. In the roped off line waiting to go through, you snake back and forth through the line, some people in suits with matching bags, tourists in flip flops shockingly underdressed for the winter weather, snowbirds with passport pouches around their necks. But then, right before the metal detector, everyone casts off their baggage, shoes, coats, laptops, their identity. Everyone passes through the narrow arch with socking feet and empty hands. Just who they are. A little like being born.
The Gospel of John doesn’t tell us what Nic decided to do. We don’t know if he went back to his life as usual, or if he left his encounter with Jesus and lived differently? It’s an open question.
Jesus is telling us in this morning’s text that it is all out of our control (the wind blows were it chooses). Yet, that doesn’t mean that we are off the hook. To be born again, to be born from above, to be born of water, spirit, wind…takes some intentionality. how do we seek God’s presence? How do we receive new birth? What are we clinging to so tightly that we can’t fit through the birth canal? It parses out differently for each of us, but with reflection we can begin to name those things that we grasp so tightly imagining that they will entitle us to a place with God. And after we name them, we can work on setting them aside.
Those are all questions to take home with us. In the meantime,
Seek out those who are recently born. Gaze into their little newborn faces and see their trust in you, the wholeness of who they are wrapped up in a little bundle. Know that when God’s eyes fall upon your face, God receives you into God’s heart of infinite love.
Amen.
January 26, 2008
December 24, 2007 - Peace - Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger." Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about." So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.So what does the peace that the angels are singing about, what does this peace look like? Is it like a Christmas Card?
On the Christmas cards that I get, it all looks pretty nice, stars unfurled in the balmy night sky, angels soaring and proclaiming the glad tidings. We can be easily misled into thinking that God’s peace comes when all is right with the world, children are well fed, workers earn a fair wage, all war has ceased, when all is well, then the angels will unfurl their wings and take to the heavens and our hearts will soar as we resonate with the good news that God’s peace has come….
But when I read the gospels, the peace that Jesus brings has a different tone. Yes, it resonates with my core, yes, it clearly comes from God, but it is so contrary to convention and expectation that it is difficult to recognize it.
To the woman who had been working in the sex industry, who scandalized the host of a fancy dinner party when she came in and kissed Jesus’ feet and poured out perfume on him while the grilled salmon was served – to her Jesus said “your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you, go in peace.” (Luke 7:50)
To the woman who had been cast out for 12 years because her bleeding made her ritually unclean, when she joined the crowd and dared to reach out for Jesus’ coat. The instant her fingers touched the hem – she felt the bleeding stop, Jesus felt the power go out from him. He called her out from the crowd and assured “daughter, your faith has healed you, Go in peace.” (Luke 8:48)
To the disciples who had fled into hiding, huddled in grief, bewildered by Jesus’ arrest, terrified by his brutal death on the cross, Jesus came and stood among them and said “feel my wounds, - peace be with you” (Luke 24:36)
That’s how peace comes in the Gospels. It comes in the middle of difficulty. It comes in the middle of excruciating hope and longing, it comes when things are as far from being perfect as we can imagine. Thank God.
Thank God that we don’t have to wait for perfection for God’s peace to break into our world.
So tonight, in the glow of the candles, As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, As we carry our hope for his speedy return, let us seek out the peace that the Gospel describes.
Let us join the angels in their joyful chorus and sing the good news in the most unlikely of places:
sing to the woman whose pastor refused to bury her life partner;
sing to the day laborer waiting in the rain for work;
sing to the mother holding her feverish child in the ER;
let us find ways to sing the good news with the whole of our lives—what we say, what we do, where we spend our money—let the angels song fill our hearts:
“Glory to God in the highest, and peace to all people on earth”
November 16, 2007
November 11, 2007 - Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Luke 20:27-38
MP3 File
Airport watching
My favorite thing about traveling is the airport experience. I love watching the people - Sitting waiting at the gate, observing the stories that unfold around me. Things that when they happen to me in my life totally hook me, are just interesting when they happen at the gate – screaming kid, kicking on the floor – I give a compassionate smile to the mother, husband who didn’t pack the travel snacks, go figure. Passenger going for it with the airline representative at the counter, raising his voice, belittling the employee – its an interesting study in power dynamics. This passage is a little bit like the airport for me. Its like walking in on someone else’s argument. Sadducees, one bride, seven brothers, resurrection day….We need to know more of the back story before we can feel the impact of the Jesus’ exchange.
