Proper 16 A

It is interesting to consider the messianic language observed in the post 9/11 George Bush presidency in relation to Constantine, whom Eusebius called the thirteenth apostle and the one in whom the Logos expressed a new divine initiative. The messianic status assumed by Constantine was a pre-Christian messianism, uninformed by the crucifixion’s interpretation of that story and, indeed, embracing a vision Jesus himself rejected. Constantine’s motive in calling the ecumenical councils was to maintain imperial unity rather than the critical pursuit of truth. The distortions of Christianity brought by Constantine have in many ways been reborn with new vigour in the conflicts and aspirations of recent Western history.

In the Matthew story for this Sunday (Matthew 16.13-20), Peter confesses his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah. Some were saying the life of Jesus was interpreting the life of John the Baptist or that of Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets in this contemporary moment. Peter says Jesus’ life interprets the story of the Messiah, or that he “is” the Messiah. Unlike Mark’s Jesus, Matthew’s Jesus does not immediately explain the Messiah’s necessary suffering, to which Peter famously objects. In Matthew, Jesus congratulates Peter on his inspiration, puns on his name to call him the rock on which he will build his church, and promises him that what he says will go. The addition is part of Matthew’s characteristic emphasis on the life of a church that embodies the presence of Christ (Emanuel) in its common life and acts as God’s presence in the world.

Matthew’s vision of the church does not merge the divine agenda with the agenda of the world, or the state, as under Constantine. While Jesus affirms Peter’s ministry in the world in the deepest possible sense, as a partnership with the transcendent God, what Peter has yet to understand is how such being-in-the-world is a matter of embracing the suffering of the world, identifying with the godforsaken and the abandoned in a way that shapes life in opposition to imperial Rome and the principles of the pax Romana.

What Jesus will say here about the Messiah is not so much something new, spoken against a Jewish understanding. Jesus interprets the faith of the people of exodus and exile ad the compassionate God who lived with his people through these experiences. The life of Jesus interprets his people’s Messiah story in one particular legitimate way that nevertheless sharpens oppsition to alternative interpretations—that Constantine would make, for instance, or George Bush or ancient Near Eastern religious culture in general, interpretations made from different social locations. This is the conflict of interpretation that will catch Peter as the story unfolds here.

What Peter must learn is what our reading from Romans teaches (Romans 12.1-8): to those who may be tempted by a faith that seeks accommodation and self-preservation in the world, a triumphalistic faith that is politically uncritical and therefore merely “spiritual”, to these Paul says the kind of spiritual worship he wants is one in which we put our bodies on the line. Being in the world is not accommodation to the world but transforming the world. Our “bodies” belong not just to God (and therefore to the future to which God calls us) but to the believing (and acting) community: we are “members together” (Romans 12.5). We are not our own. It is this kind of vision that animated Jesus on the cross and allowed the cross, a symbol of abandonment and death, to interpret the joyful solidarity of the kingdom. The cross, in a new understanding, becomes the new life of the resurrection. This is the new messianic vision, there at the very beginning in the OT heritage of transformation and liberation into new futures, but always new and unexpected. It is because of this necessary and painful engagement with the real world and the powers of history that we speak of the resurrection in terms of history, not because of the factuality of the appearance stories.

Connections to the Exodus 1.8 – 2.10 story ae obvious. The Hebrew midwives, unwilling to live subservient to the state, become midwives to a new future for their people. Bringing this story into our general theme, I am reminded of Matthew’s emphasis on engagement with an actual world as (often subversive and certainly suffering) agents of transformation. As “members together” the body of Christ shares in a messianic calling to transform our world to God’s future vision. Christ ‘r’ us. This is what is so scary for Peter. The messianic vision interpreted by the life of Jesus is not just about Jesus. It is about the Christian way of life. It is the pattern of our discipleship.

Proper 15 A

Isaiah 56.1-8, Matthew 15.21-28

Isaiah 56 marks the beginning of what has become known as Third Isaiah, which is characterised by the kind of inclusivist vision we have here in the embrace of the eunuch and the foreigner. This embrace effectively counters the exclusions announced in Deuteronomy 23.1-8. Just as pointedly, the pairing of eunuch and foreigner raises questions about the nature of the Abrahamic promise of children and land that has so fundamentally defined the Judean identity.

