Faith

Proper 22B: When The Journey Gets a Little Unfamiliar

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Unfamiliar JourneyOLD TESTAMENT: Job 1: 1, 2: 1-10

Read from the Book of Job

The Book of Job is anonymous and it’s not really known when it was written, although historical Biblical scholars place it between the seventh and fourth centuries bce. Its purpose is not really known either, although it has a great deal to do with the way we see life and how our faith speaks through our lives. Contrary to what we may desire, Job offers no answers to the life’s suffering or life’s heartaches except faith. It takes all of those contrived images of God and shakes them at their core leaving nothing for us but a relationship with God instead. God is not here to “fix things” or to reward us or to punish us. God is here to welcome and love us.

In the beginning of our passage, Job is characterized as righteous and good, a man who sought God and turned away from those things that separated him from God. The passages following this depict his family as the same—righteous, blessed, and wealthy. Everything is perfect.

In the next part of our reading, the Lord and Satan have what is actually the second discussion before the heavenly court. Note that “satan” is actually the literal translation of the Hebrew hassatan and is not Satan, the devil of later times, but a member of the heavenly assembly. His task evidently is to inquire into the behavior of the human race and to bring back word to God. Ha-satan is considered more of an office or a function. Think of him as the accuser, the adversary; more of a prosecuting attorney but one who is operating on God’s behalf.

The satan has tested Job and Job has passed the test. It has been proven that Job’s integrity was not because of his prosperity and blessing; Job’s integrity is intact. Essentially, God can now say, “I told you so!”. But the satan claims that Job would give all of this for his life. He proposes a “skin for skin” challenge—what would Job do if YHWH attacks Job’s very life? (From Jewish midrash) In the bargain with Satan God outwitted that trickster with the command that Job’s life must be spared whatever else happened. This put a terrible pressure on the Adversary, since the command was like saying, “You may break the wine bottle, but you must not let the wine spill.” (Williams, 76)

So the satan afflicts Job with the disease of the sixth plague of Egypt (Exodus 9:9-11), foul boils that cloak his entire body. Keep in mind that this was more than just uncomfortable. Those with repulsive skin diseases were separated from the community and often found themselves living among the garbage. Job’s famous ash heap may be the ancient equivalent of a modern landfill, with its ripe smells and continuous burning. Into the scene, steps Job’s wife, urging him to let go of his integrity, already, and curse God. But Job remains steadfast.

The idea that God blesses the faithful, rewarding the righteous with what they deserve, and that the opposite, trials and tribulation, are signs of being out of sync with God—apparently the prosperity gospel is nothing new under the sun—is rejected outright by Job. It is rejected in the portrayal of the struggles of a genuinely “blameless and upright” man, and in Job’s response—both to his wife and to his situation.  Job comes to us as a warning against believing in a God who rewards piety and virtue with prosperity and success.  Job is us and with his story is a reminder that God never promised us ease and plenty but rather Presence and Grace and a Love more incredible than we can ever fathom—now, tomorrow, and every tomorrow thereafter.  Isn’t that better than worrying about whether or not we’ll be rewarded or punished in the future?

Back in the early 5th century, St. Augustine distinguished two kinds of love, in Latin, uti and frui. Uti love is love of use. I love money — not because I particularly enjoy looking at it or feeling it. I love money because I can use it to get something else I want. Uti. Now, frui love is different. I love — I’m not sure that’s a strong enough word — I love chocolate, not because of what I use it for, which really isn’t all that good. I get fatter, cholesterol count goes up. But it doesn’t matter. I just love chocolate. I’ll do anything to get it. Frui.

Augustine said we have this bad habit of loving God with uti love. We love God because we hope to get God to help us get whatever it is we want (blessing, prosperity, even eternal life). Lord, I’m after the good life, a better job, this or that success: so, bless me! But God prefers not to be used. God wants us to love God with frui love. We just love God, not because of what we get out of it, but just because God is God, and we would do anything for God. As the Westminster Confession put it, the chief end of humanity is to love God and enjoy [God] forever. (From “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People”, by Rev. Dr. James C. Howell, available at http://day1.org/890-why_bad_things_happen_to_good_people, accessed 22 September, 2009.)

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What does this say to you about God?
  3. What does this say to you about righteousness or faith?
  4. How does this speak to our own world?
  5. If we can no longer ask the question, “what has God done for me?”, what question should we then ask?
  6. What does that mean to you to love God just for loving God?

