June 16th, 2010
By Pastor Bill
This is God’s World
1 Kings 21:1-21/ Galatians 2: 15-21/ Luke 7: 36-8:3
3rd Sunday of Pentecost/ Year C/ June 13, 2010
The narrative of the criminal confiscation of Naboth’s vineyard by
Jezebel and Ahab is one of the more important texts in the cycle of stories concerning Elijah and Elisha. the figures of Ahab and Jezebel represent more than just wicked persons, even wicked persons in high office; they are emblematic of an oppressive social order in which the structures of power, fortified by cultural and financial interests from abroad, deprive ordinary citizens of their wealth and their happiness. Faithfulness to the God of Israel and simple justice in dealing with one another appear to be the two issues that drive the prophets of Yahweh in their confrontation with the Baal-worshiping royal house. If such a text as that in 1 Kings 18 emphasizes the importance of fidelity to the religious traditions of Israel, the present text stresses the crucial role of social and personal justice in Yahweh’s land.
Ahab covets the vineyard of Naboth, a faithful Jew. The land was good and had been a part of Naboth’s family’s inheritance from the time of Moses. It was a considered a sin against God to sell one’s divinely given property to someone other than a relative. His decision is not an economic one, for he cannot sell his property to someone outside his family—not even the king—without violating ancient God-given principles concerning the relationship between Israelites and their land (Lev. 25:1–34). Even in the face of a disaster as ruinous as the Babylonian invasion of the early sixth century, a hard-pressed but faithful Jew of Jerusalem would sell his land only to a relative (see Jer. 32:6–12). Naboth’s faithfulness to the land is understood for what it is: faithfulness to the God of Israel, who has entrusted this land to the people of Israel. Naboth’s faithfulness demands to be noticed as the bold contrast it is to the egregious unfaithfulness of Ahab and Jezebel. Ahab’s greed has made him sick. He has taken to his bed in a gloomy “Resentful and sullen”mood (v. 4), Ahab pouted on his bed, refusing even to eat, when informed of Naboth’s decision not to sell his land. Jezebel, his foreign wife came into his room and castigates him for his childish behavior. When he told her Naboth would not sell him his vineyard for money. She assaults his virility as a man and as a king. “Do you not govern Israel? Get up eat some food, be cheerful, and I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.”
Leaving her husband, she called her minions to her, wrote letters to the elders and nobles who lived in Jezreel against Naboth, accusing him of cursing God and the king. Then take him out and stone him according to the law.
There is also a subtle note struck here for democracy. We often assume, quite rightly, that the ancient roots of modern democracy are to be found among the Greeks, whose tenacious opposition to tyrants made them noteworthy among peoples in the classical age. But Naboth, while not a democrat in the ultimate sense of that word, is aware that all persons have rights, even persons who till the land, and not even the kings of the earth may deprive these persons of those rights without violating God’s intention for human life. When Jezebel learns what has happened, she does what absolute rulers have done since the beginning of time: she acts with unbridled self-interest. Naboth is killed on trumped-up charges, whereupon Jezebel presents the land to a delighted Ahab (vs. 5–16). Jezebel, the actual murderer of Naboth, is not more evil than Ahab. She is simply less troubled by the humanitarian aspects of Israelite faith and tradition. She sins. Wills she get away with her devious behavior? Will Ahab, King of Israel, Protector of the Covenant People get away with his greedy acquisition of Naboth’s vineyard?
However, as Ahab goes to claim his prize, he is intercepted by Elijah, who has been directed by Yahweh to confront the king. And God’s message is harsh. He reminds Ahab that one is not to covet what the neighbor’s possessions, and that “Vengeance is Mine,” over those who sin against me and people. God’s message to Ahab and Jezebel and all of Israel is that when power corrupts there will be consequences. And Justice will be done.
Elijah, though fearful of Ahab and Jezebel, told Ahab the truth. He confronted him with his evil actions. Deep within his soul Elijah remembered the times of his own trials, that God always walked with him. What he spoke to Ahab was the truth. This evil perpetrated on the innocent Naboth is not God’s doing it is human actions down with corrupted power. Evil cannot win against God.
