The Good Ol' Testament

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51

 

I’ve been taking some heat recently, as I do from time to time, for the Sunday Bible readings.  Not the poetic and inspiring spiritual readings from the Letter to the Ephesians, but the Old Testament readings.  Some of you are puzzled as to why we have to listen to stories in church about people behaving badly, about adultery and treachery and murder.  You wonder about readings which seem to put forward an archaic picture of an angry and vengeful God.  You ask what positive spiritual benefit there could be in retelling such stories, and whether we couldn’t choose more uplifting ones, or possibly just leave off the regular reading of a lesson from the Old Testament altogether.  So I’ve decided today to explain, if I can, a little about why the Hebrew Bible is the way it is, and why I think it’s worth reading.

First, I want to say that it’s okay with me that you are raising these questions.  It means you are engaged, and paying attention, and care about what the church says it believes, which is as it should be.  I also want to say that I accept full responsibility for the fact that we are reading these particular texts in our Sunday worship.  Because while I’m pretty sure our bishop would not permit us to stop reading the Hebrew Bible entirely, I do have some leeway in deciding which texts we choose to use.  The Episcopal Church plans its reading of scripture on the basis of something called the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a schedule that we share with millions of other Christians in many denominations around the world.  And every year, during the long Season after Pentecost (roughly June through November), the Lectionary gives us a choice of two different “tracks” for the Old Testament reading. 

One of these tracks follows the practice that prevails throughout the rest of the church year, of cherry-picking readings from the Hebrew Bible that mirror themes of the Gospel lesson of the day.  This makes for a coherent “package” of readings that feels quite satisfactory.  But it also reinforces a bias that has colored the Christian reading of the Bible since the dawn of the Gentile church.  This is the view that the Old Testament has no other purpose, and no other meaning, than to give a kind of advance notice of Christ.   We are free to take a bit from this place and from that one, as it suits the telling of our own story, because those scriptures are no more than preamble to our own, with no narrative structure or compositional integrity of their own that we are bound to respect. 

In doing this we take our lead from passages like today’s Gospel reading from John, which makes a sharp distinction between Jewish memory, and the new thing that is Jesus Christ.  It is “the Jews” who grumble that Jesus cannot have come down like something new-made from heaven, because he is the son of Joseph.  They know his father and mother, and can trace his ancestry like that of any other Jew.  Jesus replies that what he means is that he is sent to carry out God’s purpose.  He has come to gather those who have heard and learned from God.  He will nourish them with the imperishable food of God’s will, and this guidance already draws them right through history with the life of the world to come.   

But if you think about it, what Jesus is describing here is a deeply Jewish project.  Its foundation is a history of distinctively Jewish hopes.  The anti-Jewish polemic of the New Testament, with its emphasis on differentiation, has made it hard for us to see an essential continuity.  Because as diverse and incongruous a collection of writings as the Hebrew Bible is, it has an underlying unity, which is embodied not in the text, but in the life and hope of a people in their God.  Jesus was one of those people.  His genius was a new experience of unity with the God of Jewish revelation, life with whom he embodied to the ultimate degree. For Christians the life, and death, and resurrection of Jesus is the decisive event that reinterprets all that came before it.  But we have to see that it is the culmination of a story that Jesus knew to be the story of himself.  So if we want to really understand Jesus as a living person, we need to learn to read the book that taught him who he is.   That is why, every year, I choose the other lectionary track for the Sunday readings during the season after Pentecost.  That is the one that traces the rough outline of the whole Hebrew Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending three years later with the last book of the Hebrew Bible, the book of the prophet Malachi.    

These readings sometimes fit awkwardly, at best, with the Gospel lesson on any given Sunday, but they do relate powerfully to each other.  Consider the readings about David of the last few weeks.  We heard about David’s moment of glory, when he ascended to the throne of his united kingdom, which spoke of a transcendent hope in God’s promise to his people of sovereignty and peace.  But the Hebrew scribes also knew they had to tell the whole truth about David, and so we had the story of Bathsheba, showing David’s lack of integrity and abuse of power.  This led to personal and national tragedy, as a sign of God’s judgment. 

