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.

Proper 7 A

Genesis 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39.

This is Refugee Week. Sarah, jealous for Isaac of Abraham’s son by the Egyptian slave Hagar, demands that Hagar and the child be banished. Abraham obeys, even while he is full of regret. In Islamic tradition, all this comes as a command from God, not Sarah, by the way. Hagar and her son Ishmael (Ismael in Arabic) go out into the wilderness of Be’er Sheva to die.

One agenda excludes another. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t come bringing peace, but conflict. His agenda must have priority, and so it is with the promise to Abraham and Sarah. So the story of Hagar’s exile informs not only the stories told by the many displaced people seeking asylum in our world today and their vulnerability. It also informs what is perhaps the primary conflict of our time, the conflict between the sons of Abraham, the Jewish/Christian community and the Moslem East. Ismael is the father of the Arabs.

The story is concrete and contemporary. I thought of Ismael’s exile the other day when I was speaking with an Iraqi man we know, a failed asylum seeker living in destitution, shunned by the people he is living among because his story is not their story. When he came to this country nine years ago asylum seekers were allowed to work, and he had landed a job with Royal Mail working in a local post office. But then the immigration authorities changed the rules. He was no longer allowed to work, and had to live instead on the meagre allowance given to those who were seeking asylum. But even that support has been exhausted, and as he awaits an appeal of his failed petition, he lives off the good will of friends and acquaintances, the Refugee Council and our church. I thought he was beginning to look quite emaciated. We arranged to give him a lift to Birmingham, where someone he knows may have a place for him to live as he awaits the appeal. We gave him a fiver—all we had—and he wept. Here is the living Ismael, exiled to the wilderness because there is no room for his story in the mainstream story the rest of us were living by.

The meaning of the Genesis story is that God’s concerns are always bigger than ours. No matter how you interpret the inheritance of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it’s still a tribal thing, a story that excludes, something by nature partial and incomplete. The author of what we are reading is deeply aware of this, and shows God’s care for the excluded. God brings water to the wilderness for Hagar and her son, and promises that the child will become the father of a great nation. There is a tension between tribalism and universalism here that runs like a bright thread throughout Israel’s troubled history. Israel’s literature is acutely aware of the larger narrative, and acutely aware of its own ambivalent position (even though the same cannot always be said about the Zionist ideology of Israel as a modern state). Today at a conference called "Fear, Democracy and Religion" (the third in a series here in Wales bringing Christian and Muslim leaders together in dialogue), Robin Morrison, Church and Society advisor for the Church in Wales (Anglican), said "My trust in God ends when I think I can erect the boundaries of my faith and police them." My trust needs to be in a God that is bigger than anything I believe. If I erect doctrinal limits to God, I am in sin. And yet I cannot avoid speaking of God in language that is limited and culture specific. The Abraham and Hagar story teaches us the pain of this paradox.

The gospel reading from Matthew 10 provides profound commentary on this Genesis story. This conclusion to the discourse on sending the twelve brings home the central good news in Matthew that the sending of the twelve into the world parallels the sending of Christ into the world, a mission to those in peril by one who himself began life as a refugee, a mission to the lost, the harassed, to those whose spirits have been crushed, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The concern is no longer tribal. It reaches back to Israel’s incipient self-critical universalism to become a mission to “the ends of the earth”, with a God that is the God of both Isaac and Ismael.

We recall last week’s reading, in which Jesus (the Lamb of God) sees his own harassed people as sheep without a shepherd, and sends the twelve to them as sheep among the sheep, as lambs as vulnerable to the menace of the wolves as those they are sent to. Jesus himself has pioneered the way, “numbered among the transgressors”, as Isaiah said. The twelve should not think of themselves as immune from the kind of suffering Jesus endured. Those who read the Gospel of Matthew already know the basic story, of course, and here the cross is mentioned for the first time in this gospel. The path of discipleship is the way of the cross. If Jesus was called the devil incarnate, they will be, too. It’s no easy street, but Jesus says don’t let them get to you. Peacemakers must learn to immerse themselves in the conflict their vision of justice for the dispossessed generates among those wed to the status quo. No truth worth telling is without conflict, and it must be spoken openly and courageously.

