God tested Abraham. He said to him “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am’. He (GOD) said.   “ Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you”.

So two questions arise. Why would God ask this of Abraham, and why would Abraham agree to such a request? After all, we have ample evidence from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 that when Abraham encountered a seemingly brutish and retaliatory streak in God by threatening retribution on all who had displeased him (thank goodness God didn’t have a cell phone), he was more than capable of reasoning God back into divine senses. So why didn’t Abraham, in this instance, reason with God?

He could easily have pointed out to God that this was an ill-judged idea. Why kill the next link in fulfillment of the promise that Abraham’s descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky? God’s request seems both short sighted and unbelievably cruel. As if to rub salt into the wound, God emphasizes that Isaac is Abraham’s only son and not only that, but God goes out of his way to remind Abraham if he needed any reminder that is, that Isaac is the son he loves.

We are given a clue as to God’s intention in the first line: God tested Abraham. Ah, so something becomes clearer. This was a test to see if Abraham loved God more than he loved Isaac. Can God be so insecure, so needy, so desperate to receive exclusive adulation and affirmation?

Last week Linda+ invited us into the Jewish practice of Midrash. Midrash is a process for interrogating the ancient Torah texts. The earliest Midrash commentaries seem to date from the 2^nd Century AD, and this tells us that Midrash represents a development in Rabbinic Judaism’s attempt to humanize these ancient and sparse Torah texts, to mitigate their harshness in order to fit them to the experience of a contemporary time.

In the St Martin community, on this coming Monday, we arrive 43-days into The Bible Challenge – a 365-day program for reading the entire Bible. But this only begs the question: Why read the Bible in 21st Century America? Especially these sparse and harsh Torah texts that strike us as so alien to our understanding of God? This is an important question for Episcopalians who over the last 100 years have steadily jettisoned any personal discipline of Bible study. So let me offer responses to this crucial question. I want to identify two responses here.

Story shapes personal identity

Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue notes:

I can only answer the question what am I to do?, if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Macintyre suggests here that identity is story shaped. We come to know ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves as well as the stories that claim our ultimate allegiance. Such stories are responsible for shaping us. Small and mean selfish stories constrict our development beyond meeting our own self-interests. Large stories give us room to grow and change, they invite us into a more expansive vision of interpersonal and civic relationships and responsibilities.

The Biblical epic has always fundamentally shaped Jews and Christians. Judaism seems better at recognizing that stories are multifaceted in that they can be reframed and retold to bring out different emphases. Stories are continually being told and reheard in different ways. We are not shaped by the literal reading of these stories according to a strict dichotomy between true or false. We are shaped more through how we come to interpret their meaning. As Midrash reveals, meaning is a continually evolving process.

Story shapes community identity

The communitarian response to the question why read the Bible today is given greater clarity by Paul D Hanson in A Political History of the Bible in America comments:

To gain a solid footing for understanding the mixed legacy of American political history, it is necessary to turn to the more ancient epic from which the leaders of our nation, from colonial times to the present, and for better or for worse, derived justification for their actions. That epic is the Bible.

So on the weekend when we celebrate the founding of the nation, we are reminded that for Americans the Bible has occupied a more central role in our political process than might be true in other Western democracies. Our leaders and sections of society repeatedly appeal to the Bible in the civic space, and as Hanson notes for better or for worse. In that conversation it’s crucial for Episcopalians to stop ceding the high ground to those who would apply an anti-Midrash spin on interpretation, i.e. take the stories we encounter, especially in these very ancient and harsh Torah texts as literally true and able to speak uninterrupted to our modern context.

Scholars now believe that the Genesis stories were only written down, or at least, re-edited during the very late period of the captivity in Babylon some 1500 year after the time in which the stories are set. We might ask why is this?

Part of the answer lies in how nations respond at points of crisis. At a time of crisis when the very existence of the Jewish people was imperiled they revisited and recast their ancient stories of national manifest destiny. This is a process that we in contemporary America have a feeling for as we face into a crisis of national identity articulated through competing interpretations of our formational stories. The sacrifice of Isaac was a story that spoke about God’s deliverance for those who keep faith, those who in the face of adversity pass the test of trusting in the beneficence of God’s ultimate purpose.

In Bible Challenge group discussions, St. Martin’s folk, especially women among them seem to take great exception to these primitive stories that depict a nomadic society’s very tribal and patriarchal view of God. I encourage us to note our response of repugnance as our first visceral reaction in our engagement with these ancient texts. A visceral reaction, not intellectual insight is where textual engagement begins. But after this what next? Do we simply reject these texts as holding no potential for any meaning? Are we to retreat into our lofty 21^st-century judgmentalism that proclaims loudly this is not our God or the God of Jesus?

This attitude blinds us to the contemporary relevance of many of these ancient myths, and so we too, need to develop our own Midrash for textual questioning. We must read these stories because they are where our God shaping story begins. It’s clear from our post-Jesus perspectives that both we and God have come a long way over the millennia. To know our place in the world through the story of which we are a part, we need to begin at the beginning of the relational epic that continues to evolve within historical time through the events of human history.

Genesis 22:1-14

What can we discover through a Midrash-style questioning of this text?

1. Anthropologically, is this story an echo of a primitive pre-Israelite time when child sacrifice was practiced, which later becomes conflated and given an Israelite spiritual meaning as an event in the life of Abraham? Perhaps.
2. Did God really command the sacrifice of Isaac, or did Abraham believe that was what God asked of him? Even if we exonerate God the point still remains that Abraham trusted in his experience of a God who had over and over again proved trustworthy. Why should he second-guess God now?
3. Is this a story about the blindness of human devotion? Religious devotion has proved throughout history an effective instrument for practices and attitudes that flow from the hardness of the human heart. Did not Jesus confront and expose the way religious devotion became a mask, a facade concealing the cruelty of the human spirit?
4. What’s the ultimate point of this story? At one level the story shocks us. But on closer reading, this story demonstrates that God is not the capricious tyrant we fear, for it is God who stays Abraham’s hand. The dénouement of the story reveals a God who will provide as long as we have the courage to trust.

