Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • The Things That Make for Peace

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 17

    The Things That Make for Peace

    P.C. Enniss, Jr.

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    So far as we know, Jesus wept publicly three times. One is recorded in the gospel narrative, as on the eve of Palm Sunday, astride that ridiculous donkey descending the slopes of the Mount of Olives with the spectacular panoramic view of Jerusalem spread before him, the echo of the crowd in his ears (“Hosanna , blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. . . . Peace in heaven and glory to the highest”) when abruptly Jesus halts the parade. Pausing, overlooking the city, through misty eyes Jesus murmurs, “If you only knew the things that make for peace . . . but you cannot see.” One wishes Jesus had been more explicit. One wishes that time, or circumstance , or inclination had permitted Jesus to deliver a discourse on the things that make for peace. Much is implied, of course, from other words spoken at other times. Likewise, much that makes for peace is obvious. Still, he didn’t say it! He didn’t tell us, in words clear and incontrovertible so that forever afterward the church could say to the world, “You see, these are the things that make for peace. The Bible says, one, two, three.” We wish Jesus had told us more specifically the things that make for peace; only, he chose to leave it a mystery—or is it so obvious? Either way, the clue comes in the phrase “the things tending to thy peace” which the Expositor’s Greek Testament interprets (Vol. 1:609) “You do not know the things tending to your peace = salvation.” Through the editor’s use of equal marks, the translator equates “peace” and “salvation.” Interesting translation, for the Palm Sunday scenario is peppered with military imagery. The “triumphant entry” bore all the marks of a military parade. The crowds sang praises to the “king who comes in the name of the Lord” in much the same manner as they had welcomed victorious warriors for generations. So the scene is described, appropriately, in military language for that is what “they saw” as they lined the streets of Jerusalem that Sunday morning. What they did not see, hidden from their eyes, was that Jesus was talking not “military language” but “salvation language.” It is as if Jesus had said, “You do not understand what it takes for salvation” and what they heard was “You do not understand what it takes to stop the war, to bring the boys home, to get the economy moving again.” Very simply, though they understood Jesus’ words, they did not understand Jesus’ meaning. They understood “peace” in narrow, political, military terms; while Jesus understood “peace” as being as wide as “salvation” itself, including political and military peace, but only as a subheading under a much more comprehensive kind of salvation which Jesus came to bring. Consequently, we must understand that peacemaking is always more than the cessation of warfare. Peacemaking, like salvation, has to do with reconciliation between all who are estranged—individuals from God, individuals from one another, groups from groups, neighborhoods from neighborhoods, na-

    Page 18

    tions from nations. But if peacemaking is more than the cessation of warfare, it is never less than the cessation of warfare, and that is the secondary focus of this essay. There is a story being told that reportedly traces back to one of the SALT talk negotiations, that compares the current world crisis to a football stadium crowded with spectators awaiting the start of the game. Just after the national anthem is sung, with the teams already in place for the kick-off, the announcer —with trembling voice—tells the spectators that a terrorist group has taken over the stadium. All the gates are locked. No one may leave. Everyone must remain seated. In horror, he adds that sticks of dynamite are strategically placed beneath the stands, enough to annihilate the entire stadium and everybody in it. The dynamite is set to be detonated the moment either team scores a touchdown. Then he says, “Play ball!” It is, you see, a new game. Survival depends on devising new rules for playing the game. Nothing short of a whole different way of thinking —different purpose—different goals—a mindset that embraces a different way of winning—will save us. Nothing short of conversion will do. Not, however, conversion in the narrowly “religious” sense of the culture, but in the broadest possible sense of utter newness. (“If one is in Christ, that person is a new being altogether”). “Religion” claims Michael Novak “. . . is primarily a conversion to the sense of the sacred. By conversion, I mean a focusing of one’s way of life: I mean taking up one standpoint, after having occupied another. . . . to be religious, then, is to experience the hierophany. It is to recall a day and an hour—or perhaps a slowly dawning realization during an identifiable stretch of time—where one’s sense of reality was altered. It is to be changed, to have one’s psychic center of gravity changed. It is to regard the world in a new way. It is to be oriented. It is to be centered.” (Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Doue, p. 28). Nothing less than that kind of conversion , so comprehensive as to include the way we think about war, will save us. Only, therein lies the problem, because the world “knows” war is serious business with little place for preachers, except of course to bury the carnage and hopefully, to bless the war effort as the “best” way to insure the peace. It is still amusing, and telling, that conscription poster that appeared all over England at the outbreak of World War II, declaring that every citizen over eighteen except women, imbeciles, and ministers of the gospel was to register for the draft. That old attitude that war is too serious a matter for religion is still with us, and the conversion required is one comprehensive enough to include a different way of thinking—about everything! A riddle that was going around a few years ago makes the point. It goes like this: a man and his son were in a terrible automobile accident. The father was killed instantly. The son, critically injured, was rushed to the emergency room where it was determined that immediate surgery was required to save his life. The surgeon was summoned and quickly arrived. Only, the surgeon took one look at the victim and declared in horror, “I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son.” To “get” the riddle, one must adjust to a way of thinking different from the way most of us have been accustomed to thinking most of our lives. The surgeon, of course, was the boy’s mother.