This story is not only about evils power naboth’s vineyard, it is about God’s people and God’s vineyard, We are God’s people, the earth is God’s vineyard, given in trust to us to care for and maintain as an inheritance. Even when stomped, burned, robbed, flooded with oil, and even when the night of despair seems long and unending, grace conquers evil power, and joy comes with the morning. We are all God’s people, god’s vineyard. We suffer all things such crops normally endure, droughts, floods, and calamities of all sorts. Yet we keep hoping, not based on the events currently engulfing us, but on what we have experienced with God. God’s justice will flourish. God’s goodness comes to us even in the midst of disaster. God over comes evil, mercy overcomes pain, and as with Jesus, life overcomes death. This is God’s world. We are only its stewards. WE are called to care, to trust, and work to ensure its fruitfulness through all generations. Greed is not a part of the equation. Justice and love for all of creation is the will of God.
June 7th, 2010
By Pastor Bill
Death to Life, Tragedy to Hope
1 Kings 17:8-24/ Galatians 1:11-24/ Luke 7:11-17
2nd Sunday after Pentecost/ Year C/ June 6, 2010
“If it weren’t for the miracles in the Bible, I could take it all much more seriously.” I have heard this view expressed in a wide variety of forms over the years.
“if it weren’t for the miracles in the Bible, I couldn’t possibly take what it says seriously.” I have heard this view expressed in a wide variety of forms over the years; many times within the same congregation as the first.
The biblical miracles are in place not so much to confound nature and reason, although they do that quite regularly, but t make the case for the credibility of God in the Hebrew scriptures, and to confirm the presence of God in the person of Jesus in the New Testament. Their real purpose is to affirm the truth of the proposition that Jesus has within himself and at his command the power of God. Miracles are meant to get our attention. They are the spice of the Gospel’s mutton, as Peter Gomes has written.
But miracles have long posed a problem for us today; a problem that was never imagined by those faithful writers of the sacred texts. Rather than telling us more about Jesus and confirming in our minds and hearts who he is, the miracle have for many gotten in the way of belief, and whatever credibility we no long hold, now attaches itself to Jesus and making it difficult to believe, to trust. So now for many, a faith that was meant to be advanced by means of the miracles to the Way, the Truth and the life, has now become a barrier. We now have the task of solving the how or ignoring them all together. And when we speak of miracles as mysteries that for many seems to be a cop out, a problem in search of a solution.
The miracle of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels can make a life of faith very difficult for the average Christian. And, who among us, in times of tragedy, pain and loss long for Jesus or God to show compassion and provide the grand miracle that will set thing right, take away our hurt, our despair. We cling to the vision that miracles should be like the ones in the Bible, but the problem is that when we think this way we risk missing the smaller miracle moments in which God’s compassion can enter into our upside-down world, touch our most pain filled places and restore our shattered hearts.
In both of our stories today, that is exactly what happens. With Elijah healing comes to a woman who looses everything with the death of her only son. And with Jesus, imagine the scene. Jesus is walking toward the town gate, with his entourage only steps behind. Perhaps he can hear the weeping long before he can see the funeral procession. There is no mistaking the sheer primal sound emanating from the woman’s voice, a mother who has lost her son. It makes little difference that the child is grown, the grief and the pain is there. It is deep, heart wrenching, soul shattering. And like Elijah, Jesus is moved to compassion. “Do not weep!” he says. Unlike the characters in other miracle stories, no one comes to Jesus begging for help. Perhaps they know it is too late to do anything. Jesus reaches out and touches the bier and life races back in and grabs hold of the stone cold body that lies upon it. “Rise Up!” he says to the young man. Then we are simply told that he gave him to his mother. Like Elijah and the widow of Zarapheth, this understated gesture restores the shattered world of the woman. Her life is made whole again. Out of death comes life. Out of tragedy comes hope. And those who witness these events are stunned beyond belief. They are afraid. That is the human response when the supernatural happens; stunned silence and fear. It rocks our sensibilities and our world.
