Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, November 8, 2009

Lessons designated by the common lectionary includhe: Ruth 3: 1-5,
Psalm 127, Hebrews 9: 24-38 and Mark 12: 38-44

“The story of Ruth seems a simple ‘once upon a time’ kind of tale. Two women in dire circumstances remain loyal to each other and find happiness through the love and generosity of Boaz. But the conclusion to the story points forward rather than backward. Boaz and Ruth belong not only to Israel’s past, but to the future God has in mind for Israel and, indeed, for all humankind.” In Psalm 127, the “psalmist wisely observes that a life that does not contribute to the future is a life ‘in vain.’” Warning is also given that apart from God the future holds little promise for abundant living. The conclusion in the passage from Hebrews is that the sacrificial love of Jesus offers us a paradigm and promise for the health and wholeness of the human family. And the story of the widow’s penny in Mark 12 reminds us that “those who work to secure their own positions but neglect to recognize God (as do the religious leaders and the wealthy in the story) live only in the present, acknowledging neither God’s care in the past nor God’s sovereignty over the future.” (Quoted material from Brueggemann et. al. “Texts for Preaching”.)

A few years ago I was waiting for a flu shot and while standing in line I joined in a brief conversation with the one standing beside me. That person has just heard a speech by an advocate for children in the United States. Our children, he said, fare more poorly in our country than in any other industrialized western nation and commented on the tragedy of our misdirected national stewardship.

The conversation reminded me of a student at Brown University in Providence, who for many days was fascinated by construction workers walking high above the city along the steel girders of a new skyscraper. Then one morning he saw what he’d most feared. A worker fell from one of the girders to his death in the street below. A fellow worker, probably the foreman, came down from the top of the building in a crude elevator, looked at the body and said sadly, “Tom was leaning against the wind, and he wouldn’t listen. He was new at this work.” Later, the student had the courage to ask the man what it meant when he said, “leaning against the wind.” “Well, you see,” said the foreman, “along the coast here in the morning hours there’s often a strong wind blowing from the ocean at fifty or more miles an hour. It’s easy to be tempted to lean against that wind. But you can’t depend on it; because it can drop off at any moment. That’s what happened to poor Tom. He was leaning against the wind when it suddenly let up.”

Of course the point of this story is that we, too, can lean on things that in the long run let us down. We can lean on material things. We can lean on our class or school or club ties. We can become dependent on a culture of consumerism and accumulation. The only certain thing I know of upon which we can lean and not get hurt is God in Christ, who commissions us as stewards to look closely and deeply at our own lives and at the life of our society.

In our gospel lection, Mark urges his readers or listeners to raise the question of values. He lived in an exploitative society where the wealthy and even the religious elite, in this case the scribes, lived comfortable lives among the misery of the vast majority. This passage provokes us to reflect on the contrast between a poor widow who gives sacrificially out of her devotion to what she understands as noble and elevated in her world and the scribes who “devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.”

As it was in Jesus’ time, so it is today. Breuggemann argues that the traditional way to interpret our lesson is to lift up the widow as an ideal figure, an exemplar of generousity. Recently, however, some commentators raise the question of why the widow should be commended for supporting an institution (the Temple) that contributes to the exploitation of the poor. “Does she not rather serve as a concrete example of how innocent people are victimized by the Temple authorities?” The advocacy of Jesus in this lection is therefore both a lament on the plight of the vulnerable within his world and a condemnation of those who callously remain indifferent to them.

In the long run, when our society leans into the false values of excessive materialism, we eventually lose. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us years ago, “the moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.”

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, November 1, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Ruth 1:1-8,
Psalm 146, Hebrews 9: 11-14 and Mark 12: 28-34

“At the Heart of our Faith”

“One of the scribes came near and…asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12: 28-31)

In our lection this week, we hear Jesus quoting from the Shema (Deut. 6:4-5) Mark, however, adds the phrase “with all your mind” thus making the commandment an even greater single-minded commitment on the part of those who would follow the path and teaching of Jesus. The commandment is intended, according to my commentary, not for the general public but for that community choosing to follow Jesus. Our lection this week is at the heart of our faith and its challenge is humbling to the bravest and smartest and most talented among us.

