What does it mean?

Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

 

Back during my seminary days, when I was doing a summer residency as a chaplain at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, I met a man who told me he was cursed by God.  He said this with such matter-of-factness, such conviction that this was the only possible explanation for his life, that I felt a responsibility to hear more of his story.  He was being prepped for surgery on his back, which had given him constant pain since his car had been struck by a drunk driver.  His best friend, who was a passenger with him, had been killed.  He then ran briskly through the rest of the catalogue of tragedies, catastrophes, and misfortunes that was his life.  He finished by repeating his summary judgment—for some reason unknown and unknowable, he had been cursed by God, and his life of torment was the ironclad evidence.  When he had given his defiant testimony, he made it clear that it was time for me to leave, and so I did.   

But that man has been a symbol to me ever since.  Not only a symbol of human suffering, though of course my heart went out to him for all the terrible things he’d been made to endure; but also a symbol of how powerfully we human beings desire to make meaning of our pain.  Rather than having to wrestle with the terrible ambiguity of a good God who could allow him to undergo such devastation, that man chose to believe in a God who hated him and cursed him.  That was the way he made meaning of his life.   But it limited his relationship with God to that of the victim to his torturer.  In a sense his own suffering became his idol.   And any face of the divine that might be turned toward him in love—bearer of impossible hope, sorrowing witness, seeker of forgiveness, compassionate fellow-sufferer—was ruled out.

The story of Job was a folktale that circulated in various forms in the ancient Near East.  It was about a righteous man who was tested in a wager of the Gods and afflicted with all kinds of undeserved calamities.  But he was patient.  He didn’t lose faith, and he didn’t seek relief in immoral acts.  He remained upright in his conduct, and pious in his speech, and in the end he passed the test, and was rewarded by having all that he’d lost restored to him, with interest.  The moral of that story was pretty conventional—if bad things happen to you, don’t waver—just endure.  Keep doing right and sooner or later your luck will change, and it will all turn out okay for you in the end.

But when the Hebrew sages adapted this story and made it part of their own sacred scripture, they weren’t satisfied with the simple moral lesson of the old fable.  They seemed to think that it didn’t do justice either to the problem of suffering or to the struggle of faith.  In the character of Job they created a model, not of long-suffering patience, but of dogged persistence in demanding an answer from God.  The other characters in the Book of Job try to get him to settle for a simple rationalization for what is happening to him.  In the excerpt we read today it is Job’s wife who counsels him to take the attitude of my acquaintance in the hospital—“curse God,” she says, “and die.”  Later in the book, it will be Job’s friends who keep telling him that he must have done something wrong to deserve the punishment that he is receiving, and that if he will just admit his fault and repent, all will be forgiven. 

But Job’s integrity is such that neither of these easy ways out will satisfy him.  He persists in arguing with God, demanding an accounting of the charges against him, in short, seeking a relationship with God that is founded on the truth of what they mean to each other.  Job has the courage to accept that God is more than a simple mechanism for dispensing rewards to people who are good and punishments to people who are bad.  Nevertheless, the reality of his own pain bears down on him, and he still wants to know who God is and who God will be—as his creator, as a God who still cares for him.  

In this way, Job becomes a model of the religious person whose faith does not depend on material prosperity, good health, or reputation.   Neither does he make an idol of his suffering.  Such a person does not seek God out of fear of punishment or hope of reward, but because of the desire to know God for the sake of a living relationship.  To be like Job is to bring into conversation with God the whole truth of who we are, which can include all kinds of paradoxes.  We can insist on our own worth, even as we are stricken with a sense of our failings.  We can struggle and anguish, and then find ourselves suddenly still and at peace; we might cry out angrily for justice one moment, and at the next be on our knees weeping for mercy.   

Maybe that’s in part why Jesus presents his disciples with children as their model for entering the kingdom of God.  In the family values of Jesus’ time a child was the person with the lowest status.  The people of those days did not see children as having any admirable character of their own, whether of innocence, or wonder, or spontaneity, or anything else.  Only once they started taking on adult responsibilities and making a productive contribution to the family did people have any value at all. 

