To Hold and Uphold

1 Kings 17:1-16

One unfortunate thing about being human over, say, a bird, or a dog, is that humans tend to forget whose we are and who we are. The prophet’s job is to remind us. They create a kind of the hammock of trust suspended between recalling God’s faithfulness in the past, and premembering the future God is bringing. The is essential, because there is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings who’ve forgotten their belonging to God and each other.

The prophet Elijah appears out of nowhere, bursting on the scene fully formed, ready to show the people of Israel who is the real God. In those days, in the other lands, prophets were a dime a dozen. People who delivered messages between the divine realm and the world of humans camped out in temples near idols like buskers with their hat on the ground.  

So when God calls prophets in Israel, one scholar says, we can think of God ‘using the technology of the day’ – people understood the idea of prophets. But the prophets of Israel weren’t street performers; they were honored guides, whose words were collected and recorded (the Israelites basically invented scripture). Messengers of Yahweh who spoke truth to power, the prophets reminded the kings that God’s covenant calling and the law of Moses applied equally to all people, kings included. 

Also, just to be clear, the prophets were weird. Pretty much all of them. The stories are wild, all performance art and poetry, confusing and disruptive. Not really the buttoned-up lawyer-type, they were more the off-the-grid, loud and raving type, the blunt objects God uses to break through the status quo and tear it all down when the people of God lose their way, imaginations dulled and senses numbed into accepting the unacceptable. This story of unbuilding and rebuilding repeats again and again.  So, the Hebrew prophets were both revered and a little bit feared, because they were unpredictable and a little bit dangerous, not quite housebroken, demonstrating Yahweh couldn’t be domesticated either. 

There are 133 named prophets in the bible, 16 of them women. Many spoke God’s words, but some of also performed miracles, these were known as ‘men of God’. Elijah, and his apprentice Elisha, were the most well-known ‘man of God’ types, conduits of the Divine who demonstrated God’s power with works of wonder.  

Elijah is most famous for two incidents that follow today’s story– one is a face-off with the prophets of Baal Hedad, a Mountaintop Battle of the Gods that lasts a whole day, during which Elijah taunts them relentlessly, and the Baal fails to deliver even a spark. Yahweh and Elijah come out on top when Yahweh’s fire from heaven vaporizes Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice, altar included. Then Elijah takes things too far and slaughters the prophets of Baal. He immediately goes from speaking for God to cowering from the empire when Queen Jezebel threatens him and he flees for his life, bringing us to the second story Elijah is most known for. Wandering desperate and terrified through the wilderness he ends up in a cave, crying out to God. God sends a great wind, and a storm, and an earthquake, but God is not in the wind, or the storm or the earthquake, and then there is the sound of sheer silence. And this is where God meets Elijah. Speaking to him in the still, small voice. 

Those seem like significant stories, and the public showdown between Yahweh and Baal is a real boon to Elijah’s prophetic reputation. But the story we have today seems minor and unimportant. A miracle, for certain, but why is it recorded in the annuls of Kings? Why is it placed alongside stories that shaped the direction of history?

It helps to know something about the Ancient Near East. That there were many gods was simply accepted as fact, there was no alternative to polytheism, that’s just how it was for all peoples everywhere. When people groups mingled, they welcomed in each other’s gods and added them to their own collections. Different gods for different things, hierarchies of gods or their exact names—you might quibble about those details, but you would never question the array and assortment of deities. Scholars tell us that shifting from worshiping many gods to worshiping only one God was gradual – going from worshiping many gods to acknowledging them but worshiping only Yahweh, to not mentioning other gods at all, to finally saying only Yahweh is God and always has been, and there are no other gods—that process takes time, like, hundreds of years of gradual shifting.

So, Elijah is part of this shifting, moving people from worshiping many gods to worshiping Yahweh alone. King Ahab loves worshiping Yahweh, but he just mixes Yahweh up into his collection of other gods and can’t see what’s wrong with that. Only the Israelite kings did this, by the way. Outside of Israel, Yahweh was wildly unpopular, because a god who claims to be the only one does not play well with others.

So when God tells Elijah to tell King Ahab it won’t rain for three years until Yahweh says so, Yahweh is stepping into the realm of the Canaanite god of rain, fertility, growth, and increase- Baal Hedad.  In the way of the empire, the peasants work the land, the king reaps the benefits, and everyone behaves, accepting the way things are, and staying in their proper place. The temples to the rain god are in the cities where it matters, so the rain will fall specifically on the farms of the king, to feed his crops and increase the wealth of the wealthy.

But Yahweh is the God of all, with no distinction or preferences – except perhaps for the overlooked and undervalued. So, Yahweh turns off the faucet.

The law of Moses says God has called each person to know and follow God. All shall be given land, and if they don’t have it, then land and resources should be redistributed so everyone has what they need. People are commanded to look out for each other, and especially to take care of the oppressed and those on the margins, lifting up the poor, the widow and the orphan. Every person is part of God’s story and God has claimed them to be a blessing to the whole world.

But this empire structure King Ahab slides into props up the few by oppressing the many, consolidates power, tramples the weak, plunders the land, dehumanizes human siblings in the insatiable pursuit of more and more in a structure of fear and dominance, competition and scarcity, what we’ve called the way of fear. 

Not only is the one true God too big to be just one of many self-serving deities of the empire that we capitulate to, but the way of God is is in direct opposition to the whole empire thing altogether. Humans are made in the image of God to care for one another, to steward and tend the earth and its creatures, to enjoy life together in the presence of God, in an intricate and astounding world of interdependence, held in a relationship of trust and promise. Yahweh alone is God.