As we sit in lofty judgment on Abraham and what seems to us to be a grotesque caricature of a narcissistically insecure God, we miss the point that this story shines a powerful searchlight upon us and our motivations. Whatever else this story might be about it reveals our collective collusion in systems that readily sacrifice the weak and the vulnerable while rewarding the strong and contemptuous.

Among that group of young men we refer to as the World War I poets, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) chronicled through his poetry his experience alongside his brother soldiers fighting in the trenches. In The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Owen uses the Genesis imagery of the sacrifice of Isaac as the basis for his ode of lamentation on the willingness of those who represent authority to sacrifice the flower of youth in pursuit of idols, i.e. ideologies and stories that displace our trust in God with something less than worthy of ultimate allegiance.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said,
My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Our 21^st-century vantage point is fundamentally shaped by the image of God refracted through the face, words, and actions of Jesus Christ. This lulls us into a false sense of superiority when we encounter the Genesis images of God, refracted as they are through the lens of a tribal, nomadic people subsisting on the precipitous knife-edge of survivability. And yet, these Israelites are our spiritual ancestors. We are among the children of the blessing God brought about through his covenant with Abraham. Thus on closer inspection, I believe the sacrifice of Isaac disturbs us because as Wilfred Owen found a voice to express – it is not God who is barbarous, it is we who continually affirm what is barbarous in the human spirit.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Abraham was shaped by his encounter with a God to whom he gave the allegiance of complete trust. We may quibble over whether this was a good thing or not especially when it leads him to be prepared to follow through on an act of self-laceration. In the end, it was God who stayed his hand and delivered Isaac. Why God needed to test Abraham in this way, we cannot know. But what we can know is the contrast between God’s actions and ours in a society where trust in the beneficence of God has been displaced by lesser and more pernicious creeds that call for the sacrifice of many for the good of a few. The idolatry of ideology reveals itself in the promise of more and the delivery of less.

Wilfred Owen was killed on the day the Armistice was signed at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, in 1918; a different sacrifice of sorts.

A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs for Pentecost 3, Proper 7 Year A                

Genesis 21: 8-21; Matthew 10:24-39

Families. Are. Complicated. I have yet to meet anyone who wouldn’t agree on this, and honestly , f someone told me that they had a perfect family I would wonder what they’d been smoking. The other day (on the way home from a visit to my family in Virginia), I heard someone on the radio comment that she couldn’t understand why some businesses advertise by saying, “We treat you like family.” Given the nature of most family dynamics, that should send most potential customers running in the other direction. But it doesn’t. Because the idea of family draws us even as it drives us nuts. But there you have it. It’s complicated.

And so it is with Hagar. Our first lesson this morning is a continuation of last week’s text from the Hebrew Bible, in which Sarah and Abraham become the proud parents of Isaac. But the Lectionary left out a chunk of the story. You see, after God promised that Sarah and Abraham would have a child, even at their advanced age, some time passed with no child, and Sarah began to panic–she ran out of patience. So she took matters into her own hands and said that Abraham should father a child with her Egyptian slave, Hagar.

And immediately things got, complicated. To make a long story short, Hagar, who as a slave had no choice in the matter, became pregnant by Abraham. Her relationship with Sarah soured (not surprising)—she became contemptuous of her mistress. Sarah in return became abusive of Hagar, and Hagar ran away. While in the wilderness God saw her, and told her to return to Sarah, but first announced to her that she would bear a son, Ishmael, and that he would be the progenitor of a great multitude of descendants. And in response, Hagar does something that no one else in the Bible does: She has the audacity to name God to God’s face; El-roi; “God who sees.”

Yet she is generally known only as the mother of Ishmael and then forgotten. She only appears two times in the Bible. (If you don’t count a reference to her in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.) Her story of slavery, abuse, rejection, and expulsion is a painful one. It is listed by theologian Phylis Trible as a “text of terror”. There is no way to whitewash it and still be a responsible reader of Scripture. There is always the temptation to avert our gaze from difficult episodes such as this. But if we did that we would be ignoring a substantial chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures. And we can’t do that, any more than we can avoid dealing with our own family dramas. This is the story of God’s family—the human family. And just as we need to find healthy ways of handling difficult relatives and dynamics, we can benefit from finding healthy ways of reading some pretty troublesome and disturbing stories in Scripture.

Which is one of the reasons the Jewish Bible study practice of Midrash is so helpful. This is an ancient tradition; a method of viewing scripture through the lens of questioning; of a conversational encounter, with God, with the writings of learned rabbis, and with each other. Midrash is a liberating tool that encourages wondering. We are encouraged to ask a crucial question: Where is God in this? The answers may be difficult, but with God’s help they can be fruitful and transforming.

So where to start a midrash exploration of Hagar’s story today? We see a woman who is doubly cursed: exiled from bondage, with no more than a little bread, water, and her child. In other words, she’s been cast out from frying pan into the fire. The story notes that Abraham is only distressed on his firstborn son’s behalf: As for any concern for the mother of Ishmael, he is simply following his wife’s instructions, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son.” You see, Ishmael jeopardizes God’s Promise to Abraham: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…So shall your descendants be.”* That’s the promise. But Sarah, in her impatience with God, had waited long enough. She had taken matters into her own hands, but now, confronted with the mistake of her lack of trust in God’s promise, she has sought to rectify it by effectively declaring a death sentence for the child and his mother. Where is God in this???