    Page 19

    Jesus never suggested that conversion was anything less than a total and radical change in the way one thinks about things—about everything. Nobody has been more helpful to me in pointing up the radical nature of our peacemaking than Walter Brueggemann in his comments on the eighth chapter of Jeremiah. Brueggemann bores in on verse 12 which describes the religious leadership of Jeremiah’s time and place. “They were not ashamed. They did not know how to blush.” Then Brueggemann tells of the time he was in the sixth grade and a two-engine plane crashed in a cornfield near his house. He ran, with his young friends, to watch as the ambulance crew, with rubber gloves, lifted little bloody pieces of the passengers from the crater the wreckage had carved in the cornfield, and he tells of watching as they stuffed what they could find of those people into plastic bags. But the memory that lingers most vividly, he recalls, as he stood there staring at that crater of “human hamburger,” is that of “watching a woman standing next to me holding a baby, eating an apple,” and what he remembers, he says, is wondering, “How can she do that, now, here?” Only later, in mature reflection on those twelve-year-old feelings, Brueggemann says he understands his bewilderment. “She had no shame. She had no sense of incongruity, no sense of disproportion. . . .” Then the theologian charges that the greatest task of religious leadership in this country today is to help cynical Americans learn to blush at the incongruity of so much with which we are confronted. We have, in our time, he claims, all but lost our capacity to be appalled and indignant and ashamed. What a condemnation ! Only, how true! Virtually nobody in a position of leadership and power seems ashamed and embarrassed that military spending is now costing the peoples of the earth more than one million dollars a minute. The world spends an average of $19,300 per soldier per year, while spending $380 per school-aged child for education , and there is little embarrassment. In the world, there are 556 soldiers per 100,000 people. There are eighty-five physicians, and few seem embarrassed at the incongruity. Nuclear weapons can travel from western Europe to Moscow in six minutes, while the average rural mother in Africa must walk several hours a day for the family’s water supply, and there is little blushing over the inconsistency. The United Nations calculated what it would cost to provide adequate food, clothing, medical care and education for every individual on the face of the earth, and it amounted to what the world spends on armaments in two weeks. And no one seems embarrassed. Must we not conclude that Brueggemann is right: “We have lost the capacity to blush. But,” he adds, “the preacher’s job is not policy. The preacher’s job is to open up the deep recesses of human sensitivity, to observe there the incongruities that are eating people’s hearts out.” The preacher’s job first of all is to resensitize his or her own eyes to the embarrassments of our days, and then to cultivate where possible a community of authentic Christian prudes who are offended to the point of rebellion by the obscenity of it all. Only, embarrassment is not innate. One learns to blush. The kind of embarrassment Jeremiah has in mind requires a reference point, some norm for shame. It is the kind of embarrassment that comes from conversion, from having one’s eyes opened, from turning around and seeing for the first time. One wonders, and doubts, if there was

