Mercy and Truth

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

From time to time, one of my sermons makes someone mad.  As you might expect, it happens when I wade into the troubled waters of race relations, or climate change, or some such hot-button topic taken from the headlines.  And it’s not like I don’t know that I’m stirring the pot.  I labor over those sermons more than the others, and often have a hard time sleeping the night before I give them.  To the extent that the issue has been politicized, I try not to take sides.  My intention is to find in the scriptures a perspective that reveals a spiritual dimension to the real problems of the world.  But even as I do this I have to deal with the limits of my experience, and my own inherent biases, some of which are firm convictions, and some of which are assumptions of which I am not even conscious.   So there’s always the danger that the perspective I present as “biblical” and “spiritual” truth is really just a clever way to justify my own opinion. 

And other people have their inherent biases, and limited experience, their passionate convictions, and unconscious assumptions, as well.  So I am not surprised when someone takes offense, but when it actually happens it is always painful.  It reminds me that, among the world’s many problems, none is greater than our human inability to see them in the same way.  Maybe I’d be on firmer ground if I stuck to questions of personal faith and morality, and the work of spiritual growth, to talking about salvation, and Jesus, and heaven, and God.  These are the common interests, after all, of almost everyone who comes to church—including me.   But, then, I come to church with a responsibility that other people don’t.  I’m supposed to preach, and I’m accountable in what I say, not just to what I think is important, or what I imagine you want to hear; I’m accountable to God as God is revealed in the Bible. 

This is a responsibility I took on at the time of my ordination, when I made a solemn public declaration that I “believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.”   Now, there is probably no end to the theological discussions we could have about what that means.  But it has clear practical implications for the everyday work of a preacher.   What it means for me is that at the beginning of each week I sit down with the scriptures that the church appoints for the coming Sunday and read them.  I read them out loud, slowly, several times.  I read the Gospel, at least, in its original language.  And as I read them I listen for the word or the phrase, the verse or the verses, that speak to me in a voice that is not my own.  I wait for the word that moves my heart and my mind, out of their unthinking circular grooves and into wonder, into an openness and attentiveness to meaning I take to be a little closer to the truth.

And for the rest of the week, with those scriptures in my mind, I listen to my life.   I watch for the correspondences between the active story or the image in the book, and the things that go on in my world.  Because, the God of the Bible is infinitely beyond our knowing, but has also revealed himself, as intimately acquainted, and concerned, with every aspect of our lives—from our most intimate thoughts, feelings, and relationships, to the social and political conflicts, and historic events, that shape the destinies of nations.   If I am going to preach to others to believe in that revelation, not as some abstract, impersonal truth somewhere out there, but as the light and the life of the world, I have to open my own life, my own world to the scrutiny, and interpretation, and critique that comes from the scriptures.   And like life itself, that sometimes that pushes me into places I would really rather not go. 

So it’s not like I sit down at my desk and think, “what can I say this time that will really piss people off.”   But lately, the lectionary has given us a lot of Jeremiah.  And maybe it is because of this year’s election campaign, and the general air of anxiety and crisis floating around, but Jeremiah has captured my imagination recently more than he ever has before.   The word of Jeremiah summons the whole house of Israel to look at some very hard truths, to look at their idolatry and self-deception, and their injustice to the poor, to contemplate the true nature of war, and to face a historical reckoning with the consequences of breaking faith with God.   And maybe it’s just me, but it feels like this is a moment when you and I are also being called—individually, yes, but especially collectively—to look at hard truths.  Anyway, for good or ill, I have felt compelled to give more thought than usual to Jeremiah, and I have asked you to do the same.

Now, I’m well aware that there is an aspect of my personality that gets off on this stuff, a part that is grandiose and angry, judgmental and self-righteousness, which is exactly why I’ve always wary of preaching in that vein.  And as a sinner, everything I do has mixed motives.  But, for what it’s worth, the best intention of my prophetic preaching, if you want to call it that, is love.  It is an invitation to intimacy, to move beyond the easy friendliness that we maintain by keeping silence about the things that really make us angry, or sad, or afraid.  It is offered in the hope that there is great reward in making the journey together into the heartbreak of the world, including the heartbreak of failing to see exactly eye-to-eye, and our reward is the faith that God’s word speaks even there.   

