Tag: Martin Luther

“The Life Giving Breath of the Church”

Psalm 104:34-35, 37  I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please Abba God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless Abba God, O my soul. Hallelujah!

Introduction

Unintentionally and unwittingly our Christian talk (and God-talk) often sounds as if we’ve forgotten the role of the Spirit in our praxis and doxology (practice and worship). I’m sure many of us, including me, keep the Spirit tucked away back in the recesses of our mind, and we don’t feel like we’re forgetting anything or anyone. I mean, come on, we, Episcopalians, are good Trinitarian, Creedal Christians; we believe in all three persons of the God head. But I get the impression from others—including from myself—that we don’t often take the Holy Spirit—the divine Spirit of God, God in God’s self—seriously. Any form of the pastoral don’t forget about the power of the Spirit is met with yeah, yeah, yeah, the spirit…whatever. (The last part mentioned silently as we turn to continue to do things of our own mind and power.)

Liturgically, the feast day celebrating the arrival of God’s Spirit to dwell in sinner-saints pales in comparison to the way we celebrate Christmas and Easter. Maybe it’s because Pentecost lacks a precursory penitential period like Christmas and Easter; there’s no obvious demand to sit and wait like there is in Advent or an inspiration to fast like there is in Lent. Frankly, this Sunday feels like just another Sunday; once Easter hits, all the BIG feast days are done, now it’s time to relax… Don’t worry, I’m implicated here, too. I’m aware of my own slackened posture toward everything that follows Easter Sunday’s setting sun.

For the Christian Church, the Church doesn’t exist until the Spirit comes, until today. Christmas doesn’t cause it to exist; Easter builds the foundation for it but not the structure. Pentecost establishes the Church in both its seen and unseen expressions; the Spirit is the reason why the Church will never die even if it ceases to exist as it does today. The Spirit is at the core our Christian Identity, both individually and corporately. It is the Spirit who brings all of us together in sibling like unity while celebrating our radiant and beautiful differences is certainly divine work, as Paul says,

Romans 8:14-17

For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these ones are sons [children] of God (v.14). Paul, addressing the Jewish and Gentile Christians in Roman, declares to both parties that anyone (“whoever”) has the divine Spirit of God is by default a child (“son”) of God. It is these ones who were indebted to the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of the flesh (clean/unclean; wise/foolish; free/slave), who are now indebted to the Spirit.[1] In this way, their obligations to and association with others must take on a different vibe: one informed by and structured on the unity created by the Holy Spirit. [2] Another way to say this is, Christian Romans—both Jew and Gentile—are dependent on the Holy Spirit for their identification with Christ and their union with God by faith and this makes them more than just a group of individuals; it makes them one body.

Paul goes further, though. It is the Spirit, according to Paul, that makes those who follow The Way of Christ, family. Thus, why Paul then says, For you did not receive a spirit of captivity again into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption by which we cry out, “Papa, Father!” (v. 15). The divine Spirit, who is the source of their identity as “Christ followers” and of their union with God, is the one who ensures that whoever is carried by the spirit, whoever is dependent on the Spirit can call God “Papa!” (By the Spirit, God becomes “Papa!” and is the one you run to in distress rather than flee because of fear.[3]) The theme of adoption Paul employs here carries with it the legal connotation familiar to the Roman society: a person who is not related to you by birth is designated as one’s heir.[4] According to Paul, and this will sound offensive to us[5] as it probably did to the Jewish Children of Israel, no one is a child of God by birth (creation) but only by adoption through the presence of the Holy Spirit,[6] …the same Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (v. 16).

Does this mean that the “children of God” are only Christians, and it is these who are worthy of love, life, liberation?[7] The answer to that is “No.” Recalling v. 14, For whoever is guided/carried by the Spirit of God, these are sons/children of God, the “whoever” expands the definition, broadens the scope from those who look, act, are a certain way to whoever is so imbued with God’s Spirit and whoever thusly acts like children of God (cf. Romans 2).[8] Said in another way, those who love/anyone who loves those who and that which God loves are the children of God because to love as God loves is the result of the presence of God who is love.[9] Concurrently, Paul is talking to a community threatening division over identities,[10] to this Paul says, Stop it! You are all the children of God, no group more so than the other; we are all children of God who have this same Spirit affirming us and helping us all to cray out “Papa, Father!” (Αββα ὁ πατήρ being both Aramaic and Greek father addresses[11]). Thus, their obligations are to each other—no matter previous religious affiliation and sex (Paul switches from “sons” (υἱοί) to “children” (τέκνα) or other facets of identity[12]. If this, then, following John from last week, those outside of the church will know these ones follow Christ and encounter Christ thus God through the community in unity’s witness in the world by the power of the Spirit.[13]

Our passage ends with Paul saying, Now if children then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs of Christ, if we suffer together/are affected by the same thing so that also we might be glorified (v. 17). According to Paul, those who are guided/carried by the Spirit of God, are those who become children of God, who have God as their Abba, Parent, and are those who are joint-heirs with Christ. Heirs of what? Well, not heirs of the honor and glory and power offered by the kingdom of Humanity, but of suffering. What type of suffering? Well, the suffering that Christ suffered. Those who are children of God are siblings of Christ and if siblings than they will also speak and act in the world as Christ did and this brings suffering and not human defined glory and success. Why? Because Christ didn’t identify with the strong and powerful, but with the weak and powerless and this, by faith and the power of the Holy Spirit yoking us into the family of Christ and God, means that we identity with the least of these, too, as Christ did;[14] in this way, we do not create our own glory defined by the kingdom of humanity, but receive glory from God in the reign of God.[15] How the disciples of Christ, the Church, treat the most disenfranchised and oppressed of society, speaks to their identification with Christ and whether or not the Spirit is present in and among them.

Conclusion

Every Sunday, we say this about the Spirit:

We believe in God within us, 
the Holy Spirit burning with Pentecostal fire,
life-giving breath of the Church, 
Spirit of healing and forgiveness,
source of resurrection and of eternal life.

This is no small declaration. God dwells within us in the Spirit, who inflames our hearts and bodies to participate in God’s mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation, the Spirit is the means by which we are healed and how forgiveness (both God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others) is worked out, and it is the Spirit that is credited with our daily resurrection and the the hope we carry of our bodily resurrection into eternal life at the time of death. The Spirit is the “life giving breath of the Church”; in other words, without the Spirit there is no Church. Our first reading highlights this point: Peter and those with him receive the Spirit and can now speak in different languages thus proclaiming the good news of God that is the incarnate word of Jesus the Christ. From here, the church begins to be a thing in the world, a place carved into time and space to make room for an encounter with God in the event of faith through Jesus preached and, by the power of the Spirit, Christ heard. It is by the Spirit that people, from anywhere and everywhere, can gather and be one as Christ and Abba God are one and be made into the representatives of Christ in the world (ref. John 17). It is by the Spirit that these people so gathered can grow into the likeness of Christ, to become those who can hear the leading of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven and follow the divine footsteps toward the beloved who are fighting to survive in any generation (ref. John 16). It is by the Holy Spirit that the ones so gathered can become the mature Christians of Ephesians who find themselves flexible in receiving and responding to God’s continuous self-disclosure even when it contradicts the kingdom of humanity (ref. Ephesians 4). And it is by the power of this Spirit of Love, that those who hear and gather can consider themselves to be God’s children, thus heirs with Christ of all that is of Abba God.

[1] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 139. “Although he does not explicitly state the further implication of no longer being debtors to the flesh, it is clear form what he has said previously that we are debtors instead to the spirit.”

[2] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “When we leave the law of sin and death to follow the law of Spirit and life, we exchange one set of obligations for another. Our new obligations are established not by a system of patronage but by being brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. This relationship is what determines our responsibilities to one another.”

[3] LW 25:358. “For in the spirit of fear it is not possible to cry, for we can scarcely open our mouth or mumble. But faith expands the heart, the emotions, and the voice, but fear tightens up all these things and restricts them, as our experience amply testifies. Fear does not say Abba but rather it hates and flees form the Father as from an enemy and mutters against him as a tyrant. For those people who are in the spirit of fear and not int eh sprit of adoption do not taste how sweet he Lord is…but rather He appears to them as a harsh and hard, and int heir heart they call Him a virtual tyrant, although with the mouth they call Him Father…”

[4] Lancaster, Romans, 139. “To further stress the relationship of being brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul uses the image of adoption, a legal practice in roman society of designating someone who is not one’s physical offspring to be one’s heir.”

[5] Lancaster, Romans, 140. The modern conception of “children of God” based on our being all created as God’s children is not the image Paul has. “…Paul speaks of being children of God by adoption, not by creation. Although it does capture and expand concern about our obligations toward one another, this understanding of all humans as children of God does not help to understand what Paul means in these verses.”

[6] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The status of child of God is not given to all humans simply by virtue of being human. It belongs specifically to those who have been led into this relationship by the Spriit.”

[7] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “The idea that ‘children of God’ is a more restricted group than all humans leads to the question about who belongs in that group.”

[8] Also building here from Dorothee Sölle’s conception that anyone who identifies with the least of these and meets their real, tangible, physical need are those who represent Christ to humanity. See her Christ the Representative.

[9] LW 25:358-359. Shifting from spirit of fear to spirit of love can only happen if “we have His spirit, so that in the same spirit we love the same things which He loves and hate the things which He hates in the same way that He does. For we cannot love those things which God loves unless we have the love and will and spirt which He has. …And those people are called godlike men and sons of God because they are led by the Spirit of God.”

[10] Lancaster, Romans, 140. “Paul is still addressing the whole community (‘you’ plural and ‘we’). His intent is not to break down community in competition over who is a child of God and who is not, but rather to underscore the new community we have when we are in Christ.”

[11] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “…Paul has included both the Aramaic and Greek forms of address to God. The inclusion of both languages makes sense in a community made up of Greek and Jewish followers of Jesus, and since both words indicate the adopted status of the ones who cry out, each group needs to recognize its common inheritance with the other. Because the word ‘heir’ calls to mind Paul’s discussion of inheritance regarding God’s promise to Abraham (4:13-14) the direct address to God in both Aramaic and Greek reinforces the common spiritual ancestry of the followers of Jesus, whether they may be Jew or Gentile. Neither group has a lesser place in the community, and they need to see and treat each other equally as brothers and sisters in Christ.”

[12] Lancaster, Romans, 141. Word play in Greek between huiothesias and huioi “The Greek wordplay between “sons” and “son-making” also calls to mind that in 8:3 Paul says God sent the Son into the world to deal with sin. Through Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, we come adopted sons and therefore join heirs with Christ. The masculine language in Greek has a purpose in connecting all these ideas, but Paul drops the masculine language in 8:16-17 to speak instead of ‘children’ (tekna). By shifting to language that is not gender -specific, Paul makes clear that women as well as men are heirs with Christ, thus breaking down on of the traditional hierarchical barriers between people in Romans society and opening the way to think of how other barriers are also overcome in Christ. Adoption makes the followers of Jesus kin to one another, brothers and siters in Christ, regardless of their place in society.”

[13] Lancaster, Romans, 141. “The presence of the Spirit in the gathering for worship leads the followers of Jesus to cry out to God as a parent, confirming that they are not slaves but children of God. Their allegiance to the dominion of the Spirit presents them with a new set of obligations—not obligations of slave to master but rather the obligations of joint heirs because of their common adopted status.”

[14] LW 25:356. “‘To be led by the Spirit of God’ is to put to death our flesh, that is, the old Adam, and to do it freely, promptly, and gladly, that is to despise and renounce all that is not God, even ourselves, and thus ‘not to fear death or the friends of death, the fierce race of penalties,’ and likes ‘to give up the empty pleasures of the world its corrupt and sordid prices,’ and freely to relinquish all good things and embrace evils in their place. This is not characteristic of our nature, but is a work of the Spirit of God in us.”

[15] Lancaster, Romans, 142. “Of course, the inheritance that joint heirs with Christ receive comes through being baptized into his death. Suffering comes before glory. Just as the son took on the vulnerability of weakness, which brings social shame, the joint-heirs with Christ must give up the mindset of the flesh that would seek glory in status and power and instead follow the Son’s example of accepting the suffering that accompanies weakness in order to gain a more secure glory. The passive ‘be glorified’ indicates that glory is not ours to be own, but rather it is God’s to give.”

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“Prone to Wander”: Into the Tomb

Psalm 114:7-8 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of Abba God, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.

Introduction

A day of silence. A day of eyes dampened with doubt, confusion, fear, anger, and even despair. It’s not just the women who cry; the men cry, too; no one is exempt from the overwhelming barrage of emotions that comes when hopes are dashed, expectations go up in flames, and faith feels shattered. The one whom they loved, the one whom they followed, the one whom they would die for—so they claimed—had been killed, and his body lay in a sealed tomb, guards flanking the massive stone. They didn’t even have time to prepare his body properly before the Sabbath moon rose gently in the sky reminding them that what was was no longer …

In the silence of that Sabbath, thoughts of what happened, how could this be, what was it all for, is this really it paraded about the minds of the disciples as they forced themselves to rest, no recourse to business of banal tasks to keep their minds occupied. They were stuck in this moment of death, like Jesus in that tomb. The extra layer for some (all?) is that they didn’t stick around, defend, follow Jesus all the way… They ran, denied, hid, betrayed. Their consciences were plagued with loss and confusion and burdened with the uncomforting, weighted-blanket of failure and guilt—heavier for some, lighter for others. These precious souls (no matter their guilt and failure, their denial and betrayal) had to endure the sun-down to sun-down plus a few more hours to receive the actual ending of the story. On this night, all those years ago, the disciples of Christ sighed, wiped away tears, and wondered what it was all about… Death, and all its children, held them hostage like Christ sealed in the tomb.