One of the things I find utterly delightful about our sacred scriptures is this habit of undermining or at least re-interpreting their own tradition. Here in Isaiah 56 we have an earlier instance of the attitude Jesus expressed when he said, “You have heard it said, but I say….” What Third Isaiah is saying is further intensified when we see it against the background of Ezra and Nehemiah laying down strict boundaries for who is in and who is out. This, along with the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26) and the idea of a Promised Land, constituted the inheritance of exile, a time when Israel not only preserved but in large part created and codified its identity in hostile surroundings.

The inclusive vision of Isaiah 56 is an alternative response to exile that goes back to more fundamental roots, to a faith that is based on justice rather than inheritance and the maintenance of identity and ritual purity over and against what is “other”. The chapter begins with the appeal to maintain justice, and one of the ways of doing this is to keep the Sabbath, which according to Deuteronomy is a way of maintaining justice rooted in the experience of exodus. Sabbath rest is Sabbath freedom, release from oppression and drudgery, a redefinition of the human being who is no longer seen as a beast of burden. Such freedom is inherently a universal principle limited neither to ethnic identity nor to place, and, indeed, a gift specifically given to the stranger as a way of remembering a people’s estrangement in Egypt.

Sadly, what seems to me the more fundamental vision of my faith tends to be the minority position. The land question, for instance, is still in control of the Ezras and the Nehemiahs. In the Sojourner’s ‘Daily Digest’ I receive via email I read today that "In exchange for West Bank land that Israel would keep, Olmert proposed a 5.5 percent land swap giving the Palestinians a desert territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip. ... The land to be annexed to Israel would include the large settlement blocs, and the border would be similar to the present route of the separation fence." How long can such injustice prevail? Good old Bob Dylan used to say the answer to that is so obvious it is blowing in the wind and defining an imminent future. So much for 1960s counterculture prophecy. The dispossession of the "other" is even worse now than it was then, as bad now as it was when Israel first returned from exile to insist on (re)claiming land rights.

The gospel lesson raises the perennial question. What does it take to listen to the voice of the Canaanite woman? To the eunuch? To the asylum seeker or the homosexual? According to the story in Matthew even Jesus (read ‘Christianity’) wears the traditional blinders. Even Jesus can forget that his tradition is inherently inclusive, as, indeed, it proved so infectiously to be after his death. The Ezras and the Nehemiahs have made of the so-called “Great Commission” at the end of this Gospel a mandate for proselytising, for building an imperial Church. It seems to me if we are going to teach what Jesus taught and do what Jesus did we will be sent by these words to liberate and affirm people, Sabbath-style, maintaining justice. Such a vision may always be against the grain. It always seems to be, anyway, even within our own tradition. But that doesn’t make it any less the gospel imperative, one that Jesus carried all the way to the cross. And in today's time of tension and disagreement within religious communities, the Church needs to be doing its creative best to carry this imperative forward in an articulate, public and forceful manner.

Proper 12 A

Genesis 29.15-28, Romans 8.26-39, Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52. I learned a lesson early in my ministry. There are plenty people out there who want to be part of a church community. The trick is to take down the barriers that keep them out. The readings we have for Proper 12 A are all about overcoming obstacles. Jacob wants Rachel, and works seven long hard years for her hand, only to come up against the principle that you can’t marry off the second daughter before the first. So, accepting Leah unquestioningly, he works seven more long hard years for Laban before he finally gets the bride he wants. And thank God for polygamy.

Paul teaches us to let nothing stand in the way of the love of God we have known in Jesus Christ. And in Mathew the merchant in the parable lets nothing stand between him and the pearl he desires. Seventeenth century Puritans spoke of the experience of conversion as “buying the pearl”. For once, life has a centre and a meaning that reconfigures everything else, an Ultimate Concern worth having, in Paul Tillich’s words.

The pearl and the treasure in the fields are secrets, hidden things like the mustard’s seed’s proverbial status as the least of all seeds. Jesus quotes Psalm 78, which is worth chasing up a few verses further:

¹Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

² I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,

³ things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.

⁴ We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.

The parables disclose fundamental mysteries that have been forgotten, according to this psalm, in the perverse behaviour of a previous generation. I think of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed” (verse 51). The idea is disclosure, not mystification. It’s like Pane and Teller explaining what the secrets are behind the trick they have just performed. And the secret is God’s unconditional love. You are accepted. In the context of Psalm 78, this secret comes in the gift of Torah, a way of life that is freely given to a people, without their deserving, that they might live as compassionately as God is compassionate. Freedom from servitude, land (the root meaning of salvation in Hebrew is “spaciousness”—a place in which to be free), a way of life that is compassionate and just, all this comes to us as a gift from what Burns called “the Giftie”.