Today the Hebrew Bible shows us not the angry Jeremiah, the judgmental, accusatory Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, but Jeremiah the heartbroken.  It shows us Jeremiah who longs for the capacity to express even more fully the pain he feels over the sufferings of Israel: “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt; I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me…O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears.”  The word of God that can be a sharp arrow of truth, piercing ignorance and denial, or an iron rod, sternly correcting pride and vice, can also be a human heart breaking, a voice wailing for the sufferings of her children.  It is in that sharing of the cup of our suffering that the Word seems most human, most true to our world and our experience.  A God who speaks when we are lost and overwhelmed by personal tragedy or national calamity, in a human voice stricken with grief, is a source of true hope and consolation.       

Even in the midst of an unjust and conflicted world, the mercy of God invites us to have faith in a higher perspective.  That is how the author of 1^st Timothy can urge that prayers be made for all people, even though only a small handful have embraced what he teaches.  Because the source of a godly, dignified, and peaceable life in a messed up world is faith in the God who desires that all people be saved.  Christians are to pray for kings and those who are in high places, even when those kings demand sacrifice and worship as if they were gods, and put Christians to death who refuse to do it.  If we defy such people in the name of the only God who really is God, how can we harbor ill-will against them whom God desires to save?  If Jesus gave himself as a ransom for all, who are we to decide who is worthy of our prayers of concern? 

Of course, 1^st Timothy also says that God desires that everyone will come to the knowledge of the truth.  And in this mercy that moves us all toward the truth we see the dual nature of the word of God.  It is not always easy for us to hold both parts together.  We tend to splinter off into those who worship the God of certain revelation, of stern judgment and unchanging truth, on the one hand, or those who preach the God of mercy and forgiveness, long-suffering kindness, and reconciling love, on the other.  But the salvation of God, as the Psalmist says, is when “mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”  This is the salvation embodied in Christ, who holds our double-standards, our wishful-thinking, hypocrisy and lack of faith, up to the brightest, most revealing light possible —the radiant sun of his forgiveness and love.  

  

Scribes for the Kingdom

Genesis 29:15-28

Psalm 105:1-11, 45b

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

When you think about it, the Kingdom of Heaven is a funny idea.  Clearly it is not like kingdoms on a map, where Heaven is this pink country, over here between the green and the purple ones.  It is not like the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom.  Heaven, which is Matthew’s way of saying “God” because, as a good Jew, he is shy about using the divine name, has to include all countries, all plants and animals.  Because God created everything, and sustains it, and his sovereignty over it is unlimited and eternal.  That is elementary biblical monotheism.

The Hebrew scriptures say that it really is that simple.  But they also tell us, and our own experience confirms this, that from the human point of view, the picture is more complicated.  And it is that complicated human situation that Jesus is addressing with his parables.  Jesus isn’t a theologian, he’s a preacher.  So the purpose behind his parables is not to convince people to get new ideas about God.  It is to train them for the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is to give them a way to follow that leads through the tangle of human complications to the simplicity of life in God, with God.  It is to help to see how God really is present and active and working in the world around them, in their lives.  The parables are meant to show people how to align themselves with the flow of God’s power, to go with it, and to let it carry them where God wants to go.

But when we hear parables one after another the way Matthew’s Gospel presents them, it seems that they are not all saying the same thing.  For example, there are those that compare the Kingdom of Heaven to a person who discovers something unique and particular: a pearl of great price, or a field with a buried treasure.  That person then goes and sells everything else that he has in order to purchase that one precious thing.  But others say it is like something extremely common, a mustard seed or yeast in dough, that grows and accomplishes its purpose easily and naturally.  Is it like the dragnet that catches every kind of fish in the sea, so that they can be sorted into good or bad, or like the one we had last week about the field where the wheat and the weeds are growing up together, and it does more harm than good to try separate them?  If you were trying to turn these sayings into a consistent doctrine of what the Kingdom of Heaven is and how it operates, you’d have to conclude that Jesus is a pretty poor theologian.

But, again, that would be to misunderstand what the parables are trying to do.  As we’ve said, they are not aimed at getting people to understand a concept, but to go in a different direction with their lives.  I think it helps to see how this works if we imagine that Jesus spoke each of these parables on a different occasion.  Each time, there were people in the audience who hadn’t been there before.  Each time, the setting was a little different—a market town, a fishing village, or a farming community—and the situation was different—the news from the capital, the questions people asked, the things that had been going on in their lives.  The parables seem to say different things because each circumstance and audience called for something different.