So, against that backdrop, here comes this little story.  After delivering his message of drought to the King, Elijah is sent by God to hang out by a drying up wadi (or creek), and told God will provide. And indeed, God does – never without a sense of humor, using ravens, an unclean bird, to bring food to him, because, remember? God is Lord of all, not even captive to our ideas of God, and is free to do what God wishes. So why not shake it up? Ravens it is! When the creek dries up God sends Elijah some 50 miles away to find this one, particular widow, whom God says will provide food and water for him. 

But when he finally gets there, famished, the lady seems not to have gotten the message. She’s willing to give him a bit of water, but when Elijah asks for food she says, (more bluntly than the Peace Table puts it), “I have enough oil and flour to make my son and me one last scrap of food and then we will lay down and die.” And Elijah has the nerve to ask her to feed him first. He promises the ingredients won’t run out. So, she does, and they don’t. 

And when I hear this, I don’t think, how wonderful! I think, how dare he ask her for that? She’s poor! She needs it way more than he does because she has a kid to feed too! There is only so much to go around! And to give it to some you must deny it to others. If he were really a good person, really from God, he would never demand something from someone who has so little!

And there is the voice of the empire within me! The empire imagination that keeps the peasants in their place and views the world through scarcity and competition. Exactly what the prophetic imagination comes to confront and expunge.

Why does this story matter? Here’s why: Because we too have been coopted by the empire to accept the unacceptable. We’re terrified when the status quo gets rocked and shaken, and the built gets unbuilt, because while it might not be perfect, at least it feels stable. It may be rotten with injustice and inequality, but at least we know how much eggs will cost. And the many gods we worship – gods of security and protection, gods of image and achievement, gods of wellness and longevity that we sacrifice to to keep the world from shaking so we can eek our way forward without much tumult or upheaval – when they fail us, and our 401Ks plummet, it’s terrifying.  We don’t want an unbuilt and rebuilt reality. As much as we call ourselves Christians, we don’t actually want a death and resurrection kind of God, a God who comes in weakness and shares suffering and invites us to see one another and share life with each other come what may and trust that God will meet us there and hold us fast. We want the empire, plain and simple. 

But this little story calls us back to the way of God, not by the prophet’s bold declaration but by his hunger and need. Yahweh is a God who provides. A manna in the wilderness God gives enough for the next meal, and the one after that, if we share it with one another. Not enough to increase and hoard, to rely on our own strength, power or cunning over and against one another. But enough to keep us operating in the currency of covenant, that is, trust and promise. 

The widow must trust Elijah, and must trust the promises of Yahweh through him. Elijah must trust God to provide and the kindness of this woman. He must entrust himself into God’s hands by entrusting himself into her hands. And she seems an unlikely source of security, indeed, not who you’d expect to provide for your needs because she apparently can’t even provide for herself or her son.  But when Elijah asks ‘the least of these’ for help, he elevates her from irrelevant object of pity to Provider of Hospitality. He comes to her in need of care, and sees her as able to care for him, even if she can’t at first see herself that way. And suddenly they are both freed from the empire. They are living the law of Moses, where all are neighbors, siblings in the human family, looking out for each other, and Yahweh is God of us all, promising to hold us and uphold us.

And so, Elijah gets to live the message he will go on to proclaim: There is only one God, this one, Yahweh, alone, who provides all we need and brings life out of death. This is whose we are. And we are called by this God to be a blessing to the world in our mutual care for one another. That is who we are.

There is nothing more destructive in all the earth than human beings forgetting our belonging to God and each other. And very often we just mix up Yahweh into our collection of other gods and get on with our empire-living. But we are the prophetic community, called to recall God’s faithfulness in the past, premember the future God is bringing, and join right now, from our weakness and need, in the kingdom of the living God unfolding here among us and between us, trusting the God of resurrection to meet us in our places of death. 

So, dear ones, may live the message we proclaim, hear within the silence the still, small, voice, and rest in the hammock of trust.

Amen. 

Remembering how we do this

Our faith in the present is shaped by remembering God's faithfulness in the past. We are sustained by the same God who has sustained us before, and all those before us.  We modern folk are always looking forward. We forget that at any moment we could receive again the gifts and lessons we've been already been given. Here is a glimpse back at our own journey where God met us in difficult times. This God meets us again, here and now.

 Repent: lament, return, remember, rest
A sermon from June 2021 (mid-pandemic lockdown, post George Floyd murder)

 

Psalm 4

Answer me when I call, O God of my right!
   You gave me room when I was in distress.
   Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer. 

How long, you people, shall my honour suffer shame?
   How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?
          Selah
But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself;
   the Lord hears when I call to him. 

When you are disturbed, do not sin;
   ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
          Selah
Offer right sacrifices,
   and put your trust in the Lord. 

There are many who say, ‘O that we might see some good!
   Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!’
You have put gladness in my heart
   more than when their grain and wine abound. 

I will both lie down and sleep in peace;
   for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.

 

There’s a desperate vigilance and awful heaviness about the world at the moment. I think even if we aren’t paying super close attention, many of us are still feeling it. A shared, psychic weight to the world. Even as we are hurriedly vaccinating people, the case numbers are rising toward a global highest point, and what, another mass shooting? Wasn’t there just one yesterday? The pressure feels audible, the tension palpable. So many people I know have commented on how utterly exhausted they feel. But at the same time our sleep is fraught and spotty. We are alert, restless and exhausted.

