There was a night, years and years ago, when I think I saw Jesus.
It happened after my friend’s older brother died suddenly during his gym class. He collapsed with a brain aneurysm. They came into our class, called his sister out, then made the announcement over the loud speaker and sent us all home for the day.
Sent us home. Home had always been a place where I felt safe, where God was good and the world was right. But at home too my family reeled in shock over this news. The whole town was stunned, grief-stricken. And I wondered what happened to God.
God was supposed to protect good people. God was supposed to be on the side of the elect. How could God let something like this happen? Was there a God, or was it all a lie?
I remember suddenly feeling utterly alone. No one could comfort me. When I was in college I read philosophers who talked about “existential angst,” that place where we humans go when we hit rock bottom and the faith we’d thought we had eludes us. I never thought the philosophers adequately captured the angst-ness of that angst. They spoke of it too intellectually when it fact what it was like was having your heart and soul torn out of your body.
I had pretty much decided to become an atheist. If God was going to let bad things like this happen, then He couldn’t be God. That was my conclusion.
Until God showed up that night. Or I had a psychotic break. You can decide. At any rate, I’d had a picture of Jesus hanging over my bed and decided to take it down. But as I did, something happened. I was like Jesus’ eyes in that picture weren’t just painted on. There was a glow. Something Glowing and Radiant.
I was terrified. I dropped the picture and turned my head away. I looked out the window where the screen captured the reflection of the light of the moon and turned it into a cross.
I wasn’t an atheist anymore. And I knew I wasn’t alone, either.
Years later I still try to figure out what happened that night, and I realize there are plenty of psychological explanations in which any therapist worth his salt might counsel me and say, “There, there, the mind does strange things when under stress,” except whatever happened was unlike anything that had ever happened to me before or since, and as much as sound psychological thinking can explain it away, I can’t explain it away.
Whatever happened to me doesn’t come close to what ever happened with Peter, James and John – the disciples I like to call the Gethsemane Three - up there on the mountain with Jesus all aglow and the biblical Who’s Who gathered round about Him. I kind of get Peter blathering on about building tents or booths or whatever. There was some remote Jewish expectation that the End of the World and Dawning of the New Age would happen during the Feast of Booths, which was a Jewish festival commemorating their time in the wilderness and apparently involved sitting around in booths. At any rate, there are things we cannot fathom and Jesus’ transfiguration was one of them. Theologians refer to the “elusive presence of God,” and God’s glorious presence is elusive. You can’t make booths and tents and sit around with God’s glory.
I’m not sure what you do with these elusive moments of God’s glory except be baffled by them. You’d think that they’d change you forever, and they sort of do, except you’d also think that after experiencing something like this the Gethsemane Three might not have been so prone to falling asleep that night in Gethsemane. You’d think they’d have wanted to stay awake to see what there might be to see.
But no. After the Transfiguration, the Gethsemane Three debated theology with Jesus on the way down from the mountain and willingly obeyed when Jesus told them not to mention what happened until long after the resurrection. And since they didn’t have a clue at the time about the resurrection, that would be like Jesus telling us to not say anything until Spiritualization; we don’t have a clue what Spiritualization means, so we’re just as happy not to talk about what we don’t understand, in case anyone thinks we’ve lost our minds.
I’m not sure what to make of the Transfiguration story any more than I’m sure what to make of whatever happened to me years ago, except I do get this: Jesus brought the disciples up the mountain to see that glory and also try to explain to them who He is, who God is – yes, glory, but more than that. Here in the ninth chapter of Mark it is clear that the Gospel is telling about more than God’s glory. Here in the ninth chapter it is clear Jesus is saying God is the one who will go to the cross for us. The heavenly voice is saying God is the one to whom we absolutely must listen if we have any hope at all of living the lives we yearn to live. We must listen, listen, listen. But even when we fail at listening, God’s love does not fail.Which is why every single Gospel that tells the story of the Transfiguration follows it immediately with the story of Jesus and what seems to be an epileptic child. The gospels often tell the same stories, but they tend to change the chronology around, the way old married couples disagree about what happened first, second and third. Not here. Every one of the Gospels is trying to tell us something by telling us about the Transfiguration and then what happened next.
What happened next was an absolute failure of faith.
When Jesus and the Gethsemane Three got down from the mountain they found the rest of the disciples embroiled in some hugely public debate with the scribes. The disciples were looking like frauds. A few chapters back Jesus had given them power to cast out demons, but here they could not, and thus the “discussion” with the scribes.
The father of a sick child explained, “Teacher, I brought you my son. He has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; it seizes him and dashes him down…I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”
Jesus made some pretty strong comments about the unbelieving bunch he had to put up with, but then asked the father more about the boy and the father shared how devastating and dangerous the boy’s condition was, and how desperate he was to find a cure, and begged, “If you are able to do anything; have pity on us and help us.”
IF you are able to do anything, the father begged, with words that indicated something less than a huge statement of faith. Let’s be honest about this guy, because part of the power of this account is in that honesty. This guy wasn’t there because of his great faith in Jesus. He was there because he was desperate.
If you can, the boy’s father pled. And Jesus retorted, “If YOU can!” Or maybe he retorted, “IF you can?” Then Jesus said “All can be done for the one who believes,” which either meant if our faith is strong enough, amazing things will happen, but could also mean Jesus has enough faith to carry the day despite how lousy our faith may be.
It was then that the father cried out what I believe is both one of the most powerful and honest prayers in the entire Bible. He cried, “I believe; help my unbelief.”
This father knows that when it comes to being able, he’s not able at all. If he’d have been able, something would’ve happened by now. We want to be able. We want to have the kind of strong faith that can move mountains and endure whatever suffering comes our way, but seriously, which ones of us actually do? The Gethsemane Three who stood there up on that mountain and saw Moses and Elijah and Jesus transfigured still fell asleep in the Garden. They all still fled the scene when the soldiers came. Peter denied Jesus three times. We’re a motley crew. But this father got it right for us. He prayed the prayer that is the most honest of prayers, the most honest of prayers for mercy: I believe; help my unbelief.And Jesus does!
As powerful as the Transfiguration may be, as wondrous and amazing as those moments of God’s elusive glory may be, the part of the story that tells us the truth about who God is for us comes here, in the midst of our struggles to believe, in the midst of our fearful doubt, in the midst of our desperation and fear.
I believe; help my unbelief. And Jesus does!
Paul said it well: Nothing in life or death, or angels, or rulers, in things present or things to come, neither heights nor depths nor power nor principalities nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Not even our wobbly faith.
And Jesus leaves us with a clue, a challenge, a word of divine guidance.
The disciples asked Jesus privately why they couldn’t cure the boy. Jesus answered, “This can come only through prayer.” Prayer is how we stay close to the God who remains close to us. Prayer is how we listen. Prayer is how we hope. Prayer is how we hold God’s hand.
I can’t recreate whatever happened to me that night years ago. But I can pray. When we do, that elusive presence of God becomes just a little less elusive. Thanks be to God from all of us who know more than we like to admit about belief and unbelief. Amen.Mark 1:29-39 February 5, 2012 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Jesus “traveled all over Galilee, preaching…and driving out demons,” Mark tells us, and in that simple verse, and throughout the Gospel of Mark it is clear one of the major, if not THE primary way, Jesus cast out demons was through preaching, through what he said and taught.
We know this, really, in our hearts. We know that when we’re in despair, it is assurance from God, or reassurance from God, that gives us hope. One simple word of faith, one word of love and grace can lift us up; that a word of encouragement can come upon us with the strength of eagle’s wings. But have you ever thought how it can also cast out demons?
I was trying to figure out how to explain this, knowing that we Presbyterians struggle to explain demons and would rather just not talk about it, when thanks be to God, the Lord landed a book in my path through an email I just happened to get this week from my college. God works in very mysterious ways. One of the professors of my alma mater wrote a book called Situations Matter, which I downloaded, thank you Kindle, and as I read it realized nailed exactly what the Gospel is talking about.
The author starts by asking us if we remember a few years ago when a toddler in England was abducted by a couple of ten year old boys, who murdered him. What shocked the world was not only that ten year old boys could already be sociopaths, but that the noisy abduction happened in a crowded mall and nobody did anything. Thirty-eight people admitted to the police they saw that toddler with those boys, he was screaming and crying, but not one of them intervened. Not one of them recognized the emergency for what it was. The author notes we could all conclude people in Liverpool, England, must be different and depraved. Except their behavior is matched by the behavior of people all over the globe. This professor lifted up stories of shockingly apparent apathy that have made the news over the years, like the time and man died on subway in New York and no one noticed for hours. Or back in 1964, when we were watching Rob and Laura Petri and Andy Griffith and the world seemed to be a gentler place, when a woman was stabbed and attacked and screamed so loudly the attacker ran off, but returned when he saw no one come to her aid. And there was that dated but memorable study done at Princeton, at the seminary no less, where researchers staged a poor man in distress on the chapel steps, and then did a set up job for the poor students being studied to see if the pressure of not wanting to be late to a class plus a lot of modeled peer apathy might make these future clergy ignore the man in distress. It worked. Nearly all ignored him, all in such a hurry to get to the lecture on The Good Samaritan. Researchers have been all over this phenomenon, debating it and studying it until a whole lot of experts have concluded that being in a group of people or in a crowd, or even if we’ve recently come from being in one, or even thinking about one, makes us far less responsive to people in need.
The author of this book explains that situations, even emergencies, can be ambiguous. So we human beings use other people around us as guides, gauging their reactions and reacting accordingly. So even good Christians studying to become pastors, when in a rush and seeing no one around them attending to a person on the ground, won’t attend to him, either. A child abducted in a mall? If the crowd doesn’t respond, likely we won’t, either. We could just conclude people are inherently selfish and self-centered. But ! There’s another study! Evidently some researchers arranged for a vapor like smoke to seep from a wall while students were engaged in completing some kind of work. If the smoke occurred when students were alone in the room they responded immediately, fearing for their own safety. But if they were in a group and the people around them failed to respond; only 10% of the others took action. People would stay in a room filling with smoke because if the others weren’t alarmed, they evidently concluded they shouldn’t be, either.
We like to pretend that teenagers are the only ones who lean towards conformity. But one study indicated that even if you KNEW a right answer, if you were in a room where everybody else gave the same wrong answer, odds were, once called upon, so would you. O we like sheep. Evidently being wrong is easier than breaking rank and refusing to go with the flow. It’s scary !
We may be far too sophisticated to want to call this a demon, but studies or no studies; most of us realize that something happens to us, something sometimes even demonic, in crowds and groups. Groups permit inaction, irresponsibility, and group-think. And as much as we like the “majority rules” idea, group-think can be horribly wrong. Consider Nazi Germany. Or the crowds who demanded Pilate release Barabbas instead of Jesus. Or sports events in which people pour onto a field and trample each other to death.
We can all be possessed.
