Thy Word and the Human One

November 15, 2015

Mark 8:27-34

With the news from Paris still hanging heavily all around us I am tempted this morning simply to preach again the word from last Sunday about God and human suffering. Yet even in the face of the horrors from Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Garissa, and so many other places both far and near, I remain convinced that more than anything else we still need to hear and to heed the call to be a light in the present darkness. For followers of the Prince of Peace, responding to that call requires of us deep reflection and deeper relationship with the one who calls, with the one who asks, in our reading for this morning:

“Who do people say that I am?”

That’s been the question swirling around Jesus for a long, long time. It continues to swirl, and in all kinds of ways.

Jesus has his own web site, and he’s on Twitter – has been since 2006. You can follow him at Jesus Christ (@Jesus), where his profile says, “carpenter, healer, God.” Earlier this month he tweeted, “my dad once built a clock and then the universe happened.” Pretty good stuff, but Katy Perry still has about 75 million more people following her than Jesus does.

It’s handy – for me, at least – that Twitter uses the language of followers, because that does get right to the heart of the matter. It’s the language that Jesus uses – if not on Twitter then, at least, throughout the gospels. Certainly he asks, “who do people say that I am,” but far more often the crux of the matter rests on the response to his oft-repeated invitation, “follow me.”

Dozens of times in the gospels – and more than 80 times throughout the New Testament – Jesus said, “follow me.” As singer-songwriter (and UCC pastor) Bryan Sirchio put it, “He never said, come, acknowledge my existence / Or believe in me, I’m the 2^nd person of the Trinity / But 87 times he said, Follow me.”[1]

In the same song – which, I hasten to add, is a 3-minutes song not a systematic theology, Sirchio also adds,

“Yes, we need to know what we believe / to follow the Jesus who’s real /

God save us from the Christ’s we create in our own image.”[2]

Knowing what we believe is both crucial work and, of course, where things get murky. Thus we find ourselves right back where we began, asking “who is this Jesus?”

The global Christian community has proclaimed an orthodoxy around Christology for more than 1,500 years, dating back to the year 325 and the creed of Nicaea which declares,

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from True God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.

Those are lovely liturgical declarations, but they raise way more questions than they answer. To begin with, what’s the difference between God and True God? What does light from light even mean? Begotten not made – now there’s a distinction without a difference if I ever heard one.

The great creeds of the church are fascinating and important documents that tell us a great deal about the development of the tradition and about key moments in that development, but they really don’t tell us a much of anything about the Jesus who is real.

Indeed, the Apostles’ Creed, which many of us learned as kids, reduces the entire actual life of the real Jesus to a few commas. “Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried …” Not much in there about “follow me,” unless, against all odds, to follow Jesus means to champion an Oxford punctuation mark.

Where the ancient creeds leave off, however, a wealth of contemporary scholarship and theological reflection steps in with provocative suggestions about both the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, to use a distinction I first encountered in the writing of the late Marcus Borg.

While Borg offers some compelling insights in such books as Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and The Heart of Christianity, among others, I personally find more substantial ground in Walter Wink’s Christological work in The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man.

I hope you heard something in that title that doesn’t sound quite right: the Son of the Man as distinct from the Son of Man? As Wink, and others, have pointed out, the Son of the Man – the title that Jesus used most often in referring to himself in the gospels – is unusual and exceedingly rare in both older Hebrew texts and other contemporaneous Greek ones. In fact, the actual Greek in the gospels is both rare and awkward as it has two articles that would be more accurately translated into English as the Son of the Man. Most translations render it as “the son of man” because it sounds less strange.

The phrase son of man appears without the definite article in Hebrew scriptures more than 100 times, 93 of them in the book of Ezekiel. The Hebrew idiom was generally equivalent to human being, though its usage in Ezekiel is distinctive because it is the principle way that God calls on Ezekiel.