We’re to treat others as we ourselves would be treated. That command is more than a hint about getting along with others we know. Rather, it is intended to go way beyond individual “making friends and influencing people” kinds of interaction in isolation from the larger national and world community. One recent insight into this truth came to me during a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hundreds of thousands of visitors travel to this remote New England town to savor the work of this profound illustrator and artist as he tells stories in the work he has created. From 1916 through 1967 his art framed the covers of “The Saturday Evening Post” and the hundreds of them give great insight into the history of our nation. But the room of the museum that especially attracted me was devoted to Rockwell’s paintings illustrating the “Four Freedoms” articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 at a time of increasing national anxiety. Belgium, Holland and France had been impaled by Nazi Germany and Norway just invaded. Japan was threatening. In an address to the congress, Roosevelt laid out some objectives that he hoped might arise from building a lasting peace. He called for “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear — which translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.” These are words that can hardly be considered out of date.
So that when our nation thinks seriously about “nation building” in places like Afghanistan today, one of my first questions is this: If we can’t build our own nation, “securing economic understandings which will secure …a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants,” how can be build one whose culture and history we know so little about?

Let me quote from Bob Herbert in his recent (10/13/09) column in the New York Times. He writes: “Whether it’s Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, Camden, N.J. — take your pick — we’ve looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise.”

Herbert continues: “We’re having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America’s third largest city…While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan we’ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.”

You get the idea. As a nation, we’re doing a great job in violating the basic challenge of Jesus to treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. We sit passively as our congress awards itself a magnificent health care plan while so many in that body seem willing to capitulate to the special interest moneyed lobbyists of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. We watch while our military representing a tiny and unrepresentative portion of our population fights wars in places and among people they clearly do not understand. And with a tired army supplemented by career mercenaries paid by “for profit” corporations like Blackwater, a name that became so infamous and sinister its name was changed to something abstract and innocuous. All of this does make one wonder whether we’d be engaged as we are if there were a universal draft and a more representative military. But our society no longer has the stomach for that. Too many of us allow an increasingly desperate job-despairing and disappearing middle-class or the easily hooked by promises of adventure inner-city youth fight these battles! Not exactly the message and command of Jesus, is it?

Still, we come again to the “heart of our faith” and its command not suggestion that we are to treat our neighbor as we would like to be treated ourselves. It’s our “impossible possibility” as well as our eternal task!

Ralph Ahlberg

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 25, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 42: 1-6 and 10-17, Psalm 34:1-8, Hebrews 7: 23-28 and Mark 10: 46-52

The story Mark tells in our lection this week is about the process of recovering sight or vision. Of course, like other biblical healing stories, the story of Bartimaeus is subject to widely divergent interpretations. For some, it is a story about a man who was literally blind. Bartimaeus is a person with no chance whatsoever of passing an eye examination at the Motor Vehicle Department. He is certifiably blind and cannot see. If we read the story that way, we could argue that just as Jesus healed the paralytic who then takes up his pallet and walks; just as he restores the sanity of the violent Gerasene demoniac; just as he raises the little daughter of Jairus who has died — so he cures the blindness of Bartimaeus.

We all have our own ways of reading the Bible, but to read it as stated above it can lead to the perverse belief that if only we had sufficient faith, the woes and physical problems we suffer would suddenly disappear! It seems not a helpful way of thinking about Mark’s story.

Rather, what I believe Mark is sharing with his audience was his absolute conviction that the quality of Jesus’ selfless love has enormous healing power. It can restore wholeness. It can breathe new vision into the human soul. In other words, when we have become blind to the world and its beauty and potential, the tough and caring love that characterizes Jesus can restore our sight. It helps us, for example, to recognize the present danger of “scarring” that occurs as a result of child poverty, which in turn is the result of our nation’s dangerous unemployment rate, now approaching 9.8 percent by 2010. (Krugman, NY Times, 10/2/09)

What Mark understands Jesus calling forth from us is a vision that allows us to understand the unhappiness, the brokenness and abuse that arises in a world without the capacity to see the misfortune of our neighbor. William Shakespeare was well aware of this kind of spiritual vision. He makes the point in that famous scene where, out on the heath King Lear cries out to the blinded Gloucester, “you see how this world goes?” And Gloucester responds, “I see it, feelingly.”