Now here’s the part I want you to hear, the part Jesus showed us long before this book was ever published. If the blind crowd has any hope at all, it is because one or two people have the courage to speak up and say otherwise. Sure enough, in experiment after experiment set to trap people into conformity, sometimes all it took was one or two people to refuse, to speak up, in order to get people to actually start thinking again.
Jesus cast out demons by speaking up. God intervened with a Word.
Reading this book made me never want to go near a large group or sit in a crowd where I could become swayed by the demonic phenomenon of group blindness, but the fact is there is no escaping it. Unless. Unless we arm ourselves to not trust group-think. Unless we arm ourselves to question. Unless we arm ourselves to try to listen to GOD’s voice and not that of the crowd. Unless we gird up our loins and arm ourselves to be the ones who speak up.
You and I may have never thought we were called to do exorcisms, but we are. Not by sprinkling water or tossing oil in the air or muttering magical words the way they sometimes do in the movies, but by daring to see, to speak, to act.
When we don’t, little boys and girls and victims of all ages and genders and we ourselves are carried away by evil.
Cast out the demons. Amen.
Psalm 62 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Preaching on a psalm isn’t like preaching on a story. It’s more like taking a chair beside the psalmist, late in the night when we’re more likely to open up and talk about things like faith and doubt, hovering together over a cup of hot chocolate or more, sharing with each other how it is for us. And if we’re lucky, as we often are with these kinds of conversations, somehow, finally, by the end of the night, we find ourselves strangely comforted, not because anything has changed, not because suddenly we’re healed of all our illnesses or cured of all our doubts or eased in all our anxieties, but because after sharing together we know that those moments of faith and fear, faith and doubt, faith and uncertainty, faith and the devastating evidence to the contrary, are how it is with faith among us humans; and that somehow on this rocky path, there is God.
Some say Psalm 62 is the song of someone giving himself or herself a pep talk. The psalmist wants to trust God, is trying to trust God, and so is urging himself to trust God.
For God alone I wait…
God alone is my rock…
…How long will the bad stuff continue; how bad will it become…
For God alone I wait…
God alone is my rock.
Let’s all trust in God!
(because this whole trust thing is a lot easier when other people are doing it with me!)
It is kind of a pep talk. But I think it’s deeper than that. I think what we have here is a record of a very faithful person under siege by things gone horribly wrong. At minimum, the people he trusted have betrayed him. His former friends are saying terrible things about him. They smile at him and are nice to his face, but the minute he turns his back its lies, lies and slander. And who can you trust? And why have they turned against him? Maybe it was something he did, but maybe not. Maybe it was something that happened to him. Then and now when terrible things happen to a person we sometimes blame the victim. It’s his fault. He wasn’t as great as he pretended to be. Look what happened! They used to think illness was God’s punishment; tragedy, God’s wrath. I wish I could say we don’t do that anymore. So this aching man (or woman) is trying to cling to faith, trying to battle his pain and fears with his faith.
I love the Hebrew meaning of what comes across in English as “I will never be shaken.” In Hebrew, it’s more like, “I won’t totter…too greatly.” I’m tottering a lot, Lord. I’m tottering a lot, but I won’t totter so much that I’ll fall apart …because God is my rock. Right?We believe. We really believe. And yet, when crisis hits us, when tragedy hits us, when frightening diagnoses hit us, we can’t help but to look at what is happening – and if we don’t sense the very Presence of the Most High God right then and there, or if the crisis is so enormous that we just can’t fathom where God is in the mess, we totter. We believe, but …where are you, God? And we wait. We wait for God to DO something.
For God alone my soul waits in silence, the psalmist sings.
I don’t think it’s the psalmist who is in silence when he first sings that. I don’t think it’s the psalmist’s soul that is in silence at this point. I think it’s God who seems silent. For any of us who have been there, and a whole lot of us have been there, we know that waiting for God when God seems silent is one of life’s most challenging exercises of faith. And what happens deep in our souls in this waiting time is immense.
For God alone I wait…God alone is my rock, the psalmist sings, wondering and worrying and reaching for his faith. For God alone my soul waits, he prays, as he tries to cling in faith to the assurance that what he’s known before, that Presence of God as a rock, refuge, and salvation, will happen again.Waiting.
Something happens in the waiting. That’s the amazing good news for all of us. Something always happens in the waiting. The silent God somehow isn’t silent anymore.
Walter Brueggemann once said, “Prayer is not pious abdication. It is a daring maneuver whereby the speaker breaks the categories of trouble and shatters the closed world of threat. It is a definitive alternative to sinking, despair and fear[i].”
The one who waits and prays discovers that somehow amid all that silence, all the things that terrify us, God draws close.
It would be almost funny if it wasn’t so poignant how it happens in this psalm. The psalmist starts out almost academically: God is my rock, God is my refuge, God is my salvation, he reminds himself. But he could be saying those things in some answer to an essay question. The psalmist is talking about God to himself and to others, the way we sometimes do when we’re trying to convince ourselves to hang in there in faith. But then, at the end of the song, he sings, “the power belongs to God,” and suddenly it all changes. It’s not academic anymore. Suddenly he sings, “steadfast love belongs to You, O Lord,” and you know God is there right in front of him. He knows God is there. Not merely “God is my rock, “ but “ You, O Lord, O steadfast love”.
The psalmist pulls up next to us, and tells us that’s how it was with him, and we can think about how it is with us, and share that with each other. Every time I take a walk around the pond in my subdivision I come to a place that is probably the most barren-looking spot n the whole region, where it’s all rocks and gravel and no row of trees, and every time I walk there I know I am on holy ground. That is the place where years ago in one of the worst seasons of my life I cried out to God, who seemed so silent at the time, and who had seemed so silent for so long, so that whole promise about “delivering us from evil” seemed to be in jeopardy. I had cried out over and over telling God the things God might want to do if God actually wanted to, say, seem like GOD, but it all seemed to be of no avail. And then suddenly on that rocky path, of course it had to be on the barren rocky path, as I was tottering, there was God.
There’s nothing we can do to MAKE that happen. It just comes, in God’s time, which sometimes seems like a long time. The most we can do is to assure each other of it. God will come. God will intervene. God will save.
So it's as though the psalmist is saying, “If you are waiting for God, come, let’s talk." The fascinating thing with this song now being Scripture is that this amazing understanding and this holy assurance has now become the very word and promise of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 January 15, 2012 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
I have a confession. When I first looked at the Lectionary options for this week, and saw this passage with the word “fornication” leaping off the page, I immediately decided to choose something else. Anything else.
But then I read a brilliant article in the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, written by a scholar who dared to go back to the original Greek, who dared to look again at years and years of Christian discussion about this text, who dared to step back into this portion of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that commentators have long described as “disjointed,” “obscure,” “unfinished,” “imprecise,” and “incoherent.[i]” This is one of the most difficult passages of all of Paul’s writings. In the English translations we’ve added things like quotation marks to try to sort things out, because it seems like Paul is quoting things that other people are saying and trying to respond to them, but Paul didn’t use quotations, so it’s all a best guess practice. A best guess practice with plenty of reference to sex. Initially I concluded there’s got to be something else to preach on. But then I read the article from South Africa.
This scholar asserts, and I think he’s right, that our misunderstanding of Paul in Corinthians has led to a profound theological misunderstanding that continues to tear apart the church of Jesus Christ.
The misunderstanding includes what Paul means by calling us a Temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul does that in various places in his letter to the Corinthians. Down through the ages, with the help of the Greco-Roman culture and the cultures of the West, people have come to believe that, as this scholar explains,
the individual Christian (if his is ‘born again’!) is like a bottle containing the Holy Spirit poured into him like a fluid . He goes around carrying it with him, as an individual…(with) a direct personal link with the Almighty which is independent of any particular earthly authority or community. If such and such a “church” doesn’t suit him, he can move away or start another one as he chooses, because he carries the Spirit with him when he goes[ii].
The tragedy is, he explains, is that now to most Christians in the West, Christianity has become essentially a private, personal matter whose main concern is “moral” and “religious.” Young and old adults in record number are declaring themselves “spiritual, but not religious,” because of all the church has and has not done. They KNOW there is something more to God than Chief Legislator of Morality and Piety Police. They sense God is more wondrous, more mysterious, and more loving than many Christians apparently proclaim. Because of that, and because the Holy Spirit is seen as the private possession of an individual, the Christian church and the destruction of the unity of the Christian church seem irrelevant at best.
The bitter irony is that what Paul was actually writing about was the unity of the Christian church, and what Paul would have seen as blasphemous was the destruction of that unity.
God did not strike the Pharisee we know as Paul blind on that road to Damascus in order to call him to preach sexual morality. The Pharisees were already on top of that. But somehow, because Paul used sex as a case study to help us explain our spiritual unity with each other through Jesus Christ, our attention has gone straight to sex and we lost sight of his main point, which was unity.
“Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” Paul writes in the 3rd chapter (3:16-17). Anybody who’s taken Greek 101 can see that the “you” in that sentence is plural. You, together, O Church, are God’s temple. Yes, the Holy Spirit touches each one of us. Yes, the Holy Spirit does gracious and amazing things in our individual lives as believers. But it is TOGETHER that we are the Temple of the Holy Spirit.
By God's grace, you and I in this room have sensed this. There have been moments in worship that are so powerful, so profound, that we know something holy has happened, that the Presence of the Most High has indeed dwelt among us, thatt we are connected to each other in a way that words strain to describe.
This is exactly what Paul knows to be true. The former Pharisee knew full well that even way back in Deuteronomy the people of God sensed, knew, that there was something special about being in the holy sanctuary of the Temple. More than any other time, when they entered that sanctuary, they knew they were in the Presence of God. Now after Jesus Christ, Paul knew that the Presence had left the building and the community of the church became where that special Presence resides. So when leaders of splinter groups in the Corinthian congregation began to tear at the unity of that community, Paul went after them. He was enraged that Christians were trying to use the church to promote their own agendas and political ends. We belong to GOD, Paul wrote. Our purpose is to serve GOD, Paul insisted. And our union with Christ and therefore each other is more profound than we realize!
Apparently these would-be leaders were teaching that because we are made free of the law through Jesus Christ, we can do anything we feel like doing. Some scholars think these particular people were hanging around the Greco-Roman banquets where considerable networking took place, in addition to consumption of vast quantities of food, wine and , by the way, prostitutes. That behavior didn’t strike Paul as particularly helpful to the unity, ministry and mission of Jesus Christ. In fact, just before this paragraph, he catalogued a whole list of behaviors which he did not find helpful to the mission and message of Jesus Christ, or to the health and well-being of community in general, which included not only prostitution and adultery, but greed, drunkenness, theft – all things that tear apart relationships, families, communities, whole societies. And whereas there may not be any more Jewish laws to have to worry about, Paul knows that some behaviors are just not beneficial. Just because you CAN eat a plate full of Burger King french fries doesn't mean it's beneficial to do so. And there are things we do to each other -- selfishly asserting our greed, engaging in adultery, losing ourselves to addictions until they destroy our families - that indeed damage the very life and lives we hold most precious. So why would we harm our relationships, our family, our community by doing them? And why, when Christ has set you free, would you go back to behaviors that take control of your life? Why would you do that to yourself, and why would you do that to others? Don’t you understand that one person’s actions can negatively affect the whole family, the whole body?