On this night, all those years ago, the disciples died with Christ. What they didn’t know was that the story wasn’t as over …

Romans 6:3-11[1]

In Romans 6, Paul anchors the silence of Saturday into the death of Good Friday and the life of Easter Sunday. For Paul, those who follow Christ follow him in the ways they speak and act and through deep identification with Christ even if it means going into the tomb with Christ on Good Friday. For Paul, this identification with Christ in Christ’s death is the key to the identification with Christ in his resurrected life. For Paul, this is how believers participate in the entirety of the Easter event, from beginning to end, from death into new life. In other words, our Romans passage is a clear distillation of what is happening as we transition from death to life through the silence of Saturday.

Paul begins with a question (v. 1) that he then (passionately) answers in v. 2: What therefore will we say? Should we persist in sin so that grace might superabound? Hell no! How can we who died to sin still live in it? In this portion, Paul addresses the new life believers have in Christ: this is absolutely not a continuation of what has gone before and is something completely new! There is a clean break between what was sealed up in the tomb with Christ on Good Friday, and the new life the believers step into on Easter Sunday Morning.

Because there is no continuation between what was by deeds of the flesh and what is now by faith in Christ, Paul feels compelled to ask the Romans, Or, do you not know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? (v.3)Meaning, there’s a lie floating about that those who believe in Christ don’t suffer Christ’s fate, that we are exempted from that death. For Paul, while we weren’t nailed to the cross in literal terms, we do suffer a death like Christ’s, and this is actualized in our participation in the waters of baptism. (Being submerged under the water is to buried with Christ, to come up out of the water is to be raised with Christ.) For Paul, it is imperative that we take seriously the reality that we die like Christ; for Paul (and thus for us), THIS IS GOOD NEWS! Paul writes, Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of Abba God, in this way we, we might also walk in the newness of life (v.4). Through what God did in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, death that leads to life is the only path for believers. What is ruled out? Death that leads to death. Why? Because those who journey through a death like Christ’s receive resurrection into new life that cannot die like Christ cannot die (and this new life is both internal and external, spiritual and temporal!).[2] Thus why Paul can then write, For if we have become united together with him in a death like his death, we will also [be united with him in his] resurrection (v. 5). We live unafraid of another death because we live eternally in and with Christ.

Paul continues to elaborate about this identification between the believer and Christ, Knowing that our old person was crucified together [with Christ] with the result that the body of sin is abolished, so that we are no longer a slave to sin, for the one who has died [with Christ] has been declared righteous from sin (vv. 6-7). Paul anchors the believer in the death of Christ so that their body of sin—not their existence as fleshy creatures, but their defective orientation resulting in sin thus death[3]—is put to death and this is liberation because it cannot weigh the believer down anymore. Another way to say this is that by virtue of identification with Christ in Christ’s death, sin and its consequence, death, are put to death.[4] What was ushered in by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, has been put asunder by the death of death that is brought in and through Christ’s death and resurrection. And if this is the case, then with Paul we can say, And if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live together with him (v.8). Captivity itself is now held captive and the captives—the ones formerly held in captivity to sin and death—are liberated.[5]

Paul then writes, Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead no longer dies, death no longer rules over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God [always]. Thus you, you also consider yourselves to be dead to sin and only living to God in Christ Jesus. For those who follow Christ, to live is to live unbound by death, released from captivity, no longer controlled and threatened by sin. According to Paul, it’s not that believers now no longer sin; they do. Believers will miss the mark, they will shoot and not score, they will mean one thing and do another, they will harm, they will mar, they will wound. What Paul is getting at is that the believer—while still a sinner—is liberated from the effects of sin which is death. The believer—now declared righteous although a sinner still (simul iustus et peccator)—has died once and for all (like Christ) and never needs to die again to sin (though sin is going to happen).[6] In other words, the believer does not need to intentionally sin so that they can die again to sin and again be declared righteous. Doing so is unnecessary and declares the grace of God unnecessary (Hell no!), as if being made righteous can come by any other means apart from grace and faith in Christ.

Because Jesus died once for all, believers in union with Christ by faith will never really die (they will “fall asleep in Christ”) because death has met its own death, captivity its own captivity. [7],[8] Rather, like Christ, they will live by the grace of God and for the grace of God.[9] This is an eternal living because the believer—by faith and God’s grace—lives in Christ and Christ who is now the Lord of life is no longer subject to death and its lordship—thus, those who live in Christ have life eternal because Christ is now eternal even in his raised and ascended body.[10] Even when sin shows up in the believer’s life—and it will—this eternal living is not hindered or hampered. Rather—through easy access to forgiveness and absolution—the believer can get up, wipe the dust off, and try again to live the life that reflects their eternal life in Christ.[11] Here the spiritual can manifest in the temporal, the outer aligns with the inner, God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Conclusion

For the disciples, the deathly silence of Saturday was palpable. For (about) 36 hours, waiting for the Sabbath to pass, waiting for the dawn of second full day after Christ’s death, they died, each one of them died with Christ—in grief, loss, shock, doubt, hopelessness, helplessness. They despaired of themselves, they released all that they thought was, and they came to the absolute ends of themselves. And here, in their ignorance to the divine movements, amid their darkest doubt, their deepest despair, surrounded by a void of sound or word, God was about to usher them into a brand-new conception of what it means to live in Christ, to live in love, to live liberated from all that was. As the host of heaven held its breath and as the disciples cried, God was on the move raising the greatest gift for the cosmos: the fulfilment of God’s glorious promise, Jesus the Christ raised holding death itself captive to death.

Tonight, we move from death to life. This service dives in deep to the silence of Saturday, the despair of a missing messiah, the stripping away of hope. At the beginning, we are all stuck in our sin, set on a path toward death eternal, forever held captive by its threat and presence, stealing from us any sense of peace—for how can anyone really have peace if they are always scrambling away from and fighting against death and its fruits? But in the blink of an eye, God moved, the heavenly host exhaled, and we find ourselves shrouded in the mystery of Christ being raised from the dead to be for us the source, sustenance, and sustainment of divine life, love, and liberation for all people, the entire cosmos, forever and always. As those who are prone to wander, God has come in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit to be our new life marked by remembering and not forgetting, walking and not tromping, gathered and not estranged, accepting and not judging, peaceful and lifegiving and not violent and death-dealing. Today we are new creatures with a new life and a new way to walk in the world for the wellbeing of our neighbors and to the glory of God.

Hallelujah! Christ is Risen!

[1] All translations from Romans are mine unless otherwise noted

[2] LW 25:309. “For having put on our mortal flesh and dying only in it and rising only in it, now only in it He joins these things together for us, for in this flesh He became a sacrament for the inner man and an example for the outward man.”

[3] LW 25:313. “The term ‘old man’ describes what kind of person is born of Adam, not according to his nature but according to the defect of his nature. For his nature is good, but the defect is evil.”

[4] LW 25:310. “Eternal death is also twofold. The one kind is good, very good. It is the death of sin and the death of death, by which the soul is released and separated form sin and the body is separated rom corruption and through grace and glory is joined to the living God. This is death in the most proper sense of the word, for in all other forms of death something remains that is mixed with life but not in this kind of death, where there is the purest life alone, because it is eternal life. For to this kind of death alone belong in an absolute and perfect way the conditions of death, and in this death alone whatever dies perishes totally and into eternal nothingness, and nothing will ever return from this death because it truly dies an eternal death. This is the way sin dies; and likewise the sinner, when he is justified, because sin will not return again for all eternity…”

[5] LW 25:310. “This is the principle theme in scripture. For God has arranged to remove through Christ whatever the devil brought in through Adam. And it as the devil who brought in sin and death. Therefore God brought about the death of death and the sin of sin, the poison of poison, the captivity of captivity.”

[6] LW 25:314. “The meaning is that we must undergo this spiritual death only once. For whoever dies thus lives for all eternity. Therefore we must not return to our sin in order to die to sin again.”

[7] LW 25:311. “Because for death to be killed means that death will not return, and ‘to take captivity captive’ means that captivity will never return, a concept which cannot be expressed through an affirmative assertion.”

[8] LW 25:311. “For the entering into life can, and necessarily must, become a departure from life, but the ‘escape form death’ means to enter into a life which is without death.”

[9] LW 25:313. “Nor can he be freed of his perversity except by the grace of God…This is said not only because of the stubbornness of perverse people but particularly because of the extremely deep infection of this inherited weakness and original poison, by which a man seeks his own advantage even in God himself because of his love of concupiscence.”

[10] LW 25:315. “For just as the ray of the sun is eternal because the sun is eternal, so the spiritual life is eternal because Christ is eternal; for He is our life, and through faith He flows into us and remains in us by the rays of His grace. Therefore, just as Christ is eternal, so also the grace which flows out of Him is from His eternal nature. Furthermore, just because a man sins again his spiritual life does not die, but he turns his back on this life and dies, while this life remains eternal in Christ.”

[11] LW 25:315. “He has Christ, who dies no more; therefore he himself dies no more, but rather he lives with Christ forever. Hence also we are baptized only once, by which we gain the life of Christ, even though we often fall and rise again. For the life of Christ can be recovered again and again, but a person can enter upon it only once, just as a man who has never been rich can begin to get rich only once, although he can again and again lose and regain his wealth.”

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“Prone to Wander”: Willingly Killing God

Luke 18:13d: “‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”

Should have done it sooner but I didn’t because
I don’t even know myself
Everything I’m based on is just something I was
And I can’t even sell myself
Oh mirror mirror hanging on the wall
Show me how to love myself
Should have done it sooner but I didn’t because
I don’t even trust myself[1]

We are so prone to wander from the God whom we love that we will willingly choose indifference rather than love, captivity rather than liberation, and death rather than life. We will forget what we stand for, whose we are, and what we were meant to do and be in the world; for what? Short term success? We will throw our friends under the bus, and we will forget our neighbor and let them be dragged by the words and deeds of others; for why? To keep ourselves secure in our peer groups, at work, and hidden from the judgmental eye of our family? We will literally scorch the earth for profit, burn every bridge out of vengeance, and cut off our noses to spite our faces; for whom? No one. In the end no one will be in our corner because their bodies will be casualties in our own personal vendetta against life, love, and liberation.

I look much smaller seen from inside out
Far too small to see myself
Down on reflection, cast in hate and in doubt
Flawed and flaws I add myself
Oh mirror mirror hanging on the wall
Please just show me someone else
My hopes were low and I got so much so less
Nothing left to save myself[2]

I wish I had better news. But I don’t. At the end of the day yesterday, we all imagined that we would do what the Israelites did during the Passover, that we would exclaim with Peter, Wash all of me!, that we wouldstep back from our own weak and faulty judgment and trust God, letting faith work itself out in actions of love and trust in God and in our community. The reality is that our exposure yesterday bleeds into today: we’re not able to suspend our judgement long enough to bring God glory and well-being to our neighbor. In fact, we are dead set on doing the exact opposite:  dragging God down to our level, baptizing God in our image, and driving our neighbor further and further into alienation and isolation.

Each day a broken clock is true at least twice
Twice the odds I give myself
I know it would be kinda easier sometimes
If I felt like someone else
This is my SOS, these are the bridges I’m burning
I never needed such help, this is my SOS
I gave my level best, these hands are drowning, not waving
This is my SOS, this is your heart and I’m breaking[3]

The worst part about all of this is that we’re all captive and complicit in the destruction and death raining down around us. We definitely bring it upon ourselves and of our own volition. To be honest, can we even choose anything different? We’re steeped and marinated in a culture that prizes a dog-eat-dog mentality, where the dog is another human being (our neighbor, our friends, our family). We grow up thinking that our free will is what caused us to become so successful, ignoring the luck of birth year, family of origin, skin color, sex assigned at birth, ability to fit in with the status quo, and the access to funds that open doors. We are bombarded with explicit and implicit messages that human beings are only as good as their productivity, the tautness of their skin, the firmness of their muscles, and the sturdiness of their steps. We’re drowned in a deluge of national and local rhetoric that plays off of our worst fears and provokes our deepest anger, that convinces us to confuse security built by militarized weapons with enduring peace. It’s not only that we have a wandering heart—we do; we’re taught to wander, to stray, to estrange ourselves from God and rewarded with cash to do so…if we’re lucky. In doing so, we are prone to promote death (in all of its insidious manifestations), even to the point of causing it.

Isaiah 53:1-12

Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Isaiah doesn’t identify who the speaker is here; it could be anyone: rulers of other nations, the Israelites themselves, Isaiah himself.[3] The passage is also silent as to whether this suffering servant suffered and the others did not, or if he suffered alongside the suffering of others.[4] The absence of a definitive voice and the ambiguity of the extent of suffering allows this passage to be a point of brutal exposure. As we take on the role of speaker, we become accountable in this event because the “we” and “our” become our pronouns; we’re implicated, we’re guilty, we’re the ones who transgressed and sinned and put it on an innocent other and then, like narcissistic, gaslighting pros, we turned against him and accounted and accused him of being stricken by God.