This giftedness of the essential divine love that is the foundation of all of life is what theology means by “providence”. When Paul says (verse 28) all things work together for good for those who love God, he doesn’t mean a home in the suburbs with a paid-up mortgage or a holiday villa in Majorca, let alone peace in Zimbabwe. He gives this assurance in full awareness of the hardships and persecution surrounding the Christian life. Tillich, in The Shaking of the Foundations, says,

Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted….The content of the faith in Providence is this: when death rains from heaven as it does now, when cruelty wields power over nations and individuals as it does now, when hunger and persecution drive millions from place to place as they do now, and when prisons and slums all over the world distort the humanity of the bodies and souls of men as they do now, we can boast in that time, and just in that time, that even all of this cannot separate us from the love of God…..Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted.

What Tillich says is born out in the organic images of growth in the parables, the mustard seed, the yeast. The “creative and saving possibilities” that Paul speaks of as the Spirit moving within and through us in prayer and unvoiced desire are prior to human agency, divine, ultimate.

The business about predestination in this reading from Romans that has exercised the community of Reformed churches so painfully over the years can thus be understood in terms of this general priority of God’s love which becomes, for us, that pearl of great price. In our tradition, it became a rather frightening doctrine, leading to sermons like Jonathan Edwards’ notorious “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Probably influenced as much by sixteenth century theories of the divine sovereignty of kings as anything, John Calvin’s understanding of God’s complete sovereignty over human affairs combined with this passage to create something of a theological monster. But I doubt Paul was intending to speak systematic theology here. He’s picking up on prophetic language of covenant and promise, the general proclamation of a fundamentally gracious God: “A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” Exodus 34:6-7). The message is, God’s love is something you can count on, a fundamental sense of companionship in the midst of whatever disasters we may confront, a companionship we proclaim most visibly at the Lord’s Table, and in the Christian life to which we are called. At the end of the day it is in our discipleship that God’s promises become publicly visible. As we love one another no matter what, God’s Providence finds its place in the world. As Promise Keepers, we keep the promises that were made to us from the beginning of time, the mysteries the parables disclose. What gets in the way of us keeping the promises God has made to us?

Proper 11 A

Genesis 28.10-19. I suppose my mysticism comes from the influence of the late medieval mystics on Calvin. This is a rather unsung feature of Calvinism that the more stolid burghers who more generally represent my tradition have missed. But it is there. Mystical moments come as fleeting instances of insight incapable of verbal reproduction. You need to be there. Three mystical experiences, more intense, rivalling Jacob’s vision of angelic traffic, were all from my young adult years. Two of the three were induced by literature rather than by what we have defined as strictly orthodox religion. The earlier experience came the first time I heard Alan Ginsburg read. It was Wichita Vortex Sutra in a huge auditorium of a lecture hall in Indiana University, as arid a place as the wilderness at Luz where Jacob stopped for the night, but crowded to the rafters with desperate undergraduates who had, like me, grown up spiritually hungry in the small towns and farm communities of Midwest America. It was an incredible experience, as if I had been transported to a nowhere emptiness like West Texas or as if Ginsberg’s incantation had raised me several removes from ordinary earthbound experience. The second experience came as I finished reading Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time. I was sitting on the floor in the late afternoon by a roaring fire. And then it was like a second later the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace had gone cold. In between time, any sense of ego had disappeared as who I was merged with the universe. That is the only way I can describe it. Clearly, I hadn’t fallen asleep, as when I returned to ordinary consciousness I was still sitting erect on the floor beside the fireplace, now gone cold, hours later.

The third experience occurred following my first real experience of desperate poverty on the twelfth floor of a public housing project in South Side Chicago. I don’t need to go into the experience itself, only to say that when I returned to my flat I sat there in a trance for the whole weekend, eyes wide open but not really seeing anything as the wheels of my consciousness slowly reconfigured themselves.