And yet Jesus embraces and blesses the children as if to say that God comes into our lives precisely in those places where there can be no question of deserving or not deserving.  God meets us in the simplicity of our hearts’ seeking for blessing, our reaching out to know and to be known, to love and to be loved.  And this means that the real meaning of who God is for us is always ahead of us, always a potential that is yet to be fully realized, like that of a child.  No experience of suffering, any more than any great satisfaction or accomplishment, ever sets the final seal on the possibilities of a relationship with God.

And yet we recognize that such a life of integrity and openness is not easy, and it’s not something we can do by ourselves.  The story of Job is a story told by people who have suffered to one another, to help them sustain and deepen their faith.  The teaching of Jesus is for a community of disciples, to invite them to enter together a kingdom that is coming to be on earth as it is in heaven.  From this Sunday through All Saints’ Sunday on November 4^th we will celebrate our life together as people who support one another to live with integrity in our relationships with God and each other. 

We call it our Stewardship Season because we take time this month to acknowledge that everything we are and everything we have really belongs to God.  That acknowledgment is not a cause for cursing and lamentation, but for celebration, because if everything really belongs to God, there isn’t any part of our lives we have to leave out of our religion.  Our relationships with God have room for our suffering as well as our contentment, and our anger along with our sweetness.  They include our poverty as well as our wealth, our limitations as well as our abilities, our weaknesses along with our strengths. 

A community of integrity embraces the whole variety of individual gifts and experiences.  It encourages us to be honest about our needs, and about our capacity to give.  It invites us to bless every part of our selves and every person in our lives with faith in God’s potential to make it mean something true.    

Don't trip

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Psalm 124

James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

About fifteen years ago I met a man who had been a business associate of my father’s when I was a child.  My parents had thought he was pretty interesting then, and that he’d only gotten more so in the years since, which is why my dad thought the two of us ought to get together.  So I called him up.  We were eating sushi one day in Sausalito, when I told him of my newfound interest in the Episcopal Church.  He mentioned that he took his mother to services at Grace Cathedral a couple of times a month and he had some mildly complementary things to say about the place.   Then he paused for a moment, looking at me as if gauging how much he ought to say, and told me this story. 

For a number of years he’d managed a hot spring spa and New Age personal growth center down the coast from Big Sur.  One night he and some of his friends decided to do some executive team-building or something, and they all took a big dose of a hallucinogenic elixir favored by indigenous shamans from the jungles of the Amazon.   Which I guess was groovy, for all of them but one.  When the drug took effect one man started acting terrified.  As his friends tried to calm him down, he became more and more incoherent and withdrawn, and then unresponsive, even catatonic.  They tried everything they could think of to help him snap out of it.  They massaged him, and beat drums, and smoked him with burning sagebrush; they waved aromatic essences under his nose, and chanted “Om”, but nothing worked.  They started to think he might die.  Finally, in desperation, one of them started saying the Lord’s Prayer.  And that’s what did it.  Whatever strange, dark, land that man’s soul was wandering in, it was the Lord’s Prayer that called him back.      

I thought of this story as I was reading again about how Jesus’ disciples try to stop a man from casting out demons in his name, because he’s not official, and doesn’t answer to them.  Jesus tells them to leave him alone—after all, at least he’s not dragging his name through the mud, which lots of people are happy to do.  And, he adds, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  It is hard to imagine a more generous statement of giving the benefit of the doubt than that.  But for whatever reason, Christians throughout history have tended to ignore this story, and to reject that principle. 

We’ve preferred to do what Matthew did with this saying, when he incorporated material from Mark into his own Gospel, which was to twist it around to say: “whoever is not for us is against us.”   And so we have supposed that everyone is against us: Jews, Pagans, and Muslims, Animists and Atheists, Spiritualists and Secular Humanists.   Sometimes we were right—they were against us—but sometimes we were against them first.  And for a lot of our history, and I think this is still often the case, the people we’ve been most inclined to imagine are against us, have been other people who take the name of Christ.

