September 4, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about 9-11. With the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center coming up, there are stories and retrospectives all over the web about those events, and about how our world has changed over the last ten years. There’s another commemoration that comes before next Sunday, and that is our observance tomorrow of Labor Day. I’ve not noticed, except among progressives here in Madison, much reflection on that holiday in light of the protests here and elsewhere over the challenges to workers’ rights. Continue reading →

August 21, 2011

What’s in a name? We have heard stories of name changes in Genesis—Yahweh changed Abram’s name to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, and Jacob to Israel. In today’s gospel, Jesus changes Peter’s name from Simon, to Peter—the rock. What’s in a name? How is it tied up with our self-identity? Continue reading →

Proper 15, year A

Mt 15:21-28

August 14, 2011

Imagine you are a parent, a mother whose daughter is ill. You’ve been to all the doctors, they haven’t given you a certain diagnosis, and they haven’t been able to treat her. All they can say is that she’s possessed by a demon. You’re at your wits’ end. You’ve even tried the quacks, the self-styled miracle workers and faith healers. But nothing has worked. Now you hear about this guy who’s coming through town; he’s not from around here, he’s Jewish, and back where he’s from, he’s done some amazing things. So you figure, let’s go check him out.

You see him walking down the road with his entourage, there are lots of people around him, and surrounding him are a bunch of guys who look like his security detail, his handlers. You have no chance to get close to him, so you cry out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” You’re making quite a ruckus by now, so the security guys, ok, let’s call them disciples, tell Jesus, “send her away.”

This is your last chance to help your daughter and you hope your shouted plea will bring a response, but the guy, Jesus, just keeps walking as if he didn’t hear you. So you keep trying. What do you have to lose? Somehow, you are able to elbow your way through the crowd, get past his handlers. Now, you kneel in front of him and ask again, “Lord, have mercy.”

Now you’re making a scene in front of him, blocking his way, so finally, Jesus has to respond. But does he turn to you in compassion and ask you what’s wrong? No. He tells you that your problems are no business of his. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, I am here to help Jews, not Gentiles, like you.

In fact, the gospel has made that point even more clearly in its description of the woman as a Canaanite. To call her a Canaanite is bizarre. The Canaanites of course were Israel’s old enemies 800 years before. They had worshipped Baal and his female consort Asherah, and the Old Testament is full of stories of conflicts between Yahweh, Israel’s God, and Baal. So Matthew is trying to make the point that this woman is completely outside of God’s care, she’s not just any old gentile—she’s belongs to the most worthless, most hated group of all.

So Jesus tells you, “look I’ve got nothing to do with you.” But like any loving parent, you won’t take no for an answer. “Lord, help me,” you plead.

Now Jesus responds to you directly, but what he says is hardly reassuring. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” You’re not sure you believe your ears. Indeed, we hearing these words 2000 years later, aren’t sure we get what Jesus means.

But what the meaning quickly becomes clear. You do get it and reply, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.”

Let’s stop right here. Did you get it this time around? Jesus has basically called her (and those of her community) dogs. She doesn’t deny it, she doesn’t bristle at the put down. Instead, she turns it back on him. “We may be dogs, Jesus, but remember, loving masters give their dogs table scraps to eat.”

Now, you’ve finally convinced him. Jesus praises your faith, and your daughter is healed instantly. Not a very pretty story is it? Jesus isn’t behaving like he’s supposed to behave, and the woman isn’t exactly a model of proper decorum, either.

This is may be of the most troubling stories in all of the gospels. Jesus is supposed to be merciful and compassionate, he’s supposed to respond with love and care when someone asks him for help. But that’s not what he does here. It’s not just that Jesus treats her with what appears to be enormous disrespect. It’s that she forces him to change his mind, to do something he seems not to want to do.

This story reminds of something quite important. Jesus is not quite everything we want him to be. We’ve got this warm, fuzzy notion about Jesus and this story breaks that notion apart. We want him to behave according to our standards and expectations, to fit into the box we’ve made for him, but unfortunately, the gospels tell a different story. As much as we want to domesticate Jesus and make his message one that confirms our preconceived notions of faith and of God, the gospels tell a different story. And this story may be the one that is most challenging of all.