Jacob’s experience of the angelic traffic at Bethel gives a clue to a patriarchal narrative in which the main characters are not so much free agents as they are figures in a bigger story for which God is the protagonist. We saw this most vividly in the story of Abraham and Isaac at Mount Moriah in which it is clear how little Abraham understands about the story he is caught up in. Here at Bethel we get the connection that explains what is happening, and what is happening is what all mysticism opens a window to. The story in which we have always considered ourselves to be the heroes are not, in fact, our stories at all, but God’s. This is the mystical vision. For all Jacob’s efforts to throw the dice in his favour, at the end of the day it is the grace of God that shapes his life. Jacob, unsure what to say, says that if God sticks with him, providing for his subsistence (“bread and clothing” was shorthand for the provisions given to slaves and seasonal workers—“daily bread” as we say in the prayer), then this cairn he has set up will be the God’s dwelling place, Bethel (house of God). He doesn’t even have to say this. God will stick with him, willy nilly, and this is God’s abode, a “thin place”, as George MacLeod described Iona, where earth is in easy access of heaven.

I remember with great embarrassment the time earlier in my sojourn here in the UK when I was reading this lesson from Romans (8.12-25) when I was still getting my bearings with British pronunciation, learning to say “garage” with the accent on the first syllable and “controversy” with the accept on the second. Over here, we pronounce the “h” speaking of a “herb” (it’s silent in the States) and often don’t when speaking of an “horse”. How were we supposed to do it when we said, verse 17, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and join heirs with Christ”. It certainly did sound odd when I gave “heirs” a hard “h”. All three times. How stupid. This has noting to do with explicating the actual lesson. I just wanted to confess it.

It continues to fascinate me that Paul unfolds the meaning of Jesus as the Messiah by bringing our own spiritual experience in line with his—sonship with God Is something we share. As last week’s lesson spoke of the same Spirit of God that raised Christ from the dead (at his conversion, at his baptism?) being within us to raise us to new life (at our conversion, baptism?), so this week “all who are led by the Spirit, they are sons of God” (Romans 8.14). We, like Jesus, are adopted as God’s sons (and daughters)—Paul’s language is much more in line with Mark and John, and he seems to know nothing of the kind of birth narrative we have in Matthew and Luke.

There is a big “if” qualification here. If we suffer like him, we will be glorified like him. Suffering, here, is a broader, more essential condition of our humanity than the specific, historical experience of persecution, but it is nevertheless a stance taken and a witness made. For Paul, the great visionary, any mystical experience like the exuberant sense of entering into adoption as a child of God at baptism is lived out practically, and here this is a suffering taken on as solidarity with creation itself, a fundamental one-ness with a world that is always in a state of becoming, as Aristotle would say, or a state of flux, more Platonically conceived. In order to grasp what Paul is on about I think we have to get into the messy, eclectic mix of Hellenistic philosophical discourse. For the Stoics, for instance, the spiritual goal was to rise above the essential “suffering” the self (ego) experienced in the world through the pursuit of an inner harmony and self-control that in turn resulted in public responsibility and civil order. Paul takes a different tack. We are to suffer “with [Christ]” as a way of living in solidarity with all who can only hope for a better future. There is this sense of companionship that is there from the very beginning, or lived out from baptism, as we live out a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that is inseparable from our sense of oneness with others and with creation itself. This solidarity is of course the key to that future we hope for but do not see. In a sense, it is already the fulfilment of that hope, though the realisation of that may only come in fleeting visions, like Jacob’s fleeting vision of the traffic of angels between earth and heaven.

The story in Matthew is the story of the weeds sown among the corn in Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43. Think about what this parable may have felt like had it not been so awkwardly interpreted by Matthew’s follow-up allegorical explanation, allegory being a mode of interpretation foreign to Semitic practice. What if the original parable had gone something like, “The kingdom of heaven is like what happens when the farm workers refrain from pulling up the weeds lest they inadvertently pull up the corn in the process." Clear judgement will come. But the emphasis is thrown not so much on the weeds and the evil one as it is on the sense of forbearance, a fundamental Christian virtue. Those who refrain from condemnation have the mind of Christ, who was a servant of all, who suffered in solidarity with all. To refrain from judgement, then, is to live in a sense of oneness with the Spirit of God that flows through who we most deeply are. Todd Weir has a brilliant take on this reading, quoted on The Text This Week website: "The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and tares. Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul." Several weeks ago I explored Jung’s concept of the unconscious “shadow” in terms of the process of individuation and the sense of accepting ourselves as whole persons, shadow, warts and all. The parable invites us to see as God sees, to open our lives to God’s world- and self-transforming Spirit. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. This is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn about ourselves. Sometimes it takes a bit of a mystical vision, to get the whole picture.

