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. 

Sitting at the lower place

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Every year the seminary that I went to gives out a prize for the best preacher in the graduating class.  And by the time I was a senior there, I thought maybe that prize would be mine. I’d given sermons at my home parish in San Francisco before I even went to seminary, and many more at and my field education site once I got there, and the responses I received gave me confidence that this was something I was good at.  It’s a tradition at the seminary that on Tuesdays throughout the year, one of the seniors gives the sermon at the mid-day Eucharist.  And from what I’d seen and heard there, I thought I measured up well against the competition.  I was proud of my own senior sermon, and when the call went out later in the year for a student volunteer to fill an open date on the preaching calendar, I jumped at the chance to give another. 

So I liked my chances to win the prize; and as our class was lining up for the commencement ceremony, and bishops and rectors of cardinal parishes of the church were coming down the line, giving us their congratulations, I couldn’t help fantasizing about that moment when I would hear my name called and, in front of my classmates, and the faculty, and all those distinguished guests, I would walk up to the podium to claim my reward.  And when the ceremony began, and we’d marched in, and were in our seats, and the big moment was drawing near, my heart was racing.  Finally, the Homiletics Professor and Dean of the seminary went to the microphone and announced that the winner of the Rt. Rev. Richard Millard Prize for Excellence in Preaching for the class of 2005 was…Katherine Kelley. 

I was stunned.  I didn’t know until that moment just how much I had wanted that award, and how certain I had been that they would give it to me.  As I struggled with my emotions, I thought I saw some of my classmates stealing glances at me, as if they knew that I’d been expecting to win, and I imagined that the color of my face betrayed my disappointment, and I was ashamed.  Suddenly I was no longer paying attention to what was happening around me.  The ceremony kept moving along toward the moment when I also would be called up to the podium, to receive that diploma that I’d worked so hard to get, that only a few years earlier seemed forever out of my reach, but I was stuck back there, thinking of the honor I had been denied: “Kathy Kelley?  The one with the voice like a rusty hinge?  How is this possible?”

Finally, I pulled myself together.  I recalled that I had missed Kathy Kelley’s senior sermon, and that for all I knew she was an outstanding preacher.  As the commencement exercises ended, and I looked for her in the crowd to congratulate her, I remembered the Baccalaureate dinner a couple of nights before.  After dessert, the seniors had the opportunity to get up and make some farewell remarks to the seminary community.  Mine were pretty lame—your basic “I want to thank everyone who made this moment possible” kind of speech.  But Kathy Kelley’s was oratory, a wise and heartfelt tribute to the lay people at Trinity, Sacramento who had nurtured her faith and her call to ministry.  She ended by admonishing us all to honor the laity of the church, and lead them and serve them with humility and love.  When she was finished the room was completely silent for a long moment, and then burst into applause.

Academic prizes are only one way our society singles people out for honor.  The cultural code that assigns us our places in the pecking order is extremely complex, and it depends on everything from the brands we display on our clothes and our cars, to the neighborhoods where we live and the places where we work and the schools where we send our children, from how we spend our vacations to where we sit when we go to the ball park.  But in Jesus’ day the code was simpler.  There weren’t that many ways to stake a claim to prestige.  And one of the main places it was done was at wedding feasts and dinner parties.  Who could hold the most lavish banquet, and who would be invited, and who would not, and who would accept the invitation, and where they would sit when they came—these were the things that mattered in the high-stakes game of social standing. 

And that is why the documents of the New Testament contain so many passages about wedding feasts and social banquets.  That is why the Gospel of Luke remembers Jesus’ remarks to supper guests in the house of a leader of the Pharisees.  Because in this passage Jesus isn’t giving advice about banquet etiquette—he’s pointing out the senselessness of fighting with your friends over rank.  It’s all just based on someone else’s opinion, and honor can turn to shame in an instant, and starting out at the bottom is just as promising a strategy as starting out at the top.   This is also why it is so radical for Jesus to tell his host that he’d be better off inviting the kind of guests to his party who don’t get invited to the better sort of affairs and can do nothing to burnish his reputation.  Because the only reputation that matters in the end is the one we have in the eyes of God, and God’s idea of who is honorable, and who is not, is not like ours.   

