Generation Trust

Exodus 17:1-7

March 23, 2014

Back in the 90s when the X Files was the trendy thing on TV, I suggested that Generation X-Files would be a decent name for the cohort coming of age at that point because it seemed like their motto was, “trust no one.” It turns out I was one cohort too soon on that, as the recent Pew Research Center’s polling of the so-called millennial generation shows. They really don’t trust anyone.

If you think about it for even a moment their lack of trust makes perfect sense. After all, every single major social institution has failed them: the schools are broken, and they know if first hand; the economy has utterly failed them; the church is a mess; prior generations have completely befouled the environment and now the climate, itself, is failing them; and as for politics – well, that is an obvious complete and utter failure.

The result of such widespread, systemic failure? Trust no one.

In a piece headed, “In No One We Trust,”[1] Joseph Steiglitz wrote last week in the New York Times, “We do not measure trust in our national income accounts, but investments in trust are no less important than those in human capital or machines.” As he notes, “Without trust, there can be no harmony, nor can there be a strong economy.”

Lack of trust is certainly no way to build a commonwealth or a community, and it’s also exactly what Moses faced in the wilderness of Sin. The people are complaining because they’re thirsty, tired, lost and feeling betrayed by their leader.

“Why did you bring us out here to the wilderness of Sin to let us die? We were better off in Egypt!”

Moses, for his part, is afraid the people are going to stone him, so he feels betrayed by God who called him into leadership, and he complains to God: “what am I going to do with these people?” Later on in the saga, in fact, Moses will say to God, “what I am supposed to do with YOUR people, the ones YOU brought out of bondage” – as if Moses had nothing at all to do with the whole situation.

I find that back and forth amusing, but I do not find it at all surprising. After all, when trust is absent responsibility will be hard to find as well.

You don’t have to look very far to see that this is exactly what’s going on in our own culture. We have a deep and growing mistrust of leaders, and even more than that, a broad and general mistrust of the institutions they lead.

And no one wants to take any responsibility for the situation. In fact, it seems that we mostly just want to blame the entire situation – persistent high unemployment, massive and growing inequality, widespread institutional dysfunction – on the “invisible hand of the market,” as if none of the all-too-visible hands in the various cookie jars of wealth and power on Wall Street or Capital Hill had anything to do with any of it. Well, I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

The Exodus saga describes not only the liberation of an oppressed people, but also their emergence as a distinctive people in their own right. That they emerged from bondage, from oppression, from massive social and economic inequality is never far from the consciousness of those who framed their founding principles as a people. Thus the legal framework for their emerging society as described in Exodus and the subsequent books of the Torah insists throughout on particular care and concern for foreigners, aliens and the poor, not only in their equal standing before the law but also in specific economic policies. These concerns are not afterthoughts, but are always front and center.

Oh, to be sure, there is certainly stuff in these ancient texts that makes absolutely no sense to us, nor does it pertain to our time and situation. Ignoring the instruction to kill the witches will not make us unbiblical. The challenge, in all times and situations, for a people of faith whose roots sink deep into ancient soil, is to do well the work of discerning the vast difference between eternal truth and ancient Middle East world view.

That work is hard, but it is not impossible. Look for the through-lines. Interpret according to the rule of love. Or, as Jesus put it in Luke, “be compassionate as your holy father is compassionate.”

One of the consistent through-lines of Judeo-Christian scripture is concern for the poor, and condemnation of unjust and unequal social and economic situations.

I like to believe that’s because the people who – inspired by the Holy Spirit – led God’s people and crafted these ancient texts were faithful and compassionate folks. On the other hand, scripture is pretty honest about them. They were a mixed lot that included scoundrels, harlots, thieves, and murderers along with liberators, leaders, prophets, and priests. Oh, and some of them lived on both sides of that grey line.

Still, I like to believe that they were mostly faithful and compassionate, that they found the capacity to trust God and build trust among God’s people. Moses was faithful and compassionate, to be sure, but he was also utterly practical.

In the next phase of the story that follows immediately after our text for today, Moses seeks his father-in-law’s advice to develop a practical system for the administration of justice. Seems he’s figured out that the people are going to keep complaining, so he needs a system to hear the complaints, judge them, and respond.  

In other words, he takes concrete personal and systemic actions designed to build and maintain trust.

Alas, as Stieglitz observed last week in the Times:

Unfortunately, however, trust is becoming yet another casualty of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.

Pitting people’s relative interests against each other in a zero-sum game is no way to build a commonwealth or a community. In fact, the growing gap between the haves and have nots is an affront to God. It is sinful.