We enter the narrative as the ones who scapegoated Christ to appease our own judgments of good and right and wrong and bad. And, whether we like it or not, we are exposed. We cannot have it any other way; as these prophetic words are read to us, we are brought into the prophet’s pain[5] at what is to come for the suffering servant. In being brought into Isaiah’s pain, we’re brought into God’s pain and thus we’re exposed for who and what we are. We’re not given an option to discard the invitation; our RSVP has already been mailed back affirming that we will attend this event of the destruction of the innocent one as our. In other words, we, with Isaiah and God and the Suffering Servant, are invited to suffer, too.[6]

And we do suffer. We suffer because we’re guilty. We might be wonderfully and fearfully made, but we’re guilty; we’re beloved and complicit; we’re helpless and captive and condemned. No matter what justifications and excuses we may throw around, the reality is: we’ve brought ourselves here, to this point, to the depths of the horrors of human existence, to the reality that we would rather harm and kill anyone who comes against our power and privilege. Isaiah brings us into the light of our most dire confession and transfers to us his suffering and agony, [7] transfers to us God’s suffering and agony[8] because of our wayward hearts hardened by our greed, lust, vanity, rage, theft, gluttony, and pride. Here, in the light shining through the suffering servant, the blood on our hands is illuminated. There’s no getting ourselves off this hook.

Conclusion

We’re in agony, we’re suffering, we’re stuck, we’re captive to death, and we’re exposed.

Rather than let Christ’s voice call us, Christ’s actions challenge us, Christ’s presence change us, we clamor for Jesus’s death, and we get it. Because we would rather be violent to reinforce how right we are than suffer the humiliation of maybe being wrong; because we prefer to stay on our own devised course, we refuse to change directions and dare to take an unfamiliar path; because we’re prone to wander because of our own choices and calcified hearts, the judgment of God is surely upon us. Today, in this story, we’re reminded that Jesus bore our iniquity…because he bore our very, very bad judgment informed by the doctrines and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and not the kingdom of God.[9] The weight of that judgment, as we watch and witness the death of God by our hand, renders us to our own death. Today, our incarceration to our own comfort, to what makes our own selves feel safe, to our obsession with violence and death comes to a cataclysmic head-on collision with God; none of us survive.[10]

Today, we get what we want; by our own hands we realize and affirm our captivity to our own fear and our anger. Today, we stop moving and we curve all the way in. Today, we’re dead where we are and as we were, stuck in the thick of violent impulses and submerged in our own human-made culture of death. Because today, we killed God.

[1] Sneaker Pimps, “SOS (feat. Simmone Jones),” verse 1.

[2] Sneaker Pimps, “SOS (feat. Simmone Jones),” verse 2.

[3] Sneaker Pimps, “SOS (feat. Simmone Jones),” verse 3 and chorus.

[3] Benjamin D. Sommer, “Isaiah,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 891. “The identity of the speakers who express their shock at the career of the servant is unclear.”

[4] Sommer, “Isaiah,” 891-892. “Either the servant suffered on behalf of the speakers (i.e., the guilty were not punished at all), or he suffered along with the guilty, even though he himself did not share in the guilt of his fellow Israelites. The former idea (i.e., the notion of vicarious suffering) would be unusual for the Bible; the latter idea (the idea of corporate guilt) is not.”

[5] Abraham Heschel The Prophets New York, NY: JPS, 1962. 149.

[6] Heschel, Prophets, 149. “As a rule we reflect on the problem of suffering in relation to him who suffers. The prophet’s message insists that suffering is not to be understood exclusively in terms of the sufferer’s own situation. In Israel’s agony, all nations are involved. Israel’s suffering is not a penalty, but a privilege, a sacrifice; its endurance is a ritual, its meaning is to be disclosed to all men in the hour of Israel’s redemption.”

[7] Heschel, Prophets, 149. “Deliverance, redemption, is what the Lord has in store for Israel, and through Israel for all men. Her suffering and agony are the birth-pangs of salvation which, the prophet proclaims, is about to unfold. In answer to the prophet’s fervent invocation (51:9), the Lord is about to bare His arm or His might before the eyes of all the nations. (Cf. 52:10 with 53:1).”

[8] Heschel, Prophets, 151. “Israel’s suffering is God’s grief. In reflecting on what this people has endured, His words sound like pangs of remorse.”

[9] LW 17:221. “It was not for Himself and His own sins, but for our sins and griefs. He bore what we should have suffered.”

[10] LW 17:221-222. “We thought he was suffering because of His own sin, as it were. In the eyes of the world and of the flesh Christ does not suffer for us, since He seemed to have deserved it Himself. This is what the prophet says here too, that He was judged guilty in the eyes of the world. It is therefore difficult to believe that such a one suffered for us. The Law is that everybody dies for his own sins. Natural reason, and divine as well, argues that everybody must bear his own sin. Yet He is struck down contrary to all law and custom. Hence reason infers that he was smitten by God for His own sake. Therefore the prophet leads us so earnestly beyond all righteousness and our rational capacity and confronts us with the suffering of Christ to impress upon us that all that Christ has is mine. This is the preaching of the whole Gospel, to show us that Christ suffered for our sake contrary to law, right, and custom.”

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“Prone to Wander…”: Forsaking the Way

Psalm 91:1-2 They who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, abide under the shadow of the Almighty. They shall say to Abba God, “You are my refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust.”

Introduction

One of my most favorite hymns is, “Come Thou Fount” (a hymn that shows up in our current season of music. Of the three verses, the third is my absolute favorite.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart; O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.[1]

As I mentioned on the evening of Ash Wednesday, the prophet Joel brings us to the brink and asks us to take a deep, long, hard look in the mirror. The reality is, while we may not think about it often, we are prone to wonder from God. If it helps, please know that I am all too aware of my tendency to want to wander from God, the God whom I love, the God who saved me from myself for others, the God who has given me life, love, and liberation from sin and from human made, harmful mythologies and ideologies. So, if you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this or are feeling that type of shame that leads to condemnation and hiding, don’t worry… you aren’t alone; I’m right there with you.

Sometimes we wander because we forsake the way. There are two types of ways we wander because we forsake. Sometimes, it’s intentional. We’re done. It’s too hard. We just can’t. Sometimes the demand is too great, so we stop participating and we give up. We opt for something easier, something with more give, something with more personal reward seen by others and, more importantly, approved by others. Think about times you’ve tried to “self-differentiate” and the system pulled you back in being stronger and more dominant than your meager efforts—it’s easier to just give up and give in, go back and pick up where you left off, dismissing the work you’ve done thus far. Even uncomfortable and toxic systems can be comfortable even if detrimental. The human mind prefers comfort and ease to the hard work of embarking on something new. I saw a meme once that said the nervous system prefers a familiar hell to an unknown heaven.

Sometimes, though, our forsaking the way is slower and not as intentional. It’s more like forgetting to follow true north and then, OMG, here I am, and I don’t know where this “here” is. neglected to double check, assuming we knew exactly what we were doing and where we were going. And then, nope. This is best expressed when we slide away from our spiritual traditions because of the banality that is caused when tradition becomes traditionalism and boringly oppressive unto death. Blah, blah, blah, I know all of this. So, we stop listening, stop paying attention because we’re convinced we know the what, how, who, when, where, etc. Eventually we are allured away to something sparkly and new, something different and exciting, something that makes us feel special and unique. Yet, by the time that allure and shine has worn off we realize we are nowhere near where we should be; we’ve strayed and in straying we’ve forsaken the way.

We are prone to forsake because we are prone to wander from our God of love.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

“‘So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ You shall set [the basket of first fruits] down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.”

According to Moses, Israelites are ”to make annual pilgrimage to the central sanctuary, bringing the first fruits of the harvest, to thank God for the land’s bounty.”[2] Upon bringing the basket of first fruits of harvest, the Israelite is to recite a short history summarizing the main events bringing Israel to where they are now; it is a confession of faith and is the verbal adherence to the first command of the Decalogue.[3] According to Moses, the Israelite bringing the basket of first fruit concludes their confession of faith with an acknowledgement that even the items they carry in as an offering are an offering dependent on God; even this bounty is not of my own doing. (As we say at the start of the Eucharist, “For all things come of you, o God…”) Finally, the Israelites are to take everything and throw a massive celebration to honor the coming of the harvest season, to honor God and God’s faithfulness, and, notably, to honor those who have nothing. According to what Moses has offered us here, there is no division between those who brought offerings and those who did not. Here, in this moment, there are no lines drawn in the sand; mercy and solidarity triumph over tribalism and productivism. God’s reign is experienced in the midst of the kingdom of humanity.[4]

So here we are in an interesting spot in the book of Deuteronomy; one that doesn’t really have “Lent” written all over it. So, first, let’s go back just a skosh. Right around chapter 14, Moses (using traditional authorial language) reviews all the laws again. (That’s what the name of the book means: Second Law or Law Again.) Moses details all that is entailed in the Decalogue; this task is finished at the end of chapter 25.[5] Before that? Well, a few (fun!) things, right before the recapping of the Law there is a hefty section on the blessings and curses for adhering to the law and the need for Israel to stay pure and focused on God (chapters 6.5-13). The beginning of chapter 6 is my favorite: the greatest Commandment. Chapter 5 is the quick version of the Decalogue much like the one that appeared in Exodus. Chapter 4 is Moses’s command for obedience to God (one of his final ones considering he’ll die at the end of the book). And chapters 1-3 are a retelling of major events of Israel’s history up until that point.

So, when in chapter 26—the “‘Concluding liturgies’” portion[6]— Moses turns to speak of giving the first fruits to the priest and scripts out a response for each person bringing their basket of fruits to the priest, it’s in response to all that has come before. In other words, it’s a confirmation of the covenant that has just been laid out for the children of Israel.[7] It’s also an offering of praise and thanksgiving for deliverance from enemies and for occupation of the land promised long-ago to Abraham.[8] All this to say, chapter 26 is about Israel NOT forgetting and forsaking the who of “Who let the captives out…”[9] Just as the first commandment of the Decalogue is, “‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me,’” (Ex. 20:2-3), this commandment not only aligns the remaining nine to it but is a declaration that Israel must always remember who liberated them from Egypt. In remembering this, everything else falls into place. And, according to our text, this remembrance is to extend to God and the neighbor: [10] the Levites (priests), the orphans, widows and strangers. For Israel and according to Moses, to remember God’s love for Israel is to love others, especially the disenfranchised, unpropertied, the “have-nots.”[11]

Conclusion

None of what is in this passage on Deuteronomy is about Israel forsaking the way and giving up. In fact, it’s all about Israel remembering, remembering intimately, and celebrating and preforming that remembrance. Truly, it’s not about them giving up at all. But here’s the thing, the bulk of Deuteronomy is about asking Israel to exhorting Israel to stay with God, to keep their eyes on God, and walk with God thus walk with their neighbor and correct the wrongs in the world. But why? Why is God, through Moses, telling all this to Israel and, actually, “telling them again”? Because, well, Israel had a history of forgetting and giving up and wandering away. I say this not only because I’ve read the book; I say this because literally a few moments outside of the great liberation from captivity through the wet ground of the parted Red Sea, Israel was ready to drop it all and go back to Egypt so they could have leeks. Whether intentional or unintentionally, Israel will begin to forsake God, to forget, and to wander away from their God whom they love and thus to also forsake and wander away from their neighbor. Israel will get caught up between the allure of the sparkle and shine of the kingdom of humanity (the power and privilege) and forsake God and their neighbor, the stranger, the oppressed, those dependent on help. They will forsake God and God’s way because it grows too difficult and comes with little earthly reward. Moses knows this, God knows this.

So it is with us. And as we go through this first week of lent, let us consider our times of forsaking because we’ve forgotten the good story, became bored of God’s good Word, or because it was too hard, too uncomfortable, too weird, ugly, blech. As wonderful and miraculous as we are, we are fleshy, meat creatures prone to wander. The good news is, God knows this, and God comes to do something about it.

[1] https://hymnary.org/text/come_thou_fount_of_every_blessing

[2] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 423.

[3] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 424. vv. 8-9 “The thanksgiving prayer recited by the pilgrim provides a precis of the main narrative line of the Pentateuch and Joshua (the ‘Hexateuch’). For that reason, the verses have been seen by some scholars as an ancient confession of faith, or creed, that is olde than its present context. Strikingly, this summary of the main events of Israel’s religious history makes no mention of the revelation of law at Sinai/Horeb. The same is true for many similar confessions in the Bible…”

[4] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 424. v. 11 “Enjoy” “or rejoice” “specifically in a festive meal consumed at the central sanctuary…which must include the Levite and the stranger for whose benefit (along with other disadvantaged groups) the following law is directed.” The law in v. 12

[5] LW 9:254

[6] Bernard M. Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 423.

[7] LW 9:254 This portion “confirms the covenant between God and the Children of Israel.”

[8] LW 9:254

[9] Levinson, “Deuteronomy,” 423-424. V. 5 “This verse is deployed in the Passover Haggadah (just following the section on the Fours Sons) in a famous passage that emphasizes God’s miraculous sparing of Israel from a long line of persecutors, beginning with Laban’s attack on Jacob (Gen. 31).”

[10] LW 9:254 “So he also treats the tithes to be paid every three years, teaching that they are to be given to the Levites, the orphans, the widows, and the strangers, with the affirmation that they are a fulfillment of the work of love.”