As Wink points out, the church has never made much, if any, use of this odd Greek phrase that Jesus used so often in reference to himself. In fact, the rest of the New Testament pretty much ignores it, as well.

So, Wink asks, what did Jesus mean by it? Another way of asking that question would be, “so, who did Jesus think that he was?”

If Jesus cajoled his contemporaries to follow him – and clearly he did – then whom did he think he was asking them to follow? The second person of the Trinity? Their first-class ticket to eternity? Lord and savior? Son of God? The son of the man?

If it is true, as John Calvin insisted in the opening lines to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, that “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God,”[3] then surely Jesus must have had a fairly well thought out self-understanding. Just as surely, if the point of Christian life and faith is following the way of Jesus, then it matters who he thought he was.

This is a brief homily not a graduate seminar in theology, so we’re not going to slog our way through 350 dense pages of Walter Wink this morning. The heart of his argument is deeply mystical, and is captured in a brief passage on Christian vocation, or the summons to follow the way of Jesus. Wink writes,

There is a summons, a call in the human self, for God to be born in it. But there is also God’s call to the self to be born in God. In God is hidden the mystery of humanity and in humanity the mystery of God.[4]

The point is quite simple, on the one hand, and incredibly difficult on the other. Simply put, the way to God is to live our lives as Jesus lived his.

Or, as St. Irenaeus, one of the so-called desert fathers of the very early church, said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” In Jesus the disciples, and so many others, witnessed a human being fully alive – it is as rare and unusual as the son of the man.

It is also, however, precisely what we invited to become. This invitation is what Jesus articulates powerfully in Matthew 25 – which forms the heart of the hymn we sung a few minutes ago: whatever you did for the least of these my sisters and brothers, you did for me.

We realize our truest selves when we follow the way of Jesus, when we take up the cross and follow him, and when we allow ourselves to be confronted by him in and through the lives of the outcast, the poor, the marginalized, the broken.

This mystical way is far from easy, and, to be honest, it is not actually simple either. That is to say, the theology is rich, deep, and complicated, and worthy of a lifetime of reflection. So this is, as always, preliminary and partial, and I’ll draw it to a close this morning with a paragraph from the book that some of us read together over the summer, James Carroll’s Christ Actually:

The key to the actuality of Christ is precisely in the imitation of Jesus: the study, in Dorothy Day’s phrase, of our life conformed to his; the following, as [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer put it; what [Albert] Schweitzer called the stepping in to help in Jesus’ name. Why? Because what was revealed in Jesus – what made others eventually see him as Son of Man, Christ, Logos, God – was that his capacity for transcendence (transfiguration, resurrection, call it what you will) was exactly a capacity that lives in every person. Not just those we designate as saints. That is why the profound ordinariness of transcendence as beheld in him was essential – it was ordinary enough for each one of us to match, with our fears, irascibility, vanities, and doubts; also our hopes, gifts, desires, and strengths. Acting fully as who we are, the imitation of Christ is the way to actualize in ourselves what makes Jesus matter.[5]

Who do you say that I am? As for me, Jesus is the one who calls me beyond my deepest fears into my fullest self – the son of the man calls to me to be a human being, fully alive. He calls you, too. May we travel the way together. Amen.

---

[1] Bryan Sirchio, “Follow Me” on Justice & Love, Crosswind Music, 1999.

[2] Ibid.

[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I, i.

[4] Walter Wink, The Human Being (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 47.

[5] James Carroll, Christ Actually (New York: Viking, 2014) 265-6.

Thy Word and the Forsaken

Psalms 22 and 27

November 8, 2015

You’ve probably seen some variation on the internet meme about God not giving you more than you can handle. One I saw last week concluded, “If God never gives me more than I can handle then God must think I’m a badass.”

It’s cute as a meme. It is terrible as a theological statement. Not only that, it is destructive and insulting to those who truly suffer and feel abandoned and alone in their suffering.

