Saturday, May 26, 2012

Hindsight, Love's Timelessness, and the Will of God





I once had a lovely and very wise professor (the incomparable Ray Anderson) say in class, “You can only know God’s will in hindsight.”  He was speaking, of course, of that desire to figure it out right now, to deduce by prayer and spiritual guesswork what God wants you to do in a certain situation, so that you don’t make the “wrong” choice and screw up whatever it was God had planned for you. But when he said it, “You can only know God’s will in hindsight”, I realized with a start that was quite true in my life. 

How those Spanish language classes in high school and college that went nowhere were suddenly useful for the three months I spent in the Canary Islands, how a painful falling out with a friend revealed dark and shameful things in myself and ultimately made me a better friend to another down the road.  How that experience I had in long-distance email conversation with someone my senior year of college led me to the little bitty paragraph in the seminary catalog that felt like it was written for me and into the concentration that I hadn’t known existed, and a sense that I had found what I was meant to do. How being thrown together with a random roommate opened me up to an enduring group of friends.
That kind of thing. 
That when you look back, you can see how things were connected, how one thing led to another, how God was involved, what God was intending.  You can only know God’s will in hindsight.

At the time I imagined that you could also look back and decide you had missed God’s will, seeing how your bad choices had led to other choices and so on.  And in hindsight you could now see that God had clearly been leading you in a particular direction and you had disobeyed, gone a different way, missed the will of God. 

How often could Israel have looked back and seen they should’ve gone a different way? That God was leading them and they were not following? How often could they have had that recognition of God’s will in hindsight – oh! God wanted us to stay free and not to be slaves again!  Oh! God wanted us to stay in relationship and not worship idols and ignore God after all!  Oh! God was up to something and we missed it…
And this is part of the prophets’ grief.

At this point in the prophets I am tired. I am weary of Israel’s turning away and of the cries to return. I am worn out from the loss and punishment and I am skeptical of the hope that is promised. At this point in the prophets I am not sure why God is still hanging on, why God hasn’t given up. The people clearly have, many times.
But God doesn’t, and I don’t get that.

If there was ever a question about God’s fidelity, let it now be put to rest – God simply wont let them go.  But in Malachi, the people question even that. It opens with the words of God, “I have loved you.” and the immediate response, “How have you loved us?”

Malachi means My messenger… We know almost nothing about who this prophet was, and whether Malachi was even a name, or a stage name, short for “Messenger of God…” “Malach-Yahweh”, We suspect he probably prophesied sometime in the early 5th century BC, but beyond that, kind of a mystery. The book itself is constructed in a very argumentative fashion, asking lots of questions back to God after the statements God makes through the prophet.
I have loved you. How have you loved us?  Where is the respect due to me, O priests who despise my name?  How have we despised your name?  By offering polluted food at my alter. How have we polluted it, in what way? What!? What is it?!? What did we DO!?!
You get the picture.

So if there every was a point where it seems like you’ve perhaps not only missed the will of God but blatantly disregarded it, and even maybe chosen so far away from the will of God as to leave it completely, it seems likely that they’ve reached that point. 

Since the very beginning, God has wanted to be in relationship with these beings, these persons made in the image of God, to share God’s self with them and have them be open and share themselves with God. To collaborate, together to care for the earth and each other; and for all of it to function in the intricate, delicate but strong balance and harmony of life interdependent and free.
But all along, this plan of God keeps getting foiled, in one way or another the people keep turning on God and each other, keep cutting themselves off from the greater whole, keep meeting their own needs at the expense of their neighbors, and in hindsight they could know quite clearly that this was not God’s will, not God’s will at all.

But here’s the thing, even so, that doesn’t actually stop God. Their choice against God’s will doesn’t actually stop God’s will, though it delays it from time to time.  God wills that we live in God’s love and share in God’s creativity and enjoy the world God has made and one another within it; God wills that we be fully who God made us, whole and free and connected.  God’s will never changes.  And as far as we may wander away from God’s desires for us, God never gives up. 

So since September we’ve watched God’s strategy unfold – first by breathing it all into life, and choosing one to bless the many, and when that fails, a family to care for the world, and when that is short-lived, then God delivers them from slavery and gives them a whole new way to live, making them into a nation that will bless the world, and when they start to forget and demand a king, God gives them one and works through the king, and when the king builds God a house God moves in, and when the king is evil and the people are basically enslaved again, God sends prophets, truth-tellers and corporate grievers, holders of hope and keepers of memory, and when the people continue to ignore the prophets and continue to forget who God is, and get invaded and attacked and the temple is torn down, God sends more prophets and promises, and when the whole nation is broken in two then dwindled to one and then that one is wiped out and the people are scattered and no hope remains for them and everything is over, God continues to draw them back to God, again and again and again and through any means.

God’s will, God’s plan, unfolds along with, and sometimes in spite of, our plans.  “You can only see God’s will in hindsight” doesn’t mean you might see that you hit it or missed it.  It means you could simultaneously look back and recognize where you went wrong and where you should’ve gone a different way, but at the same time see where God worked in and through what did happen, so that you wouldn’t be who or where you are now if it hadn’t gone exactly that way.