[11] LW 9:255 “… it denotes the confession of faith and the thanksgiving of the righteousness the sprit, where we acknowledge at the same time that the Lord has freed us from great evils to which we have been subjected, and that we have accepted many good things by faith. But bringing of tithes denotes that we are wholly given to the service of the neighbor through love…”

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“Prone to Wander…”: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

Psalm 103:8-11 Abba God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. … Abba God has not dealt with us according to our sins…. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is God’s mercy great …

I recently received a pin from a very nice person in the New Dimensions class I’ve been teaching on Tuesday afternoons. The pin is a green dumpster, top open with a fire burning within it. The dumpster has a face, it’s smiling and there’s some sweat forming at the corner of the dumpster’s “brow.” Right below the smile is a white sign that is, when you look closely, being held by two tiny dumpster hands. The sign reads, “It’s fine. I’m’ fine. Everything is fine.”

I love this pin for two reasons. The first is that it’s my running joke/motto (?) while teaching this New Dimensions class on “Resistance and Love” that “It’s fine, everything’s fine.” It’s my way of inserting laughter into a discussion that often takes a serious posture and tone. The second reason is: it’s flat out lying. If I’m walking around saying “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine!” then nothing is fine, and I’m trying to convince myself that everything is fine when it positively, absolutely is not fine.

Tonight, on this Ash Wednesday, let’s be completely and painfully honest: things are not fine. People are scared. People are hurting. People are dying. Everything is not fine.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near–
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like blackness spread upon the mountains
a great and powerful army comes;
their like has never been from of old,
nor will be again after them
in ages to come.

Through the prophetic words of Joel, God is shedding light on Israel’s past.[1] This may seem like an odd thing to say, considering Joel mentions a day that is coming. But by mentioning this coming day—this coming day of divine judgment—it’s an indictment on what the people in general and the leaders in specific have been doing. God, says Joel, is on God’s way, and when God gets here, it’s not going to be great because the leaders and thus the people have not been oriented towards God’s will on earth as in heaven.

Notice that Joel does not say that a day of gladness is coming. Rather Joel is announcing a day of gloom, requesting that the inhabitants of Israel—everyone within the range of the blowing trumpet and wailing alarm from the holy mountain—come together and tremble because of this coming day of God. Like a thermometer, Joel’s words demonstrate that Israel is not well and judgment draws nigh.

In other words, everything isn’t fine, and God is going to contend with Israel through a plague of locusts that will come like thick darkness and consume everything in its path (this is the “army” referenced by Joel[2]). This event, while common (locust plagues were common), will outperform any other locus plagues that have come and will come; it will even outperform the one form long ago when Israel was still held captive by Pharoah in Egypt. Keep in mind that that plague was the 8th plague to hit Egypt to convince Pharoah to let God’s people go; a plague of locusts indicates a people and leadership stuck and set in their hard-heartedness, refusing to listen.

But, as there is with God and God’s dealing with God’s beloved, there’s a glimmer of relief…maybe.

Yet even now, says the Lord,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.
Who knows whether he will not turn and relent,
and leave a blessing behind him,
a grain offering and a drink offering
for the Lord, your God?

For Israel, according to Joel, there’s a possible way out, but it will demand a level of faith that Israel hasn’t displayed recently. If Israel not only hears Joel but really listens, like shema type listens (Deut. 6ff), they will turn from their errant ways and return to God. There’s a catch though, according to Joel, It must happen before God comes;[3] thus, why Israel will have to press into their faith. They will have to believe the words of Joel, and that they are fromGod. Thus, it will demand that Israel self-examine and realize they fear humans more than they fear God. They must find their way back to their love of God which results in being unafraid of the rulers and authorities of the kingdom of humanity.[4] Joel continues:

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the aged;
gather the children,
even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room,
and the bride her canopy.

Joel declares that Israel needs to be sanctified: everyone. From the old to the young, even those invested in profound ritualistic events (like marriage). Everyone must stop what they are doing, gather, and fast together, to be sanctified together. But that’s not all. Joel shines the spotlight on the people of Israel first, and then turns that light on the leaders, exposing them, especially the priests…

Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord,
and do not make your heritage a mockery,
a byword among the nations.
Why should it be said among the peoples,
`Where is their God?'”

Here the religious leadership of Israel is exposed and called to turn back to God, too. The priests are to “weep” for their own part in straying; they are to pray for the people, and this is a confession that they’ve participated in/helped along the people’s and the leadership’s straying because they, too, have wandered away from God. They, too, have preferred their own power and privilege while the people were sacrificed by the rulers; they, too, have forgotten that they serve God thus serve the people and not their own whims and desires. Thus, they must now pray before it’s too late.

There’s a risk here in Joel’s words: God won’t show up, and Israel will be left to its own devices, left to being lost, left in the shadow of God’s departure. Joel wants his reader to imagine this horror, this gloom, this potential obliteration and feel the impending fear and identify with his voice, thus God’s merciful calling to them. Joel wants his audience to make his words their words, to step in faith, and a commit to making these actions their own so to secure their future with God and with themselves.[5]

Conclusion

Joel is setting us up to enter into this moment of Ash Wednesday with honest self-reflection to see that our tendency is, like Israel, to lie, to stray, to turn our backs, to think we know better than God, to be more afraid of other people (what they think of us, what they may say about us, losing our status and privilege) than considering loving God with our whole heart. We conflate God’s love for us with the thinking that God winks at our complicity with evil, human ideologies and actions that threaten the lives of the least of these among us (our houseless siblings, our queer siblings, our black siblings, our poor siblings, our immigrant siblings, our native siblings, our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and the flora and non-human fauna of creation). God is merciful says the entire bible,[6] but God does not relish when human beings harm other human beings through war and genocide, through inhumane laws and policies, and through the creation of deeper and wider lines in the sand making the “in-group” smaller and the “out-group” larger, colder, hungrier, thirstier, more naked, less safe.

Joel advocates for the mercy of God in our passage, but between being caught in the death of our sins and the life that is promised in God there is a call to repentance, a call to penitence, a call to take a deep, hard, long look at ourselves in the mirror and for once…FOR ONCE… be completely and brutally honest with ourselves before turning that judgmental eye on anyone else. Ash Wednesday prepares us to come face to face with our mortality, with our own death so that as we can prepare ourselves to enter this moment and this season with the  fertile ground and nourished soil of a heart eager to see God.[7],[8]

We must come to terms with how prone we are to wander and leave the God we love who is the source of our love, our life, and our liberation.

Welcome to Lent.

[1] Zvi, “Joel,” 1166. “The lack of references to specific events in Israel’s past (locust plagues were not uncommon) and the overall imagery of the book encourage its readers to understand it against the background of Israel’s past in general.”

[2] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “Military imagery is pervasive in this section; in this context, the army is a personification of the locusts…”

[3] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “On the need to turn back to the LORD, and for a communal lamentation. This must be done before the arrival of the Day of the Lord, which is near or close…otherwise Israel too will be the victim of God’s power. “

[4] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 209. “To fear God is to be unafraid of man. For God alone is king, power, and promise.”

[5] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Joel,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1166. “The readers of the book of Joel are asked to imagine a terrifying plague of locusts and its horrifying impact on society and the natural environment created by the human society. Then the locusts become a mighty army sent by the Lord against Judah. As the text leads the readers to sense that human society and culture in Judah are at the brink of obliteration, it asks them to identify with a prophetic voice that calls on them to return to the Lord, to fast and lament. Then the book moves to Judah’s salvation and to a range of passages dealing with the ideal future, in which the fate of the nations figures prominently.”

[6] Heschel, Prophets, 290. “Merciful and gracious…are qualities which are never separable in the Bible from the thought of God.”

[7] LW 18:96 v. 13 “Return to the Lord. It is as if he were saying: ‘This will be the means—where you have come with your whole heart, with a true heart, then you are returning to the Lord. Otherwise, it will not happen.’”

[8] LW 18:98 “The righteous…use them correctly, for they are bruised and cast down by the angry threats of God; they bear divine judgment; they recognize their sin and their damnation So, when they hear these promises, they turn to the mercy of God. In this way their conscience again are lifted up and become peaceful.”

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We Are Exposed

Psalm 84:3,5: Happy are they who dwell in your house, Abba God! they will always be praising you…Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.

Introduction

We are in times that are exposing who we are and what we stand for. We are in times that are exposing what we believe and how those beliefs inform our actions. We are in times, as a church, where we have been exposed and have been found lacking.

I’ve watched the last week and a half unfold; I’m an observer, it’s my preferred mode through the world. So, I’ve watched as things were said, actions taken, and when an Episcopal bishop preached. Focusing in on the last part of this abbreviated list of events, I listened to the bold and biblical sermon by the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC, Bp. Budde and watch it take over the stage that was to be reserved for a new president taking oath and office. What caught my attention, though, wasn’t the sermon itself. From what I can tell and conceive to be the event of proclamation and preaching, Bp. Budde was well within her sphere—as a bishop in the Episcopal church—in explicating the scriptures in the way she did, preaching Christ, and offering a humble plea to an incoming leader in the way she did.[1] (Church history is literally filled with such sermons.) What caught my attention was how people reacted: either people were astounded by such a sermon, or they were angered. Hmmm, such drastic responses; seems somethings afoot…

Why? I kept wondering. Why were people so flabbergasted for well or for ill? Why were people stunned by the sermon or clutching their pearls over it? Then it dawned on me. Ah, we don’t expect a denominational preacher, let alone a mainline, liberal leader, to be so bold and confident to, figuratively, stand toe to toe with a leader of the temporal realm and assert her spiritual authority within her spiritual realm. We’ve stopped expecting this level of proclamatory confrontation because it has ceased to be given to us. We’ve stopped expecting this boldness of preaching because we’ve grown lukewarm over the decades—preferring our own comfort while fearing the power of big donors in our churches. We’ve opted to sacrifice the radical Word of God’s revolutionary love for the beloved on the altar of our intellectualism in the name of demythology. We’ve allowed the gospel of Christ to be stripped of its power to summon the sleeping awake and the dead alive, sending into the world empty and vacuous notions of good news. We’ve been exposed; we’ve forgotten what preaching is about: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, awaking the sleepers, called the dead into new life, and bringing Christ close to God’s beloved by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Malachi 3:1-4

Our First Testament text is from the book of Malachi; it is situated in the Persian period when the temple was rebuilt and sacrificial worship was underway.[2] Malachi means “my messenger;”[3] according to rabbinic sources, Malachi was considered not only one of the last prophets (along with Haggai and Zechariah) but a sage, too.[4] This prophet-sage messenger came to the people of Judah, those who seemed to have everything back in order and brings God’s message and word of judgment. Malachi is holding up a mirror to the people of Judah and asking them to take a long look; is everything as great as it seems? Malachi asks the people to consider how they fail God and themselves—day in and day out, personally and publicly.[5] Unlike other prophets who focused their attention on the leadership of Israel allowing God’s word of judgment to illuminate the sickness and decay, the violence and death embedded deep in the leadership, Malachi is exposing the people. According to Malachi, everything is not great even with the rebuilding of the Temple and the reinvigoration of sacrifices; Malachi’s people have grown comfortable while ignoring their own spiritual malnourishment wreaking havoc on their relationship with God and with themselves: they’ve neglected Torah, the hearing of Shema; they’ve ceased to hear so deeply that they follow God and God’s word of Torah.[6]

So Malachi comes and exposes the people for who and where they are; Malachi exhorts the people back to Torah, which has just been canonized.[7] One of the neat things about the text, the nitty-gritty exposing parts of the text, is that the exposure is not strictly built from the fear of God’s judgment, but rather getting the people to identify with the “evil-doers” within the text[8]—just as the prophet Nathan did with King David. In this “identification” not only do the hearing and reading people find words to say to God (for the “evil doers” speak and are heard in the text), but they are also asked to examine themselves, to see where they fall short, and to repent.[9] When we speak along with the characters of the story, we, effectually become and identify with those characters and their words become our words and that can be exposing, especially here for Malachi’s people.

Thus says the Lord, See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight– indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Malachi 3:1-2)

While we don’t really know who the messenger is in our passage (v. 1), we Christians tend to see this messenger not as Malachi himself (though he is a type of messenger here), but as Jesus the Christ, this person who is God.[10] With this in mind, the “prepare the way” is a reference to the preparations needed in the heart of the people. This heart need preparing because it’s this heart that is calcified and looks for God in many places (even the Temple) but never finds God because the seeking is oriented toward that which resonates with the kingdom of humanity and not with the reign of God. God works in and through the heart of God’s people, causing them to hear so deeply that they heed and harken to God’s Word by faith and in action.[11] For Malachi, this heart must be prepared to receive the messenger.

These two verses emphasize that the messenger of God is coming to the people.[12] The messenger comes, and the messenger represents God to the people. Considering this messenger coming, the human question is asked: who can endure? Rightly, our response, when looking around and taking honest stock of our captivity and complicity in and to the kingdom of humanity, is: no one! No one will be able to endure; and this humility is part of the desired preparations mentioned earlier—preparation that reorients the creature to their creaturely status before and to their Creator.[13]

But humility isn’t the only form of being prepared mentioned by Malachi; he goes on:

For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

The people will be humbled, and they will be purified by fire and cleansed with a “sharp cleansing agent” (think: lye). The messenger, the one who comes as God’s representative, is both the “Purifier” and the “Purification”, the people will be stripped of their complacency and comfortability.[14] It is here, at this point of exposure, humility, and purification where God can, once again, work through and with the people. God’s exposure brings life to God’s people; they are found wanting and God provides.

Conclusion

I know it’s uncomfortable to be exposed; but exposure leads to healing and health. Being exposed allows us to locate ourselves in the mess and then find a way out of it, the path out is illuminated by the light of the Word of God that is the calling of our names in the proclamation of Christ. To be exposed by this messenger, by the Word of Malachi, by our Christ is to be exposed and accepted and received and not exposed and condemned and sent away.