So, to my mind, the healing of Bartimaeus is Mark’s way of showing us that when we reconnect with the person and spirit of Jesus, we reconnect with spiritual wholeness and health and that human capacity we all have to see “feelingly.”

A few years ago, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman was published. In his own autobiography, “True Compass,” the late Ted Kennedy references the book as an inspiration to him as a senator. For it tells how spiritual vision grows. After coming to adulthood, Truman spent from 1903 to 1905 working in a bank. But then, because he was needed, his next ten years before the First World War were spent at the very hard work of farming in rural Missouri on the family homestead. As a boy, he had memorized the beatitudes and other parts of the New Testament, much of which have to do with neighborly love and respect for God’s creation. Even so, his attitude towards African Americans came right out of a bigoted environment where he was influenced for a time by members of the Klu Klux Klan. But the point McCullough makes that inspired Ted Kennedy is that Harry Truman grew as a human being. He came to understand that the content of character and not the color of skin is what are important in a human being. That new vision opened his eyes and eventually gave him the moral power as president of the United States to take the strongest position in regard to civil right since Abraham Lincoln. Harry Truman connected in a new way to those truths he’d memorized and to the love that shines out of the life perspective of Jesus.

The meaning of the key word in our lection from Mark this week is the word, “blind.” It derives from a word which means “opaque” or “enveloped in smoke.” It points to a blindness that allows us to see the speck in the other person’s eye but not the two-by-four in our own. It is the kind of blindness represented by the Pharisees, as in their supposed moral superiority they move to stone a woman caught in adultery. It is the kind of blindness we see today in the political pundits who pander to the baser instincts of the human soul in their attacks on Barack Obama.

Hopefully, our vision as nation will be clear enough to see the increasing desperation of those without adequate health care, without the opportunities many of us enjoyed to get a good education or earn a living with the promise of a dignified retirement. All of these and much more are possible if — as with Bartimaeus — we discover that vision of God’s kingdom on earth; a vision of the love of God made flesh; a vision of the love of God made flesh in you and in me.

Ralph Ahlberg

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 18, 2009

Lesson designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 38: 1-7, Psalm 104: 1-9 and 24 and 35c, Hebrews 5: 1-10 and Mark 10: 35-45

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” (Job 38: 1-2, 4) “You stretch out the heavens like a tent, you set the beams of your chambers on the waters… You set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken.” (Psalm 104: 1b-3, 5) “Every high priest, chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf…to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness…” (Hebrews 5:1-2)

There is a hymn widely loved and often sung in congregations of our order. In the “New Century Hymnal” it is numbered 26 and based on the 104th Psalm, one of our lections for this week. The last stanza reads: “Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, in you do we trust, nor find you to fail; Your mercies how tender, how firm to the end, our Maker Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!”

Might these words seem trite or over-sentimental? Perhaps, but many a hurting and perplexed human being has been supported and strengthened by such prayerful poetry. I think, for example of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. While reported to be a well-adjusted, emotionally stable man, he was well-acquainted with trouble. His first wife died very suddenly while they were practically on their honeymoon traveling in Europe, and his second wife, after eighteen years of marriage died very tragically when her dress caught fire. As grief-stricken as he was in both cases, he was blessed with a faith and a spirit that refused to be defeated. No doubt he was speaking to himself when he wrote to a friend saying that “there are natures whose native strength and elasticity enable them to endure the worst, and yet live.”

In 1854 Longfellow was invited to speak at his fiftieth reunion at Bowdoin College. In one of his poems he reflects about all those he and the remnant of his class have known who are no longer with them; and then he gets into old age and he writes:

“Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.
It is not strength, but weakness, not desire,
But its surcease…”

Then he adds:

“What then? Shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not yet come, we are not quite
Cut off from labor by the failing light;
Something remains for us to do or date,
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

For me this poem reflects the human need for a quality of faith that allows hope and meaning to enter in. In this regard, a New York Times Sunday Book Review (10/4/09) by Ross Douthat offers an excellent reflection on Karen Armstrong’s new book, “The Case for God.” In terms of our lectionary readings of the week, it does seem on target reflecting both our human need for a faith perspective and the contemporary difficulty in acquiring it. The reviewer describes Armstrong’s argument for a better appreciation of liberal religion which in recent decades has fallen on hard times. She contends that many moderns have come to understand our faith and theological convictions as a set of propositions which require affirmation. When contemporary science challenges those understandings, all too often the reaction comes to take the form of either a nihilistic “cultured despiser” of religion or a biblical literalist. Armstrong proposes neither atheism nor fundamentalism but a path that emphasizes the perspective that Job arrived at towards the conclusion of his painful journey. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” She points to an approach to our faith that calls for the pursuit of an unknowable God rather than a quest for theologically “right” answers of orthodoxy.

