NOTE: Here are today's worship notes for the second Sunday of the summer using Krista
Introduction
One of my
political and ecclesiastical colleagues from Cleveland, the Reverend Dr. Marvin
McMickle who currently serves as the President of Colgate-Rochester Theological
Seminary, recently wrote these words to his friends on Facebook:
At times like these when the world seems to be at its
darkest, it is essential that our faith in Christ shines forth at its brightest
level. Whatever we say or do about the hateful and hurtful events occurring
around us in this country and abroad, we must always remain faithful to the
core teachings of Jesus. This is no time for foolishness and frivolity in the pulpit. This is a time for
prophets to rise and for God's message of justice, love, mercy, and grace to be
declared. Many people will be protesting many things over the next two weeks. I
hope the words of the gospel can be declared and heard above the shouts and
chants of the moment. The prophets always began by saying, "Thus says the
Lord." Preachers, please don't step outside of your authority and become
just another news commentator. Tell the world what the Lord says.
Brother
McMickle knows that words matter: as Krista
Tippett sp carefully articulates in her new book, Becoming Wise, “words
make worlds… and our words can either help us repair the world or tear it
further apart.” Today as I press on with part two of our worship series
constructed upon the insights of Ms. Tippett’s text in dialogue with the
appointed Bible reading for this day, there are three broad points I would like
us to consider:
· First, the
importance of knowing, telling, hearing and sharing life-giving stories
and poems in community – especially in times of trouble and anxiety – as an
alternative to fear.
· Second, the
imperative of listening carefully and generously to all people – but
especially those with whom we fundamentally disagree – and responding to them
with vulnerability and humility rather than anything even remotely resembling
arrogance.
· And
third, the indispensable urgency of honing our verbal
skills in public with precision and probity so that creative alternatives to
hatred, panic and chaos are birthed among us.
The Word
made Flesh never asked us to agree with everyone we meet nor find common ground
where it does not exist. But we have been advised to become wise as serpents
and gentle as doves in pursuit of shalom
and this cannot come to pass without clarity.
Our words make worlds – and our world’s a mess partly because of our
sloppy, ugly and dangerous words – speaking without thinking as a Polish dissident
once said to me in Warsaw. “Americans do
it all the time,” he said, “You are privileged to live in a place where your
words seem to have no consequences – or so you think – but that would never
happen here in our police state.” So,
using Tippett’s book as a launching pad, let’s talk together about this
morning’s stories from the Bible and tease out a few implications for living into
these challenging times.
Insights
The first
narrative we are asked to contend with speaks to Tippett’s point about sharing
creative, nuanced, poetic and life-giving stories if we are ever to move beyond
our culture’s current starvation for fresh language. We live in an era drenched “in the failure of
official language and discourse” to tell us the truth. She writes: “We crave truth tellers. We crave real truth
– and there’s so much baloney all the time… the performance of political
speeches you see on the news (are so often double-speak) that it feels like
there should be a thought bubble over the head of the speaker saying “what I
really would say if I could say it is… this!’”
+ That is part
of the attraction and appeal to Donald Trump’s stream of consciousness
shenanigans: his words may be filled
with lies, hatred, dangerous and incoherent free associations – they may be
jingoistic and soaked in white supremacy code words – but they are passionate
and hit some of us in the gut. The same
was true for many of the speeches shared at the Republican Convention in
Cleveland: they were crude and often vulgar diatribes, hardly what we have come
to expect in public presentations, but they were saturated in deep experiences
of loss and anxiety and thus articulated authenticity.
+ I don’t
think I heard one talking head get behind a podium and use policy wonk
during that whole event. It was reality TV on steroids – immediate, passionate
and forceful words. What it wasn’t,
however, was compassionate or even life-giving. It was rant without reason,
coarse rage without constructive alternatives, a public temper tantrum in prime
time that never moved real people beyond their grief to lament and then the humble
and complicated reconstruction of our common lives.
That’s why
all the world religions insist upon telling and retelling the time-tested
stories of our respective traditions.
These stories keep us from becoming too self-absorbed and offer broad,
poetic language that annihilates ideology.
Professor Walter Brueggemann put it like this:
The Old
Testament prophets hardly ever discuss an “issue.” What they’re doing is going
underneath the issues that preoccupy people to the more foundational
assumptions that can only be gotten at in elusive or poetic language. Sadly, the institutional church has been
preoccupied with issues. And when we do that, we are robbed of transformative
power because then it is ideology against ideology and that does not produce
very good outcomes for anyone.
