John the Evangelist tells the best stories! True, he does have a propensity to put long and theologically complex speeches into the mouth of Jesus that easily tax the attention span of the modern listener. Yet even in his set-piece discourses, John gives Jesus some pretty arresting sound bites, e.g. servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them is a good one for today’s political class to heed. Or, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

Nevertheless, John’s whole understanding of Jesus unfolds within the framework of seven stories commonly referred to as signs of the kingdom[1]. These are undoubtedly among the best stories in the New Testament.

The story of the raising of Lazarus is the seventh in the series of seven signs. As with all John’s stories, it is complex and multilayered. The Raising of Lazarus constitutes a kind of prologue to the events that begin to spiral, culminating over the course of a Thursday night and Friday morning, two weeks from now.

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Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis was an early disciple of the great Sigmund Freud. However, Freud was notoriously cantankerous and brooked no disagreement from his disciples. Consequently, like Jung, Assagioli eventually parted company with Freud over Freud’s discounting of the spiritual component in human development.

I mention Assagioli because of a method of listening he advocated that employs something called bi-focal vision to distinguish personal psychoemotional elements from spiritual transpersonal ones within and individual’s life story. Bi-focal vision tracks two distinct elements that are nevertheless interconnected and intertwined in ways that create the confusion and conflict that brings a person into therapy in the first place.

Applying Assagioli’s concept to a text rather than a person, the use of bi-focal attention allows us to separate out the way John weaves a transpersonal -theological meta-narrative, i.e. an overarching inclusive story about salvation, into what is also a story of love, loss, and recovery at a human-relational level.

The story so far

Jesus, with his disciples, received a message from the sisters of Lazarus that their brother is ill and dying. Jesus greets the news with what appears to be detached disregard, saying Lazarus is not going to die, rather that what is happening to him is an opportunity to glorify God. He then delays setting out for Lazarus, Martha, and Mary’s home in Bethany by two whole days. In the meantime, Lazarus does die and is interred in his tomb. On the fourth day, Jesus nonchalantly declares that now Lazarus has died it’s time to visit his friends in Bethany, situated in Judea about a day’s walk from Jerusalem. His decision fills his disciples with dismay for Judea is now a very dangerous place for Jesus to go. Last time he was there he narrowly escaped being stoned to death. Nevertheless, they all set-off and as Jesus nears Bethany, first Martha, having been looking out for his approach rushes out to greet him. Likewise a little later Mary, when Martha tells her (privately) of Jesus’ arrival also goes out to greet him. Despite his seemingly enigmatic delay in coming, Jesus, now in a state of some emotional distress, is taken to the tomb and calls Lazarus to awaken and come out. To the amazement of most of the onlookers, Lazarus emerges still wrapped in his winding sheet.

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When we apply bi-focal attention to this story, we can begin to see that there are two narrative strands flowing simultaneously,  throughout. This is a theological story about God and at the same time it is also a human relational drama. One strand is transpersonal in that it transcends individual experience, while the other is deeply personal.

We’ve already noted that the disciples are puzzled by Jesus’ response to the news of Lazarus’ imminent death. Instead of rushing off to Bethany he simply says that Lazarus’ plight is not one that will lead to his death but is an opportunity for the glory of God. At the human-relational level, this seems a callous response. However, here we have in John’s story the first indication of the transpersonal-theological motive of the glorification of God. But then Jesus immediately throws his disciples off the theological scent by mollifying their human fears in declaring that Lazarus merely sleeps, so no need to be alarmed.

The next puzzlement lies in the contrast between the two encounters Jesus has, first with Martha, and then her sister, Mary. Incidentally, we know both these women independently of John’s account. Both Martha and Mary appear in Luke 10:38-42, from which we learn that Martha is the active, doer, always on the go, while Mary is the contemplative one. John does not mention their Lucan biographies because like us, his hearers would already know them, and it’s no surprise that while Mary is being comforted indoors, Martha is out, pacing the road on the look out for Jesus’ approach.

Both sisters greet Jesus with identical words: Lord, if you had been here my brother Lazarus would not have died. We puzzle over how Jesus’ response to the sisters could not be more different. In his response to Martha, we see Jesus responding in theological focus. In response to what is in effect Martha’s rebuke – really Jesus, how could you not have come at once for now Lazarus is dead! – he subjects her to an examination of her belief in the resurrection. I have to say that this is not evidence of a very good pastoral manner here. He then identifies the resurrection with himself leading Martha to proclaim: Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. 

In the theological strand within John’s story, Jesus understands the death of Lazarus as an opportunity, not for sorrow, but so that God might be glorified in the presence of the bystanders who come to believe. The absence of concern and anxiety can be explained because the outcome is already preordained, so no need to worry. Bi-focal attention allows us to see how John presents the encounter between Jesus and Martha at the level of the theological significance of Lazarus’ death.

By contrast, Jesus response to Mary who greets Jesus with exactly the same words as her sister has used, reveals Jesus now identifying with the human-relational level and thus he is profoundly overcome by grief and sorrow. John describes Jesus being greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. The result is that Jesus too begins to weep with Mary. Bi-focal attention allows us to see John now presenting Lazarus’ death at the human dimension of a relationship of love and loss. Nowhere else, does Jesus appear more vulnerable and human than in his response to Mary, and together both now weeping, they go to the tomb of friend and brother.

It is at the tomb, we begin to see for the first time how the transpersonal-theological and human-relational strands come together because both are actually about relationship. Standing, publically weeping over the death of his friend Jesus now invokes his transpersonal relationship with God: so that they [the onlookers] may believe that you sent me! Lazarus come forth, is not only an expression of deep human compassion but is also a public proclamation of God’s glory.

***

John now tells us that many of the bystanders came to believe when at Jesus’ command they see Lazarus emerge still encased in his death shroud. It’s here that the Lectionary ends the story. But by ending the story here we are in danger of missing the larger point John is making in this story. This is not an all’s well that ends well, story.