Just as Malachi held up a mirror to his audience (reader and hearer), asking them to take a long and hard look, we too are being addressed and being asked to do the same by God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit found here in these ancient words. If we take this moment seriously, we will see that we’ve lost our focus, we’ve lost our words, we’ve lost our orientation toward God, taking on everything else we’ve deemed to be good and right. If we’ve allowed our spaces to be acquired by the kingdom of humanity, we’ve forfeited our voice and have forgotten what God expects of us as God’s beloved children. Hope is not lost though, because exposure has come and we can rejoice because we were blind, but now we see, we were deaf but now we hear, we were dumb and now we speak. We can find ourselves relocated before God, oriented to the Creator as their creatures, we can reclaim our space in the world as the manifestation of the spiritual realm, and we can, once again, find our voices to speak into the darkness of the kingdom of humanity and remember exactly what God expects of us as followers of Christ baptized by fire and the Holy Spirit. If we don’t hear our names called by Bp. Budde when she addressed President Trump, then we’ve missed the entire point of that sermon. And what does God expect/”require” of us? To love Mercy, to do Justice, and to walk Humbly with our God.[15]

[1] It was quite good, appropriate, and within the rights and privileges vested in a consecrated Bishop of the Episcopal church. Briefly, this vocation—the vocation of Bishop—has been, is, and always will be principally about two things inspired and informed by the Holy Spirit, faithfully and prayerfully: caring for the beloved of God in Christ as Christ (directly and indirectly through their priests and deacons) and protecting the faith of the church by maintaining the proclamation of God’s Word made known in Christ and pointing the church to Christ.

[2] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1268. “The book of Malachi is set in a period when the Second Temple was rebuilt and sacrificial worship was resumed. It was composed in the Persian period, and is addressed originally to the inhabitants of the Persian province of Yehud (Judah).”

[3] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. Malachi = “My Messenger”

[4] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. “Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are all understood by the Rabbis as the last of the prophets, and the Talmud mentions rulings and saying s by this prophet that seem to characterize him as an early sage, in addition to his being a prophet.”

[5] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268. “The readers of the book of Malachi are asked to look at some pitfalls in everyday life and in the cult of the Temple, and particularly at how they affect the relationship between the Lord and Israel, resulting in a lack of prosperity.”

[6] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1268-1269. “Messages of cultic reform and proper worship are deeply interwoven with the conviction of the coming of a future day in which the Lord will trample all evildoers. Such optimism about an ideal future is typical in prophetic works. Further, the book asks its readers to identify proper behavior in these and all matters with following the Torah (or Teaching of Moses.”

[7] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1269. “As a whole, the book is aimed at persuading its readership to follow the Torah of Moses, or at strengthening their resolve to continue to do so. This message must be understood within the book’s historical setting, soon after the canonization of the Torah.”

[8] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1269. “The use of disputation format in much of the book contributes rhetorically to that purpose, for it allows the arguments of evil doers to be heard, in order to be countered and neutralized. Further, it allows the reader some limited form of self-identification with the actions of the evildoers, and as such serves as a call for them to examine themselves and repent.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malachi,” 1273. “The identity of the messenger in 3.1 has been highly debated. Is My messenger (Heb ‘malakhi’) Malachi? Or is there at least a pun on the name of the prophet? Is the messenger the angel of the covenant, a zealous, powerful enforcer of the covenant who is like a smelter’s fire and like fuller’s lye (i.e., a purifying, caustic treatment)? Is he Elijah (see v. 23)? Does the text indicate an expectation of a priestly Messiah? …The New Testament merges this v. with Isa. 40.3 and identifies the expected messenger is John the Baptist (Matt. :0; Mark 1.2; Luke 7.27).”

[11] Martin Luther, “Lectures on Malachi,” in Lectures on the Minor Prophets I: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Malachi. LW 18, trans. Richard J. Dinda, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1975), 409. “That preparing, then, is to make humble and to arrange things so as to allow God to work in one. You see, the way of the Lord is where He himself walks. The prophet mentions nothing about our ways except that we should abstain from them.”

[12] LW 18:409. “Behold, He comes! The repetition indicates certainty.”

[13] LW 18:410. “2. But who can endure the day of His coming? In Hebrew this reads: ‘Who will regulate or control the day, etc.?’ or, ‘Who will provide?’ It is as if he were saying: ‘Remain in your fear, then. Stay humble. Let that Messenger prepare you.”

[14] LW 18:410. “Blazing, or purifying….[Hebrew word] means a sharp cleaning agent or soap that washed great stains out of garments…The kingdom of Christ is a mystical smelting furnace that purges out the impurity of the old Adam. …Christ is not only the Purifier but also the purifying agent. He is not only the blacksmith but also the Fire; not only the Cleaner but also the Soap.”

[15] This is an adaption of Micha 6:8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” NRSVUE

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Remember and Rejoice Even Now

Canticle 9 The First Song of Isaiah Surely, it is God who saves me; I will trust in Abba God and not be afraid. For God is my stronghold and my sure defense, and Abba God will be my Savior.

Introduction

Joy. Joy? In this economy?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been awash in many a meme and reel describing the harriedness of a mom during the Christmas season. From doing advanced math to figuring out the equity calibration among the presents for the kids to just making sure that things are “merry and bright” and feel like Christmas, these memes solicit a chuckle here and there as I navigate the various holiday season enterprises. The funniest memes and reels include moms who must also navigate a Christmas season with a kid who has (the audacity to have) a December birthday…

Joy. Joy? In this economy?!

But Joy is precisely what is being asked of me as I show up here, in this place. Maybe the audacity isn’t so much my kid who has a December birthday, but mine…can I have the audacity to have joy…even now?

We speak of Advent as a time of waiting and expecting; I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I’m waiting and expecting something I’m really just catastrophizing and imagining the worse, dreading everything. But what if the news to come is good? What if the waiting and expecting is for something remarkable, life-altering, world changing, something categorically awesome and awe-filled, something that rejuvenates tired bones and fatigued bodies, something that solicits that electrical surge of No Way! through the brain when something unbelievable happens? What if joy and its activity “rejoicing” are precisely the emotive and active prospects of this very moment, of this very economy, of this very time of waiting and expecting?

Canticle 9 The First Song of Isaiah

Therefore you shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation. And on that day you shall say, Give thanks to Abba God and call upon Abba God’s Name…

Our canticle brings us into the realm of rejoicing, whether we like or not and whether we are ready for it or not. The canticle starts with a declaration from Isaiah, “Surely, it is God who saves me; I will trust in Abba God and not be afraid” (v.1). These words of Isaiah begin to conclude what has come before in the previous eleven chapters.[1] The words are not strictly Isaiah’s though, they are for the assembly. These prophetic[2] words of Isaiah 12 are liturgical words, thus, per Advent 1, they are psalmic.[3] It is not only Isaiah who praises Abba God; it is Israel’s summons to praise God because of all the good things God has done: God has been Israel’s “stronghold” and “sure defense” and God has demonstrated God’s self to be Israel’s savior (v.2). In remembering these deeds of God and the salvation they receive from God’s hand, Israel is ushered into the celebration of rejoicing and praise (v.3),[4] not unlike Moses and Israel did when they were liberated from Egypt. The words of Isaiah 12:1-6 are a litany of quotations from the psalms, other portions of Isaiah, and exodus.[5] Israel is being swept up in the great and grand salvation of God because God’s salvation is not one and done; God will always be their God thus their salvation, and they will always be God’s people in need of saving.

As the canticle continues with v. 4, “And on that day you shall say, Give thanks to God and call upon God’s Name; make God’s deeds known among the peoples; see that they remember that God’s Name is exalted.” On that day…meaning, not only on back then when their foreparents stood on the shore of the sea liberated from Egyptian oppression, but on any day when God’s salvation is made known to the people shall they give thanks and call upon God. Israel has been saved, is being saved, and will be saved; Isaiah has the fullness of time in view. [6] Israel will remember that God has saved and in remembering will look forward to God’s salvation in the future; with both their past and future secured in God, Israel’s salvation is present tense and they are liberated to brings God’s justice further into the world.

With the imagery of the Passover and liberation from Egypt in mind,[7] the canticle beckons the Israelites to remember that it is a faithful remnant that call upon God’s name, who respond to God’s judgment and redemption; and this is Isaiah’s hope.[8] The remnant is not the powerful, not the leaders, not the ones out front; the remnant is hidden among the regular people, like you and me, the ones calling out to God from their squalor, from their pain, from their suffering, from their oppression, from their existential fatigue;[9] they are the ones who remember the great deeds of Abba God and abide in God.[10] Martin Luther in The Bondage of the Will, says something similar about the true church of Christ, “The Church is hidden, the saints are unknown.”[11] The promised new community which the remnant constitutes is heard, according to Isaiah; their present reality is formed by a mutual remembering of the past and this constitutes the future of Israel.[12] God’s people will not be easily snuffed out no matter where they are or where they go because God is both their defender and their salvation in every moment. It is the remnant, spread far and wide, whose voices become one as they “Sing the praises of Abba God, for Abba God has done great things, and this is known in all the world” (v.5), and as they “Cry aloud” and “ring out [their] joy” because they are anchored in God because God is with them and God is their God and they are God’s beloved. [13]And knowing an believing this, there is reason to rejoice even in the waiting and expecting; especially in the waiting and expecting.

Conclusion

In Advent, we are summoned in and asked to remember while we wait. Following the logic of Isaiah 12:1-6, when we remember we also find ourselves looking forward to God who is our past and our future. We dare to look forward, to pick up heavy heads and cast tired eyes into the great unknown and dare to look forward with confidence that God will do what God has promised God will do because God has demonstrated God’s self as trustworthy (yesterday, today, and tomorrow). In this sacred time of waiting and by our holy remembering, we join our voices with that ancient remnant of Israel, those eager voices of yesteryear crying out to God. In this sacred time of waiting and by our holy remembering, we join our voices to those who cry out today for God’s intervention: those who are threatened with extinction and cry out to God, those who are scared to live as they are and cry out to God, those who fear for the lives of their loved ones because of the color of their skin and cry out to God, those who only know the cold bars of captivity and cry out to God, those who cry out to God from the depth of their nakedness, hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Israel’s call in the world is to think upon the gråeat actions of God and to then participate in God’s mission in the world righting the wrongs in the world. For those of us here today, those of us also waiting and remembering, we, too, are asked to participate in righting wrongs, in identifying with the least of these, in seeking God’s justice and peace in the world.

So, as we refresh our exhausted minds by remembering once again the off-the-wall story of God coming low in the humble form of a baby born to Mary in a cave so that God’s self can identify with God’s beloved, let us also find new energy to sing and praise God, to throw our hands up and rejoice again…even now, especially now.

[1] Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 107. “The chapter offers a response to the great deeds of God’s salvation to his people in Zion that were recorded in the previous eleven chapters.”

[2] Childs, Isaiah, 108. “It seems clear that the traditional conventions of the Psalter have been reused to shape an eschatological psalm of thanksgiving into a new vehicle for the prophetic proclamation of the book.”

[3] Childs, Isaiah, 108. “…chapter 12 is dominated by the psalmic language of Israel’s liturgy.”

[4] Childs, Isaiah, 108. “Verses 3 and 6 bracket the second confession and offer further theological grounding for the call of praise by the community of faith.”

[5] Childs, Isaiah, 108. “The passage is a veritable catena of citations and allusions form other sections of Isaiah, from Exodus, and the Psalter. For example, v. 1=Isa. 5:25; v. 2a=Ex. 15:2b; v. 2b=Ex. 15.2a; v. 3=Isa. 35:10, 55:1; Ps. 105:41, 43; v. 4=Ps. 105:1, 148:13; v. 5=Ex. 15:1, 21.”

[6] Childs, Isaiah, 109-110. “The theme of salvation is repeated three times, not just as a promise extended, but a reality experienced…It is this experience of the redeeming mercy that evokes joy as an inexhaustible source of life-giving water. Moreover, as with the rest of the Psalter, the experience of salvation calls forth a witness to the rest of the world that bears testimony to the wonders of God’s might works.”

[7] Childs, Isaiah, 110. Analogy between this text and Moses’s song in Ex. 15.

[8] Childs, Isaiah, 109. “The major point to make is that chapter 12 presents the voice of the faithful remnant of Israel responding to the great deeds of God, both in judgment and redemption, which had occupied the prophets throughout the former chapters.”

[9] Childs, Isaiah, 110. “Thus an analogy is established between redeemed Israel after the deliverance from Egypt and the present remnant, who in their experience of faith already stand on a safe shore a second time after having been rescued from enemies and exiles.”

[10] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 208. “God not only asks for justice; He demands of man ‘to regard the deeds of the Lord, to see the work of His hands’ (Isa. 5:12; cf. 22:11), ‘to walk in His paths’ (Isa. 2:3). ‘If you will not believe, you will not abide’ (Isa. 7:11).”

[11] Martin Luther “Bondage of the Will” LW 33:89

[12] Childs, Isaiah, 109. “Up to now there had been the promise of anew community of faith that would emerge from the ashes of Israel’s destruction, but the actual voice of the remnant had not been heard. The presentation of this voice of praise serves to confirm that the new society of faith was not merely a future promise, but was a present reality, made concrete first in the son Shearjashub (7:3) , but above all in the sign of Immanuel (7:14). This community of faith confirms in liturgical praise its experience of God, and the choice of the idiom of the Psalter bears testimony to the liturgical actuality of the worship.”