Great thinkers of our Christian heritage like Augustine or Aquinas, we are told, “understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as ’something that people thought but something they did.’” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and ‘apophatic’ theology, apophatic being a word that even my computer spell-check found questionable. It means an emphasis on what we can’t know about God, so that faith development has more to do with developing skills like meditation and prayer and living out the praxis of justice in daily life than it does the cloistered-like recitation of creeds!

Even in the Hebrews lection there is to commend in high priests who deal gently with the ignorant, and there is much to value in the discipline of reading the Psalms and generally seeking meaning from the weekly lectionary readings from Scripture. At least in my old age, I find it most rewarding!

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 11, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Job 23: 1-9 and 16-17, Psalm 22: 1-15, Hebrews 4: 12-16 and Mark 10: 17-31

Jesus was setting out on a journey when the young man described in our gospel lection ran to catch up with him. “Good teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” It is an answer that provides a helpful perspective for thinking about life. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

One of the weaknesses of history and politics is that it tends to categorize its subjects into either black or white: People become villains or heroes, evil-doers or do-gooders, bad people or good, champs or chumps — all depending upon their political and/or economic loyalty. Yet, often time has a way of tempering our judgments, blending the black with the white into a grey that is probably more accurate than either extreme.

One historical illustration of this tendency is one of the most maligned of American theologians, the 18th century Congregational minister and educator, Jonathan Edwards. Recalling his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and his graphic image of hanging like a spider on its web above the fiery torments of hell, many have labeled him a dour, life-denying moralist. A recent biography by George Marsden challenges and portrays him in a more balanced and appreciative light. We learn Edwards taught that the real world is essentially relational where the highest or most beautiful love is selfless and sacrificial. It is that quality of love which is the true center of the reality to which we humans are called.

With that said, I am sure Edwards, like all of us, had his bad days! For it is true that while all of us like picturing ourselves as pure and good, the truth is none of us really are! After telling his questioner that no one is good except God alone, Jesus prompted him by saying, “you know the commandments, don’t murder or steal or lie…” And the young man stopped him and in effect said, “Look, I’ve always kept these rules…”

I can imagine a sad smile appearing on Jesus’ face as he looked at him and said, “There is one thing left: Go, sell what you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come, follow me.” My take is that while the young man had kept the rules, he forgot all about service. He forgot that goodness and faith and virtue are all tied up with doing.

So does Jesus make it clear the imperfection that inhabits the human soul. Our path lies over a gray ribbon of history that ties human follow to historic fortune. On PBS this week I’ve been watching Ken Burns wonderful film narrative of how our national parks emerged, just barely, from the wonton greed and ravaging conduct of the vast majority of our citizens whose inclination was only to exploit that great beauty and wonder of the Sequoias, the Redwoods, the grand canyons and mountains and rivers that make our land so unique. We should praise the courage and insight of people like John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright whose heroic efforts kept them from untold degradation and harm.

So what helps us to rise above the self-absorption and greed so common to our history? And how do we get beyond our inadequacies long enough to leave some measure of goodness as our gift to the future? After a lifetime of historical reflection, Arnold Toynbee said that it is “religion, not civilization that is the serious business of the human race.” He understood the human need to seek depth and to find meaning in the midst of the mystery and struggle that life is. In other words, our highest calling as human beings is to love God and to prove it by the way we relate to one another.

Ella Wheeler wrote some words that seem and appropriate way to end this brief meditation.

“There are two kinds of people on earth today,
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say.
Not the good and the bad, for ’tis well understood
That the good are half bad and bad are half good…
No! the two kinds of people on earth I mean
Are the people who lift and the people who lean!”

May we all become more like lifters and not leaners!