And this is where the midrash comes in. Let’s wonder. Abram sent Hagar away. “And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.” I wonder what Hagar encountered in the wilderness? Since midrash actually encourages inter-scriptural exploration, we can look at other stories of wilderness wandering in the Bible. Certainly the Israelites wandered, and there is a wealth of stories of their journey and their attempts (not always successful) to be faithful to God. Jesus wandered for 40 days after his baptism, tempted by Satan. Both the Israelites and Jesus faced challenges and emerged equipped for the future. John the Baptist emerged from the wilderness as a prophet. What about Hagar? Was she changed somehow? Did she and Ishmael talk with each other? By all calculations Ishmael was actually an adolescent, not an infant, but Midrash texts speculate that he was quite ill, which was why she had to carry him. Was he even conscious, or could Ishmael sense Abraham’s and Sarah’s rejection of him? I wonder–what demons haunted Hagar in the wilderness? Powerlessness? Resentment? Guilt? Fear? Grief? Did she rage at the God she had so courageously named to God’s face? Did she shake her fist at “God Who Sees”, now apparently blind to her plight? Midrash bids us ask, Where does it hurt, Hagar?

We can continue to wonder and wander the scriptural wilderness: What if she and Ishmael weren’t totally alone? Perhaps they were shadowed by the angel that later called out to her. Perhaps the angel heard every word of fury, recrimination and second-guessing and absorbed it, comprehending her pain. Perhaps, just maybe, God’s silence wasn’t divine rejection after all, but divine listening. I asked a minute ago if Hagar was changed. Maybe not, but what if God was changed? What if God was moved as Hagar wandered and struggled and fed the last crumb and drop of water to her son? Imagine God watching and listening as Hagar, spent and out of resources, did the only thing she could do; lament. As testimony to her pain and rejection and in grief for the child she was certain would die, she lifted up her voice and wept. There is no truer, more authentic prayer than lament; it is the dark night of the soul. And the silent, listening God heard her cries and took pity on her. “What troubles you, Hagar?” Where does it hurt?

A midrash exploration of Hagar’s time in the Wilderness is a fruitful way to engage the text and to discover God’s presence between the lines. When we can do this with Scripture we can perhaps learn to do this in our own lives; to ask, “Where is God in this?” But it should by no means minimize or marginalize suffering—ours or anyone else’s. There is always a risk that assurance of God’s abiding presence becomes mere platitude or Facebook meme, which does a huge disservice to those who suffer. We are meant to gaze upon Hagar’s story and to grieve for and with her; to witness to her abuse, rejection and exile. We are even within our rights to question God. Midrash encourages it.

For example, the fact remains that as Hagar was sent packing God was silent. This is, after all, a story about the Promise, and as such it speaks a hard truth. God promised Abraham and Sarah a legacy of countless heirs, and their rejection and exile of Hagar assured that legacy. But I still struggle with any general assumption that what happened to Hagar was God’s will. I simply don’t believe that God wills human suffering, Promise or no Promise. God didn’t tell Sarah to violate God’s trust and take matters into her own hands; Sarah chose to do that. God didn’t exile Hagar and Ishmael; Abraham did. The fact is that people do stupid, mean, cruel and thoughtless things to each other, but that doesn’t mean that God wills it, then or now. Like it or not, this story reflects the very real frailty of the complicated human family, and our family story is all-too-guilty of projecting our own baggage and selfish motives on God rather than looking in the mirror.

I read something the other day that sums it up: “I screamed at God for the starving child until I saw the starving child was God screaming at me.”**

The good news is that God perseveres. We can trust that. God continues to work within the framework of the gift of free will and the resulting complications and chaos that accompany it. In our Gospel today Jesus alludes to the same idea when he says that he will set a man against his father, daughter against mother; that one’s foes will be part of one’s household. God’s call entails the risk that relationships will be disrupted. But that stress on relationships is because of humans’ choices about how they will respond to God’s invitation to new, transformed and abundant life. Jesus’ entire life and ministry was about reminding everyone, from Temple authorities to lepers, that God is the God of the outsider, the rejected. The Hagars. Jesus knew that what he proposed was not the status quo, and that can be difficult for those who are afraid to risk change and for those who, like Sarah and Abraham, struggled to trust that God’s promise would be steadfast; that God will not give up on God’s dream, no matter how many times and ways we are tempted to screw it up.

So we must be clear-eyed about the suffering and trials of Hagar. We can’t soften their impact, though we can witness to her lament and, through closer and imaginative reading, ask her where it hurts. In doing that, we gain a window on our own lives and the lives of our neighbors. Hagar’s suffering is redeemed through us; it calls us to see and hear her lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of our time, and it further calls us to offer them God’s healing wherever we can, like a well of cool water in the harsh wilderness. And by God’s grace and with God’s help, that’s not really complicated at all.

*Genesis 5:15   ** –unknown

 

Three folds of the cloth yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear. Frost, snowflakes, and ice, all in water their origin share. Three Persons in God: to one God alone we make our prayer.

Ancient Irish poem to the Trinity                                                            

The Trinity emerging in historical experience.

For the first generation of Christians, their radical transformation on the Day of Pentecost was a confusing, yet exhilarating experience. They had an experience of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the Eternal One, creator of heaven and earth, whose dwelling place was far away. The Law had been given by God as a gift of his presence, yet in another way, it also emphasized God’s distance.