 

It feels like we’re given two options, and neither one is tenable. One is to watch every minute of the Derek Chauvin trial, read everything we can about little Adam Toledo, break apart the video of Daunte White’s killing, stay up late watching national guardsmen teargassing journalists a few miles away from us, track the vaccinations, stay on top of the politicians, check in on the suffering children at the border and the conflicts simmering all over the globe, worry about the threat of climate change, and compulsively wonder what more we should be doing. And if we are not out marching or speaking out then we are following those who are, because we need to feel like we are doing something, like something is being done that can stop all this, or fix all this, and Lord, it’s all so awful how can we ignore even a moment of it? 

 

The other option we’re given is to go numb and limp. To shut it all off, and block it all out, and take in nothing but our own lives and desires. And maybe we occasionally feel a teeny bit guilty, but that’s better than helplessness and rage with no outlet. And sometimes we just bounce wildly back and forth between the two.

 

But there is a third way. And I think this Psalm gives it to us. 

 

It starts with lament. When the tears feel close, and sorrow claws up the throat, and anger and rage are right here next to us, we aim all of that right at God.  We moderns are pretty scared of lament in church, preferring the more palatable confession, but lament is an integral part of our faith. And this particular lament of David, we know, was sung in community, all the voices crying out together, Answer me when I call to you God! How long will this go on?

 

There is a mystery word here that shows up 71 times in the psalms and twice in Habakkuk, Selah. Because it’s very close to the word for pause, and also the word for praise, throughout the millennia it has come to be seen as a kind of mix of both - pause and praise God. Take a beat and turn your attention back to God.

So built right into the song is a pause, everyone stopping, silent, shifting focus back to God. And then continuing on in unison.

 

So hear the Psalm again, in this paraphrase:

 

O God who knows me, answer me when I call!

When I have been confined in anxious misery before, 

you’ve opened up expansive space for me to breathe, 

please hear me now; give me your grace again.

 

How long will our humanity be torn down? 

How long will lies be elevated, 

and people spread vitriol, delusion and exploitation?

 

Stop.

Take a beat. 

Turn your attention to God.

 

God has drawn us to God’s own being, 

those who seek God are claimed for God’s purposes.  

When you are worked up and distraught, 

don’t turn to division and blame; don’t tear down others.  

Instead, sit in it with God, 

be silent in a restful space. 

 

Stop.

Take a beat.

Turn your attention to God.

 

Lay everything before the Almighty in vulnerable honesty, 

and trust God with it. 

So many people say, “There is no goodness that we can see!” 

Oh Lord, let your love and truth shine on all of us!

You have filled me with deep joy, 

more happiness than when they have all the wealth 

and satisfaction they desire.

 

I won't stay up babysitting the world,

I will sleep soundly and deeply

because this your world, God, 

and my life is held in you.

 

Lament. Return to God. Then remember.  

This earth is heavy with sorrow and need. 

And at the same time this planet turns slowly in the utter silence of the vast cosmos, nestled amongst the great lights of burning stars, held in orbit to the sun. And within this planet, while one hemisphere is nestling down in winter hibernation, here the green shoots push up through the soil, and trees are awakening. And all over the planet new babies are born, and broken relationships are mended, and people are tending to each other, and there is laughter and joy, and tears of deep connection, and healing, and hope, and love remains the most powerful force in the universe, always at work, always, always, always.

 

But oh! We forget. So quickly, without realizing it, even when we’re trying to remember. 

This happened to me yesterday. I was remembering, and then I was completely derailed when I read in a commentary from 2012 (Shauna Hannan, Working Preacher) that in the first verse, where it says, you made space for me it originally alluded to “release from a tight noose at the neck,” the opposite of the word for when I was in distress, which is used for “a constricted larynx.”  And I stopped hearing the promise of God’s deliverance and the invitation to trust, and all I could see was that God did not make space for George Floyd when he was in distress, and how could I preach this text in the shadow of that? 

 

All day long I spun out, all day long I fixated on my words, the overwhelming sorrow and brokenness of this world, the pain of our city.  I did not lament. I obsessed. I did not take my anguish and sit silently before God. I logged onto the news and social media and started babysitting the world again. I did not come in honesty before the Almighty. I got caught up in blame and frustration in the country, and became controlling and edgy in my own house. 

And then I looked at the clock and realized it was time for evening prayers.[1] So I sat down on zoom with those who meet together every evening.  

Stop. Take a beat. Turn your attention to God.

 

And suddenly there was joy, in sharing about a day spent with happy little cousins, and our delight and horror at a ridiculous amount of accidentally purchased bananas.[2] Suddenly God was meeting us right there in our humanity, in our need, in our coming together. Then one of them repeated back to me that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and I was invited back into trust.

 

We are meant to stand with one another and for each other, to hold each other and fight for life for each other and us all, for this whole beautiful and broken world. We are made for love. God calls us into God’s purposes; we are drawn into God’s own being. We get to share in the love God is already, always bringing.

 

And then, at the end of the day, we sleep.  

To sleep is to yield to our most essential humanity – our creaturliness, our need, our soft, vulnerable, universal humanity, the warm breath, closed eyes, heavy limbs of us. 

 

Sleep is trust. It is pure being. Sleep is admitting we are not God. Sleep returns us to the humility of our own humanity. Only from here can we be fully in this life, with and for each other. 

 

We belong to God. This is God’s world. God made it. God came into it to bear our suffering and share our pain and take on our death so that death cannot, will not define us, will not have the last word, will not prevail. 

 

So stop. Take a beat. Turn your attention to God.

 

There is a poem by Pablo Neruda that I love, called Keeping Quiet. It goes like this:

 

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

 

For once on the face of the earth

let’s not speak in any language,

let’s stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

 

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines,

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

 

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would look at his hurt hands.

 

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victory with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

 

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.

 

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with 

death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

 

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.” 