[13] Childs, Isaiah, 110. “In the response of faith the reality of the divine presence, ‘God with us’ (Immanuel), has been experienced, pointing to the full eschatological consummation of the kingdom of God. Israel can shout in joy because the Holy One of Israel, who has always reigned over his creation (6:3), even now shows himself mighty in the midst of his people (v. 6). The eschatological tensions of the chapter testify that the remnant already shares in that for which it waits in expectation.”

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Beloved Little Children of God

Psalm 146: 1-2, 4 Hallelujah! Praise Abba God, O my soul! I will praise Abba God as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, for there is no help in them. Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help, whose hope is in their God…

Introduction

Last week we were reminded that there are no external boundaries that create a Christian group; in fact, we could say that based on what we learned in Ephesians and what we learned last week boundaries—dividing walls, traditions forcing some to withdraw from and exclude others—are anathema to reign of God. If so, then why do we—Christians—seem deadest on creating barriers to inclusion with the ecclesia and God?

I ponder this question a lot because of where I find myself caught in this particular socio-political timeline. I may be too sensitive here, but the lines between who is “right” and who is “wrong” are appearing to be deeper and thicker than ever before. It feels easy to pull apart right now, to cut ties, to wipe the dust from your sandals and move on. It feels safe to fall deep into your own party of ideas and ideologies, to surround yourself with those just like you, to shrug and sidestep those “others” who don’t think like you. It even feels good to be really frustrated and angry, to give into fear, to have anxiety and worry about the global dumpster-fire we seem trapped in. Even if easy, safe, and good feels really good (and it can feel really darn good), for Christians that path is contrary to the path articulated to us by Christ, the one we are supposed to travel, to walk in, and to grow through.

In short, part of Christian praxis and identity in the world is our burden to pull together and not pull apart, to dare to step into the void of the unknown and risk our comfort and safety, and to relinquish our addiction to anger and fear so to disrupt hostility and enmity with equity and justice. We are exhorted to see that even those whom we might call “dogs” are none other than our dear siblings, beloved little children of God.

Mark 7:24-37

And then he was saying to her, ‘You permit the children to be filled first, for it is not honorable to take the bread of the children and drop it to the little house dogs.’ And she answered and says to him, ‘[Yes] Lord, even the little house dogs under the dining table eat from the crumbs of the little children.’ And he said to her, ‘On account of this word, go; the evil spirit has gone out of your daughter.’ (Mk 7:27-29)

Mark continues the story from where we left off last week. After addressing the crowd about what actually makes a person clean or unclean (hint: it’s not what goes in but what comes out), Jesus sets out: Now, from there, writes Mark, he rose and departed toward the territory of Tyre. Tyre was a region that was connected to Palestine and exerted financial dominance over Galilee; in some historical documents, the Tyrians are considered Israel’s “‘notoriously… bitterest enemies.’”[1] Within this relatively small detail, Mark demonstrates that Jesus is continuing to push boundaries—even if reluctantly,[2] And then he entered a house desiring no one to recognize him and he was not able to escape notice. Mark highlights that the message about the dissolution of boundaries, of the destruction of traditions and dividing walls of the kingdom of humanity, is not only for the house of Israel but also for the neighboring territories (and the world).[3] Jesus’s traveling participate in God’s will: Gentiles are not excluded from the mission of the reign of God and the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[4] God is for them, too; God is for the entire world and all humankind no matter the race, the color of the skin, the orientation and identity of the person.[5] If Jesus is the way to this God, then this way, this door, is wide open; [6] no one will be excluded because of random lines drawn in the sand willy-nilly separating this or that people.[7]

The story continues. Mark tells us that Jesus’s desire to go unnoticed by entering a house fails,[8] But at once, after hearing about [Jesus], a woman—whose daughter had an unclean spirit—came and fell before his feet. Now, the woman[was] Greek—Syrophoenician by race—and she was asking him to cast out the evil spirit from her little daughter. This isn’t just any person, and this isn’t just any woman. This is a desperate woman before God. This woman was willing to transcend religious tradition, social expectation, and political boundaries to heal her daughter (either her daughter or one related to her).[9] She is a thoroughly Gentile woman (the double identification emphasizes this point), and she carries the threat of ritual impurity because her daughter is possessed by an “unclean” spirit. There were many strikes against her: woman, Gentile, and unclean (ritually).[10] This woman is in great need and hears about Jesus being in Tyre and is willing to risk her wellbeing to seek healing for one whom she loves. Love does this; faith in Christ also does this.[11],[12]

But Jesus doesn’t reply to her in a way the reader would expect, considering what’s occurred thus far in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus says to her, ‘You permit the children to be filled first, for it is not honorable to take the bread of the children and drop it to the little house dogs.’ As one commentator said, Jesus’s response “is certainly not diplomatic,”[13] it is downright offensive (not only today but especially then[14]); he comes across as one who won’t help.[15] No matter how you parse it, the intentional term Jesus calls her, κυνάρια (translated as “little house dogs”), is flat-out insulting and dehumanizing (she’s a dog not a child—and this goes for her entire race).[16] At that moment, she had every reason to be discouraged.[17]

But rather than be discouraged, she seizes on a moment, or an image: Yes, Lord, even the little house dogs under the table eat from the crumbs of the young children. The “yes” is lost to our translation, but it’s there in spirit. She doesn’t disagree with the insult and then twists the image to emphasize that the little house dogs are happy to eat—even if second—the crumbs that fall to the floor and under the table; [18] in other words, it is right to let the crumbs fall into the possession of the dogs and let the dogs have their moment.[19] Theologically, what she sees here is the bold articulation of the power of the reign of God transcending not just local religious tradition but also socio-political division and boundaries; crumbs fall from the table for the children on to the floor where the dogs are.[20] Why shouldn’t they eat, too?

What happens next? Her daughter is delivered of the evil, unclean spirit. Jesus replied, this time full of grace, like one happy to be wrong,[21] and walks back his initial (human[22]) comment and heals her daughter with one (divine) word,[23],[24] On account of this word, go!; the evil spirit has gone out of your daughter. Just as he did before over dirty hands and she did just then about dogs, Jesus demonstrates that the tradition and boundaries of the kingdom of humanity are no match for the transcending power of the reign of God and the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[25] The divine equity of God’s mission in the world is pronounced here: it is not about being exclusive but inclusive; the bread of life will be shared with all no matter who they are or from where they hail.[26] She, too, is a child of God, worthy of living bread.[27]

Conclusion

According to Mark’s Jesus, no one—absolutely no one—is to be excluded from the presence of God made known in Christ and revealed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore here, in this passage from Mark, we are given every reason and motivation to pull together, to step outside of our comfort and safety, and relinquish our anger and fear. According to Mark’s Jesus, no one is so far gone to be outside of God’s great reach.

What is most paramount in this passage for us today—the thing that really jumps out at me, the thing that Mark wants his audience to understand—is that we are to be a healthy amount skeptical of the traditions and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and how these very things have infiltrated our theology and worship, causing us to gate-keep, calling it God’s will. In this passage, Mark wants us to see that Jesus turns his back on the conception of God’s will that leads to exclusivist thinking, ranking some humans as more important to God than others. Nothing is further from the truth. No one has a unique claim to God or those who belong to God. And we do not work from the idea that we are “right” as if everyone else is wrong; it’s not about right and wrong, which is the worst language to speak in; rather it’s about working from hope, hope and our being fully dependent on God and God’s word.*

Beloved, remember that you are the beloved little child of God, adopted into the family of God through faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit; remember, too, there are more people out there who think they are dogs and beyond God’s concern because that’s what our society has told them. To them we are sent; to them we go bringing God’s love, life, and liberation. To them and for them we bring divine equity and justice to the glory of God.

*This is inspired from Philip G. Ziegler’s AAR Paper (2023) “The Revolutionary Philanthropy of God–The Dogmatic Engine of Paul L. Lehmann’s Theological Ethics,” San Antonio, TX, p. 6. “…those who subsequently are impelled to ‘move against the focus of power’ in the existing social and political situation do not do so from a position of self–possession and strength–a position of right–but as those undone by judgment and grace and so in repentance, humility, and hope for others. Lehmann emphasizes that Christians and revolutionaries–Christians as revolutionaries–always ‘bear a righteousness not their own’ (Phil 3:9). They cannot and do not pursue their own righteousness; rather, their ethical and political adventure seeks only the righteousness of their neighbor.”

[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, eds. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 297. “Tyre, whose territory adjoined northern Galilee, had long been an important trading city. It had close links with Palestine, particularly under Herod the Great, and its coinage was widely circulated there; indeed, it exercised considerable economic dominance over the neighbouring area of Galilee. But it was clearly foreign territory, and Josephus…describes the Tyrians as ‘notoriously our bitterest enemies.’”

[2] France, Mark, 294. “[Jesus’s] initial intention is apparently not to engage in a ‘Gentile mission’ as such but simply to remain incognito (7:24), but events soon dictate otherwise and he responds, even if at first reluctantly, to Gentile needs.”

[3] France, Mark, 294. “The debate about purity has raised the question of how far, if at all, the mission of Jesus has a relevance beyond the community of Israel, whose observance of the Mosaic food laws was an effective practical barrier to social contact with those who did not observe them.”

[4] France, Mark, 294. “Mark’s specific deduction that Jesus’ teaching has ‘made all food clean’ signals a radically new approach which will in due time make possible the integration of Jews and Gentiles into a single community of discipleship.”

[5] France, Mark, 294. “The first pericope…highlights the racial issue, as Jesus. ‘debates’ with the Syrophoenician woman the basis on which the ‘children’s bread’ can properly be enjoyed also by the ‘dogs’…”

[6] France, Mark, 296. “Within that sequence this pericope marks the further opening of the door rather than an attempt to sing it shut again.”

[7] France, Mark, 296. “The whole encounter builds up to the totally positive conclusions of vv. 29-30, while the preceding dialogue serves to underlines the radical nature of this new stage in Jesus’ ministry into which he has allowed himself to be ‘persuaded’ by the woman’s realism and wit.”

[8] France, Mark, 297. “…Jesus wishes to get away from public attention…uses a ‘house’ for the purpose…but is unable to escape those in need.”

[9] France, Mark, 297. “…there is no doubt that here [Ἑλλην]carries its normal biblical connotation of Gentile (as opposed to Jewish), and the term Συροφοινίκισσα (the prefix Συρο- distinguished the Phoenicians of the Levant form those of North Africa around Carthage) reinforces the point. That such a woman chose to approach a Jewish healer, and even fell at his feet, indicates either desperation or a remarkable insight into the wider significance of Jesus’ ministry…”

[10] France, Mark, 297. “Few of those who approached Jesus had so much against, them, from an orthodox Jewish point of view. She was….a woman, and therefore one with whom a respectable Jewish teacher should not associate. She was a Gentile, as the double designation Ἑλληνίς Συροφοινίκισσα emphasizes. And her daughter’s condition might be expected to inspire fear and/or disgust, while the ‘uncleanness’ of the demon suggests ritual impurity.”

[11] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher. (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 104. “Unlike Jairus, she seems to take for granted that Jesus can work cures at a distance. Before a word is exchanged, she is already presented as a woman of deep faith.”

[12] Placher, Mark, 106. “It is her faith, though, that lies at the center of the story.”

[13] France, Mark, 298. “Jesus’ response, though nowhere near as brutal as in Matthew, is certainly not diplomatic.”

[14] Placher, Mark, 104. “What he says is harsh enough in our culture, but even harsher then, in a culture where dogs were not beloved house pets but disgusting scavengers who skulked about living on garbage. Calling someone a dog was a real insult…”

[15] France, Mark, 298. “The whole tone of the sentence is negative to the point of offensiveness, and suggests that Jesus has no intention of helping the woman.”

[16] France, Mark, 298. “The use of κυνάρια seems to add gratuitously to the Semitic neighbours as unclean animals. Biblical references to dogs…are always hostile. To refer to a human being as a ‘dog’ is a deliberately offensive or dismissive….Jews typically referred to Gentiles as dogs. The diminutive form (used in biblical literature only in this pericope), perhaps indicates the status of the dogs in Jesus’ image as dogs of the house rather than of the yard, but it does not remove the harshness of picturing Gentiles en masse as ‘dogs’ as opposed to ‘children’. It is the sort of language a Gentile might expect from a Jews, but to find it in a saying of Jesus is shocking.”

[17] France, Mark, 298. “…as a response to the Gentile woman’s request it is very harsh, and does not encourage her to expect help at the present time.”

[18] France, Mark, 298-299. “Jesus’ image (and his inclusion of πρῶτον) have given the woman the cue she needs, and enable her, on the basis of his own saying, to refute his οὐκ ἔστιν καλόν and replace it with a defiant Ναί, κύριε – ‘Yes, it is right’. By using the vocative κύριε (it’s only appearance in Mark…) the woman recognizes Jesus’ authority and her dependence on his help, but need not convey any more specific theological insight; it is an appropriate address to a distinguished stranger.”

[19] France, Mark, 299. “Jesus’ own image is thus pressed to its full extent, and provides the basis for her request to be granted, not refused. It is a remarkable twist to the argument, and one which displays as much humility on the woman’s part as it does shrewdness. She does not dispute the lower place which Jesus’ saying assumes for the Gentiles, and even accepts without protest the offensive epithet ‘dog’, but insists that the dogs, too, just have their day.”