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 4, 2009

Lessons designed by the Common Lectionary include: Job 1:1 and 2: 1-10, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1: 1-4 and 2: 5-12, Mark 10: 2-16

In the lections assigned for this week, the reading from Job begins a discussion about his trusting God even during the calamity of undeserved suffering. Psalm 26 supports the first reading in its prayer for one whose life is under threat and who, aided by his prayerful appeals, is able to trust God. In Hebrews, according to my commentary, we find “the most polished piece of rhetoric in the New Testament,” telling us that God speaks to the human family most authentically and decisively through Jesus, who is exalted even above the angels in heaven. It is a very high Christology, indeed! In Mark, we find that hard teaching of Jesus about divorce which over many centuries has created such an abundance of guilt; but it also contains his seminal teaching that values the powerless and vulnerable above the powerful and well-placed. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:14b-15)

I suppose those who selected these lections saw a connection between the trust Jesus saw in children and the trust he recalled in the figure of Job in his willingness to confront God over his experienced unwarranted injustices. What has occurred is that the evil Satan (“a transcendent being who acts independently of and contrary to God’s will”) points out to God that Job is good only because life has been good to him. God accepts that challenge to Job’s goodness by allowing all manner of misfortune to fall on him. He loses all the foundations of what made him a happy human being: possessions, a close-knit family; even his physical health and well-being are allowed to dissipate with a debilitating skin disease that rendered him ritually unclean, which had to have been a devastating and threatening possibility for the Jewish audience being addressed. But even with all of these extremes of suffering, Job remains the age-long exemplar of faithfulness and integrity.

So the question that seems to be asked is how we measure up in terms of our own faithfulness and integrity when confronted with undeserved and innocent suffering. There are many positive examples of such faithful living. I think most immediately of Dietrich Bonhoeffer locked up in prison for his opposition to Hitler’s evil government. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” he confesses his faith that “God will give us all the power we need to resist in time of distress. But God never gives it in advance, lest we should rely upon ourselves and not on God alone…” Even so, Bonhoeffer remains haunted by the temptations of doubt, depression and fearfulness. In an eloquent and heartfelt poem entitled, “Who Am I?” he seeks to understand himself in his own situation of suffering.

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house…

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine,
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

Yes, there are always Job-like figures in life to challenge and to inspire us. In reading Bruce Gordon’s recent biography of sixteenth century John Calvin, I discovered that same quality of patient faith in his throes of conflict and suffering. And I was intrigued in reading “American Lion,” Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson and Edward “Teddy” Kennedy’s autobiography, “True Compass” to discover those same human qualities of growth and faithfulness arising from the cauldron of tragedy and consequent suffering. Suffering and doubt are a part of every life.

Job will always remain as a human testimonial and a paradigm to the possibilities of integrity and faithful living in the throes of tragic circumstance!

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 27, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Esther 7: 1-6 and 9-10; 9: 20-22, Psalm 124, James 5: 13-20 and Mark 9: 38-50

“…the awareness of being God’s elect has often bred a form of elitism, a sense of self-importance that subtly builds barriers between groups and persons rather than bridges. For whatever reasons, the experience of being loved can lead to an unhealthy feeling of specialness, which questions others (as if God’s love were somehow limited to a few) and at the same time fails to be self-critical. The problem is apparently not peculiar to the modern church, since the Gospel lesson designated for this Sunday is aimed at such a sense of self-importance among the original disciples.” (Breuggemann et. al., pg. 529 in “Texts for Preaching – Year B”)

In our Gospel lection, John reports to Jesus about the disciples’ recent mission where they reported observing someone “casting out demons in your name.” They tried to stop him because, as they reported, he “wasn’t following us.” Jesus corrects the disciples, warning them of the dangers of a too narrow understanding of what it means to follow him: “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mk. 9: 39-40) My commentary suggests the danger of overestimating our own position as the uniquely chosen of God.

In my reading of Bruce Gordon’s recently published biography entitled, “Calvin,” which in part celebrates this year the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, I was struck by how much the great reformer was also captive to a seemingly obsessive need to punish those who disagreed with him. Perhaps the most notorious negative incident in Calvin’s life was his successful effort to support Genevan magistrates in their condemning Michael Servetus to death by being burned at the stake for his heresy. (He would have preferred the use of a sword!) Those critical of Calvin use this as an illustration to complain about what they believed to be his tyrannical and intolerant character.