Consider the
deeper truths offered to us in the story of Abraham on the road to Sodom. Please
note that this is still chapter 18 of
Genesis – this is still a narrative about God doing extraordinary and
surprising things in our lives – like what has just preceded today’s text. Those
of you who were here last week, do you remember what happened during the story
of Abraham and Sara in their old age?
God’s promise of progeny was delivered in the form of a baby named
Isaac, right? And what does the name
Isaac mean, if you recall? He laughs – laughter – one who is surprised by God’s
extraordinary gift of life even in the most unexpected situations. So, while the action we going to hear about
today moves beyond the laughter, the surprises born of grace are still
be held close and not forgotten, ok? And they include: first, a story that
speaks of God’s commitment to share the fullness of life in all its
complexities with Abraham and Sarah and by implication you and me, too.
· Verses 16-19
tell us: “That the men (the angelic
messengers of the Lord) set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom; and
Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what
I am about to do, seeing that
Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the
earth shall be blessed in him? No,
for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after
him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so
that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he
has promised him.”
· Do grasp what’s taking place in these three sentences? Abraham is given an awareness of the cruelty
and sin taking place in Sodom and Gomorrah – the wickedness and offense – but
it has nothing to do with the homosexuality we were once taught. Rather the sin
of Sodom is their wanton selfishness, greed and the total absence of
hospitality – especially to the poor. The prophet Ezekiel was explicit in chapter 16: This
was the sin of your sister Sodom – she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed
and unconcerned – self-absorbed – for they did nothing to help the poor and
needy in their community. What this
story is telling us in vibrant detail is that we are intimately tied into the
healing of the world – tikkun olam as the Hebrew prophets put it – the repair
of the world. It begins with
understanding both the brokenness of our sisters and brothers and the complexity that informs
this breech. In our text we are told
that Abraham has been charged by the Lord to do righteousness and justice – tzedek
and mishpat – advancing merciful and true relations between kindred flesh and
healing acts of fairness in real time. So in conversation and questioning, God
and the angels decide that Abraham cannot be kept in the dark about the wounds
of the world. That’s one truth we need
to reclaim in this story.
The other is
that there are precious few easy answers in the work of compassion and justice
– rarely are their satisfying short-cuts or one size fits all solutions – so we
need all the rigorous conversation and questioning of one another and God we
can muster if we’re serious about repairing the world. That’s the second
insight: Abraham openly argues
with the Lord and raises questions NOT because he knows better than God, but
because this is how wise people learn and clarify what is true and possible. He
isn’t playing “gotcha” but searching out the meaning of loving kindness in the
real world.
And that’s
what we get here: Abraham realizes that
there is going to be bewildering collateral damage in God’s proposed destruction
of Sodom, so he challenges the Lord saying, “I grasp your need to act, O Lord,
but do you have to destroy everyone? What if I can find 50 just and loving
people? Will your loving kindness trump your anger? Is your mercy greater than
your wrath?” Good questions and they
cause God to reconsider the excessive implications of even holy anger. “Well,
no I don’t actually have to act that way….” Then the real parsing begins: well how about 45? Or 40? It is the origin of sacred bargaining with
blood and lives hanging in the balance: suppose I find 30? Will you still be cruel in the name of
loving-kindness? 20? 15? 10? Will you hold off your righteous anger, Lord,
for just 10 loving people?
This is a
GREAT story if we’re paying attention that points to the way wisdom takes up
residence in the human experience. It urges us to honor gracious questioning in
community and prayer. It pushes us past “debating issues by way of competing
certainties… so that we sense what is at stake for real human beings.” And it emphasizes that our “well-being is
linked to that of others in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe.”
But we only comprehend this if we’re willing to wildly raise questions and then
listen with intense generosity. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:
Love the
questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very
foreign language. Don’t search for the answers (all at once) which could not
even be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. For the
point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far
in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answers.
+ Rowan
Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, believes that in the 21st
century that living as one of Christ’s disciples has become a lost art: “The notion that we need to be skilled, need
to be wise in order to be God’s creatures, has been discarded and abandoned.”
+ The Lord’s
disciples in the other story for today, found in St. Luke’s gospel,
tells us precisely this truth: teach us to pray they ask! Show us the way! Help us to learn what we do not already know.
In this we see the value of humility and trust and even fortitude in pursuit of
serenity.