Proper 10 A

Genesis 25.19-34; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-23

Did you ever hear the story of the two Bole Weevils who were rivals for the hand of a lovely little female Bole Weevil? We used to enjoy telling this story when I was studying for my PhD in literature back in the 1970s, because one of the Bole Weevils was a slight, scholarly type. In the comic books we grew up with there was always an ad for the “dynamic tension” Charles Atlas body-building programme. The ad showed a skinny kid getting sand kicked in his face by a beach bully. This was the familiar type being portrayed by the scholarly Bole Weevil in the story. His rival was an athletic type, rather dense, like Esau in the Old Testament story—one who would enjoy hunting and knew how to do car repair and lay tiles. The girls always went for this type. The scholarly Bole Weevil knew he didn’t have a chance as a suitor. But at the end of the day he was indeed the one chosen by the lovely little female Bole Weevil, to everyone’s surprise. And why? Because he was the lesser of the two Weevils.

This joke explains an awful lot of the Genesis narrative, and indeed the self-understanding of the Israelites throughout their history—the story of the triumph of the underdog. This is the story of Gideon, the story of the slaves in Egypt, the story of those who were exiled to Babylon for their own damned fault, but for whom God’s grace nevertheless became real once more in their homecoming. The story of Israel is the story of God’s grace for the underdog.

In Jacob’s case this story is dramatised as the unwillingness of the second child to settle for the cards he has been dealt. In traditional societies everywhere the older child gets it all. The Patriarchal narrative in Genesis is about patrimony going to those one would least expect to receive it—Isaac, born so late and unexpectedly in Abraham’s life just when all hope of promise would seem to have been dried up, Jacob the second son, and then when the disaster of famine hits it is the youngest, the good-as-dead Joseph who saves the day for his brothers. These are all stories of hope in defeat and exile, and they form the theme behind the child who grabs onto his elder brother’s heel as he is born.

The point of the story of course is not just that the grace of God saves the underdog. The underdog refuses to settle for the cards as they have been dealt, as I said above. I think of community organisers like Saul Alinsky or some of the famous Twentieth Century martyrs, Martin Luther King, Jr, Ghandi, Oscar Romero—people who refused to accept the way things were and acted to change them. The story of Israel is both the story of God’s grace and the story of those who carry the will of God in their own hearts to work for change.

Paul’s explication of the struggle between “the law of the spirit of life in Christ” and “the law of sin and death” in Romans 8 needs to be seen in terms of this underlying significance of the Jacob story as it broader biblical context. It certainly won’t do to diminish the significance of what Paul is saying by limiting it to a merely personalised concern for what we do with our silly members. The law of sin and death is not only that incurvature of the spirit to the concerns of self and security as described by Augustine but the limitation of hope to preserving the stability of what has been known in the past. What Paul is speaking about is a dynamism of a living spirit that breaks through all fundamentalisms and literalisations and power structures in family life, society, church and geopolitics that fear the future and fear vulnerability and fear what compassion for others might require of us—power structures that so often form the scaffolding of our very identities and leave us unable to grow and mature. It is one of the greatest mistakes of Christianity to see what Paul is talking about in terms of biological death and life after death. These are merely the vehicles of a metaphor articulating a dynamic that takes place in the ordinariness of our lived lives, in our experience of transformation and liberation. The church has hijacked this powerful language of personal and social transformation that lies so deeply in the heart of Scripture and literalised it as palliative assurance to the emotionally vulnerable at the time of funerals, and, as a consequence, severely impoverished the spiritual life of its people. When Paul says, verse 11, “If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you” (my emphasis). The real death Jesus died, after all, was the same death we die at our conversion, the death to sin: “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God” (Romans 6.10). Death, for the baptised, is not something we either dread or anticipate in the future. For the Christian, death is located in the past. As the baptised, we can say, “I died” (Romans 7.10). This for me is a core theme in the Christian life, and so much works against us addressing it openly.