These would-be leaders just didn’t seem to understand the ramifications of what they were doing. What kind of a witness will the church of Jesus Christ have if we’re all hurting each other and pulling away from each other, each doing our own thing as if our unity didn’t matter at all? If God chose the one unified Church as the special place of God’s presence, why would we try to set up shop across the street?
These are the questions Paul raises. Serious questions. Profound questions for our lives both as individuals and as a community.
What if Paul is right, and not individualism and division, but community and unity is where the real power of God resides? What if everything we’ve ever done to pull away and split and splinter is a greater wound on Christ’s body and therefore our own souls than we ever imagined? What if the great call is to find our way home again, back to all of us, in every corner, TOGETHER being the Temple of the Holy Spirit? What if there an even greater power and presence of God than we’ve ever known just waiting for us – us all - to see the light?
Can you imagine if Christians all over the globe joined together to declare disunity the real threat, the real enemy, to the people of God? And then backed it up with our actual actions.
Paul is calling us to imagine that, and to spread the word. Amen.
[i] Rosser, Brian S., “Temple Prostitution in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20,” Novum Testamentum, 1998.
[ii] Draper, J.A., “The Tip of an Ice-Berg: the Temple of the Holy Spirit,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 1987.
Way back in the 13th century a Christian mystic named Meister Eckhart said that the Gospels told about the virgin birth not just because it is something that happened to Mary. He said that it is something that happens within us spiritually. It’s not something restricted to the past, but was shared in scripture because it is an invitation and a possibility for each one of us. Christ’s great moment of glory was on the cross, in resurrection. That’s where we base our faith. So the story about Mary, he says, has more to it than just an explanation about how Jesus came into the world. Mary was “full of grace,” and Meister Eckhart insists we can be full of grace, too. We are more Mary than we realize. Each of us continually are faced with invitations and choices in the midst of pregnant possibilities. To what should we say YES? To what should we say NO? How much of life’s interruptions and surprises, welcome and unwelcome surprises, are part of God’s leading with angels afoot if we could just see them or take a teenage leap of faith. No matter how old we are, none of us know what will happen to us next. Despite all our best plans; life happens. The question is, when life interrupts, when some new possibility is held out in front of us, will we respond in fear and pull back and refuse the change? Or will we explore this unexpected turn of events, and seek God’s leading in it; GOD in it?
Mystic Eckhart wonders if we’re willing to be like Mary, a theotokos, one who is willing to bear God into the world. “We’re all meant to be mothers of God,” he writes, remembering the model of Mary as we seek to do it: living with our confusion and fears and perplexity, willing to go forward in trust, open to possibilities we’d call impossible, open the way sincerely seeking teenagers are open, rather than doing what we tend to do as we age: nailing things down, declaring things settled, wishing things could remain the way they were before. Open to new ways; God’s new ways.
What if we went out from here wondering how we could be God-bearers; wondering how many times God has approached us; wondering how many times God has come and knocked on our doors looking for a yes. What if we went out from here listening for those holy knocks and whispers of angels, saying yes to be a theotokos, a God-bearer to the world God seeks to redeem? Amen.Luke 1:47-55 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
From talking with many of you this week I know that I am not the only one in this room who could hardly bear to hear the news about the assault and murder of the 7 year old girl in Canton. It is one of those things that is so unspeakably horrific you don’t even quite know how to deal with it. We need words stronger than angst, horror and pain. For me, it was not just the news about the child that tore at my soul, it was the news that DFACS went in and took the other two children away from that mother. I know DFACS doesn’t do that lightly and I had no idea what the back-story was, but neither idea that came to mind was a peaceful one. Either there was good reason to remove the children OR in the end, there was no reason at all, and this poor mourning mother faced a double horror, a triple horror, that her moment of greatest grief upon the death of one child was multiplied by the removal of the others. I didn’t want to think about it; it was all too real and too heart-breaking. It made me remember the story I’d heard on NPR where a state was getting financial gain by taking away the children of Native Americans, and the primary cause was not negligence or harm, but poverty. Poor children would all be better off in rich families, right? Folks could argue that. The mothers were helpless against what was happening.
Can you imagine if someone swooped in to take Jesus away from Mary? A poor, unwed mother. You could argue for it.
As much as I don’t want to think about the horror faced by too many poor mothers, as much as I ache over the impossible situations they face in trying to protect their children and yet put food on the table, maybe that’s what we need to think about when we hear Mary’s song of praise, this incredibly well-known poem-prayer we call the Magnificat.
What kind of pain did Mary have, what kind of situations did she see, that this young woman, this teenager, sang a song of praise to God that included words like these:
He’s scattered the proud…and brought down the powerful…and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
Ironic, isn’t it, that some of the world’s best art, displayed in the wealthiest cathedrals, sung by the world’s most prestigious choirs, are based on the Magnificat, where some of the world’s richest have dared to sing,
He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.Dared to sing it because maybe we want it to be true.
I think about mothers in poverty, facing things I hate that they face, and I want God to fill them with good things. And when it comes to the rich, the one’s we call “the filthy rich,” if they’ve gotten there by stepping on others with their sheer greed, then I want God to send them away empty – no more toys for them. They have enough. And if the rich is us, you and me, then I hope Joanna Adams and Barbara Brown Taylor are right in their interpretations of this verse; that the rich who have unwisely filled themselves with so much that doesn’t really satisfy are emptied so they can be fed at last with what really does nourish[i] ; that “the rich will be sent away empty so that they have room in them for more than money can buy”[ii]
Those sound like healing words to me. I think I want to join Mary and sing in that hope.
Mary borrowed some of her prayer from Scripture; from Hannah, they say. Hannah was the mother of Samuel, one of two wives of her husband, and the unfertile one. The old, barren one. Of course, we know Scripture well enough to know if you’re old and barren, look out, because children could be on the way. I take considerable comfort in knowing God answers the prayers of older people; and just because you have been barren most of your life, just because life did not add up to what you’d hoped, doesn’t mean God isn’t going to swoop in and do something amazing. When Hannah discovered she was pregnant, she sang a song praising God for remembering the least and the lowly, the old and the wrinkly, and giving a little comeuppance to those who needed it.
I can imagine Mary learning Hannah’s song sometime in her childhood and parking it somewhere in her soul, where we park things we wish were true, we wish would happen to us, but we see no signs of it, no signs of God’s miracles for us. But we have these stories parked in our souls that sprout out little seeds of hope amid the doubt, amid our sober counsel that says, “Get real.” And then God showed up in Mary’s life and the Scripture promises came alive. What other song would spring to mind, but Hannah’s?
When you’re holding your cooing baby in the maternity ward, it doesn’t matter if you’re 17 or 45. You’re all still singing the same song about amazing grace.
And what is so utterly compelling about Hannah and Mary’s songs is that both sing not just for themselves, but for so many others, for all the people who are dishonored and bullied and overlooked. For all the people who are on the bottom of every ladder and can only dream about honor and worth. For everyone who aches for justice and peace because in their lives they have neither.
Neither Mary nor Hannah sang, “I’ve got mine, too bad about you!” No, they praised God because they realized what God was doing in their lives meant God was doing something amazing in the world, and hadn’t given up on any of it, or any of us.
As people of faith, you and I are invited to sing this song with Mary, to proclaim it and hope it and if we’re especially blessed, let it get inside us.
Mary did not suddenly become rich in the way the world measure’s riches. But she knew just how rich she suddenly was. Of all the ways God could change the world, God started not with Caesar or Herod, but Mary, a poor, country girl, whose story reminds us where to look when we yearn to see God’s power in a world that so desperately needs God.
If we can sing this song with Mary, maybe we can better sing the song the early church sang about Jesus, when they praised,
Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,Echoes of holy words that keep trying to get us to see not as the world sees.
Echoes of holy words that whisper to us to keep watching. To keep watching in the poorest and most hopeless places. To keep praying for that family in Canton and to hope, in faith, that somewhere, sometime, somehow, they will know that God has been with them, for them and for more than them, like Mary. To notice things, like the changes on the campus of Virginia Tech, that the shooting this week was indeed tragic, but something was different, different enough to make us wonder about the soul-work that’s gone on in the administrators and students. Or the newscasts that happen now and then where people forgive in unforgivable situations. To watch what is happening in the world around us, while singing Mary’s song, on the watch for the hand of God where the world least expects it. Amen.
[i] Joanna Adams in The Christian Century, December 12, 2006
To Lament, to Long, to Hope
Isaiah 64:1-9 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Christmas carols are back on the radio and I love it! But there’s one song that’s always been hard for me to hear. It’s Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “Silent Night.” Do you know it? It’s the one where they are singing “Silent Night” in the foreground but in the background radio announcers are delivering the litany of bad news that was our world back then. We could do a remake today with the background about Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, how we have the worst stock market since 1942 – the whole litany of what’s not right with our world.
They say this passage in Isaiah is among the most profound of all biblical texts. The mood behind this chapter captures all of that “Simon & Garfunkel Silent Night mood plus the mood of our country after 911, when as far as terrorists were concerned, or any country related to them, could be summed up with the words: Get ‘em! Get ‘em good. Shock and awe. Take ‘em out.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,[ii] Ibid.
Waiting for God
Matthew 25:1-13 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Did you ever have the nightmare where it’s time for the final exam, only you have some big problems? The first is that you haven’t studied for the test. The second is that you’ve never actually gone to the class. The third is that you don’t even know where the classroom is. It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that nightmare means somehow and somewhere in our lives, we’re not feeling fully and adequately prepared.
Be prepared. Is that what this parable is about? We’ve got to be prepared for Jesus to come again. We’ve got to be prepared for Judgment Day. That’s not a bad message. It’s an important message. But is that the whole message of this parable? You know I’m thinking not, because if that was Jesus’ whole message He could’ve just said, “Look, you’ve got to be prepared,” and not bothered with a whole story.
So this is about being prepared; but what else is it about?
I read a fascinating account of weddings back in Jesus’ day. Israel was under occupation by the Romans, and the Romans and the Jews weren’t all that far away from being like Nazis and the Jews. Nevertheless, weddings then, like now, were joyous occasions. Sometimes our weddings get so lavish I think this is just craziness; our society has gone nuts with weddings; but partly I realize it’s been like that for a long time. In India the weddings last for a week, and 2000 years ago and today the weddings lasted days and days as well. Evidently back then, the wedding party would take the longest possible route through their towns to finally arrive at their homes for the big party. The more houses they visited the more blessings (and by the way gifts) they received. And a wedding was an opportunity not only to celebrate, but to be reconciled with lost friends or be gracious to the poor who could offer blessings if not gifts. You’d stop everywhere and along the way there would be SO much celebrating and hospitality. Even the Pharisees agreed it was okay to put aside your study of Torah to celebrate a wedding. The result of this was, of course, that you’d never know when the wedding party would arrive for the final BIG event. It could be late into the night. Like midnight, here in Jesus’ parable.