And Jesus
delivers in two illuminating ways: He gives them first a prayer outline to master
by practice – what we call the Lord’s Prayer – and then speaks to of living
with into life’s questions: ask, search
and knock and it shall be given to you.
These are not stream of consciousness ramblings or off the cuff remarks,
but the careful distillation of sacred wisdom.
The poet,
Susan Stewart, said “that hearing is how we touch one another at a distance.”
Jesus gave his followers precise
words to practice – and in the hearing of these words as well as their spoken
repetition – the disciples found themselves touched by God’s wisdom rather. Specifically, when the disciples listened to
Jesus, they were practicing a spiritual discipline that included: trusting
a love greater than their imaginations, surrendering
to an authority built upon love and compassion rather than competition and forgiveness within and among
others even those who wound us:
Father – our
Father, not my father nor my possession, but our shared source of life beyond
all
control – open us to your kingdom – your truth – your vision for creation that
is not narrow or ideological – but pregnant with possibilities and peace for
all. Unlock for us a life of trust and
hope that transcends anything we can control. In fact, let us live as if you
were already the Lord of the earth as you are now in heaven. Let us only
be concerned only about what we need for today – our daily bread – not hording
or greed like Sodom and Gomorrah – but simple satisfaction like your children
in the desert with Moses – where sharing by all meant scarcity for none and
hording turned your holy manna into maggots. Let the totality of our lives, Lord, be guided
by forgiveness – not shame or guilt of competition or winning – but tenderness
within and humble generosity beyond for that is what you require: do justice, share compassion and walk with me
in humility.
Jesus taught
them – instructed them – and insisted they not only learn these words by heart,
but practice expressing them in their own words and actions; so that over time,
but within history, these words of love would become flesh. The Lord’s Prayer is a parallel New Testament
story to the Hebrew Bible’s tale of Sodom and Gomorrah where Abraham pleads
over and over for mercy as if he were saying: Lord, you are the one who
forgives us as we have forgiven others, so let your judgment pass that grace
may rule this day as it already does throughout your kingdom in heaven. Today’s Psalm tells us much the same thing:
the steadfast love and faithful-ness of the Lord endures forever. They are
greater than God’s anger and wrath and at the heart of all that is holy.
Conclusion
We tell
life-giving stories and poems to nourish our better angels. We practice listening to others with
generosity for this is how we touch one another at a distance beyond time and
culture. We cultivate precision in our
words so that we bring healing rather than cruelty to creation. I love the stories of the Hebrew Bible. I
cherish the words of Jesus. And I give thanks to God for wise teachers like
Krista Tippett who remind me that our words create worlds so our words, stories
and poems must be generous and vast enough to give shape and form to the mercy
and grace of our God. Let me leave you
with a story from the late Elie Wiesel that has guided my heart for nigh on to
35 years. It comes from the Hasidic master Israel of Rizhin born in Eastern
Europe in 1797. He is the last undisputed leader of the Hasidic tradition – and
a master story teller. He used to speak
of a young Hasid, a student of the second great rabbi Maggid of Mezeritch, who
married the daughter of an opposing school of spirituality, who “forced him to
choose between his family and his Rebbe.”
The
son-in-law swore that he would not return to Mezertich and the wedding took
place. But after a few months – or perhaps years – the young groom could not
resist the impulse to join his companions and their Master as they prayed and
danced in the forest. When he returned home his angry father-in-law marched him
to the local rabbi for a judgment. The
rabbi consulted the Shulkhan Arukh (the 15th century guide to Jewish
law in Europe) and issued this verdict: since the young man had broken his
promise, he was to give his wife a divorce at once. Overnight, the young Hasid
found himself homeless and on the street. He had no means of his own, no
relations. Inconsolable, refusing all nourishment, they young mystic fell sick
and with no one to care for him, died shortly thereafter.
“Well,”
Rebbe Israel the Rizhiner used to say, “when the Messiah will come, the young
Hasid will file a complaint against his father-in-law as well as the local
rabbi charging them both guilty of his premature death. The first will say: “I
obeyed the rabbi.” And the rabbi will say: “I obeyed the tradition.” And the
Messiah will say: “The father-in-law is right, the rabbi is right and the Law
is right, too.” Then he will kiss the young plaintiff and say: “But I, what do
I have to do with them? For the Messiah has come for those who are not right.”
Let those
who have ears to hear: hear.
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