For John, the raising of Lazarus is the turning point at which there is no escape from the path to the cross. When we read on in the text we learn that as well as some of the onlookers coming to faith others reject the theological message of salvation and go off to conspire with the Temple authorities. On hearing of events at the tomb of Lazarus, the authorities now have the evidence they need and vow to put Jesus to death; justifying their decision in terms of the murky politics of national security. Don’t let anyone convince you that the cross is not a political act. 

***

The raising of Lazarus is not a premonition of the resurrection, a kind of trial demonstration. Lazarus’ emergence from his tomb is simply resuscitation. Lazarus is returned to life for the somewhat limited purpose of glorying God in the presence of some of the bystanders. It is not to set up a happily ever after ending. For in the act of glorifying God, Jesus drives others of those who witness his action into the arms of the authorities, setting in motion the very resolve that will end in his arrest and death. Lazarus’ return to life is a limited time offer only and ensures that at some future date he will die again.

The theological point for John is that what begins in resuscitation will end in resurrection. If you want to know what the difference between the two is, you will need to tune in on Easter Day. You will only comprehend the difference, having first traveled the way of his Passion – liturgically speaking – with Jesus. In the meantime we pray:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy before he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it no other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. 

[1] The seven signs of the kingdom are:

1. Changing water into wineat Cana in John 2:1-11 – “the first of the signs”
2. Healing the royal official’s sonin Capernaum in John 4:46-54
3. Healing the paralytic at Bethesdain John 5:1-15
4. Feeding the 5000in John 6:5-14
5. Jesus walking on waterin John 6:16-24
6. Healing the man blind from birthin John 9:1-7
7. Theraising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45

 

John 9:1-41  A sermon from The Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs, Assistant Priest, St Martin’s Providence

We have here a story of a man who has had a transforming encounter with Jesus; a man whose story of God’s love and compassion is so compelling that he can’t help but share it. A man whose story is the cause of curiosity, wonder, and consternation all at once. A man who was cast out by his community of fellowship. A man who knew Jesus’ presence with him even in a moment of rejection and vulnerability, and worshiped him.

That man was the writer of the Gospel of John. His community of Jewish Christians was expelled from their synagogue because of their belief in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, and this painful rupture in all likelihood influenced this narrative of a man cast out because he refused to disavow Jesus as the source of his healing.

So we have a story within a story; both of them about communities in points of transition and how they respond to the prospect of change.

I’ve always loved this passage because of its energy; a kind of theatricality that catches the listener up in a swirl of question and accusation, a cast of thousands (sort of) and a back-and-forth dialogue worthy of The West Wing.

And at the quiet gravitational center of it all; a blind man and a Messiah. One thing I do know; that though I was blind, now I see. This statement is a simple narrative of transformation. The man, whose name is unknown, doesn’t need to embellish; he just speaks his truth while neighbors, Pharisees, and parents talk past him, flailing about for more answers than he can provide, nor does he care to, really. Perhaps he has enough to deal with as he negotiates his way in a world now flooded with light and color; a world in which the Dream of God has come intimately close. He is, through the application of dirt, spit, and water, a new creation.

So he asserts his new identity though the cost is high; he is expelled from his synagogue. And yet Jesus, who, you will note, is only actually in this drama at the beginning and at the end, though his presence is felt throughout—Jesus seeks the man out and reveals his own identity:

Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.

For the writer of John’s gospel, this was personal. The energetic images make real a moment of conversion and its initially chaotic aftermath. The perseverance of the man who has been healed, the confrontation with the community, the pain of rejection and the moment of worship are related by a storyteller who is deeply invested in what he is telling.

…I was blind, now I see. A simple statement of identities; an old one transformed into a new one. And the Gospel writer has incorporated it into Great Story: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Great Story of God’s love for creation is woven of smaller stories like this, of encounters with the Word made flesh; a tapestry of God’s Dream unfolding before our eyes.

And what gives this tapestry its vividness and dimension is its authenticity. There is not only the joy of healing in this encounter with Jesus, there is also the spiritual blindness and deafness of a community, and the pain of rejection—human frailty and vulnerability on full display. And this is important because it is frailty that teaches us the most about ourselves and who we are called to be as children of God and disciples of Jesus.

Notice the interaction of the man who had been born blind and his interlocutors. Question after question are launched at him, but does anyone really seem to be listening? The Pharisees are focused on violation of the Sabbath and whether the healer was a sinner. The man’s parents, rather than being overjoyed at their son’s healing, would rather be anywhere than being questioned by the authorities on the unusual way in which the healing had occurred. The neighbors are curious, but they either talk about him rather than to him or they keep asking the same question over and over: How did this happen? Where’s the guy who did it? And he keeps telling his simple story: …I was blind, now I see.

It’s like a feedback loop that they can’t escape. See, the thing about stories is that they are a two-way street. We’ve talked a lot about Story here at St. Martin’s, in part because storytelling is the connective tissue of the Body of Christ. But we haven’t talked much about what is fundamental to making a story truly effective. It must have a teller, obviously. But it isn’t a story until it has a listener—someone to attend to it. And the quality of the listening is as crucial as the narrative itself because it is only then that we have meaning, within the community.

So at the end of the story, when Jesus talks about blindness, he’s also talking about deafness—whatever dulling of senses has come to insulate us from fully encountering the truth of another. “Surely we are not blind, are we?”, the people say to Jesus. Well, actually, yes, you are, he says. As long as your own agenda keeps you from seeing, hearing, truly knowing the fullness of what is in front of you, yes, you are blind. And your blindness and deafness are distorting the story that someone is trying to tell you; they are obscuring the signs of new life that he is trying to show you.