The mystery behind the sending of the twelve as unprotected lambs in the midst of such conflict is the mystery of the incarnation itself. What the incarnation attempts to teach through symbolic narrative, “myth”, if you will, is just this sense of being “sent” into a world of conflict, born into a world where Herod’s soldiers are out to get you, or, as Luke would have it, where there is no hospitality at the inn. The incarnation is a metaphor of our own vocation as disciples to put flesh on the Word of God through action and engagement among the excluded. The mission to the “ends of the earth” undertaken at the end of this gospel is not to be understood as expansionist empire building in the way monotheistic religions can too often operate, as if all the values pursued throughout this gospel were suddenly thrown away at the end, but a going out in solidarity with the lost sheep and with those like Ismael who find themselves in exile, or to those who are crushed in spirit, those who mourn, the anawim of the Beatitudes. This is the way of the cross, the new life into which we who have died with Christ are reborn in our baptism.

Proper 6 A

Genesis 18.1-15, Matthew 9.35-10.23. The mysteries behind our lessons for this Sunday are almost unbearably deep. First of all, the three visitors receiving the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 are also God in some strange and ambiguous way. They are addressed in verse 3 as “my Lord” (adonai), a word with neither gender nor number, which is either a term for God or a general term of respect. Later in the story, “the Lord” appears to be one of the three, as the other two travel off on their own to visit Lot in Sodom. The three certainly constitute a divine presence—and we remember our favourite Orthodox icon of the Trinity depicting these three. In any case, God in Hebrew thinking seems to have had a plural dimension.

We can imagine, in the light of the Matthew story, these three visitors sent to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. They are bringing news of an unexpected inbreaking future. The hospitality factor is crucial. The hospitality is a present reality revealing and anticipating the promised future. In India they have this popular yet profound saying, that “the guest is God”. In Calvinism we have a different saying, “letting God be God”, which has to do with God’s sovereign authority. The Hindu saying is much more relevant to this Sunday’s lessons. The godness of God is somehow connected to the hospitality of the host, which, in a sense, allows God to happen. God is more of a verb than a noun, more of a relationship at least than a something. For the Calvinist the godness of God happens when the believer becomes open to conversion, but such moments of conversion are never genuine unless that include concrete acts of hospitality to ordinary others, both stranger and neighbour. The guest is God. Calvin himself would have understood this. For him the foundation of all theology was an understanding of God unavailable apart from the understanding of self, and the self could never be understood without understanding God. Scholastic Calvinism post-Synod of Dort loses this tension, as do the Barthian neo-orthodox, who put too much weight on God and lose the human dimension altogether. God becomes so removed and abstracted from human experience that he becomes an irrelevant cipher, the sort of thing people like Don Cupit and the God-is-dead movement people used to enjoy writing about. I think the Arminians, defeated at Dort, came closer to maintaining that original tension between God and human experience. Oh dear, I fear I am getting much too academic here. Let's go back to the readings.

The link between the Matthew reading and the Genesis reading is not hospitality as such but failed hospitality. Matthew 10.15 warns that for those who refuse hospitality to the twelve the judgement will be worse than for Sodom and Gomorrah, the story immediately following the Abraham and Sarah episode. You will remember that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the inhospitable reception of the two men who had come to visit Lot, a story that is basically the same story we read in the story of the Levite and his concubine at the end of Judges. Current scholarly opinion is that the Judges story is the earlier of the two. Both stories show that the culture of hospitality so deep seated in the Near East even today is no final virtue. As the Levite gives the crowd his concubine to gang rape, so Lot offers his two (betrothed!) virgin daughters, only to be held back from doing so by the heavenly visitors, who then obliterate Sodom and Gomorrah. Hospitality can be problematic. The promise needs to be bigger than ordinary human convention.

In Matthew of course the story of failed hospitality seems to reflect the trials and persecutions experienced by the early Christian community that constituted his readership. Jesus sends the twelve out as sheep among wolves. Augustine comments that this is a brilliant move. The common strategy is to send out wolves among sheep and, indeed, the well-meaning predatory manipulation of a vulnerable public that passes for evangelical strategy in today’s world tells us what Augustine is talking about. Don’t leave conversions to accident, the professional evangelists say. It is amazing how so many consultants in church growth have adopted the theories and methods of modern marketing. They ought to read Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda. Ellul's chilling account of how we communicate and how churches have adopted the communication strategies of the business community warns that you cannot adopt the media of communication without adopting the predatory ideology. It comes as a package, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can separate the two. Most contemporary evangelism operates as wolves among sheep. Jesus wants us to throw off the power evangelism and operate as sheep among wolves.

