God Here and Now (Proper 12A)

 

God Here and Now

30 July 2023

Proper 12A

Said Mass with Hymns 9:00 a.m.

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b or Psalm 128; Romans 8:26-39;

Matt 13:31-33, 42-52

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

What would the world look like if things were as they ought to be, if God were truly in charge, right here, right now?  What does the Reign of God, or as Matthew puts it, the “Heavenly Domain,” look like? Jesus regularly asked himself this question.  He tells parables to try to get at the matter.  We heard several today: the Mustard Plant, the Yeast, the Hidden Treasure, the Costly Pearl, and the Dragnet.   

 

What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now?  The people around Jesus gave various answers: The Sadducees and Herodians said things were already as they ought to be: they were part of the powers that be, controllers of the Temple and collaborators with the Romans, wealthy and happy.  How could God’s Reign be any different?  The Essenes argued that the world would not be set to right until their kooky little sect had conquered the world by force of arms in an apocalyptic struggle between the Sons of Light (them) and the Sons of Darkness (everybody else).  The Zealots thought it would come through violent revolt against the Roman occupiers and a return to an independent Jewish state.   The Pharisees taught that it lay only in personal piety, scripture study and prayer, and putting a fence around the law so as to separate Jews from gentiles more and more.

 

Jesus’ parables give a different answer.  They grab you and throw you for a loop—demand a change of perspectives and expectations.

 

 

 

 

God here and now, in charge—It’s like a mustard plant:  a tiny seed that produces a huge plant, growing in unusual places, unplanned, apart from human control.   It does not measure up to the usual ordered, stately images for God’s kingdom—vineyards, olive trees, or the great cedar tree, which in Ezekiel shelters the wild birds in its branches.  For Jesus, the birds seek shelter in a huge volunteer weed.  

 

God here and now, in charge—is like a woman who stirs in a couple of spoonfuls of sourdough starter into three measures—about fifty pounds—of flour.   With a little time, that huge amount of dough is raised.  God in charge is not the pure, unleavened bread kosher for Passover, but the impure bread of ordinary life, bread produced by adding rotten corruption to the flour.   God in charge is not the holy work of male priests, but the ordinary domestic work of women! 

 

 

God here and now, in charge—is like a peasant working someone else’s field who uncovers a treasure hidden there. Excited, he reburies it, and then scrapes together everything he has so he can purchase the field and its contents.  The field worker, not the land-owner, finds the treasure: usually only those getting their hands dirty in work are the ones who know its details enough to recognize its surprises.    This is not about legal title, but finders, keepers.  No matter how hard it is to scrape together the necessary capital to buy the field, the peasant does it since his glimpse of the treasure was so wonderful.  And his peasant smarts show—he doesn’t tell anyone else about the treasure until he has clear title to the land. 

 

 

God here and now, in charge—is like a drag-net that catches all sorts of fish.  It is not selective or discriminating.  It works below the surface, hidden, and catches everything it touches.   St. Matthew, ever on the lookout for ways to regularize some of Jesus’ more “anti-religious” statements, has added the comment about sorting good and bad fish on the shore.  But Jesus’ original point was that God in charge is overwhelmingly inclusive, uncontrollable, and, despite its seeming messiness, wholly reliable and worthy of trust and hope.

 

 

God here and now, in charge—is like a jewel merchant who finds the most perfect pearl he has ever seen.  Like the peasant, he sells everything he has in order to purchase the prize.   Not only dispossessed field hands can find a treasure.  Those accustomed to trading in fine things can as well.  Maybe even the religious, maybe even the pious and observant—those who are often the butt of the jokes found in Jesus’ parables—may yet encounter God, and be permanently changed.   But the cost for them is just as high as for the dispossessed. 

 

The point is developed by Matthew who adds a similitude almost certainly with an autobiographical edge as yet another parable on the lips of Jesus:  Like a religious scholar or scribe who should be looking only to old things, the kingdom brings in new ones as well.  It’s like some owner of a dream home who likes to show off not only his new and faddish acquisitions, but the old tried and true ones as well. 

 

Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom emphasize the presence of God in everyday life—glorious messy everyday life.  They stress the utter strangeness of God in what we are used to.  In these stories, we encounter abundance, joy, the fulfillment of human desire and the turning of tables on the oppressor.   We have heard these parables so often, we don’t actually listen to them. 

 

So here are some parables I have written to make the same shocking points Jesus intends in his.