    Page 20

    much embarrassment on the part of the crowds who followed Jesus during the events of that last week of his life which we call “holy”; or was there a kind of cynical numbness derived from the sense that this is the way things are, always have been and always will be. One suspects the latter. It is pure speculation, of course, but one suspects, if they were anything like most of us, that the only embarrassment they felt as Jesus halted the procession to survey the city, was that the parade might get off schedule. And so Brueggemann, again, identifies “numbness” as the dominant feeling of our time, as it was in Jeremiah’s, as indeed it must have seemed to Jesus a week later surveying the crowd that encircled the cross. Brueggemann quotes Robert Lifton, who has studied what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done to us all, as saying that the nuclear threat now is so deep and so wide and so unthinkable and unspeakable that the only way we can handle it is to grow numb, and cynical, and not to notice. Peace begins by noticing, as salvation begins by noticing. If Easter is the paradigm event of salvation, through which we see reflected our hope, then the Golgotha event with its calloused centurians tossing dice for his garments, with its sleepy disciples on the Mount of Olives, with its fickle crowd crying “Crucify him”—Golgotha is the paradigm event of the world’s apathy, through which we see reflected our despair. The way out of despair into peace is the way out of death into life. The things that make for peace are the things that make for salvation. The fundamentalists are right, of course, “Christ is the answer.” Only, not in any simplistic, privatistic formula so narrow as to fit on our automobile bumpers. Rather, Christ is the answer as he “opens our eyes” to those revalatory truths of God by which our sense of reality is changed. To be converted is “. . . to be changed, to have one’s psychic center of gravity changed. It is to regard the world in a new way. It is to be oriented. It is to be centered.” It is to see things differently, where there are new norms for appropriateness where war is not the norm, peace is the norm—suspicion is not the norm, trust is—greed is not the norm, sharing is—competition is not the norm, cooperation is—deceit is not the norm, truth is—revenge is not the norm—mercy is—hate and hostility are not the norms—love and hospitality are the norms—and finally, death and destruction are not the norms, but life and salvation are the norms. In an absurd story, though not so absurd as our modern-day war stories with more “real” names like Hiroshima, Beirut, Belfast, Guernica, Vietnam, Munro Leaf told of a bull named Ferdinand. Only, Ferdinand was no ordinary bull. Ferdinand saw things differently. Unlike all other bulls in history and tradition, the great symbol of strength, aggression, violence and warfare, Ferdinand preferred the peaceful life of harmony and tranquility where he could enjoy the trees and the flowers. To accentuate the anomaly further, as the years went by, Ferdinand grew into a very large and ferocious looking bull. The story is familiar. When the men came to Madrid scouting for the most spirited beasts they could find in order to take them back for the famous bull fights, they found Ferdinand in the field with all the other young bulls. While the others, eager to be chosen, put on the most ferocious display, Ferdinand was content to sit in the corner of the field smelling the flowers and watching the show. Only, as Ferdinand sat down, he had the misfortune to sit on a bumble

    Page 21

    bee which stung him mercilessly, whereupon Ferdinand rose with a great roar and began charging about, snorting and bellowing, butting the air and pawing the ground in a way that impressed the scouts tremendously. So impressed, they took Ferdinand to Madrid for the great bull fight. On the day of the contest , a great crowd assembled, for it was said Ferdinand was the fiercest bull in all Spain. Only, when the gate was opened and Ferdinand strolled into the center of the ring, amid the wild cheers of the crowd, he smelled the lovely flowers in the hair of all the lovely ladies. And Ferdinand calmly sat down to enjoy it all. Nothing the matadors or the picadors could do would make Ferdinand fight. They hit him, screamed at him, waved their red flags, poked him, but Ferdinand refused to fight, preferring the peacefulness of the spring day and the beautiful flowers. And so finally they took him back to the pasture, “. . . where he sits to this day under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers.” Conrad Hyers (The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith, 150) suggests that this favorite story for children raises for adults the basic question: “What is human nature and destiny, and where is true life to be found?” (Is this not the question of salvation?) For Ferdinand’s friends, life was to be found in Madrid, in the bull fight, in the aggressive life of adventuresome combat, finally in the valiant fight to the death. Only Ferdinand saw things differently. Ferdinand noticed things the others did not notice, the simple pleasures of the pasture, the humble beauties of the flowers, the trees, the butterflies. The story has a way of cutting across the grain of the sort of “bullishness” that characterizes contemporary civilization. In a world increasingly influenced by western aggressiveness, the story offers alternative norms—stillness, harmony and peace. Listen to Hyers:

    Ferdinand is no hero, but he is a very remarkable bull. He has none of those dramatic qualities that will attract the attention of pioneering, competitive , and conquering temperaments, and he performs none of those marvelous feats that might give him a name and turn him into a stirring legend. He climbs no mountains, plunges into no watery abysses, slays no dragons, rescues no maidens, outwits no gods or demons, and lays claim to no saving discoveries. Yet one suspects that in a peculiar manner all his own, he is already where the hero is trying so valiantly to get.