The opening of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 always reminds me of the huge cottonwood tree that stood outside our house across the street from the church I served in Chicago. Once a year the entire neighbourhood was covered with its seeds—billions and billions (to quote Carl Sagan) of white downy little things carried on the hot summer air—a perfect image of the prodigality of God’s grace. But who understands God’s grace, and who can receive it? The inability of some to hear and see has been proverbial from the year zot, as Matthew indicates by quoting the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 6.9). Those who can hear (i.e., whose lives are fertile ground for the seed) are described more clearly in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. They are those whose spirits have been crushed, those who mourn and are not comforted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are peacemakers, the anawim. The very experience of brokenness, in other words, is a prime factor in being able to hear (and therefore receive) the grace of God that remains opaque to others. The “others” are those who for reasons of social position, power, wealth and so on lead them to so focus in upon themselves and the anxious preservation of their own securities that they remain deaf to the gospel call to let go and to allow God to be God. Those who grasp lose, those who let go for the sake of Christ gain.

Matthew throws in a verse that in Mark is part of a parable about stewardship: “For those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Again, this needs to be read alongside the blessings of the Beatitudes, I think. In both Mark and Matthew this wisdom is about how unfair the gospel is, but in Matthew those who have been most blessed with wisdom are those at the bottom of the pile. In the upside down world of the gospel the voice of authority comes from below, from those who know what righteousness is because they have been denied it, and from the crucified, not, that is, from Caesar or from Pharaoh, the usual sources of authority. The wisdom of the parables has been denied to the clever.

Those who constitute poor soul for the gospel therefore are those whose life encumbrances make it virtually impossible for them to hear. They are poor stewards, unable to risk themselves in giving, and poor hearers of the Word. The seeds may be broadcast, but these seeds are pitched toward those who hold counter-values to the prevailing social order, which, like religion, always has this tendency toward a conservativism and resistance to change that guarantees oppression of the weak.

But it's not just politics we’re speaking of here. I had a conversation with a lovely young woman at a party a few weeks ago that lead to a question about what books we liked to read. Her favourites were those personal motivation books I see dominating the shelves at the airport W. H. Smiths shop. It came out later that her mother had died a couple of years ago, and that she was still struggling with this, and that she and her mother had both expected her mother to get better even at the last moment of an obviously terminal illness. I thought to myself as I listened how typical this young woman must be in representing the anxieties Matthew is so concerned about in his gospel, and how her anxieties are encouraged by being surrounded by a culture that pushes us to be all we can be without limits. Read The Fat Jesus by Lisa Isherwood. We can’t hear the gospel because we are possessed by the culture we live in.

A few years ago, thinking about my looming retirement (this coming January), I responded to a programme the county council was running giving free training to those who might wish to start up a business. I had a few interviews with an advisor in the programme. He saw the business of business as an ideology, and saw the church as the great enemy. The best thing about life was to get there first and climb to the top of the pile. He had no use for Fair Trade or Fair Trade, let along our work with destitute asylum seekers or other marginalised people like the gays and lesbians our open and affirming policy attempts to serve. It struck me how business damages people, and why there are so few business people in our churches today, whereas back in the fifties, when culture and church were more congenial bedfellows, we had plenty of business people in church. I believe it is still this way, in certain churches, back in my home country.

And then of course there is all this resistance to women bishops in the Church of England. What are the cultural factors that lead so may people to think this way? Who can explain the misogyny and the homophobia and the biblical literalism championed by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans?

In any case, there are multiple factors that lead the seeds to fall on infertile soil, and most of them have to do with the cultures in which we live and move and have our being. The gospel teaches us to break free, with the spirit that raised Christ from the dead, because at the end of the day these concerns that cause us to be deaf to the gospel are the sources of sin and death, in the Pauline sense of those words.

A final comment on Matthew 13 is that while Mark ended this story celebrating the superabundance of the harvest from the good soil, Mathew gives a variety of yields, a hundred, sixty, thirty-fold. Life is complex. Not even the good soil will give you consistent results.

Proper 9 A

Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67;
Matthew 11.16-19, 25.30

John, in prison, wants to know what the Messiah is up to. He sends his disciples to find out. Jesus invites them to see what is happening. At the end of our reading, Jesus says wisdom is made known by its results, and the results, in this case, are the fruits of the kingdom: the lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are healed, the dead are raised and the poor for once hear some good news.

