The solidarity of grace

Growing up, I enjoyed watching my mom do things around the house, especially in the kitchen. Whatever she did, I watched how she did it, and then I asked her to let me try. To this day, when I peel an apple, I peel and slice it just like she did. When I chop an onion, I chop it just like she did. When I fold a shirt or a pair of socks, I fold them the way she did. I can’t tell you how many things I learned simply by watching her.

Listening to her, though, is a different story. She loves to tell others about her ironing one day, and I was there with her, my eyes following the tip of the iron gliding across the ironing board like the bow of a ship. I remember my fascination with the hissing sound of the steam and the clean smell of freshly ironed laundry. She set the iron on its back while putting something on a hanger or in the basket, and she said, “Don’t touch, it’s hot.” She laughs every time she tells that story, how, of course, as soon as she turned around, I touched the iron.

Many parents seem to think this has something to do with their children’s need to test boundaries or challenge parental authority. Maybe. What I remember is that I was curious about the meaning of ‘hot,’ and I learned to use a bit more caution when it comes to my desire to know – not every life lesson has to be painful, after all. There is truth, though, in the parents’ suspicion; little humans do like to push boundaries, just to see what will happen or how far we can go.

“Don’t play in the creek,” says the parent, “the water’s too high” – “Well, let’s see about that,” says the little one.

“We use the scissors only for cutting paper, don’t even think about cutting your brother’s hair” – well, dear parent, you know that you just planted an irresistible idea in your child’s mind, don’t you? Some say that the story of Adam and Eve, the tree and the serpent has something of that dynamic. God says, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, just not that one.” Suddenly that one tree, among all the trees of the garden, is the most fascinating and attractive. To me, the story is an invitation to think about what it means to be human.

Adam is named after adamah, the Hebrew word for the soil from which the human being is made. Adam, before it becomes the name for Eve’s partner, is the embodiment of humankind, and humankind is given three gifts: A beautiful, bountiful garden that is our home and our calling: our purpose is to be keepers of the garden; earth and earthling belong together. The second gift is God’s permission to freely eat of every tree; the garden is ours to inhabit, enjoy and explore. And the third gift is a boundary, a prohibition. As creatures of God we have limits, and within these limits life flourishes as God intends. To be human is to live with this God-given purpose, in God-given freedom, and within God-given limits.

According to the story, the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the earthling, and when they awoke, they were male and female – and things got even more complicated. Now we look at humankind not just in relationship to God and to the earth, but to each other.

The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent is incredibly generative. More than almost any other story, it has shaped and reshaped our views about moral freedom, male-female relationships, sin, shame, guilt, sex and work, and it comes with hundreds of years of footnotes and commentary. Some of the footnotes have caused a lot of pain, especially for women. E.g., we read in 1 Timothy 2:11-15,

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

Not so fast, dear writer, you can’t just assume that all your readers are sharing your assumptions. This one certainly doesn’t. If anybody was actually deceived in the garden, it was the two of them together; Adam was there, after all. It’s not like he came home after a long day of tilling and keeping to eat his dinner of forbidden fruit. You could make an argument that if Adam is that clueless, he – the man – shouldn’t be teaching anybody, but rather be the one learning in silence. But the story is bigger than its highly questionable use in blaming others or silencing voices that those in power want to shush.

Many footnotes have identified the serpent with the devil, but the story says the serpent was just that, a serpent, one of the animals of the field God had made. It was part of God’s creation, not some cosmic intruder bent on disruption. The serpent was crafty, cunning, smart, wise, yes, but not evil.

The serpent began a conversation, and you may think a talking snake is curious – but this is not the first story you’ve heard that has talking animals in it, is it? I find far more intriguing that this was the first conversation that wasn’t with but rather about God. In a way, we’re witnessing the beginnings of theology. The serpent inquired, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” and it’s entirely up to us to decide if that significant overstatement was an innocent mistake or a trick to sow suspicion. The woman corrected the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden’” and she added, with no basis in anything God said according to the story, “’nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” And the serpent replied, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The serpent tells the humans something God didn’t tell them, and so the word of the serpent puts the word of God in question. Did God  keep something back? Why didn’t God tell them the whole truth about the matter? Does God really have their best interest at heart or is God jealously protecting divine privileges? Suddenly the words and motivations are in question along with the larger matter if the creator of life can be trusted when it comes to what makes for the flourishing of life.

What will the human beings do? Here’s what they don’t do: They do not turn to God for answers, nor do they turn to each other to discuss their options and decide how to proceed. Instead they turn to the tree and its promises, and they take of its fruit and eat in silence.

And nobody dies. It turns out that the serpent hadn’t deceived them, but rather told them the truth; perhaps not the whole truth, but who knows if it knew the whole truth.

We are created for relationship with God and with each other, but our relationship with God is not simply part of our genetic program. It is rooted in trust. The story allows us to reflect on what happens when mistrust creeps in: alienation and estrangement grow, silence and shame drive out joy. Mistrust disrupts the fabric of creation and puts life on a trajectory away from communion with God, and death creeps in.

Death creeps in – not in the form of mortality, mortality is part of life – death creeps in in the breakdown of the relationships that make us human: our relationship with God, with the created order, and with each other. Life is no longer rooted in mutuality and care, but in suspicion and competition.

When Paul writes that sin came into the world through one man, it’s not so we can all blame Adam as though Adam were somebody else. We are Adam the earthling, created for communion with God, yet unable to escape the dominion of sin after we have given it access to God’s world. Sin is too big for us; bigger than the sum total of the wrong we have done and the good we have not done, bigger than all our loveless thoughts and thoughtless words together.

Paul wants us to see is that sin is not a lower-case transgression, not even a human disposition, but an upper-case power that enslaves us and keeps us from being who we are meant to be.

But Paul doesn’t want us to see that because he relishes gloom and doom and sin talk. He wants us to know that big, upper-case, creation-enslaving Sin has been defeated. Paul points to Jesus as the one human being who lived the life God intended for humankind. Jesus was fully at home in his relationship with God and God’s creation and with all of us. Mistrust could not enter; rejection and injustice could not break the bond of love. Sin and Death had their way with him, but sin’s dominion and the reach of death ended at the cross.

God raised Jesus from the dead, making him the firstborn of a new creation where sin and death are no more. And just as Adam was our life pattern in the oppressive, sad solidarity of sin and alienation, Jesus now is humanity’s life pattern in the liberating, joyful solidarity of grace. Just as we were one in Adam under sin’s dominion, we are one in Christ and find our true human identity under his dominion of grace. And the reach of grace is greater than the reach of sin ever was.

Lent began on Wednesday with ashes smudged on our foreheads and somber words urging us, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Remember you are mortal, you are human. The ashes were all that was left of the palm branches we waived when Jesus came riding into town and we were so excited about God’s reign on earth. The branches went up in flames much like the exuberance of our joy and our commitment to living as God’s people, on God’s terms, in God’s creation. Ashes were all that was left, and on Wednesday we used them to have the symbol of our hope traced on our foreheads – the cross of Christ, the triumph of God’s love over sin.

Lent is the gift of forty days to reflect on our priorities. Reconsider our choices. Remember our calling. Renew our commitments. Refocus our attention. Resist the pull of lovelessness. Return to a baptized life. Reclaim our identity as God’s own – in one word, repent. Forty days to let the Spirit lead us to a fuller understanding of what it means to follow Jesus and find fullness of life through him.

Transfiguration

In the church, we call this Sunday The Transfiguration of the Lord. On this day, the gospel reading takes us up the mountain with Jesus, in the company of Peter, James and John. This mountain moment is the pivot point in the story when everything shifts from Jesus’ work in the villages of Galilee to his work in Jerusalem. Everything shifts — from Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign in his teaching, his healing, and his radical hospitality — to his journey to Jerusalem, to the hill outside the city where the journey of hope ends in betrayal, injustice, and violent death.

And here, at the midpoint of the story, this luminous mountain moment shines like Easter. He was transfigured before them — his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Everything shifts on this mountain.

Six days earlier, Jesus had told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And it was too much to take in for any of them. “God forbid it, Lord!” Peter said. “This must never happen to you.” Everything shifts on this mountain where the heavenly voice affirms Jesus’ identity and commands his disciples to listen to him – particularly when he tells them about the journey ahead.

I want to read a passage from an essay by Brian Doyle. It’s seemingly about something altogether different, but bear with me.

