I Learned Something Today

I learned something today

listening to Bill speak about comfort as the gospel

that God’s consoling, comforting, relational presence

actually is not what the gospel is about but rather

is the gospel – the good news – the thing hoped for

the evidence of that unseen – the elusive ‘it’ of Jesus –

comfort . . . consolation . . . love . . . mother love . . . 

clasping to the breast in fierce . . . challenging . . . 

account demanding . . . calming . . . consoling . . . 

Love

How about that?

To My Fellow Christian Sarah Palin: Baptism, Enemies, and Truth – Words That Matter

Governor Sarah Palin recently delivered an address to a gathering of NRA folk in Indianapolis.  I listened to the speech in its entirety and recommend you do the same.

Reasonable people can and do differ on a great many issues, gun use and access among them.  And Governor Palin and I are on different sides of the question.  Fair enough.

What is not so fair, I would suggest, is the appropriation of the language of our shared faith; the clinging to a gospel that is rejected in the same breath; and a disregard of facts (truth) when speaking of one’s enemies.

Regarding our “enemies” (by which Gov. Palin is referring to terrorists), she says, “. . . if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” [huge applause and cheering]  

1. The appropriation of the language of our shared faith Baptism is the rite, the ritual, the sacrament – the holy sign (one of only two for Protestants) – the outward evidence of the inward reality of having been claimed as God’s very own in Christianity.  When Jesus himself is baptized, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon him and God proclaims Jesus as God’s own son, in whom God is well pleased.  (Matthew 3.16-17).  Waterboarding shares with baptism only the use of water.  Waterboarding is to baptism as torture is to the doctor’s smack of a new-born baby’s butt.  To call torture baptism in a speech using other language of faith and God ignores Jesus’ own gospel message, a particular affront in this Easter season, when Christians world-wide celebrate the resurrection of the one who was himself tortured to death by state actors.  I want to believe that Gov. Palin is using the language of ‘baptism’ in a secular way (as in being ‘baptized’ by fire, meaning to be introduced to a certain way of being/acting in extremis).  The problem is that the remainder of her speech is peppered with the language of faith in a way that makes such a dismissal virtually impossible, because she weaves faith into her speech in such a way as to suggest that to carry a gun is not merely a constitutional matter, but also a biblical right or even imprimatur.

2. Clinging to a gospel the speaker rejects all in the same breath Use of the language of ‘enshrinement’ – the language of the sacred or holy –  (as in gun-ownership being ‘enshrined’ in our constitution); referring to baptism when speaking of waterboarding; giving the gratuitous shout-out to prayer in school;  and wrapping up with: “Celebrating family, faith and freedom . . . God shed his grace on thee, America, so stand and fight . . .” co-mingles the language of faith and Christianity in particular with the torture of enemies (waterboarding), killing with a gun as a problem-solving technique (my cold, dead hands language and the implied warning to Attorney General Eric Holder, “you don’t want to go there, buddy”); and the very specific link of “enemies” with torture as an indictment of the claimed lack of political will of those who differ with her on this issue (they would coddle the enemies that she, if in charge, would waterboard) – all this leads to a conclusion that for Gov. Palin, Jesus’ gospel is a call to arms.  The problem, of course, is Jesus, who actually happens to be very specific when it comes to enemies:  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? . . .”  (Matthew 5.43-47; also Luke 6.27 & 35).  You simply cannot, with any integrity, wrap yourself in the gospel and advocate the torture of your enemies in the same breath.  Jesus recognizes the human habit of responding to enemies in exactly the way Gov. Palin recommends.  He recognizes it and rejects it out of hand.  Advocate torture if you will.  But you cannot, you may not, you must not, clothe yourself in The Risen One to do it.