Bu the thing was, scholars tell us, Roman law didn’t allow anyone on the streets after dark without a lantern. It was illegal. So those lanterns these maids were supposed to be carrying were critical, so no one would be arrested, so no one would mistake the wedding party for a bunch of thieves or terrorists. And once everybody arrived at the final destination, it was a matter of security to bolt up the doors, like you might today in a crime-ridden neighborhood. Shutting out latecomers wasn’t being mean; it was a matter of protection. If you really cared about your family and friends, you wouldn’t go opening the door in the middle of the night to anyone. Think Anne Frank and her family, hidden away. They just couldn’t open the door.[i]
So clearly, being prepared and bringing enough reserve oil for your lantern was serious business. If only half of you brought reserve oil, you couldn’t really divide it up to share it with the other half or you’d all run out of oil.
Now oil, like light, is a code word in the Bible, and we know Jesus has used it to mean good works and faith, compassion and generosity, prayer and spiritual strength. And we all know those are things that try as we might to give to each other; the bottom line is we can’t. Some things we have to have and do for ourselves. We can show our faith, but we can’t GIVE it to other people.
So suddenly five of the maidens realized they’d run out of oil while the ten had napped in the wait. Good news: napping is allowed! But five were now out of oil ; they couldn’t borrow from the other five, so they ran back, someplace, somewhere, to get more oil. At midnight. Can you buy this stuff at a 24-hour Kroger? Or did they all have hordes of it back home and just neglected to bring it with them?
But here’s where perhaps the parable is and isn’t about the oil. Yes, they ran out, the way all of us can run out of faith or hope or love, not that we planned to but because stuff happens. Life can use up all of our reserves; things can happen that can use up way more of our reserves than we’d ever imagined; and many of us run out of oil. It can happen, even to the ones chosen to be bridesmaids. And time can run out too. We like to live as though we have all the time in the world - all the time in the world to repair a relationship, or reach a secret goal we’ve had for years, or to make that mark we wanted to make, or draw closer to God, or be better disciples, or do what we all know it takes to be the wise, prepared maids. But then, suddenly, there’s no more time. And now it’s too late.
So the five foolish maidens ran off to get more oil. I think that was their fatal mistake. I think that’s the secret crux of the matter hidden in this parable.
If oil represents spirituality and faith and closeness to God and all things holy, seriously, where were they going to get more? In town? Back home? In a store?
Where do you go when you’ve run out of that spiritual oil? For a whole lot of people in America, sadly, the answer to that is not in a church. They think that because they ran out of oil while IN a church, then they have to look elsewhere. But where do we go to find more oil?
I know you can get a lot of peace on a golf course, but not the transformation Jesus offers. We can get refreshed through a vacation, but that fades when we’re back in the muck. Some try through an extra glass, or vat, of wine, which can be sadly, a tragic mistake. Others of us rightly sense that oil and good works, acts of compassion and generosity, have something to do with each other; but what happens when we’re so burned out that we can’t even muster any enthusiasm for that? Where can we get the oil we lack, that we need, that we crave?
From the Bridegroom. From Christ. Yes, our five companions didn’t have enough to share. There’s no church on the planet that can fully serve as God or give all God offers. But the Bridegroom has an eternal supply. What if those who’d lacked had stayed with the other five, and waited, waited together for God? Being the church has always been risky business, and surely the early church knew that waiting for Christ could mean arrest, especially if you’re standing there with five questionable people who are breaking that lamp law. But what if they’d stayed, realizing that while Rome wanted them to have lit lamps, their real role was to rejoice and be part of the celebrants for the wedding? You can’t do that when you’ve left and gone back to town hunting for oil. What if they’d stayed? What if when the Bridegroom arrived they admitted they’d run out of oil and didn’t want to risk everyone’s safety, so if the wedding party had to proceed without them, they’d understand, but they still wanted, at least now for a second, to offer their blessings and congratulations? Might they not have discovered that the Bridegroom has an eternal supply of oil? Wouldn’t it only be the foolish who’d go looking elsewhere?
“Watch, therefore,” Jesus concludes, for you know neither the day nor the hour. You can’t watch if you leave.
Best to be the prepared maids. Absolutely. Best to load up on acts of compassion and love and all the oil they bring. But if and when we run dry, wait. Wait together for God. For the promise in the parable is that He is coming. And we know this parable isn’t just about the End; that we’re not just talking here about when Christ comes at the Second Coming. We’re talking about now. Now, here in the dark, when some of us have oil and others are running dry. Here, together, waiting for God, for He is coming. All with ears to hear, hear. Amen.
You Are All Students
Matthew 23:1-12 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
If you were here last week, you know that I found something beautiful and compelling in the Book of Leviticus in its sincere attempt to help us stay mindful of God, to find ways to honor God in our daily lives so that we take God for granted much less often and instead savor and cherish the amazing fact that you and I, mere mortals, no more than dust, are cherished by God. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” wonders the psalmist in awe, and I appreciate Leviticus’ effort to help us in turn be mindful of God and mindful of each other.
Unfortunately, Leviticus got abused and folks turned the Law into almost a god unto itself. Enter the scribes and the Pharisees who didn’t practice what they taught and used God’s Law to clobber other people. They let their positions of leadership get to their heads and loved way too much the status and honor their positions afforded them. You know the game. Celebrities play it all the time. If people treat you as though you are very important, those watching will think you are just that important, and you can begin to conclude it is actually true; you matter more than anybody.
Being a good Presbyterian, I’m quite fond of today’s scripture passage. There are a whole lot of religious leaders floating around today who I think qualify as Pharisees and I rather enjoy having Jesus take them down a notch or two. Unfortunately, judging those lousy hypocritical Pharisees isn’t Jesus’ whole point here. It’s a little unsettling to me that Jesus says we ought to listen to the Pharisees and what they teach. I’d rather write the bums off hook, line and sinker. How can I trust their theology? How can I trust their scriptural interpretations? When it comes to the ones I identify as Chief among the Pharisees today, it’s not just their actions I detest, it’s their theology; it’s where the amazing grace of Jesus and the, dare I say it, open-mindedness of Jesus, seems to have gotten lost. Why would I want pay even half attention to what they teach? Given what Jesus has been teaching – the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, the parables – why would anyone want or need to spend even half a second listening to the scribes and Pharisees, especially when Jesus says, “You have one teacher,” and we all know one teacher is JESUS, not the Pharisees, not the celebrities, not the guy with the microphone.
I think the answer comes in the very next words Jesus says: you are all students. You are all students.
The scribes and Pharisees are students, the disciples are students, the crowds are students, the rabbis are students, I am a student, you are a student. We are all students. What if we approached life more with the attitude that we’re all students?
The candidates running for President? All students. The current Congress and House of Representatives? Students. The TV evangelists? Students. Not one of us in the bunch has all the answers. Not one of us has a sure grip on reality the way God sees reality. Not one of us ought to be called “teacher”. For as Christians, we have only one teacher, one instructor, and that is our Messiah, our Lord. The rest of us are only students, relying heavily on the hope that this Holy Instructor grades on a curve and really, really hates to fail anybody.
It’s as fellow students that Jesus says we ought to listen to what even Pharisees teach. One of the greatest temptations I have, and I think I share this with some of you, is that I like reading the writings of people with whom I agree. I like listening to the talk radio shows only of those who see the world a little more closely to the way I see it. I like surrounding myself with those whose insights and positions I find edifying and enriching, which almost always means they are in line with what I already think anyway. The trouble with that is that it’s too easy to simply dismiss the ones with whom I don’t agree. I know they are wrong, so why waste my time even listening to them?
The trouble comes if the ones I’m dismissing are fellow Christians, fellow seekers, fellow people of The Way who are trying, best they can, to follow Jesus Christ. Maybe I can see what lousy hypocrites they are, but the truth is, really, so am I, try as I may to the contrary. There’s a reason so many of us Presbyterians keep the Prayer of Confession in the worship service. I think we try to be people of integrity, we really do, but we’re not just that good at being perfect. What if there is one tiny iota of “they have a point” among the ones I’m dismissing outright and I refuse to listen to any of it? How will I learn the chapter they know; and if they dismiss me, how will they learn the chapter I know? Fellow students, all of us.
One of the most challenging of all the challenging things in our multicultural ministry, our multicultural partnership here, is the fact that underneath this roof in this holy sanctuary are not just people who speak different languages and come from different backgrounds and cultures, but also people whose theology lays in very different places and perspectives on the theological map. Ray-Thomas and Bethany are both Presbyterian, but our partnership here includes the far rightest of the right on the evangelical/conservative side and some on the left on the theologically liberal side, and then a whole bunch of us who clamor for our place in the moderate middle, who are accused of being on the right or the left depending on the other person’s perspective. The amazing thing is, we haven’t blown up yet. I suspect one of the reasons for that is that we know we’re all just students of this multicultural ministry adventure, so we are primed to listen to each other just a little more closely, as fellow classmates.
The other day I realized just how shockingly rare this is. You may know that our denomination is struggling, being pulled apart at the seams again largely over the issue of the ordination of homosexuals. Some of us are so tired of fighting over this we’d do anything to escape it. And what is happening is that congregations are trying to escape; and sadly many PCUSA congregations are thinking about leaving the denomination. In the throes of this, I wrote an email to the PCUSA denominational staff person in charge of multicultural ministry. I asked if there was anything we could do to urge that we find a way, as conservatives, moderates and liberals, to make room for each other in one denomination. I cited our church; that we manage to sit next to each other in the pews despite differences; that we’re in this partnership together despite differences; that we’re committed to trying to love and cherish each other despite differences. He wrote back thanking me and telling me he’d forwarded my email far and wide, to the very top ranks of the denomination, to people who are giving up on the ideal that we could have unity in diversity, to remind them we don’t have to give that up. We are fellow students; one side is not wrong and the other side right. We are seekers together; and the only One who really has a hold on the Truth is God, THE Teacher, THE Instructor.
The rest of us are only students; but how wonderful to be students! Think of babies and pre-schoolers, how they learn, how they are constantly learning. It looks like they are chewing on a rattle, but actually they are figuring out all kinds of things, and they emit newness and freshness and learning. Hang around a four year old long enough and you see it in action.
But as we age, we learn, and then cometh the danger of thinking we know it all. We think we already know, so no need to learn this or that. We know enough to get by. Why bother learning that new technology the three year old has mastered? We don’t need it. Instead, we know so much, and we’re good at so much, that we can go on auto-pilot. And we do. The trouble is, it’s in auto-pilot that we lose our keys, our glasses, our wallets…and sometimes our faith.