Very rarely are we able to reach back into the past and mark a moment when our innermost tides began to flow in another direction; but I think I see one, a moment when I realized with a first hint of cold honesty I was being a selfish buffoon—and possibly the moment when I began to grow up. It is beside the point that it took me another ten years at least to get there, or that I am not quite there yet, even in my fifties.

I was sitting at the dining-room table. My dad and my mom and my sister were sitting there also. I believe it was lunch. My brothers were elsewhere committing misdemeanor. I believe it was summertime. The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling. I believe the meal was finished, and my mother and sister were having tea and cigarettes. My father mentioned casually that our cousins were coming for dinner next Sunday or something like that. I believe these were the Connecticut cousins and not the New York cousins. I shoved my chair back and whined and snarled and complained. I believe this had something to do with some vague plans of my own that I had of course not shared with anyone else as yet, probably because they were half-hatched or mostly imaginary. My father said something calm and reasonable, as still is his wont. I said something rude. My mother remonstrated quietly but sharply, as still is her wont. I said something breathtakingly selfish. My sister said something gently and kind, as still is her wont. I said something cutting and sneering and angry.

My mother slowly put down her tea. Odd that I would remember that detail, her cigarette in her left hand and her teacup in her right and the cup descending slowly to the table. The table had a blue cloth, and just outside the window the yew hedge was the most brilliant vibrant green.

As I remember it was just as my mother was putting her teacup on the table, just as the smoke from the cigarettes was rising thin and blue and unbroken like twin towers, just as my father put his big hands on the table and prepared to stand up and say something calm and blunt to me and cut the moment before it spun out of control, that I realized I was being a fool. It wasn’t an epiphany or a trumpet blast or anything epic. It was an almost infinitesimal wriggle of something for which I don’t have good words even now. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, though I was embarrassed, later. It was more like for a second I saw who I actually was rather than who I thought I was, or wanted to be, or wanted other people to think I was. I understood, dimly, for an instant—I believe for the first time in my life—that I was being a fool.[1]

Brian Doyle calls it A Fool’s Awakening, and awakening is the word, the experience that for me ties his piece to the luminous mountain moment of the gospel. It wasn’t Jesus, I want to suggest, who was transformed in front of his friends’ eyes, it was their manner of seeing him. Suddenly they saw who he really was rather than who they thought he was, or wanted him to be. They saw, not because they had read the right books or studied hard — they saw because they were awakened.

We heard a passage from 2 Peter this morning that makes reference to that mountain moment. The text addresses a situation where believers wrestled with disappointment and doubt. “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father,”[2] Jesus had told his disciples, and for more than a generation, the church had lived with the hope of Jesus’ return in glory. But when? Why hadn’t he come yet? What was taking him so long? People were making fun of believers; they’re quoted in 2 Peter as saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!”[3] Apparently the argument was gaining ground that the apostolic teaching about Jesus’ return as judge was a “cleverly devised myth” and that the prophecies of scripture were unreliable. Cleverly devised myths. Stories made up for people who can’t handle the cold, hard truth that justice is but a dream. For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. Sounds remarkably contemporary for a text from the end of the first century, doesn’t it? We expect commercials and campaign slogans to be cleverly devised myths, designed to tell people what they want to hear, but I can’t think of the apostles’ witness as the equivalent of Jesus commercials.

“We did not follow cleverly devised myths,” the author insists, “when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.”

The apostles who were with him on the mountain, the men and women who saw him on the third day, they were not a bunch of myth makers bent on deceiving impressionable people; they were eyewitnesses of his majesty. They were men and women struggling to find words for that moment of awakening, for an experience that opened not just their eyes but their entire being to the presence and promise of God in Jesus. To them the point was not when Jesus would come to judge the living and the dead, but that it was Jesus who would come. They were the first to trust that the unsentimental love of God they had encountered in Jesus was also the power that holds the future, and that in the end, we would not be accountable to no one or solely to ourselves, but to Jesus. I can’t think of those convictions as cleverly devised myths, but rather as a transfigured, awakened, way of seeing, thinking, and being.

John Calvin wrote,

Profane [people] think that religion rests only on opinion, and, therefore, … insist to have it proved by reason that Moses and the prophets were divinely inspired. But I answer, that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason. For as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of [people], until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.[4]

We have no great certainty of the word itself, until it be confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit. For the Lord has so knit together the certainty of his word and his Spirit, that our minds are duly imbued with reverence for the word when the Spirit shining upon it enables us there to behold the face of God.[5]

We’re about to enter the season of Lent, a time of deep, and much needed, critique of the many cleverly devised myths we tell each other and ourselves. May it be for us a season of awakening to the Spirit’s lustrous presence, and may we all come to behold the face of God – in the words of the prophets, in Jesus on the cross, and in all whom he calls his brothers and sisters. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts — and all of creation is transfigured, shining with the glory of God.

[1] Brian Doyle, “A Fool’s Awakening,” The Christian Century, February 19, 2014, p. 12

[2] Matthew 16:27

[3] 2 Peter 3:4

[4] John Calvin, Institutes, 7.4.; see http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.iii.viii.html

[5] Ibid., 9.3.

All shall shout out

“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet. “Lift up your voice like a trumpet!”

I wonder what life was like in those days, in and around Jerusalem. I wonder if those were quiet days, when the voice of the prophet sounding like a trumpet through the remains of the city would have brought public attention to the words. Or if they were they days like ours, days of constant noise, when I for one barely know what to say anymore amid the assault of trumpets determined to drown out what remains of integrity and honesty and reverence.

Senator Mitt Romney from Utah voted “guilty” on one of the articles of impeachment against the President, and he did so knowing that his vote wouldn’t change the outcome, that there was nothing to gain politically and that there would be intense backlash. He said on the Senate floor, “The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise ‘impartial justice.’ I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.”[1] Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina responded on a call-in radio show, “All I can tell you is that God gave us free will and common sense. I used the common sense God gave me to understand this was a bunch of B.S.” And he explained that for Mr. Romney to arrive at a different conclusion, meant that “your religion is clouding your thinking here."[2] If this were an actual conversation, then Mr. Romney would perhaps have pointed out that, rather than clouding, his religion was illuminating his thinking with the values and convictions of his faith. But actual conversation and real debate and truthful speech are endangered species in our time.

“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet—but what good can come from shouting when all are doing it? When all are shouting the level of noise goes up and everything else goes down. Does anybody hear what’s actually going on? Does anybody notice the cracks in the magnificent house this republic has long aspired to be?

“Shout out, do not hold back!” the Lord told the prophet during a time of deep uncertainty for Israel. A great number of leaders and skilled workers had been taken into exile after the Babylonian armies had sacked Jerusalem about seventy years earlier, but now some of the exiles were returning, or rather their children and grandchildren — people full of longing and hope for a new beginning for the city and the land and the nation. But the new beginning was delayed; the return from exile was nothing like the joyous parade they had envisioned. “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” The people are complaining that God is not paying attention to them and their religious practice, and they seem to wonder, “Why should we continue to worship, if it doesn’t do us any good? What’s the point?”

“Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, delight to draw near to me,” God declares, and that’s awesome, isn’t it? — I wish people in my city were as eager to seek and delighted to know God! But then God adds, “as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” There was a disconnect between the intention expressed in worship — to seek God, know God’s ways, be near to God — and the actual conduct of the community. There was a disconnect between the people’s idea of worship as a means to get God’s attention and the prophet’s idea of worship as a way to align ourselves and our daily life with the purposes of God. And the purposes of God, according to the prophet, are freedom and covenant, justice and mercy, righteousness and a neighborly economy. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect.”[3] This God desires a covenant community committed to loosing the bonds of injustice and breaking the yoke of oppression so all may walk erect; a community where fasting means deciding against self-indulgence and for sharing life’s essentials with the hungry, the poor, and the naked. “The devotion [this God] requires is solidarity that troubles with the elemental requirements of economic life for every member of the community.”[4]

Where is this covenant community? In the prophetic imagination it extends from your neighbor to the farthest reaches of creation. And this kind of community has been resisted and denied ever since God first revealed it to humans: in the garden, in the wilderness, in Israel, in Jesus, in the church.

Where is this covenant community? Wherever we let ourselves be drawn into it by the God who made us and who breaks every yoke, every dividing wall, every hostility between us.

Margaret Thatcher, some of you will remember her, famously said in 1987,

“I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

One author called this “an expression of methodological individualism,”[5] I call it forgetfulness.