One of the things I like about this story is that it shows a woman, an outsider, someone who has no religious power or even religious significance in the Jewish world of first century Palestine, challenging Jesus. More than that, as an outsider, as someone of reviled status, she forces herself into the story. She forces her way through Jesus’ disciples. She forces him to pay attention. She makes him stop in his tracks and notice her. When he ignores her dismisses her, she doesn’t walk away. She flat out disagrees with him, takes issue with him, engages in wordplay, and beats him at his own game.

The story addresses one of the central problems in early Christianity—the relationship of gentiles to the God of the Jews. Now, it’s not a big deal for us, since we are, I presume the vast majority of us, Gentile Christians, we weren’t Jews. But it was a big deal for the first Christians. In fact, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus ministers to Gentiles only three times and this is the first occasion in his public ministry that he encounters a Gentile. It is clear that his mission is to Jews. After his resurrection, of course, he commissions the disciples to “make disciples of all nations.” But at this point, Jesus’ ministry is to the Jewish community and it may be, that until this encounter with the Canaanite woman, he had no notion that he might also minister outside that community, to Gentiles. Certainly, Matthew places this story here, to use it as a turning point in the gospel.

Just as the Canaanite woman challenged Jesus, this story challenges us. We claim to be followers of Jesus, but this remarkable tale confronts us with two very different models of following him. On the one hand, there are the disciples who are acting here as security guards to prevent unwanted people from gaining access to Jesus. They protect the traditional standards and boundaries of the faith. Moreover, they have not exactly been examples of faith. Jesus tells them more than once, “Oh, you of little faith.”

On the other hand, there is the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus on her knees, addresses him as Son of David, and says, as we say in the liturgy, “Kyrie Eleison, Lord, have mercy.” In the end, Jesus says to her, “Great is her faith.” It is she that exhibits faith, she who understands who Jesus is, she who is the true follower, disciple, of Jesus.

But her faith is not the docile, simple faith that is so often extolled in works of piety or devotion. Hers is a questioning, challenging faith, a cheeky faith—demanding answers and responses not only from those around her, but also from the very God in whom she believes, the Jesus, before whom she kneels and begs, “Kyrie, Eleison, Lord have mercy.”

The Canaanite woman speaks for all of us when she demands that Jesus help her, because in Matthew’s gospel, it is in part through her demand that the mission of Jesus was extended to us. But she also challenges us all. She demands of us to admit where we stand, with the disciples who maintain the boundaries of comfort and convention, or with a God who is constantly breaking down the barriers that divide human beings from one another, who constantly challenges us to imagine a God whose grace and mercy extends not only to ourselves and those like us, but to all those whom we hate, revile, ignore, and dismiss.

Proper 12, Year A

July 24, 2011

Corrie and I are trying to choose paint colors for our house. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now, so it’s not like we’re acting impulsively. Of course, the colors that are on the walls right now are quite attractive, and have become familiar to us. But we want something different. Just what we want, we aren’t quite sure. It’s been a long process. Over Christmas, I put a few patches of color here and there, then a few months later, another set of options were added. A couple of weeks ago, I put a coat of primer over all of the old paint samples, and we’ve started anew. It’s getting rather urgent, because I’m starting two weeks of vacation tomorrow and the plan was that I spend much of the time painting. The problem we’re having is that we find it hard to imagine just what this or that room will look like in this or that color. We ask ourselves, is that what we really want?

In a way, our struggle with paint colors is not unlike much of life. We live in patterns and routines that we follow for no apparent reason except that they are comfortable and we can’t imagine what it might be like to live in a different way. It’s only when something big shakes us out of those old patterns that we see the possibility of something new, although often that possibility is quite frightening, brought on by illness, death of a loved, loss of a job, or something else of that magnitude. It’s rare that we will take such leaps into the unknown, into an imagined future without such prodding. The comfortable, the familiar, is just too easy, too normal. Continue reading →

Proper 10, Yr A

July 10, 2011

Well, it’s summer in Madison. Life has slowed down just a bit, except on the square where summer means a never-ending succession of events that disrupt parking and help to keep attendance down at Grace. Though, truth be told, we use it as a convenient excuse, that and the heat. Chances are, even if there were plenty of parking for anyone who wanted a spot, our attendance would still be lower in the summer than in the rest of the year. That’s the way it works in pretty much every other church.

It’s summer, and we have entered, at last, the long months of what in the Catholic liturgical calendar, is called ordinary time. From now until the beginning of Advent, we will be paying close attention to Jesus’ ministry as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. We will also be hearing, week by week, stories from the Hebrew Bible, where this week, we hear of the birth of Jacob.