 

Christ has risen. He is risen indeed. 

Death does not get the last word, and love is the most powerful force in the universe. 

May we join in fully. And may we sleep soundly.

Amen.

---

[1] At this time, Pastor Lisa and I were praying every morning and evening, and the congregation every Sunday night, over zoom, with a family navigating mom's cancer.

[2] In my first foray into online grocery shopping, rather than 14 single bananas, I’d inadvertently bought 14 2lb bunches of bananas.

Wisdom, Empire and Prophets

 

1 Kings 3-11  (Read Bible Story Here) Maybe every Evangelical kid did this, but I specifically recall after hearing about young Solomon as a child, praying and asking God for wisdom. I did this in my bed at night for years. It seemed to me there was something special, timeless, unbreakable about wisdom, and I wanted in.    A group of researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine study wisdom. They say that while “Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity...wisdom…resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge.” (Sternberg [1]).)   Wisdom is attunement to the way things are, to being itself. It is like glimpsing the inner alignment, sensing the deeper coherence underneath it all.  And wisdom always moves us beyond ourselves and connects us with others. Wisdom flows from our shared belonging to God and each other, whether it speaks directly of that or not. Wisdom was brought into being before anything else, scripture tells us, watching God create time, and space, and us, and everything else.  (Prov. 8:1-4,22-31)   Solomon says in Proverbs, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (9:10) This phrase in English ‘fear of the Lord’ means something like deep awe, and it is linked linguistically with the word for seeing – Abraham Heschel wrote, Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing, the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe." (Heschel: God in Search of Man).   Wisdom begins at awe. Wisdom listens to the silence beneath the noise. So, it necessarily recognizes the noise for what it is– it is honest about what is in front of us but knows that is not all there is.   And then wisdom grows not in the simple parts of our lives, but in the most messy, complex painful, death-into-new-life experiences. Suffering births compassion, despair pushes deeper into hope, failures produce humility and resilience. And we participate—we can choose to receive and walk the paths that wisdom is carving in us.   All the exemplars of wisdom studied by the University of Virginia researchers had one thing in common– they had all, at some point, made a deliberate choice to pursue something that was hard. They faced their addiction, they owned their wrongdoing, they stepped up to adversity. When hardship came, they chose to remain vulnerable and changeable instead of hardening and becoming bitter and shut down.   When the researchers asked the wise people what had given them the courage to step into something difficult, their answers could be summarized in five things:  a community that held their experience  cultivating gratitude and hope some kind of quiet reflection or prayer doing something to help others, and  having some kind of spiritual grounding to help guide them as they made hard but good choices.   Since wisdom is from God, it doesn’t surprise me that these things sound exactly like church.     The wisdom researchers describe, “…a wisdom atmosphere as one in which doubts, uncertainties and questions can be openly expressed, and ambiguities and contradictions can be tolerated, so that individuals are not forced to adopt the defensive position of…“too confident knowing”.’ They state, “When we foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness, in ourselves and in others, we are opening up the possibility for wisdom. When we foster the capacity for self-reflection in our children, or our community, we are creating the matrix for wisdom to develop.  When we foster gratitude, wisdom is likely to follow. When we accept the complexity and ambiguous nature of things, and refuse to accept a simplified black and white explanation, we are increasing the likelihood of wise decisions.    When young Solomon takes the throne, he asks for wisdom.  And God is very pleased with this request.  Because while wealth, or power, or revenge would serve Solomon, wisdom will serve the people.  So God gives him wisdom, and then God gives him wealth and power as well, because wise leaders use wealth and power for the goodness of all. And at first, Solomon did.   But, contrary to popular opinion, humans do not, in fact, naturally get wiser with age. If we resist the hard lessons, avoid vulnerability, shun community, pursue the noise instead of the silence, invest in the self-construction of pride instead of the deconstruction of prayer, ignore the needs of others, and disdain guidance, we lose attunement, the deeper seeing dims. We may be smart, but we will no longer be wise.   Solomon, for all the wisdom he began with, lost his awe. And unlike David, he did not have a prophet Nathan to confront him when he went astray. There was no one who spoke truth to power. Who reminded him of his vulnerability and humanity? Who called him back to God when he got distracted by his own power and cleverness, or enslaved to his own desires and drives? Solomon stopped seeing God and those he was anointed by God to serve.   And so, for all the good that Solomon did, he also did a catastrophically bad thing.  He turned Israel into an empire, and the people of God adopted the mindset of the empire.   An empire mindset is numb to imagination. It has no ability to envision a future outside of what is presented in the present. Its goal is to build and maintain stability. In all things it reinforces the authority of the king.  And it keeps people accepting what may not be good for them, because that serves to keep order and ensure the longevity of the empire.  (See Bruegemann: The Prophetic Imagination)   Walter Bruggemann says Solomon’s reign did three things: 1- it shifted the economic focus from equality to affluence. No more everyone-in-it-together provided for by a generous God, like with the manna in the wilderness, now it was looking out for oneself and one’s own interests and building wealth at the expense of others.   2- it shifted the political focus from justice to oppression. The law of Moses in Leviticus says, “If your brother or sister becomes poor and cannot maintain themselves with you, you shall maintain them, as a stranger and a sojourner they shall live with you. Take no interest from them or increase but fear your God; that your brother or sister may live beside you…For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.” (Lev.25:35-42) But Solomon built this empire with forced labor.    