Who among us has not prayed for a miracle at some point in our lives? Who has not called out in challenge to all things faithful that a compassionate God would make us suffer so? In these moments, miracles seem to be a sign that God is working to set things right in a world gone very wrong. Illness, death, financial ruin, loss of job, chronic pain, divorce, depression, addiction, injured and disabled children, violence, war, abuse terror and mass trauma, the list is long of those circumstances of life that seem to dismantle our assumptions about our world and how it should be.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulmann, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts proposes a way of understanding why we human creatures are so upended when tragedy strikes.
She says: : We live with certain core assumptions about the world, this is and the world is benevolent (bad things will not happen) and meaningful (events of the world should make sense) and that the self is worthy ( events in the world correlate to the good or bad that we bring into the world.” At first glance, we would agree. We are smart enough to know that the world is not fair and that sometimes tragedy follows no line of reasoning. Yet in that moment when our world comes crashing down around us, very often our first question is “How could this happen?” “What did I do to deserve this?” These questions belie the truth of Janof-Bulman’s thesis.
As people of faith we go one step further, and ask “where is God in the chaos that threatens us. Underlying these questions are the questions that rock us to the core. What would it mean if we no longer lived in a trustworthy world? What would it mean if events in our lives were random, without meaning? If we assume a correlation between good behavior and good outcome, what doe it mean that we have no control over the events of our lives?
When all attempts to make right sense of the senseless prove futile, we turn to God to find meaning. Miracles are the first signs we look for; proof that God’s compassion will bring our world back into alignment.
Amazingly like the widowed mothers in our stories, sometimes we get the grand miracle we pray for. The father or husband whose heart stops on the table or on the way to the hospital is brought back from the edge of death. The mother of two young children beats the odds and survives the cancer that all the doctors said was hopeless. Or the out of work person, finds the perfect job they have prayed for and searched for so long. But more often than not, in spite of doing everything right and praying every night and every day for every good thing, the sixteen year old who just got her license is killed by a drunk driver on her way to school. The perfect marriage ends in divorce and sadness and animosity. The cure we prayed for doesn’t come and death ensues. Where then is God and God’s compassion? God is there in the midst of the chaos, the pain, the suffering, the loss, the hurt. WE cling to the central message of the Gospel, that in “Christ Jesus all this are possible. Yes our lives, like Jesus’ life, is filled with those messy unfinished edges, not the nice tidy endings that the two widows experienced in our stories. But miracles to occur, even in the most mundane of places. They may not be dazzling or spectacular. When we focus on only one vision of what is possible, we become blinded to the many moments in which God’s compassion reaches into our lives to hear, touch, and stand in the chaos of life, helping us to find new meaning even in the greatest tragedy. Jesus hears the cries in the deepest crevices of our hearts, and touches the deepest places of our pain just as he stepped into the place of death that day on the road out of Nain. Jesus, and through him God, is present in the chaos of our unpredictable, overturned, and shattered world, bringing meaning from meaninglessness and hope out of tragedy. We are the voiceless widows. We are the silenced orphans. We are the homeless strangers. We are the aliens in a foreign land. We are the poor wayfaring strangers of this world. But even in the midst of our pain, our suffering and even our death, God covers us with life, calls us forth to serve, feeds us on the bread and wine of life, and fills us with hope. God’s promise is sure. Jesus is the proof.