 

NEW TESTAMENT: Hebrews 1: 1-4, 2: 5-12

Read the Scripture from Hebrews

Even though it’s called an epistle, Hebrews is not really written in the form of a letter but is rather a sort of address to which notes have been attached. We really have no idea who the writer was or in what setting he or she actually delivered the sermon. It is evident, though, that the future mattered and the author depicts God’s speaking through first the prophets in the past and now the Son (or Jesus Christ) in the present. Both of these points toward the future of what is to come.

The message of Christ is not so much in what Jesus said but in what he did and who he was. This is why the author goes right into the idea of Christ’s self-offering and his ascent to sit at God’s right hand. The idea of forgiveness of sins and the ongoing support that Christ offers is of paramount importance. The author is asserting that, despite the older claim that Jesus was a Messiah-King, Christ is instead above all imaginable powers. The ancients believed that angels were the invisible powers, usually good, but not always, who hovered above the world and had the power to determine destiny. You can see evidence of wisdom thought here in the depiction of Christ as the one more powerful than all other powers, the one through whom all power exists.

The second section asserts that not only is Christ above all other powers, but that he got there by traveling the same road on which we journey. Christ was human and, yet, was enthroned above the angels. Christ was the one who was just like us and experienced the same kind of vulnerability, temptation, and suffering and yet was placed “above the angels”, above all powers that be.

This is a message from a pastor urging his or her congregation to stay true to Christ. It affirms that wherever we may find ourselves, God speaks to us “at many times and in various ways”. (Perhaps it followed our reading from Job as their first reading that day!) Ultimately, though, God most fully reveals who God is and what God is feeling,, thinking, and doing in Jesus Christ: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of [God’s] being.” To demonstrate the deepest heart of God, Jesus shared humanity’s flesh and blood, was made like us in every respect, suffered like we do, prayed with “loud cries and tears,” died a violent death, “tasted death for everyone,” and in some mysterious way by his death “destroyed death itself.

In an interview with Anne Lamott, who is no stranger to pain, Linda Buturian asked her what she most wanted to convey to her son Sam about God. “I want to convey that we get to be human,” Lamott answered. “We get to make awful mistakes and fall short of who we hope we’re going to turn out to be. That we don’t have to be what anybody else tries to get us to be, so they could feel better about who they were. We get to screw up right and left. We get to keep finding our way back home to goodness and kindness and compassion. . . I want him to know that no matter what happens, he’s never going to have to walk alone. . . That’s what I’m trying to convey to Sam.” (From Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, Jennifer L. Holberg, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2006), quoted in “We Get to Be Human”, by Dan Clendenin, October 2, 2006, available at http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20061002JJ.shtml, accessed 23 September, 2009.)

  1. How does this passage speak to you?
  2. What does it mean for you that Christ is above all powers?
  3. What does it mean for you that Christ was human?
  4. What does it mean for you that we get to “be human”?
  5. What stands in the way of our being “human”?

GOSPEL: Mark 10: 2-16

Read the Gospel passage

To be honest, the first readers of this version of the Gospel probably found Jesus’ statements about divorce and remarriage as challenging and counter-cultural as we do.  Divorce in the first century was a generally accepted part of life, both among Jews and perhaps more so within wider Greco-Roman culture. Some writers and public leaders spoke against divorce as bad for society, but for the most part people debated only details of its legal basis. Among Jewish legal experts, Deuteronomy 24:1-4 was a key text, one that assumes divorce will occur and prescribes procedures for carrying it out.  So the Pharisees who ask Jesus about divorce do so “to test” him. As for the Pharisees’ intentions, they might hope their question will expose Jesus as dangerous to families and their society.

Jesus, however, turns the conversation with the Pharisees away from the legal foundation for divorce to God’s design for marriage. That is, he dismisses the law as a concession to human weakness and offers a different perspective rooted in creation. His brief argument describes marriage as a strong and unifying bond between two people. It is because he sees marriage in such a way that he speaks against divorce as he does.

In essence, Jesus DOES disapprove of divorce, not because it is against religious rules, but because it is destructive, because it affects relationships and peoples’ lives.  Keep in mind that the in the ancient world, marriage was primarily a means of ensuring economic stability and social privilege.  A woman’s sexuality was the property of first her father and then her husband.  (Hence, the old language in the marriage ceremony about “giving away” the bride, which has since been removed from our Book of Worship.) Divorce could happen just because a man finds something objectionable about his wife, leaving her penniless, destitute, and shunned from society with no recourse.  Jesus seems to be speaking specifically against the custom of a man leaving his partner for another woman.  Jesus’ point is that divorce, even if allowed by Mosaic law, was not created to justify adultery or to satisfy one’s desires or ambitions.  Jesus is giving women a greater equality in the marital relationship.