 

 

God here and now, in charge is like a woman who buys a dollar lottery ticket.  Not expecting to win, she doesn’t even check the results for a few days.  But when she does, she learns she has not only won, but won big: 10 million dollars.   She is so shocked she falls down and can’t talk for a few minutes. 

 

 

God here and now, in charge is like a man who gets a bad tattoo.  After several years of being unhappy every time he sees it, he goes into an ink shop and asks if they can fix old, bad tattoos.  One of the artists is an expert in repair and redesign, but it costs a lot. The man gets excited, and goes and refinances his house to get the money together.  After many hours of pain in the chair, the man looks at the magic the artist has wrought, using the old defective ink-work as ground for and part of a larger piece.  The result is beautiful, much better than even what the man had originally imagined when he got the first tattoo.  He is so happy with it that he constantly tries to find occasions where wear short sleeves so he can show it off.

 

 

God here and now, in charge is like a woman in the process of a nasty divorce.  Her abusive husband has hired the better lawyer, and she is about to lose almost everything.  But in sorting through things that the husband couldn’t be bothered to look at, she finds the old coin collection he inherited from his father a few years after their marriage and which he has never bothered to even look at.  She notices a couple of coins that look rare and checks up on them.  They are worth more than all their other assets combined.  So she says nothing, puts the coin collection on her ledger in the agreement, which the ex-husband signs happily.  She never has to worry about finances, or he abusive ex, again.

 

God here and now, in charge: abundance, surprise, and a call to joyfully give up what alienates us from God and from each other. 

 

I invite us all this week in our prayer and meditation to ask how we think things would be if God were truly in charge and things were as they ought to be.  Picture it, savor it.  Listen to Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, and let us use our imaginations to try to come with some of our own.  And may we pray for joyful open eyes to see clearly God at work in the world about us.  May we pray and live, “your kingdom, your will be done, on earth as in heaven” and get out of the way of the Kingdom coming.  May we know the abundant joy of God coming here and now, fully in charge.   May we live the happy news that Jesus proclaimed. 

 

In the name of God, Amen. 

 

Trust Beyond Understanding (Proper 8A; the Akedah)

 

Trust beyond Understanding

Proper 8 Year A

2 July 2023 

9 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford, Oregon

Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

“God said, ‘Take your son Isaac, your only son, the one whom you love, ... and kill him … for me.’” This is a text of terror, a tale of horror.  It raises all sorts of questions, without a doubt one of the most troubling and disturbing stories of the Bible. 

 

Many commentators discuss it.  Eric Auerbach, in his great tour of Western literature, Mimesis, uses the story to show how Biblical narrative reaches out to the listener and demands acceptance or rejection, submission or revolt.   It demands that you react.  This narrative element is, I believe, why many universities are uncomfortable in teaching the Bible, even “as literature.”  The Bible, and this story most of all, does not want to be taken as mere literature.

 

Episcopalian writer Madeleine l’Engle retells the story with a twist: God puts Abraham to the test as in Genesis, but then expresses to the angels disappointment in how Abraham did.  God says that Abraham has failed the test that She has given him. 

 

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of the story have differed wildly, another indication of how uncomfortable the story makes us. 

 

Christians traditionally have seen Abraham as a model of deep faith, who trusts God so much that he gives up all his hopes for the future.  We usually call the story “the sacrifice of Isaac,” and liturgically read it, as today, during ordinary time, when readings focus on day-to-day living and growing in the faith.  Christians often see in Isaac the beloved son as a hint of Jesus’ dying for our sins on the cross. 

 

Jews call the story “the Binding (of Isaac)” and usually see it through his eyes.  They identify with Isaac, seeing themselves as the chosen but suffering nation, blessed and at times afflicted by a demanding Deity.  Like Isaac bound on the altar, they are miraculously saved, again and again, through God’s loving kindness.  They read the story on the Rosh ha-shanah, the first day of the Jewish year, and the beginning of the High Holiday season in the fall, which culminates in the Day of Atonement.   The high point of the service is the blowing of the shofar, a ram’s horn trumpet that brings to mind the ram caught in the thicket that serves as a substitute for Isaac at the end of the story. 

 

Muslims tell the story somewhat differently. The festival Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates the story.   I lived in West Africa a few years ago.  I remember very vividly the days before Adha, called "Tabaski" in that part of the world, Muslim shepherds would drive large herds of sheep to the beach and then wash them in the sea before buyers would take them home, slaughter and roast them stuffed with rice, raisins, and dates, and them serve them as the main dish in their holiday meal.