One bride for seven brothers. Its just a wacky idea. Even in its 1st century context it was an exaggeration, but not as strange as it sounds to us. The Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It provided protection for women. We need to understand, we are talking about a male-dominated society and marriage was a crucial element in maintaining continuity. The family was the center of relational, economic and social stability. The women’s role was to bear the children to perpetuate her husband’s family. If she was widowed, without kids, the Levirate plan “B” was for her to marry her dead husband’s brother. This created the possibility that her husband’s family line would continue and that she would have economic and social shelter. So, to the ears of the crowd gathered in the temple courts that day, the concept of a widow marrying her brother-in-law was pretty neutral, and playing out that she would marry all seven brothers was mocking of Jesus.
Jesus is a hick
So Luke tells us Jesus is out teaching and preaching in the temple courts. This was the market place of theological thought. Remember his accent, his clothes, his hair all give away the fact that he’s from the backwater town of Nazareth – this a detail not lost on the sophisticated urban crowd in Jerusalem. He is interacting with the various religious leaders and groups of the day.
Pharisees – pro-resurrection
The Pharisees were one of the key forces. They believed that it was good to interpret and extrapolate meaning from the Torah. In keeping with that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Sadducees – urban sophisticates
The Sadducees were in reaction with the Pharisees. The Sadducees seem to have been one of the more culturally sophisticated movements of their time[1]. Their followers were often the leading priestly families and the aristocracy. The Sadducees were more conservative than the Pharisees. They argued for literal interpretations of the scripture and rejected what they saw as Pharisaic speculation on the unknowable. (Let me share a little seminary secret – you can keep them straight because they were “sad you see” because they didn’t believe in an afterlife Sadducees).
Sadducees meet Jesus – resurrection signature issue
So today’s text finds the Sadducees approaching Jesus where he is teaching in the Temple courts. Strutting their intellectual stuff and this is their signature issue. We’ve all been in on these kinds of conversations. Some one with formal education and razor sharp intellect constructs a water tight argument, then they seal the deal with a question that you’d be a fool to answer in any way other than the way they want you to – you don’t think that we should leave a child behind do you? It seems as though the Sadducees are out for sport, some theological ping pong. Certainly more eager to prove their point and underscore their influence than anything else.
Jesus’ response is interesting – at the onset it is surprisingly flat. We can imagine the crowd wondering what he would do, doesn’t he understand what is at stake? would he fold or put up a fight? Who will this woman belong to in the resurrection? – what kind of a question is that! Jesus is thinking – There is no right answer to a wrong question!
Karl Barth (a reformed theologian from Switzerland) said “the Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more”[2] Anytime that we “use” God or the church or a point of view to determine winners and losers or to prove that we are better than others, we become participants in deadly game, life without God. We’re just batting around a ping pong ball, keeping our own score.
Some questions belong to the people who are truly famished for an answer. The question of what lies on the other side of death is one of them. It’s the people who admit to knowing crushing defeat, whose dignity and certainty have been deconstructed – these are the people who can begin to know the landscape of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised.[3]
Paul Duke shares some great insights on this question. He points out that other people we read about in the Bible get a very different answer from Jesus to the resurrection question. Jesus tells Martha in her hour of grasping for hope at her brother’s grave – I am the resurrection.
To Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears outside another grave, Jesus gave the ultimate answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death.
When we ask the question with earnest tears in the shadow of death, we may hear our name for the answer. When we inquire about resurrection as though we are counting on the response to establish us as the most insightful and progressive Christians in the room, the answer we get may fall flat on our ears and we may wonder about whether the question was heard.
Jesus, in his compassion, does give the Sadducees a response. He turns their fool-proof argument inside out and lays out how they have missed the boat.
Jesus responds that there is an age that follows this one. And in the age to come we enter into God’s presence in a profound way. He invokes Moses encountering the burning bush. After he peers over the sand dune, Moses realizes that the moment has shifted from everyday to extraordinary and he pulls off his shoes because its all that he can think to do to respond to the fact that that the ground which he is standing on is holy. His face is flushed from the heat as the bush burns brightly and refuses to be consumed.