Unquestionably while Servetus was considered a heretic by the standards of both Rome and Geneva, the leaders who demonstrated a tolerance way beyond their time were humanist thinkers and teachers such as Niklaus Zurkinden and Sebastian Castellio who warned that “one should be very careful about who is named a heretic, for Christ himself had been executed on such a charge.” These men opposed Calvin on three fronts. First, they were disgusted by the execution of Servetus; second, they rejected the very principle of punishing heretics; and third they found Calvin’s doctrine of predestination unacceptable. That doctrine which had such a hold on our Puritan forebears taught that God determines before time all who will be saved and who will be damned. Recall the impact that Jonathan Edwards’ teaching of this rather intolerant idea had on early New England!

I am reminded of this danger whenever I discover in myself a too ready willingness to be overly critical of those whose theological and political positions are at variance with my own. How different am I, I have wondered, from those first disciples who felt threatened by others doing similar work. About twenty years ago, for example, I was invited to Arizona by a friend whose family there was deeply involved in a fundamentalist church of more than ten thousand members. At worship, our initial greeting was given by someone I judged as a “stand-up” comedian, warming up the congregation. A full symphony orchestra accompanied a two hundred member choir and when it came time for the sermon by the lead minister, a hydraulic pulpit rose up from the center of the chancel! All of the demons that I can imagine assaulting John Calvin were assaulting me in my judgment of this congregation and its leadership. Later on, I was introduced to this lead pastor and became better acquainted and even played a couple of sets of tennis with him. I discovered that he was and I assume still is a good and sincere human being! But at the time through my narrow perspective I felt him a rival and opponent — not a collaborator in God’s work.

It was then that I stood in need of this Sunday’s lection from Mark. Eventually it got to me — partly through my study and experiences at Hartford Seminary and sharing in its work in interfaith dialogue — and I began to understand how dangerous is the tendency towards self-righteously taking oneself too seriously and (laughably) believing that somehow I possessed a superior understanding of God’s truth.

Our lesson this week reminds us of Jesus’ inclusive message that “whoever is not against us is for us.” That quality of generosity of spirit is a great part of our hope for a more loving and more peaceful future!

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 20, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Proverbs 31: 10-31, Jeremiah 11: 18-20, James 3: 13-4:3 and 7-8a and Mark 9: 30-37

I wonder if it isn’t true that every culture can be judged by the kind of person it holds up as an ideal. For example, the ideal of the ancient Greeks was the well-proportioned personality; they valued a happy medium in all things. On the other hand, the ideal of the Romans was the soldier who embodied the Stoic virtues of discipline and courage. Under Germany during the time of Hitler, Nietzsche’s “superman” was in ascendancy, and the Nazi state valued the superiority of a particular race and the ruthless elimination of persons who were mentally ill or were minorities like Gypsies and Jews.

What does our culture value? One could argue that we value the strong individualist, the woman or man who demands independence from any constraints of government or religion. We’ve seen such “heroes” pictured, automatic weapon strapped on their backs, demanding the right to bear arms on college campuses or even in worship on Sunday. Their attitude is a kind of survival of the fittest. Gone from any frame of reference is that early American notion of “commonwealth” where a nation of individuals covenants together for the common good.

But the ideal Jesus held up for the world to value wasn’t the well-developed personality; nor was it the Stoic ideal nor the fiction of individuals without need for the support of a larger community often represented by ties to religion or state. Instead Jesus, as described in our lection from Mark for this week, picked up a child and raised up that child for his disciples to see. And then he said something to the effect that “this is my ideal for people of all ages and times.”

It’s hard to imagine what a shock that must have been to his disciples who’d just been arguing about which of them was the greatest. A child? Women and especially children had very little value in his time, even less than they have today. And besides, putting sentiment aside, children can be pretty cruel. So why should Jesus hold up the child as the ideal pattern of behavior?

August Comte, a noted philosopher, once argued that we’ve progressed from religious mythology through the abstraction of philosophy to the certainties of logic and science. While there’s truth in that argument, it seems to me that his use of the word “progressed” serves some discussion. The passage of time doesn’t necessarily mean the enrichment of mind and heart. For myself, I don’t find in the banality of advertising or in the violence of television programming or in the despair of fellow citizens desperate for adequate health care, exhibit “A” of evolving nobility. So it could be that Jesus’ valuing of a child offers us more help than we might think. In the capacity for faith the child can help us because the child points in the direction of letting go of an intellectual and cultural veneer that can blind us to deeper and more lasting truths. Trust in God will never be out of style. Nor will the natural simplicity and sincerity we often discover in children. Jesus warned about clever and sophisticated insincerity. He warned about the barrier he saw in this to God’s truth about life. He saw that the person who’s always posing and pretending just isn’t present to others or sufficiently in touch with life to value such simple but critical things as love and mercy and justice. And he also taught that such a person should have our mercy and not our judgment because there’s probably a lot of that kind of posing and pretending in us all.