The twelve are sent empty handed and without resources, vulnerable enough to evoke a spirit of hospitality in anyone with any human sensitivity, and thus enable the God-event to happen. Their unaccomodated journey is stripped not only of its survival kit but of the trappings of office and authority abandoned in the very journey of incarnation, an existential emptiness that, as in King Lear, enables us to touch the deepest dimension of being human, and, so, open to the hospitality of others. This, at the end of the day, is mission in reverse. We allow those we meet to enable the God-event to happen through their hospitality and our capacity to be guests in their presence. Thus the good news, so unexpected and so miraculous that it brought laughter to old Sarah, is experienced when the missionary is able to listen and so confer dignity and authority upon the host. The genius is to be sent as sheep among wolves. This is the way of the cross. It can change the world.

It is interesting to observe that "sheep" occur three times in this reading. First, Jesus describes the harassed and helpless crowd as being "like sheep without a shepherd" (9.36). Second, the twelve are sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10.6), to those Jesus has observed in their harassed and helpless state, but specifically to their particular socio-political situation--not to just anyone, as if the good news had some kind of bland, generic applicability to just anyone. And third, the twelve themselves are to contextualize themselves in the very harassed, helpless world of those who will become their hosts. They are to go"like sheep" into the midst of wolves (10.16). They will have no more protection, no more status than those they are being sent to. This is the gospel narrative in little, isn't it? It also repeats the narrative of the Exodus, in which Yahweh sees the oppression of the Hebrews and sends Moses to deliver them. The same promise, "I will be with you", is repeated in this story: "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me" (10.40). The guest is God. Christ 'R' Us.

Proper 4 A

“Be doers of the word,” we read in James, “and not merely hearers.” That well-known verse from James summarises what we get here in Matthew at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

I spent last summer writing a course called “Introduction to Christianity as a way of life”. It ran for two months in the autumn. If I had the energy, I would lay it on again this year, but there is just too much going on right now. I think I will recruit someone else to run it.

The course was motivated not just because of my growing conviction that Christianity is far more than a set of beliefs. The motivation also came from a concrete experience early in my ministry. Here’s the story: Mike Sugano and his wife became members of the first church I served, in Chicago. They’d come to St James as many other young adults had, as something like refugees from the narrowness of an otherwise thriving, large evangelical church, looking for something more solid to bite on and for more social action. Mike had literally been converted on a streetcorner. When he and his wife divorced, he naturally found much of his emotional support in his family and in the Chicago Japanese community—Mike worked for a family firm, and he was the only Christian there. So it was no surprise to me when he started attending the Chicago Buddhist temple. Gyomay Kubose, along with his son a friend of mine, was the founder of this community and the leader there.

It was good for Mike to return to his roots. What bothered me was something he said when he came to me one day, and, sitting in my office, explained to me how important this was and what it meant to him. Christianity, he said, was a way of believing, while Buddhism was a way of life. I winced. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. But that, by and large, was the way it was. And I recognised this as coming from Kubose, too, as Kubose had his arguments with Buddhists who practised a merely cultural form of Buddhism, attending temple and reciting sutras, the kind of religious practice Jesus is complaining about here in those who attempt to ingratiate themselves by crying “Lord! Lord!” Buddhism needs to be a personal, disciplined way of life, Kubose would say, and that is what he taught. But I would argue the same for Christianity.