Is there room for regret? Sure. Tons. But there is no room to ever say you’ve left the will of God, because no matter where you go, what direction, God will be there, working in and through, and seeking forever and always to bring you to Godself, to God’s love.  And God doesn’t give up.

I was once at a wedding where it was the groom’s second marriage and the bride was quite young and they were standing there kind of against the odds or expectations.  And as the boat we sat on pulled away from the pier and the motor chugged to life beneath our feet, the pastor began talking to them about love.  And while most other people couldn’t make out clearly what he said to the two of them over the sound of the engine, catching only the word “love” here and there, I was close enough to hear it.

He said that something timeless and redemptive happens in love – that in this moment, in the timeless power of God’s love, all other loves are redeemed.  All other experiences of love become part of this very love before you – it is now as thought you were always meant to be, as though you have never not loved this other you now pledge your life to, and even in loving others you were loving this very one as well, already, preemptively.

And in love it is now as though I have never not known you – because now you are a part of me, timeless and true, and I can’t imagine I was a baby, a child, a teenager, somewhere other than, and apart from, you.  It simply cannot be, for I am only me as I am now, with you.  Through my relationship with you I find my self, and all that went before is part of how we see, and love, one another. 

And if love works this way, then even the “mistakes” of our pasts become the material that makes us who we are, and there is no us without these experiences we bear inside ourselves, and the will of God weaves in and through and underneath it all, bringing us always to love. 

And so, When God comes into this world, a brand new squalling infant in a smelly stable, a flesh and blood person like you and me, it is as though God has always been here in this way, with us, among us, as though it was never any different. 
And from the very beginning then every uttered prophesy, every sung psalm of joy or cry of longing, every birth and battle and barren womb was waiting for, anticipating, foreshadowing the day when God would arrive.
 And the angels in heaven knew it would be because it had been decided this way all along, even though the very moment before they couldn’t have conceived of it.
 And for God it was as though this had been the point all along, this had been the intention, the will of God, and God would never NOT have come to share this life in the flesh with those God made in God’s own image. 

Return to me, God says. But how shall we return? We ask.

You can’t, my love, my heart, joy of my being. You’ve made that abundantly clear. You are incapable of returning. Through kings and prophets, children and warriors, devastating loss and breathless success, by temple and triumph, wreckage and ruin, famine, flood, faith, wandering and wondering you’ve shown me – you cannot return.
You try, from time to time you do try, you long to, you have even taken a few steps forward but always you fall back, always you turn away.  How shall you return? Oh, my love, you cannot.
But I can come to you.

So God does.

And when the world had all but forgotten, and the pleading of the prophets had given way to a long stretch of silence and it seemed things would remain this way always, love breaks in.
And now for all the prophets’ struggle and honesty and hope and grief they dispense on the people in their time, they also, unknowingly anticipate the arrival of God on the scene, Jesus, God-with-us. And when people look back they see it all over the prophets, who were saying what was to come.  This timeless love of God breaks in and infuses all loves, redeeming the story –every part – as the will of God unfolds towards love and redemption, healing and wholeness for all creation. And the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.

And so tonight you and I, sitting here together in our pews of hindsight, on the threshold of Pentecost (we'll celebrate that next week!), and seeing the story from the end of the Easter season, we know too that love has broken in.  
We look back as resurrection people, people who know that God brings life from death and hope from despair, people who can hold for all of those gone by, and for the weary world around us, the promises of the future, we are the prophetic people. 
We’re the people who can grieve how far we have fallen away from the people God wants us to be- where the hungry and poor and outcast are seated at the table and all have a place in the love of God. And by grieving the brokenness in which we find ourselves, we hold open the space for the alternative: the kingdom of God’s love, here and now, one day, and forever.

 How shall we return to you?  we ask. 
I will come to you, God answers.  
And then God does.

The will of God is unflappable and unfolding; we can recognize it in hindsight and share in it now, and anticipate it to come.  The grace of God’s judgment keeps cleansing, refining, burning away all that bogs down and clogs up and holds back love. 

And the story, every story, your story, is all part of love’s story, every part of it, and every moment in love’s path is claimed, and will one day be redeemed in love.  
This is the will of God.
Amen.



Sunday, May 20, 2012

Prophetic humor, and being free as God is free



This week we read the story of Shardrach, Meshack and Abednego, and it was interpreted to us by our children through instruments, puppets, costumes, some great acting, and a life-sized statue of Justin Bieber (as the gold idol).
(See Photos of our day with Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego).

It takes a certain gift, in the midst of a dark and terrible situation, to use humor to make a point.  It’s a particular way of remembering, or grieving, or stirring people to hope, Comedy is.  Up to this point we’ve seen prophets who have thundered criticism at the empire. Prophets who have embodied deep grief and sorrow. Prophets who could inspire to a distant hope in the future. But they have all been so serious

And this is a serious story too, I mean, the men themselves were not laughing, and neither was Nebechenezzer.  But the telling of the story is that sharp, political humor that highlights the power as foolish and lifts up the powerless as hero. Comedy can be enormously prophetic.