Rabbi Shai Held wrote about our passage from Isaiah — it’s read every year on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement —

So much of human religiosity comes down to a hoax we try to perpetrate on God. ​We’ll give You worship​, we say in effect, ​and You just mind Your own business. Your place is the church, the synagogue, or the mosque; butt out of our workplaces and our voting stations. You’re the God of religion, not politics or economics.

And God laughs. ​If you want to worship me,​ God says, ​you’re going to have to learn to care about what I care about—and who. And as the Bible never tires of telling us, God cares about the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. If those people don’t matter to us, then God doesn’t really matter to us either. That’s Isaiah’s message.[6]

The poor, Isaiah reminds us, are not “people [who] have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations,” but kin. They are we and we are they, or in Paul’s words, “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”[7] The social solidarity implicit in our faith and the vision of covenant community has always been a challenge, and the American project of building a more perfect union has been no exception. I believe that the deterioration in our public discourse has a lot to do with the ease with which we say I and me and mine, and the slowness with which we learn to live and say we, particularly a comprehensive we no longer dependent on the exclusion of them.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around where we are – a fragmented and fragmenting church in a fragmented and fragmenting world – and what this moment means for us as followers of Jesus and servants of God’s reign. Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” Perhaps it begins with small things like remembering in the dark hours that “you” in those bold declarations is plural. There is no private faith, no private ministry, no private communion. Isaiah told his first audience to end their privatized, self-centered fasting, and to practice the fast of God’s choosing: to untie or cut the knots of injustice, to break the yokes that kept their neighbors from walking erect, and to share life’s essentials so that all would receive them.

“Then,” he said, “your light shall break forth like the dawn. … Your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places; … and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”

Then all shall shout out, and none hold back. All shall lift up their voices — and the singing shall be glorious.

[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/02/05/full-transcript-sen-mitt/

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/06/lindsey-graham-god-wont-ask-why-didnt-you-convict-trump/4683788002/

[3] Lev 26:13

[4] Brueggemann, WBC, 189.

[5] See Samuel Brittan https://www.ft.com/content/d1387b70-a5d5-11e2-9b77-00144feabdc0; original quote in Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987

[6] Rabbi Shai Held https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-25-ordinary-21c-isaiah-589b-14

[7] Rom 12:5

Simple, not easy

In his novel Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin takes us to a reading of a will. Present were two brothers, Evan and Hardesty, sons of the deceased, in addition to the lawyer and others.

The lawyer read.

“‘Herein the last will and testament of Vittorio Marratta, San Francisco, drawn the first of September, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-five.

“‘All my worldly possessions, ownerships, receivables, shares, interests, rights, and royalties, shall go to one of my sons. The Marratta salver, which is on the long table in my study, will go to the other. Hardesty will decide, and his decision as it is first announced will be irrevocable. Neither son will be entitled to the patrimony of the other, ever, under any circumstances, the death or desires of one or the other notwithstanding. I make this declaration in sound mind and body, convinced of its justice and ultimate value.’”

That’s a fascinating family moment, isn’t it? Two brothers, one gets his father’s entire and very considerable wealth, and the other gets the Marratta salver — a tray. And it’s not the father who chooses. Helprin writes,

Hardesty shook his head in pleasant incredulity and then began to laugh when he saw Evan begin to quiver in anticipation of having to get a job.[1]

The salver had been given to Signor Marratta by his father, … who had received it from his father, who had received it from his father … etc. etc., how far back no one knew. … The Marrattas believed that the salver was protected. It had survived wars, fires, earth-quakes, and thieves, who, like Evan, seemed not to want it. Hardesty wondered how his brother could have refused such a miraculous thing, for in the cloud-buffeted sun it shone in a hundred thousand colors, all subsumed in gold and silver. Seamless rays rose from it in a solid thicket, radiating in blinding beauty from the words engraved around the rim, meeting the others above the center, and plunging downward to illuminate the primary inscription.

“‘La onestà, honesty,” was the first, never properly valued, Signor Marratta had said, until one must lose a great deal for its sake alone, “and then, it rises like the sun.” Hardesty’s favorite, even though it was the word around which his mother’s death seemed to revolve, and even though he associated it with tears more than with anything else, was “il coraggio, courage.” Next was one that he hardly understood— “il sacrificio, sacrifice.” Why sacrifice? Was it not a defunct trait of the martyrs? Perhaps because it was so rare, it was as mystifying to him as the last virtue …, the most puzzling, the one least attractive to him as a young man, “la pazienza, patience.”But none of these qualities, hard to understand as they might have been, and even harder to put into practice, was half as mysterious as the pronouncement inlaid in white gold on the center of the plate. It was from the Senilia of Benintèndi, and Signor Marratta made sure early on that Hardesty knew it and would not forget. … Hardesty picked up the gleaming salver and translated its inscription out loud:

“‘For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.’”

He repeated this to himself several times, and then put the salver into a pack that held everything he would take with him.[2]

Honesty. Courage. Sacrifice. Patience.

For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.

I hear echoes of scripture — the city on the hill, the new Jerusalem; some might say, writer, protagonist, and reader are tapping into the deep current of Western culture. Hardesty remembered his father telling him,

Little men spend their days in pursuit of such things [as wealth, fame, and possessions]. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I’ve seen them die. They fall away as if they have been pushed, and the expressions on their faces are those of the most unbelieving surprise. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are in themselves the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.[3]

I appreciate Signor Marratta’s stoic wisdom during these days of easy lies and little courage.

Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are in themselves the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.

Micah was no stoic, and far from unperturbed in the storm. He was a prophet from the hinterland of Jerusalem, where he witnessed the devastations wrought among rural folk by the corruption rampant among city leaders.

[Your] rulers give judgment for a bribe, [your] priests teach for a price, [your] prophets give oracles for money; yet [you] lean upon the Lord and say, “Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.” Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.[4]

In our reading, Micah presents a court scene, with God as the plaintiff, the people as defendant, and the mountains and hills as witnesses, or perhaps, jury, in this breach of covenant case.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!

Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice.

… for the Lord has a controversy with his people.

And the plaintiff rises and speaks, but what we hear, along with the mountains and hills and foundations of the earth, are not itemized accusations, but agonizing and sorrow-filled questions and implorations:

O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!

What’s troubling the God of the covenant is not the long list of trespasses which Micah could have recited readily from memory — what’s troubling God is what those individual breaches reveal about the relationship between the covenant partners.

I brought you up from the land of Egypt, God declares.

I redeemed you from the house of slavery.

I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.

I was with you all the way, through it all, was there when you entered the land, crossing the Jordan from Shittim to Gilgal—I remember, don’t you?

The mountains and hills remember—don’t you?

And now the defendant speaks, not addressing the plaintiff directly, but perhaps the mountains and hills, or all of us who, thanks to Micah, get to witness this emotion-laden moment between God and God’s people.

With what shall I come before the Lord?

The written text doesn’t communicate tone and attitude and emphasis, and so it’s hard to tell how much frustration is driving this speech; to my ear, it’s a lot. Some hear honest questions here, I hear irritation and aggravation:

What does he want?

Shall I come before the Lord with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

I don’t know about you, but I’m picking up some hyperbole here and even a touch of sarcasm—Rivers of oil? How much is enough—is anything, ever?

Shall I give my firstborn?

The mountains and hills are quiet, and for a moment the questions just hang in the air:

What have I done to you?

With what shall I come before the Lord?

How have I wearied you?

What does he want?

And now Micah turns to us, not to deliver the verdict, but to teach us, to tell us the truth about our relationship as covenant partners with God: remembering the saving acts of God has nothing to do with some cosmic ledger where the kingdom accountants keep a record of what we owe for divine goods and services rendered. Remembering the saving acts of God is about knowing the character of God and letting our own character be shaped by it:

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?

What God requires of us are not thousands of this or rivers of that, but us walking humbly with God, lovingly leaning into the kindness with which God meets us, and seeking to build right relationships with neighbors near and far, with our fellow creatures, and with future generations of life—and in, with, under, and through it all with God.

The psalm for today, Psalm 15 further illustrates the simplicity and urgency of Micah’s teaching. The psalm begins with questions, and the answers rest in the verbs that follow:

Who may abide in your tent, Lord?

And who may dwell on your holy mountain?

The person who lives free of blame,

does what is right,

and speaks the truth sincerely;

who does no damage with their talk,

does no harm to a friend,

doesn’t insult a neighbor;

someone who despises those who act wickedly,

but who honors those who honor the Lord;

someone who keeps their promise even when it hurts;

someone who doesn’t lend money with interest,

who won’t accept a bribe against any innocent person.