There are obviously cultural differences for us today, to be sure.  Marriage is less about economics and more about people seeking mutual fulfillment.  Jesus describes marriage as something that transcends contracts, as something rooted in identity. Perhaps that is the message that we should take—not that divorce is wrong, necessarily, but that any relationship should be rooted in identity and treated with the seriousness that entails.  I don’t think the concern here is right or wrong but rather to heighten our awareness of our connectedness.  Relationships and commitment and love are not and should not be conditional.  They are part of who we are.  And when a relationship ends, there is an offering of healing and return to wholeness in a new and recreated way.

As for the last part, remember that children were treated like women.  They were not protected, they were not honored, and no one was concerned with them at all.  But while the disciples were listening to Jesus haggling with the Pharisees over the “legalities” of marriage, these bothersome children were shooed away.  But not only did Jesus welcome the children, he said that we should be like them, we should be curious enough to explore and vulnerable enough to depend on someone else.  We should be open to imagining what we do not know and trusting enough to rest ourselves in God.  After all, isn’t that what matters?  Jesus was both welcoming the unwelcomed and reminding us to open our lives to God.

Perhaps this whole sort of discombobulated passage that we read today is more about not following the rules and following Christ.  Jesus didn’t care about rules; he cared about showing us the way to God. He cared about showing how to relate to each other, how to relate to God, and even how to relate to ourselves.  We were never promised that it would be easy or that things would always come out alright.  We were just promised that we would be loved and welcomed and always have somewhere to go.  We were promised something new—we just have to open ourselves enough to imagine it.

  1. What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  2. What, then, does this say about relationships? About wholeness?
  3. What does this say about the “rules” that we create?
  4. What does it mean to become like a child for you?

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. (G.K. Chesterton)

Where the heart does not reside whole, there is only duty, not fidelity. (Joan Chittister)

My ego is like a fortress. I have built its walls stone by stone. To hold out the invasion of the love of God. But I have stayed here long enough. There is light over the barriers. O my God…I let go of the past, I withdraw my grasping hand from the future, And in the great silence of the moment, I alertly rest my soul. (Howard Thurman)

 

 

Closing

 

This Sunday is World Communion Sunday.  It is the day that the whole world remembers, renews, and is recreated and refashioned into something new.  As the time zones click through the orbit of the earth, there is table seating after table seating after table seating until all of us are seated together.  THIS, my friends, is the Kingdom of God.  It is something that we must imagine.  The Eucharist gives us that glimpse if only we will allow ourselves to imagine it and see it. (Invite persons to go around the room saying what they envision, what it is that they glimpse, that is God’s Kingdom. Close with “THIS, my friends, is the Kingdom of God.”  And all the people said…Amen.)

 

Proper 17B: Beloved

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Grass and Sky (DTF301137)OLD TESTAMENT: Song of Solomon 2: 8-13

Read the Old Testament Lectionary passage

This week we are continuing our theme of wisdom by looking at one of the Wisdom Writings. The writing known as the Song of Solomon, or the Hebrew title the Song of Songs, is not the usual fare for Scripture. Essentially, it is a love song between lovers full of what can be characterized as erotic imagery and many are surprised that it is included in the Bible at all. In fact, the language could almost be considered secular, with no mention of God at all. Its inclusion in the canon produced what could be considered a great debate among rabbis in the first century. Some considered it little more than a drinking song. The matter was settled by Rabbi Akiba, the great teacher and mystic, who said, “The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” (Mishnah Yadayim 3: 5)

Because while modern scholars often view the writing as a celebration of sexual love between a man and a woman, both Jewish and Christian theologians of previous centuries claimed that it described the deep and abiding mutual love between God and Israel or Christ and the Church. Mystics illustrate the power of the book to shape our understanding of our life with God—a deep yearning that knows only the language of intimate communion.

This week’s passage is the only text from the writing that is in the Lectionary. It describes a love marked by fidelity and mutuality. The lovers are faithful to each other. They have eyes for no one else. The love is one that is mutual and equal. (In fact, the woman speaks more than the man! She is in no way passive or submissive.) Commentator Ellen Davis argues that in a reversal of the punishment of Eve in Genesis 3 (“your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”), the woman in the song declares “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.” She says that there is an abiding mutuality that repairs the rupture and places the lovers (and love) back in the Garden.