For the first Christians, their experience of Jesus posed something of a conundrum in relation to the God of their Fathers. As they had lived through the roller coaster of events and emotions of Holy Week, and Easter, they could not shake off their undeniable gut sense that in the life of Jesus, they had had an experience of God, no longer remote, but God as part of their everyday lives in the world.  Their hearts had been set ablaze by an experience of God face to face: living, breathing, walking, in whose gaze they discovered new selves and a new sense of God.

Then on the Day of Pentecost, a new and unexpected experience crashed in upon them as they encountered the living Spirit of Jesus. No longer Jesus the human person whom they had known as a part of their lives, but the dynamic power of Jesus now fully experienced from within. What really confronted all their hitherto expectations was their direct experience of God, no longer solitary, but dynamic, relational and communal.

The first generations of Christians lived out their new experience of God, it seems without too much controversy. As Luke in Acts reveals, they lived the life of dynamic, energetic, and empowered transformation. Yet, the New Testament nowhere describes God in the language of the Trinity. The first Christians didn’t need to think about the nature of their experience of God because they were too busy living it.

The Trinity solidified in doctrine

The doctrine of the Trinity as we have inherited it today is the result of a need that arose with the passing of time. In the early days of any movement, people just live out their experience of inspiration. But as movements grow up, they morph into institutions. Between the third and fifth centuries, the Church grew from a charismatic movement into a powerful institution, second only to the institution of the Empire, itself.

Institutions need to develop official policies to ensure consistency and conformity. For later generations, the conundrum at the heart of the Christian revelation of God became something less to be reconciled through living and more to be explained, protected, and defended. The Church of the first five centuries needed not so much to explain the nature of God as to protect the nature of Christ from being reduced to one of two simple assertions. Was he divine or human?

This question provoked two competing assertions. The first was that Jesus was God masquerading in human form. Being divine, Jesus was not genuinely human in any meaningful way that you and I are human. The second assertion was that Jesus was only a man, although a great man, nevertheless just a human being uniquely attuned with God in the sense of an avatar like Moses, or the Buddha, or the prophet Mohammed.

Yet the conundrum at the heart of the Christian experience was that Jesus was both divine and human, both natures existing simultaneously, yet independently. As an experience that you don’t think about but just live, the notion of Jesus as human and divine is not such a problem. When you begin to need to understand it, to protect and defend it from attack, you need a way to explain what on the face of it, seems absurd.

The doctrine of the Trinity evolves to protect the core mystery of God as experienced by Christians. In Jesus, the divine and the human might lie at polar ends of a continuum, but it is the same continuum. If to be human is to be most like God, then God must first have experienced being fully human.

I don’t think we can imagine the heat of controversy and accompanying violence out of which the doctrine of the Trinity was forged. As the bishops hotly debated the issues in council, their followers roaming the streets in armed bands settled the issues in rivers of blood.

The bishops, steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle applied the best thinking of the day to address the conundrum at the heart of the Christian experience. How can God who is one be also experienced in three distinct ways? The purpose of the Great Councils was never to explain the mystery of God, but to protect the Christian experience of the mystery of God’s divine nature from being reduced to only that which made sense viewed from the perspective of human logic. Good doctrine gives us enough certainty to be going on with while preserving the ultimate unknownness of God from domestication within the limitations of the collective human imagination. 

The Trinity reinterpreted within a contemporary experience

Each generation must interpret the Christian Tradition in ways that maintain continuity with what has gone before while, at the same time, speaks with the particular voice needed in the here and now.  Theology says less about God and more about our current state of awareness of God. Whereas once Aristotelian logic offered a vehicle for theological articulation, today, a psychologically informed understanding of human nature becomes one of our key vehicles for theologically expressing ourselves.

A psychologically informed view of being human reveals how our individual identities emerge through the processes of being in relationship with others. Identity is constructed relationally because who I think I am is to a very great degree shaped by my perception of the ways others experience me.

Being able to contemplate others as separate from our own thoughts is a crucial milestone in human development. As we behold another, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the face of the other looking back at us. All of this is rooted in our earliest experience as infants. Increasing brain development during infancy allows us to gradually build up a sense of separate selfhood as we discover ourselves in our mother’s face. We catch from our mother her sense of us, communicated through her touch, the sound of her voice, and principally through her gazing back at us.

Andrei Rublev’s archetypal depiction of the Trinity, from 1410, shows the Trinity as three identical persons sharing the same loving gaze.  His depiction shows God not as a singular entity but as a relational community. The figures are identical, reflecting the oneness of God, yet at the same time, each figure represents the separate and distinct ways in which Christian’s experience God.

Rublev shows God the creator on the left gazing at God the Son in the center and at God the Holy Spirit on the right. Son and Spirit each encounter themselves in the reflection of the Creator’s face as they mirror God’s gaze. For the identity of the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from the identity of the Creator. What the Councils of the early Church referred to as three persons being of one substance, we might rephrase as three expressions sharing one identity. 

Today, any serious exploration of the Trinity cannot be separated from the debate about gender. The Tradition of the Trinity ascribed masculine identities to the relational elements as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Despite the feminine noun for spirit in both Hebrew and Greek, even the Holy Spirit has been referred to as he. As 21^st century Christians, we hear God’s voice more clearly in nongendered ways. The traditional ascription of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is simply a by-product of patriarchal language and culture. Today we need to be sensitive to the fact that although Tradition has spoken in male terminology, the theological emphasis lies not in the gendered but in the relational nature of the names.

Understanding the relational nature of the patriarchal names, it then becomes possible to avoid the gendered terms and still retain the relational emphasis that binds the members of the Trinity into a unity. It’s common to hear Father, Son, and Holy Spirit referred to as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. However, creator, redeemer, and sanctifier denote economy of function, not unity in relationship. I prefer to refer to God as Lover, Beloved, and Love-Sharer, thus emphasizing the relational quality within the community of God that commends itself so powerfully to us in a world where the presence or absence of being in relationship is the significant measure of meaning and a key indicator of our quality of life.