And yet, if I were really up against it, if I were facing the crisis of my life, I don’t’ think I’d go searching for someone clever or sophisticated to talk with so much as I would someone with a compassionate and accepting heart; the kind of person Jesus was pointing to when he held up a child. And if I were looking for a leader to follow, it would be one who’s sense of justice and love was coupled with a wise pragmatism when looking at the issues of our time and place.

My commentary on this passage from Mark concludes: “Where the disciples have argued about greatness and with it, of course, power, they are directed by Jesus to open their arms to the powerless. What would happen if the church could begin to think and act this way? What if the notion of greatness could be conceived of in Jesus’ terms?”

“Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

And remember these other words from our lection from Mark this week: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (Mark 9: 35b) That imperative of Jesus has more in common with the value of commonwealth than it does with the plutocracy our nation has been edging towards.

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 13, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Proverbs 1: 20-33, Psalm 19, James 3: 1-12 and Mark 8: 27-38.

In her book, “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” Rachel Remen tells about her childhood home. When she was just three or four years old, her father brought home a huge jig-saw puzzle with many pieces. It was set out on a large table in the living room and everyone who visited tried to fit in a piece or two. Rachel climbed up on a chair and stared at all the fascinating pieces of the puzzle. The brightly colored ones reminded her of birds and flowers. The dark ones looked like insects and spiders. She didn’t like the dark ones. So, when on one was looking, she took a handful of the dark pieces and hid them under the sofa cushions. She did this several times. It’s easy to imagine the frustration and anger of those trying to finish the puzzle.

Finally she confessed to her mother who took the hidden dark pieces and used them to complete the puzzle. Little Rachel was astounded at the beautiful picture of a deserted beach that finally took shape and how it depended on the dark pieces for its completion. Dr. Remen writes: “Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of my life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time– the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger. What brief glimpses I’ve had of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift every last piece.”

It was that darker side Jesus recognized at the beginning of his ministry. For the first time in Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells us where he’s going. He’s moving out of Galilee, moving toward Jerusalem. Earlier commentators once called this “the end of the Galilean spring and the beginning of the Jerusalem winter.” We can almost feel the cold chill descend on the text. The way now leads not just to Jerusalem, but to the cross.

Peter, the head of the disciples, our representative, rebukes Jesus. Is this any way for a Messiah to behave? When Matthew tells this story, he gives Peter a set of reasonable words: “Lord, this ought not to happen to you.” (Matt.16:22) Luke, when he tells it, somehow fails to mention Peter’s outburst at all. In this they were like that small child at the crossword puzzle disliking its darker pieces and wanting to hide them. And yet, “Those things that hurt, instruct,” wrote Benjamin Franklyn at a later time. Just so! Jesus says in so many words that if we miss the lessons the darker side of life teaches us, we flunk the course. Three times in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus predicts his suffering and death and every time, the disciples demonstrate that either they don’t understand — or maybe more to the pint — they understand all too well and don’t like what he is telling them. Three times, Mark repeats this prediction. You know that Mark is the shortest of the gospels, so if he repeats something three times, it has to be something of great importance, but also something so odd, so against our grain, that it bears repetition.

Mark, you see, recognizes that while the seeds of our troubles are within us, so too are the seeds of our redemption. He knows we live in a world that encourages self-seeking, self-aggrandizement, self-concern. That’s the darker side which scripture explains in the fall of Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis. But Mark also sees Jesus leading us in that inevitable darkness in a new and different and positive direction. Jesus says to us, “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, and take up your cross.”