As Michael Pasquarello points out in his blog, Moses isn’t given answers to his questions or solutions to his problems. Instead, he finds himself standing in the presence of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the God of Rebecca and Isaac, the God of Leah and Rachel and Jacob – the God of the living.
In the age to come, Jesus explains, things work out differently in terms of relationship. Its no longer about having children to added to your credit, but being God’s children. Its no longer about establishing and preserving a position or a network of security and power, but being in God’s presence.
So maybe we don’t personally run into many Sadducees when we go to the Temple courts. After reading this text, I feel prepared to put them in their place if I run in to any.
Chances are, God will catch us just like Moses, unaware, going about our business. One minute 4 year old Eva’s telling me all about the pizza they had for lunch at school and then she’s asking “Where is Fuzzy Grandpa? Nana misses him…Where did he go when he died?
So I take a breath, pushing away the distraction of trying to preserve my position of power, I kneel down on the holy ground that has opened up next to her and gently lay out my hope for the life to come. She nods her assent and requests cheese sticks for a snack. The flames recede, the bush is just a bush again.
In terms of now, this afternoon, the week that lies before us I find that God is inviting us into deeper relationship.
God is inviting us to lay down our ping pong paddles, to set aside our needs to prove our points and protect our position.
God invites us to be vulnerable and earnest in our seeking.
Because as much as we are earnest, as much as we are vulnerable in our desire to know more of God, so too will God respond with the fullest of measures.
God promises to meet us in the shadows of our grief, the valleys of our doubt, the darkness of our night.
God meets us there with the Good News of resurrection and new life.
In the age to come, for sure and now.
Amen.
MP3 File
Airport watching
My favorite thing about traveling is the airport experience. I love watching the people - Sitting waiting at the gate, observing the stories that unfold around me. Things that when they happen to me in my life totally hook me, are just interesting when they happen at the gate – screaming kid, kicking on the floor – I give a compassionate smile to the mother, husband who didn’t pack the travel snacks, go figure. Passenger going for it with the airline representative at the counter, raising his voice, belittling the employee – its an interesting study in power dynamics. This passage is a little bit like the airport for me. Its like walking in on someone else’s argument. Sadducees, one bride, seven brothers, resurrection day….We need to know more of the back story before we can feel the impact of the Jesus’ exchange.
One bride for seven brothers. Its just a wacky idea. Even in its 1st century context it was an exaggeration, but not as strange as it sounds to us. The Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It provided protection for women. We need to understand, we are talking about a male-dominated society and marriage was a crucial element in maintaining continuity. The family was the center of relational, economic and social stability. The women’s role was to bear the children to perpetuate her husband’s family. If she was widowed, without kids, the Levirate plan “B” was for her to marry her dead husband’s brother. This created the possibility that her husband’s family line would continue and that she would have economic and social shelter. So, to the ears of the crowd gathered in the temple courts that day, the concept of a widow marrying her brother-in-law was pretty neutral, and playing out that she would marry all seven brothers was mocking of Jesus.
Jesus is a hick
So Luke tells us Jesus is out teaching and preaching in the temple courts. This was the market place of theological thought. Remember his accent, his clothes, his hair all give away the fact that he’s from the backwater town of Nazareth – this a detail not lost on the sophisticated urban crowd in Jerusalem. He is interacting with the various religious leaders and groups of the day.
Pharisees – pro-resurrection
The Pharisees were one of the key forces. They believed that it was good to interpret and extrapolate meaning from the Torah. In keeping with that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Sadducees – urban sophisticates
The Sadducees were in reaction with the Pharisees. The Sadducees seem to have been one of the more culturally sophisticated movements of their time[1]. Their followers were often the leading priestly families and the aristocracy. The Sadducees were more conservative than the Pharisees. They argued for literal interpretations of the scripture and rejected what they saw as Pharisaic speculation on the unknowable. (Let me share a little seminary secret – you can keep them straight because they were “sad you see” because they didn’t believe in an afterlife Sadducees).