And 3- it shifted the religious focus from God’s freedom to God’s accessibility.  In the time of Moses God was available, but on God’s terms. God cared for the people but remained uncompromisingly free, saying things like, I will show mercy to whom I show mercy and you cannot see my face and live. There has always been this tension between God’s freedom and God’s accessibility –God is available to us but not ruled by us. David lived in this dynamic tension with God – both the fear of the Lord and the intimacy with the Beloved. If Moses erred on the side of God’s freedom, Solomon obliterated this tension in favor of total accessibility. Now there is no sense that God is free and can “act apart from or even against the regime.” God is on call. God is boxed in. God is used to bolter our point and back up our power.    Brueggemann explains the empire mindset further, “Solomon traded the vision of freedom for the reality of security.  He…banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He…replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises…were reduced to tradable commodities.” In other words, Solomon exchanged the Way of God for the Way of Fear, and Israel became a successful empire.   Solomon’s reign came to be known as the “golden age” in Israel, where the Kingdom united by David reached its pinnacle in wealth, stability, power and global influence. This lasted Solomon’s lifetime, and then it all crumbled apart spectacularly.    That’s what happens to empires; they rise and then they fall. They dominate, and then they collapse, or they fizzle out. Even a cursory glance of history proves this to be so- no empire lasts forever. The Egyptian Empire lasted 3000 years and is now so far in the human review mirror that most of us have no idea how much of medicine, religion, science and so many other aspects of modern life were begun by them. They’re just etchings on walls and mummies in museums. The Roman Empire lasted 1600 years and people visit the crumbling structures with their selfie sticks and make movies about dead gladiators and philosophers. Empire after empire, ruling in such dominance and power: gone – the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Mogul, the Russian, the Quing Dynasty, the British Empire, the 1000-year reign envisioned by Hitler that collapsed after 12 years (thanks be to God).    All this to say, if we put our faith in empire – which is to say, in the might of our human constructs and power – we are building our house on sand. And if we live with the empire mindset, we not only close ourselves off to wisdom, we choose a life of guardedness and fear instead.   “Nations are in an uproar” – our Lent text will tell us on Wednesday– “and kingdoms falter and wobble, but the earth melts when God merely raises his voice. The God of all heaven and earth and of our ancestors is with us. Our security and well-being are in this One alone. So,” we are told, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46)   I feel deeply sad about what is happening to our country and what is happening to the world because of what is happening to our country, and what will likely happen next to our country and to the world. I am listening to the noise, and I am grieving, it turns out.    But I am not afraid. I am trying also to listen to the silence beneath the noise. Because if we trust in the One who has remained constant throughout history, the rise and fall of Kings, the changing earth and shifting civilizations, who has always held the hearts of human beings in love and given us to each other to encounter Christ right here, the God who came to be with us and actually is with us, who has broken the reign of even death itself, and promises wholeness for all people and this beloved earth, then we are secure.  No matter what happens.   I trust. Lord, help my distrust!   Because of Solomon, because of what he did to Israel, they needed prophets. We are going to be spending Lent with the prophets. The prophets are the anti-empire voices that shake the façade that keeps us all quiet and content and accepting the unacceptable. The prophets criticize by speaking for justice rather than stability, and they energize by remembering the promise of another reality toward which we can move, “to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give.” The prophetic tradition shakes us out of the numb imagination of the empire to embrace the imagination of God.     Brueggemann explains, “The real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.  Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room.  As long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.”   So, I guess it’s a prophetic act to grieve, and I will embrace that. It’s also a prophetic act to call a leader to show mercy, and it is a prophetic act to phone our leaders and remind that their power is for the goodness of the whole, not the greed of the few, and their influence is for global cooperation, not global dominance.   It's also a prophetic act to rest, lest we forget that God is God. It’s prophetic to receive joy, feed connection and speak hope. It’s transformative to lift up beauty, to call out goodness, and to bolster kindness. To seek the living and active God and not an idol of accessibility, sense the ultimate in the common, and watch for the movement of transcendence is prophetic wisdom work.   To live in the Kingdom of God in the midst of the empire is radical and powerful participation in something both subversive and everlasting. It not only grounds us, it calls others back to the belonging that holds us all, instead of caving to the lies of division and despair.   We need a community to do this with, a ‘wisdom atmosphere’ to hold us.  So we will be that for each other and for the world. Together, we will ‘assume the inner stance of least resistance’ to the presence of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit right here and now. We will foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness. We will grow our capacity for self-reflection. We’ll practice gratitude, and accept complexity, and embrace ambiguity, and refuse simplistic categories and easy explanations. We will live in the messy, hard, complex and painful places alongside one another because that is where Jesus is, and we will help each other make the hard but good choices and do the hard but good things. We’ll surrender into God’s care and calling, and trust in our belonging to God and all others, and we live accordingly. We will not fear. We will be still and know who is God.   Amen.