I could see very clearly what Mike meant. The problem is spelled out right here in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 7.21-29. Mike had come to us from a Christian community in which “belief” was all important, and in which backsliding seemed to be the greatest sin (one did not dare to doubt these beliefs, therefore). And he had come into a community whose young pastor hadn’t quite got his bearings yet, and a mainline Presbyterian church that was itself only beginning to discover its convictions and its commitment to act on them. We were learning together. In general, I thought, Mike was right about Christianity. Christianity was pretty much being practiced as a set of things to believe in. If you accepted them, you were in. If not, you were out. Liberals, to the great annoyance of the evangelicals, bonded together in the exhilarating freedom of doubt, but often without the further pursuit of taking the next step toward understanding, and without the concomitant commitment to growing in discipleship, or action. The mainline church did not easily find the strength to rise from the miasmal swamp of rummage sales and pot-luck suppers and meetings dominated by concern for membership decline. In any case, belief can’t just be faith seeking understanding, even if, against the odds, it should get that far. Faith needs to grow in understanding, but it also needs fulfillment in action, in discipleship, as a way of life, or it is no faith at all. This option just wasn’t being made available to people, generally, in American mainline Christianity. The practice of Christianity actually seemed to mitigate against what it had to offer people. Sadly, Mike was largely correct. I couldn’t argue against him. The Christianity he knew was a way of belief, not a way of life.

So I was determined from that moment on to explore this whole business of Christianity as the way of life that was itself the foundation of what we professed as belief. The heart of Christianity, for me, is an act, not a set of words. It is that act explicated in the biblical idea of pouring out the self for others (or for God, which is the same thing), which is a new way of life different from a life that is ego-dominated and clings for its security to the false god Mammon. This new way of life is symbolised most perspicuously by the cross. It is an act that demands an Exodus-like departure from social/political structures that are inauthentic, oppressive or crippling, and often requires actual re-location. It is an act that responds to being “called out”. The “ekklesia” therefore (the assembly of those who have been called out) is the community that acts, and the new life in Christ we discover in the way of the cross involves a discovery of new, deeper identity more original than before, an identity formation that is practised as an experience of individuation, but an identity that is fundamentally social. The way of the cross leads to that community of three crosses that expresses the crucifixion not as death in isolation but as life in community, and richly so, in contrast to those who did a runner. The end of the process, “salvation”, is no other worldly affair, nor is it an individual affair. The idea of taking Jesus Christ as one’s personal saviour mocks the invitation to become fundamentally and inextricably engaged with the world around us. Salvation is life together. The cross, therefore, becomes a way of life, resurrection, a re-defining of life and death. The Christian life includes this readiness to empty oneself, to “die”, as it were, without fear of letting go. Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Ordinary piety never seems to grasp this, and prefers to focus on the promise that, if we believe as we are told, death doesn’t really happen. It is amazing how what goes contrary to Christianity’s fundamental message can become its central orthodoxy.

Too many churches put the emphasis on believing in the symbols and the metaphors on a literal level, symbols and metaphors that are meant to release the Christian from an old way of life and propel us into the way of the cross. An awful lot of Christian orthodoxy still clings to the old securities, too anxious to let go of the ego. Our common human fears are too strong to allow us to respond to the invitation Jesus is giving to live as he lived and do what he did, without fear of death. Churches that fear to proclaim the gospel in this way are churches that have built their houses on sand. They comfort us by saying we don’t have to fear death because death, for Christians, isn’t real. But comfort is cruel if it is a lie. The story of death overcome in scripture is the story of life that lives on a stronger foundation than the anxiety of its on non-being.

On judgement day (to use a compelling poetic image central to biblical literature), Jesus will say he doesn’t know those who attempt to ingratiate themselves to him by calling out “Lord! Lord!” “Knowing” in biblical languages is no mere intellectual affair of the mind. It is an engagement of the whole person, as in the physical act of love making. The late OT scholar Bob Boling used to say it was the Hebrew Hokey Pokey: you put your whole self in. The threat of rejection may seem cruel, until we realize tht this is simply telling, in story form, the condition that exists when the nominal Christian has never truly known Jesus through the life experience of doing, through discipleship, through taking this leap beyond the boundaries of ordinary securities to live without fear engaged with the prayers of the world around you. That’s what it means to know Jesus. And if you don’t know Jesus, well, you don’t know Jesus. All the classic spiritual disciplines are here to introduce us, but for some reason we just haven’t found it important to practise them.