I think of the movie Life is Beautiful, an award-winning comedy about the Holocaust, in which writer, actor and director Roberto Benigni plays a father who creates a fantasy game for his young son in a concentration camp, so as to spare him from the horrors of reality.  
But the genre has us laughing and crying at the same time, recognizing the loss of humanity and truth and dignity on the part not just of the prisoners but of their captors as well, who have bought into a reality where this evil is practiced and accepted. 
By refusing to accept it, in fact making up a false reality, this father and son live a more true reality, in which humanity is upheld and people are respected and life is meant to be lived in harmony. Their game is a prophetic act, and viewing the holocaust through they eyes of comedy is prophetic as well. 

Comedy can point out the absurdity of the empire, can highlight evil and remind us of truth in instinctive, nearly unspoken ways.  Begnini says of the film, “I am a comedian and my way is not to show directly. Just to evoke. This to me was wonderful, the balance of comedy with tragedy.”

Our story today is this kind of film.  It’s recounting a tragic or horrifying situation in a funny way.  And that humor is serving a purpose.  It’s reminding, inspiring, reawakening hope, perspective, frustration. It’s doing what the prophets do: criticizing and energizing.

Most likely the last book of the Old Testament to be written down, the Book of Daniel was probably written four centuries after the Babylonian exile in which its stories are set, when the people of Israel found themselves again facing immense persecution.  So they reached back in their collective memory for these stories of another time of persecution, when their ancestors had been driven from their land and taken captive into foreign territory.

And is it ever foreign.  For the Israelites in exile there is no collective identity like they’ve known, no recognition of the God who had delivered them, or the law given them in the time of Moses.  There is no temple to center their worship or promised land beneath their feet.  They must adapt to foreign language and customs and religion and way of life in almost every way.

In the midst of this time four reportedly cultured and good-looking men from the upper strata of Israeli society are taken into the palace to serve the king.  Daniel, and Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, whom the king promptly renamed them the much more palatable Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego.

And together, they become for one another the prophetic community.  They nurture the memory of who God is and who they are, they grieve and hope and through conversation deeply rooted in tradition, prayer, and shared language, they remind one another of God’s promises and their part in the covenant relationship with God. 
For example, when everyone else in the castle was gorging on un-kosher bacon feasts, they asked the steward to give them only fruit, vegetables and water.  And so as not to get the steward in trouble with the king for starving these four, God made sure they were robust and healthy- even compared to all others in the palace.  And so the steward kept up their secret diet, and they maintained faithfulness to their God in the tradition of their ancestors. 

Daniel had a gift of interpreting dreams, although it doesn’t sound like he even knew this was the case until King Nebechenezzer had a doozie of a nightmare and none of his wise advisors could sort the thing out, so he planned to execute everyone in the palace for their lack of insight, until Daniel offered to give it a go, and whispered a prayer on his way into the throne room, “God, help me know what the dream means.” And then he did.  The king was so grateful and impressed, that Daniel kept rising through the ranks –eventually making governor of the city, and continued bringing the three boys up the Babylonian political ladder with him.

Daniel, who is star of the rest of this book with his lion-defying and dream-interpreting and apocalyptic-visioning, doesn’t show up in this story, for some reason, but his three companions do, his best mates, his fellow comrades in exile.  And they continue, by their words and actions, to be a thorn in the empire’s side, to embody – quite literally – an alternative reality to the one set before them all as complete and inevitable.  And not only do they do this by refusing to bow, they also do this quite powerfully in what they say just before they refuse to bow.  “Our God might save us, but even if God does not, we will not bow.”  
Even if God does not…

There’s radical freedom in this story. The freedom of these three not to participate in what everyone else does. The freedom of God to meet them how God will.  And God does meet them – not by sparing them from the fire, however, but by joining them right there in it.   But perhaps the more prophetic moment here is the one where they name both their own freedom and God’s.  
We will not bow.  And God may not act. 

Both of these things go so deeply and shockingly against the wisdom of the day, against the empire mentality, the royal consciousness, where the king is in charge and no one is really free, not even the king, but really, not even God.  Gods are made and manipulated, pleased and coddled.
But in their words is an echo of Moses’ encounter with the Divine on the mountain and in the burning bush, I am who I will be.  You cannot contain me.  And also I, who brought you into freedom, will reach out to you and care for you and show you how to live free and in harmony with one another.

And these three boys believe it.  In the face of death itself, they stand for a reality bigger than what is in front of them, an authority greater than this foolish, blustering king, a power more formidable than a raging fire, a way of being that does not bow to humiliation, punishment or even death itself, but to the God who stands outside life and death, beyond and yet within it, and they remember. 