The Trinity as devotion

Can we recapture in our own time and place a devotional approach to the Trinity?History turns full circle. As it was for the first followers of Jesus living in a pre-Christendom world, so for us living in a post-post Christendom world. Like them, our faith is less and less about conforming to right belief and more and more about living lives of right practice.

At the center of my daily devotional practice sits an icon of the Trinity written in the style of Rublev by Laura Smith, an accomplished icon writer, living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. This icon was a farewell gift to me from Laura and the congregation of Trinity Cathedral. When I gaze at each identical figure seated around the three sides of a table, I observe their mutual gaze of intimate love. This intimation of loving intimacy evokes in me my yearning for God. I too, long to catch a glimpse of my greater-truer self as I  gaze upon and sit before the gaze of the members of the divine community.

Sitting before the icon of the Trinity I am reminded that my identity is constructed within me through the interplay of my relationships around me. I experience myself shaped and reshaped continually through the way I experience others looking back at me.

Participating in the mutual gaze of Rublev’s representation of the Holy Trinity invites me to reaffirm my personhood as the image of God. I am reminded that I belong to a community that is, albeit and imperfect one, nevertheless a reflection of the Divine Community. Fashioned to be a relational being, I discover my individual identity as a fruit of being in divine community.

Three folds of the cloth yet only one napkin is there,
Three joints in the finger, but still only one finger fair,
Three leaves of the shamrock, yet no more than one shamrock to wear,
Frost, snowflakes, and ice, all in water their origin share,
Three Persons in God: to one God alone we make our prayer.                                                                  

Spirit Imaginings

Picture if you can the moments following the Big Bang. Picture the intense concentration of matter and energy exploding outwards into the vacuum of space. Theologically, the uncreated source and first cause of all energy we name as God the Creator.

In your mind’s eye imagine the arresting image of dark, empty-formlessness covering an impenetrable deepness and the Spirit of God brooding over the dark emptiness of deep space. To my modern mind, this is an image of an organizing energy, an intentional energy that brings order out of chaos, creating form out of formlessness.

The Hebrew word used for Spirit is the feminine noun Ruach. It’s a surprise for many English speakers to realize that the Spirit of God carries the pronoun – she. The feminine principle evokes the images of bringing order out of chaos. Out of chaos, the universe is birthed- a process St. Paul in Romans imagines as the whole creation [which] has been groaning in labor pains until now.

Paul fashions this metaphor further as he tells us that as we too, have a part in the universe’s laboring. We groan, we pant, and we push driven by the hope of imminent new birth. In this state of travail, the Holy Spirit, like a midwife comes to our aid, brooding over our birthing of a new world.

For Luke, God’s Spirit brooding over the empty darkness of the deep at the beginning of creation now broods over the world a second time in a display of pyrotechnic, splendid, terror. For Luke, in this Pentecostal coming the Holy Spirit impregnates our DNA with God. Jesus has now ascended and God becomes built into our very nature empowering us to continue Jesus’ work as the agents for the coming of the kingdom.

*

Having seen the new Wonder Woman movie with my granddaughter Claire on Friday afternoon, I am reminded that Luke’s purpose is not to impress us with pyrotechnics like the latest blockbuster special effects. He wants to draw our attention, not to the manner of the Spirit’s descent, but to the effect upon humanity of the descent of the Spirit. The tongues of flame and the noise and rush of wind are metaphors for a new birth. At the Day of Pentecost the curse of Babel was lifted; difference no longer a scourge of division becomes the source for enrichment. Paul, in I Corinthians reminds us that in each of us, the Spirit takes appropriate expression so that our differences and diversity contribute to the building up of the whole.

Luke’s theological message is that for those born anew as members of the Church, it is no longer the business as usual of the old order;  a business based on discrimination, exclusion, and oppression of differences.

**

In the sonnet God’s Grandeur, the 19^th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, proclaims that:

The World is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil – Crushed.

Yet against the background of this optimistic proclamation, Hopkins questions why humanity is so reckless of God’s gift of creation: 

Why do men then now not reck his rod? (not recognize God’s rule?)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil and wears man’s smudge

and shares man’s smell:

The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Spirit Imperatives

In 21^st-century America the Holy Spirit broods over us still; birthing through us a new world order. If our commitment is not to the common ownership – from each according to ability, to each according to need – of the first Christian Communities, then it must be to the continual renewal of the ideal of the common good.

Among our politicians, lawyers and more latterly businessmen are overly-represented, producing a politics dominated by transactional thinking. This is not a phenomenon invented in the last four months. The early decades of the 21st-century have seen the complexities of society reduced by transactional thinking into a division between winners and losers. Transactional thinking corrodes our civic life to the point where now investment in long-term development is routinely sacrificed to short-term gain. Ideals degenerate into deals and the art of the deal has become the new way of being smart.

As a result, the disproportionate influences of transactional thinking produce a society where childcare, education, support of the elderly and infirm; where access to both legal representation and effective health care are all reduced to buying-power transactions.

Hopkins images our social relations: seared with trade, bleared, smeared, with toil wearing man’s smudge, sharing man’s smell. We have become a society where the differences of race, gender, and class most often translate into differentials of power and privilege. A society where access to the protections necessary for all in a thriving civic society are afforded the few but denied to the many.

We continue in our insensible stupor, failing to believe that climate change is not something that happens to other people, but is actually happening to us. Hopkins: The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod., gives us an image, of dangerous mental insulation in the face of the disavowed realities of lived experience.