The redemptive work of God

2 Samuel 5:1-5; 8:15-9:13 

 Handsome and talented, winsome and strong, also deeply flawed, proud and punishing, and then wise and benevolent in his old age, David is the ideal on-screen hero. I am, frankly, stunned there isn’t already a six season Netflix series about him. The bible gives him a hefty portion of Old Testament airtime with 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles, casting for him the perfect villain in King Saul. Predecessor to the throne, this former army general with real main character energy, is both immensely kingly then increasingly mad. He’s super jealous of David and hungry to hang onto power. Dangerous and prone to fly into terrible rages, King Saul is calmed only by the gentle harp playing of his nemesis, young David, which must drive him all the more mad.

Then we’ve got the wise Yoda figure in the prophet Samuel (whose own life is also a compelling show waiting to be made). He anoints Saul to be Israel’s very first king, and then later secretly anoints David when David is only a shepherd boy - the youngest and least likely of his many brothers to be anything but a country bumpkin, but he’s got skills, battling lions and bears to protect the sheep, and he’s a songwriting savant, making music all alone out in those green pastures near quiet streams, so maybe the series could be a musical. 

 

Then there’s the bond of a soulmate, a deep, abiding friendship with a close and intimate confidant, Jonathan, who, as a boy, watches the little kid David slay the giant Goliath in front of two mighty, cowering armies, (thatscene would be the title sequence for sure!) and then introduces himself, and the two become fast friends, and Jonathan loves our hero as he loves his own heart.

 

Jonathan also happens to be the mad king’s son, and he stands between the two to protect David’s life on several occasions. They meet up in fields and caves when David is in hiding from Saul’s fury, amassing a pirate crew of renegades and living off the land. Jonathan tries relentlessly to make peace and bring David back into the king’s good graces, and finally, in grief and sorrow, lets him go when he sees Saul will never relent.  Jonathan and David promise forever to stand by one another no matter what, and then Jonathan and Saul die in a different battle with the Philistines. (Goliath’s side gets them after all).

 

There is the love of a princess, who becomes his wife, and later is horrified by David’s unrestrained public display of emotion. Then another woman, Abigail, who saves her own husband from David’s wrath, deeply impressing him and then marrying him when her husband dies, and more women who become wives as well.

 

And there’s his sleezy, cascading into evil, obsessing over the married Bathsheba and impregnating her, then sending her husband to the front lines of battle commanding the rest of the army to retreat so he would be killed, and David could marry Bathsheba and cover up his shame. David’s greed, arrogance and cruelty are exposed in a humiliating confrontation with the new prophet, Nathan, whom God sends to David to set him straight. Crushed with grief and regret, David repents. And even though that baby does not live, he and Bathsheba remain married and other children follow, including Solomon. And Bathsheba herself rises to power, advising her own son once he assumes the throne.  

 

David’s vivid life is dogged by the threat of death, frequent betrayal, sheer terror and staggering loss, and along the way he builds the city Jerusalem, and unites the tribes and establishes the nation of Israel. He steals, cheats, rapes, lies, kills, and sacrifices those he loves for his own power and well-being. And he is also rules with wisdom and love, and is generous, kind, loyal, trustworthy, tender, and heartwrenchingly vulnerable. He ends his life passing on drawings and plans for the construction of the temple like a mantle and blessing to his son Solomon. 

 

But what’s especially compelling about David is how his heart is laid bare in the Psalms. Trust and gratitude, anguish and wonder, contrition and pettiness, anger, longing and love – half of the book of Psalms is written by him. It’s like having a glimpse of his inner world, his relationship and ongoing conversation with God. David’s prayers became the prayerbook of the Church, and of Judaism before us. Jesus himself was raised praying these same Psalms that we pray. For three thousand years - from sanctuaries to hospital bedsides, at caskets and christenings, chanted by monks and whispered in concentration camps, David’s words have been recited in every language on the planet, and the conversation with God continues. 

 

Now, having reacquainted ourselves with David, let’s imagine this week’s episode of our King David TV series begins with a flashback. A messenger, racing and breathless, arrives at Jonathan’s house, and stammers out to the servant who opens the door that Jonathan and King Saul have just been killed in battle. The household flies into a panic, people race around grabbing what they can and prepare to flee. A nursemaid bursts into an upstairs room where a young boy of five is napping. She snatches him up out of bed and carries him out, half asleep, still limp in her arms. Running to the stairs she whips around a corner and the boy slips from her grasp, dropping over the railing to the stone floor below. She screams and races to his side, and the flashback ends. 

 

We jump 20 or so years ahead to today’s reading. David has been king for some time, and most of the rest of Saul’s family has long been wiped out by David’s side in the ongoing battles for power.  The battle dust and construction dust died down, I imagine David finds himself in a period of relative peace. Perhaps he’s standing at a window on a beautiful sunny day, a soft breeze rustling the olive trees in the garden below. Calm is nice, but it can also bring up sorrow and ghosts, and David longs for his dear friend Jonathan. There is nothing David can do to change the past. But in the quiet of this pause, the question arises, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

And here comes up again that word we learned with Ruth – whose whole story is an illustration of this. The word is hesed, which means something like belongingnesss; here it is translated simply kindness. From the willingness to listen deeply, the song of God’s way rises up, and David summons a servant and asks, Is there anyone left of the family of my enemy who tried to destroy me, that I may embrace in God’s belongness, for the sake of Jonathan who did that for me?

 

And there is one person left, Mephibosheth, the boy whose tragic fall on the day of his father’s death began this episode. He survived all the killings between these enemy households over the years, overlooked, perhaps, because his disability made him seem unworthy of notice. Certainly, he was not seen as a threat or a player on the political gameboard. So David finds Mephibosheth. And the man must think he’s finally been discovered as the last of Saul’s household, and will surely die at the hand of the king. But instead, David raises him to honor, to eat at the King’s table for all his remaining days, giving him servants and Saul’s former lands. David goes on to care for him as his own son, and act as surrogate grandpa to Jonathan’s grandson Mica. 

He who was forgotten and forsaken, living in obscurity in someone else’s household, is welcomed in, given home, security, and belonging in the loving care of his father’s best friend and grandfather’s mortal enemy.  

 

God’s redemption is relentless and never-ending. In our own places of brokenness and unfinished business, we are met with grace. And from our vulnerability, not our strength, we are drawn into God’s unfolding salvation of the world.  When we seek to live honest and open to God, pouring out our pain and our praise, we’re formed for God’s purposes, and made ready to recognize the nudgings of the Holy Spirit when they come. 