Human love and Divine love are not mutually exclusive. They are not unrelated. Human love, at its best, is a reflection of God’s love. So, before my grandmother becomes offended at the implication that there is a part of the Holy Bible that is part of the tradition of erotica, remember that we are dealing with a God in Christ whose love for us is both shocking to our sensibilities and seeking to shock us out of all the ties to the ways of death, including our own prejudices and our own “proper” ways. We are called not only to love God but to be “in love” with God. Implicit in this poem is a sort of pining absence, a longing so deep that the poet cannot be complete without the One that is loved. I think that’s the way we’re called to be. I mean, think about it, we were created in the image of God, made with a shape and a sense into which only God fits. And we struggle. We struggle to find what fits into that shape. And in the absence, in the longing, we finally find that Presence of God, we finally find that One in whom we are destined to fall in love. Seventeenth century mathematician, Blaise Pascal spoke of it as a “God-shaped vacuum” in every human, a hole that only God could fill. It’s like being in love.

Perhaps it is the language that makes us bristle, that makes us squirm a bit in our pews. Perhaps we are even a bit uncomfortable with a God who is so intimate, so a part of us, that falling in love is all we can do. Perhaps we really haven’t thought through what it means to be created in the image of someone else. It means that we have to let ourselves go, that we have to become who God called us to be, that we have to realize that there is something more, that WE are something more, that we are created in the image of our Beloved, that we are created to fall in love with God. It is about completion; it is about wholeness; it is about being who we were created to be. It is about falling in love with God and falling into God.

Our lectionary does not include the rest of the poem. I want to read the next four verses. Here’s how they go:

O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards— for our vineyards are in blossom.”   My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.  Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains.

We know that God transforms.  We know that Jesus Christ redeems.   We know the Holy Spirit walks with us each and every day.  Do we know what that means?  Do we understand that that depicts the most intimate relationship imaginable?  It is more than loving God.  It is rather understanding that we are called to fill ourselves with God, to fill that God-shaped hole in our being with the very Spirit, the very One in which we live and move and have our being.  We are  not just called to love and support and figure God out in this endeavor but rather to fall in love with God.

  1. What is your response to this passage?
  2. What is your understanding of the relationship between God and us that is represented here?
  3. What does it mean for you to “fall in love” with God?
  4. Why do we have such a hard time understanding that type of love in terms of our relationship with God?

 

 

NEW TESTAMENT: James 1: 17-27

Read the New Testament Lectionary passage

The book of James was once called the “epistle of straw” by Martin Luther. Apparently he did not like it. But the letter offers driving questions concerning the shape of the Christian life. The author is aware that people sometimes limit their understanding of faith to a simple set of claims. For the writer, this is inadequate. Here, the faith that counts is the faith that is active in one’s life, the faith that shapes one’s life and brings one closer to God.

The verses for this week first explore the question, “Who is God?” For the writer, God is identified by what God gives. Every perfect gift comes from God. Every perfect truth is of God. The second question is, “Who are you?” The writer speaks of a lack of connection and correspondence between hearing and doing, between what one should be and what one does. For me, I think the main word here is “be”. We are not just called to listen; we are not just called to do; we are called to “be”.

The passage calls us to look at our lives, to look at ourselves in light of this God of Lights who has shone a light of illumination as to who we are called to be. This is where we see ourselves. This is how God creates us to be. Why do we miss that? This epistle is often seen as a sort of “Christian Wisdom letter”. Faith and works are not opposed to each other, as Luther claimed. They’re not even disconnected. The truly wise will live the way they believe. In the understanding of the writer of James, that is “pure”religion.

As Eugene Peterson puts it, “Wisdom is not primarily knowing the truth, although it certainly includes that; it is skill in living. For what good is a truth if we don’t know how to live it? What good is an intention if we can’t sustain it?” True holiness is not so much an absence of bad things. It is presence of compassion. It is about the way we treat others, the way we treat Creation, the way we live our lives.