It turns out NOT knowing it all, having questions, seeking, looking for connections, being open and hungering for more is what it takes to have a growing faith.
We are students. All of us. Thanks be to God. Amen.You shall love God with all your hearts, souls and minds, and your neighbors as ourselves…can we hear the depth and the richness to that call? Amen.
[i] Daniel M. Harrell The 30 Day Levitical Challenge in Christianity Today, 52, no 8, Aug 2008, p. 30
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid, p. 30-33.
Invitations
Matthew 22:1-14 October 9, 2011 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
The burning city and guest tossed out into the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth may distract us just a tad from the fact that this parable is about being invited to a party.The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like God offering us a party with our closest friends, all the best foods we can imagine, but a whole bunch of us are declining the invitation; declining the invitation to JOY.
It makes you wonder: are you and I doing things keeping us from the joy God wants us to have? How many of us have relationships or other places in our lives where we’ve found fault or lost interest and somehow have lost joy?
This is a parable about joy; but why all the violence?
The simple answer is that Jesus has to be dramatic, because he doesn’t have enough time left to be anything else. According to Matthew, this parable came towards the end of Jesus’ ministry. Things were reaching a fever pitch between Jesus and the religious leaders. And Jesus never gave up hope that all of Israel would finally come around and understand the moment in history in which they lived; that they would come around and realize who God really was, what God really was like, and abandon all the games and distortions that were happening in the name of God.
So he told this parable about a wedding invitation. Just imagine if the British royal family had prepared the wedding of Prince William, but those invited concluded, “Huh. Maybe I’ll be busy that day.” Imagine if NO ONE had gone to that wedding. The world would’ve known, right then and there, that that was the end of the British monarchy.
Jesus knew full well when he told this parable that the guests’ refusal to come was political; whatever they were pledging allegiance to, it was no longer the king. And it didn’t take a brilliant mind to figure out that Jesus was telling the leaders of the religious institution of his day that whatever they were worshipping, it was not God.
Here’s the killer: God wanted them at the party, even though they’d screwed everything up. They were within inches of an experience of a lifetime but they refused to come.[i]Jesus told them the king tried again. Please reconsider. I’ve prepared everything; a delicious feast.
But they paid no attention. Ameleo is the Greek word here, and maybe one we ought to know by heart, because if we forget everything else about this parable, if we can just remember this one word it might change our lives. Ameleo means “overlook; make light of; be careless about; neglect,” and Jesus is saying that’s the word that fits how way too many of us treat God. Even those who consider ourselves very religious. Because it doesn’t matter how religious we are if we’ve traded the real God for some lesser, packaged version.
Allegiance, love for, connection to the real God is what this parable is about, and Jesus said it in the most politically blunt way possible. He explained some of the invited guests thought there was more important stuff to do, while others shot the messengers who carried the invitations. They shot the messengers! When it comes to allegiance to a king (or to God) the difference between apathy and violence is only a matter of degree. Either way your loyalty or your love is not first and foremost to that king.
So, Jesus said, the king responded the way kings respond to insurrection.
And instead of everyone living in a wonderful, holy, reciprocal relationship of joy, the king and these people were now on opposite sides, and it wasn’t the king who started it.
But that king still wanted a party; still wanted a wedding reception for his son.
So the king decreed his servants go into the streets and invite anybody they could find. You can’t help but wonder if the people were in the streets because their homes had been burned; were they collateral damage? Were they symbolic of the holy truth – that when we are the innocent victims, when the consequences of what others do come crashing down on our shoulders and destroy our lives, God finds a way somehow, in time, to turn it into new life?
Those people came. So the wedding hall was filled with guests.
This would have been so much easier a parable if Jesus had just ended it there. We could have said, “Oh, those foolish Jews. They missed their chance. But now the Gentiles have taken their place at the party. Hurray for us!” Except Jesus continues.
The king noticed a man not wearing appropriate wedding clothes.
This was almost as inconceivable as the initial guests refusing the invitation. Scholars say hosts would provide appropriate garb at the door the same way fancy restaurants hand out the required neckties. You could either don one of those or borrow clothes for the occasion.
And the truth of it is, we all know that sometimes in our spiritual lives, all we can do is borrow. As good Presbyterians. We know that our whole lives are supposed to be lived in joyful gratitude for all that God has done. But sometimes, what’s happening to us now is so painful and so hard that it’s difficult to conjure up gratitude. In those times, we know it’s good manners to fake it, to don a smile nevertheless, to try not to spread our negative emotions all over everybody else at the party but somehow try to adopt their positive feelings; to plaster a smile on our faces even though our lips may be trembling the way it is at funerals when you’re standing there in the greeting line as the guests tell you they are so sorry about your loved one, and you’re trying to smile, but your whole face is trembling in the grief of it. Sometimes in our spiritual lives all we can do is borrow, borrow prayer, borrow faith, borrow compassion, try to hang on close to those who seem close to God in the hopes that some of it will rub off. Think about how this parable might have gone had this guest donned the appropriate clothing but was standing there with tears in his eyes and a trembling lip. Would the king have tossed him out?
No. But this guest didn’t bother. We’re back to that Greek word – ameleo. Carelessness. He just didn’t care. It wasn’t that his heart was broken; he wasn’t suffering trauma or pain. He just didn’t give a rip.
Imagine the disciple Matthew remembering this parable. He was one of the few disciples left who actually knew what it was like to sit at a table with Jesus; who knew all the ups and downs of everything that led to the upper room, to that last supper, when they dined right at the edge of the Kingdom of God. [ii] Imagine how it would have been for Matthew to watch anyone come to the communion table casually, swallowing the bread and cup without a second thought, like they were munching on pretzels.
Do you think Jesus told this parable in anger or lament?
To care. That’s what God asks of us. To care the way Jesus showed us to care. To get religion back on track to where it is actually about compassion, justice and generosity. To spread such love that the joy of the party takes hold and no one wants to say no. All with ears to hear, hear. Amen.
Lessons on Bowing
Philippians 2:1-13 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Like so much in life, we’ve got to get the context of Paul in order to get the full impact of what he’s saying. Philippi is a Roman colony, dripping with Roman culture and Roman values. And top among the values in Rome, top among the things that really matter, is status. Status. Not just whether or not you have legal status, but how high up the social ladder you are placed.
Did you ever know anyone who name-drops? Whenever you are with them, they manage to bring things into the conversation, like, “Well, yesterday when Brian McCann and I were having lunch,” or “You know, the other day when I was doing the Bible study with President Carter, I pointed out to him…” Whatever name dropping we manage to pull off, the Romans were superior in the game. Remember the couple that crashed President Obama’s inaugural ball? They were small potatoes compared to the Romans. In Philippi, you go up to somebody’s door and instead of just their name being inscribed on the post, they’d have their whole resume inscribed on the wall. They didn’t just make statues to their gods; they made statues to themselves. Status was everything.
And mostly you were born with it, or not. And if you were born with it, it was your blood line duty to point it out to the world.
Everybody knew the hierarchy, who topped whom, and everybody knew who was on the bottom rung: the slaves, the debtors, the low-life.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians was the only letter in which Paul actually noted people’s status –the bishops and the deacons. And it’s almost like he had to do that because Philippi was a Roman city par excellence, and status ruled so much that it pervaded every part of their lives. Even the low-life’s found ways to rank themselves and each other.
I’d like to pretend this was all some kind of Roman quirkiness, except you and I still do it, our society still does it. It’s like a bad virus that has spread through the ages and none of us are immune. And it’s almost like we force each other into it.
One of my favorite hobbies is to interview High School seniors who are applying to my alma mater. All college applications leave a huge section for students to boast about their extracurricular activities and there’s a whole glaring column in which you are supposed to note your positions of leadership. You don’t want to send in your college application without at least one leadership position highlighted. So we put these kids in tough situations. I remember one senior, great kid, but his leadership list was a little weak. He did have one place where he reported he was the President of his Philosophy Club. I, of course, asked about it, and it turned out that his best friend was the Vice President and that actually, the President and the Vice President were the only two members of the club. The bottom line is that this kid was just trying to figure out life, but hanging out in the basement discussing the meaning of life with your buddy doesn’t make for a spiffy resume, so he was the President and the friend the Vice President. And we essentially drove him to it; made him secretly feel a little less because he wasn’t the President of the student body or the President of the marching band. He was a good kid, contributing to the world through kindness and insight, but he was made to feel as though that wasn’t good enough.
Philippi was so full of status-consciousness that Paul wrote to the “bishops” and the “deacons”.
But here was a problem: he wrote from prison. From prison.Imagine if I got arrested and thrown in prison. Some of you would probably be supportive, “We always knew this multicultural ministry might cause trouble,” you’d say to each other, but you’d visit me and send me cards, and maybe even a cake with a saw in it.
But others wouldn’t understand. In the 1980s Presbyterian Pastor John Fife co-founded the Sanctuary Movement which provided support to Central American refugees escaping death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. In 1986 Pastor Fife was convicted of violating federal immigration laws. Some folks said, “Well Scripture says Christians should obey the law, and this pastor wasn’t obeying the law, so he deserves what he gets.” They evidently forgot the irony – that Paul was the one who wrote those words about obeying civil law but Paul himself did not always obey them. Sometimes in life, you have to figure out which law is higher: God’s or the state’s. You wish they’d never conflict, but when they do, you have to make a choice. When Pastor Fife was threatened with prison, some Christians concluded that he must not be a truly godly man; they were certain God would not let one of His own wind up like that.This is exactly the kind of situation in which Paul found himself. He wouldn’t stop doing the work of Jesus Christ and Rome threw him in prison for it.
Some in Philippi understood; but others weren’t sure. How do you deal with public gossip when your pastor is in prison? How are you not guilty by association? How could they explain to a status-seeking world that Paul’s imprisonment was a God thing? How could God let a good man’s life be endangered by prison like that? Some began to think maybe Paul wasn’t as godly as they thought he was…
It doesn’t take much to suffer a fall from grace in the public eye.
But sometimes when life cuts you open and you lose everything, God reaches in and does amazing things. Being held in prison under these circumstances seemed to have given Paul 20-20 vision, and suddenly by the hand of God he could see into their culture with stunning clarity.
Status seeking, the power of fame, a culture where you have to measure yourself against others to feel good about yourself, is a culture of utter blindness.
You know what really matters, Paul wrote to the church in Philippi: encouragement and love in Jesus Christ; sharing in the Spirit; finding a unity in the Lord. That’s where LIFE is found, that’s where joy and meaning are found! O, my Philippian friends, unhook from this Roman stuff. Instead, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus (2:3-5).
Do you realize what the gospel tells us? Paul asked. And he quoted this magnificent hymn about our Lord, this beautiful hymn in which, hold onto your hats, Philippians, Jesus, though born with the status of God gave it all up and emptied himself, refusing to grasp and grab for any of it, and became as a slave…
the bottom rung of humanity, the lowest of the low, Philippians…
And was crucified, in the death Rome usually reserved for slaves, the least of all, the dirt beneath our feet.