 

Sometimes the task before us is clear and we know what is ours to do. And sometimes the chaos of life’s moment sets the terms and we put our head down and faithfully hang on.  But periodically a chapter ends, or a space opens up, and in the quiet the question may arise, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

When the search for an answer involves surrendering to God’s purposes, we will be drawn into the redemptive work of God, and the belongingness of God that embraces the world will be made manifest in our lives. 

 

God joins this human life with us, in all its fullness and its emptiness too. That Jesus rose from the dead means there is no darkness so deep that he is not there, no peace so restorative that he does not share it with us, no journey so difficult that he does not walk with us, no sorrow so great it will define us, no brokenness so complete that it cannot be made into a source of wholeness and life by the God who brings life out of death. This is the belongingness of God. This what God does and is always doing. 

 

Big-screen lives like David’s capture our attention, but mostly God works redemption in ordinary places like around dinner tables, and through ordinary acts like grandparenting a child who needs it.

 

And the work God has for us to do most often begins in our own impossibility, loss or brokenness. It may heal something unfinished in us, reawaken something dormant, or break us open for something entirely new. But always, it will bring deep joy, because we are made in the image of ministering God to minister to others, and when we participate in God’s world-healing hesed, we’re tasting already the meal that awaits us all at the table of the King forever. 

 

Amen.

Life goes on

 

In Meditations from the Heart, Howard Thurman writes:  

During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that
life goes on.
This we are apt to forget.
 
The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms;
the purpose of life outlasts our purposes;
the process of life cushions our processes.
 
The mass attack of disillusion and despair,
distilled out of the collapse of hope,
has so invaded our thoughts 
that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral.
There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility.
 
This is the great deception.
 
By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion 
without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace.

Let us not be deceived.
 
It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces
by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained.
 
Birds still sing; 

the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields,
and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.
 
There is no need to fear evil.

There is every need to understand what it does,
how it operates in the world,
what it draws upon to sustain itself.
 
We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil.
Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body,
the reduction to rubble of cities;
the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man 
and to give his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.
 
When this happens,
there is nothing left,
the very citadel of man is captured and laid waste.
 
Therefore, the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within.
This would be to be overcome by evil.
 
To drink in the beauty that is within reach,
to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness,
to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God
in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind—
this is, as always, the ultimate answer to the great deception.

AMEN.

A blessing on Inauguration Day

 

On Inauguration Day - a message from 60,000 feet

Hi Church-

i am on my way home to you from a journey spanning 5000 years of history, having witnessed God’s hand in all of it- through the rise and fall of empires, loss and regain of technologies and knowledge, rerouting of rivers and quaking of mountains, civilizations built and forgotten, ancient stories of human might, evil, kindness, ingenuity, apathy and faith, with ripples into our own lives, imaginations and understandings of the world.

I stood where tradition says Moses was pulled from the Nile by the Pharaoh’s daughter, touched the stone of a room where the refugees Mary, Joseph and young Jesus lived for three months of their four year journey into Egypt after saying goodbye to the visiting Magi and being warned in a dream of Herod’s wrath, and saw the 3500 year old mummy of (possibly) Joseph, buried among the Pharaohs after God saved Egypt and the surrounding nations from famine through his dreams and courage. 

We learned of ancient calendars with 36 ten day weeks and annual five day end of year celebrations, shaped around three annual seasons based on soil: Inundation-Nile flooding, Planting and Harvesting, and ate dinner serenaded by residual carols amidst remaining decorations from Christmas which, in that part of the world, is not December 25, but January 7. 

All this to say - human experience ebbs and flows, shapes and reshapes. 

What seems unquestionably the way things are is not the way they always have been or will be, or even may be elsewhere right at this moment.
But  in all things, God is still God.
In all things humans are still human.
The story we belong to is a long one, and it's deep and sure.  
And, as Lisa reminds us in the sermon below, we participate by loving one another and watching for God's invitations in ordinary life. 

In love, hope and gratitude to be in this together with you,
Kara

 

Prayer for Today

God, as our county's leadership once again shifts
from one administration to the next,
pause us here
within the scope of history and future,
to receive your presence
with us now.

Thank you for the ways healing and world-shaping
comes through ordinary people,
in everyday ways:
the flower planters and soul tenders, 
  the music makers and bread bakers,
  the heart holders and art creators, 
  the food growers and poem weavers, 
 the child raisers and story cherishers, 
 the learners and leaders, 
the witnesses and the wise,
young and old, 
 the neighbors who neighbor each other, 
every day, come what may.

God-with-us, Love Incarnate,
may we trust in you.
Keep us open-hearted, brave and kind,
with deep roots and a wide horizon,
able to see this world and all in it,
as your beloved,
and to live that way,
which is to say:
In all things may we remain
guided by your Spirit,
grounded in your love,
and buoyed by Christ's joy. 

Amen

New Beginnings

 

Epiphany: Matthew 2:1-12, Journeying through the Bible: Numbers 27, Joshua 1:1-9, 3-4

So here we sit at the beginning of a new year. New years are funny, because things are no different on January 1 than they were on December 31. But it’s a new beginning nevertheless, because from where we started counting, the world is now 2025 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, instead of 2024. 

Actual new beginnings happen in our lives all the time, tangible shifts that redefine and redirect us, like starting college or a new job, retiring or moving to a new state, being given a new diagnosis or a new grandchild.  And then there are the new beginnings that become a new beginning because everyone treats it as one, like new years. So, happy new year!

Our culture would have us seize hold of this declared beginning; new year new you! It’s a new chance to take control of our lives, to start over where we’ve slipped in our self-improvement projects. To set new goals, buy new stuff and subscribe to new apps. There is nothing wrong with setting goals or using tools to help us meet them. But the story we are sold about what a good life is tells us it’s all about us, and all in our hands, and even newness must be managed and controlled. 