I know that’s been true for me.  You know that bumper sticker that says “O Lord, save me from your followers”?   For a long while I resisted calling myself a Christian, not only because of modesty about what it really means to follow Christ, and not merely because lingering doubts about God and the Bible and Jesus Christ, but because I had serious, almost insurmountable doubts about some Christians.  And it cuts both ways—I am absolutely certain that there are a lot of Christians who would have serious doubts about me—if they would even consider me a Christian at all.  The fact is we seem to have an inexhaustible genius for thinking up new reasons to excommunicate each other.

It’s a tendency you can see already getting established in the later books of the New Testament. Now I’m not going to stand here and say that there is never a time when we have to challenge people who we think are promulgating erroneous teachings or questionable practices in the name of Christ.  But Jesus is not worried about that in today’s Gospel story.  He’s happy to give the free-lance exorcist the benefit of the doubt.  Anyone who does honor to his name is fine with him. There is, however, something he is concerned about, something  so concerning that he uses some of the strongest, most over-the-top language in the Gospel to talk about it.  And what he’s concerned about is “stumbling.” 

But what is this “stumbling”?  The Greek original actually gives us a clue.  The word is skandalizo, which is where we get the English word “scandalize.”   Literally, it means “to set a snare for someone; to trip someone up,” but it can also mean “to give offense.”  In its passive form, it can mean “to take offense.”  Now, to better understand what kind of “tripping up” Jesus is talking about, it helps to look at the two other places in the Gospel where the word appears.  In Chapter 6 of Mark, it is Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth who take offense at him.   They are scandalized because they’ve known him his whole life and his mother and brothers and sisters still live just down the street, and they just don’t know to do with the fact that he’s come back to town as this enlightened wonder-worker.  So they reject him.  The other place, besides today’s text, where skandalizo shows up is in chapter 14, when Jesus and his disciples have finished their last meal together and are on their way out to Gethsemane where he is to be betrayed, and he says to them:  “You are all going get tripped up by what is about to happen; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’”

So when Jesus says in Mark 9 “it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a great millstone around your neck than to cause one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble,” he’s talking about not giving anyone reason by our actions to lose whatever small measure of faith they have in him.  He’s warning his disciples against—oh, I don’t know, treating them arrogantly, as if they aren’t “real Christians.”  And when he talks about cutting off a part of your body that causes you to stumble, and does it three times, he’s stating as strongly as he possibly can what is at stake when we start to think of rejecting him.  The word that is translated “Hell” in this passage is the name of the place outside the walls of Jerusalem where they used to burn the garbage.  A stinking, smoldering, wasteland of perpetual decay—do we need a better image of what the world is coming to if it persists in taking offense at God? 

But there is something that keeps things from turning to garbage.  And this brings us to the last, and the strangest, in the strange string of sayings in today's gospel lesson.  In the days before refrigeration, salt was more than seasoning, it was preservative.  Salt is what prevents decay.  And the fire that consumes and destroys is not the only fire there is.  God offers us an alternative to the world as garbage dump, which is to be salted, salted with the fire of the Spirit.  And in Jesus, God comes in person to offer this fire to all.  The creative source that preserves and renews life, is here, calling us to follow, assuring us that any offense that others may take at us, any price we have to pay, is nothing.  Or, we can take the garbage dump—the choice is ours. 

Don’t pay too much attention to what other people are saying about Jesus, whether you agree with them or not.  They can’t make your decision for you.  And don’t fight with anyone over who knows Jesus better—it only makes him look bad.  “Have salt in yourself,” he says, “and be at peace with one another.”  Don’t get tripped up, but keep your faith in Jesus, who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt.   Where we look for enemies, he looks for friends.  Where we divide and discriminate, he creates community.  Where we seek to dictate and control, he sets people free.  That’s why he’s the Messiah and we’re not. 