Consider just the past hundred years of human history, and you quickly understand why such a statement is terrible theology. If you say, “God never gives you more than you can handle,” then, at best, you make God a lousy judge of human character. After all, you don’t have to look very carefully at just the past few years to find countless people suffering countless cruelties far beyond the capacity of any human to endure.

At worst, if you stick with the logic of the meme, you make of God a divine sadist who thought that the Holocaust would be a good test for the Jews, and for everyone else caught up in the Nazi death machine.

No. God does not hand out suffering to test our faith or our capacity for suffering. God is not the author of our pain.

But dismissing poor theology is not the same as articulating an alternative, and it falls far short of doxology – that is to say, a proclamation of praise. What, then, can we proclaim about the difficult word that arises in Psalm 22, and that is repeated in Matthew’s account of the crucifixion in which Jesus’ final words are, “My God, my God – why have you forsaken me?”

As theologian Douglas John Hall writes in the preface to his book, God & Human Suffering, “God … and human suffering! Perhaps the most difficult combination of words in the Christian vocabulary – in the human vocabulary!”[1] It is, of course, far from a recent combination. Indeed, as Hall notes, the suffering of the community of the church is a predominate them of New Testament writings.[2] The older testament testifies, as well, to the universality of suffering as part of the human condition.

As the dread pirate Roberts told Princess Buttercup, “life is pain, princess; anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.”

Of course, that is not all that life is. Life is also joy and laughter, and anyone who tells you otherwise is also selling something.

Scripture, on the other hand, testifies to the fullness of life from the joy of new birth to the grief in response to life’s ending, and everything in between – laughter at unexpected good fortune, joy in triumphs, pain at defeats, suffering in oppression, determination in the struggle.

Scripture confronts honestly the experience of sorrow and suffering, and expresses more than once the feeling of abandonment. Nowhere is that feeling articulated more powerfully than in Jesus’ cry from the cross. What do we make of that troubling word?

It’s worth noting again that the gospels are not journalism, they are theological testimony and proclamation of good news. That is to say, who knows if Jesus actually said these words?

We do assume that the first readers of Matthew’s gospel would have been familiar with the words. The scholarly consensus holds that Matthew wrote to an early Jewish-Christian community that would have been intimately familiar with the Jewish texts cites throughout the story.

The larger question, though, is why put these words on the lips of the dying Christ? What does it mean to proclaim this, to include this passage in your proclamation? What does it tell us about Jesus? About God? About suffering? And, if this is gospel, then what is the good news in it?

Some interpreters suggest that the line is evidence that Jesus lost his trust in God, and, in that moment, believed his life had been a total failure, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Others insist that the line – which quotes the first stanza of Psalm 22 – can only be understood in the context of the entirety of that psalm which ends with praise and the profession of deep and abiding faithfulness.[3]

Personally, I think the truth runs through an uneasy middle place for most of us, and, perhaps, even for Jesus. That is to say, in the midst of our suffering and sorrow, most of us experience a mix of loss and longing, despair and hope, abandonment and comforting presence. Both ends of the struggle are real, and both are true.

The journey of faith is not a straight line, but rather a tortuous route that swings – sometimes wildly – between deep doubt and utter trust. That is why, for followers of Jesus, the cross stands at the center of the community of the church.

The Protestant reformers insisted that the marks of the true church – one, holy, catholic, and apostolic body – include also, at the center, the cross. As Douglas Hall put it, by this “Luther certainly did not mean the presence of crosses, jeweled or roughhewn, with or without the Christus figure, but some real evidence of Christian participation in the sufferings of Christ in this world.”[4]

But why? It’s not for the sake of martyrdom, though surely there have been martyrs. Rather, throughout the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the call of God to the people of God is always a call to serve in God’s world. The church is called today just as the people of God have always been called – elect of every nation, yet one throughout the world, as the old hymn puts it.