Who wants to hear about what we can’t control? We got the genetics we got, were born to the place and people where we started, affected by whatever is currently polluting the air or water or zeitgeist, and our lives are tangled up in larger systems and structures mostly beyond our say so. And we are each limited, singular humans, with only so much time, only so much capacity, only so much ability. But good grief, what kind of new year message is that? Being honest about limitations is zero fun. Being vulnerable, or needy? blech. So, let’s keep reaching for control instead. And starting over at it every year! Maybe one year we’ll master it all. 

All our scriptures today are new beginnings. And, surprise! They tell a different story about what a good life is, and who shapes our lives and the world. 

It’s Epiphany, so we meet again our regular new year’s visitors: Magi, traveling from afar, bringing gifts to worship God coming into the world. This was never in their life plans or new year’s resolutions. But they lived open to the direction of something outside themselves and responded when the call came. They ventured into the unknown, deferential to the uncontrollable, obedient to the call, and in the home of a peasant woman and her carpenter husband in a nowhere town 500 miles from home, they met God incarnate face to face.  

The magi departed from that place changed. They were set on a new path, with a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and belonging to a new, small and very diverse community of those who had been in Christ’s presence, and who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

Next, we jump backwards 1400 years before the birth of Christ. Where we left off our journey through the bible, the people of God, called to be a blessing to the world, were living in the wilderness, learning to trust God to take care of them, and allowing their identity to be reshaped from slaves who existed to prop up the empire to the people of God called to be a blessing to the world.

We meet up with them today in a new beginning moment. They’re ready to enter the promised land and settle in the new home God has for them. We didn’t read the first story assigned to today, but it is depicted in our picture for the day, so it feels only fair to summarize it. As the leaders began planning for how land would be divvied up once they got to their new home, following the male family lines, 5 sisters with no brothers whose father had died came to them and said, why should our family line die out in the land because our father had no sons? We should be given land too. So, Moses brought their case to God, and God said, They are right. Change the law. When the people entered the promised land, they did so with a law that was more just, because these sisters spoke up, God heard them, and the leaders listened.

So now we come to the threshold moment, the old is ending and the new is about to begin. The people of God called to be a blessing to the world have been living in liminal space, neither here nor there, biding time, learning trust and being shaped by God. And now they will be going home. 

But to go from wandering to settled, they will need to cross the swollen, raging river. They will pass through waters of rebirth, waters of deliverance, waters that remake identity. For us, these waters are baptism. For them, the waters that had released them from the death of slavery and ushered them into new life 40 years before was the red sea, which had parted miraculously so they could cross over into safety in the care of God. This is the story that has shaped them, the experience of God’s saving hand of grace to the generation before them. Their own understanding of God and trust in God has been shaped by their parents’ stories of God’s faithfulness. 

Now it’s their turn. In front of their eyes, the water separates, and God makes a way where there was no way. 
And the presence of God and care of God is known not just in stories now but felt in their own bodies– their feet pressing into wet sand and slimy stones, the smell of the damp river bottom, the hot sun and wind on their faces, the astonishing sight of the water itself participating with God in their new beginning. 
God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. When they came out of the waters they were changed, set on a new path, with a new perception of creation and their place in God’s order.  They were God’s people, called and led, who would now be watching together what God was doing in the world as ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

They mark the experience with a symbol, stones from the riverbed stacked up as a signpost, and Joshua tells them, “Your children will ask about these stones, and you are to tell them about God parting the waters here as God did at the red sea. Worship God always.”

Inside an ancient story, the same faithful God is always bringing new beginnings. They don’t come from our efforts or control. They come in our endings, our impossibilities, our stuckness, arriving in our places of death and loss that feel like they might define us forever. Sky and water, stars and rivers, strangers, babies, sisters, leaders, long, arduous journeys and staying still for long, long stretches all are part of God’s work. God’s beginnings surprise us, leading us into the lives of new people, like the watching, ready Magi. God’s beginnings use our vulnerability and voices to change the way forward for others, like the brave sisters. God’s beginnings bring us home with continuity and hope, like the children of God coming out of the wilderness into the promised land. However it happens and whomever it involves, God is always bringing salvation and healing, new life, hope and renewed belonging. Always. 

As we begin this new year, lots will be changing in our country and our government, in the global landscape and in our neighborhoods, in our work places and relationships, and in our lives and even our own bodies in ways we don’t yet know and can’t yet see.  

But hear the words of God to the people of God standing on the brink of a new beginning: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’

Maybe instead of naming all the ways we intend to be strong and courageous because we’re so self-guided and goal-driven and in control, we might admit we’re not really in control, and enter this new beginning honest with ourselves about our vulnerabilities and fears, truthful with each other about needing one another, and open to God incarnate who is with us wherever we go, who leads us where we might otherwise not go, and who will meet us face to face where we could never imagine. 

Maybe we enter this new beginning listening, open, watching and ready, helping each other remember and trust that God who has been faithful before is faithful now, and will be faithful again. 

God’s new beginnings are personal, but never individual. When redemption, hope and new life happen to one of us, other people are always involved, and even sometimes creation, and the newness impacts not only us but blesses the world. The Holy Spirit changes us, sets on a new path, gives us a new perception of the universe and everyone in it, and we are rooted more deeply in our belonging to an old, vast, and very diverse community of those who have been in Christ’s presence, who are watching together what God is doing in the world, ready and willing participants in God’s unfolding story. 

2025 years after joining us in person, how will this faithful God show up this year? 

I can’t wait to find out.