The mystery of God’s way with his people includes glory and judgment, promise and warning.  And somewhere in between these extremes is compassion, as in today’s reading when we simply bear witness to the grief-stricken cries of a father for his son.   Because whatever else David’s  story is about, it is about a man, and the raw emotional truth of human experience.

The Bible is not God’s word about us, and it is not our word about God, and it is not our word about ourselves, but it is all three of these things woven inextricably together.  Which is exactly what is unique about it.  It contains almost no mythology: no descriptions of heavenly realms, or tales of the origins and adventures of the gods.  It is also quite thin in metaphysics and philosophy.  What it is about is the unity of the God who made us, and the world in which we live, and who sustains the life of all.  It attempts to tell the whole history of human interaction with that God.   And because it is a human story it is full of the brave and noble, the shameful and ignorant, the inexplicable things that humans do.    

But woven throughout, and tying it all together, is this recurring theme of the revelation of God.  God keeps breaking in to interrupt the human story, and the message of these revelations is not just “I exist—worship me!”  It is, “I care what happens to you, and I have a purpose for you.  I am involved in your story.  I do what I do for my own reasons, but they have everything to do with your flourishing, with your living the way human beings are really meant to live.  So trust me—and here’s what I want you to do.”

This repeated discovery of God’s involvement with them is why this inconsequential little tribe of Israelites, left behind a far more detailed record of their history than the great empires on their borders.  That is why they clung tenaciously to that memory through one conquest after another, through all the persecutions and deportations, and efforts at forced assimilation—because their history as a people was also the history of God’s word to humankind.  And it is more than a story of the past—it is also God’s blueprint, sketchy though it might be, of a truly human future.

That refusal to let go of memory makes the Bible sort of like your crazy Great-Aunt Millie’s attic.  The out-of-fashion and horribly uncomfortable ladies underwear is jumbled together with the Picasso she found at a garage sale.  There is a lot in it that is peculiar, incomprehensible, even downright repugnant.  But it’s funny how we moderns, in our arrogance, assume that the compilers of the book didn’t know that.  They were surely dubious about many of the same things we are, but they did not share our confidence in the infallibility of our own hindsight.  “If we have learned anything our ancestors didn’t know,” they seem to say, “that knowledge was hard-won and is easily lost.  So we want to remember how we learned it, by telling the whole story.”  They didn’t claim that all of it was equally true, or equally important, only that all of it was worth remembering. 

Rest and Relaxation

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

I’ve just come back from a week with my wife’s family at Cape Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  My father-in-law first drove down there with Meg and her sister Cathy forty-three years ago this summer, and it has been his summer vacation destination ever since.  I myself have gone twelve or thirteen times, including every summer but one since our daughter was born, so the place has become deeply familiar, and infused with happy memories.  The rhythm of our days there is a simple one.  By family custom, television and radio are not allowed, and our days revolve around eating, sleeping, reading, games, and conversation, and being on the beach or in the waves.  It is a place where I let go of responsibilities, where the deadlines and demands of being a parish priest and householder and citizen drift away and I can rest.

I am grateful to have had this opportunity once again, and I thank everyone who helped hold down the fort here at St. John’s while I was away.  I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I am, and there may be some of you here today whose financial strictures or work or family responsibilities make it impossible for you to take a real vacation.  So I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining when I say that for everything that is idyllic about our annual trip to the Outer Banks, it is not all rest and recreation.  There is also a fair amount of stress and strain involved, most of which has to do with getting there and back again.  There are two days of travel on either end, one day each way at crowded airports, and one on crowded highways, days of long lines at the security checkpoint, at the boarding gate and the car rental counter, days of waiting for a turn in the bathroom on airplanes and in gas stations and convenience stores; days of traffic jams on I-95 and the Capitol Beltway, and at the Hampton Roads Bridge and Tunnel.

And in the midst of so many thousands of complete strangers, when you, like every one of them, is thinking only of getting where you want to go as quickly as possible, it’s easy to stop thinking of them as persons just like yourself.  It’s easy to relate to them only as obstacles, as particles of interference that are causing friction and slowing you down and standing in the way of the few precious days of rest and solitude that you so need and deserve.  It’s easy to forget that each of them only wants the same thing you do—to get to a place where they can stop moving and lay down their burdens and rest.