There was a time, not so very long ago, when attending a church like St. John’s was one way to lay claim to social prestige.  If you wanted to establish your credentials as a solid citizen and a moral person, someone of good character, whose acquaintance would reflect well on others, it paid to belong to a church.  And I would guess that this church gave its members that extra touch of distinction that some of the others did not.  Now I’m not saying that there weren’t a lot of genuinely devout and faithful people here, at every stage of the 167-year history of St. John’s.  But I do think it’s safe to say that there were also some of the other kind.  And somewhere along the line those folks stopped coming here, because it was paying diminishing social returns.

Today going to church is no guarantee of respect.  Indeed, there are some circles where it marks one out as a bigot, or a credulous fool.  There are others for whom church is still valuable for social climbing, but they tend to prefer places a little more fashionable than ours.  And we, who used to sit at the highest place at the table, now find ourselves nearer to the lowest.  But I think that if we’re truthful to the wisdom of our tradition, we’d have to say that it’s a better place to be.   At the low place it’s easier to remember that social status is an idol, a cracked cistern that holds no water. It’s easier to remember that honor is just shame that hasn’t shown up at the party yet.  At the low place it’s easier to remember what it is like to be uninvited, to be on wrong side of the codes of social acceptance.  In the low place it’s easier to remember how treating others on the basis of what they can do for our social standing is an affront to God.

It’s also a place where it’s easier to remember Jesus, and the dinner parties that he had, where he ate and drank and celebrated the Kingdom of God with tax-collectors and prostitutes.  It’s easier to remember how he sat at table with the one who would betray him, and the ones who would desert him, and said, “this is my Body, given for you.”  From the low place we keep the feast that he commanded, holding in highest honor the last meal of a condemned man.  Everyone is invited to this feast, where we come not for distinction, but forgiveness, where we belong, not to an exclusive social set, but to the eternal kingdom of the love of the one creator of us all.  

You didn't have to be there

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Of the 50 to 60 million inhabitants of the Roman Empire, a tiny elite, perhaps one-half of one percent, owned some 80 percent of the wealth.  Nearly every scrap of writing that remains to us from those days, the novels, the poetry, the plays, the works of history and philosophy and rhetoric, was written by members of that elite.  It was written for members of that elite.  It speaks from their worldview.  It addresses their concerns.  We have a pretty good idea from the surviving literature about how the one-half of one percent lived, what they ate, how they spent their time.   We know many of their names. 

Contrast this with the peasants, the small shopkeepers, the artisans and laborers, the miners and sailors and soldiers and slaves who made up the remaining ninety-nine and one-half percent of the Empire’s population.  They didn’t write books, and the people who did write them were not really interested in their lives.  Their names aren’t carved on stones in the ruins of ancient cities.  We know next to nothing about them, so that when a distinguished historian recently published a book describing what we can say about them from the available evidence, he gave it the title Invisible Romans.

But there is one work of ancient literature  that is by members of the ninety-nine and one-half percent.  This book, really a collection of books, is about ordinary people.  Thanks to these writings we know some of their names, some details about how they lived, and what they cared about.  We know about them because certain experiences that they had were so significant that they decided everyone should know about them.  They organized themselves into resilient and mobile little groups, dedicated to giving testimony to what they had witnessed.  Eventually these testimonies were written down, so that they could be carried from place to place and passed down through the years in something like their original form.  Stories by ordinary people, about ordinary people, intended, by and large, for ordinary people, that by one of history’s great miracles have come down to us.

I am talking, of course, about the New Testament.  And today, on this day of Pentecost, we whose very existence as a people called “Christians” is owed to those ordinary people, celebrate the miracle that gave us birth.  This miracle has two parts.  The first part is the way in which Jesus’ disciples discovered that they were now responsible for his mission.  Not only responsible, but willing and able and empowered by God to carry it out.  That is the transformation that we celebrate in the fifty days after Easter—that this little  group of ordinary, invisible people made the journey from running away in fear on the night of Jesus’ arrest to bravely carrying on the work that he started. 