May 30th, 2010
By Pastor Bill
To Dance with God
Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31/Romans 5:1-5/John 16:12-15
Trinity Sunday/ Year C/ May 30, 2010
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day in the church calendar when we acknowledge the importance of the Trinity in our understanding of God. When we look at the Trinity and try to understand what it means it becomes confusing and downright nonsensical to our rational 21st century minds. We understand that God is the Creator who spoke the world and all that is in it into being. We say we understand that Jesus is God’s son, Emmanuel – God with us- that God became a human being in order to bring us into relationship with God. But we do not always understand the Holy Spirit, the life, giving, breath of God that was present at the beginning and is still present today. When we talk about the Trinity we tend to focus more on the first two persons, the father and the son. The Holy Spirit tends to be a non-descript entity that seems to exist independently of the father and the son. For centuries the church has fought and argued over the meaning of the Trinity. The church has written creeds and confession that attempt to articulate the churches understanding of the relationship of God, the Son and the Spirit. Much of what has been written is sometimes incomprehensible to our rational 21st century minds. How can God be one God and yet three persons? In struggling with this issue, the early church articulated the defining marker of God by which Christians find their own identity, the doctrine of the Trinity. According to this doctrine, there is one God in whom there are three persons who share one substance. Further, according to this doctrine God has a name that denotes those three persons-Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When Christians pray typically they address the Father through the Son, in the Spirit. And when we proclaim the “Good News” we do so in the name of the God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Even today there is still heated debate over the words we choose to describe the divine. Is it right to address God with such gender specific words as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Why not use more generic words to describe the Godhead such as creator, redeemer and sustainer? The real issue though is how do we understand the relationship of the three persons. How do the father, the son and the Spirit relate to one another in relation to the creation, preservation, and perfection of the world?
I have struggled with this doctrine for a long time. How can the one God be three persons each with distinct attributes? How can Jesus be both Father and Spirit and human at the same time? Ultimately it is a mystery. I would like to say that I have an answer, but I know that my answer, as with any answer is inadequate to bring understanding. The depth of God and God’s being is deeper than our human minds can penetrate. We cannot know the whole mystery of God. We catch glimpses of the whole in the different persons of the Godhead revealed in the scriptures. Even though the Trinity is not named directly in the scriptures, there are snapshots so to speak of their actions and presence scattered throughout the Bible. What we do know is that it is the power of God’s Spirit that guides us and directs us in our understanding of God and God’s purposes for us and for the world.
William P. Young in his bestselling book The Shack seeks to wrestle with and bring understanding to the difficult questions of the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and where is God in a world filled win unspeakable pain?
Macenzie Allen Phillips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she had been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Now four years later, in the midst of his “Great Sadness,” Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently sent by someone called “PAPA.” The note invites him back to the shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he goes. He walks back into his darkest nightmare. What Mack finds there will and does change his life forever.
Mack is talking to PAPA.
Mack is struggling with the Why did this happen question; he asks;
If you couldn’t take care of Missy, how can I trust you to take care of me? (there he had said it, and he noticed his hands were knotted into fists, ready to strike)
“Mack, I’m so sorry.” Tears began to trail down her cheeks. “I know what a great gulf this has put between us. I know you don’t understand this yet. But I am especially fond of Missy, and you too.”
He loved the way she said Missy name and yet he hated it coming form her. It rolled off her tongue like the sweetest wine and even through all the fury still raging in his mind he somehow knew she meant it. He wanted to believe her and slowly some of his rage began to subside…
“Honey, there’s no easy answer that will take away your pain. Believe me if I had one, I’d use it now. I have no magic wand to wave over you and make it all better. Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship…”
“I think I would do this better if you weren’t wearing a dress.” Mack said attempting a weak smile.
Mackenzie, I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, its because I love you. For me to appear to a s a woman and suggest that you call me PAPA is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling back into your religious conditioning… To reveal myself to as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend is not about reinforcing religious stereotypes. …
Hasn’t it always been a problem for you to embrace me as your father? And after what you have been through, you couldn’t very well handle a father right now could you?
Why there has been such an emphasis on you as being a father? I mean it seems to be the way you most reveal yourself.
Well, there are many reasons for that and some of them go very deep. Let me say for now that we knew once the creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking that mothering. Don’t misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering was needed because of its absence…
We are not three Gods, and we are not talking about one God with three attitudes, like a man who is a husband, a father, and a worker. I am God and I am three persons and each of the three is fully and entirely one.
“HUH! Exclaimed Mack.
If I were one God and only one person, this you would find yourself in this creation without something wonderful, something essential. And I would be utterly other than I am.
And we would be without…? Mack didn’t know how to finish the question.
Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within me, within God myself. Love is not the limitation. Love is like flying, I am love…
You do understand, that unless I had an object to love, or more accurately , a someone to love, If I did not have such a relationship within myself, then I would not be capable of love at all. You would have a god who could not love. O maybe worse you would have god, when he chose, could only love as a limitation of his nature. The God who is cannot act apart from love. Each of us is love incarnate… we are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command, or a great chain of being and your ancestors called it. What we are is relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over the other because we rest in each other. Its like a great dance with three partners each dancing together in love…1.
The relationship of the Trinity is like a Divine dance to use the Greek term perichoresis. As one writer has put it:
“The Divine Dance. The Divine Dance of the persons of the Trinity.
In the beginning was the Dance, and the Dance was in God, and the Dance was God…
An eternal Dance; the three persons of the Godhead dancing eternally, in an embrace of love, mutually giving and receiving. Always dancing.
In the beginning God created a Dancing partner…
The world was created in its own dance, and invited to join the Dance. But the lead dancers said No! and started their own dance. The hands of God are extended to restore the Dance, and inviting us to Dance: The Son, and the Spirit, the two hands of God.
The Dance for us has a beginning, and an end, and they are not the same. The beginning starts with anticipation, expectation, and desire; the end concludes with satisfaction, completion, and rest – until the next Dance.
We look upon the Dance of God, as he ever circles about us. We try to understand. We so often fail. The Dance goes on, and the part we have in the Dance goes on, though we are not Dancing, only dancing, yet that dancing seems to be incorprated despite our best efforts. We look, and the Dance seems to change, to reverse, to go back on itself – it repented the Lord that… – and then the Dance goes on, seeking it’s goal, never seeking return to the starting point – I the Lord change not. This is the nature of Dance: round and round you go, sometimes to and sometimes fro, but the Dance goes on.
And us? Some of us sit as wallflowers. We won’t dance under any circumstances. Some of us are dancing around our handbags in our own dance, while the Dance wheels about us. We dance on our own. But dances are communal, not individual, everyone knows that. Dances are free, though structured: God’s Line Dancing.
Will you join the Dance? God’s two hands, The Son and Spirit, await you, pull you, invite you, to take you into the Dance, to wheel you about, make you dizzy at times, exhilerated at times, exhausted at times, fearful at times. But it is The Dance.”2
1.Young, William P.; The Shack; 2007, Windblown Media, Los Angeles, California pp. 92-102; p. 122
2. Perichoresis is the Divine Dance. http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/archive/index.php/t-27144.html
May 23rd, 2010
By Pastor Bill
“A God of Pizzazz”
Genesis 11: 1-9/ Acts 2: 1-11/ John 14: 8-27
Day of Pentecost/ Year C/ May 23, 2010
On Pentecost, the awesome power of God is revealed. Seven weeks after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the disheveled and mournful band of followers has gathered in Jerusalem as Jesus directed. They gathered to worship, sing, remember and pray. They came together as the group with whom Jesus had spent intimate time preaching and teaching for three years. Having lived with Jesus everyday they had come understand that he had an almost supernatural connection with the God of their ancestors Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, Moses and Aaron, Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea. These disciples believed that the son of Mary and Joseph was Emmanuel – “God with Us”-now the living Christ.
They had scattered after the events of Easter. But now they felt the need to come together to support one another because they were now a minority and lived a faith that the majority in Galilee did not. As they gathered in that upper room to worship that morning, there was a noise so loud it could not be ignored. So startled were they that they lost control of themselves. Their sensory systems were flooded with adrenaline so that their minds and bodies processed intensely the sound, energy and feeling of the coming of the Holy Spirit. She had come as Jesus had promised, and it was an experience that came from deep within, not something cognitive. They were changed from a frightened, rag-tag bunch of people into a bold and vocal group proclaiming the awesome power of God revealed in Jesus Christ. No one was excluded. Nothing human made could have engineered what the disciples felt that morning. The coming of the Spirit filled them with life, joy and enabled them to speak in languages from every corner of the known world.