And so to trust in this God is not necessarily to trust that they will be saved, it is to trust in the Savior God, whether or not God chooses to save them.  It is not to trust in what God does in exchange for our pleasing God, it is to trust who God is, regardless of our good or bad behavior, and regardless of God’s specific intervention in the time or the way we think God should act. 
To trust in God is to trust in one who is free – more free than we can ever know or understand or grasp as human beings. But who has made us in the image of this very same freedom.   And it is such a radical freedom that it is not free from- free from obligation to others, free from work or contribution to the whole, free from accountability – that’s the empire’s freedom, that is the crazy king’s kind of freedom: to make a arbitrary idol and demand everyone agree with you. 
No, God is not free from.  God is free for. Free to be for us, to be with us. Free to create and recreate. Free to share Godself with those God has made. Free to change God's mind. Free to act, and free not to. 
And we are made free for as well. Free to see our neighbor and act for her, free to give of ourselves expecting nothing in return, free not to compete and judge and compare, and get our worth and value from what others think of us or our own intellect or power or charm, free to love unconditionally, free for unrestrained joy, free for deep connection, for forgiving and apologizing and restoring, free to live fully present, free to be known and to know, free to share and to give. 

We are free because God is free, free to live. Fearlessly, honestly, fully, joyfully. And every other person with their face in the dirt before that monstrosity, that enormous and ridiculous waste of gold, that ego on a stick that Nebechenezer had set up in their presence, every other person there was not free.  Forgot their freedom.  Bowed to the King’s hunk of gold, which is to say bowed to their fear of punishment, to their fear of humiliation or loss of honor or home or title or life.  Every other person swallowed the lie that we are not free.  We are owned. Bought. Slaves to the system, whatever our particular system might be. 

But when the three stood up to the king, when the three survived the flames, they revealed to everyone that the wizard was just a schmuck behind a curtain with a loudspeaker and some pyrotechnics.   The only thing the king can do to maintain his empire at this moment is to now demand everyone bow to their God, or he’ll have them torn limb from limb.  But it’s too late. The emperor has no clothes and the kid on the street has screamed it for all to hear.

There are lots of ways of being prophetic, and humor is not to be underestimated - it can expose, criticize and energize.  Sometimes laughing at the situation frees you just enough to suddenly envision an alternative, and if you can envision it, perhaps you can even live from it, and if you can live from it, then the alternative is more real and more possible than the situation would lead you to believe. 
Even right in the middle of it, even when you can’t change it, even if it is a huge idol and peer pressure from the entire nation and a violent and unstable ruler and a blazing fire ready to consume you- there is something outside this, another option for how to be in this.  In such a dire moment, when faced with the command: “You will do A, or B will be done to you.” The boys answer, “Be that as it may, we choose C.”

This is a story you tell when you’re persecuted and scared, when you’re struggling and weak, when the empire is bigger than you and you think you’re going to lose your place, and you might even forget who you are, or that you are free.  You tell the story of the ridiculous, over the top king enslaved to his ego and his power, and the comprehensively demanding, death-threat pressure on everyone there, and these guys who stood up anyway.  And who let God be God, and who remembered God was free and they were too – whether or not God saves us, we will not bow, they said. 
You tell the story of the God who joins them in the most terrible part, the part that should kill you but miraculously doesn’t.

When you’re struggling and things are serious and ominous, and you need a dose of truth, you tell this story of the true God who shows up much differently than the vociferous, domineering, power-wielding king.  The true God who slips silently into the fire and stands alongside, incognito, and without engaging the power players or validating this circus with so much as a word.   

And perhaps in the telling, in the absurdity and severity of the story, it will dawn on you, even if just for a moment, that in the middle of it all and despite all evidence to the contrary, you are more free than you act, and in fact, life is beautiful.  And when this realization washes over you, I defy you to keep a straight face.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Broken Down and Remade


Jeremiah - by Michaelangelo

This sermon continues our journey through the Old Testament prophets.  We had an artist in the center of our worship space, working with clay, creating, destroying, and recreating pots, throughout our worship service.

Jeremiah 29:10-14
Jeremiah 18:1-11



It sucks to see what nobody else can see, and then have nobody listen when you try to tell them.  I have this reoccurring nightmare sometimes-  I keep trying to explain, I'm talking and begging and nobody is listening.  Nobody will believe me, (although in it I am often an adult arguing with my parents who think I am still a teenager, so it clearly has more to do with my own issues and unresolved frustration than anything in reality). But with this nightmare, I wake up and it’s over, thank God.

But this was Jeremiah’s whole life.  Jeremiah was the son of the priest Hilkiah – the one who found the scrolls and brought them to King Josiah. His prophetic calling began around then and continued past Josiah’s death at the hands of an Egyptian army – whom Josiah had engaged despite Jeremiah’s warnings, as they passed through Judah to war against Assyria in the north. 
Jeremiah led the people in great grieving for Josiah, and then continued to prophesy through the abbreviated reign of Josiah’s son and replacement by an Egyptian regent, and the unfolding tension in which Judah was caught between the superpowers of Egypt and Babylon at the time.  He continues to function as prophet through the fall of Judah and destruction of the temple, when the Babylonians take over and the people are scattered.

When Josiah died Jeremiah could see that Judah’s days as an independent nation were numbered, and the people were already falling away from Josiah’s ways.  The reforms the people made under Josiah didn’t stick, and the horrors to which they sank under his grandfather Manassa were so abhorrent to God and so destructive to them, that their effects lingered.  And so it begs the question, how bad can things get before there’s no turning back?  At what point is death so chosen for so long that life can not resuscitate? 