The first-century community of John’s Gospel and the 21st-centurymainline church both share the experiences of enormous change and transition. An encounter with something new and untested tends to raise the adrenalin level so that we perceive threat where there might just as easily be opportunity. And when that happens it is vital to resist the temptation to retreat into nostalgia—a kind of blindness–and instead stop, breathe, and attend to what is in front of us.

Let the teller tell the story

In our Lenten Program this year this is what we are doing. In the course of our dinner discussions we have the opportunity to tell stories about our journey of faith and to listen to each other. We are learning to articulate our faith in a way that is magnetic to others—attracting them to a community that seeks—and very much needs–to grow. And the corollary to the telling of each story is that we also learn to attend to it—to see the identity of the teller as beloved of God who can offer a story of his or her own. Because we are not just called to name and claim our own identity as followers of Jesus; we are called to see Jesus in others. And that carries with it the risk that comes from true listening; the risk of change.

To truly listen to someone is to be open to the possibility that what you hear will change you. As the community of the man born blind learned, that is a scary proposition.

If the neighbors, parents, and religious authorities in this story had set their anxious questions aside they might have glimpsed the Dream of God becoming manifest right in front of them. They thought they were listening, but they weren’t. What they were doing was listening in order to change someone, rather than taking the risk that the listening would change them.

Last Saturday I had a humbling experience. I was involved in the annual Diocesan Learn & Lead workshop, which this year tackled the topic of generational differences and what they mean for the church. As I look back on it, the committee’s biggest concern as we planned the day was to gain understanding of what we perceived as “that shy, elusive creature, the Millennial.” Our committee made a special effort to invite Millennials– young people born between 1982 and 1999 because we felt that it was important that we not be talking about them in their absence.

So instead we talked about them in their presence. We had made the mistake of not asking a member of the Millennial generation to lead the discussion of a video presentation. So instead of observing an informative back-and-forth dialogue between generations I watched in some consternation as Baby Boomers began to opine about Millennials in the third person even though seven of them (they were totally outnumbered) were sitting right there. The opinions about them swirled through the air for several minutes until one young woman was finally able to get to the microphone and say, If you would like to know more about us, we’d be delighted to tell you, if you would ask us. Thanks be to God this was greeted with widespread applause.

But it was during lunch that the real grace happened. As the rest of the conference attendees moved around them a couple of older folks and five of the young people took their sandwiches and sat in a circle on the floor. At that quiet gravitational center, the young folks talked. They talked about their frustration at being treated as the automatic go-to people for social networking and technology when their gifts, talents and interests are vastly more diverse than that. They talked about their frustration at being assumed to be too young to take things on when they are more than fully capable of developing and running successful programs; They told of their childhood experiences of church and faith; about their desire for community with their friends, and their desire to have their questions about spirituality and religion truly heard and not dismissed. As one person said with an ironic smile, If I may generalize about Millennials, we all hate being generalized.

And as the hour and the conversation went on, I noticed a number of people quietly gathering around the little group. This time, instead of opining, they listened. I think I was not the only one who felt humbled in the presence of the vulnerability and wisdom of these young people.

I was blind, but now I see. Now I could see, not generalized “Millennials”, but individual story tellers with names: Mike, and Christopher, and Patrick, and Kenny and Frank.

That’s all anyone really wants, isn’t it? Regardless of age and wherever we meet. To be truly seen; to be known as a child of God with both strengths and vulnerabilities. Our challenge as a community focused on Jesus—because that is, after all, what we are—is to be that quiet gravitational center for others—that place where they not only encounter Jesus, but where they show Jesus to us, so that we all may be transformed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stating the dilemma 

I am the rector – which is Episcopal speak for senior priest-pastor of a church where many faithful people are perplexed about how and in what to believe. Given our formation and experience in the modern world, we are a highly educated, middle-class congregation, both attributes that seem to only add complexity to our perplexities concerning faith.

For many of us, the metaphysical image of an enchanted universe in which God is actively present within the material structure of time and space seems improbable to our disenchanted, rationalistic minds. What we seem clearer about is the social action bit – we understand about being good people doing what good people do. Yet, is this really enough to sustain a robust and dynamic faith in this brave new world of ours?

Many of us feel an affection for the parish community rooted in memories of former times when family and community jelled together in a seamless whole. Some of us are new or newer seekers, attracted by the messages heard from the Sunday pulpit or read in the online sermon blog relationalrealities.com.

The Anglican approach of sitting in the tension where Tradition meets Modern Family is attractive to people fed up with easy answers to complex questions. However, this approach is not for everyone. We are keenly aware of our greying, we know that the biggest challenge facing us is the need to grow in order to maintain our historic witness. We are warm and welcoming and committed to social action, yet our worship life, which lies at the heart of our self-definition, is complex and not instantly user-friendly.

Nevertheless, it is the human dimension of community life that holds many of us still in place, despite our perplexities and complexities about what it means to be a Christian in the modern world.

How are we to find a good account of the hope that is within us for ourselves, let alone give it to those who are searching? 

I came across this paragraph in a wonderful piece: Why nothing seems to get people back to Church in which Erik Parker challenges the notion that the way to attract Millennials (outsiders) is to emphasize the community – social networking aspect of church life. He tellingly notes:

Now, imagine someone is looking for a church. They are looking for a church with a commitment to following Jesus at its core and they show up at a social commitment church. It would be like showing up for a soccer team that stopped playing soccer years ago, and who instead gathers for coffee and donuts with friends and family. But this gathering of people still call themselves a soccer team. Now imagine members of that “soccer team” wring their hands week after week over the fact that no one wants to join the team to clean up coffee and pick up the donuts. You can see why soccer players looking for a team wouldn’t join. You can see why many members of the team left a long time ago.

Our future lies in being a community that offers an experience of being part of what Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry calls the Jesus Movement. I know it sounds kind of glib, but it focuses attention on the core nature of Christian community. The actual playing of soccer is not an historical artifact for something called a soccer team. It is the sole justification for existing. Likewise, being disciples of Jesus is not an historical artifact for a Christian community – an optional bolt on for a minority of those who are so minded.