3. Disregarding the facts when speaking of one’s (political) enemy It is popular to the point of hardly meriting notice, let alone response, for folks in the political sphere today to make false claims against their opponents.  But it isn’t okay that they do nor that we allow it to pass by.  Truth matters.  Facts matter.  False claims of facts and truth matter because they misshape our perception of reality.  Gov. Palin takes on and carries as a theme in her speech, with references to the various bracelets she is wearing, a claim that Attorney General Eric Holder advocates the wearing of some sort of tracking bracelet by gun owners.  There is only one problem with the claim: it is false, as attested by the presumably liberal TPM and presumably conservative Bearing Arms.  Facts and truth matter to our faith as well as our practical day-to-day lives (if there can even be any separation of the two): we follow the man who self-identified as the way, the truth, the life, who instructed his followers to allow their yes to be yes, their no, no. (Matthew 5.37).  It may well be that Gov. Palin and/or her speechwriters  believed what she said about the Attorney General to be true.  But that doesn’t solve much: when we are speaking, it is our duty to assure that our words are true, that they are accurate.  That is actually part of the job of being a Christian.  Truthfulness is so important that it is actually enshrined (unlike our constitutional provisions) in our holy writ, which we refer to as the Ten Commandments, among which is the provision: Thou shalt not lie (or more accurately, bear false witness – that is, to say something not true about another person).  Before we say it, it is our job to know whether it is true and if we cannot or do not know, we should not say it.  The fact that it took me less than 5 minutes to find two sites online that referenced the Attorney General’s actual remarks indicates that the truth was easily discoverable.  One simply had to wish to find it.  Gov. Palin claimed that the Attorney General wants to track by bracelet those who own guns.  What he actually said was that there was interest in exploring smart guns that can only be used by the actual owner (via a chip in the gun which links electronically to a bracelet worn by the owner).

Truth matters.  Taking care to tell truth matters.  Taking special care not to speak ill of enemies falsely (recognizing our own inner tendency not to give our enemies the benefit of the doubt) matters.  Making claims about the gospel which directly contradict it matters.  Clothing ourselves with the gospel of the Prince of Peace while proclaiming things like torture matters.

As a fellow Christian, Governor Palin, I beseech you: make your case, but please, please, please, stop standing on Jesus’ back to do it if you're not willing to grapple with the ways in which the gospel challenges your views.

Please.

The Forgotten Jug

In John 4, the gospel writer tells of a woman’s chance encounter with Jesus at a well.  When the woman departs, she leaves her water jug behind.

Why did she leave her jug behind?  What does it mean?  That one seemingly extraneous detail drives me crazy.

One tradition is that the jug represents the Samaritan woman’s former ‘evil ways’ – having way too many husbands and boyfriends for any one woman to have – that she is symbolically and then really leaving behind.  It’s a creative reading of the text – I don’t know of anywhere else that a jug represents the ‘container of evil’.  But hey, it’s a theory.

And then there is the view that she left the jug as a symbol of all that we leave behind to proclaim the good news.  The Samaritan woman is the first evangelist, the first proclaimer of Jesus as Messiah in John’s Gospel, and as such, maybe she is a prototype.  God calls the unlikely to proclaim the unknowable in ways unpredictable.  The Samaritan woman’s story certainly says all that.

But for all the good news, the woman will still, at the end of the day, need her jug.  So why leave it behind?

My own guess is that the jug is left behind because this is no time for containers or containing . . . life-giving water in the person of Jesus Christ is running wild in Samaria . . . and this God will not be contained . . . not in old ideas about how the world is, not in old ideas about how God is . . . and not in old ideas about how we are to view or treat each other . . .

Jesus is our spiritual makluba*, our spiritual child-delighting, grown-up shattering upside-down God . . . who brings us the good news we never expected, often in a way we never wanted and usually from people we never intended to know.

When I think of water, I do not think of the safety of the drinking glass or the carrying jug . . . I think of the dark sea into which Jonah’s pride cast him . . . I think of whale bellies and other scary-safe places . . . I think of tides whose pull I cannot ignore . . . I think of oceans too vast to see, to deep to know . . . too much for me to swallow . . . and so I float . . . for what else can I do?

Maybe, just maybe, John meant the forgotten jug to remind us that God, like water, will not be contained . . . that God, like water, goes where God wills . . . into the glass of our very selves, through the cracks of our brokenness . . . or in a tidal flood sweeping us along for the ride.

Maybe, just maybe, the woman left her jug because she had come to a new truth . . . who, caught up in a tidal wave, brings along her jug?

Maybe, just maybe, God has been waiting all along for us to come to know a simple thing:  I do not carry the water . . . it carries me . .

As Alla Renee Bozarth wrote, To feel alive, important and safe, know your own waters and hills, but know more.  You have stars in your bones and oceans in [your] blood . . . 