    Jesus did not spell out the things that make for peace. Was it, one wonders , because it is such a deep mystery—or is it so obvious? Munro Leaf suggests , in his children’s story of Ferdinand, that docile, peaceful Ferdinand already possesses what the other warring bulls are fighting for. And the whole story is about as absurdly obvious as the proliferation of nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear annihilation. The only difference is children hear the story and laugh. We read the newspaper and weep, for we know not the things that make for peace. When World War II ended, I was fourteen; but I remember a phrase that captured the mood of those days. The country was called on to “convert from war to peace.” Tank plants had to re-tool to make passenger cars again and parachute factories readjusted for ladies lingerie. Empty colleges had to pre-

    Page 22

    pare for the flood of returning G.I.’s, family routines had to change to accommodate a father the children hardly knew. The moment peace was declared, nothing was the same. What was required was a conversion from a mindset committed to the making of war, to a mindset committed to the making of peace. Nothing less than a conversion would do. So it is today.

  • The Things That Make for Peace

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 2

    The Things That Make for Peace

    P.C. Enniss, Jr.

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    So far as we know, Jesus wept publicly three times. One is recorded in the gospel narrative, as on the eve of Palm Sunday, astride that ridiculous donkey descending the slopes of the Mount of Olives with the spectacular panoramic view of Jerusalem spread before him, the echo of the crowd in his ears (“Hosanna , blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. . . . Peace in heaven and glory to the highest”) when abruptly Jesus halts the parade. Pausing, overlooking the city, through misty eyes Jesus murmurs, “If you only knew the things that make for peace . . . but you cannot see.” One wishes Jesus had been more explicit. One wishes that time, or circumstance , or inclination had permitted Jesus to deliver a discourse on the things that make for peace. Much is implied, of course, from other words spoken at other times. Likewise, much that makes for peace is obvious. Still, he didn’t say it! He didn’t tell us, in words clear and incontrovertible so that forever afterward the church could say to the world, “You see, these are the things that make for peace. The Bible says, one, two, three.” We wish Jesus had told us more specifically the things that make for peace; only, he chose to leave it a mystery—or is it so obvious? Either way, the clue comes in the phrase “the things tending to thy peace” which the Expositor’s Greek Testament interprets (Vol. 1:609) “You do not know the things tending to your peace = salvation.” Through the editor’s use of equal marks, the translator equates “peace” and “salvation.” Interesting translation, for the Palm Sunday scenario is peppered with military imagery. The “triumphant entry” bore all the marks of a military parade. The crowds sang praises to the “king who comes in the name of the Lord” in much the same manner as they had welcomed victorious warriors for generations. So the scene is described, appropriately, in military language for that is what “they saw” as they lined the streets of Jerusalem that Sunday morning. What they did not see, hidden from their eyes, was that Jesus was talking not “military language” but “salvation language.” It is as if Jesus had said, “You do not understand what it takes for salvation” and what they heard was “You do not understand what it takes to stop the war, to bring the boys home, to get the economy moving again.” Very simply, though they understood Jesus’ words, they did not understand Jesus’ meaning. They understood “peace” in narrow, political, military terms; while Jesus understood “peace” as being as wide as “salvation” itself, including political and military peace, but only as a subheading under a much more comprehensive kind of salvation which Jesus came to bring. Consequently, we must understand that peacemaking is always more than the cessation of warfare. Peacemaking, like salvation, has to do with reconciliation between all who are estranged—individuals from God, individuals from one another, groups from groups, neighborhoods from neighborhoods, na-