Back in the days of Noah, God wiped out the whole world and started over with Noah, but also started over with Godself -  I wont ever do this again. I wont ever destroy everything and everyone and begin again, I am not that kind of God.  But now God is sitting here with this people who have sacrificed their own children, who have broken down all it means to be in this relationship with God and each other, having nothing left of their covenant, shattering it in every imaginable way. 
And the way forward here, the role God takes on, is a grieving parent watching her child die after her body is ravaged by meth and her mind destroyed.  It  doesn’t matter at this point if she decides to get clean. It’s too late for her to drop her dealer and join Narcotics anonymous.  She didn’t listen back when her parents begged her to go back to school or start eating again, when they pointed out the toll her horrible choices were having on her own life and her friends and family, and she refused help when they offered all their resources and support to help her choose a different way.   Now it’s all over and the next step is life support and ultimately pulling the plug and the parent just has to let it happen.  That’s God in this book.  That’s Jeremiah’s voice in this time in the life of Judah.

Jeremiah grieves. It’s what he does. Incessantly, relentlessly. He pisses people off he’s such a weeper.  His grief is deep and unending, and keeping silent is impossibly painful.  His misery is two-fold: One, he is utterly brokenhearted over what is coming for the people and nation he cares about.  And it’s coming. He keeps telling them, but they are refusing to listen. They are numb.  And this is the second reason for Jeremiah’s great grief.  It is absolutely devastating that they wont hear him, that they refuse to listen to what is coming.  They will lose everything they have.  It’s going to be over for them.  It’s too late to turn this ship around.  And nobody is listening. In fact, they do whatever they can to shut him up.

Enter the potter parable.  While the approved prophets of the kingdom are telling the people that its all good and rosey times ahead, Jeremiah is reminding them that their actions have consequences. And that God will not let it continue as is.  In fact, that it is coming to an end anyway, and God is not going to stop it.

This is not the distant God who sets the world in motion and refuses to participate, or even the unmovable, sovereign God whose mind is made up and whose will cannot be altered. This is a proactive, reactive and interactive God, who is willing to change God’s mind, who is willing to do whatever it takes to shape the people into a vessel of God’s love for the world.

Here’s the thing about God – the potter is not throwing out the clay. Yes, the pot is broken down and destroyed, but then it is reshaped into something new.  And here’s the thing about Jeremiah, he saw what God had in mind before it happened-  first that the people would be ravaged by Babylon and taken into exile. But then, also that one day they would return, that it would begin again.  That while God’s short term plans may shift dramatically as the situation calls for, God’s longterm plan was bigger, that the future was still out there, still in God’s hands, still hopeful.  He believed this so much that as the Babylonians were descending on them, from his prison cell, as people were panicking and fleeing, and from someone who must have thought him completely insane, he bought a piece of land.  Like buying stock in the company just as it was collapsing.  He had a longer view.

The message of Jeremiah is that sometimes the way God works is by breaking us down and starting over. This time, instead of destroying the world and saving a remnant – (a move God regretted and promised after Noah never to do again) God dismantles the remnant itself, strips the house down to its foundations and rebuilds, collapses the clay and shapes something new. God will never give up on God’s people or the world that God loves.  Destruction, even, becomes a tool. It is not in vain. God will use it to shape something new.

The difference between God and the grieving parent lies not in the grief, or the love, or the loss, or the wishing it could have been different or the anguish at how things turned out.  The difference is in the fact that God is the creator-  who creates and creates and recreates, who is greater than death and whose material is life, who doesn’t give up and is not hindered, who, just down the road from this moment, comes to actually share life with us all, who dies and is resurrected. The difference is that God brings life out of death. And we are the people of who’ve been brought out of death into new life. Death is not the end. 

But true though this may be, it doesn’t look so good heading into the death part.  It doesn’t feel good to reap what you’ve sown, to be broken down and remade, to die and be reborn. Re-creation is not a painless process.

The people without memory had not only forgotten that they were meant to be God’s vessel of love in the world, that they were meant to partner with the God of life and live free, whole, interdependent, and generous - they had forgotten how to even live outside the moment, they had forgotten the faithfulness of the past and the promises of the future. 

So when they were scattered from their home and the temple was in ruins, after they were settled in foreign lands with no hope of returning, Jeremiah continued to say what the people continued to disbelieve and ignore.  That the story is bigger, that God is still moving. That death is not the end.  That the God who creates life is creating still and always. Creating and recreating.  That things can reach a point where things are so bad that there is no turning back, and when they do, there is going forward instead.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their spouse, says the Lord.

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-33)

God is involved, hands on, heart engaged.  And this world, and we in it, belong to God.  God changes strategies, but the end goal is always the same – it is always wholeness, love, life abundant and full, shared and multiplied.  And we are vessels of this love.

May we - in memory, in grief, in hope and in discourse – continue to be shaped for God’s purposes in the world.  May we listen to the voices of warning and voices of hope, voices of grief and truth, and voices of celebration and promise.   And may we ourselves be that voice in a world God is redeeming.
Amen.