***

The birth of the new Spirit-filled order comes as a challenge to the human propensity to distribute power, unequally. Luke’s vision of the Holy Spirit is of the anima – the feminine energy of new birth, embracing and celebrating the rich diversity of being human. Difference, no longer the scourge of division becomes the celebration of diversity as the Holy Spirit broods to birth the Kingdom among us.

The real point in Luke’s description of the Day of Pentecost lies not in the pyrotechnics of the Spirit’s arrival but in the transformation brought about in those gathered on the day. Lives were changed. A community of the fearful was transformed into a community of risk taking, radical living.

The question that should obsess us is not how to mimic early Christian social structure, but to ask what does the experience of transformed risk taking, radical living look like in our own time and place?

For many of us, a key agent for feeding personal transformation into the process for social change is our Christian faith. Yet, we have an expectation of the life of faith letting us off lightly. I believe this is what prevents us really taking this question seriously. We want to enjoy the comfort and sustenance of religion while expecting to escape largely unchanged by its radical imperatives.

We engage in acts of charity towards the less fortunate while failing to contend against systems that deprive whole communities of access to the fruits others of us expect to enjoy. We want to preserve our self-contained privacy from one another’s demands, and to be left untroubled to enjoy the fruits of our own material success, insulated by faith, carefully avoiding any imperative to change our worldview and shift our emphasis for our daily living.

God as Spirit is brooding over the abyss of the world continually calling forth order from chaos, creation from emptiness. At Pentecost God, as Spirit impregnated deep within the human DNA, filling the God-shaped space within us and the emptiness between us empowering us to now become co-creators with God in the healing of a broken world. I give way before the eloquence of Hopkins:

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;  

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods –

with warm breast and with ahhhhh! – bright wings. 

Vada Roseberry’s Creation Window, Trinity Cathedral, Phoenix, Arizona.

Listen to God’s Grandeur  Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

A sermon from the Rev Linda Mackie Griggs for the Sunday after the Ascension

For about two precious weeks each Spring, the scent of lilacs sweetens the air around my house. During that time I never miss the chance to stick my nose into a cluster of the blooms and take a big whiff. The key is to exhale, completely, so there’s nothing left in your lungs but anticipation. Then inhale—completely. Breathe it all in.

Bliss.

There’s something about finding that tiny point of emptiness before breathing in that makes the scent all the sweeter. Finding that point where you’re waiting to inhale.

Now, hold that thought.

“…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

Believe it or not, Luke, the author of Acts, wasn’t really concerned about physics. You might think that the focus would be upon this great upward movement of Jesus into the clouds. My mother (a post-Enlightenment woman if there ever was one) used to scoff and mumble about staring at the soles of Jesus’ feet, and if you google the Ascension you will find a number of interesting images. Actually , mom was in good company—there are theologians who find the whole episode to be a little embarrassing.* The Incarnation? No problem. Resurrection? We can handle that. Ascension? Please. Even laying physics aside, the very idea of God as being exclusively UP THERE no longer works, cosmologically or theologically. While we often still gesture upward when talking of God in heaven, most of us on reflection will acknowledge God as immanent—being all around and within Creation and not just above it.

But Luke was part of a world that believed in a three-tiered universe of Underworld, Earth, and Heaven. In the first century the idea that Jesus would ascend was not in the least bit out of the ordinary. Of course the Son of God would ascend and be exalted to God’s right hand. If you look more closely at Luke’s description of the disciples’ reaction, you see that they just gaze upward—they just watch him go. They don’t fall down in fear like, for example, the shepherds on that first Christmas. In the conventional wisdom of multiple cultures of the time, ascension was what happened to those who were especially favored by God or the gods. Hercules, Moses, Enoch, Elijah, even the Roman emperor Augustus were said to have ascended from earth into the heavens. If Jesus hadn’t ascended; now that would have been a surprise.

But to dwell on this argument is really beside the point; it’s the equivalent of standing and staring upward with our mouths hanging open long after Jesus is gone. The angels bid us to move along; nothing more to see here.

But just because we shift our gaze away from heavenly acrobatics doesn’t mean that this episode isn’t significant. The Ascension story is not as important for what the disciples saw as it is for the fundamental nature of the moment itself. It is in fact an existential moment in the life of the Body of Christ.

I have talked before about something I called the “liminal millisecond”—that fleeting yet infinitely deep moment of God’s time in which everything can change. And the fact is that liminal milliseconds happen all the time; it’s just that you can see some more clearly than others. Like now.

A liminal millisecond is a threshold between the past and the future, when (theoretically) virtually anything is possible. It is moment that often requires a decision: Who or what is God calling me to be now?

It was in such a moment—this Ascension—that we see the completion of Incarnation: When the two men (or angels) tell the disciples to stop looking upward, and when they return to Jerusalem, Luke’s focus shifts from Jesus in the world to the community in the world. What he shows us here is the singularity that will become, on Pentecost, the Body of Christ.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth.”

As usual, this was not the response the disciples expected when they asked if NOW Jesus was going to restore the kingdom. It wasn’t what they expected, but when has Jesus ever given them an answer they expected? But it was the answer they needed. This was not the time to revisit old expectations. This was a time to prepare for something new. The purpose of Jesus’ ascension was to make room for his promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

Waiting to inhale. Just like the lilacs.

What Luke describes here is that liminal millisecond when all is emptiness and anticipation. Waiting to inhale the Spirit.

The disciples, a couple of them perhaps reluctantly, turned toward Jerusalem and an uncharted future, equipped with each other and a promise from Jesus. They faced a world in pain and turmoil. A world of empty places just waiting to be filled with the Gospel.