It isn’t easy to learn about the cross. In fact, it requires great maturity to discover that life’s puzzle needs its darker pieces to complete the picture. That essential insight of the cross, that fundamental paradox of losing life in order to find it, lies in a willingness to move out of an adversarial relationship to life and into the powerful kind of openness Jesus lived. From that kind of position, it was possible for him to make a greater commitment to life. Not just to the pleasant and comfortable things of life, the bright pieces of the puzzle, but to all of it. The paradox is that the less attached any of us are to winning all the time, to conforming to whatever the culture tells us is brightest and best, the more alive we can become and the more we can trust our ability to take joy in the newness of the ay, whatever it may bring.

Jesus, it seems, doesn’t promise that by following him, things will go better for us. Rather, he promises that noting worse will happen to us that happened to him. We’re to follow him, not because he’ll make us feel better. We’re to follow him because his wisdom proves to be true. That quality of wisdom is addressed in our lesson from Proverbs this week and is well worth pondering. James, on the other hand, explains how the tongue and the words it articulates can provide great hurt as well as great healing. All of our lessons this week seem to point to the wisdom that has been revealed and which is necessary for abundant life.

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 6, 200

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23, Psalm 125, James 2: 1-10 and Mark 7: 24-37

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold. The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of them all…Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fail. Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor…Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the Lord pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.” Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23

“One woman dies in childbirth for every one hundred thousand live births in Ireland. Two thousand one hundred women die in childbirth for every one hundred thousand live births in Sierra Leone.” New York Times Magazine 8/23/09

Tradition has it that Solomon, ancient king of Israel and David’s son, is the traditional author of this week’s lection from Proverbs. He has been associated with great and powerful wisdom that points to the way God wants us to behave and to interact with one another as a part of God’s creation. His words are a far cry from the reality depicted by Upon Sinclair’s comment above and the brutal statistic coming from the New York Times Magazine which devotes the major part of that issue to the plight of women and their brutal treatment in a large part of our present world.

Our lection from Proverbs provoked my interest in an article by Robert Wright, author of a recent book entitled, “The Evolution of God.” Both the article and the book seem to suggest, as William James did, that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” That idea coheres with our message this week from Proverbs. Especially at that point in the article where Wright points to a British theologian named William Paley. Paley lived around the time of Charles Darwin and interacted with the latter’s thesis concerning evolution. This nineteenth century theologian used living creatures as evidence for the existence of a purposeful creation, “a product of design, with a complex functionality that doesn’t just happen by accident.” In other words, he said that we are created by God for a purpose within not only a physical backdrop of evolution but a cultural one as well. Let me quote from Wright’s article:

“The technological part of cultural evolution has relentlessly expanded social organization, leading us from isolated hunter-gatherer villages all the way to the brink of a truly global society. And the continuing cohesion of this social system (also known as world peace) may depend on people everywhere using their moral equipment with growing wisdom — critically reflecting on their moral intuitions, and on the way they’re naturally deployed, and refining that deployment.”

Wright tells us that this rationale fits the classical elements of theology: 1) God’s reveals a human purpose within God’s creation; 2) that purpose involves a struggle for the good; 3) the struggle eventuates in a fulfillment in which God’s intention of good triumphs.

It seems even our lection from Mark’s gospel supports this model when it tells a story about Jesus’ example of goodness in his struggle which eventuates in the healing of a demented daughter of an alien Gentile. Both dementia and disunity were overcome, modeling God’s intention of health and justice, prerequisites for the unity within the human family that God intends. As Thomas Long puts it: “This gentile woman perceives that Jesus is pushing with all his might, groaning against the rusty bolt of the demonic, but when it comes to her daughter, his strength alone, as it is in Nazareth, cannot break it loose. So she speaks a frail, desperate human word that by God’s grace becomes the word. By doing so, the woman, unlike the unbelieving Nazarenes joins in faith the work of Jesus. She places her hands alongside his, and together they push with all their might. The old bolt breaks free, and the healing power of Israel’s God joyously flows to the bedside of a gentile girl.” (Christian Century Magazine, 8/25/09, pg.21.)

As we struggle today with the “rusty bolts of the demonic” lying at the heart of Upton Sinclair’s understanding of the blind self-interest that creates so much suffering in our own nation** as well as in the larger world, may it be that the wisdom of Solomon, the witness of Jesus in positing God’s intention and the insight of Robert Wright help us to know that we are truly wealthy when our lives are shaped by a spirit of justice and mercy.

** Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: + 87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: + 428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10
-Harper’s Index, September 2009