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We have been using Frederick Buechner's Peculiar Treasures, in exploring the prophets. Here is his description of Jeremiah.


 
JEREMIAH
7th c BC

The word jeremiad means doleful and thunderous denunciation, and its derivation is no mystery. There was nothing in need of denunciation that Jeremiah didn’t denounce. He denounced the king and the clergy. He denounced recreational sex and extramarital jamborees.  He denounced the rich for exploiting the poor, and he denounced the poor for deserving no better. He denounced the way every new god that came sniffing around had them all after him like so many bitches in heat; and right at the very gates of the Temple he told them that if they thought God was impressed by all the mumbo-jumbo that went on in there, they ought to have their heads examined.

When some of them took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, he appeared with a clay pot which he smashed into smithereens to show them what God planned to do to them as soon as he got around to it. He even denounced God himself for saddling him with the job of trying to reform such a pack of hyenas, degenerates, ninnies. “You have deceived me,” he said, shaking his fist. You are “like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (Jeremiah 15:18), and God took it.

But the people didn’t. When he told them that the Babylonians were going to come in and rip them to shreds as they richly deserved, they worked him over and threw him in jail. When the Babylonians did come in and not only ripped them to shreds but tore down their precious Temple and ran off with all the expensive hardware, he told them that since it was God’s judgment upon them, they better submit to it or else; whereupon they threw him into an open cistern that happened to be handy. Luckily the cistern had no water in it, but Jeremiah sank into the muck up to his armpits and stayed there till an Ethiopian eunuch pulled him out with a rope.

He told them that if they were so crazy about circumcision, then they ought to get their minds above their navels for once and try circumcising “the foreskins of their hearts” (Jeremiah 4:4);  and the only hope he saw for them was that someday God would put the law in their hearts too instead of in the books, but that was a long way off.

At his lowest ebb he cursed the day he was born like Job, and you can hardly blame him. He had spent his life telling them to shape up with the result that they were in just about as miserable shape as they’d have been if he’d never bothered, and urging them to submit to Babylon as the judgment of God when all their patriotic instincts made that sound like the worst kind of defeatism and treachery.

He also told them that, Babylonian occupation or no Babylonian occupation, they should stick around so that someday they could rise up and be a new nation again; and then the first chance they got, a bunch of them beat it over the border into Egypt. What’s even worse, they dragged old Jeremiah, kicking and screaming, along with them which seems the final irony: that he, who had fought so long and had against all forms of idolatry—the Nation as idol, the Temple as idol, the King as idol—should at last have been tucked into their luggage like a kind of rabbit’s foot or charm against the evil eye or idol himself.

What became of him in Egypt afterwards is not known, but the tradition is that his own people finally got exasperated with him there they stoned him to death. If that is true, nothing could be less surprising.
  
   (Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, from the book of Jeremiah)

Sunday, May 6, 2012

The matter of memory




This weekend I traveled to Kansas City to see two of my sisters graduate – one from college and one from law school.  I stayed in the bedroom of my 8 year old nephew, Vincent, amongst legos and bugs pinned to velvet plaques, stars glued to the ceiling and collections of books about dogs.  After he’d oriented me to the important things in his room and left me alone, I realized there was music playing softly. It was a cd with the Sunday school songs I had grown up with: Jesus loves me, I’ve got the joy down in my heart, Jesus loves the little children, Oh, how I love Jesus, and others, on a mellow cd where they were paced, I discovered, to match the beating of a heart.  The cd was set on repeat.

When he came back in I said, “Vincent, that music is so relaxing.”
He said, “Yeah, I think so too.  I like to sleep with it on. Hey! maybe you could too!” 
So when I went to bed that night I did not turn it off.  Throughout the night when I would stir I would catch morsels of music, words that I had grown up hearing, comfortable, familiar, somehow part of me.  They wove themselves in and out of my dreams.  When I awoke, the songs of my childhood and my faith gently called me back to day.

“Keep these words that I am giving you. Recite them to your children.  Talk about them when you are at home and away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

You are my children who I delivered from the land of Egypt. I am your God.  You shall love Yahweh your God. 

It’s all God has ever wanted.  Back and forth this tumultuous relationship goes throughout time – from the beginning when when God breathed it all into being and placed the tree of God’s vulnerability among them, Choose me, choose life, I will show you the way to live fully, wholly. And instead they chose not to trust the God who loved them, and to look after themselves and turn against one another. And on and on it goes, rolling through centuries and millennia, God’s relentless love and humanity’s turning away and God’s constantly adapting strategies to share life with these cherished ones made in God’s image.

There are lots of reasons, I suppose, why people turn away from love.  In this story, they don’t even know yet that they have. 
What is it like to have lost your memory? To have forgotten who you are, what shaped you, where you come from, where you’re going? What is it to be not just one, but a whole people like this? Yesterday disregarded, tomorrow uncertain.  Trapped in eternal present, and unpleasant present, at that.