When we did a Bible study that included this passage back in January, someone asked the quite logical 20^th-century, English-speaking reader’s question about the Wilderness of Sin from which the whole congregation of Israelites journeyed by stages. “Is it,” the reader asks, “a wilderness of separation from God, a place of moral failing, a desert of sinfulness?

Well, no. It’s just an ancient place name with a fairly uninteresting etymology related to lunar gods worshipped by some ancients in the area.

It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but the Wilderness of Sin is just the name of a place the Israelites found themselves in, not the naming of any mark of shame or sinfulness that might have put them there.

No, the only connection to us that question might have is this: like the Wilderness of Sin, poverty is also just the name of a situation that people find themselves in, it is not sinfulness, it is not another name for moral failure.

The most distressing aspect of what passes these days for current national conversation about poverty is how easily political and economic and media elites embrace the rhetoric of attaching moral failure to poverty. Such rhetoric has the wonderful advantage of getting the well-off off the hook for any responsibility for those who are less well-off.

After all, if it’s their own damn fault, their laziness, their lack of work ethic that put them in poverty, then why should the rest of us help … or even care?

Well, to begin with, the causal relationship between moral failure and poverty is just about exactly like the relationship between the Wilderness of Sin and sinfulness. It’s simply way more complicated than that.

But even if that were not the case – even if there were a direct, causal relationship between moral choice and economic circumstance – the only way we can respond to the poor if we want to keep calling ourselves followers of Jesus is with concern, care, and compassion. Not only that, but we must also, if we want to keep calling ourselves followers of Jesus, push in the public square for policies that put the needs of the poor at the top of the agenda rather than out of the picture altogether.

Oh, we don’t have to do this, as citizens of the commonwealth or of these United States. We can promote and pursue policies that protect the economic elites with the conviction that a rising tide lifts all boats, with a firm belief in the free market, and with trust that wealth of the nation ensures the security of all her citizens no matter how that wealth winds up being distributed.

We can believe all that – and promote and pursue policies that flow logically from such beliefs. But we cannot believe all that, and believe this, too. We cannot believe all that, and call ourselves followers of Jesus.

Or, as Stephen Colbert put it so succinctly:

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”

A bit later on in the great saga of the birth of Israel as God’s covenant people, Joshua will succeed Moses as leader of the people. He will be faced with similar choices, and will ultimately declare: “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I pray for the wisdom and the courage to be able to make the same declaration, for it is only when we can do so, that we will be able to restore a generation of trust. Amen.

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[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/12/21/in-no-one-we-trust/

Go!

Genesis 12:1-9

March 16, 2014

Have you seen the video floating around the interwebs these days secretly shot from the top of a not-yet-completed sky-scraper in Shanghai? Or how about the one of a woman bungee jumping into a 600-foot gorge in South Africa?

I actually can’t even watch the ones shot from great heights. They always make me feel slightly ill. So it leaves me wondering why people do such things?

Any daredevils, thrill-seekers or risk-takers among us this morning who can enlighten me?

*****

Personally, this morning’s story from Genesis is enough risk-taking for me, and if you take this foundational story of our faith seriously it will give you more than enough vertigo for the day. It’s a story of the bottom dropping out.

The framers of the lectionary made an interesting decision with where they have us pick up the story. By beginning the Abraham saga with God’s initial command, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house …” they leave us with the impression that this is something akin to creation ex nihilo; perhaps sojourn ex nihilo. Out of nothing comes this journey.

But that’s not the way journeys work for most of us. We just got back from California last week. The journey did not come out of nowhere. Not only did we plan it for months, but we took it to a particular destination for a particular purpose. Bud’s out there, and we went to visit. (And, by the way, thanks for your faithfulness and support – I know y’all worshipped well in our absence, and we had a fantastic time!)

Most of the journeys we take are similarly planned and purposeful; even those that seem to come up at the last minute don’t really spring up completely out of context.

Truth is, that’s not what happens in Genesis either.

Listen for a bit of context in these words from the end of the previous chapter:

 Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

 Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.

What are we to make of this? It sounds, at first blush, like just another one of the Bible’s weird forays into genealogy, which leave every preacher remembering the seminary advice: don’t preach the lists. But the lists often have a great deal to tell us, and this one is no different.

To begin with, the list reminds us that this story of Abraham doesn’t, in fact, come out of the blue. Abraham is situated among a people, a family, a tribe, and a particular history. This is not a sojourn out of nothingness, but rather leaving home and history.

It’s also a leave-taking from disaster.