The Sermon on the Mount concludes with the observation that Jesus teaches with authority, not as the scribes. The Greek word for authority, "exousia", is usually translated as "power". It is related to the word for "being", and means power or authority in terms of the freedom to do or create according to one's own autonomous being. The plural form, "powers", relates to governmental authority. The authority of Jesus as the power to act is thus distinguished from the authority of the scribes, whose role is to preserve every jot and tittle of what has been received from the past. What the scribes offer is a kind of paint-by-the-numbers form of discipleship, in which the best disciples are those who do not paint outside the lines. Such mind-numbing pedagogy abhors the kind of self-assurance that can say, "You have heard it said. . . . but I say unto you".

By contrast, Jesus teaches by inviting his disciples to learn through doing, and he promises that they will do even greater things than he does. What disciples do is critical, not what they repeat or what they believe of what has been received. They will be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.

Proper 3 A

Our reading for this Sunday concludes a section of the Sermon on the Mount focussing on hypocrisy which needs a brief overview in order to open up the “not to worry” business at the end of chapter 6. The section begins with a critique of the hypocritical giving that is more motivated by concern for the reputation of the giver than it is by any concern for those in need. Giving should be done in total secrecy: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” J. J. Hunsecker, the corrupt, duplicitous gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success, has an endearingly cynical variation on this: “My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years.”

Prayer can be equally hypocritical, done for show as the Gentiles do, heaping up phrases that, however poetic and artfully crafted, are empty. The model of prayer given here is not just prayer that is private, but prayer that seeks, primarily, to transform the life of the one praying, as opposed to seeking to manipulate the will of the deity.

Instruction on fasting follows a similar concern about hypocrisy. Fasting should not be done as a public display. Those who do fast in this way have already received their reward, Jesus says. I presume this means they have achieved the kind of recognition they have desired by drawing attention to themselves in a way that builds a public reputation. Fasting in secret ensures that the relationship will be between the one who fasts and God alone. The “reward” that comes from the Father then is that close relationship itself that makes possible the transformed heart, the proper intention of fasting, and a reward similar to the fruit of prayer in the will of God being done in the faithful disciple.

The next bit, concerning the storing up of earthly treasure, extends this exploration of hypocrisy to our relationship with material things and exposes the root of hypocrisy in the anxiety for the security of the self. The common wisdom is that the self will be made secure by the accumulation of things. Along with prayers and fasting that focus on the self, we engage in shopping therapy. The need to prevail that drives our game-theory economy and brings super bonuses to City executives reveals the raw spiritual nerve of hypocrisy. The focus on the self, the need to succeed and dominate one’s world, the fear of failure, the fear of death, all this interprets the life that finds its security in building up worldly treasure.

So when we come to this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 6.25-34, we see the observation that one cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon, in the light of this warning against hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is defined as existential anxiety dressed in the clothing of the classic spiritual disciples. It won’t wash, though it probably defines the way an awful lot of Christians practise their faith. You can’t pursue a life of faith with the goal of security for the self. That’s what the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount teaches.

Our reading is a summary of the concerns that have come before. Hypocrisy as a form of human behaviour is like irony in literature—saying or doing one thing and meaning another. Here in this Sunday’s reading the story of hypocrisy hints at an undercurrent of social criticism. That Solomon in all this glory was not clothed as magnificently as the lilies of the field is no simple comparison between manufactured and natural beauty. This is what we know about Solomon:

1 Kings 4.22: Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty cors of choice flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, one hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks and fatted fowl.

How about that for a cure of existential anxiety? And at what human cost did Solomon live in such luxury? Read on:

1 Kings 9.15: This is the account of the forced labour that King Solomon conscripted to build the House of the Lord . . . . and whatever [he] desired to build, in Jerusalem, in Lebanon and in all the land of his dominion. All the people who were left of the Ammorites, the Hitites, the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel—their descendeants who were left in the land, whom Israel were unable to destroy completely—these Solomon conscripted for slave labour and so they are to this day.

So “Solomon in all his glory” is no ordinary citation of your standard manufactured, as opposed to natural beauty. Solomon comes laden with all the prophetic critique of his reign implied in the Deuteronomic history of 1 Kings.