Whoever does these things shall never be moved.[5]

The words are simple, and powerful in their simplicity. The psalmist doesn’t assume, though, that the Lord’s tent will be empty, because in their simplicity, these words are rarely easy to live. The point is that they are worthy of our aspiration. The words engraved in the Marratta salver were honesty, courage, sacrifice, and patience. Micah adds kindness and humility to the virtues that make justice shine, and he urges us to add them to the pack that holds everything we take with us.

For what can be imagined more beautiful than the earth full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea?

[1] Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 1983), 269.

[2] Ibid., 271-275.

[3] Ibid., 273.

[4] Micah 3:11-12

[5] Translation drawn from CEB and NRSV.

The net and the catch

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus sounds a lot like John, the man who baptized him.[1] The reign of God has come near, and its nearness demands a complete reorientation of our lives: Repent. Turn around. Change course. Let this nearness determine your next step, and every step thereafter. John the wilderness prophet has been arrested by Herod, but Herod cannot silence the proclamation of God’s reign on earth, much less stop its invasion of the world.

In Pasolini’s film version of this scene,[2] Jesus is walking at a quick pace down a country road. A group of farmers traveling the opposite direction stop to look, perhaps to exchange a greeting, and as he briskly passes them, he says, almost over his shoulder, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” and just keeps moving. Where is he going? Now he is at the lake, sees two brothers at work, says to them, “Follow me, I will make you fish for people,” and just keeps moving. The two hurry but they can barely keep up. Now he sees another pair of brothers, at work in the boat with their father, and he calls them, and immediately they leave the boat and the old man and follow him. The four hurry but they can barely keep up with him.

What’s the rush? Where is he going? What about Zebedee, the old man? Jesus didn’t call him, did he? Is he too slow for the pace at which God’s reign is invading the towns of Galilee? When I was young, I didn’t think too much about old Zebedee, but now I find it easy to imagine that the two of us might be about the same age. I see Jesus and the four men rushing away from the shore, and the old man alone in the boat, a net in his lap and a puzzled look on his face. “James, John, what do you want me to tell your mother?”

No answer. Matthew has no interest in Zebedee’s feelings, or anyone else’s, for that matter. In this rendering of the gospel, Peter’s wife, Andrew’s children, or Zebedee’s thoughts are simply not in the picture. There’s only Jesus’ movement and the urgency of his call and the immediacy with which these men respond. There’s neither ‘hello’ nor ‘good-bye.’ There’s no brief discussion of what to do about dad, no careful weighing of options between brothers and other family members. There’s only “the strange power of this Jesus, who declares and compels rather than explaining and persuading.”[3]

Jesus’ call to discipleship is not some kind of church commercial promising you your best life now or whatever desires your heart may harbor. With his call he claims you and me as his apprentices in the service of God’s reign. And when we hear this call, there are only two options: either we follow this urgent demand — for the sake of the world and God’s reign in it — or we pretend there is no call, no divine claim on our life.

The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the shadow of death light has dawned.[4]

We rightly hear this as a joyous occasion of great promise, but for some of us who’ve sat in darkness so long that our eyes and minds and imaginations have grown accustomed to the dimness of all things — for some of us the light is too great, too intrusive and disruptive. Herod had John arrested, because he didn’t want to hear about any justice other than his own. He had the Baptizer shut up, because all that talk about divine judgment and divine righteousness allowed people to envision a world beyond the one he maintained on Rome’s behalf. Herod has no interest in a world emerging around a truth he can’t control or spin into its opposite or silence.

When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. “He withdrew” — the connotations of the Greek range from “he went away” or “he departed” to “he fled.” In Matthew the term is used to describe Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt because of Herod and later from Judea to Nazareth because of one of Herod’s sons. And the same terms describes Jesus moving into the wilderness after Herod had John beheaded.[5] Raj Nadelia notes that “in each instance, people flee because of imperial violence or the possibility of such violence,” and that “given the threat of imperial violence, it would have been tempting for Jesus to flee to safety and avoid confronting the empire entirely.”[6] But far from it, Jesus went to Galilee where Gentile control had been the status quo for seven long centuries, and there he built a movement among farmers, fishermen, and day laborers, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” For some, his light was too great, too intrusive and disruptive, too radical, for others it meant that following him they could begin to see the outlines of what the kingdom of heaven come to earth might look like: life made whole.

In Jesus, the reign of God has invaded the world, and his call to discipleship claims us as citizens of heaven and workers in God’s mission. This doesn’t mean that we all quit our jobs and hit the road with Jesus or that we cease being the children of our parents, the siblings of our brothers and sisters, or the parents of our children. But this call does make our lives part of God’s healing and liberating work, and it redefines the meaning of words like family and neighbor and righteousness.

So the fishermen leave their nets and their boat, but they do not stop fishing. They put their skills to new use. Fishermen turned mission workers. Instead of catching fish, Peter and Andrew brought people to Jesus, or something like that. Fishing for people sounds just fine until you think some more about the details: fish get caught in a net, they are pulled out of the water, then there’s a lot of wild wiggling and tossing, but eventually they all end up — fried, baked, or poached — on somebody’s dinner table. Fishing for people loses its missionary innocence when you think about the many ways in which fish are tricked with bait and fooled with lure only to get hooked and reeled in. Fishing for people, if it is to have anything to do with the mission of Jesus, cannot be about tricking or fooling people, though.

The prophet Jeremiah spoke of fishermen as instruments of God’s judgment:

I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight.[7]

Here the Lord announces a day of judgment, and people will be caught like fish and hunted like animals hiding in the clefts of the rocks. Read next to this passage, fishing for people sounds frightening. Have Peter and Andrew, James and John been called to round up people for God’s imminent judgment as the kingdom of heaven is drawing near? It this what’s behind the urgency and speed with which Jesus is moving from scene to scene?

The disciples followed Jesus as he went throughout Galilee, teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. They watched and learned. Great crowds gathered, people came from all over Galilee and neighboring regions, but this was no roundup operation. People were drawn to Jesus and followed him and they witnessed the power of God making things right and whole.

How did the disciples participate in this movement? Mending nets used to be part of their daily work: after the catch was brought in and taken to market, they would sit on the beach or in the boat, checking the nets for rips and holes, and repairing them. As fishermen they had many skills: they knew how to be patient, they had developed endurance, they worked well with others, and they had learned to cope with failure as well as success. But perhaps the best gift they brought to the mission of Jesus was their ability to notice even the smallest tear in a net, and their skill and care in mending it.

The purpose of God’s judgment is to make things right in the world. God doesn’t judge to condemn the world, but to restore and make it whole; God judges in order to mend what is torn and broken. In the advance of God’s reign in the world, the only fishing that is going on is done with a net that has been cast wide — and dropped to the deepest depth, deeper than even our best hopes can reach, down to where people sit in great darkness and in the shadow of death — and God is pulling the net in, carefully so as not to lose a single one. The net is Christ and all who belong to him, all of his siblings, young and old, the whole family of God, fishing for people.

The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the shadow of death light has dawned.

We are the net, woven into a web of new relationships and mended by the grace of God, and we are the catch. And we are being pulled up from the dark depth to live in the light of God’s glory.

This fishing expedition is a rescue operation, and Jesus calls us to it for our own sake as well as for the sake of the kingdom of heaven on earth — and the two are one, because in the end we can only be whole together.

In the end we can only be whole together — regardless of what the servants of empire dream up to appropriate or otherwise silence the life of Christ in our day. I close with the opening lines of the Psalm for today:

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?[8]

[1]Matthew 3:2, 17

[2]The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964; available at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6kf3qx

[3]Placher, Mark, 31.

[4]Matthew 4:16 quoting Isaiah 9:2

[5]ἀναχωρέω Mt 2:14; 2:22; 14:13

[6]http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4366

[7]Jeremiah 16:16-17

[8]Ps 27:1

How long to sing this song?

When I was in my 20s — I was a graduate student in theology at the University of Heidelberg — I participated in what you could call an urban mission year. There were about ten of us, men and women, graduate students in theology, sociology, and social work; we lived and studied together in a dorm-like facility in Mainz, and for three months we worked in entry-level industrial jobs, and for another three, with a union.

Several of us worked the second and third shift at a GM parts warehouse. It was the second-most boring work I have done in my life. We each had a palette jack truck with a twin-bed-sized basket, and after picking up a list of parts at the foreman’s office near the loading dock, we walked up and down endless aisles between massive, towering shelves, collecting the various items—everything from tiny light bulbs to complete exhaust systems, axles, doors and hoods for all kinds of vehicles.