If you pay attention to the lists, to the genealogies in scripture, it is abundantly clear how overwhelmingly important kinship is to the people of Israel. Some of us pay similar attention, but many of us, and I count myself in this camp, know very little about our own families of origin past a few generations. For example, I know that my mother’s great-grandfather came from Ireland probably during a mid-1800s potato famine. But I know nothing of that part of my roots beyond that. My mother’s mom’s family traces its roots back to the founding of Hartford, Connecticut, but I can’t really tell you much about any of them from those early 1600s until, oh, about 1927, when my mom was born. Interestingly enough, my father’s family, on one side, traces its roots back to the same founding crew in Hartford. The respective family names are inscribed on opposite sides of the Founders’ Monument in Hartford.

I suppose that’s mildly interesting, but, again, I don’t know anything about any of those people between those early Americans and my parents’ births in the 20s. Other than knowing that the Ensigns come from Scotland, I know nothing about who they were, where they lived, what they did.

I don’t think that is at all unusual for contemporary Americans. We are a rootless people who reinvent our selves and renew our stories constantly. Most of us pay precious little attention to things like family trees.

But the limbs and branches and roots of such trees were of primary importance for the people of Israel. Around the campfires of the Chaldeans, I imagine Terah told his children and grandchildren stories of his father, Nahor, and Nahor’s father, Serug. He probably knew all the names going back many generations, and he had likely learned the stories of how they had made a life, generation after generation, there in the land of Ur. And that’s precisely how you know that when God said “go” to Abram, Abram was getting up to go from a site of disaster and despair.

For his wife was barren. There would be no more generations of his people to occupy their land. There was no future there for them.

“Go,” says God. “Go to a land that I will show you.”

Ah, right. This great story of journey begins without a map. In fact, it begins without a destination. It begins, simply, with the imperative: “go.”

I like to travel, and I’m perfectly happy to explore a few unknown hiways and biways when I do. But this is more than a bit crazy. “Go.” Don’t ask questions; just go, and I’ll show you a land. Frankly, that’s nuts. It’s as crazy as bungee jumping into a gorge – crazier, in fact, because there’s no cord attached in this story.

Perhaps the only way any of us will actually take such risky leaps of faith is to get to places of despair. The addict who hits rock bottom might just be ready to chart a new course of recovery. The student who has all but flunked out might just be ready to ask for some extra help. The victim of spousal abuse who sees the abuse about to pass along to another generation – the kids – might just be ready to leave the relationship.

I think that’s where Abram and Sarai are in this story. They have reached the limits of their own capacity, and all they can see ahead of themselves is a bitter end to their family’s story.

They are willing to take a risk of faith, even if they are not, necessarily, ready. Indeed, how could we ever be truly ready to go when we don’t know where we’re going?

But they are ready to risk.

As I said, perhaps it’s simply because they’ve reached the end of their own devices.

But I don’t think that’s all. They have clearly reached the end of their line, but they come to that end with a faith they have inherited all along the line.

Thus, when God speaks, they are willing to listen, to hear, and, ultimately, to trust enough to obey.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that for him it was never really a question of faith, but, instead, one of obedience. Bonhoeffer trusted the presence and the leading of God, but obedience was always difficult because God didn’t ask for simple things. God asked for his life.

Well. There’s nothing at all new or surprising about that. When God speaks, God bids us follow, and, in the following, God calls us to let go of all that we have held so close, all that we believe has given us security, all that seems certain.

And we’re called to give that up – for what?

A land that I will show you.

God does provide an enigmatic, yet nonetheless powerful picture of what will come with this journey to the land that God will show.

We go there to plant seeds. They will grow to become a great harvest. God will make of that a great nation, through which all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.

Tonight the Lenten study group is going to look at the first of the Great Ends of the Church. It says that one of the six great purposes of the church is to proclaim the gospel for the salvation of humankind.

The Abraham story captures the gospel, the good news, in its essence: plant seeds, trust God, a great community will grow, and through it all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed.

It’s incredibly risky business, this trusting God, going when God says “go,” being obedient when God bids us follow.

Sometimes I think people take crazy, adrenalin-fueled risks because they don’t believe good news to be good, they don’t trust that the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, that small seeds planted today will reap a significant harvest, that God will be good in all times and places, even the ones we can’t imagine or understand. So they just go for the simple rush of thrill seeking.

Somehow I can’t quite imagine Dietrich Bonhoeffer sneaking into a skyscraper to shoot video dangling from a crane. He had real risks to take for the sake of his nation. Nor can I see Gandhi bungee jumping. He had an empire to overthrow. Nor King. He had a life to give for the sake of freedom.

God said to each of them, and to countless other faithful folks in ways both grand on the world stage and intimately small ways as well, “go. Go from the place that is safe and comfortable to a place that I will show you. Go. Plant small seeds. Reap a great harvest. Be a blessing to all the earth. It shall make all the difference. Go.” Amen.