In my community, we are less perplexed by the question – in whom can we believe? Jesus is a magnetic figure. The gospel message of hope over despair is a compelling one. Given what I have said about our levels of education and intellectual sophistication, the real question we stumble over concerns the how of belief.

How are we to find a good account of the hope that is within us to give to ourselves, let alone give to those who are searching?

Faith

Last week I preached on the call of Abraham, the first of the Hebrew Patriarchs. This Sunday we hear of an incident at the waters of Meribah involving Moses, the first of the Hebrew prophets. These are two chapters from the greatest story ever told, to quote from the title of that old Hollywood blockbuster. The greatest story ever told is a story that is technically an epic. Epic and myth are both a variety of story. But whereas myth is a story that exists outside temporal time – i.e. it is always the same and forever unchanging, an epic is an unfolding story that develops and changes within time. Epic is a story embedded in history, playing out within time through its impact on the lives of individuals and communities. The greatest story ever told is an epic story. Abraham and Moses are major footnotes in this epic story; a story that for Christians culminates with Jesus.

Abraham, Moses, and Jesus demonstrate lives of faith, modeling within their particular contexts day-to-day experience of what living in covenant with God looks like. In John’s Gospel, we eavesdrop on an encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well that models how we too are called to challenge the limitations of social convention in order to reveal something completely new[1].

We talk of having faith as if it’s a noun, a commodity we either possess or don’t. I don’t understand what having faith as a commodity I can have more or less of this looks like. I do understand what keeping faith as a verb means. Keeping faith helps me deal with what comes at me day-by-day. Keeping faith is not like telling myself that ten impossible things are true before breakfast every day. Keeping faith is letting my life be shaped by the greatest story of faith. The greatest story ever told, my current catchphrase for the Biblical epic is such a story and it must be at the center of our lives if we are to be followers of Jesus.

Story

We are storied beings because stories shape and guide our lives. Stories make sense of the world and ourselves in it. One pervasive story shaping our lives in the 21st century is the materialist story of the individual deal maker, who through the exercise of power grabs material success. We are shaped by the story of the autonomous individual who beholden to no one else pulls him or herself up by their own bootstraps. There is a corresponding story that shapes those who don’t match up to this story; a story of losers or victims. Competing stories have different consequences not only for those in them but for wider society. It’s not difficult to see the consequences of competing stories playing out around us.

The congress is currently struggling with competing stories about the role of health care for American Society. One story shapes us as a society in which health care is a right of all citizens and as such becomes an inclusive instrument for social good. This story competes with another story that sees health care as the private concern of individual citizens, the outworking of personal responsibility and personal choice. In this instance, in trying to decide which story to give allegiance to, as Christians we need to ask how does each story on health care fare when judged by the consistent priorities and demands of the greatest story ever told?  We then need to repeat this analysis with respect to the other stories – stories of race, gender, sexuality, power and powerlessness, in short, the many other stories that shape our lives.

Relationship

The greatest story ever told has one central recurring theme that translates human experience in a variety of contexts that could not be more different from one another. It is the story of covenanted relationship. Covenant is a form of relationship that binds separate persons together in mutual partnership. The covenant made between Abraham and God is renewed between God and Moses and uniquely reaffirmed in the covenant between God and Jesus. The interesting thing about covenant relationships is that they not only serve the interests of the partners but exist for the fulfillment of a higher purpose.

This last week in the New York Times David Brooks wrote of the human dimension of covenanted relationships:

People in a covenant try to love the other in a way that brings out their loveliness. They hope that through this service they’ll become a slightly less selfish version of themselves…. Love is realistically a stronger force than self-interest. Detached calculation in such matters is self-strangulating. The deepest joy sneaks in the back door when you are surrendering to some sacred promise. 

Will the story of covenanted relationship provide the good account of the hope that is within us to give to ourselves, and most importantly of all to those who are searching?

[1] We see the dynamics of this played out in the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman; in the way she comes her eyes become open to seeing him contrasting with the continued cultural blindness of his disciples.

1. The encounter with the woman at the well occurs within the context of the historical dispute between Jews and Samaritans about the location of God’s dwelling place, whether here on the Samaritan Mt. Gerizim or at Jerusalem and reflects the sad legacy of division following the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel some 700 years earlier.

2. Using living water as a metaphor for faith Jesus offers a new vision of a world freed from the disputes of history and geography.

3. This sign story offers a radically new vision of gender relations in which Jesus speaks directly to a woman in public to whom he is not related. He addresses her as woman not sister – implying a level of equality between them contradicting the gender hierarchy of his society.

4. Water also becomes the metaphor for inclusion. The living water that Jesus offers cannot be polluted by racial or religious differences. It can be drawn by anyone, and shared with everyone without distinction.

5. Liberated from the blinders of history, religion, race, and gender, the woman is led to make the first proclamation of Jesus as messiah from the lips not from an insider, i.e. one Jesus’ Jewish disciples, but from the despised Samaritan outsider. Foreigners have a way of comprehending the truth first.

6. The shock and horror of the disciples on returning to find what has been taking place between Jesus and the woman simply reinforces the radical nature of this exchange. Faced with Jesus radical departure from strict religious, racial and social conventions they instantly reject the possibility of discovering something new. This is what insiders do. When their worldview is challenged they quickly foreclose on possibility and retreat into the blindness of conventional expectations.

 

Bernard Malamud along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth was a prominent Jewish writer in the middle of the 20-century. Last week I quoted from his novel- The Natural –in which he writes: we have two lives … the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Faith is what moves us from the life we learn with into the life after that.

We approach a major turning point at Genesis, chapter 12 with the introduction of the man who comes to be known as Abraham, the father of nations whose descendants, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim have become as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Abraham’s story is a story of the journey from the life learned with to the life after that, a journey taken by the quintessential person of faith.