And, in particular, every person and every crowd that Jesus spoke to had its own form of resistance to his message.  We all have our habitual, unexamined ways of thinking, which are a way of keeping God at a distance.  So if you inviting people to get involved in their lives in a different way, to be a part of what God is doing in the world right now, you need words that take them where they don’t expect, and maybe don’t want, to go.  The author of Matthew understands this, and he uses Jesus’ parables in a way that he thinks will have the most impact on his audience, and will speak to their situation.  For his community of marginalized Jewish Christians, the parables manifest the unique importance of Jesus as a prophet and teacher.  They speak to the mystery of why it is that so many of their brothers and sisters not only fail to understand his significance, but strenuously, even violently oppose it.  Matthew makes the parables, with their unexpected reversals of meaning, a metaphor for the Gospel as a whole.  He turns the drama of understanding or not understanding the parables into the prelude to the final judgment of the world.   Matthew sharpens the parables into a sword, to cut through fear, confusion, and indecision and show how high the stakes are in this fight and to say that it is time to take sides.

And, just so we understand what he is doing, Matthew concludes this section on the parables in the following way:  Jesus asks, "’Have you understood all this?’” and the crowd all answered, ‘Yes.’"  (Again, the focus of the passage is that the people should grasp what they are hearing and decide about it for themselves.)  And he said to them, "’Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’"  This could be a reference to Jesus, who quotes the law and the prophets, when it helps to get his point across, but also feels free to create surprising new teachings.  But it could just as easily refer to Matthew himself, who has the audacity to write a new book of holy scripture for the sake of his community.  He works creatively with all kinds of old material—the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, different collections of the sayings of Jesus, many would say the Gospel of Mark—and shapes them into a new story that he hopes will wake people up to see what they could not see and do what they fear to do.

This process didn’t stop with the writing of the Gospel of Matthew.  The Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t frozen in that moment, like an insect in a lump of amber.  It has kept growing, like the seed of a mustard plant, so the process of trying to communicate it hasn’t stopped either.  And if we want to perceive the working of God in the world in our own day, to align our lives with it, and to help others to get into that flow, the question of what language to use looms large.  What treasures can we bring out of the storehouse, both old and new, with the power to change the way we see, and the way we walk?  Of course, as a preacher, I wrestle with this question almost every day.  But I don’t think this is just my work, or just my responsibility.  I’ve been trying to introduce it into the discernment conversation that is happening in formal and informal ways in our congregation right now—as we seek to clarify our shared understanding of who we are and what we need and what we are called to become, I keep wondering “what are the images and stories from our tradition that speak most powerfully to our circumstances?” 

And this needn’t apply only to our life together in the parish.  For our personal faith to come alive, and for us to become effective Christians in the world, we all need some training as scribes for the Kingdom of Heaven.  I think some regular reflection on the scriptures, in private reading or familiar conversation, even if it is just to take the little lectionary insert from the bulletin home after church, to read again and think about it during the week can be really important.  Not in order to construct a theological system, or to be able to quote verses for the sake of argument, but to rummage in the storehouse of our own imagination, to wonder about what those ancient people said, and why it was important to them and how it might be important to us.  And if you are already doing this you know what kinds of surprising treasures you bring out of it, some of them old, and some of them new.        

      

The light of dawn

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

In the seven summers before I got married I took long backpacking trips in the High Sierras of California.  John Muir called those mountains “the range of light,” and for me, as for him, that name evokes many images in the mind’s eye, memories of cloudscapes and waterfalls, of flowery meadows in the sun, and evening alpenglow on granite towers high above the trees.   And when I hear the words of Isaiah about the dawn, I think of a time my father and I camped amid the rocks above the shore of a small alpine lake.  It was the last night of a ten-day hike, and, as I usually did when the skies were clear, I did not pitch my tent but slept in the open. 

The first time I woke up it was deep night.  There was no moon and it was as if there was no world but the stars, and the light of stars, shimmering like snow on the ground.   When I woke up for good it was the early dawn, and though sunrise was still far off, I felt surprisingly refreshed.  I sat up in my sleeping bag and watched the pale light creep over the sky, slowly stealing away the stars.  In that light, the earth came into view again, a blackness at the jagged edge of the horizon.  On those stark heights a cold wind awakened and blew down through a world of dim shapes and deep shadows.  I sat like that for an hour or more, listening to the silence and seeing the color gradually come back to the earth.  At last, with surprising suddenness, the sun cleared the ridge, flooding the hollow of the mountains with warmth and light, unveiling the beauty of the world’s morning.   