THIS is the one God highly exalted.
It’s enough to blow a Philippians’ mind apart.
Christ, Paul teaches us, is not only the One who bows to Almighty God, but also bows to the least , to people who are nothing, to us, so that our eyes can be opened and we can bow to Him.
The hope for humanity is not a world where people grab and grasp for power, honor and glory, Paul wrote. Our hope is in when we bow to Christ, and therefore each other, and discover, that’s where true power is.I’ve got to be honest. I remember learning about humility and how Christians were supposed to be humble in college, but my friends and I worried…how can being a doormat possibly be effective? We wanted to change the world. We could see how broken it was. But we weren’t idiots; we could see who had power and it certainly was not the humble.
Until, of course, God threw a little learning lesson at our feet in the form of Mother Theresa.
I know she sort of had that fame and humility thing going on at the same time, but she didn’t grasp after the fame. At a conference a few years back the Christian writer Shane Claiborne told about his faith journey and how years ago he’d decided he wanted to spend some time with the sisters in Calcutta. How do you arrange for something like that? Somehow he got the phone number for the sisters of Calcutta and called them. And Mother Theresa answered! Mother Theresa answered the phone!
So, really, humility, giving yourself for others, won’t work, won’t make a difference in this world?
This morning our choir sang an anthem, and I found the words hard to sing because we prayed in song, “let me live for You,” and I realize just how hard that is; how much it demands. Because it means it’s time to give up the mindset of Rome and embrace the mindset of Christ.
All with ears to hear, hear. Amen.
Jonah 3:10-4:11 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
Everybody knows the story of Jonah – Jews, Christians, even Muslims. The Koran describes Jonah as “Him of the great fish.” How utterly ironic, and I think maybe tragic, that all three religions know this story, this story that is, of all things, about God’s universal love, and yet look at us – like three spoiled children, each starting each other down with the sure and certain knowledge that God loves me best, and some of us questioning whether God loves that other one at all.
We know the story. God sees the sin of Ninevah, which today is Iraq, so God sends Jonah, the reluctant prophet, to go to Ninevah and tell them God has had ENOUGH. Preach to Iraq, God says, so Jonah promptly heads towards Spain.Jonah has absolutely no interest in preaching to Ninevah. If you preach to Ninevah, there is a slim chance that the reckless, recalcitrant infidels will repent. And if they repent, God may relent. Jonah did not want to give his life in the service of their repentance. Ninevah, later called Assyria, destroyed Israel in 722 BC and was then and is now among Israel’s worst enemies on the planet. The horrific acts of terrorists? Israel knew all about it from Ninevah. Go preach to Ninevah? No, thank you.
Jonah had a better idea. He would go to Spain and God would wipe Ninevah off the face of the earth.
Of course, instead, Jonah wound up in the belly of the big fish, got spit up after three days, and landed on the shoreline where God said again, “Go to Ninevah,” and not wanting another three days in the belly of the fish, Jonah went to Ninevah.
But his heart wasn’t in his work.
Preach to Ninevah, God said. But Jonah didn’t spend hours pouring through scholarly journals, looking at the roots of Hebrew words, trying to come up with good illustrations, carving out a sermon that would knock their socks off. No. He just stood up, completely unprepared, and simply said, “In 40 days Ninevah will be destroyed,” and sat down. End of sermon.
David always tells me my sermons should be shorter. Clearly, he’s right! The five word sermons are the way to go! Not only did the people of Ninevah repent; even their animals repented. You have never seen such repentance on the face of the earth. They were just dripping with repentance!
Ninevah repented. God relented. Jonah resented.
Jonah was furious. God let Ninevah off the hook. And worse, now it looked like Jonah was a false prophet. He said they’d be destroyed in 40 days. Forty days came and went, no destruction…kind of like the poor saps who stood waiting for the end of the world last May. Nothing happened; they stood silently waiting while the rest of the world snickered.
You made me look like an idiot! Jonah lamented unto the Lord.
And now, thanks to your grace, Holy and Divine Creator, Ninevah will live to destroy us on another day. Thanks be to God, Jonah mumbled in fury. I can see the brilliance of Your Plan. You and your Divine forgiveness. Now the Ninevites think Israel’s prophets are fools and moreover, they see they can get away with anything as long as they throw on some sackcloth and ashes when they are done. Good job, Lord.
And God said unto Jonah, “Enjoying your anger?”
And Jonah, who clearly was enjoying his anger, stomped out of the city of Ninevah to go sit someplace to watch what he hoped would be God coming to His senses and blast Ninevah off the planet.
It simply never occurred to Jonah to ask himself what would have happened if he’d offered the Ninevites more than a five-word sermon; what would have happened if he’d gone to them in compassion, ministering to them and actually teaching them about our gracious, slow to anger God? Their hearts were so open to change, but Jonah didn’t stay to sow more seeds into that change. What if he had stayed and become community, family with the Ninevites? Would history have been altered; would the animosity between Israel and Ninevah have turned to friendship? Jonah never wondered about that.
Instead, Jonah went and sat to see what would happen to that lousy city, his attention finally riveted to the city. Meanwhile, God’s attention riveted to Jonah.
Concerned about the world and concerned about each and every one of us; that is our God.
…A God who can get fish to obey him, worms and bushes to obey him, a God who might just throw us into the belly of a fish to get our attention, who in the end will only invite but not force a change in our human hearts. Our God of utter power, utter sovereignty, will only invite but not force a change in our hearts; which is why, I think, when we sing, “Change my heart, O Lord,” some of us practically beg it, because we’re pretty sure it’s the only way our stubborn hearts will change.
Jonah left the city to go watch to see what would happen, and God made a bush grow like gangbusters to shield Jonah from the sun. (And here’s an interesting trivia fact: the word for that bush in Hebrew comes from a combination of words that mean “to vomit” and “Jonah,” as in how the big fish vomited Jonah back to life. God has a great sense of humor.) Anyway, Jonah loved that bush, and when God sent a worm to attack the bush and it instantly flopped and Jonah’s shade was gone, Jonah, still mad at God’s grace upon his enemies, was devastated. “I want to die! “ he cried, in a wonderful biblical example of how we humans can take things out of perspective.
God destroys your shade tree and you want to die? How obvious can Scripture be with red flag warnings, “Be careful when you are feeling sorry for yourself! You will likely not see things in perspective. Do not trust your judgment when you are angry and hurt!”
God said again to Jonah, “Is your anger good for you?” Feeling good about your anger? Is your anger working for you?
“Yes!” Jonah declares, resembling something of a three-year old.
OK, fine, God says. Then maybe you can understand this. You’re upset about a shade tree that you didn’t create or tend but only loved because it brought you shade, and you begrudge me for loving Ninevah, which I made and tended?
I love it: God asks, “Should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than 3200 people who don’t know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
And Jonah doesn’t answer. The question just gets left, hanging in the air.
And there it hangs, right on through the generations. And Jesus picks it up. In the 12th chapter of Matthew, the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign, and He tells them the only sign they’ll get is “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:38-40). If Jesus was going to identify himself with a prophet, why in the world would he pick Jonah?
Many of us like to think about Jesus with children crawling all over his lap, declaring, “How I longed to gather you under my wings, but you would not,” this sweet and gentle Jesus. And then there’s that rather scary God of the Old Testament, and we’re quite glad we have sweet Jesus. But I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice, underestimating who Jesus really was and how Jesus really felt[i]?
Was it really utterly simple for Jesus to love enemies? He grew up in a regime that committed the mass murder of two-year olds. To say Rome was oppressive hardly begins to cover it. Was it easy for him when Herod beheaded John? Did that just roll off his holy heart? Every day of his life he saw Roman abuses of power; and the Pharisees’ abuse of their power. Was it really all that easy for Jesus to forgive? Remember the story where Jesus called a Gentile woman a “dog”? Remember when he called the people “an evil generation”?
The only sign you’ll get is the sign of Jonah, Jesus said, and when pushed to the brink in the Garden of Gethsemane, while begging God to spare him of the suffering, he uttered Jonah’s words about being grieved unto death. Was it really all that easy for Jesus to get over his anger and forgive? Might Jesus, like Jonah, have agonized over the consequences of God’s grace?
What wondrous love is this, O my soul, may be even more wondrous than we’ve imagined before.
While we still seem to struggle over the unanswered question about whether or not God should love Ninevah, Jesus answered the question with his life. His preaching about loving our enemies wasn’t mere talk. He may have absolutely identified with Jonah’s struggle to give his life in service to those who don’t deserve it, but He went through with the greatest gift of grace the world has ever known. This Jesus says to us, “go and do likewise,” knowing full well just how costly it is.
The only sign you’ll have is the sign of Jonah, Jesus said. All with ears to hear, hear. Amen.
On Holy Ground
Who would have imagined it: holy ground on Midianite dirt. But wherever we encounter God is holy ground, the holiest of ground.
This is one of the reasons people who’ve gone away from churches sometimes find themselves wandering back –when we are really hungry for God, really desperate for some word, some touch, some kind of holy connection, we go to a place we’ve heard God has been, or suspect God has been, in hopes we’ll discover God there now. We want so desperately to discover God there now.
More often than not, we wander into the holy ground the same way Moses did – in middle of our ordinary lives, carrying things we don’t like to talk about, shaped by memories of things we wish had been otherwise. Some of us know what it is to be on the lam, running away; running away usually not because we’ve killed somebody, but more likely because we have destroyed we’d never meant to destroy - relationships, careers, reputations…our own reputation. We come as strangers and exiles, so many of us, so many of us running away or lost or trying to build a new life, trying to find a new way to live now that we’re in this new place in life. When you go from 5th to 6th grade, from Middle School to High School, from High School to college, from being single to being married, from having no children to having children, from being SO sure of your marriage to a place where you are not sure at all, from being married to single, from employment to unemployment, from “full house” into “empty nesters,” and then “retirees,” from being a couple to widowed, from being a young adult to mid adult and then from middle age to “Senior Adult, in every one of these seasons we have to figure out how do we live now that we’re here in this new place.
We come to church because we sense this is holy ground. Sometime, somehow in this very room, God has spoken through Scripture or a song or some part of some prayer, in moments of silence or moments when we’re running around greeting each other. The moments when we hear God’s voice are close but fleeting. As Frederick Buechner says despite how fleeting they are, “these moments are windows into the truest meaning and mystery of the cosmos itself.”[ii] Sometimes the holiness has almost knocked us off our feet at weddings, seeing two people stand before God and us making promises they pray to God they can keep; and at baptisms, especially when it’s a baby being baptized and you just know the parents are standing there praying God help them through the teen years, and at funerals and memorial services, where sometimes the presence of God is so close its like we’re being anointed.
We ought to all take off our shoes before we enter…
Mid-Easterners and Asians and others know full well what taking off your shoes means. Shoes are removed before you enter a home. Taking off our shoes means we are home. In many ways, holy ground is more home than home.