____________________
*makluba – an upside down rice dish from the Middle East

Sermon Cliff Note: Holding Fast & Letting Go

Archeologist Robin vanAuken writes of her vocation as being a ‘steward of the past’.

But not all that is past is created equal.  Some is treasure.  Some is trash.  Context makes the difference.

How many of us have gone through the leavings of someone we loved after they died?  How much of what they left behind did we keep?  How much did we give away or toss away?  Context matters.  Their past is not ours.

In deciding what to keep, my Great-Aunt Virginia undoubtedly asked, “might I need this”?  When I’m going through my dead Aunt Virginia’s papers, however, I do not ask whether she might have need of it. The question I ask is not about Aunt Virginia’s need; it’s about mine.  And that shift in the question changes everything.

But what has that to do with stewarding the past?  With what we of today are to keep from yesterday to carry in to tomorrow?

Everything.

It has to do with humility.

It has to do with care.

It has to do with understanding.

And it has to do with love.

Humility: some people of the past genuinely believed that the ownership of another human being was not only consistent with being a godly person, but it was so entrenched in their worldview that they genuinely believed the person over whom they claimed ‘ownership’ had a duty to be owned and not resist.  We have to be humble about our understandings when it comes to things biblical.  Sometimes we get it wrong.  Seriously, harmfully, wrong.  And almost always, our wrongness arises out of our certainties, out of our pride that we can know absolutely what God intends – not only for ourselves, but for others as well.  Our certainties, especially when they concern what someone else should do, must be tempered with humility, with the simple realization that I might be wrong.  Or those I revere who came before me might have been wrong.  Their path need not be mine.

Care – as Christians, we have a duty of care.  But care of whom?  Of what?  And to what end?  In Luke 9.60, Jesus tells a young man whose father has died to leave the dead to themselves and come now.  It’s cruel-sounding, this command not to even attend his own father’s funeral.

The call to the Christian is to be concerned with, to care about, the things which concern God.  And when it comes to the work of this world, God makes it clear that God’s focus is on the living, not the dead – on the present and not the past.

We are to take care of Jesus’ message, yes.  But it is for a purpose and not merely for its own sake.  Church is not a cemetery.  Nor is it a museum.

Jesus’ message is a living gospel proclaimed by living people to living people.  It is a word from the past, but it is a word for the present.

If we preserve Jesus’ message perfectly but keep it under glass, we have killed it.  The gospel is a living gospel or it is no gospel at all.

Understanding is necessary in order to have something worth proclaiming.  Amidst my Aunt Virginia’s papers were coupons from the 1920's . . . her ledgers of the money she spent day-to-day . . . her bridge scores . . . and stock certificates.

It takes understanding to be able to tell the important from the unimportant . . . that worth preserving unto the next generations and that which can be cast away.  Without understanding, one might  keep the bridge scores and toss the certificates.

Understanding requires intentionality.  It requires listening.  It requires learning.  It requires letting go of what we think, as if our opinions were our gospel, and being open to learn from others.  It requires a teachable spirit, one willing to learn.

Finally, stewarding the past has to do with love – a love that embraces and values the one in need standing right before us as much as we do our memories of those who have gone before – and even more.

To be good stewards of the past challenges us to examine what to keep and what to throw away.  And that requires from us large doses of humility, understanding, care and love.

Ultimately it requires that we surrender our own questions of the past and ask instead whether in the keeping or discarding we are about our Father’s business or our own.  As church, the only business we have is our Father’s.

Amen.

The Good News: You're Welcome Here

A woman new to these mountains shares with a neighbor, one of my flock, about being ousted from a church because she has tattoos.

He calls me with a question: Do churches really do that?

Me Sadly, yes.

Him Why?  Who does that?

Me People for whom the rules are really important, I suppose.  And there is a reference in Jeremiah to the avoidance of designs on our bodies (tattoos).

Him But why?

Me I don’t know.  All I know is I’ve got a tattoo.  So maybe you could tell her that so she’ll know she’s welcome here.

Him I’ll do that.  And I’ll take her some cucumbers.

Fresh garden cucumbers are a fine accompaniment to the good news, don’t you think?  Eddie and his cucumbers make fine evangelists.

And isn’t you’re welcome here the good news at its heart?  I know it was for me.