[20] France, Mark, 299. “Putting it more theologically, the mission of the Messiah of Israel, while it must of course begin with Israel, cannot be confined there. The Gentiles may have to wait, but they are not excluded from the benefits which the Messiah brings. On this basis, she is bold enough to pursue her request; even the crumbs will be enough.”

[21] France, Mark, 296. “He appears like the wise teacher who allows, and indeed incites, his pupil to mount a victorious argument against the foil of his own reluctance. He functions as what in a different context might be called ‘devil’s advocate’, and is not disappointed to be defeated’ in argument.”

[22] Placher, Mark, 106. “Here yet again humanity and divinity come together in a single narrative of a single agent—the same Jesus who loses the argument can cure her daughter.”

[23] France, Mark, 299. “Διὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον makes it clear that the woman’s response, and the attitude which it reveals, has changed Jesus’s apparent intention. It is of course impossible now to be sure on the basis of the printed text alone whether his words were designed to provoke such a response, or whether he genuinely did intend to refuse her request and was persuaded by her argument. Much may have been conveyed by tone of voice and gesture. But Mark, by placing the incident in the setting of the opening up of Jesus’ ministry to the Gentiles…suggests that his initial reluctance should be taken with a pinch of salt.”

[24] Placher, Mark, 106. “If Mark did not show us Jesus’ initial harsh remark, we could not see the grace with which Jesus concedes defeat in an argument. That the woman does win the argument is a point any valid interpretation needs to acknowledge. To say that that could not happen is to deny Jesus’ full humanity.”

[25] France, Mark, 297. “That Jesus ultimately responded to a request from such a suppliant, and even that he was prepared to engage her in a serious dialogue, is typical of his unconcern for convention when it stood in the way of his mission.”

[26] France, Mark, 296. “As a result the reader is left more vividly aware of the reality of the problem of Jew-Gentile relations, and of the importance of the step Jesus here takes to overcome it. The woman’s ‘victory’ in the debate is a decisive watershed as a result of which the whole future course of the Christians movement is set not on the basis of Jewish exclusivism but of sharing the ‘children’s bread’.”

[27] Martin Luther, “Second Sunday in Lent,” Sermons Volume Two, trans. John Nicholas Lenker, et al, ed. John Nicholas Lenker. 2:126. “He compares her to a dog, she concedes it, and asks nothing more than that he let her be a dog, as he himself judged her to be. Where will Christ now take refuge? He is caught. Truly, people let the dog have the crumbs under the table; it is entitled to that. Therefore Christ now completely opens his heart to her and yields to her will, so that she is now no dog, but even a child of Israel.”

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The Paraclete Cometh

Psalm 104:34-37a 34 I will sing to Abba God as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please God; I will rejoice in Abba God. Bless God, O my soul!

Introduction

Last week, Jesus prayed for his disciples to have the fortitude to remain in the Word of God. Being not of the world but remaining in the world means that this fledgling community belonging to Christ needed to remember that their creation as this fledgling community was solely based and sustained on God’s Word proclaimed in and through Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, this one who is God. As Jesus prepares to leave his disciples, he knew that the hatred of the world toward this new community of God would try to eclipse the joy and confidence of these faithful. So, he prayed. He prayed that they would remain one as Jesus and God are one, because they are stronger together as a group, and the world loves to divide and conquer. He prayed for the sustaining of their identity, that they remember whose they are, because the world will do whatever it can to make the forget. He prayed for them to be protected in their new creation (new eyes, new ears, new words), because the world will try to steal from their new creation, forcing them to relinquish new eyes and ears, holding their proclamation hostage, demanding they forsake their divinely gifted life, love, and liberation.

Jesus knew they needed help. This little community—barely a smoldering wick—was about to be launched into the world to fend for themselves. They would be assaulted on every side because of who they were and what they said: they, like their Christ, were to become the locus of God’s revolutionary activity in the world; their message would echo Jesus’s, calling into question the kingdom of humanity, exposing the upside-down world, and proclaiming the words of the divine revolution in the world for the oppressed. Jesus knew they were sitting ducks and without God, they would not make it far because this community was not a community created by human strength so it could not be sustained by human strength. So, this community needed something bigger and stronger, something that is of the same substance as the word that not only called this community into being but also the entire cosmos.

Jesus prayed on behalf of the community, asking for God to show up. And God did.

Enter the Paraclete!

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

“But I, I say to you the truth, it is profitable to you that I, I go away. For if I do not go away, the paraclete cannot come to you. But, if I go, I will send them to you. And coming, that one will convict the cosmos concerning sin and concerning justice and concerning judgment…I still have many things to say to you, but you are not able to bear them just now. But, whenever this one comes, the Spirit of Truth, they will guide you in every kind of truth, for they will not speak from themself, but as much as you listen they will bring back word to you. (Jn 16:7-8, 12-13)

The lectionary loops us back into John 15 after bringing us to John 17 last week. Thus, according to the logic of the lectionary, Jesus’s promise of the Spirit is the fulfillment of the prayer to God to protect, guide, and strengthen the disciples who will be left in the world. But the advent of the Spirit, the Paraclete, is more than just a helper for those who will be left by Jesus; they are the very foundation of the church, as we say in our creed every Sunday: the Spirit is the “life-giving breath of the church.” For it is through, with, and by the Spirit that the work and word of Christ started in the body of Jesus will transition to the work and word of the fledgling community, who is now transfigured into the body of Christ in the world in Christ’s absence.[1] It is by the Spirit of God, the Paraclete, that God’s will and mission in the world will continue to be made known to the beloved in and through the new community of God.

Jesus—the Reconciler—must leave the disciples and return to God the Creator so that the Spirit of God—the Redeemer—can be sent into the world, specifically into the hearts of the disciples, to continue the work of God in the world. The work of the Spirit is to continue to reveal God in the world by means of the light of truth that is the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ.[2] In this way, God’s self-revelation and mission in the world is not cut short by Jesus’s bodily absence; through the Spirit rather than the incarnate Word, Jesus the Christ, does the Word and mission of God begin to transcend not only geographical boundaries (Acts 10 fulfilling Acts 1:8) but will also transcend chronological boundaries. By the sending of the Spirit, the Word of God will continue in the world, the light of truth will continue to illuminate hearts and minds from one era to another, in one context to a completely different one, through decades, centuries, and millennia.[3] It is through the witness of the Spirit in the lives of the disciples that witnesses back to Christ and thus forward to God[4] that is the continual fuel for the fire of divine revolution setting human hearts ablaze like match sticks—one by one.[5]

It is for this reason that Jesus both addresses the disciples’ impending grief (being left alone in the world in distress)[6] and exhorts them toward joy: even though they will grieve Jesus’s absence, feel fear and anxiety, they will be comforted by God’s Spirit, the Paraclete, who will usher them further into God’s truth and into God’s reality thus farther and deeper into God.[7] This is why Jesus turns the conversation toward what the Paraclete will do when they show up, because it is through the disciples (and through the church that will be born through their bodies and the Word of God) that the Paraclete will expose the world’s misconceptions of sin, justice, and judgment.[8] In this way and to quote Rudolf Bultmann, “The world is accused, and the Paraclete is the prosecutor.”[9] With the Paraclete set loose in the world through the disciples, human sin is exposed by divine righteousness,[10] human justice is brought to trial by divine justice, [11] and human judgment is found guilty by divine judgment.[12] Thus, God’s truth continues to be the light of the world from one era to another, within one context and then in another, living in one heart and at the same time in a completely different heart. The one word of God is always new in every moment as a word of revelation; it is not static doctrine, archaic dogma, suffocating fundamentalism, and deadly legalism. Rather, it is always a new living-word summoning the dead in their tombs into life in the world.[13]

Thus, Jesus can assure the disciples that even though he has much more to teach them, he will leave that to the Paraclete who will guide them (teach/lead) into every kind of truth further revealing Christ into the world, further instigating God’s divine revolution of life, love, and liberation in the world in pursuit of the God’s beloved. The Paraclete will not lead the disciples (those then and those now) to a static conception of God or into a conception of God so different there must be a break with this history set out through Christ, but into God’s self-disclosure made known in the revelation of God incarnate, Jesus.[14] In other words, divine truth will be revealed in every moment as the present moment—whatever/wherever—is revealed by the divine word and ushered into divine comfort by the Paraclete, who is the Spirit of Truth.[15] Starting first with the community—whatever/wherever—and billowing outward into the world.

Conclusion

Those first disciples lost their main, they lost Jesus whom they loved dearly—they staked their lives on this love of Christ, and then he left them. The distress they felt was real; it’s a distress that we feel today, feeling left/abandoned by God without Jesus to be here with us bodily. But the Paraclete remains in the world and always with the disciples of Christ, those who are thrust by faith into God and are dependent on God’s word. Our God is Triune, three persons one God; personal and close, at all times, in all eras. God is not dead, dear ones; God is alive, God is here, God is with us, and God is within us. Martin Luther writes about this portion of the Gospel of John, “Therefore God has been gracious to us and has given us a Comforter to counteract this spirit of terror—a Comforter, who, as God Himself, is much stronger with His comfort than the devil is with his terror.”[16] The one who lives in us and through us is the one who can bend space and time to become one spot and moment so that all time and all space is in this God of presence, revelation, and comfort.

Yet comfort only comes when God’s truth exposes and reveals us, the way we miss the mark, our decrepit ideas, broken systems, and violent ideologies. By the presence of the spirit—it’s conviction—we cannot pretend not to see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel. We do not have the luxury of undoing God’s summoning of us out from our tombs back at Easter. By the Spirit, the Paraclete, this humble community, bends its knees, confesses, and finds absolution by faith in Christ and union with God. Through the conviction and exposure of the Paraclete, divine comfort becomes true comfort—not the comfort of the world that is fleeting, comfort that lasts through thick and thin because it’s built out of the stuff of the infinite and not finite, of the eternal and not terminal, out of the substance of God and not the substance of humanity.

God’s Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete, the Prosecutor comes to bring God close to us through the light of truth to live with us and among us and in us, to work in and through us the divine revolution of God’s love, life, and liberation in the world. Today we rejoice because Christ’s joy is made complete in us through the sending of the Paraclete who binds us to God through Christ. We can let go of the rope and fall into God because God will show up because God never left us.

[1] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, Gen Ed, RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 552. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966). “After Jesus’ departure, the situation on earth will remain unchanged in as much as the offence which Jesus’ work offered the world will not disappear. The witness, which till now he had borne to himself, will be taken over by the Paraclete, the Helper, whom he will send from the Father.”

[2] Bultmann, John, 553. “The ἀλθείας is for him the self-revelatory divine reality, and the function of the Spirit consists in bestowing revelation by continuing Jesus’ revelatory work, as is stated by the words μαρτυρήσει περὶ ἐμοῦ…”

[3] Bultmann, John, 553. “Jesus will send this Spirit from the Father, and from the Father he will come forth. This two-fold designation makes the reference to the idea of revelation certain’ even after Jesus’ departure, God’s revelation will be mediated through him: he it is, who sends the Spirit…who bears witness to him; but he does so in his unity with the Gather, who has made him Revealer; he sends the Spirit from the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father, just as it is said in 14.16 that the Father sends the Spirit at the son’s request, or in 14.26 that he sends him ‘in the name’ of the Son. All these expressions say the same thing.”

[4] Bultmann, John, 554. “Thus their being with him ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς has not come to an end with his farewell, but continues further; and this is the only basis on which their witness is possible. Their witness is not , therefore, a historical account of that which was, but—however much it is based on that which was—it is ‘repetition,’ ‘a calling to mind,’ in the light of their present relationship with. Him. In that case it is perfectly clear that their witness and that of the Spirit are identical.”

[5] Bultmann, John, 553-554. “The word μαρτυρήσει indicates that the Spirit is the power of the proclamation in the community, and this is made fully clear by the juxtaposition of the disciples’ witness and that of the Spirit: καὶ ὑμεῖς δὲ μαρτυρεῖτε (v. 27). For the witness borne by the disciples is not something secondary, running alongside the witness of the spirit.” And “Their preaching is to be a ‘repetition’ of his preaching, or a ‘calling to mind,’…” (554)

[6] Bultmann, John, 558. “They are not asking where he is going to—the answer would be: to the father, and that would solve their difficulty—but they are in λύπη because they are about to be left in their distress.”

[7] Bultmann, John, 558.

[8] Bultmann, John, 560-561. “Only in the word was Jesus the Revealer, and only in the word will he continue to be it; for the Paraclete, who is take his place, is the word. The word is very far from being a closed doctrine, or complex of statements, not on the other hand is it the historical account of Jesus’s life. It is the living word; that is, paradoxically, the word which is spoken by the community itself, for the Paraclete is the Spirt that is at work in the community.”

[9] Bultmann, John, 562.

[10] Bultmann, John, 563. “The world understands sin as revolt against its own standards an ideals, the things which give it security. But to shut oneself off from the revelation that calls all worldly security in question and opens up another security—that is real sin, in contrast to which all that used to be sinful was only temporary and passing.”

[11] Bultmann, John, 565. ‘For the world , this victory is just as much a κρυπτόν (7.4) as is the real nature of ἁμαρτία; as the world sees things, to suffer the wreckage of death means condemnation by God; the world can only see victory in what is visible. But the significance of the victory lies precisely in the overcoming of the visible by the invisible; this is why the world does not know that it is condemned, or that it is conquered. But this is what the Paraclete will show.”