So here we are, like the disciples, at a pivotal moment between Ascension and Pentecost, facing a world still in pain, still broken and begging for hope. Where do we find the empty places just waiting to be filled with the power of the Spirit?

The thing about emptiness is that it contains its own kind of fullness. On the one hand it can be filled with anxiety about an unknown future. This carries the risk of denial—a desire to dwell nostalgically on a (allegedly) simpler (and arguably rosier) past in order to avoid confronting the challenge of seeing things from new perspectives. That’s a form of gazing upward into the clouds. All we get is a crick in the neck. So what is the alternative? Instead of anxiety we can let the empty places that await us be sources of invitation, drawing us forward to new opportunities for formation and ministry.

For example: St. Martin’s was invited a few weeks ago to the 9^th Annual Interfaith Poverty Conference, and those of us who attended were blessed to hear a bracing keynote by The Rev. Dr. James Forbes of Union Seminary calling us out as God’s “Dream Team” in the fight against poverty in Rhode Island. Conference attendees participated in workshops on immigration issues, minimum wage issues, racial and economic disparities in education and housing, and challenges faced by low-income seniors.

The facts presented were startling. 13.9%. That’s the percentage of people in poverty in Rhode Island in 2015; that’s 141,000 people, mostly people of color living in poverty. 19.4% of children- children—again, mostly youngsters of color, in poverty. And 9.2% of children living in extreme poverty between 2011 and 2015.   Almost one in ten? I have to confess something here. These figures shouldn’t have startled me. And they wouldn’t have, if I had been paying attention. These people are our neighbors. 

You may have heard (and if you haven’t, you have now…) that the Episcopal Church and the ELCA (Lutheran) Church have joined together in a call for fasting, prayer and advocacy on the 21^st day of each month through the end of the 115^th Congress to stimulate awareness and action in combating poverty in this country and throughout the world. Why the 21^st of each month? Here’s another statistic: That’s when 90% of Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program benefits run out. For our neighbors. You do the math.

In our Gospel today we are reminded that God has given us to each other, that we may be one, as Jesus and God are one. And to be blind to our neighbors is to be blind to God’s call to oneness with all of God’s beloved; to commit to compassion, service and justice.

For those of us coming up for air in our first week of The Bible Challenge, there may still be at the back of our minds the lingering question of why we do this—what is the point of reading the Bible all the way through? Here’s a little more encouragement: Did you know that there are over 2000 references in the Bible to issues of the poor, wealth, poverty and social justice? Over 2000. As we engage more and more deeply every day with Scripture, I pray that it becomes not just an intellectual exercise or isolated spiritual discipline that we pick up once a day, like a set of free weights, and then lay aside until tomorrow. This work should be building our muscles to be fit for God’s purpose—the fulfilling of God’s dream of healing and reconciliation. We are not learning just to speak of the faith that is in us, but to live it, in how we engage with the world and with all of our neighbors.

This liminal moment in which we find ourselves as Pentecost approaches is an existential moment. Who are we? What are we becoming? As we wait to inhale the Spirit, filled with nothing but anticipation, may the God who surrounds and enfolds us draw our gaze, not upward, but into the eyes of our neighbor, because it is there that we will find Jesus.

*”Rudolf Bultmann in his essay The New Testament and Mythology: “We no longer believe in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for granted… No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven … And if this is so, the story of Christ’s … ascension into heaven is done with.”

 

 

 

In the lead up to beginning The Bible Challenge at St Martin’s, there are two key questions that will focus our attention as we go forward. Firstly, how do we approach the language of the Bible? Secondly, how are we to understand what we read there?

The Bible contains multiple literary genres and they can’t all be approached in the same way. For instance, the New Testament contains gospel, letter, historical, and apocryphal literary genres. They are not all nails for which the hammer is always the right tool.

Gospel language is narrative language. Stories unfold through parables, i.e. confrontational tales drawn from ordinary life. Gospel language is rich in metaphor and allegory, both devices hinting at meaning beyond the literal face meaning of the words used.

The N.T. letters use the language of instruction, guidance, and often condemnation. Yet here we find metaphor and allegory used to nudge us in the direction from what is, towards what should be.

Biblical historical writing, unlike modern history, is not an objective analysis of events but a highly constructive arrangement of events to communicate a clear theological meaning.

Apocryphal writing evokes the language of dreams as a response to unendurable suffering, made endurable by a vision of victory in the end.

Acts 17:22-31 is an example of the historical genre. Luke is the historian of the early Church and in this sense, his history is very close to, if not is actual propaganda. His intention as a propagandist is two-fold. Firstly, he writes a history of the early years of the Church to commend Christianity to the wider pagan world of his time. His history is also intended for later generations of Christians, commending us to emulate in our lives the patterns of the first generation of Christians. Luke intends for us to read his history in order to develop a certain spiritual worldview.

A case study in reading history: Acts 17 

Paul had been cooling his heels in Athens for a few days after arriving from Borea, a town south of Thessalonica. It had been a tense time in Jerusalem during the recent council with the other Apostles. But at the council, Paul had won the argument. Gentile Christians did not have to submit to circumcision and the Jewish dietary codes.

Of course, he had known that Peter would eventually be won over; Peter, whose gregarious and generous personality led him to want to agree with everyone. But James? Paul had not been so sure that James, the leader of the conservative faction could have been persuaded. But in the end, James and the others had all agreed to give Paul a free hand in his mission among the gentiles. Buoyed up by his victory, Paul, accompanied by Silas and Timothy had set out immediately on a second missionary journey, swinging through the house church communities in Asia Minor and Greece.

Things had gone badly in Borea, however. There, Paul had encountered strong opposition from the Jews who came to hear him in the synagogue. It had been agreed with Silas and Timothy that Paul should hightail it out of town and go down to Athens and wait for them to join him there.