Sadducees meet Jesus – resurrection signature issue
So today’s text finds the Sadducees approaching Jesus where he is teaching in the Temple courts. Strutting their intellectual stuff and this is their signature issue. We’ve all been in on these kinds of conversations. Some one with formal education and razor sharp intellect constructs a water tight argument, then they seal the deal with a question that you’d be a fool to answer in any way other than the way they want you to – you don’t think that we should leave a child behind do you? It seems as though the Sadducees are out for sport, some theological ping pong. Certainly more eager to prove their point and underscore their influence than anything else.
Jesus’ response is interesting – at the onset it is surprisingly flat. We can imagine the crowd wondering what he would do, doesn’t he understand what is at stake? would he fold or put up a fight? Who will this woman belong to in the resurrection? – what kind of a question is that! Jesus is thinking – There is no right answer to a wrong question!
Karl Barth (a reformed theologian from Switzerland) said “the Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more”[2] Anytime that we “use” God or the church or a point of view to determine winners and losers or to prove that we are better than others, we become participants in deadly game, life without God. We’re just batting around a ping pong ball, keeping our own score.
Some questions belong to the people who are truly famished for an answer. The question of what lies on the other side of death is one of them. It’s the people who admit to knowing crushing defeat, whose dignity and certainty have been deconstructed – these are the people who can begin to know the landscape of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised.[3]
Paul Duke shares some great insights on this question. He points out that other people we read about in the Bible get a very different answer from Jesus to the resurrection question. Jesus tells Martha in her hour of grasping for hope at her brother’s grave – I am the resurrection.
To Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears outside another grave, Jesus gave the ultimate answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death.
When we ask the question with earnest tears in the shadow of death, we may hear our name for the answer. When we inquire about resurrection as though we are counting on the response to establish us as the most insightful and progressive Christians in the room, the answer we get may fall flat on our ears and we may wonder about whether the question was heard.
Jesus, in his compassion, does give the Sadducees a response. He turns their fool-proof argument inside out and lays out how they have missed the boat.
Jesus responds that there is an age that follows this one. And in the age to come we enter into God’s presence in a profound way. He invokes Moses encountering the burning bush. After he peers over the sand dune, Moses realizes that the moment has shifted from everyday to extraordinary and he pulls off his shoes because its all that he can think to do to respond to the fact that that the ground which he is standing on is holy. His face is flushed from the heat as the bush burns brightly and refuses to be consumed.
As Michael Pasquarello points out in his blog, Moses isn’t given answers to his questions or solutions to his problems. Instead, he finds himself standing in the presence of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the God of Rebecca and Isaac, the God of Leah and Rachel and Jacob – the God of the living.
In the age to come, Jesus explains, things work out differently in terms of relationship. Its no longer about having children to added to your credit, but being God’s children. Its no longer about establishing and preserving a position or a network of security and power, but being in God’s presence.
So maybe we don’t personally run into many Sadducees when we go to the Temple courts. After reading this text, I feel prepared to put them in their place if I run in to any.
Chances are, God will catch us just like Moses, unaware, going about our business. One minute 4 year old Eva’s telling me all about the pizza they had for lunch at school and then she’s asking “Where is Fuzzy Grandpa? Nana misses him…Where did he go when he died?
So I take a breath, pushing away the distraction of trying to preserve my position of power, I kneel down on the holy ground that has opened up next to her and gently lay out my hope for the life to come. She nods her assent and requests cheese sticks for a snack. The flames recede, the bush is just a bush again.
In terms of now, this afternoon, the week that lies before us I find that God is inviting us into deeper relationship.
God is inviting us to lay down our ping pong paddles, to set aside our needs to prove our points and protect our position.
God invites us to be vulnerable and earnest in our seeking.
Because as much as we are earnest, as much as we are vulnerable in our desire to know more of God, so too will God respond with the fullest of measures.
God promises to meet us in the shadows of our grief, the valleys of our doubt, the darkness of our night.
God meets us there with the Good News of resurrection and new life.
In the age to come, for sure and now.
Amen.
[1] First thoughts on Year C Gospel Passages from the Lectionary, Pentecost 24 – www.staff.murdoch.edu.au/-loader/lkpentecost24.htm
[2] Paul D. Duke, Transfigured relations – Live by the Word – Christian Century, October 25, 1995
[3] Carlyle Marney quoted by William Willimon, Paul Duke, Transfigured Relations
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