    Page 3

    tions from nations. But if peacemaking is more than the cessation of warfare, it is never less than the cessation of warfare, and that is the secondary focus of this essay. There is a story being told that reportedly traces back to one of the SALT talk negotiations, that compares the current world crisis to a football stadium crowded with spectators awaiting the start of the game. Just after the national anthem is sung, with the teams already in place for the kick-off, the announcer —with trembling voice—tells the spectators that a terrorist group has taken over the stadium. All the gates are locked. No one may leave. Everyone must remain seated. In horror, he adds that sticks of dynamite are strategically placed beneath the stands, enough to annihilate the entire stadium and everybody in it. The dynamite is set to be detonated the moment either team scores a touchdown. Then he says, “Play ball!” It is, you see, a new game. Survival depends on devising new rules for playing the game. Nothing short of a whole different way of thinking —different purpose—different goals—a mindset that embraces a different way of winning—will save us. Nothing short of conversion will do. Not, however, conversion in the narrowly “religious” sense of the culture, but in the broadest possible sense of utter newness. (“If one is in Christ, that person is a new being altogether”). “Religion” claims Michael Novak “. . . is primarily a conversion to the sense of the sacred. By conversion, I mean a focusing of one’s way of life: I mean taking up one standpoint, after having occupied another. . . . to be religious, then, is to experience the hierophany. It is to recall a day and an hour—or perhaps a slowly dawning realization during an identifiable stretch of time—where one’s sense of reality was altered. It is to be changed, to have one’s psychic center of gravity changed. It is to regard the world in a new way. It is to be oriented. It is to be centered.” (Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove, p. 28). Nothing less than that kind of conversion , so comprehensive as to include the way we think about war, will save us. Only, therein lies the problem, because the world “knows” war is serious business with little place for preachers, except of course to bury the carnage and hopefully, to bless the war effort as the “best” way to insure the peace. It is still amusing, and telling, that conscription poster that appeared all over England at the outbreak of World War II, declaring that every citizen over eighteen except women, imbeciles, and ministers of the gospel was to register for the draft. That old attitude that war is too serious a matter for religion is still with us, and the conversion required is one comprehensive enough to include a different way of thinking—about everything! A riddle that was going around a few years ago makes the point. It goes like this: a man and his son were in a terrible automobile accident. The father was killed instantly. The son, critically injured, was rushed to the emergency room where it was determined that immediate surgery was required to save his life. The surgeon was summoned and quickly arrived. Only, the surgeon took one look at the victim and declared in horror, “I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son.” To “get” the riddle, one must adjust to a way of thinking different from the way most of us have been accustomed to thinking most of our lives. The surgeon, of course, was the boy’s mother.

    Page 4

    Jesus never suggested that conversion was anything less than a total and radical change in the way one thinks about things—about everything. Nobody has been more helpful to me in pointing up the radical nature of our peacemaking than Walter Brueggemann in his comments on the eighth chapter of Jeremiah. Brueggemann bores in on verse 12 which describes the religious leadership of Jeremiah’s time and place. “They were not ashamed. They did not know how to blush.” Then Brueggemann tells of the time he was in the sixth grade and a two-engine plane crashed in a cornfield near his house. He ran, with his young friends, to watch as the ambulance crew, with rubber gloves, lifted little bloody pieces of the passengers from the crater the wreckage had carved in the cornfield, and he tells of watching as they stuffed what they could find of those people into plastic bags. But the memory that lingers most vividly, he recalls, as he stood there staring at that crater of “human hamburger,” is that of “watching a woman standing next to me holding a baby, eating an apple,” and what he remembers, he says, is wondering, “How can she do that, now, here?” Only later, in mature reflection on those twelve-year-old feelings, Brueggemann says he understands his bewilderment. “She had no shame. She had no sense of incongruity, no sense of disproportion. . . . ” Then the theologian charges that the greatest task of religious leadership in this country today is to help cynical Americans learn to blush at the incongruity of so much with which we are confronted. We have, in our time, he claims, all but lost our capacity to be appalled and indignant and ashamed. What a condemnation ! Only, how true! Virtually nobody in a position of leadership and power seems ashamed and embarrassed that military spending is now costing the peoples of the earth more than one million dollars a minute. The world spends an average of $19,300 per soldier per year, while spending $380 per school-aged child for education , and there is little embarrassment. In the world, there are 556 soldiers per 100,000 people. There are eighty-five physicians, and few seem embarrassed at the incongruity. Nuclear weapons can travel from western Europe to Moscow in six minutes, while the average rural mother in Africa must walk several hours a day for the family’s water supply, and there is little blushing over the inconsistency. The United Nations calculated what it would cost to provide adequate food, clothing, medical care and education for every individual on the face of the earth, and it amounted to what the world spends on armaments in two weeks. And no one seems embarrassed. Must we not conclude that Brueggemann is right: “We have lost the capacity to blush. But,” he adds, “the preacher’s job is not policy. The preacher’s job is to open up the deep recesses of human sensitivity, to observe there the incongruities that are eating people’s hearts out.” The preacher’s job first of all is to resensitize his or her own eyes to the embarrassments of our days, and then to cultivate where possible a community of authentic Christian prudes who are offended to the point of rebellion by the obscenity of it all. Only, embarrassment is not innate. One learns to blush. The kind of embarrassment Jeremiah has in mind requires a reference point, some norm for shame. It is the kind of embarrassment that comes from conversion, from having one’s eyes opened, from turning around and seeing for the first time. One wonders, and doubts, if there was