Paul had spent the last few days just ambling about splendid Athens with its many temples and impressive public buildings. He had never before found himself in such a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city and had been taken aback by the plethora of sects and cults all competing in a boisterous religious marketplace for custom among the curious Athenians. He had to admit he had found it all more than a little shocking. But yesterday, he had come across a temple dedicated to the unknown god. He had been a little amused at how these Athenians liked to hedge their bets. He realized that it really was true what they said about the Athenian insatiable craving for the latest novel idea and exotic practice.

Athens remained the center of learning and philosophy in the Classical World. Rather like the Great Britain of its day, Athens’ political and military power had long ago been usurped by an upstart new power centered at Rome. Yet, Rome still bowed before the hallowed Athenian Oxbridge[1] halls of learning.

This very morning Paul had found himself at the Areopagus, the rocky outcrop where the philosophical schools of Athens met to debate and dispute the pros and cons of various approaches to religion.

He hadn’t intended to speak and no one was more surprised than he when the learned Stoic and Epicurean scholars invited him to address them on this new teaching that seemed so strange to their ears.

In such august company, he had begun by measuring his words; not his usual preaching tactic. He had praised his audience for the quality of their religious thought and identified his new teaching about God with the object of their worship at the shrine to the unknown god. They had recognized his reference to Epimenides, one of their great poets when he had described God as the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being. They had also recognized his reference when he told them that we are the offspring of God, the god they recognize in the unknown one.

Oh yes, things had been going well. They had applauded when he had launched into a blistering critique of the pagan idols all around the city. This sophisticated audience had no truck with the popular worship of gods of gold and stone. Had he not ridden the rising energy of the crowd, now emboldened to proclaim that hitherto God had overlooked times of human ignorance but now called all to repentance through the raising of his son Jesus from the dead.

Having arrived at the crux of his thesis he had been stopped in full flood by the deafening silence in that moment before the whole Areopagus had erupted into scoffing cries of ridicule. Stoics and Epicureans, who agreed on nothing, both scoffed this Hellenized Jew’s ludicrous claim of resurrection from the dead.

Amidst the cries of derision, a small group had come to him and said we will hear you again. Compared to the thousands added to the church day in and day out through Peter’s preaching this was small success. But Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, both seemingly important citizens had been among the small group who had been persuaded by his words. Yet, Paul was kicking himself because he had so easily forgotten that those who consider themselves wise by worldly standards have no need of God.

Reading Luke’s history in Acts is a different kind of experience from the metaphor-rich language of the gospel writers. Historical narrative is less impactful – less heart changing in the moment.

Luke’s historical narrative functions in the same way that we might go to a play. We don’t attend Shakespeare to dismiss his characters because of their lack of historical plausibility. Watching Lear or Macbeth on the stage, they become knowable to us because we are drawn into identifying with them.

There is a tendency in some circles to idealize the characters we encounter in the Bible. We read about Paul’s exploits and we imagine him to be a much better Christian than we can ever be. I don’t regard idealization ever to be very helpful. On the other hand identifying with Paul, allows us to see him as a human being struggling with life in the same way we struggle with life.

I have viewed Paul standing on the rock of the Areopagus through the lens of my own speculations. Paul’s dilemmas and his challenges are so familiar to me. Paul’s way of resolving them offers a model for how we might do the same. Our context differs from his in so many ways and yet across all historical contexts the experience of speaking faith into a faithless world is remarkably the same.

At this point, I could take the direction of drawing out the parallels between the challenges facing Paul in 1^st century Athens and our challenges in 21^st century America. Idolatry – the placing of a lesser object in the place of ultimate concerns, still abound as much now as it did then. Like then, so also now. How are we to speak our faith into our public lives, not for the purpose of telling other people how to live their lives, but because we long to give a good account of the hope that is within us? How do we share the good news with others who like us, are struggling, seeking, and searching for that something more to living? In the midst of a world of material preoccupation, the longing for that something more to living seems to elude us as never before.

Yet, I want to stay close to the questions I mentioned at the outset: how do we approach the language of the Bible, and how are we to understand what we read there?

I propose these as questions to guide us forward as on May 22^nd we begin day 1 of The Bible Challenge. As we have moved closer to the date, the immensity of the challenge comes home to us more and more. Will we be up to it?

The answer will be at times yes we will. But at other times, our answer will be no we are not. The relentlessness of a 365-day reading program that doesn’t even let up for weekends will mean that there will be days, maybe even weeks when we are not up to it. The point will be – are we prepared to keep going or will we take this as a sign to give up?

Any discussion of reading Scirpture has to engage with the really big question. Why should we even consider reading the Bible?

Have you wondered why it is that in a community where most of us pride ourselves on our levels of education and skill amidst the sophistication of our ways of viewing the world, we seem prepared to remain as children in the life of faith, undereducated, unformed, the products of a spiritually arrested development – grappling to apply faith concepts learned as children to the adult complexity of the world? It’s a question to ponder.

To meet the demands of The Bible Challenge within the concept of life-long learning is the only way for us to grow up in our faith lives so that developmentally, our spiritual perspectives match the other aspects of our worldview.

As in all other areas of our lives, this will require commitment, dedication, and most of all perseverance in the face of the temptation to give up because we imagine reading Scripture is all too much for us, or worse, we don’t need it.

Paul’s life mission was to give a good account of the hope that was within him. This is our life mission also. This will require us to bring our faith life up to levels of emotional and intellectual maturity that characterize the way we live, and work, and have our being in all the other areas of our lives?

[1] A term conflating the names Oxford and Cambridge to refer to these centers of hallowed learning.