So what, then, was it like for them when those scrolls were opened?  What was it like to hear a story that was true about you and you never knew it? What was it like, after more than a lifetime of ruthless, unpredictable and oppressive authority, lawless self-preservation, fear and corruption, to being gathered one day in the square, by your young king and told that when cleaning out and repairing the temple this was found:  the law, the ten commandments, the history. The word of God. 
What was it like to hear the words aloud that your ancestors wrote, a message from God in their voice, guiding their lives and it was supposed to guide yours too, but you’ve never even heard of it before.  Like learning your own middle name for the first time.  Discovering you’re adopted, or that you’ve got a whole family of people you never knew, or that you’re incognito royalty.  It’s the Aboriginal lost children of Australia stolen from their people and raised in white homes hearing their language for the first time. It’s a dug up time capsule not only introducing your ancestors but blowing misconceptions about your own identity out of the water.  It’s an opening of your own past that completely alters the present and rewrites the future.

I picture stillness over the crowd, barely a breeze, rapt attention and dead silence, not a throat-clear among them, as the words are read:

My people, here is who you are! And here is how I designed life to work best, together and not just alone, for others and not just yourself, giving and not just taking, sharing and not hoarding, resting and not just toil. Each one treasured, all together belonging.  Forgiven, free.  Here’s the relationship you were meant for – with me, with each other.  You belong to me. I have chosen you for a special purpose in the world – I will care for you and you will live within my care so that you can care for others.
And the crowd holds its collective breath as these words sink deep into their souls.

And the most painful and poignant part of all of it, I imagine, is standing there listening when the words are read, Whatever happens, my children, Do not forget this!
 In fact, rehearse it, Teach it to your children, talk about it when you’re awake and dream it when you’re asleep, Discuss it over dinner, leave post-its lying around, tuck it in your purse and have it in your pocket and Literally stick it to your own forehead so you don’t forget.  It’s that important.

And you’re standing there hearing this as the third generation of people who’ve completely forgotten.  You’ve never told it to your children and you never heard it from your parents.  You’ve never discussed it over dinner let alone carried it with you in your pocket or plastered it to your forehead. You’re hearing it for the very first time. 
All the ways it could have been. 
All you’ve done that you can’t undo.  All you would’ve done differently had you known. Hope and shame comingled.  Joy and sorrow welling up and spilling over.
All together you stand there remembering what you never knew.

Huldah the prophetess knew. She recognized the scriptures when they brought it to her.  She told them what these words were and she told them what God was waiting to say when they finally looked up and noticed God again. 
How did she know?  How could she be the one-  she, and not even the priest - who could speak with confidence when the people were finally ready to hear again the truth of their situation?  How did she alone remember?

She was not alone. The prophets, who criticized the dominant consciousness and pointed out all the heartbreaking ways things were not as should be, who energized the people with the promise of a future different than the pain of the present, these prophets did not exist in a vacuum.

 They came from communities, a tiny remnant of people who remembered the story, who were raised with it as part of their lives when everyone else forgot.  They listened to the songs as they fell asleep, they heard the tales over dinner and rehearsed the lessons in the fields or the streets.  They prayed to Yahweh, and shared life with the living God when everyone else had left God long before for lifeless idols of their own making.

Even when the whole people had forgotten, even when perhaps nearly all the copies of the book of the law had been lost or destroyed, even when the kings of Judah was behaving worse than the worst of their enemies, and the cruelty and suffering was unending, there were some who remembered. Some who kept the memory alive for the rest of them.

Brueggemann says, “The subcommunity that may generate prophecy will participate in the public life of the dominant community…from a certain perspective and with a certain intention.  Such a subcommunity is likely to be one in which:

-       there is a long and available memory that sinks the present generation deep into an identifiable past that is available in song and story;

-       there is an available, expressed sense of pain that is owned and recited as a real social fact, that is visibly acknowledged in a public way, and that is understood as unbearable in the long term;

-       there is an active practice of hope, a community that knows about promises yet to be kept, promises that stand in judgment on the present,

-       there is an effective mode of discourse that is cherished across generations, that is taken as distinctive, and that is richly coded in ways only insiders know.  
        (from The Prophetic Imagination)

Imagine now, that we are such a community.  That prophets are grown here, that together, we are prophet.  That one day all the world will know again the love of God, will live in love, and peace, and justice, forgiveness and generosity,
and for now, we keep that reality alive and rehearse by remembering the faithfulness of God in the past, and telling the stories that have shaped our journey as individuals, as communities, as the church, as God’s people, in scripture, in our lives, imagine we hold that memory.
And imagine that we grieve together that things are not as they should be, we share that grief in honesty together, we talk about what separates people from each other, together we look open-eyed at injustice and brokenness and suffering.  Imagine we can openly name death in all its forms and grieve it. And not because we’re somehow exempt from it, but because we participate; even in our own lives we’re part of what shouldn’t be.

And Imagine that we practice hope, we live out of promises yet to be kept, we find strength from God’s future to treat each other as God sees us, we find courage to live unafraid to reach out to others, to see and be seen, to listen and be heard, we recognize all people as children of God and treat them that way, because one day these glimpses we see will be realized in all fullness. 