Unconventional wisdom

Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

Wednesday morning my wife Meg’s car wouldn’t start.  I won’t go through all the details, but on Wednesday night, after a full day of bicycling to work and shuffling our other car on trips to and from school and to the store and to a soccer game, after three visits from Triple A that left us with no solution, only a statement that the battery they sold us last year was not the problem and a “drain was detected,” and we shouldn’t call them anymore, I finished washing the dishes and went to find Meg.  She was folding laundry.  We commiserated with each other about how stressful car problems can be.  Neither of us is particularly mechanical, so when something more serious than a flat tire goes wrong with the car, we are both kind of powerless.   Meg said, “I realized I was feeling helpless, so I thought it might make me feel better to take on a task I could handle.  I decided I could do something about that pile of clean laundry.”

That struck me as a wise thing to have done.  It’s something that the ideal wife depicted in today’s lesson from the Book of Proverbs might have said.   The theme of Proverbs is wisdom, and the wisdom that it offers begins with the acknowledgement of God, and so we might imagine it is something mystical or esoteric.  But it’s not.  It’s practical.  It is wisdom that applies to daily life and worldly affairs.  It is related to the idea of creation, for it is through Wisdom that God did his work in fashioning the world.  The ordered structure of the universe, and its natural and moral laws, are the domain of wisdom.  The one who learns wisdom carries on God’s work of establishing a good world, a world of beauty and justice, prosperity and culture.  And the one who fears God knows that the commandments of wisdom are the cornerstone of the good life.  It is wisdom that gives the necessary temperament to seek such a life, and wisdom who directs the effort, and who blesses the results.  One who lives such a life becomes a blessing for others.

There is a lot to admire in this picture.  But we also have to acknowledge that this kind of wisdom is pretty conventional.  And conventional wisdom hasn’t really changed a whole lot in 2,500 years.  If you were to ask a random sample of Americans today “what are the personal qualities that lead to a good life,” they probably would come up with a list of characteristics not too different from we see in this ideal wife in Proverbs--industriousness, self-reliance, an entrepreneurial spirit; strength, generosity, piety and kindness; selflessly providing for the needs of her family and promoting its social prominence; earning the esteem of her children and her neighbors.

And it is just because conventional wisdom is so consistent across cultures and through time that the wisdom of the New Testament is so strange.  When the Letter of James talks about wisdom it is not so interested in how obedience to God’s laws leads worldly happiness.  Rather it sees wisdom as what enables a person to resist the seductions of evil that corrupt even our most honorable motivations.  There is awareness here that the pursuit of happiness as the world counts happiness can easily become a trap.   Self-discipline and self-reliance can lead to self-aggrandizement.   The pursuit of virtue can lead to hypocrisy, the desire for excellence to rivalry and envy.   Success in one’s life and fortunes can lead to disdain for those who are less able or less fortunate.  The idea that God’s wisdom is the foundation of the good life can lead those whose lives are manifestly good to believe that they are specially blessed by God, and that those whose lives appear less so are God-forsaken.   True wisdom, according to the book of James, is that close acquaintance with God that keeps us humble and gentle in heart, and rejects any desire for worldly goods that would lead us to fight with each other to get them.

So what lies behind this critical difference, this exception to the conventional wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, the conventional wisdom that still prevails in the world we live in today?  If we were scholars of the history of religion we could trace some complex process of development.  But I think that there is one simple explanation that is sufficient.  There is one event that had the power to shake the conventional wisdom of ancient times to its foundations, and it has not lost that power even today.  I am speaking, of course, of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It has been frequently taught in Christian tradition that “the Jews” were responsible for the murder of Jesus, but this is of course a libel and a falsehood.  It was not “the Jews” but some Jews, who were instigators and accessories to a crime committed by some Romans.  And the point I’m making is that the particular Jews that rejected Jesus, who accused him of blasphemy and insurrection and handed him over to be killed, were the chief priests, the scribes and the elders.  They were the urbane and cultivated people, the socially-prominent people, the well-educated and pious people, the people who, by the conventional wisdom of theirs and every age, are best-qualified to determine what is lawful, what is wise, what is politically feasible, and in the national interest, and what is not.   It was these people, people who could have read the description in Chapter 31 of the Book of Proverbs and thought proudly of their own wives and their own families, who rejected and killed the Messiah of God.   