Genesis 1-11 reveal that the story between God and humanity has not gone so well. If God learns from past mistakes with the introduction of Abraham we see God developing a new strategy. In singling out Abraham, God shows that for the foreseeable future it’s the personal relationship touch that will make all the difference. God’s choice of Abraham shows us that God seems to choose unusual candidates for this kind of partnership. Abraham and his wife Sarah are already beyond childbearing age; odd candidates for the father and mother of a new nation. In the choice of Abraham, we come to see God’s desire clearly. God and Abraham develop a relationship that is startling in its portrayal of God as intimate and personal.

Historical data

Genesis 12:1-4 opens with God identifying Abraham, known at this point by his earlier name of Abram with the request to 

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.

Somewhere between 2000 and 1800 BCE, Abram, with his father Terah and their extended clan migrates from the Chaldean city of Ur-Kasdim, finally arriving at Harran, a town located in southeast Turkey. Although we don’t know the reason for this clan migration, this type of moving around is a feature of herding societies, often in response to changing climatic and grazing conditions. Abraham subsequently moves around the region between Harran and the Nile delta in response to drought and famine events. It’s only when Sarah dies that Abraham makes his first purchase of land at Machpelah near modern day Hebron. Here he buries Sarah in the Caves of the Patriarchs where later he himself as well as Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, are laid to rest. Rachel, Jacob’s principal wife is missing for she is buried in Ramah, north of Bethlehem. The purchase at Hebron is the first actual indication of the land that God promises Abraham and his posterity.

As a result of the explosion in archeological excavation following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, scholars came to believe that the Patriarchs were the personification of tribal units that eventually coalesced into what comes to be known more generally by Abraham’s clan name of Hapiru or Hebrews.

The story of the relationship between God and Abraham is the first story cycle in a series of story cycles that comprise the rest of Genesis. Abraham is remembered as the first of the Patriarchs, a title that descends from father to son through the story cycles of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; Joseph being the last of the Patriarchs, and with his story cycle the book of Genesis draws to its close.

Coloring in the outlines

Genesis describes the major events between Abraham’s leaving Ur until his death at the age of 147. The Biblical narrative is rather spare in that it speaks in the language of external events, i.e. he went here, where this happened, and he then did that and this, then happened – so on and so forth. We are fortunate in that we live in a period of time when the archeological data has greatly expanded our knowledge of the historical context for the Age of the Patriarchs’. Interesting and helpful though this is, we receive the story of Abraham and God as a story about faith, love, obedience, and responsibility. As a story of faith, it acts upon us as we color the external, historical events with an internal, imaginative meaning.

In Abraham God enjoys the kind of relationship immediately recognizable to our 21^st-century sensibilities. It’s more than a typical Biblical transactional relationship. It’s a relationship, which from our more psychological perspective is truly reciprocal in a modern relational sense.

God finds in Abraham the quality of connection originally hoped for in Adam and Eve. But as the subsequent events in the Garden of Eden reveal, this was not to be. Like the partners in a true relationship, God and Abraham are each capable of deeply affecting the experience of the other. God commands and Abraham obeys and so far this is not so startlingly different from what has gone before. Yet, in the developing narrative about their relationship, we discover something quite new in the way Abraham and God relate to each other. Abraham claims the authority conferred by relationship to confront and challenge God. Abraham engineers the changing of God’s mind with God conceding to Abraham, time and again. In Abraham, God finds a willing partner, who will also be responsible and faithful in a relationship that becomes the foundational template for covenant as the key expression of a relational theology.

Faith is what moves us from the life we learn with into the life after that. Abraham’s story is a story of the journey from one life to the next taken by the quintessential person of faith.

The God of Abraham’s faith

In our Lent program titled Going Deeper, we are exploring our engagement with faith as a public expression of our baptismal covenant that makes us accountable to God to work together for the renewal of the world.

Like Abraham, we don’t necessarily begin this collaboration with a completed sense or understanding of God. Like him, we continually discover the reality of who this God is, as we go along. Drawing on our tradition’s transgenerational experience of God as the fruit of the relationship between God and Abraham, we are led to our own generational –individual encounter with God.

Location, location, location – but where?

Christians, traditionally have believed in a metaphysical dimension in which God exists objectively, i.e. independently of our subjective experience or non-experience. We tend to no longer share an enchanted perception of this objective God’s physical location in places, objects, and people. We are by and large no longer super-naturally minded outside the genres of entertainment. The entertainment industry’s focus on the supernatural indicates that there is, nevertheless an unrequited need in us that our spiritual lives now seem unable to meet.

We are an intensely, relationally-seeking people. For some, this experience is a directly apprehended mystical experience but for most of us, and Episcopalians tend to fall into this category, God communicates through the sacramental story. The sacramental story is by its very nature a participatory story through which God becomes present and active in our lives and the events of our history. As we participate in this sacramental story we become shaped by it through worship and action. Sunday by Sunday and on the days in between we affirm our accountability to God, playing our role in the renewal of creation.

God told Abraham:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.

For Christians, the covenant God made with Abraham comes to a complete fulfillment in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is our transformational story through which God is now telling us:

Go from the life you learn with into the life after that – the new life I will show you!

Lauren Belfer’s novel And After the Fire is a story that plays with time. In this instance, the interplay of past and present superimpose upon each other. Traced through events in 18^{th and} 19^th century Berlin, Belfer chronicles the fate of a previously unknown Bach Cantata from the chaos of 1945 Weimar to present day New York,  Her narrative moves seamlessly from the present back into various periods of the past before reemerging again into the present time.

I don’t want to spoil the story for you so all I can say is that Belfer not only plays with the interweaving of past with the present but explores the tension between preservation and suppression, between making known and keeping secret.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”. 