The idea that wisdom is known by its results connects the idea of wisdom with the idea of prophecy in a very useful way. The true prophet, for instance, the one who actually speaks with the Lord’s voice, is the prophet whose words come true (Deuteronomy 18.22). The connection of prophecy to wisdom illuminates both traditions. Wisdom, with God at the creation, speaks out of the depth and purpose of what is. So does the prophet. And the prophet speaks in the name of God to make judgements and promises accordingly. I think of Jeremiah and Hananiah hammering it out over which one is really speaking the word of the Lord (Jeremiah 28.15). Which one has the greater wisdom?

The story that comes to my mind will not be familiar to British readers of this blog (if, indeed, there are any readers whatsoever!). When I was in my late teens and young adult years (1960-1968, a long, long time ago) The Andy Griffith Show was a weekly series on television telling the adventures of a dependable, level-headed small town sheriff named Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith). In American culture, the small town sheriff, like the small town mayor, is the epitome of wisdom. Andy’s role in each episode of the series was to straighten out the madcap, comic complexities brought on by the rest of the show’s characters, his son Opie, his maiden Aunt Bee and particularly his deputy, Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts. Week after week Sheriff Taylor is obliged to restore a community to order that has been rendered chaotic by Fife’s seemingly endless professional gaffes and social faux-pas. Sheriff Taylor’s homespun wisdom represents to me the best of the prophetic tradition. His typical response to Fife’s latest hare-brained scheme is to say, “I just don’t think that’s going to work around here, Barn.” This was the model of wisdom that was imparted to me by Harvey Lord in my internship at University Church in Hyde Park, Chicago Harvey said a pastor has to be like the typical small town mayor who knows the people and knows what is going to work and what is not going to work. That’s the way it was with Sheriff Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show. He was the prophet who could tell ahead of time what was going to work and what wasn’t.

In the biblical wisdom tradition, of course, we have the added factor that wisdom connects with the mind of God, to use a convenient anthropomorphic metaphor. It’s deep stuff. It involves understanding our scriptural heritage on the deepest level of significance and knowing the opposition as well. It involves a grasp of politics and an appreciation of the critical aspects of the historical moment. There may be an element of mania, but if prophetic mania is all we have, we wind up with prophets like Barney Fife when what we need is one like Sheriff Taylor.

Sheriff Taylor is not only able to predict what will happen if Barney Fife has his way. He is an agent in the plot—not just an observer. He sorts out the mess, recovering stability and order in the community. On a more serious level, this is Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The figure of the community doctor often took this role in medieval literature. In the New Testament we have Jesus. His wisdom is known by its results. Wisdom, like good prophecy, doesn’t just speak of what will be. Wisdom makes things happen.

And what does happen? The lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are healed, the dead are raised and the poor for once hear some good news—this is the standard formulaic way of saying the kingdom has arrived. But specifically, it means a party atmosphere has descended on this place. This is pure celebration. In the presence of Jesus, unlike John, fasting is impossible (Matthew 9.14-15). Jesus is the bridegroom, and through him the world becomes a wedding feast. This, too, cues in the messianic age in richly traditional language, and connects the gospel reading with the story of Isaac and Rebecca in our Old Testament reading. Blessing, in Hebrew Scripture, is the joyful fecundity celebrated in the coming together of men and women. In Genesis the image of God resides in men and women together. As for Adam and Eve, try reading Matthew Fox to understand this story as original blessing alongside the more familiar story of original sin. The story of Noah and his wife (Jewish tradition calls her Naamah) is all about blessing. The Abraham and Sarah story is all about blessing, as is the story of Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Rachel. In the light of these stories of original blessing, we need to see the stories that show how we get it wrong, like the story in Judges 19 that begins, "And the Levite took unto himself a concubine...." In the early monarchy David's adulterous affair with Bathsheba and the multitude of wives and concubines that lead Solomon to idolatry are to be seen as betrayals of this original blessing that will prefigure national collapse in the Babylonian exile. This dark, self-critical seam runs throughout the biblical narrative as a confession of primal betrayal. But that is another story. I digress.

The point is, there is something about wedding feasts and human fertility that connects centrally to the Hebrew vision of life with God, and this is the whole substructure of the tradition of the messianic banquet in subsequent prophetic tradition (well, some of the Patriarch narratives may be commenting on the prophetic vision, rather than vice versa).