But it was not some particular defect of their religion, or their class, or even their character that led them to do it.   They were only defending the prerogatives of wisdom as they knew it.  Jesus foresaw the conflict, knew it was inevitable, because he understood the power of conventional wisdom that made it impossible for them to change course, or to see him for what he was.  He saw that power at work among his own disciples, as they argued with each other on the road about which one of them was greater.  And he countered with a teaching that redefines worldly achievement as unconditional, selfless service.  It’s a teaching that still makes us squirm when we hear it today: "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."

 And then he gave them a different way to think about how the wisdom of God shows up in the world.  In place of the all-powerful Creator, the master-builder of the universe who with wisdom established the foundations of the earth, spread out the dome of the heavens, and gave to us his people a perfect and eternal law, Jesus shows his disciples a child.  “Welcome a child,” he says, “and you welcome me, and not only me, but the one who sent me.” A child.  The most vulnerable and least powerful of persons.  A being who depends entirely on the love and protection of others.  One who knows nothing of social status or the distinctions of greater and lesser honor.  One whose needs are simple –love, food, warmth, companionship, play.  One whose gifts are simple—openness, affection, spontaneity, hope, and joy.  Welcome such a one, and you make room in the world for God. 

This wisdom of Jesus is still an available alternative to the usual way of trying to be happy.  A different way of seeking the good life is still waiting to be tried, kind of like that pile of laundry in the other room, waiting to be folded, as we fuss and fret and worry about fixing the car.  It’s true that that this way leaves you open to getting hurt, or being taken advantage of by all the serious people going about their serious business of  getting ahead in the world.   But there are worse things than getting hurt.  And there are better things than being one of the few who gets the things everyone else thinks that they want.  Or so says Jesus, but what did he know?

The way through

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, maybe seven or eight, and I was on summer vacation at my grandparents’ cabin in the Sierras.  I went for a morning hike with my mother and younger brother on the old stagecoach road that runs along behind the cabin.  After a half –hour or so of walking, we had to scramble down a steep bank onto a wide, freshly-graded road that cut into the old one.   Going on a little further we came around a shoulder of the mountain and out from under the forest cover onto a hot, naked hillside.  It was dotted with stumps of trees and large heaps of bark, branches, and bulldozed earth.  My mother began to cry out in grief and fury.  She started shouting words that I recognized from my father and his carpentry projects, but that I’d never heard her use before.  This was a place she knew, a place she had visited from her childhood, a place she remembered as a cool, green, magical forest.

That day made a strong impression on me, and it wasn’t long after that I created a new imaginary self.  This was not the first time that I’d daydreamed a fantasy life.  As children do, I used to create scenarios in my mind and return to them again and again, making them more and more elaborate until finally it took more energy to reimagine them than the pleasure that they gave, and I moved on to something new.  But this particular fantasy was one of the most vivid I ever had. 

I was the leader of a band of merry outlaws who roamed the Sierra Nevada.  Relying on swiftness, stealth, woodcraft, and cunning, we would appear as if out of nowhere to fire our arrows into the tires of logging trucks, before melting away into the forest without a trace.  Our enemy, The County Sherriff, would use every trick in his book to capture us, but in spite of all his dogs and radios, deputies and helicopters, his stratagems were in vain--we always were one step ahead.

The child, becoming painfully aware of the injustice in the world, imagines himself a hero who can set things right.  He draws on stories like the legend of Robin Hood and retells them to himself in a way that makes meaning of things that are troubling, things that he doesn’t understand.  And something kind of like that seems to be happening in Galilee when we pick up the story of Jesus in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and they say, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."