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Writing about the Canadian Charles Taylor, to my mind one of the towering figures in contemporary philosophy, Joshua Rothman in his recent op-ed in the New York Times wrote that Taylor:

has explored the secret histories of our individual, religious, and political ideals, and mapped the inner tensions that cause those ideals to blossom or to break apart.

Taylor’s massive opus A Secular Age, which one summer I dedicated myself to working through, explores the historical, religious, and political developments that have led to our arrival in the current secular age. He contrasts how in 1500 it was impossible not to believe in God with the impossibility for many today of holding such a belief, exploring how the culture of the West has moved from one position to the other.

In the long 400-year emergence of our current secular Western mindset, Taylor notes the gradual transition from what he terms the age of enchantment to the age of disenchantment, the term he uses to refer to our current predicament.

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The Biblical narratives are the product of enchantment mindset. To the enchanted imagination, God is most frighteningly present in the physical structures of the material world. Divine power not only inhabits objects and places, it makes itself felt through the relational spaces that separate one person from another. It even penetrates our inner worlds of intention as we human being struggle in the tensions between good and evil, between God and self.

The enchanted mindset understands God’s dwellings in spatial terms of up and down, in and out. An expression of the spatial nature of God’s presence in the world is the idea that God inhabits sacred mountaintops. Human encounter with God requires a laborious journey up to the mountaintop where God dwells and where the encounter between divine and human takes place.

On the mountaintop, God conceals Godself in thick cloud while simultaneously self-revealing in blinding light. On the mountaintop Peter, James, and John experience an epiphany of the divine Christ, after which they must negotiate the even more perilous path down the mountain carrying the experience.  They must carry the remembrance of what they have seen and yet, at the same time practice a kind of forgetting.

Many have been perplexed why Jesus so insistently binds his companions to the silence of secrecy? I am reminded of Belfer’s novelistic exploration of the tension between preservation and suppression, between making known and keeping secret.

The easiest explanation for Jesus binding his companions to secrecy is that the time is not yet right. Events on the mount of the Transfiguration are only at a midpoint in a longer process towards the dénouement of his ministry.

As they were coming down the mountain Jesus ordered them, “tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead”.

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The Transfiguration story is a halfway point for Matthew and the other gospel writers. It marks the transition when Jesus leaves preaching and teaching in the Galilean countryside and turns his face towards to Jerusalem.

The event on the Mountain of Transfiguration is also for us a halfway point between Jesus’ birth and death.  The Transfiguration is a momentary glimpse through the space-time continuum as it were into the unity Jesus enjoys with God. Yet, at this stage of the journey, it must be preserved in secrecy, for the journey is only halfway through.The danger for us is to play with time in an unhelpful way, to impose the future onto the present before we are ready for it.

Jesus’ point to Peter, James, and John is that they are not yet ready to bear the full realization of what they have witnessed on the holy mountain. The danger for them is that the transfiguration becomes a high point, a peak experience that they hanker endlessly to return to; a state for which they yearn rather than a stage through which they emerge.

If I had revealed the plot and ending of Belfer’s story I would have spoilt your experience in reading it. Yet, when it comes to the gospel we know the plot and how it ends. This distances us from the day to day experience of living through the story and its power to interact with us as it unfolds.  We miss the point that this story must be lived through in temporal time, one day at a time. Because, at the level of everyday experience, like Peter, James, and John, we find that we too are not yet ready for the full implications of its ending.

The Transfiguration bookends the Christmas-Epiphany season. From here on we move into a different section of the spiritual journey. The landscape becomes rocky and desert-like as we journey down the mountain into the season of Lent.

Our upcoming encounter with the themes of Lent will show us just how ill prepared we are to receive the fullest insights of the Transfiguration. Lent offers the opportunity to open more profoundly to the transformation process that will prepare us for the last great epiphany of Jesus’ earthly life – his death and resurrection.

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If God was powerfully present within the material structures of the enchanted age, God has been locked outside of the structures of our disenchanted age. For us, the material universe is an experience of being alone.

Yet within our disenchanted age, the Church’s calendar continues to move us along a journey taking us from Jesus birth to his death and into new life. The Bible despite being the product of enchanted imagination still offers us the only narratives which have the power to shape and fulfill our otherwise disenchanted lives.

Transfiguration is not a state we yearn for, but a stage we emerge through as we journey onwards into the processes of personal and community transformation. Yet for that to happen we have to possess the courage to place God and the center of our living and loving. Can we? Will we? These questions will go to the heart of our study over the next six weeks.

 

Sermon From the Rev. Linda Mackie-Griggs for Epiphany 6

I have been told that I am a perfectionist. Fair assessment. I’ve found that being a perfectionist is both a gift and a source of anxiety. That which makes me the go-to person in the office for proofing bulletins is the same thing that makes me fret for days if a typo gets past me. It’s a blessing and a curse: Whether this is a trait that will be life-giving or soul-sucking is a choice; one that I regrettably seem to be faced with on a pretty regular basis.

When we hear about blessings and curses in this morning’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, we see even starker choices:

If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, … then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear… I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

This is the conclusion to Moses’ farewell address to his people before they cross the Jordan into the Land of Promise. What has come before is what as known as the “second law-giving” that comprises the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy; an expansion of the Ten Commandments that details how the People are to live in right relationship with their God. Undergirding it all is a single theme: That the people should be faithful to the One God. And No Other. And a corollary to this is that there is to be a bright line of separation between those who worship the One God and those who don’t.