And Imagine that we practice noticing what is easily overlooked, and we get good talking about it.  We are truly People of the resurrection, who see it and seek it everyday. 
Imagine we have an effective mode of discourse; we can talk about all of this, we have rich language and imagery that we share, and we value wrestling through difficult things, we appreciate sharing stories and perspectives and insights and questions.  
And we do it in song and art and prayer and laughter and beauty and broken bread and spilled wine and cooked meals and long conversations and quiet moments and all different learning styles and all different gifts.  Imagine we become fluent in our ability to communicate with each other over the deep and important things God is stirring up in our lovely and ordinary world.

Because the world has forgotten, it’s memory is short.  And we are here to remind the world who it really is.  Created by God, each one loved by her creator. All together made for life and love.  In astonishing diversity made for harmony and wholeness.  And imagine we live this out in defiance of the dominant consciousness that has forgotten, but we also live it out in sure anticipation. We wait.  Because we know it’s coming.

My second night in Kansas City was spent celebrating with my family.  In the room last night there was a lot of joy and hope, and a lot of brokenness and pain.  Hard-fought achievements accomplished, long-suffered challenges met, pride and happiness. Also relationships strained and persons in turmoil, marriages already dead tentatively and awkwardly seated alongside new ones born. Foster kids separated from their family who can’t love them without hurting them, but loved and held by a new family of people they should never have met in their lifetime.  Children entering the teen years, hesitant and beautiful, and wild, masked, caped and flashlight-armed young ones racing in and out from the night. 
It was a room full of people seeking to love in the ways they know how – favorite desserts, group photos, flowers, laughter over stories of the younger years, fear or hope over what might be ahead.  All of it was there.  Exhausting, sweet, and poignant. 

And I returned to my 8 year old nephew’s bedroom and kicked off my shoes and closed the door.  And I heard the music still softly playing.  Reminding, gently, insistently.  Jesus love me, this I know. The peace that passes understanding down in my heart.  Because he first loved me.

There is a truth that goes deeper and reaches back further, through struggle and pain, past amnesia and unknowing,
a love beyond all denying and turning away and forgetting, that plunges into death and roars joyfully back into life again, that stretches strong from the beginning of everything out past all eternity. And even in this moment, it holds you.
I am the Lord your God. 
Be open. 
Remember.
Grieve.
Hope.
And share it, however you are able, with each other.
Now, loved ones, let it pulse through you with each beat of your heart.
Put it on repeat and never stop listening.
Amen. 


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We've been collecting little summaries about the various prophets as we've journey through the Old Testament. Most of them we take from Frederick Buechner's Peculiar Treasures, but he didn't have one for the prophetess Huldah, so we created our own.



HULDAH
7TH C  BC


Josiah.  When he came to power people said it was a relief; he’d be a puppet, perhaps, but at least he wasn’t his grandfather.  Or his father. Maybe this one would be better.
She wondered what would become of them all.

When he came to power he was eight years old, but he was not naive.   The advisors that had murdered his father just three years into his reign had in turn been murdered by the people.  And now he sat on the throne, his toes just shy of the floor, his arms propped up high on both sides.  He could feel the weight of the world pressing on his narrow shoulders, the shadow of danger hovering over him. 
She held her breath and waited to see what would happen.

But he had heard the stories, whispered in the corridors, told to him by a kind nurse, a peddler in passing, a servant’s child.  The snippets of stories sang in his soul, resonating in the fibers of his own being - the stories of Yahweh, and the people of God, of Solomon and David, Moses and Miriam.
She prayed he would listen to the stories.

You didn’t have to be fully conscious to see that the temple of Solomon, towering in their midst, was crumbing in disrepair, not to mention filled with idols and temple prostitutes installed there by his child-sacrificing grandfather King Manassah.  You didn’t have to be a genius to guess it wasn’t what it once was.  Or was meant to be.  Before.  Back then.
She retained the memory.  She grieved their amnesia.  She held out hope for the people’s return to their God.  And she waited.

When he came to power he was only eight, but he knew what kind of king he wanted to be.
For a few years he watched. He listened. He gathered people who could tell him the old stories.  He learned from the mistakes of his father and grandfather.  And then he made his move.
He started by cleaning up the temple. He started by rebuilding what was breaking down.  He could think of no other place to begin. 
And when the priest found it, when the priest brought it to him, he knew.  Without being told, without ever having heard the words before, he knew what to do.  He tore his clothes.  The grief of God and the prophets became his own.

She heard them coming before she saw them. 
When the party from the palace made their way to her door, and she paused and smiled, before rising to greet them. The time had come.
They placed the scrolls on her table.  She lifted one and held the sacred words in her calloused hands.  She stroked the fine letters and her eyes filled with tears.  She looked at the messengers, the questioners waiting for her answer, and she knew that their lives and the world they knew were about to change.
She answered them.

“Tell the man who sent you that this is truly the word of God.  And God is indeed very angry. For generations the people have turned away, and they will reap what they’ve sown.  But also, they will return.  By the wise hand of this king, they will return to their God.”

                                                                        (Kara Root, from 2 Kings 22-24)

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