[12] Bultmann, John, 565. “In each case the world thinks it possesses the criteria for this judgment in its concepts of ἁμαρτία and δικαιοσύνη. But as it deceived itself over the meaning of A and D, so too it fails to see that the χρίσις is already ensuing, that the prince of this world is already judged; i.e. it fails to see that it is itself already judged—condemned for holding on to itself, to it s own standards and ideals, to what can be seen.”

[13] Bultmann, John, 561. “For the word is at the same time spoken into a situation; i.e. it is spoken as the word of revelation against it. If therefore the community has any understanding of the word of revelation that brings it into being, it can and must know that it has always to interpret the word afresh and to speak it into its own present as the word that is always the same—that word that is the same because it is always new.”

[14] Bultmann, John, 575. “This means that the Spirits’ word is not something new, to be contrasted with what Jesus said, but that the Spirit only states the latter afresh. The Spirit will not bring new illumination, or disclose new mysteries; on the contrary, in the proclamation effected by him, the word that Jesus spoke continues to be efficacious.”

[15] Bultmann, John, 574. “If the Spirit is at work in the word that is proclaimed in the community, then this word gives faith the power to step out into the darkness of the future, because the future is always illumined afresh by the word. Faith will see the ‘truth’ in each case, i.e., it will always be certain of the God who is manifest in the word, precisely because it understands the present in the light of this word.”

[16] Martin Luther, “Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 14-16,” Luther’s Works, vol. 24, ed., Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1961), 291.

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The Good Fruit

Psalm 22:28-29 28 To Abba God alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before Abba God. My soul shall live for God; my descendants shall serve God; they shall be known as Abba God’s for ever.

Introduction

Last week, I ended the sermon with this:

The Christian walk is hard not because we have to be pious and self-righteous or force ourselves to be perfect and better than everyone else; it’s hard because to love your neighbor in the name of God is hard. In her most systematic text, Thinking About God, Dorothee Sölle writes,

“Love has its price. The cross expresses love to the endangered, threatened life of God in our world. It is no longer a question of a biophilic embracing of life which spares itself the cross. The more we love God, the threatened, endangered, crucified God, the nearer we are to [God], the more endangered we are ourselves. The message of Jesus is that the more you grow in love, the more vulnerable you make yourself.”[1]

Beloved to love is hard because it’s risky; God knows because God loves and risked everything for you, the beloved.

I didn’t know that this week’s gospel message would take that message and go deeper into the depths of Christian existence that is radically shaped by God’s love, faith in Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Following Christ out of the Jordan is risky business; following Christ out of the tomb is even more risky. Because love—the love of God and the love for the neighbor—makes us vulnerable, as vulnerable as God made God’s self in Christ for the Beloved.

John 15:1-8

I, I am the true vine and my Elder is the vinedresser. All vine-branches in me not bearing fruit [God, God] removes, and all [vine-branches] bearing fruit [God, God] prunes so that they may bear more excellent fruit…Remain in me, and I [remain] in you. Just as the vine-branch is not able to bear fruit from itself if it does not remain in the vine, in this way neither can you, you if you do not remain in me. (John 15:1-2, 4)

Our gospel brings us to Jesus’s announcement that he is the true vine, God (his parent) is the vine-dresser, and those who follow Christ are the vine-branches. This passage falls within the “farewell discourses.” Through these chapters (13-17), Jesus leaves his disciples with exhortation and guidance, warning and prayer, all things necessary for them to persist when he leaves (in chapter 18 he is arrested and is resurrected in chapter 20). So, seen through the larger discourse of the “farewell discourses” a discussion about Jesus being the true vine, God being the vine-dresser, and the disciples being vine-branches makes more sense. Thus, in being the true vine there is no other vine for the disciples to find true life apart from Jesus.[2] This is why the disciples are exhorted by Christ to remain in Christ as they go about the activity of the Spirit in the world through proclamation and prayer.[3] In other words, to isolate this passage may render it more traumatizing and scarier than it ought to be—though, that doesn’t make its message easier to digest.

Christ knows that his disciples, those near and far, will come up against turmoil and tumult in the world either indirectly (because the world is chaotic and a bit happenstance) or directly (because the message of God’s revolutionary love causes things to be right-side-up that have been up-side down for too long). Christ is eager to give his disciples something to cling to while they wander this earth without him, so that when they encounter indirect or direct suffering they know they are not alone but that God, Christ, and the Spirit are with them, walking them through this trial and tribulation.[4] And while the thrust of the passage is on the vine and the vine-branches (and which ones are or are not bearing fruit), God is pictured here in a tender and loving way who faithfully forms and shapes the lives of those who follow the vine, those who follow after Jesus.[5] In this passage we see God use the (indirect and direct) ills of this world for the well-being and benefit of those who follow after God by faith and love.[6] It is this God who is for the disciples whom the disciples have direct access to through Christ.[7]

I need to tread lightly here because I do not want to communicate that either we should be seeking out turmoil and tumult or that God in God’s self is intentionally bringing us pain. Rather, it is in turmoil and tumult where we cling tighter to the word and grip that divine hand of our beloved elder/parent with more fervor as we go through these challenges.[8] And in this we are formed (more and more) to the likeness of Christ, fashioned after God’s own heart, made one with the divine Spirit in us rendering us softer rather than harder.[9]

It is this process of moving from hard to soft, from invulnerable to vulnerable that makes Christian existence in the world painful. The world would deal us strife and encourage us to become hard and closed off; but with Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit and God walking with us, we are exhorted and encouraged to get up when we fall and not put on the world’s emotional armor so we can feel again, identify with the suffering of others again, to be as Christ again to our neighbor and in the world. We have no “human security”; rather we are to trust that even in this God is with us and God will bring comfort to these who are afflicted through our love which is informed/formed by our faith.[10] To be grafted onto the vine that is Christ and pruned as a result is to be grown into Christ and to be Christ’s body in the world searching and seeking the beloved of God, bringing liberation, loving even though its risky, and daring to live and fight for life even when death is all around.[11],[12] This is the good fruit that we bear into the world. [13]

Conclusion

As those daring enough to follow Christ out of the Jordan and then again follow him out of the tomb on Easter Morning, we are called to remain in Christ. We never move on from Christ as the source of our life and love in the world, and the reality of our liberation to participate in divine liberation of the whole world. To remain in Christ is to persist in faith even when things seem to be falling apart, are all on fire, and when everything actual is poised to dismantle anything possible. We are called to be those who represent Christ in the world, those who are from Christ, those who bring Christ close to God’s beloved who are in pain, who suffer, who lack, and to remind them and the world that Christ is not truly gone, but very present in our actions of love informed by faith.[14]

It is this from-ness, this remaining in that informs our prayer life and in this way as we are aligned with the life giving sap of the vine, and we are pruned, and become fruit-bearing vine-branches. In this way, our prayers align informed by our faith in Christ manifesting in loving deeds bringing God glory in the world. [15] Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven… To pray in this way, to remain in Christ, to bear divine fruit in the world aligned with the will of God, to be Christ’s body and to represent God in a world that is convinced God is dead is what it means to be Christ’s disciples. [16]

To quote her text, Suffering, Dorothee Sölle writes,

“Love does not cause suffering or produce it, though it must necessarily seek confrontation, since its most important concern is not the avoidance of suffering but the liberation of people. Jesus’ suffering was avoidable. He endured it voluntarily. There were other ways out, as is stressed again and again in mythical language: it would have been possible for him to come down from the cross and allow himself to be helped. To put it in political terms, he didn’t need to go to Jerusalem and could have avoided the confrontation. … To reconcile God with misery means precisely avoiding confrontation and, in fear of being formed in the image of Christ, which includes pain, putting off liberating love.”[17]

“The meaning of the cross is not to reconcile God with misery and finish us off in the paradox. The unity of cross and resurrection, failure and victory, weeping and laughing, makes the utopia of a better life possible for the first time. He who does not weep needs no utopia; to him who only weeps God remains mute.”[18]

[1] Dorothee Soelle, Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1990), 134.

[2] Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. GR Beasley-Murray, gen. ed., RWN Hoare and JK Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 529-530. Originally published as, Das Evangelium des Johannes, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964, 1966. “With the words ἐγώ εἰμι the Revealer presents himself again as the object of the world’s desire and longing; if one asks about the ‘true vine’, then the answer is given: ‘The true vine am I’. There is no comparison here, or allegory. Rather, Jesus as the true, authentic ‘vine’ is contrasted with whatever also claims to be the ‘vine’.”

[3] Bultmann, John, 529. “Thus the first part of the discourse, vv. 1-8, is an exhortation to constancy of faith in the language of μείvατε ἐν ἐμοί, …”

[4] Martin Luther, “Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 14-16,” Luther’s Works, vol. 24, ed., Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1961), 194. Here after LW 24. “That is how Christ interprets the suffering which He and His Christians are to endure on earth. This is to be a benefaction and a help rather than affliction and harm. Its purpose is to enable them to bear all the better fruit and all the more, in order that we may learn to impress this on ourselves as He impresses it on Himself.”

[5] LW 24, 199. “This is an especially charming picture. God portrays Himself, not as a tyrant or a jailer but as a pious Vinedresser who tends and works His vineyard with all faithfulness and diligence, and surely does not intend to ruin it by fertilizing, hoeing, pruning, and removing superfluous leaves.”

[6] LW 24, 210. “Thus, as has been stated before, God uses all trials and suffering, not for Christendom’s harm, as the devil and the world intend, but for its welfare, so that it may thereby be purified and improved, and bear much fruit for the Vinedresser. This is what he here calls pruning, so that those who are in Christ may continue to grow and increase in strength.”

[7] Bultmann, John, 531-532. “Before the exhortation is given, the phrase καὶ ὁ πατήρ μου ὁ γεωργός ἐστιν declares that Jesus’ existence for his own is ground in his existence from God, which is an indirect way of saying that as the revealer he makes it possible for his own to approach the Father.”

[8] LW 24, 211. “Therefore your suffering is not the cleanness itself, and you are not declared clean in the sight of God because of it. But it does serve to drive man to grasp and hold the Word with a better and firmer grip, in order that in this way faith may become active. The word is itself the purification of the heart if the heart adheres to it and remains faithful to it.”

[9] LW 24, 212. “Behold, thus Christ shows clearly that the cleanness of Christians does not come from the fruit they bear but that, conversely, their fruit and works spring from the cleanness which they already have from the Word, by which the heart is cleansed.”

[10] Bultmann, John, 532-533. “The relationship with God means the destruction of human security—for the believer as well. It does not provide enjoyment of peace of mind, or a state of contemplation, but demands movement, growth; its law is καρπὸν φέρειν. The nature of the fruit-bearing is not expressly stated; it is every demonstration of vitality of faith, to which, according to bb. 9-17, reciprocal love above all belongs.”

[11] LW 24, 226. “And it is done in this manner: When I am baptized or converted by the Gospel, the Holy Spirit is present. He takes me as clay and makes of me a new creature, which is endowed with a different mind, heart, and thoughts, that is, with a true knowledge of God and sincere trust in His grace. To summarize, the very essence of my heart is rendered and changed. This makes me a new plant, one that is grafted on Christ the vine and grows from Him. My holiness, righteousness, and purity do not stem from me, nor to they depend on me. They come solely from Christ and are based only in Him, in whom I am rooted by faith, just a s the sap flows from the stalk into the branches. Now I am like Him and of His kind. Both He and I are of one nature and essence, and I bear fruit in him and through Him. This fruit is not mine; it is the Vine’s.”

[12] Bultmann, John, 536. “For the Revealer is not the mediator of a doctrine that can be received once for all; his word is not a dogma, nor a view of the world, but the free word of revelation that makes alive and that establishes anew one’s whole existence.”

[13] LW 24, 226. “Thus Christ and the Christians become one loaf and one body, so that the Christian can bear good fruit—not Adam’s or his own, but Christ’s For when a Christian baptizes, preaches, consoles, exhorts, works, and suffers, he does not do this as a man descended from Adam; it is Christ who does this in Him. The lips and tongue with which the proclaims and confesses God’s Word are not his; they are Christ’s lips and tongue. The hands with which heh toils and serves his neighbor are the hands and member of Christ, who, as he says here, is in him; and he is in Christ.”

[14] Bultmann, John, 535-536. “Μέωειν is persistence in the life of faith; it is loyal steadfastness to the cause only in the sense of always allowing oneself to be encompassed, of allowing oneself to receive. The loyalty that is demanded is not primarily a continued being for, but a being from; it is not the holding of a position, but an allowing oneself to be held, corresponding to the relationship of the κλῆμα to the ἄμπελος.”

[15] Bultmann, John, 538-539. “In prayer the believer, so to speak, steps out of the movement of his life, inasmuch as the prayer is not an action that satisfies the claim of the moment—which for the believer is the demand of love. But as he prays the believer also steps out of the context of his life, in that he is certain of the prayer’s being granted, and he no longer has need to fear the future about which he prays, as of something that threatens to destroy him he can be certain that the prayer will be heard, whatever he prays for; for what else could be the content of his petition, whatever form it may take, than the Revealer’s μένειν in him, and his μένειν in the Revealer? The granting of such a prayer, which arises him out of the context of his human life in the world, is itself the documentation of his eschatological existence.”

[16] Bultmann, John, 539. “…the disciples’ union with the separated Revealer is achieved in their discipleship; and after vv. 4-6, the radical meaning of μαθητὴς εἶναι has become clear as a reciprocal μένειν ἐν.”

[17] Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1975), 164-165. Originally published as: Leiden “Themen der Theologie” ed. Hans Jürgen Schultz, Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag.

[18] Sölle, Suffering, 166.

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