God said, “I am the God of your father, Abraham…” There’s a sense in which God is known to us through the witness and faith of our parents and grandparents and the parents ahead of them.
Even when we rebel against our parents’ faith, it is still somehow there for us, like a fountain we ignore until we’re desperately thirsty. I remember how hard my mother fought to get me to church every Sunday when I became a teenager. Oh, the battles! And, O, what I a sinner I was – the worst kind. My mother would send us to church with our offering envelopes: 15 cents for God. But my friends and I, awful sinners, would wave to our parents as we entered the Christian building, and then we’d slip out the back door and sneak across the street and spend our 15 cents on candy at the store next door. Oh, I was a rebel, rebelling against what seemed to me to be useless faith. But then, when my friend’s older brother died suddenly, tragically, at 16, suddenly it was the faith of my parents that helped see me through. We sometimes think, as parents, that our sowing of the seeds of faith is coming up empty, but the seeds sown deep remain.
“I am the God of your father Abraham…”God told Moses, the God who gives babies to the barren and new life to the old; the God who promises a future when no future seems possible.
Moses, you may have been raised by Egyptians, but you are a child of Abraham
[i] See Holmgren, Fredrick C., "Between Text & Sermon, Exodus 2:11-3:15," Interpretation, 2002
[ii] Hope in Secrets in the Dark p. 76
[iv][iv] Thomas Carlyle cited by Lewis B Smedes The Power of Promises, A Chorus of Witnesses p. 161
Justice in the Bulrushes
Exodus 2:1-10 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Scott
When I was a child in Sunday School, happily making bulrush baskets out of construction paper for baby Moses, nobody told me, needless to say, about the huge political connotations of this holy story. I had simply focused on a loving mother putting her little boy in a basket and his big sister watching out for him and Moses getting to be raised by his mom and the Princess of Egypt. What a happy story, I thought.
I had no idea that the story was about systems of injustice and governments that collude with injustice and God’s response. No idea about the implications of God’s response.
I’d never noticed that the last four words of Genesis are “a coffin in Egypt.” Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, Leah, their boy Joseph were dead and the handwriting was on the wall was that the Hebrew people were as good as dead, too, stuck in Egypt. It had gone well for them while Joseph was alive, given that he was a high-ranking Egyptian official. But we all know what happens to ethnic groups and the under-classes when the economy goes bad and the tensions get high and certain great leaders pass. We turn against the ones who are different from us. The last ones into the land are the first ones we want out. Hundreds of years had passed since Joseph and the Hebrew people went from being immigrants to outcasts to slaves. It feels like God has been silent for hundreds of years because God doesn’t seem to be doing anything, except apparently, watching. Peter, in the New Testament, tells us that we often mistake God’s watching, God’s patient waiting, God’s willingness to keep giving us chances to change, with God’s inaction. If the Egyptians had ever had a sense that the God of Joseph actually had power and was worth worrying about, they’d forgotten it. So their people and their government marched right on ahead oppressing, enslaving, hurting the Hebrews, and committing atrocities that they didn’t even think were atrocities.
The other night I was watching some PBS special about the USSR’s occupation of Poland and was horrified to hear someone explaining that when Soviet officials murdered something like 22,000 Polish intellectuals, the Soviet people thought that was just something that had to be done for the good of the nation. They didn’t see it as an atrocity at all. Just like too many in Nazi Germany just didn’t see.
Evidently when Pharaoh told all the Egyptians to start tossing Hebrew baby boys into the Nile, they didn’t think it was an atrocity, either. Their economy was sinking, nations were gathering ‘round them like hungry coyotes ready to lure the Hebrews over to their side and destroy Egypt from within. So it was a matter of national security, this killing of Hebrew baby boys. Ask anyone, that’s what they’d tell you.
This happy little children’s story kicks me in the stomach, reminding me again of man’s inhumanity to man. Harder still, it forces me to look at what atrocities we may be committing that we don’t see as atrocities, or even if we do suspect they are, think we can do nothing to change things.
Someone once pointed out if you want to see the soul of a nation, look at their children.
Look at the Egyptians dumping baby boys into the Nile and you’ll see their soul. Look at Nazi Germany killing Anne Frank. You see their soul. But here’s the really hard part. What about us?
We’re good, right? We treat children well, right? We care about them and their education, right?
Except some of us are already whispering to ourselves, Not enough.Did you know that Georgia ranks 49th out of the 50 states on the problem of child homelessness? In the 2008-9 school year, there were about 24,000 homeless children. By 2008-9 that rose to nearly 42,000 homeless children. And the economy has only gotten worse. In our state, 22% of children live below the poverty line. One in twenty children in Georgia don’t know where they will get dinner tonight.
We think, “How stupid can Pharaoh have been?” The Hebrew men were their laborers, their strong backs, and Pharaoh was killing off the future of his labor. But, you know, the High School graduation rate for homeless children is less than 25%, which economists recognize translates into a $1.1 billion dollar loss of potential income in Georgia’s future.
This is not a sweet little children’s story at all. It’s a cold, stark reality story about our human failings, our human blindness, our ability to not see what we don’t want to see; a story given to us by a God of justice who does see.
But thanks be to God there is good news in this story; good news in that world then and our world now.
The God who sees rectifies, and whether we are the Egyptians in this story or the Hebrews, we all have a chance down at the Nile.
Down at the Nile a mother who thought things were hopeless for her baby boy nevertheless defiantly hoped against hope.
Pharaoh, you tell me I have to put my baby in the river. I’ll put him in the river all right. I’ll put him in a basket in the river.And down at the Nile a little girl, too young for anybody to think she could make a difference, this little girl, this big sister, watched and looked for a way to save her baby brother.
Did you catch on the news the tragic and yet absolutely inspiring story about some 8 or 9 year old girl who on her last birthday asked her friends to contribute money to charity instead of giving her gifts, and how tragically, she was later killed in a car accident, and how people hearing about that tragedy and her generosity were so touched that millions have been raised in her name for that charity? Eight or nine is not too young to start serving God; not too young to make a difference.
So the big sister waited for her chance.
And then we have Pharaoh’s daughter. I wonder if she’d grown up hearing all the nasty things the Egyptians said about the Hebrews. I wonder if she’d actually ever talked to a Hebrew as though they were a real person. She was Pharaoh’s daughter, after all. Imagine what she’d seen and heard!
When this basket washed up and she heard that baby cry, she knew immediately it was a Hebrew boy. There’s a pause in the action in the story, a split second pause. You wonder if for a split second Pharaoh’s daughter thought about obeying her dad and dumping the baby from the basket into the water. But suddenly a girl had shown up and she was watching. Regrettably, sometimes you and I need an audience to do the right thing.
Whether or not it was the little girl’s presence that made her do it, she still did it. She took up the baby. All the prejudice and blindness with which she’d grown up did not have the final word in her, did not destroy her soul. Somehow, she had compassion.
Do you think she was really fooled by the little girl who arrived just in time, announcing she knew somebody who could nurse the baby? Do you think for one second she didn’t suspect this was his big sister?
She could have sent the little girl away, but didn’t. Against all odds, she had compassion.
People wondered where God was. All we need to do is look at Moses’ mother and sister and Pharaoh’s daughter and we see the touch of God.
It’s amazing, and almost humorous in the story if the whole thing wasn’t so tragic, that Pharaoh thought the boys were the threats, when in actuality, the ones who changed the course of history were the females through whom God was at work.
The Hebrews would laugh as they retold this story, remembering how a couple of midwives fooled old Pharaoh by using his prejudice against him. He’d asked them why they weren’t killing the babies and they told him those bizarre Hebrew women were like animals the way they popped out babies and they just couldn’t get there in time. Pharaoh thought Hebrews were like animals, so bought their story. How the Hebrews laughed over that one. And then it was a Hebrew mother and her daughter and the man’s own daughter that undermined everything. His own daughter. These women, these five women, changed the course of history.
We made 160 sandwiches a week this summer to feed hungry children and we probably thought that wasn’t putting a dent in the problem. But who knows in God’s hands what might come of it.
This story urges us to be like that Hebrew mother who defied the forces of evil; to be like the daughter who refused to let the worst about her society destroy her soul; to be like the big sister who looked for her chance to intervene.
This story unmistakably tells us that God is watching. God sees. God cares. The God of love is also the God of justice. Sometimes it’s hard to hear God’s voice and other times his voice seems so clear it about knocks me off my feet. This morning I glanced at my email on my phone and saw Jim Hurley had sent something the Session. I opened it and saw the hand of God. Jim had sent around an article about defeating homelessness, about one person’s initiative that has made an enormous difference. The article quoted the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who said,
The article concludes with the admonition, “Take a good look in the mirror..”
Whether we want to or not, we all take roles in the Bible stories. Today and in our lifetimes we can be Pharaoh and his blind citizens or we can be Moses’ mother, Pharaoh’s daughter or the big sister who watches for her chance to intervene. Amen.
Matthew 15: (10-20) 21-28 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
You’d think there would be some things the early church just would not mention – like this encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Jesus had just given a lesson to the Pharisees about the danger of bad things that come out of our mouths and suddenly and strikingly here we have Jesus calling the woman a dog. If this was Peter or one of the disciples saying this, that would be one thing. But Jesus?! You’d think the early church would have cleaned this up or let this fall into the category of things we’re just not going to mention. This whole exchange upsets people so much that a number of commentators suggest we not preach on this story. Folks don’t want to touch it because it messes with our image of Jesus, with our theology.
Which may be the exact reason the Gospels tell it.This is God’s book, after all, God’s living word to us, God’s way of teaching us. And as uncomfortable as this story is, because Jesus looks outright rude, it is a holy story filled with holy lessons.
One of those lessons is to get us again to look into what it means when we declare Jesus was fully God and fully human. We so much prefer the stories where Jesus is so utterly godly we can forget he was human at all. But in this story he is very human. In one breath he tells the Pharisees it’s not what they eat but what they teach and say that matters and in the next he says something so utterly cruel that he seems to be his own bad example. This is not how we like to think about Jesus. He should be above this sort of name calling! But the horrible word slips out – dog – and in that moment Jesus is extremely, what we hate about ourselves, human.
Scholars have tried to soften Jesus’ words. Some argue that this word for dog also meant puppy, which isn’t half as bad, right? Except the truth is there’s not a whole lot of difference between calling a woman the expletive that means a female dog and calling her that expletive but adding the word “little” in front of it. You __; you little ___. We don’t want either one coming out of Jesus’ mouth. And we know there is no excusing it, not then, not now. Jesus in this moment is caught up in years’ worth of ethnic, religious, political division, caught up in that tension between the Jews and the group that originally inhabited the Promised Land. They had nothing good to say about each other. They were like Christian extremists staring at Muslim extremists, each convinced it would be better if the other was removed from the face of the earth.
And all of this is part of what the Gospel dares to let us see – these degrees to which racism and prejudice and antagonism can affect us all.