There were no mp3 players or iPods then, and they probably would have been prohibited anyway, for safety reasons, as they told a colleague who wanted to bring in a Walkman. They also told us that a new warehouse was under construction, fully automated, with robots stocking the shelves as well as collecting and distributing items from the shelves to the loading dock. Good riddance, we thought, which was easy for us to say, since none of us depended on these jobs to make a living — which was what we discussed in union meetings and in workshops at the mission center. Anyway, criss-crossing the huge warehouse with my oversized shopping basket, my soul kept searching for the right song. I would sometimes get into a rhythm, humming melodies or softly chanting snippets of psalms I remembered.

The best part, though, was getting on the train after work each day, going back to my room, taking my boots off, turning up the volume on my stereo cassette player — U2 live, Under A Blood Red Sky — and dancing through most of the album, from Gloria to 40. Never got a complaint. Everybody in the building must have loved U2. “40” was the final track on their album War, which was released in 1983. Bono said,

When we were making our third record, the War LP, we were being thrown out of the studio by the studio manager because we had overrun or something and we had one more song to do. We wrote this song in about ten minutes, we recorded it in about ten minutes, we mixed it in about ten minutes and we played it, then, for another ten minutes and that’s nothing to do with why it’s called ‘40’.[1]

It’s called “40” after Psalm 40, which inspired its lyrics.

I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the mire and clay

I will sing, sing a new song…

Billy Cerveny remembers going to a concert in Jacksonville in ’85:

The last song that U2 played that night was 40. …Towards the end, everyone at the show was singing the chorus at the top of their lungs as each member of the band left the stage except for the drummer …“I will sing, sing a new song. I will sing, sing a new song ... How long to sing this song? How long to sing this song? How long? How long? How long? How long to sing this song?” The drums eventually stopped. The lights came on, but the crowd kept singing. This went on for the next 30 minutes as we filed into the large dirt parking lot ... Nobody wanted it to stop. Most people didn’t realize it (including me), but they were singing a song that had been sung over them since the creation of the world. As I climbed into the back of my mother’s [car] and we pulled out of the parking lot, the voices began to fade, but I kept singing. I kept singing because deep down I knew the answer. How long to sing this song? As long as this song would be sung over me. Forever.[2] 

The psalm is testimony to the saving power of God; the song is testimony to the power of the ancient poetry to inspire trust and joy, and Billy’s words are testimony to the power of the song to root us in the knowledge of God’s faithfulness. How long to sing this song? the question rings out, and Billy says, Forever.

I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the Lord.

I love the movement up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and unto a rock, firm and secure, and the complementary movement from crying and waiting to singing a new song — a song of joy and encouragement, of hope and trust in God: a song to carry in our heart for the days when we are down in the pit, stuck in the bog, waiting — whether patiently or urgently.

How long to sing this song? For as long as the faithfulness of God endures. But for many of us the question sounds more like, “How long — until we can finally, all, and wholeheartedly sing this song?” Asking “How long?” just seems more honest than singing while so many are still in the pit, still stuck in the bog.

Jesus asks his first followers at the beginning of John’s Gospel, “What are you looking for?” Those are the first words he speaks in that Gospel, and they are words addressed as much to those two in the narrative who started to follow him, as they are addressed to us, those who read and hear the testimonies of John who baptized Jesus and the other John after whom the Gospel is named.

What are you looking for? What is it you need, expect, seek, want, really want? You know we could just sit here for the next ten minutes and try to answer that, honestly and without any guilt or shame, just be here and tell Jesus what it is we are looking for.

John who baptized him said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who removes the burden of sin from the world.” Yes, I want that, a world no longer burdened by sin, a world bathed in God’s Spirit, human beings living fully in tune with the Spirit’s movement in the world. Perhaps that’s something the two disciples in that scene were looking for as well. They followed Jesus, and not because they knew and trusted him, but because they knew and trusted John. Rowan Williams says that “Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.”[3] The journey of discipleship doesn’t begin with a debate about the identity of Jesus and a winning argument, but with the trustworthy life of a witness who points to Jesus — a parent, a grandparent, a camp counselor, a congregation, a friend — believing people in whose words and actions we can see a world we’d like to live in.

Tomorrow the nation takes a day to honor the life and witness of Dr. King, the prophet of God’s kingdom whose dream of a world no longer burdened by racism, poverty, and war inspired a movement for civil rights and truthful reconciliation. Richard Lischer writes,

Long after King himself began to doubt the goodness of the “white brother” and the tainted principles of civil religion, his expression of hope in the kinship of races endures, as the Sermon on the Mount endures, as a mark to aim at in a sinfully divided society. The more pessimistic he grew with regard to humanity, the more optimistic he became about God. Even in the darkest period of his own discouragement, he continued to say to African Americans, “Go ahead! God can be trusted.”

After King’s death, his old mentor Pius Barbour said in a sermon, “[Martin] was a great believer in this, the attitude of Jesus: He believed spiritual power could down any power. Can it?” Lischer responds, “It is a measure of the preacher’s abiding influence in our lives that we still ask the question and want to answer, Yes.”[4]

Generations of witnesses in the struggle have testified that spiritual power can down any power, and some of us ask, Can it? And it’s up to us to want to answer, Yes. To want to affirm with our lives and our little courage and our spotty faithfulness that God’s commitment to the redemption of the world is firm.

“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks us, and we hear the question like one we’ve heard and answered before and like this is the first time. We hear it on the Sunday after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in Richmond from Friday evening to Tuesday night, banning all weapons, including guns, from the capitol grounds. “We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies that there are groups with malicious plans for the rally that is planned for Monday,” the Governor said Wednesday afternoon, and several alleged members of white supremacist groups have been arrested in Maryland, Delaware, and Georgia.[5] Somebody thought it was a brilliant idea to have a gun rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the former capital of the Confederacy, and others jumped at the opportunity to orchestrate another Nazi revival after Charlottesville.

Michelle Alexander writes,

The centuries-long struggle to birth a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy — a nation in which every voice and every life truly matters — did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. The struggle is as old as the nation itself and the birth process has been painful, to say the least. My greatest hope and prayer is that we will serve as faithful midwives in our lifetimes and do what we can to make America, finally, what it must become.[6]

And it’s bigger than America, but this is where we are. Jesus asks us, “What are you looking for?” and he invites us to come and see. To come and see who he is, and who we are. To come and see how he rests completely in the movement of God, and to rest and move with him. To come and see the power of his love at work in the world, and to be part of that work. To come and see the promise of God’s reign fulfilled.

[1] Bono, Concert April 29, 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_(song)

[2] https://www.redbirdnashville.com/blog/2019/2/15/how-long-to-sing-this-song

[3] Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 21-22.

[4] Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and The Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford, 1995), 269. I changed “Mike” to “Martin” to avoid confusion about introducing another character. I don’t think “Mike” is a typo, but “Martin” works just as well.

[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797041211/fbi-arrests-3-alleged-members-of-white-supremacist-group-ahead-of-richmond-rally and https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/17/us/fbi-alleged-extremist-group-arrests-georgia-virginia/index.html

[6] Michelle Alexander https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/opinion/sunday/michelle-alexander-new-jim-crow.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Astonishing faithfulness

The Jordan is a mighty river. We have heard about it in ancient stories and in great songs. The Jordan holds a central place in the geography of our imagination and our faith.

Not many of us have seen it, and, until just a few years ago, I hadn’t either. That trip to Israel with a group of Jewish leaders, Rabbi Schiftan, and fellow pastors was a transformative experience—the conversations, the encounters with Israelis and Palestinians, the food, and the very land itself—to stand on the Mount of Olives and take in the view of the old city and the temple mount, to walk on stone pavement from the first century, and to look across lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. As to the Jordan, I was prepared for a little disappointment. I had heard it would be much less impressive than I imagined.

Folks who have stood on the banks of the Mississippi have looked at the Jordan and wondered what all the fuss was about, “So this is it, huh?” Of course that’s exactly what Naaman, the great commander of the army of the king of Aram said, when the prophet Elisha told him that to be healed he needed to go and wash in the Jordan seven times. “Are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?” he declared angrily, and in those days the Jordan was still considerably larger than today. The people who measure this kind of thing tell us that the lower Jordan today only has about 5% of the flow it had back in the 50’s. Agriculture and other water usage are taking a heavy toll.