Deuteronomy, like all of the other books in the Bible, did not originate in a vacuum. It is a product of its time and culture; probably written over the course of the late 8^th through the late 6^th centuries BCE. The portion we read today was written well after the establishment of Israel, and after the traumatic period of the Exile when the Temple was destroyed and the people of Israel were taken into captivity in Babylon for seventy years. In other words, the Deuteronomist (as the writer is sometimes called) had the benefit of hindsight when writing this account of Moses’ speech. The Jews read this in the context of what had happened to them in the Exile and concluded that unfaithfulness to God’s commandments resulted in tragedy:

You shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

As a genre of literature, Deuteronomy is also a product of its time. It was once thought to be in the form of a kind of treaty that was imposed by a stronger party upon a subjugated one. But later scholars determined that in form and structure this is a more mutual arrangement; a particular kind of covenant with the People that requires the assent of both covenanting parties. According to W. Sibley Towner, the book of Deuteronomy’s chief purpose is to win the assent of the People by laying out the argument that faithfulness to God is to their ultimate benefit as a community. They will prosper and become numerous in the land that God is giving them. They will have blessing, life. Lack of faithfulness, according to this covenant, means curse, adversity, death. Towner notes that as persuasive arguments go this is admittedly a hard sell, but the Deuteronomist knows that there is a great deal at stake—the very survival of Israel.

In the book of Joshua, Joshua puts a similar choice before the People: choose this day whom you will serve… The People seal the covenant, saying: we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God. But interestingly, this sealing of covenant doesn’t happen in Deuteronomy. The People are commanded to choose, but the narrative doesn’t record their response to Moses’ imperative, as it does in Joshua. This is a significant omission. This covenant demands a response—a choice. What will it be, life or death? Blessing or curse?

The lack of response isn’t an omission. It’s an invitation. God’s People are called to make the choice of blessing or curse, life or death, not just at that single point in time, but continually henceforth. To be faithful to God, then, is to be ever mindful of God’s call to faithfulness and to choose, at each fork in the road, the way of life and blessing. 

It gives a whole new meaning to the words of Moses: I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. Today. Right now, and now, and now. Whew.To choose life and blessing is to choose the way of justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness. Love. To choose life and blessing is to choose to be part of God’s Dream of reconciliation with God, Creation and one another. Every moment of every day.

The Deuteronomist, in leaving space for the People’s response, has shown them and us a door that is wide open. This is the Good News: that all of God’s beloved children stand perpetually on the threshold of Kingdom welcome.

This is the blessing–the Good News. But I confess that I am troubled by something. There is a risk inherent in the message of Deuteronomy that can’t be ignored. Since we are required to engage critically with Moses’ message and its implications, that means we must acknowledge not only the blessing in the passage but the curse as well; and that is the bright line separation that I referred to earlier between the People who believe in the One God and those who don’t – us and them.

But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish…

As many of us discovered in our reading of The Story last year, the commandment to worship only the One God and to shun the worship of idols resulted in, to put it mildly, violent confrontations between the People of Israel and, well, everyone else. How do we reconcile this with a God who loved all of Creation into being and called it Very Good? Who commanded His People to care for widow and orphan and to welcome the stranger? Whose chief commandments are to Love God and Love Neighbor, and who called His people again, and again to return and never gave up on us?

We are left to struggle with how to reconcile competing messages from the Deuteronomist. Fortunately, a life of faith is defined by questions and wrestling, often leaving us with more questions than answers. Here we wrestle with our belief in a Trinitarian God–Father, Son, Spirit– that is defined as diversity in relationship; that Trinitarian God having created a world in his image, a world that reflects that image by teeming with diversity. Deuteronomy’s message of faithfulness to that God goes head to head with the writer’s own tendency to Other, that is, to pervert the blessing of diversity by equating difference with inferiority, even evil.

A critical reading of Deuteronomy, then, invites us to consider that God’s command to exclusive faithfulness carried with it negative consequences that were born of the human tendency to Other; that is to see the world from a fearful dualistic (us vs. them) perspective. Having written in an era when the consequences of the Peoples’ lack of faithfulness resulted in destruction and exile, it is perhaps not surprising that the Deuteronomist felt the need to pin blame on idol worship—on Others.

Ironically the Christian household has done its own version of othering by saying that Jesus’ objective in the Sermon on the Mount was to correct a flawed Commandment. This perspective risks opposing Christians and Jews by implying that the Gospel somehow invalidates the Hebrew Scriptures. This does our rich Jewish foundation a grave disservice. In last week’s readings, Jesus said that the Commandment isn’t the problem—it’s the execution that’s the problem. Using vivid and admittedly provoking images, Jesus calls his disciples to listen more deeply to the commandments, not to disregard them; to recover the life-giving roots of God’s call to his people—a call that asks us not to Other one another but to use our hearts as well as our minds to discern God’s vision for us. Jesus is in effect validating the open-ended nature of the Deuteronomic covenant, saying that every day we are called to choose to cross the threshold toward the Way of compassion and reconciliation. And when we choose that way—the way of blessing and not of Othering, we do our part to help realize God’s Dream.

Beginning on Tuesday in our Atrium you will see an example of what this can look like. We have an interactive exhibit created by a South Providence organization called Youth in Action. In their own words, “YIA envisions a world where young people are at the forefront of positive social change and believes that with their natural ability to innovate, capacity to lead, and desire for positive change, that world is possible.” In a time when youth are often Othered– denigrated as naïve, lazy, narcissistic, frivolous, or disrespectful of authority, this is a group of young people that has chosen to counteract that narrative; to be a blessing to each other and to the community through their leadership, their stories, and their belief in a better world. I encourage you to spend time engaging with their work.

I will leave you with a story of another group faced with a choice of blessing or curse: A young lawyer got on the subway in Manhattan recently and was dismayed to see that Swastikas and anti-Semitic insults had been drawn with Sharpie on every advertisement and every window of the car. His fellow passengers were just staring at each other uncomfortably, unsure how to respond.

Then somebody stood up, pulled some tissues out of his pocket, and said, “Hand sanitizer gets rid of Sharpie. We need alcohol.” Immediately people all around the car reached into their bags and pockets looking for tissues and hand sanitizer, and in very short order all the hateful words and symbols were gone.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.