The second part of the miracle is that when these people stood up to talk about God’s mighty acts of liberation, redeeming the whole world through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, people actually listened.  Some of them actually got it—as improbable as this message was, as unlikely as the messengers were, it got through to them in a completely surprising way. 

You’ve probably had the experience where you are trying to tell your spouse or a friend about something that happened to you earlier in the day that was particularly affecting, or hilariously funny, something that for whatever reason you really want to share with another person.  So you try to describe it with all the significant details, and then you get to the climax, the moment that had the real emotional impact, and the person you’re talking to just kind of looks at you with a blank expression.  Maybe they force a little laugh just to be nice, and say something like “wow—sounds pretty funny,” or “that must have been really cool,” but you know that they just didn’t “get it” in the way that you hoped you would.  So you say “I guess you had to be there.”   

Well the miraculous thing about Pentecost is that these ordinary people, Simon Peter, for instance, Son of Jonah, started talking about extraordinary things, amazing, mysterious, mystical experiences of what they had learned from Jesus and how he came to them after he died, and breathed his peace into them and sent them out on a mission of healing and forgiveness to the whole world; and you know, it turned out that you didn’t have to be there.  You didn’t have to be there to believe that what these people were saying about Jesus was true.  You didn’t have to be there to feel like this was the best news you’d heard in a long time, maybe ever, and that it was meant for you. 

You didn’t have to be there to feel like someone was speaking to what you’d always secretly suspected about God and about yourself, but never dared to let yourself believe— that God loves you and everyone else in this world like a Father or a Mother, and that you aren’t an invisible person at all, but are heaven’s messenger, gifted with a high and noble purpose.  And just because you hadn’t been there didn’t mean you were left out of that purpose—it was not too late to join, and everyone was welcome, no matter if you were an important person or not, no matter what background you came from, there was a place for you in the brother- and sister-hood of the Messiah Jesus.

The apostles looked at these miracles, the way they had come to accept the mission of Jesus for their own, and the way all different kinds of people were actually taken with their message, and they knew that only God could do this.   That’s what God the Holy Spirit does, she communicates.  She connects.  She enters into the space between people and removes the barriers to love and trust and truth.  That’s why we invoke the Holy Spirit whenever we perform a sacramental act.   We know that only God can make the bread and wine really communicate the living body of the Lord to us.  Only God can really make the baptismal water go all the way in, and cleanse us inside and out for new life in Christ.  Only God can really make two people married, one flesh as Christ and the church are one.  So we ask God the Holy Spirit to come, and the message of Pentecost that she is not ashamed to be here, no matter how ordinary the company.  The church was created and is most alive today when it includes all kinds of people, and embraces all kinds of differences among them.

Take Brandon and Briana, and their baby Dallas, who are being baptized here today.  They are ordinary people.  Briana’s nineteen, and Brandon just graduated from High School last week.  They are not married.  It is not certain whether they ever will be.  And yet they come here today, as they have been coming for the last year or so, seeking God’s blessing for their family and their lives.  They could go a lot of places to hear people tell them where they’ve gone wrong or what they should be doing differently, but in the grace of the Holy Spirit we say to them here, “What an adorable baby!”  They could go a lot of places to hear that they’d be welcome just as soon as they got married.   In the grace of the H0ly Spirit we say, “You have to make your own decisions, but remember—with God nothing is impossible. What can we do to help?” 

Mainly we’re just grateful that they’ve decided to throw their lot in with Jesus.  They are exactly the kind of people he chose carry on his mission in the world.  Just look at us!  You didn’t have to be there.  You don’t have to have it all together.  You don’t have to be one of the one-half of one percent.  You just need faith in the Holy Spirit within you, who called you into this work and is giving you the gifts to carry it out.  And you need faith in the Holy Spirit outside you who is hidden in the world, ready, waiting, eager to respond to what you have to say.