What Naaman couldn’t fully grasp was that river’s significance in the life and faith of Israel. For one, the Jordan is one of very few rivers in that dry region that actually flow year-round, turning the valley into a lush, fertile band in an otherwise rather dusty landscape. More importantly, the Jordan marks the border between Israel’s wilderness wanderings and the land of promise. It was in the plains of Moab, beyond the Jordan, in the wilderness, where Moses expounded one more time the covenant commandments before the people crossed the river to live as God’s people, according to God’s will, on God’s land. It was near Jericho, where the waters of the river parted before the ark of the covenant, and the people walked across. The Jordan is a mighty river in the imagination and faith of God’s people because crossing it means entering freedom and fulfillment. The Jordan marks the border between fleeing and resting, between wandering and settling, between wilderness and home.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants who fled the terror of the South didn’t have their geography mixed up when they clung to visions of the Ohio singing, Deep river, my home is over Jordan; deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground. Oh, don’t you want to go to that gospel feast, that promised land where all is peace? The river may be deep and wide, chilly and cold, but the Lord will make a way for God’s people to cross over into that promised land.

John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea and proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” He reminded God’s people who they were and challenged them to reaffirm that they did indeed want to live as God’s people, according to God’s will and purpose, on God’s land. They came from Jerusalem and the surrounding region, and they headed down to the river to listen to John’s preaching and to be baptized by him, confessing their sins. One by one they stepped into the water. One by one they said what needed to be said. One by one he plunged them beneath the surface, into the silent depth of the old river. Their ancestors had crossed this river to enter the promised land and to live faithfully as God’s covenant people. Now they passed through these waters because they wanted to be worthy of being counted among God’s people, worthy to live in the coming kingdom of God. They prayed that the river would wash away their transgressions great and small, their shame, their fear—and that they would climb up the bank renewed and presentable.

“I baptize you with water for repentance,” the Baptist said, “but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” A mightier one would come, and he would bring the fire of judgment. Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan—and he came not to baptize, but to be baptized. He came like the rest of them had come, walking the same dusty roads and down the same rocky paths to the river’s edge, waiting in line in the heat of the day, and finally stepping into the water. John looked at Jesus, and he was convinced that the days of preparation and repentance were now over, and that the day of truth and fire had come. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” he asked. It wouldn’t be the last surprise the Son of God presented.

And so Jesus got in the water with all who had come to the river for a bath of mercy and re-commitment, for a new beginning. We get into the river hoping that it will carry away all that weighs on us, our failures and our worries, our broken promises and our self-condemnation, all that keeps us from living lives that are faithful, real and whole. We get into the water, and Jesus gets in with us. He steps into the river and is baptized along with all who gather there, not because he needs to repent, but because he wants to be with us. This is what righteousness fulfilled looks like. Obedient to God’s will and purpose, Jesus is baptized in solidarity with us. He is Immanuel, God with us in our broken humanity.  He gives himself to the murky water of our wrongs and regrets, trusting that the river of God’s grace will carry not only him but all of us with him. Stepping into the water with us, he gives himself to the path of humble servanthood, a path that would lead to the cross where the muddy tide of our sin would drown him. The brief scene at the river is like a sketch of his entire life and ministry. When Jesus rose from the water, newness erupted: the heavens were opened, the Spirit descended, and a voice from heaven declared, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

When Jesus got in the water with us, something wonderful happened to that old river that marks the border between wilderness wandering and home. In his baptism, Jesus made our lot his own: he let himself be immersed in our alienation from God, our lives far away from the kingdom. And in our baptism, his beautiful, faithful life becomes ours in the forgiveness of our sins, in our reconciliation with God and with each other, and in our call to participate in his mission.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights,” God spoke through the prophet Isaiah.

I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.[1]

John expected one more powerful than himself. What he didn’t expect was one who would faithfully bring forth justice by not breaking a bruised reed and not quenching a dimly burning wick—one who would show us the face of God through a life marked by humility, compassion, and astonishing faithfulness.

Some of you probably remember the day of your baptism, how cold the water was, and how you felt like a whole new person or not really all that different. Some of us, including myself, can’t recall that day or that moment because we were babies when we were baptized. Christians have fought long and hard over when and how to baptize people properly and it took us generations to realize that the church of God is big enough to hold a variety of traditions and practices.

No matter what particular form of baptism we undergo, in it we testify that God has claimed us as beloved sons and daughters. In our own bodies, we receive and proclaim the good news that our lives are made whole in the life and death of Christ and in the hope of our resurrection with him. Whether we were immersed in a river or had a little water poured over our head, when we were baptized we said our small yes to God’s river of redeeming grace in which the life of Jesus became our life, the story of Jesus our story, and the mission of Jesus our mission.

Tertullian was an early Christian theologian from Carthage in north Africa. Around the turn from the second to the third century, he wrote about baptism,

When we are going to enter the water, but a little before, in the presence of the congregation and under the hand of the president, we solemnly profess that we disown the devil, and his pomp, and his angels. Hereupon we are thrice immersed, making a somewhat ampler pledge than the Lord has appointed in the Gospel. Then when we are taken up (as new-born children), we taste first of all a mixture of milk and honey.

The nourishment the newly baptized were given was milk and honey—the sweet taste of the promised land, of freedom and fulfillment. Tertullian concluded that baptism paragraph telling his readers, “and from that day we refrain from the daily bath for a whole week.”[2]

Perhaps they did it to let the memory sink in, who knows, they clearly weren’t concerned about the fragrance of their witness. I wonder if somebody eventually suggested that it would be equally good to remember that we are baptized on the occasion of our daily bath—a daily reminder how in astonishing faithfulness Christ has made us his own.

[1] Isaiah 42:1-4

[2] Tertullian, De Corona Militis, ch. 3 http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-10.htm#P1019_415012

A torrent of praise

Ephesians begins with a torrent washing us in a waterfall of poetry.[1] The passage we just heard is just one breathtakingly long sentence in the original Greek, difficult to replicate in English, but we catch the flow, the surge of phrases pouring from the page, line after line, wave after wave of exuberant praise, a river of hymnic exultation that bids us bless the God who blesses all with every heavenly blessing. The style is as grand as the joyous claims the hymn presents, singing of the mystery made known to us: God gathering up all things, things in heaven and things on earth, in Christ. The whole world and all who live in it bathed in God’s grace, a grace poured out with heedless abundance. Ephesians begins with a river of song responding to the unfathomable river of God, inviting us to sing along, encouraging us to begin our year, our days, our prayers not with chalky prose, but with praise.

It doesn’t come easy, though. I read that two of the most widely quoted and shared poems in the closing years of this decade were William Butlers Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Yeats’s poem was written just after World War I, declaring “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and speaking of a time when “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Auden’s poem, written in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, speaks of how “Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth” and describes a world lying “in stupor,” as democracy is threatened and “the enlightenment driven away.”[2] Praise doesn’t come easy in these times of twittered rage and mournful lament, but the praise of God whose wondrous incarnation we celebrate on Christmas may well be the one thing powerful enough to pull us beyond our ideological captivities to a vision of one life shared by all. Ephesians wants to remind us, in poetry and prose, that in Christ we participate in a new humanity, wherein everyone and everything in heaven and on earth is reconciled to God and one another. In Christ, even our proudest divisions come to an end. Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo at the end of the 4th century, said in a sermon on the feast of Epiphany,

Now, then, my dearly beloved [children] and heirs of grace, look to your vocation and, since Christ has been revealed to both Jews and Gentiles as the cornerstone, cling together with most constant affection. For he was manifested in the very cradle of his infancy to those who were near and to those who were afar - to the Jews whose shepherds were nearby; to the Gentiles whose Magi were at a great distance. The former came to him on the very day of his birth; the latter are believed to have come on this day. He was not revealed, therefore, to the shepherds because they were learned, nor to the Magi because they were righteous, for ignorance abounds in the rusticity of shepherds and impiety amid the sacrileges of the Magi. He, the cornerstone, joined both groups to himself since he came to choose the foolish things of the world in order to put to shame the wise and “to call sinners, not the righteous,” so that the mighty would not be lifted up nor the lowly be in despair.[3]

Luke tells us of the shepherds and Matthew of the wise men, but when we put together the Nativity set, we put the whole world in and around the stable—Jews and Gentiles, poor working folk and scholarly star gazers, locals and outsiders, and even ox and ass, sheep and camels, because the vision of peace is not just for humanity, but for all creation. And all because the one in the cradle “came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” as we read in Ephesians; and now it doesn’t matter anymore how we try to determine and define “far off” because the one who went from the cradle to the cross brought us all near in the wide embrace of his unsentimental love. “So then [we all] are no longer strangers and aliens, but … citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”[4]

Members of the household of God. One life, shared by all. The purpose is no longer hidden, but revealed in Christ’s embrace of the world. Dr. King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail,

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.[5]

Those words are as true today as they were in 1963, and they are even more urgent today when we’re finally beginning to realize that the biggest challenges we face aren’t national, but global. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, and that garment has serious rips and tears in its fabric.