As Hall notes, “there is a profound blessedness in its election. But the blessedness is not of the sort that human nature usually cherishes; so the prophets must ceaselessly remind the people that its shalom is inseparably linked with a vocation within history which will lead it again and again into wilderness, exile, rejection, defeat, and other forms of suffering.”[5]

Or, as my preaching mentor said to me when I called him immediately after being asked to resign my first pastorate, “David, if we are doing our jobs there will be scars.”

There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we live this side of the Promised Land. There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we live in a broken world, and the power of evil is real. There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we are called to resist evil and work for healing and reconciliation in a wounded and divided world.

The promise of the Messiah, that story we will soon celebrate again, retains its power only because we understand that the world stills needs saving. The words of Isaiah, which Matthew used so effectively to interpret Jesus’ life, indicate the peculiar salvation Jesus will offer: “In all their affliction he was afflicted. … In his love and in his pity he redeemed them” (Isaiah 63:9).

As James Cone put it in God of the Oppressed, “Israel’s suffering is redemptive because Yahweh is present with it, bearing the pain of sin so that liberation will become a reality among all people.”[6] Cone’s work underscores the significance of the African-American experience of suffering for understanding the depth of the promise of faith:

Although the continued existence of black suffering offers a serious challenge to the biblical and black faith, it does not negate it. The reason is found in Jesus Christ who is God’s decisive Word of liberation in our experience that makes it possible to struggle for freedom because we know that God is struggling too.[7]

Cone’s work reminds us powerfully that while the experience of suffering is universal, it is also particular, and is particularly felt in the context of injustice and oppression. After all, the God of the oppressed first show’s the divine face upon hearing the cries of the oppressed struggling under the hand of their taskmasters in Egypt.

We hear that reminder and no doubt think first of Moses, the great liberator of the Exodus, the first true hero of the faith. Perhaps, in recalling Moses – especially having just quoted James Cone – we might think also of Dr. King, sometimes called black Moses.

That is all well and good. Heroes and role models can be powerful. But what I hope we also hear in this is the call to the church – to the community of faith. For if we are to take seriously the call to be the body of Christ in the world we must understand both the call and the cost of discipleship, both the reality of suffering and the call to heal it, both the inevitability of feeling forsaken and the invitation to live for the sake of the forsaken.

Nowhere in this should we hear anything like a “celebration of suffering,” or a call to martyrdom for the sake of making martyrs. To such I can merely say, climb down off the cross because we can use the wood to build something better.

No, as Hall concludes, “The object […] is to identify oneself with the suffering that is already there in one’s world, to let oneself be led by the love of Christ into solidarity with those who suffer, and to accept the consequences of this solidarity in the belief – the joyful belief – that in this way God is still at work in the world, making a conquest of its sin and suffering from within.”[8]

Friends, there is a balm in Gilead, and the great joy of our faith comes in the invitation to participate in that very balm. For we all live in Gilead. Thanks be to God. Amen.

---

[1] Douglas John Hall, God & Human Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986) 13.

[2] Ibid. 123.

[3] For a review of perspectives see Douglas R.A. Hare, Interpretation: Matthew (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993) 321-25.

[4] Hall, 123-4.

[5] Ibid. 125.

[6] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1975) 159.

[7] Ibid. 178.

[8] Hall, 145.

Thy Word and Thy Money

Matthew 19:16-28; Psalm 24

November 1, 2015

Our third reading this morning is the 24^th Psalm:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
   the world, and those who live in it; 
for he has founded it on the seas,
   and established it on the rivers. 
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
   And who shall stand in his holy place? 
Those who have clean hands and pure hearts,
   who do not lift up their souls to what is false,
   and do not swear deceitfully. 
They will receive blessing from the Lord,
   and vindication from the God of their salvation. 
Such is the company of those who seek him,
   who seek the face of the God of Jacob.^*

The earth belongs to God; the earth and all those who live upon it.