Summer, Ordinary Time, also means that we will hear a number of Jesus’ parables, beginning with the familiar one we heard today. Because we will be reading a number of the parables over the course of the next months, it might be helpful to remind ourselves of what the parables are and why they are important. Parables are stories that Jesus used to explain the nature of the Kingdom or Reign of God. In fact, he introduces several of them by saying the “Reign of God is like… and then goes on to tell the story. So the first thing to note is that the parables are meant to teach Jesus’ listeners, what the reign of God is like.

The second thing to note is that the parables are meant to be surprising; they are meant to challenge the listener to look at the world from a completely different perspective. This may be difficult for us, because many of us have heard these stories countless times, we could probably tell some of them by heart. But it’s important for us to try to recapture the strangeness of the parables in order to make them live again, and in order to discover what Jesus meant by preaching the Reign of God.

To do this, I am going to tell you the story of the sower again; this time without the editorial context in which Matthew put it, and without the second half of the story, the interpretation that Jesus offered his disciples when they asked him what it meant. It’s likely that these words of interpretation were not said by Jesus himself, but were the attempt of Christians a generation or two later, to understand the story and to put it in a meaningful context for this new community of faith.

So here is probably what the parable sounded like in its original form:

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Now, hearing the story in this way should raise numerous questions, but in case you think its meaning is obvious, let me ask you two questions. The first is, are any of you vegetable gardeners? If so, would any of you behave the way the sower does in this parable?

I could ask it another way. Are any of you farmers; well unless we have visitors, I know the answer to that question; but since we’re in Wisconsin, I assume most of you have some familiarity with modern agricultural practices, and you know that no farmer even in this day and age would act quite like the sower does in this parable. But do you know how farmers in the days before modern agribusiness did their work? I’ve heard stories about how my grandfather carefully selected his seed corn from the biggest ears, so I know how important that seed was to him and farmers before WW II. I’m also a historian, so I’ve read about how European peasants, and yes, Palestinian peasants in the Roman period operated. Of course the seed for next year’s planting came out of this year’s harvest, and even when harvests were relatively good, there was a difficult choice to make between having enough grain to make flour to feed one’s family, or saving enough seed to make sure you would be able to plant a crop in the next season.

In other words, this sower is behaving in completely non-sensical ways. Given the value of the seeds, he would not be so careless as to allow seed to go to waste by flinging it on rocks, or on a compacted path, or among weeds.

The sheer profligacy of the sower’s actions only become clear when we interpret it against this backdrop of subsistence farming and the annual reality that there might not be enough grain to feed one’s family or to sow the next year’s crop. Seen this way, the sower’s actions are so out of character, so unpredictable and unnatural that we can begin to tease out the parable’s meaning from those very actions.

For it is the case, that seen in this light, there is often, perhaps almost always, unexpected and unpredicted behavior in the parables. Yet, this reality may not bring us any closer to their meaning. Jesus often introduces his parables by saying, “the kingdom of God is like…” So how is the kingdom of God like a sower who acts irrationally and unexpectedly, with such extravagance and profligacy? Or, to put it another way, what does this parable tell us about God, God’s vision for the world and for human community?

Asked in this way, the parable invites us to imagine, to believe in a God who acts in ways completely counter to our values and expectations. We live in a world in which religion, especially Christianity, seems to be consumed with establishing barriers between those who are in and those who are out, between true and false belief, moral and immoral action. Many of us may be repulsed by such forms of Christianity, but that is the public face of our faith. Yet the God of Jesus Christ is not a God who puts barriers between us and them. Far from it. Jesus Christ preached a gospel of inclusion and welcome; the kingdom of God he proclaimed imagines a world in which all creation is embraced by God’s love.

As hard as that is for us to conceive as we look out at a broken and hurting world, it is often even more difficult to imagine when we look inside ourselves. We are often apt to hear words of judgment on our selves, our actions, know our own broken and hurting selves, and assume that God rejects us. But that’s not the case either. Whatever we have done in the past, all of the hurt and brokenness we have caused, indeed all of the hurt and brokenness that we experience in our own lives, all of that we can bring to God, and find love and acceptance.

To experience that love is what God’s reign is all about; to know, and love a God whose love towards us is as profligate and expansive as the seed thrown by the sower on good and bad soil, to love that God is what our faith proclaims. That message, God’s expansive love and accepting love, is also our duty to proclaim and share in this broken and hurting world.