Moreover, this Sermon on the Mount is revisionist wisdom literature, still following here, I think, the spirit of “You have heard it said to those of ancient times . . . . But I say to you. . . ” Solomon was noted for his wisdom as well as his wealth (1 Kings 4.29: “God gave Solomon very great wisdom . . ..so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed all the wisdom of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt”). IN contrast to the observations of natural history and human behaviour, the kind of lore that was the substance of aristocratic education throughout the ancient Near East, the wisdom of Jesus will not necessarily enable you to rule or even get a job. What Jesus offers is something far more fundamental: the wisdom of a godly life. In contrast, the entire cultural foundation of Solomon’s world, and ours, looks like hypocrisy.

The Gentiles, says Jesus, seek the kind of wisdom that enables them to pile up earthly treasure, food, drink, clothing, things, in the manner of Solomon. This only leads to further anxiety, and, ultimately, to the kind of defeat and exile described in the Deuteronomic history as it unfolds from the story of Solomon to the end of 2 Kings.

The true voice of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount is defined by the voices of those who are celebrated in the Beatitudes that set the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes, it is the meek who will inherit the earth (this verse is actually paired with the teaching here on possessions in the chiastic structure of the Sermon on the Mount). This verse of the Beatitudes is quoting Psalm 37.11, “The meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” where the word for “meek” in Hebrew is “anawim”, the poor, the weak, the afflicted—the word Jesus would have used in in the Beatitudes in its Aramaic form. Those who will inherit the kingdom are the “poor in spirit”, more properly those who are “crushed” in spirit, those who are forced to beg—the opposite of the Solomons of this world who inhabit lists like the Fortune 500.

Probably the most important development of this line of thinking has been in Korean Minjung theology that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, and, according to its authors, is "a development of the political hermeneutics of the Gospel in terms of the Korean reality," not easily exported as its contextualisation arises from specific Korean experiences of suffering. But a Korean hymn we will be singing this Sunday opens up its story for the ordinary British Christian:

Look and learn from the birds of the air,
Flying high above worry and fear;
Neither sowing nor harvesting seed,
Yet they're given whatever they need.
If the God of earth and heaven cares for birds such as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in him?

Look and learn from the flowers of the field,
Bringing beauty and colour to life;
Neither sewing nor tailoring cloth,
Yet they're dressed in the finest attire.
If the God of earth and heaven
Cares for flowers as much as this,
Won't he care much more for you when you put your trust in Him?

What God wants should be our will;
Where God calls should be our goal.
When we seek the kingdom first,
All we've lost is ours again.
Let's be done with anxious thoughts,
Set aside tomorrow's cares,
Live each day that God provides putting all your trust in him.

Words: Nah Young Soo.

Another lovely song, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” can lead disastrously in the wrong direction. Like the anthems of a lot of contemporary piety, it seems to encourage the practice of praying for a wish list and a model of faith that is geared to health and wealth. Keep in mind what happens if we reverse the terms of the hymn. If we seek first “all these things”—will the kingdom of God be added unto us? What exactly is our attitude to “all these things” to be? The key is that seeking first the kingdom of God creates a proper understanding of what actually is needed in a life that is not centred on the self and its security, but on God.

Trinity A

When I was a school governor in Birmingham I went with the kids on a tour of the Central Mosque. Our guide made it clear that Moslems didn’t believe in three gods, but one. I would imagine that the Trinity does look very odd from the outside. Sometimes it looks odd from inside Christianity as well. I have a Lego image of the Trinity ordered from The Brick Testament (http://www.thebricktestament.com/), three plastic figures legoed onto a plastic stand: an old white-bearded man in a robe, a young bearded man and a third figure looking like Casper the ghost. I’ve never been able to figure out if The Brick Testament takes this seriously or thinks it is a joke.

There are all sorts of ways to think about the Trinity and I have probably preached on them all over the years. What interests me at the moment as Trinity Sunday looms on the horizon is the immanence of God in what Paul (2 Corinthians 13.14) calls the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit.

The third person of the Trinity is not an objective thing capable of representation in Lego. It is a dimension of the faithful community as subject in its experience of God’s presence. It is the godliness of the faithful community—the community that proclaims its devotion in service as well as hymn singing. Its prayers are never separated from its compassion for the broken and excluded. Its common life is shaped by God’s presence in its faithfulness.