It was absurd to hear eleven people for Galilee speaking the local languages of Asia Minor, Egypt, Libya, Rome and other places. But God is a God who does not do things in a small way. God uses what ever means God wants to achieve God’s purposes for humankind.
To understand what happened that day in Jerusalem we must go back into Israel’s pre-history recorded in Genesis. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the descendents of Noah have banded together as one people with one language. God was concerned that the people would not learn anything new, since they were already a nice homogenous community. God was concerned with the pride and excessive ambition of the people, thinking they could speak for God. These mortals decide that the way to make a name for themselves is by building a city with a tower soaring to the sky. They want to become known in the world, and to protect themselves from being scattered over the earth. They believe that to make a name will bring the people together in one place with one language. God comes down to take a look at humanity’s handiwork and God is not impressed. God says, this is just the beginning. Nothing they can imagine will be impossible for them. So let us confuse their language so they will not understand one another’s language. And so God scatters the people and confuses their language . Their diversity had made it either impossible or highly unlikely that they would work together again.
And so ever since, Babel has come to represent individualism. The nature of capitalism comes from Babel. Each individual has the right to make a profit. All individuals have a right to better themselves. Our Babel component is our materialism, our economic and military domination. Our Babel component is everything we have built to separate ourselves from one another; The Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the Israel/ Palestine Wall, the U.S./Mexico wall, the disputes between Pakistan and India, Islam and the West, the plethora of denominations that seek unity only by excluding others. Our Babel component is that most of us Americans can only speak one language and we expect others to learn ours.
We have become addicted to Babel. We have grown up believing that Babel is the God of true spirituality. Babel is rugged individualism. Rampant Nationalism is the stuff of Babel.
But Babel is not all bad. From Babel we get our cultural diversity. We get to push ourselves outside our own understandings, our comfort zones and establish relationships that enrich and deepen our understanding of ourselves, our brothers and sisters and our God.
But Babel is what makes injustice thrive. Babel is what makes a distinction between rich and poor. Babel is hat makes people think they can own other people. Babel is what makes people think they can condemn other people because they are different. Babel is what makes people enemies. Babel is what makes war happens. Babel is often lived out in individual and corporate sin because we tend not to look to God, but ourselves for the ultimate answers. None of us speak the language of God anymore. We have lost the language of love and compassion, justice and peace, toleration and acceptance.
Pentecost is a snapshot of the opposite. The Holy Spirit comes to everyone- the intellectual and the unsophisticated, the committed and the apathetic, the fundamentalist and the pagan, the man and the woman and everyone in between. In that instant they all speak the same language. With Pentecost, the early church changed the way it did things. They got rid of their class distinctions. They came together as a disparate group with one message. The Kairos of God came and they saw the world in a different way. The Spirit moved among them and they no longer saw each other as people to be suspicious of, but as fellow children of God. ON Pentecost they were given a new chance, a new freedom to be a different of community.
To affluent and competitive people like ourselves, God’s invitation on Pentecost is join in the new creation, to slow the feverish pace of life and rest in the assurance of God’s love that is given and not earned. To poor marginalized people and congregations, God’s promise is that our ultimate value does not lie in our making a name for ourselves does not depend on our building gleaming cities and towers of achievement but upon God’s dazzling and soaring love.
This story is before us to remind us that we do not need to make a name for ourselves, because, as Jesus said, our names are already written in heaven. We are children of Pentecost and children of Babel. We long for the ideal of Pentecost but we always return to Babel. We all come from different walks of life. We are different ages, races, genders and sexual orientations. We have achieved different educational levels. Different life experiences shape us. Sometimes when we talk to each other we talk in different languages. We live in Babel. We work in Babel. We are the children of Babel. But with Pentecost, we find that God is not interested in a people united for the purpose of making a name for ourselves and our own safety. Rather, God is a God who relishes having a world full of people of different colors, sizes, shapes, ideas, and languages. Our Creator is a God who loves Pizzazz, who celebrates diversity, and calls us to tear down the walls we build. In this story of the first days of the church, we find a God who loves unconditionally every aspect of our humanness and invites us to join in proclaiming that love to the whole world. Amen