You know, the church could do worse than be an “inner beauty” shop–a place where love is shared and truth is told and the beauty of becoming is the work of the community.  For plain old mirrors are incredibly unreliable witnesses and companions–we can get stuck all by ourselves like Narcissus.  Or like the person in James, we can look in the mirror by ourselves and then rush away and forget not just what we look like but who we are.  For when we look into the mirror by ourselves, we don’t see us.  Not the real me or the real you–who are so much deeper and more interesting and real and eternal than what we can see by ourselves in even the clearest light with the finest silvered glass.  To know and to love the real me and the real you–we need each other–to look into the Christ mirror of human being and say when I see you, I see power.  I see compassion, creativity, bravery, humor, loyalty, endurance, forgiveness, wisdom, abundance.  I see potential.  When I look with you in the mirror of Christ, I see the beauty of our belovedness beyond the telling. When is the last time you looked in a mirror?  Do you remember who you saw?  Do you need someone to look with you?  I do. (From “Looking in the Mirror”, by Rev. Martha Sterne, August 30, 2009, available at http://day1.org/1406-looking_in_the_mirror, accessed 29 August, 2012)

Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures.

Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.

But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, it no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless on their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world. (Eugene Peterson, The Message / Remix”, p. 2206.)

 

 

  1. How does this passage speak to you?
  2. Why is it so hard for us to keep “hearing” and “doing” connected?
  3. How do we typically understand truth and what does that say about our faith?
  4. What does this passage say to you about wisdom?
  5. What does this passage say to you about who you are and what you are called to be?

GOSPEL: Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Read the Lectionary Gospel passage

This passage gives us a look at how Jesus dealt with the predominant culture in which he lived. The issue of what is clean and unclean and how such uncleanness is passed on, of course has its roots in the Old Testament. The objection was probably not born out of a concern about hygiene but, rather, “following the rules”. The assumption was that if unclean hands touched liquid, the liquid became unclean. So, then, if the liquid touched the food, it would become impure. If the person ate the food, the person became unclean. To guard against this, there were groups that ritually washed hands before a meal.

This was rather an extreme view, even for this time. The writer of Mark implied that this was only an “outward” observance, rather than a mark of true faith. For the writer, this really made no sense at all. The writer of Mark is encouraging readers to rethink the commandments posed in Scripture through the lens of our hearts, the lens of faith. Discerning what practices actually embody God’s will are more often learned from getting things wrong than from getting things right.

Rules and order and doctrine are not bad things. They help us make sense of it all. But when they themselves become the objects of “worship”, the “sacred cows”, then we cease to be who we are called to be. Reverence belongs to God rather than those things that point toward God.

 

Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits—so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well.  An irreverent soul who is unable to feel awe in the presence of things higher than the self is also unable to feel respect in the presence of things as it sees as lower than the self…Reverence requires a certain pace.  It requires a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan. (Barbara Brown Taylor in An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith, p. 21, 24.)

 

So, all these rules and dogmas and liturgy and theology that make up our religion are not our faith journey, but they lead us through it. I think an authentic faith is one that weaves the two together. It is not that they are always evenly distributed, but they are always connected in some way. I guess if I were to put it simply in the context of my own Christian faith tradition, I would say that “religion without spirituality” is practicing the religion about Jesus. It sounds good, but it doesn’t have any depth, no engagement. And “spirituality without religion” has a good possibility of becoming the religion about myself. I think they need to come together—both spiritual religion and religious spirituality. Then one will have the opportunity to practice the religion of Jesus. I think that is the way we get out of ourselves and become one with God in a real and authentic way. (But that’s just my take.)

I think that we all have the responsibility to look at both our religion and our spirituality with a critical eye. We need to see what works and what doesn’t. What is it that brings us closer to God? What is it that provides a vehicle for us to be an instrument to bring others closer to God and to experience God in their lives? It is always a struggle; that, too, is a means of grace. Joan Chittister says that “religion is about transcendence, and spirituality is about finding meaning in the mundane.” (Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief, 8) Maybe that’s the point that Jesus was trying to make.

 

  1. What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  2. Are there things that our own society does that it views as religious ritual that are perhaps unnecessary or exclusive?
  3. What does this say about “God’s will” and how that relates to our faith?
  4. What does this say to us about wisdom?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

 

There is only one Love.  (Teresa of Avila, Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun, 16th century)

 

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. (Willa Sibert Cather, American author, 1873-1947)

 

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. (G.K. Chesterton, English writer, 1874-1936)

 

 

Closing

 

Now I love thee alone. Thee alone do I follow. Thee alone do I seek. Thee alone am I ready to serve. For thou alone hast just dominion. Under thy sway I long to be. Amen.

(Saint Augustine, from An African Prayer Book, 137)