Though this concept of God’s presence in the faithful community is a Christian concept, it is deeply embedded in the Jewish idea of God “tenting” with the people of God, God living in the midst of the sojourning community as shekinah (שכינה). The presence is a dynamic presence. Without getting gnostic about it, God always feels a bit out of place in the world, as do those faithful disciples who are in the world but not, as the Gospel of John says, of the world. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic fellowship that finds its proper location in the world, engaged in specific locations and concrete historical moments as a matter of vocation, but being there in ways that drive toward re-location and new moments of history.

I was visiting a friend here in Wales and wanted to move from where I was sitting, and he used this quaint Welsh expression: "Stay where you're to!" The church is dead if it stays where it is to. It's whole reason for being where it is in the world, as a matter of vocation, is to move on. The model is Exodus and Exile, personal, social, political and institutional transformation. The church dedicated to preserving its past in formaldehyde is not Trinitarian.

Then there is the second person of the Trinity. This is “the Son”—but it is not simply “Jesus”, however much we want to identify the Son with the historical figure of Jesus. The mystery of the second person of the Trinity interprets all discipleship that embodies the life of Christ as its own. Trinitarian theology thus reminds us of the agenda of the biblical Jesus in calling his disciples to do what he did in mediating God to the world. “As the Father sent me,” he says in the Gospel of John, “I send you.” In John we are born again as sons and daughters of God (John 1.10-12). In Mark and in Paul we are witnesses to the resurrection through our own death and rebirth in conversion. The agenda of discipleship is to embody Christ in daily life and thus embody God just as the Messiah does. The mystery of the incarnation, at the end of the day, is the mystery of our own conversion. In faith, we come off our perches as servants and lovers down into an ordinary world that is by turns exhilarating and painful. We put flesh on the Word in our discipleship. The incarnation isn’t just about Christmas. It’s about us, and it’s about every day in the real world.

So the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, lived out in discipleship, is, communally, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God permeates human experience, wherever we let God in, in a process that transforms people and communities in ways that transform the world. Maybe that’s the difference between Christianity and Islam. I don’t know.

The love of God is that funny kind of love that is full of desire but is nevertheless not possessive or demanding. It is self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself” (kenosis, Philippians 2.7). It’s like wine being poured out at the Eucharistic feast, like costly perfume being poured out by the woman on Jesus himself (Mark 14.3), like the suffering servant who pours himself out to be numbered among the transgressors (Isaiah 53.12). The dynamic of the love of God is the dynamic of movement, of sending, the vocation of the Son kneeling in prayer in Gethsemane and the vocation of the community in the time of Wilberforce and in the time of Oscar Romero. What shall we do? Where will we stand? The idea of the Trinity is thus tied up with the vocation of the Christian to mediate and to embody the reconciling, justice-creating presence of God in the world.

The Trinitarian community recognizes God’s utter transcendence insofar as it is a community that lives unsettled, in hope. “You made us for yourself,” Augustine prayed, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This prayer isn’t about the stress of life finding peace at last in death. Theologian Joe Sittler once said “Heaven is a metaphor for life with God”, and that life is a fellowship we strive toward here and now in the path of discipleship, isn’t it? As my wife likes to say, “Don’t give until it hurts; give until it feels good.” We know when we have arrived even if we know we can’t stay there long. The triangular diagram o f the Trinity illustrates this fundamental energy of tension and propulsion between transcendence and immanence, like the traffic of angels on Jacob’s ladder.

The Trinity is critical for Christian orthodoxy because it is critical for Christian orthopraxis, discipleship. We are commissioned in the name of the Trinity in baptism to this way of life, a way of life that makes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit real in the world. Notice, for instance, that prior to the blessing Paul gives he is pressing home the way Christians ought to be living. “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith”, he says (2 Corinthians 13.5).

A final note on the lesson from Matthew for this Sunday: I don’t think the Trinitarian formula for baptism is original with Matthew. For one thing, t seems too early for the community to be baptising in the name of the Trinity as shorthand for orthodox Christian community. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, baptism itself just isn’t an important motif in Matthew, as it had been in Mark, for instance. If you take this bit out as something that had been added later, what you get is much more naturally a conclusion for a gospel that has been about instruction. Make disciples, passing on all I have taught you. Nevertheless, the immanence of God is present in human life in the assurance that, as we witness to continuing generation, God as Emmanuel is with us.