 

The Quran says that when Ibrahim's only son reaches the age of adolescence, Ibrahim tells him that in a dream he has been commanded to sacrifice him (Surah as-Saffat 37.102-03).   The son, as devoted to Allah as his father, readily accepts. Ibrahim lays his son face down for the sacrificial slicing of the throat, but a voice calls out telling him that he has fulfilled the vision and passed the test.  Ibrahim is then rewarded with a large feast, in oral tradition said variously to have been a ram, a goat, or a sheep.  Though the Quran does not name the son, Muslims have always understood that it is not Ishaq or Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, but rather his older half-brother Ismail or Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. 

 

However this troubling story has made us all so uncomfortable over the centuries and produced such wildly different interpretations, we must remember one thing when we read it.  This story does not attempt to explain God to unbelievers or newcomers to faith.   No—it is for people already in a deep relationship with God.

 

Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible at Duke University, says this, 

 

“[T]he hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful, more often than we like to admit. … The 22^nd chapter of Genesis is the place you go when you do not understand at all what God allows us to suffer and it seems asks us to bear – and the last thing you want is a reasonable explanation, because any reasonable explanation would be a mockery of your anguish. This story … is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or deny that God cares at all, or deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind. To deny God any meaningful place in your life would be to deny your own existence. And so you are stuck with your pain and your incomprehension, and the only way to move at all is to move toward God, to move more deeply into this relationship that we call faith. That is what Abraham does: without comprehension, nearly blinded by the horror of what he was told to do, Abraham follows God’s lead, for the simple and sufficient reason that it is God who is leading – to what end, Abraham has no idea.” 

 

Reading this story as if it’s about obedience and testing makes it an ugly story indeed.  Many rabbis in the Talmudic tradition note that Sarah dies in the next chapter, probably of a broken heart, and that this is the last time scripture says Abraham walked with God.  In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard says that an Abraham willingly obeying this wicked command is an Abraham whose hand is not stayed by the angel at the end.   No—this is not about obedience.  It is about trust. 

 

God commands something that is against everything God has promised.  God behaves in a way that is contrary to everything Abraham knows about God.   The child Abraham is called to sacrifice is the very child through whom God’s promised blessing to Abraham would come.

 

The great post-Holocaust Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits, in With God in Hell, explains that this trust beyond understanding is what kept Jewish faith alive despite the Nazi mass murders.   He imagines Abraham saying to this God during the heart-broken walk to Moriah: 

 

“In this situation I do not understand You. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust You because it is You, because it is You and me, because it is us….

 

“Almighty God! What you are asking of me is terrible…. But I have known You, my God. You have loved me and I love You. My God, you are breaking Your word to me…. Yet, I trust You; I trust You.”   (Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps [New York and London: Sanhedrin, 1979], 124.

 

I had a spiritual director once who told me that love was risk.  “Love means putting your heart out there where the beloved can break it.   This is all the more the case when it comes to loving God. This is certain:  sooner or later, God will break your heart.  At least that’s how it will feel.”   That is just the nature of an intimate relationship.  When we go through hell, we go through hell with those we love, for good or for ill.   Abraham goes through this with the very God who he thinks is causing him the pain.  He does so because he loves him. 

 

Saying God here was testing Abraham merely expresses how things look to us when we are suffering. We feel that maybe God is putting us to the test, though we know that God has no need of such evidence, since he already know our hearts completely.  It is an insult to God to say that somehow God was actually checking to see whether Abraham would obey such a horrible command.  Again, this story is about the human heart, not the heart of God.

 

Loving the Living God, the God of Abraham and Jesus, is dangerous, fraught with risk.  Sometimes it will hurt like hell.  It will rob us of any meaning or sense.   Our heart will be broken by the one we love best. We will find ourselves, in the words of Dante, “midway in our life’s journey lost in a dark wood.”  We must descend into hell and come out the other side into joy. 

 

Only the stark cross stands before us.  But beyond the cross, is resurrection morning.  Hidden in the bush, there is a ram.  God’s angel stands where we cannot see, ready to keep us and save us though we have no idea how.   All we need to do is in bewilderment keep on putting one foot in front of the other as we climb Mount Moriah.  All we need is trust beyond our understanding. 

 

Amen.