Left to our own devices, we can’t escape our tendency to rend asunder what God has tied together. Catherine of Siena said, speaking in the voice of God,

“I could easily have created [human beings] possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.”[6]

Left to our own devices, we keep trying to grasp for ourselves all that we should need both for body and soul, and what we create in the process are the rips and tears of alienation, distrust, suspicion, and hostility.

Left to our own devices, we make a world where unless you are like me, I have no need of you; unless you are for me, I have no need of you; and unless you are useful to me, I have no need of you.[7] But “I have no need of you” never was an option for human life, and it became a reality only because of the power of sin.

Ephesians begins with a torrent of praise, because we are not left to our own devices: Christ has conquered sin so we might live in the beloved community of his making, reconciled to God and one another, in the blessed conviviality of creation, to the praise of God’s glory. We live in a new day, because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. We belong, because Christ has made us his own, and because we belong to Christ, we are part of God’s great enterprise of reconciliation and the healing of God’s broken world. Catherine of Siena said, in God’s voice, about God’s human creatures, “I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.” God’s great enterprise of creation and redemption translates into lots and lots of small steps and everyday actions.

Brian Doyle, a gifted storyteller and writer, died in the spring of 2017 at the age of 60 of complications from a brain tumor. “We’re only here for a minute,” he told a friend. “We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”[8] The creation and redemption of the world is God’s great story, but for you and me, Doyle suggests, it’s the dailiness of catching and sharing shards of light and laughter and grace. Doyle spoke of God as the “coherent mercy” that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of “the music in and through and under all things,” and his final book of essays is “made up almost entirely of praise songs, often for the people [he] loved — wife, children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends — but just as often for … shrews and hummingbirds and hawks and … great blue herons and pretty much every other creature he happened to encounter.”[9] The writer of Ephesians heard Christ as the music in and through and under all things, and erupted in praise—because God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will: to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, the whole universe made complete in love.

I believe praise is born of wonder and gratefulness. David Steindl-Rast says, “What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. [But] we forget that.” We do forget that, but singing the praise of God from whom all blessings flow, we may yet come to “practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness.”[10] And we will each add our praise to the songs of angels, shepherds, and wise men, while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains repeat the sounding joy.

[1] Eph 1:3-14

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming and https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939; see Michiko Kakutani https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/27/opinion/sunday/2010s-america-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

[3] Augustine, quoted in Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 153.

[4] See Ephesians 2:17-19

[5] Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

[6] Quoted by Stephen Boyd, Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 139.

[7] In addition to Catherine, see 1 Cor 12:21.

[8] From a new collection of Doyle’s essays, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, quoted in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/impeachment-trump-pelosi.html

[9] Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/books/review/one-long-river-of-song-brian-doyle.html

[10] Brother David Steindl-Rast https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/19/november-19-2010-brother-david-steindl-rast-on-gratitude/7515/

A danger more dreadful than any invasion

She was five,

sure of the facts,

and recited them

with slow solemnity

convinced every word

was revelation.

She said

they were so poor

they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

to eat

and they went a long way from home

without getting lost. The lady rode

a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

was inside the lady.

They had to stay in a stable

with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)

but the Three Rich Men found them

because a star lited the roof.

Shepherds came and you could

pet the sheep but not feed them.

Then the baby was borned.

And do you know who he was?

Her quarter eyes inflated

to silver dollars,

The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air

whirled round, dove into the sofa

and buried her head under the cushion

which is the only proper response

to the Good News of the Incarnation.

John Shea wrote down this smiling observation over forty years ago and he called it Sharon’s prayer.[1] Not many of us, I suppose, dove into the sofa in response to the good news of the word become flesh, and yet, I hope, we each entered, however briefly, that moment of wide-eyed wonder that, when entered fully, washes us with joy like a shower of stars. The baby was God—Sharon, sure of the facts, couldn’t say another word after announcing the Christmas gospel.

We told the story and we heard it, we sang the carols, and we lit our candles, little flames held high in the silent night to greet the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. In the morning, surrounded by the joyous rumpus of children and a sea of gift boxes and wrapping paper and years of memories, we laughed and talked, we watched the Christmas movies, we played and ate the casseroles and the cakes, and eventually we all fell asleep, the little ones dreaming about their new toys, and the grown ups still humming the tunes that make us happy with tears in our eyes.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Matthew tells us Christ was born in the days of king Herod, and he leaves little room for sentimentality. Here we are on the first Sunday after Christmas, and Matthew reminds us how very vulnerable human babies are and how very ruthless human rulers can be. Matthew makes sure we won’t sit too long in a warm, nostalgic tub, forgetting that Jesus wasn’t born in a little village of collectible, Victorian houses. Matthew tells us that a king was born, but there already was a king, and there is always only room for one on the throne. It doesn’t get any more unsentimental than that. The birth of Christ truly took place in our world, and so the little town of Bethlehem lies still only until the shouts of soldiers and the cries of terrified children break the silence. The streets are dark and they are filled with the wailing and loud lamentation of mothers and fathers.

Stanley Hauerwas writes,

Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants.[2]

Jesus was born into a world of terror and tears—a world whose rulers recognize few if any limits when power is at stake. Herod the king, in his raging, the Coventry Carol goes, chargid he hath this day / his men of might / in his owne sight / all yonge children to slay. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, and in his fear the king unleashed brutal violence—and still the world out-Herods Herod.[3]

“What could be more innocent than the birth of an artisan’s child?” Auden the poet has Herod ask himself, and the king continues,

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant, and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd’s dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up quite close to the city walls, and the mind feels intensely awake, and this evening as I stand at this window high up in the citadel there is nothing in the whole magnificent panorama of plain and mountains to indicate that the Empire is threatened by a danger more dreadful than any invasion of Tartars on racing camels or conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard.[4]

A danger more dreadful than an enemy invasion or a military coup — that is what the dawn of God’s reign represents to the power arrangements of the Empire. And so Herod and his death squads take centerstage, but the little Messiah slips through on the edge of the scene, a child of refugees, fleeing the terror and the violence.

Matthew tells the story so we hear clear echoes of another: Pharao, king of Egypt, was building an empire on the backs of slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Afraid that the Hebrew slaves might become too numerous to control, he told their midwives to kill all Hebrew boys at birth and let only the girls live. But the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, obeyed God rather than the calculating king, and many boys lived—among them Moses who grew up to lead his people from slavery to the promised land. Moses had to flee, and he lived far from his people as a refugee until the Lord said to him, “Go back …, for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” Moses returned, and the liberation of God’s people began.

Jesus and his parents were refugees in Egypt, when an angel of the Lord said to Joseph, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Matthew wants us to hear these resonances between the story of Moses and the story of Jesus—he wants us to know that God is putting an end to the persistent story of terror and death to bring about liberation and life.

We all know that those sitting on the thrones of power did eventually have their way with Jesus and his proclamation of God’s realm. The ultimate confrontation between God’s way of ruling and the world’s was the cross, erected not very far from Bethlehem. Another Herod was on the throne, yet the methods of oppression hadn’t changed; Jesus died because Herod was frightened and all the occupants of earthly thrones with him. To their take on power—to our take on power—the life of Jesus poses a danger more dreadful than an enemy invasion or military coup: a world where love reigns and righteousness is at home.

Pam Fickenscher says about today’s passage from Matthew,

You could make a good argument that we should save this story for another day—Lent, maybe, or some late night adults-only occasion. But our songs of peace and … displays of charity have not erased the headlines of [terror and persecution and parents fleeing with their children crying in their arms, clinging to their backs, or gripping their hands]. This is a brutal world.[5]

Christmas and the cross belong together, and the dark streets are very dark indeed in which shineth the everlasting light—but shine it does.

There is another memory Matthew stirs up with his story of the massacre of the infants. Jeremiah comes to mind, and the days when the Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judah were sent into exile.