This simple, joyous, and, let’s face it, rather innocuous sounding little psalm of praise contains, if we attend to it with care, perhaps the most radical phrase in all of scripture: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.

Consider what it disrupts. Consider what it turns upside down. Consider the root that it draws us back toward.

We live in a culture that invites us to order our lives along certain more or less clearly drawn distinctions. We divide and subdivide our lives into work time and family time, public property and private property, secular space and sacred space, friend and foe, black and white. We divide our finances along similar and often related lines.

Yet this simple line from the 24^th psalm obliterates all such lines and distinctions with its majestic insistence that all that is or ever will be belongs to God.

We live in an age in which our interconnectedness invites us to reconsider old divisions. As Quaker writer Sharon Parks observes, “As we try to defend the security of our private home, we are simultaneously rediscovering the economic-ecological truth of our profound interdependence within the small planet home we share.”[1]

Martin Luther King reminded us powerfully that “we are all bound together in a single garment of destiny; whatever effects one directly effects all indirectly.”

We all belong to God, and, moreover, we all belong to one another. So whatever we hold, we hold in trust, thus we hold with care but we hold loosely.

That is such a counter-cultural perspective. We are taught to hold on tight, to grasp what we can and never let it go. After all, the one who dies with the most toys wins, right?

This is the challenge facing the young man who comes to Jesus seeking the key to salvation. He’s got the traditional obligations of his religious practice down cold. Commandments? Check. Yet he knows that something is missing. His life feels less than whole. Perhaps he feels disconnected from his community and its traditions even though he is following the letter of its law. He has so much material wealth that he should be living a life of ease but, instead, he feels a vague dis-ease. So he comes to this great teacher seeking advice.

“Get rid of your stuff,” Jesus tells him. “Your money cannot buy what you seek. Indeed, the only way to get what you want is to give up what you have.”

The young man goes away grieving because he has so much. He cannot imagine life without what he has accumulated. Other versions of the story note that Jesus looks with compassion on him, and though Matthew does not include that detail, it’s important to note what else is missing: any notion of condemnation. Jesus does not condemn the rich young man, and, in fact, notes how difficult it is for the rich to enter the kindom of God – about like squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle.

Why so hard? What is it about wealth, about the accumulation of stuff, that makes kindom life so challenging?

The key is that deceptively simple phrase from Psalm 24. The earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein – including all of our money, all of our investments, all of our stuff. When we measure our own worth by the balance of our savings account we’re using a measure that is foreign to God. Moreover, such a measure is destructive of the values of the kindom of God where the commonwealth is central and individual accumulation is of little value at best and, at worst, can be destructive of community life.

In a culture that fetishizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous, that idolizes affluence, this is a profoundly difficult word. Indeed, it is not too far a stretch to take this story and substitute America for the rich young man, and to see that we have turned away grieving from the invitation to follow the way of Jesus.

Fortunately, though we may turn away from that invitation, the one who issues is never turns away from us. God is faithful still, and God calls us, even now, to follow the way of Jesus into abundant life – life marked by the joyous celebrations of a people laughing together, marked by the deep and profound grieving of a people weeping together, marked by the incredible abundance shared by a people breaking bread together.

We live in the one of the most affluent communities in the richest nation in the world. We are the ones coming to Jesus and, so often, turning away because we grasp so tightly to that wealth. Letting go is not easy, nor does it happen all at once. It is a journey, and we make the path by walking it. It is a life that we create by practicing it bit by bit.

Jesus invites us, and more than that, prepares a table for us to ensure that we are fed for the journey, that we have enough and more than enough to walk the road before us. We gather in community at this table so that we learn to trust one another, for the way is not simple but we come to know that though we may stumble and we may fall, there’s another hand to help us up when we follow Jesus’ call. Come and see; and let us break bread together. Amen.

---

[1] Sharon Daloz Parks, “Household Economics,” in Dorothy C. Bass, Practicing Our Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) 44.