What ‘s confusing in the story is that it seems like Jesus almost sets himself up to be the bad example, sets himself up for this whole encounter. It was Jesus who decided to wander over the boundary between these two lands. If you go to the Texas border, you might just run into some Mexicans. Go to the border between Gentile territory and Jewish land, and you might just run into some Gentiles.
The woman was the one who initiated the conversation, though again, Jesus set himself up for it. She saw him and she went tearing after him, shouting at him and begging him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. One commentator was probably right when he suggested that the disciples likely thought all of the Canaanite-types were possessed by demons, so what was the big deal?
“Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David!” she cried in words that were really quite extraordinary, given her background. Imagine an Arab Muslim begging, “Have mercy on me, Jesus Christ, God of Israel.”
And what astounds us and is meant to astound us is that Jesus says nothing. It’s like he is going to walk right by this woman.
The disciples want her out of there. “Send her away,” they tell him in words that pointedly echo what they told Jesus to do with the hungry crowds before he fed the 5000. Send her away because we never know what you’re going to do. Send her away because we really don’t want you engaging in conversation with her. Send her away before you do something we’ll regret.
Jesus answered; but we’re not sure who he answered, the woman or his disciples, saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Were those words meant to comfort the disciples, reminding them that no matter how badly the Pharisees or anyone else treated him, no matter how incredibly horribly the Jewish Herod behaved, no matter how many of his own people rejected him, he was really with and for the Jews? Or were those words aimed at the woman – I am for them, not for you. Or were they for himself – who was he sent for? He’d told his disciples to go out exclusively among the people of Israel; but was that really ALL he was sent to do?
It’s not the first time in the Bible where it is almost like God is struggling internally. When everything Israel had done had warranted wrath and punishment, when that wrath was falling upon the people, Scriptures record that God asked himself, “O Ephraim Ephraim..I taught (him) how to walk, I took him up in my arms, Ephraim, how shall I give you up?” They call it the justice of God wrestling with the mercy of God.
The woman heard what Jesus said. But she didn’t storm off. She didn’t shout back. She didn’t spit in his face in her pain. Matthew tells us “she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”
We expect Jesus’ heart to melt, right? We expect him to answer her prayer right here and now. But instead we get this: “It’s not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
And while it is the word “dogs” that gets our attention, the word that is really at the crux of this is fair.
In this enduring battle between the people from the land once called Canaan and the Israelites, sorting out what is fair is sometimes hard. It was Canaan’s land first. But on the other hand, at this point in time, the economics of the region favored the Gentiles who could and did regularly take unfair advantage of the Jews.
Imagine having somebody incredibly rich whose income was derived by unjust means on the backs of innocent people who was given all kinds of benefits and opportunities on the one hand, and on the other hand having multitudes of poor people with all the rules against them who over and over and over come out on the losing side. If the rich person’s daughter is sick, should attention be riveted away from the countless poor?
“It’s not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” he answered. Matthew can’t even bear to write, “Jesus answered.” In all these things we wish Jesus hadn’t said, Matthew opted for pronouns.
“Yes, Lord,” she acknowledged, but with words that make you think she was watching when the 5000 were fed and saw all the unclaimed left-over’s, she added, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”
Which should win: justice or grace? The woman dares to imagine there could be both.“Woman,” Jesus answered, “great is your faith!” And her daughter was healed instantly.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Jesus went on from there, Matthew says, all along that region crawling with Gentiles, and healed crowds, hordes of people, crowds that included Gentiles, which is why we get yet a second telling of a feeding miracle - 4000 were fed - because now the miracle included the very ones who had been excluded before.
Did the Canaanite woman change Jesus’ mind? Did she change the scope of His mission?
You get the sense from Matthew that God the Father had this in mind all along. Matthew is the Gospel that names the Canaanite prostitute Rahab in Jesus’ family tree in Chapter One; and in Chapter Two points out that the Magi were Gentiles. You get the idea in this exchange that God the Father was teaching something to Jesus the Son, the One fully human, fully God.
This story doesn’t fit neatly into our systematic theology, where we try to make everything consistent and neat and clean and try to make Jesus forever unchanging and unchangeable. It instead tells of a day when Jesus had an encounter that by all appearances either changed him or convinced him to change to a wider mission than he’d focused on before. It’s a huge lesson with lessons for us all.
It turns out the ones we call “dogs” are not necessarily excluded from God’s grace. A Canaanite “dog” taught us about persistence and faith. The encounter reminds us that no matter who we are, as humans, we always have something to learn. The minute we think we’ve figured it all out and know what our platform is, there’s more to know. God is always one step ahead. And maybe the most challenging lesson of all is the one implicit in the story. If Jesus was in fact fully human; if he could get angry the way we get angry and hurt the way we hurt and nevertheless in the end be the One he was – self-sacrifice, love, amazing grace – then how much greater can all of us truly be than we are? The Apostle Paul will go on to insist we are all called to have the mind of Christ, to become like Christ. We like to pretend that’s too high a calling; we can’t possibly do it. But maybe, just maybe, in this story, God is showing us that Jesus came to us, like us, so we can grow to be like Christ. All with ears that dare to hear, hear. Amen.
Holy Places
Genesis 28 The Rev. Dr. Carrie Benz Scott
If you’ve ever in your life made a mess of things, or know someone who has, then you know all about Jacob. Evidently his selfishness was genetic. His Uncle Laban has been described as “a selfish, greedy, exploiting, suspicious man of wealth, who never failed to observe good manners[i].” By the time this bad gene reached Jacob, even the good manners were lost. Jacob was born “grabbing at the heels” of his older twin, Esau, and you get the sense that he started calculating early on how to usurp his older brother’s “older brother” status. You’ve probably heard the story about how one day Esau came in from the fields beside himself in hunger, thinking about food, food and more food, and Jacob traded him some porridge for his birthright. Now likely Esau thought no such trade would stand up in the court of his parents, so later on Jacob deceived their dad too, with a little help from mommy-who-loved-him-best, and ultimately faked his way into getting a paternal blessing that had the staying power of a legal contract. When Esau found out, his reaction was fairly simple: he wanted to kill him. So it is fair to say that here in Genesis 28, Jacob was running for his life.Instead, maybe what he would have named it might have been Place of Failure. [ii]. Can you imagine knowing you’ve torn apart your family and your brother hates you so much he wants to kill you? This wasn’t how it was supposed to work out. This wasn’t what he’d planned. He was supposed to have gotten the whole inheritance! Running for his life wasn’t part of the deal. Jacob must have known his scheme had gone awry, that he’d failed. We don’t get the idea that Jacob had a LOT of conscience, but maybe, just maybe, he also realized he’d failed his family. We all know what it’s like to make a mistake or have something happen so that suddenly we realize yesterday was such a good place and now we’ve lost it. We didn’t realize how good it was until we lost it. And now there’s today, and it’s bad, and tomorrow looks worse. There is no good way to undo what we’ve done, no way to undo it at all. Lying there with a rock for a pillow Jacob knew all about failure, and so do many of us. Maybe he would have called it Place of Owning Up to Failure. It is a holy place, this Place of Owning Up to Failure, but most of us don’t realize that right away.
Maybe Jacob would have called it a Place of Grief. We know about that place, too, where our grief is so real, so fierce, so palpable and all we have is a dark hole in our hearts, an empty place, an aching place. We miss the one we love. It’s a homesickness for a home we can’t have anymore, won’t have anymore, not the same way. We know about the Place of Grief.
Or maybe he’d have called it a Place of Fear. [iii]. I’m not sure I would have been able to sleep at all that night, because how would I know whether or not Esau was still awake, hunting me down? And it’s not just that. It’s also that you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. There are times in our lives when we’re in that Place of Fear and tomorrow looms, unknown. We’re awaiting the diagnosis, the surgery, the company merger, the decision on our resume, the decisions about pink slips. None of it is in our hands. None of it is under our control. We want so desperately to turn our Places of Fear into Places of Faith, but under the night sky, fear won’t seem to leave.
There are so many things Jacob could have called that place. Place of Uncertainty. Place of Regret. Place of Mixed Feelings, because he was headed on to find a wife and have a new adventure, but he’d lost so much. Certainly he could have called it Place of How I Didn’t Want it to Be, This Isn’t How I Wanted it to Turn Out. He could have given it any number of names of places you and I have been to as well; places where it is hard to sleep, hard to know where you really are.
And in that place he had a dream. The text doesn’t say whether God sent this dream or if it was a classic case of Wish Fulfillment. But however it started, it was powerful. He dreamed about God, about God right there near him, at the top of a heavenly staircase. And God reminded him that he was, indeed, the recipient of the promise given to Abraham and Isaac and now their son Jacob, no matter what he’d done. People say the God in the Old Testament is all about wrath, but not here. Here God is a God of Grace and Promise who comes to the place of failure, despair, fear, uncertainty, regret and promises He is with us. In the Place of Failure. In the Place of Grief. In the Place of Fear. In the Place of Confusion. God is there. Somehow by that Presence, by God’s Holy Presence, none of those names completely fit anymore. When God steps into the midst of that dark place and promises to be with you, it becomes holy ground.
That’s exactly what happened with Jacob. The next morning Jacob awoke, overwhelmed and awed enough by this dream that he set up markers, an altar of stones. He realized he’d been on holy ground all along and didn’t know it, the same way you and I are on holy ground and don’t see. His dream of hope and Holy Presence, his dream of call and promise and blessing was all so clear. It was a holy moment! A holy place!The ancients describe Jacob as a God-seeker who comprehends neither how to seek nor how to find. He’ll dream of God and wonderful things, but when he gets up in the morning and the rubber meets the road, he’ll second guess and hesitate and try to strike bargains with God, and pass his blind, wavering, deceiving doubt down the generations until we all have it in us in one form or another.
But there is good news in the story, good news for Jacob and good news for us. God continues to bless! If God was a God of utter judgment and wrath, the instant our Jacob said, “Well, IF…” God would have said “The deal’s off.” But God is patient, thanks be to God, and will show up in Jacob’s life again in other ways to open his eyes. And the promise is, God will do it in ours too – God will keep showing up in our places of fear, failure and grief and uncertainty. God will keep turning them into holy places of God’s Presence, where God will be there to work with us and in us. Because God knows the stuff of which we’re made and God cherishes us still. And with us securely in God’s hand, tomorrow is a new day. Thanks be to God! Amen!
[ii] See Calhoun, "'What Is the Name of that Place?' A Sermon Based on Genesis 28:10-19," Presbyterion, 1992
[iii] ibid
Listen!
Interpretation 44 no 1 Ja 1990, p 61-65.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[v] the Rev. Gradye Parsons, stated clerk of the General Assembly, to the National Elders Conference July 1 at Big Tent 2011
[i] Fred Craddock, “Does Money Carry Germs?” in Collected Sermons (Louisville, KY: Westminster, John Knox Press, 2011), p. 28
© Carrie Scott 2011