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

Rachel was the mother of Israel, one of the great matriarchs, and her tomb was on the way to Ephrath, that is, Bethlehem.[6] Rachel weeps for her children who have been persecuted, murdered, exiled, sent to death camps, and crucified—and she weeps inconsolably. In Jeremiah, God addresses Rachel, but Matthew doesn’t quote those lines here—it is too soon. But he doesn’t want us to forget them, either; perhaps he wants us to carry them with us, hidden away in our hearts like seeds of hope in this brutal world. According to Jeremiah, the Lord said to Rachel, Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears; … they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future; your children shall come back to their own country.[7]

Nothing less will do. They shall come back from the land of the enemy. The enemy shall not keep them, not one of them. Jewish mystics taught that only one place on earth would be suitable for the coronation of God’s Messiah; not a high place like Jerusalem, but that lonely place by the road, where Rachel weeps for her children.

The exile of God’s people would come to an end when the Messiah would come to lead them home.

Where shall this be?

On the way to Ephrat

At the crossroads,

Which is Rachel’s grave.

To mother Rachel he will bring glad tidings.

And he will comfort her.

And now she will let herself be comforted.

And she will rise up

And kiss him.[8]

Nothing less will do, and Matthew knows it. He wrote his Christmas story long after Easter. He wrote his Christmas story with the bold hope that the Messiah who was born in Bethlehem and crowned on Golgotha, is Immanuel, God with us until the end of the age.

We have heard the story. We have sung the carols with joy and longing. And we let our candles be lit, little flames held high to greet the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Little flames held high enough to see his face in the faces of the hungry and give him food, his face in the faces of the thirsty and give him something to drink, and his face in the face of the stranger and welcome him.

[1] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977), 68.

[2] Matthew (Brazos 2006), 41.

[3] Robert Lowell; the phrase may be Shakespeare’s (Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2)

[4] From Herod’s soliloquy in W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, in: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 391.

[5] http://www.danclendenin.org/Essays/20071224JJ.shtml

[6] Genesis 35:16-19

[7] Jeremiah 31:16-17

[8] Zohar 2.7-9; quoted by Fred Strickert, Rachel Weeping (Liturgical Press 2007), 32.

Real life

Pastor Kimberly was sitting on the rug with a group of children. She showed them a small statue of a lion lying down, with a lamb resting on its outstretched paws. She asked them what they thought of this. Brandon, one of the youngest theologians in the group, said, “Well in the Bible it says they will rest together. But in real life the lion would eat him!”[1]

The vision is glorious—real life is something else. “On the day the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up,” as Woody Allen once dryly remarked. Real life is something else. Real life, young Brandon has come to understand, follows its own rules and patterns, and in the world of real life, the words and visions of the prophets are strange announcements.

Isaiah was no stranger to real life and its patterns, though, as Brandon will soon discover, assuming he continues to hang out with Pastor Kimberly. Isaiah was fluent in the language of legislation and judicial proceedings and economic analysis.

“Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,” he declared, “who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!” When orphans become prey, the predators who eat them up aren’t lions or wolves.

“What will you do on the day of punishment,” Isaiah shouted into their dens. What will you do “in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain?”[2] In Isaiah’s vision, the calamity from far away had everything to do with the local habits of oppression and loveless accumulation.

“Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger,” he declared, channeling with passion God’s own anger—“the club in their hands is my fury!”[3] “Look,” he announced, “the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.”[4] Big trouble in the form of Assyria’s soldiers was on its way south, approaching Jerusalem, and the lopping and chopping, cutting and hacking in Isaiah’s sentencing speech was at once an accurate description of the devastations warfare was inflicting on the land and the divine verdict against Jerusalem’s leaders. Isaiah may have been walking through the streets of Jerusalem or the outer court of the temple, but in his sad and furious and broken heart, he was stumbling through a devastated, clear-cut, and trampled landscape, with not a tree left standing, only stumps.

I read about the Amazon in the paper this week, and, having walked with Isaiah for a while, I saw a landscape of judgment:

When the smoke cleared, the Amazon could breathe easy again. For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world. The picture that emerged was anything but reassuring: Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest.[5]

With devastation on that scale, no one counts trees; it takes a space agency to assess the damage. When the smoke was still rising above the Amazon, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, was getting his hands in the dirt and he got much of the nation to join him. On a Monday in July,

Students, farmers, urban professionals, foreign dignitaries, environmentalists and government officials planted [more than 350 million] seedlings … in what the government said was the largest one-day tree-planting effort in history. It was part of Mr. Ahmed’s campaign to plant four billion trees in Ethiopia before the fall to combat deforestation and global warming.[6]

In the early 20th century, about one-third of Ethiopia was covered in forests, but that had dropped to just 4 percent by 2000. 

To plant a tree is an inherently hopeful, life-affirming act, and I’m not surprised that those who did the planting in Ethiopia, wanted to make sure that every seedling would be counted, every single one.

Isaiah had walked amid the devastations of injustice and unneighborly rule for who knows how long, and having declared God’s judgment against those in power, he saw another vision. He saw a stump, and from under the bark a tiny green shoot had emerged. It was a glimpse of a promise of new life, and Isaiah spoke a new word. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,” he said, “and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was the father of king David, and David, according to the covenant promise of God, was the king whose house and kingdom would be established forever. [7]

Forever, however, assumes the kind of rule congruent and resonant with the intention of God, the kind of rule described in Psalm 72:

Give the king your justice, O God,

and your righteousness to a king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with justice.

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

Isaiah saw and declared the failure of the Davidic dynasty to reign with justice and righteousness, a failure that resulted in the land of promise becoming a wasteland. And yet, the prophet asserted, a shoot, a sprout, a scepter would come up from the stump of Jesse, and it would be a fruitful branch. This royal figure would, in time to come, enact all that the Davidic kings thus far had failed to accomplish. This ruler would be different because the spirit of the Lord would rest on him, would inspire, guide, and empower him. And all this newness would not stop with Jerusalem and Judah, it would extend to peoples and nations and beyond: this ruler would establish God’s heavenly reign of righeousness on earth.

The language of city and nation and neighborly social order doesn’t have the range needed to speak of a newness that stills every terror, every fear in all creation. Isaiah names wolves and lambs, leopards and kids, cows and lions, and a young child tending this mongrel herd of predators and prey. And none of them shall be afraid. Infants playing with snakes, and nursing babies with their hands reaching into the lairs of vipers, and none shall be harmed. Who has ever heard such a thing?

Isaiah saw it, and he has insisted ever since, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. For us, Isaiah’s vision, Isaiah’s words, illuminate who Jesus is: God’s reign in person. God’s word in our flesh. The lamb of God who is the lion of Judah.

Andrew Delbanco, in a series of lectures turned into a book, argued that, “our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished.”[8] He thinks that America’s hopes have shrunk considerably since early, colonial days when the Puritans set their hope in God. Yes, he does use a rather broad brush that paints over significant details like the hopes of Native Americans or the fact that not all settlers were Puritans, but let’s save that argument for another day and see what he wants to show us. In the early days, America’s horizon of hope was God. In the nineteenth century, America placed hope in the nation—“the last best hope of mankind,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. But in the late twentieth century, America’s hope began to be focused on the self. “The story of American hope over the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing,” he writes. The late twentieth century “conspired to install instant gratification as the hallmark of hope of the good life. By that time the horizon of hope had shrunk to the scale of self-pampering.” And that was long before the arrival of the portable, personal screen and same-day delivery.

You would think that the civil rights movement, the moon landing, and the internet would have expanded our horizon of hope, but that’s not what I’ve been picking up lately. Have you? What seems to be expanding are anxiety, fear, and despair, and hope can barely breathe. What young Brandon has learned to call real life is shrunk-horizon life, diminished life.

Isaiah saw a world expanding into the vast horizon of God’s promise, and he wants us to see it. His vision stood, and continues to stand, in direct contrast to the terror, brutality, and inequity that pervade our world. He insisted, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. The Apostle Paul, working in the same vein, wrote,

whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

Young Brandon has some concerns about the lion and the lamb. We are here to encourage him to lean into that outsized hope with us, to trust with us that love abides, and to help us live in accordance with Christ Jesus.

[1] See Journal for Preachers Vol. 28, No. 1 (Advent) 2004, 6.

[2] Isaiah 10:1-4

[3] Isaiah 10:5

[4] Isaiah 10:33-34

[5] Matt Sandy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html

[6] Palko Karasz https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/africa/ethiopia-tree-planting-deforestation.html

[7] 2 Sam 7:16

[8] Andrew Delbanco,  The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)