When the book of Second Samuel says that the Lord gave David rest it doesn’t just mean he got a break from work and travel.  It means that he won a lasting victory that brought an end to violence, danger, and insecurity.  That is how a people weary of constant war and oppression think about rest.  We hear how when David had defeated all his enemies, and was settled in his palace and on his throne, he thought of the God who had won all this for him and decided to build him a place of his own.  It’s something any pious person might have done, not unlike those who, 159 years ago a week from Friday, finding themselves safely and prosperously settled here in Petaluma, decided to found St. John’s Episcopal Church.

But then God comes into the story and tells David that his thinking is too small.  David wants to put a punctuation mark on his success with this grand gesture of piety, to say to the world “here is David’s temple, where we worship David’s God.”  But God wants it understood that the rest that he is working for is not for David, but for the whole nation of Israel.  God knows that the politics of nations and the fortunes of kings are built on shifting sands.  So God will keep working, keep building, making a house where his holy name will be established forever.  It will not be an edifice of cedar and stone, but of flesh and blood, the royal house of David, and the sons of David will also be the Sons of God.  Their glory will not be in their personal power and accomplishments, but in their embodiment of God’s covenant promise to the whole people of Israel, the promise of rest.

This is one of the great guiding ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures, and in its essence it is not about David or his offspring.  We don’t even get out of Second Samuel before it becomes clear that they are not going to come close to living up to the ideal.  What it is is an idea about God, about God’s determination not to sit on the shelf in some little sideshow tent called “religion” but rather to stay involved in Israel’s politics.  God promises to keep showing up in the nitty gritty places where human beings work out their differences, and address their shared problems, and shape their institutions, gently, firmly, unwaveringly coaxing, and cajoling, and enticing, all of us together toward rest. 

As time went on, it became harder, not easier, to see how God is working to establish his kingdom in human affairs.   But the idea didn’t fade out, it just got more nuanced.  The prophets revealed that the keynote of God’s politics was not power, but justice and compassion for the poor and suffering.  The Hebrew sages developed the notion of wisdom, the art of bringing one’s own actions and thoughts into accord with God’s ongoing work of creating the world.  And it is this nuanced picture of God’s steadfast love, working through a chosen person to move the whole society, even the whole world, toward its long-awaited rest, that comes suddenly and startlingly to life when people encounter Jesus.       

The stories of the Gospel of Mark show Jesus confronting things about being human we would rather avoid.  And today we have another case of this, illustrated by the fact that when you try to go away on vacation, there’s a whole crowd of other people who go with you.  There is ultimately no peace, no rest for us, apart from the rest of everyone.  Jesus manifests this deep truth when he looks on the crowd and sees that they are like sheep without a shepherd.  His is not a detached observation, much less a calculation of opportunity—it is a realization of divine compassion, compassion that moves Jesus to the very core.

It is compassion that stirs him to act, to do something for these souls who are forgotten by their rulers and have lost their faith in God.   But he doesn’t organize them into an army, or a party, or a cult.  He doesn’t stir them up to violence or promise them power.  What he does do is to teach and to heal.  His teaching, according to Mark, is about the Kingdom of God, and he teaches it in parables.  He shows what the work of God in the world is like by comparing it to daily actions and ordinary things—a sower goes out to sow, a woman mixes leaven into the dough.  And in his healings Jesus doesn’t so much reach out to the sick as welcome them to him.  He goes among them, and they recognize the healing presence of God; they reach out in faith to touch it, even if it is only the fringe of his cloak, and by that faith and that touch they are healed.

As a community that carries on the work of Jesus, we are called to be more than a sanctuary, more than a quiet place apart from the world.  Which is not to say that we should not cultivate an atmosphere of prayerfulness and peace.  But the purpose of this sacred space is to be an arena for the practice of a deeper kind of politics than what usually passes for the word.  It is where we learn from the nitty-gritty of our relationships and the work we do together, to see the traces of God’s wisdom, justice, and compassion, so that we can teach others to see God’s work wherever it may appear.   We come in search of healing from the sickness of our souls, especially the illusions that we are separate from others, or in control of our salvation.  And when we touch the healing we seek, we sense in it a compelling invitation to the rest of the world, a call to live with all people as those with whom God dwells—a call to lead the world to its rest.