For the common people of Galilee, the words and deeds of Jesus evoke the prophets, who destroyed foreign idols and faced down corrupt rulers, who healed and worked wonders and spoke the words of God.  Jesus awakens the imaginations of people sinking deeper and deeper into debt, people becoming landless laborers or slaves on the land of their ancestors, people crushed by the greed and ambition and violence of vainglorious overlords.  His words and his deeds remind them of the legends of their heroes, and these legends are the memory of hope.  Perhaps Jesus is a prophet like them, perhaps he is one of them, come back to life to deliver his people in their hour of great need. 

But Jesus wants to dig a little deeper.  He wants to know if his disciples have a different idea, and Peter does.  At the time of Jesus’ life Jewish ideas about the Messiah were various and somewhat vague.  And Peter doesn’t say exactly what he thinks he means when he says that Jesus is the Messiah.  But I think we can assume that one thing Peter means is that his master is more than the return of a legend.   He is someone unique.  He is the One we’ve all been waiting for, the one the prophets themselves were waiting for.   He will not just cry out against injustice, he will do something about it.  He will not just predict God’s deliverance of Israel, he will bring the plan to fulfillment.  Jesus is the hero of Peter’s ultimate fantasy. 

So it’s understandable that Peter balks when Jesus starts talking about the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem.  The hero of Peter’s fantasy is not supposed to be rejected by the leaders of the people—he’s supposed to be acclaimed by them, to lead them to put aside their petty quarrels and rivalries and unite under his authority.  He’s not supposed to be killed—he’s supposed to subjugate the enemies of Israel, bringing any who oppose him to their knees, begging for mercy.  And as for rising from the dead; well, fantasy is all well and good, but let’s not get carried away.

Part of the power of this story is that Jesus recognizes the temptation that Peter is putting in his path.  When he says “Get behind me, Satan!” he’s not being insulting.  He’s acknowledging that Peter’s fantasy has crossed his own mind.  He’s remembering a certain encounter he had in the desert, fasting there for forty days after his baptism.  He’s acknowledging a voice that’s always lying in wait for him, always flattering, cajoling, provoking him: “you have a special gift.  Don’t throw it away.  You see how desperate they are—how they only want to follow you, to do anything you ask.  Give them what they want.  You say the first will be last, and the last will be first, so how long do you want them to wait?  Just imagine how much good you could do.” 

But Jesus turns his back on that voice, and turns toward his disciples.  And I like to imagine that in that turning he is turning towards us.  He turns away from the fantasy of power and virtue, and looks to the truth of our experience, and his eyes are the eyes of compassion.  Jesus turns away from the myths of redemptive violence, and toward the reality of weakness and suffering.  And he opens his mouth, and he speaks words of hope.   They are hard words, but that is because sin has made a hard world, and he knows that we don’t need yet another fantasy of escape.  We need a way through, a real way, a way that doesn’t ask us to be superheroes, or to submit to a “great leader” and his cult of personality.   He knows we need a way to go that takes into account who we really are, and how the world really is, and what it is actually going to take to make it all the way to a new world of universal peace and perfect justice.

And we know that way is real because Jesus walks it.  That is his unique, divine mission.  That’s what makes him the Messiah.  The only truly free person in the whole world freely chooses to die as a prisoner.  Only in that way, can he show the prisoners they are captives of a daydream.  Only in that way, can he show the rulers that they are rulers of a lie.  Changing the nameplate on the door of the corner office, changing the pattern on the White House china, these things do not make change.  Change happens when people like you and me wake up from our fantasies of hero-worship, and start taking the slow, simple, sometimes costly steps in the direction of real life. 

Life—in the bodies God gave us.  Life— with the people God gives us.  Life— in solidarity with the poor, the outcast, the unloved, and the afflicted.  Life—that accepts illness, and old age, and death as part of the plan.  Life—in dogged resistance to organized selfishness and the needless suffering it causes.   Life—trusting in the basic goodness of the world and of human beings, and in God’s wisdom to turn even the worst disasters of human folly toward the good.  Life—in daily celebration of the glory of God in the work of creation.  Life, in short, in the footsteps of Jesus.