Today the church comes from Christmas, the birth of Jesus under the stable lantern and the starry sky, and arrives at the Epiphany, the breaking out of the Christ-event into the world-at-large.  By the likely date of the composition of the gospel of Matthew, the news of Jesus Christ had broken out of its family of origin, so to speak.  It had spread from Palestine, by the efforts of apostles like Paul, throughout the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora, to Arabia and Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa, and on around the Mediterranean.  Strangely, Jesus’ own people, the Jews, largely rejected the proclamation.  In the main it was gentiles who greeted it with enthusiasm. 

In the synagogues of places like Damascus and Antioch, Ephesus and Corinth, there were a lot of non-Jews, religious seekers of pagan background, who came on the Sabbath to hear the scriptures and to pray to Israel’s God.  To these gentiles the knowledge of that God was like the rising of the sun.  It filled heaven with a light of clarity and peace, that they had never known before.  It revealed the world in its true colors, as a harmonious and unified creation, where every drop of water and every grain of sand came into being together and was sustained by the power of a single loving will. 

But before the sun rises, you’ll remember, there is the pale light of dawn, a light that sharpens the contrast between earth and heaven, and reveals a world of dim shapes and dark shadows.  The God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a god of justice and compassion, a god who hates evil and hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed.  This was not a remote ideal principle of Oneness, like the God of the philosophers.  This was a God who cared, deeply, achingly, for his people, and promised to deliver them from grip of suffering and death.

The Gentiles came to the synagogue and heard that this promise now included them.  They heard that God’s own Son, the anointed righteous king of the Jews, had come.   They heard that he’d been crucified, and every barrier to God’s inclusive love had died with him.   They heard he’d been raised from the dead, to reveal God’s hidden plan of salvation which held a central place for them.  And they embraced this message, and a new community began to form at the periphery of the synagogue, a community in which Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free persons, sought the grace to live as equal citizens of a new people of God.

 In the eyes of these followers of Jesus, their community was itself a sign that he is the messiah, and that the promised deliverance had begun.   They heard anew the ancient prophecies of the dawning of a new age, when all nations would come and offer tribute and worship to the one true and living God.  In the light of that dawn, they began to hear the scriptures in a whole new way, to see things that weren’t visible before, and find new meaning in familiar stories.   They also told new stories, stories about Jesus.  They repeated things they’d heard about him, the things he did, and the things he said.  They told new converts and new generations about his life and death and as they spoke their imaginations were full of the light of the scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the only scriptures that they had.

Today some of the spiritual descendants of these gentiles, here at St. John’s, along with about 700 other people around our diocese, are beginning a project to read the entire Bible by the end of the year.  Every day we will read three chapters and psalm from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament, and one chapter from the New.   Reading in this way, we will restore a connection that has been too often and too cruelly broken, the connection between Israel’s God and the one that Christians worship as his Son.   Our reading will echo the experience of those first gentile believers who came to the synagogue to hear the glorious truth that God is one. 

This is a courageous undertaking.  Not just because the Bible is a long book and a year is a short time in which to read it all, nor just because it takes some effort to understand even a little part of it.   But because it is a book that is full of light.  It contains the light of stars, as when Abram stands outside his tent in the desert night and God says, “look up and count them—so many will your descendants be.”  It is full of the light of evening, and morning, and of that dark hour just before dawn, when the world is a place of dim forms and dark shadows, a light that reveals the darkness of history and the coldness of the human heart.  And it is a book that is full of the light of God, like the glory atop Mount Sinai, which no one can see and live.

But like those other gentiles, the wise men from the East, these adventurers will not set out empty-handed.  They bring something with them.  For one thing, they bring the understanding that not all the world’s light is contained in a book.  The wise men followed the leading of a star, and it is worth noting that it is when they took a detour to consult the experts in biblical interpretation, that they almost ruined everything. 

The wise men carry gifts, and we also bring rare treasures on this year of journeying.  The gift of life experience, of remembering what we have seen, of lessons learned and choices that cannot be undone.  We bring the gift of feeling deeply—hot anger, belly laughter, love, joy, envy, malice, gratitude, world-weariness that sinks into the bones, and every other emotion there can be.  We bring gifts of intellect, and imagination, and wonder—even the gift of doubting that it is true.  And none of us would be daring to take this "Bible Challenge" if we did not possess in some small measure the supreme gift, the gift that makes us shine, that makes us radiant with the glory that has risen over us like the dawn—the gift of the willingness to give ourselves, to offer what we have brought, to lay it down of our own free will, for nothing more nor less than love.