We stand on the threshold of the Kingdom, not just as individuals but as a society. History has shown that we tend to take two steps forward and one step back. And sadly sometimes the other way around. But we have been assured from the beginning and in the fullness of time through Jesus Christ that God’s mercy is bountiful and the invitation to faithfulness stands firm. The door to life and blessing remains open.

Take a look

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Identity

Stories shape identity. We come to know ourselves through the stories we build to explain our lives to others and ourselves. Each of our life stories comes in multiple versions, for as anyone who has attempted an autobiography will discover the way we currently construct our story is not the only way we can tell it. Each version depends on what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is included and what is left out.

Our identity is also shaped by the external stories of our ethnic, racial, and cultural identity histories. These lay claim to us. For instance, our culture has a powerful secular materialist story that has the most powerful claim over us. This is the story of the autonomous individual imbued by nature with gifts of intelligence and guile, who by the sweat of his or her own brow carves out a life of self-sufficiency and material success. Modern materialist culture assumes that to be successful all we need is the determination to be self-made people. Note how social capital (societal infrastructure) is normally left out of such a story.

All of this raises questions:

• Who do we tell ourselves we are?
• Given that each of has more than one way of telling our story, which is the principal story that lays claim to us?

A short chemistry lesson

Salt can’t lose its salinity unless the chemical bond between sodium and chlorine is broken. As one of the most stable of compounds, only an electric charge is able to loosen the NaCl molecule. Thus when salt is dissolved in water it enjoys a greater volume as it is released from crystal form, but it remains essentially salt in all its savory-ness.

In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus’ tell his disciples: you are the salt of the earth. Describing someone as the salt of the earth creates an identity. This person is wholesome, true, and above all else effective and fruitful.

More troubling are Jesus’ words: but if salt loses its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything and is thrown out and trampled under foot. Does Jesus not understand that salt can’t lose its savor?

Jesus would have observed how salt was collected from saltpans. When dried out the substance in which the salt was embedded still contains a lot of impurities. While salt as sodium chloride can’t be dissolved away it can be leached out. Heavy rain would leach the sodium chloride out of surface layers of the saltpans leaving the residue of impurities that are essentially tasteless. Like fine sand, it was good only as material to loosely gravel a pathway where it would be trampled underfoot.

Jesus has a habit of taking ordinary things to create stories of the spiritual life. So he takes salt – something crucially important in everyday life as a savory for food, a preservative of meat, a fixing for dying cloth, as a staple commodity in commercial transaction – Roman soldiers were often paid in salt in lieu of coin. The leaching of salt from the surface of the saltpan becomes an evocative metaphor for a loss of spiritual fruitfulness. While still looking like salt, without taste the residue is good for nothing. In terms of human behavior, it’s not difficult to see where Jesus is going with this.

Identity revisited

Through our stories, we identify ourselves. Jesus tells us we are the salt of the earth. Maybe we can’t lose our saltiness but like the saltpans after heavy rain, our saltiness can be leached out of us – diluted by the prevailing personal and cultural stories that claim us.

Many of us espouse storylines that promote independence and self-sufficiency as a primary value shaping our view of ourselves and of others. Most of us easily fall under the spell of storylines that shape our view of the world as a place of competitive scarcity. As a nation, we increasingly give allegiance to the storylines that make us fearful of the stranger and thereby more tolerant of simple, authoritarian solutions to complex multilayered problems. Many of us now seem to believe that the story of commercial business success and its competitive values of the unfettered self-interest are the primary attributes for good government. When we place ourselves at the center of our stories we easily forget that means justify ends not ends justify means, forgetting that justice cannot be achieved through oppressive measures.

Saltiness in action

If the gospel story has a claim on us what kind of transformation does it open us to? Isaiah 58 offers some guidance on what preserved saltiness in action looks like.Isaiah confronts the people of Israel’s collective image of themselves as faithful in worshiping God. They believe they are faithful. They complain that God does not see of their faithfulness, nor note their scrupulous observances. God retorts: Look, you can bow your head like a bulrush and lie in sackcloth and ashes all you want but you serve your own interest on the fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. In other words, ritual observances without the saltiness of social action will not attract God’s attention. Israel’s true worship has become diluted by self-interest.

Further Reflections

Competing storylines, each laying claim over us, like the spring rains upon the saltpans dilute our saltiness, washing away the effectiveness of the gospel message, the good news story that opens us to a larger, deeper and clearer vision of our role in society.

Isaiah declares God’s call to fight injustice. Isaiah understands injustice to be a systemic evil that privileges:

• the few over the many,
• the rich over the poor,
• the advantaged over the disadvantaged,
• the insider over the outsider.

Religious observance without the saltiness of a social conscience is self-serving and connives with oppression.

Undoubtedly the gospel is a hard message to follow because it confronts us again and again with our own easy conformity to storylines that insulate us to the social evil in which our blindness makes us complicit. The gospel challenges us to understand that our own self-interests are best served when we are concerned for the interests of others.

In this highly complex world of ours, each of us feels powerless to effect change beyond traditional personal acts of charity. To use the biblical metaphor, individually we can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger. Yet until we ask why the hungry have no food and the naked are unclothed, why the stranger is forced to leave her home, we change little. Hélder Câmara, who as archbishop of Recefe from 1964 – 1985 opined: When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.

Note, it is to a whole people Isaiah speaks. Jesus speaks to the community of his disciples. The you addressed by both Isaiah and Jesus is the collective you. Worship is always communal. Worship bears fruit in communal action. In worship, God addresses us as a community so that community becomes the vehicle for saltiness in action. Communal action is always social in nature.

Jesus said you are the salt of the earth but beware of losing your savor. To preserve our saltiness from personal and cultural dilution we must first get our storylines straight and recognize that if we are followers of Jesus, the primary storyline that has a claim on us is the storyline of the gospel, the good news; this good news story calls us to

think global and to act local.