There are always kill-joys who will not respond to anything. Enthusiastic children in the marketplace get frustrated because they play their flutes but their friends will not dance. They wail, but no one will weep. This, complains Jesus, is the story the world over. It is the kind of block-headed insensitivity to life that puts the bean-counting bureaucrats in charge of the churches and gets the visionaries crucified. But at the same time, everywhere, there are those who have enough wisdom to prophesy and there are others who are sensitive, or in need enough, to get the point, and weep tears that can neither be defined as tears purely of joy or purely of grief. They are both. At the consummation, at the wedding feast of the Lamb, and at the crucifixion, which is the same thing, the world's deepest joy and the world's deepest sorrow meet, and this is the kingdom. Barney Fife will never understand this. But Andy Taylor will tell you that this is where the best in human solidarity passes its test, and brings on great celebration. And this is what the Messiah is up to, even today. Go tell John the Baptist what you have seen and heard.

Proper 8 A

The tension in the Abraham and Isaac story (Genesis 22.1-9) is intensified by the spareness of the narrative. Abraham gives no word of consent to God’s command that he slaughter his son. Abraham gives no acknowledgement, neither yes nor no. He simply saddles his ass and prepares for the three day journey to Mount Moria. Abraham’s silence is only broken by his instructions to the two servants who have accompanied him. Wait here, he tells them. He and Isaac will shortly return. But Abraham believes he will return alone. He thinks he is keeping the servants from knowing the whole picture. We know that it is Abraham who doesn’t know the whole picture.

As Abraham and Isaac walk off together up the mountain, the silence is broken once again, this time by Isaac. Where is the sheep for the sacrifice, he asks his father. Again Abraham hides what he knows. God will provide, he says. And again, it is Abraham who doesn’t know.

Abraham prepares an altar, ties up his son, lays him across the firewood and reaches for his knife. Curiously, all this again happens in silence. The narrative is not interested in what Isaacx may be “feeling” or whether or not he is crying out. This is a story about Abraham. Abraham alone is the focus.

An angel of Yahweh calls his name, Abraham! Abraham! Abraham answers as he had to the voice of God in the beginning. Here I am. Yes. Abraham is told to lay down the knife, for God has seen how dedicated he is. A ram is provided for the sacrifice, and Abraham is promised once again that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the skies and the sands of the seashore.

This bare, skeletal narrative of the Abraham and Isaac story won’t allow us to ask the kind of questions today’s reader might like to ask, questions about the horrors of such blind, unquestioning obedience, for instance. This is no psychological novel.

We need to look elsewhere for meaning. This is the Abraham who proved his faith by leaving family behind in Mesopotamia in order to become the father of a new family. The definition of his life is gripped in paradox. Accordingly, here, the son who embodies this promise of countless descendents in future generations is being taken up to Mount Moria to be sacrificed. Again, Abraham must prove he is the one who will be blessed by offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky by his willingness to sacrifice his “only” son. To make an analogy with the gospel, those who seek to gain their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Those who lose them for his sake will gain them. This is the mystery we are confronting on Mount Moria. Despite the vividness of this narrative, it is not a psychological thriller, but the explication of a paradox as old as the hills. Those who die will live. Those who, like Abraham, empty themselves in selfless hospitality gain. Those who withhold hospitality (the sin of Sodom) lose. The meaning of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice the single means of God’s promise coming true for him is the same meaning we saw in his selfless hospitality. Here we meet the paradox in its starkest form, and in the paradoxical journey away from family to become a family.

The gospel (Matthew 10) has said that anyone who subordinates the demands of discipleship to family is “not worthy” of Jesus. Likewise, in the reading for this Sunday disciples who are willing to risk rejection, hatred, even death in order to bring the truth of Christ to the ends of the world are welcomed not for themselves but for this Jesus who sent them; and, ultimately, they welcome the presence of the one who sent Jesus. The mystery is the same: those who die will live. Our discipleship makes our lives transparent to the presence of God. That is life. When our lives become opaque, that is death. But through baptism we have moved from death to life.

When Paul says (Romans 6.23) that the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, he picks up this paradox. Death, here, is something you have to work for, a life of burdens, slavery to weariness. Life, on the other hand, is liberating and free. The real death Jesus died was a death to sin (Romans 6.10). We are invited to see ourselves, in our discipleship, as dead to sin and alive to Christ (Romans 6.11). Eternal life is what the Gospel of John says it is: knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ, whom he has sent (John 17.3). It has to do with hospitality, the capacity to empty ourselves in imitation of Christ, discipleship. The invitation is to a way of living, not to pie in the sky when you die, as the song says.