    Page 5

    much embarrassment on the part of the crowds who followed Jesus during the events of that last week of his life which we call “holy”; or was there a kind of cynical numbness derived from the sense that this is the way things are, always have been and always will be. One suspects the latter. It is pure speculation, of course, but one suspects, if they were anything like most of us, that the only embarrassment they felt as Jesus halted the procession to survey the city, was that the parade might get off schedule. And so Brueggemann, again, identifies “numbness” as the dominant feeling of our time, as it was in Jeremiah’s, as indeed it must have seemed to Jesus a week later surveying the crowd that encircled the cross. Brueggemann quotes Robert Lifton, who has studied what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done to us all, as saying that the nuclear threat now is so deep and so wide and so unthinkable and unspeakable that the only way we can handle it is to grow numb, and cynical, and not to notice. Peace begins by noticing, as salvation begins by noticing. If Easter is the paradigm event of salvation, through which we see reflected our hope, then the Golgotha event with its calloused centurians tossing dice for his garments, with its sleepy disciples on the Mount of Olives, with its fickle crowd crying “Crucify him”—Golgotha is the paradigm event of the world’s apathy, through which we see reflected our despair. The way out of despair into peace is the way out of death into life. The things that make for peace are the things that make for salvation. The fundamentalists are right, of course, “Christ is the answer.” Only, not in any simplistic, privatistic formula so narrow as to fit on our automobile bumpers. Rather, Christ is the answer as he “opens our eyes” to those revalatory truths of God by which our sense of reality is changed. To be converted is “. . . to be changed, to have one’s psychic center of gravity changed. It is to regard the world in a new way. It is to be oriented. It is to be centered.” It is to see things differently, where there are new norms for appropriateness where war is not the norm, peace is the norm—suspicion is not the norm, trust is—greed is not the norm, sharing is—competition is not the norm, cooperation is—deceit is not the norm, truth is—revenge is not the norm—mercy is—hate and hostility are not the norms—love and hospitality are the norms—and finally, death and destruction are not the norms, but life and salvation are the norms. In an absurd story, though not so absurd as our modern-day war stories with more “real” names like Hiroshima, Beirut, Belfast, Guernica, Vietnam, Munro Leaf told of a bull named Ferdinand. Only, Ferdinand was no ordinary bull. Ferdinand saw things differently. Unlike all other bulls in history and tradition, the great symbol of strength, aggression, violence and warfare, Ferdinand preferred the peaceful life of harmony and tranquility where he could enjoy the trees and the flowers. To accentuate the anomaly further, as the years went by, Ferdinand grew into a very large and ferocious looking bull. The story is familiar. When the men came to Madrid scouting for the most spirited beasts they could find in order to take them back for the famous bull fights, they found Ferdinand in the field with all the other young bulls. While the others, eager to be chosen, put on the most ferocious display, Ferdinand was content to sit in the corner of the field smelling the flowers and watching the show. Only, as Ferdinand sat down, he had the misfortune to sit on a bumble

    Page 6

    bee which stung him mercilessly, whereupon Ferdinand rose with a great roar and began charging about, snorting and bellowing, butting the air and pawing the ground in a way that impressed the scouts tremendously. So impressed, they took Ferdinand to Madrid for the great bull fight. On the day of the contest , a great crowd assembled, for it was said Ferdinand was the fiercest bull in all Spain. Only, when the gate was opened and Ferdinand strolled into the center of the ring, amid the wild cheers of the crowd, he smelled the lovely flowers in the hair of all the lovely ladies. And Ferdinand calmly sat down to enjoy it all. Nothing the matadors or the picadors could do would make Ferdinand fight. They hit him, screamed at him, waved their red flags, poked him, but Ferdinand refused to fight, preferring the peacefulness of the spring day and the beautiful flowers. And so finally they took him back to the pasture, “. . . where he sits to this day under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers.” Conrad Hyers (The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith, 150) suggests that this favorite story for children raises for adults the basic question: “What is human nature and destiny, and where is true life to be found?” (Is this not the question of salvation?) For Ferdinand’s friends, life was to be found in Madrid, in the bull fight, in the aggressive life of adventuresome combat, finally in the valiant fight to the death. Only Ferdinand saw things differently. Ferdinand noticed things the others did not notice, the simple pleasures of the pasture, the humble beauties of the flowers, the trees, the butterflies. The story has a way of cutting across the grain of the sort of “bullishness” that characterizes contemporary civilization. In a world increasingly influenced by western aggressiveness, the story offers alternative norms—stillness, harmony and peace. Listen to Hyers:

    Ferdinand is no hero, but he is a very remarkable bull. He has none of those dramatic qualities that will attract the attention of pioneering, competitive , and conquering temperaments, and he performs none of those marvelous feats that might give him a name and turn him into a stirring legend. He climbs no mountains, plunges into no watery abysses, slays no dragons, rescues no maidens, outwits no gods or demons, and lays claim to no saving discoveries. Yet one suspects that in a peculiar manner all his own, he is already where the hero is trying so valiantly to get.

    Jesus did not spell out the things that make for peace. Was it, one wonders , because it is such a deep mystery—or is it so obvious? Munro Leaf suggests , in his children’s story of Ferdinand, that docile, peaceful Ferdinand already possesses what the other warring bulls are fighting for. And the whole story is about as absurdly obvious as the proliferation of nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear annihilation. The only difference is children hear the story and laugh. We read the newspaper and weep, for we know not the things that make for peace. When World War II ended, I was fourteen; but I remember a phrase that captured the mood of those days. The country was called on to “convert from war to peace.” Tank plants had to re-tool to make passenger cars again and parachute factories readjusted for ladies lingerie. Empty colleges had to pre-

    Page 7

    pare for the flood of returning G.I.’s, family routines had to change to accommodate a father the children hardly knew. The moment peace was declared, nothing was the same. What was required was a conversion from a mindset committed to the making of war, to a mindset committed to the making of peace. Nothing less than a conversion would do. So it is today.

  • Psalm 77–the ‘Turn’ from Self to God

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 8

    Psalm 77—the “Turn” from Self to God

    Walter Brueggemann

    Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

    Psalm 77 offers a stunning embodiment of the reorientation of life most hoped for by evangelical faith. In the exposition that follows, I take the Psalm not simply as a devotional or liturgical residue of faith, but as an actual “speech pilgrimage” of one whose self spoke through to new faith. Specifically, the Psalm shows the route by which this life was moved from a preoccupation with self to a submission to and reliance upon God.

    I

    The first part of the Psalm is a fairly standard lament statement. We can enter its claim by noticing the quite different rhetorical moves made by the speaker. 1. The speaker is turned in on self in pity and self-preoccupation, and can speak of nothing but self (vss. 1-6):

    / cry aloud to God . . . / seek the Lord my hand is stretched out, my soul refuses to be comforted. J think of God, / moan / meditate, my spirit faints, my eyelids are kept by God from closing / am so troubled that J cannot speak / consider the days of old, / remember the years of long ago, I commune with my heart1 I meditate and search my spirit.

    The speaker does a complete inventory of his/her own person and sees how it is all, in every part, mobilized for self-concern.2 2. Then in verses 7-9, there is a series of rhetorical questions. But even here there is no yielding of the agenda of self:

    Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has steadfast love for ever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?

    Page 9

    There is obviously a reference to Yahweh, more than appeared in verses 1-6. But the rhetorical effort is to draw Yahweh completely into the orbit of selfconcern . In these verses there occur three of Israel’s most precious covenantal words, hesed, hanan, raham—loyalty, graciousness, compassion.The questions pose the most urgent faith issues. They ask about the very character of God. But they are questions that emerge out of an overriding self-concern. They appear to ask about God’s faithfulness. But they really ask, what about me? Even the most primal qualities of Yahweh are consumed in this self-preoccupation . Thus far we are at the pool of Narcissis.3 The speaker sounds as one who understands how it all works. He knows what mobilizes God’s hesed and rafyam. She knows how to get to it. The crisis of the poem may be one of two things. Either the speaker knows how to make it all work, which means everything has been emptied of mystery, or, more likely, even though the speaker knows how to make it work, it does not work! It is then a religion that has failed. Janzen has suggested that some rhetorical questions in the speech of the Old Testament are not mere rhetoric, but are serious questions.4 Such questions ask the unaskable. In the form of a question the speaker moves into dangerous and unexplored territory in the space between us and the throne. In our Psalm the speaker is a person of conventional obedience. He has some ground to stand on and some legitimate expectations of Yahweh. He is not a renegade who has forfeited his expectations from God. But the voice of obedience is on the move, driven there by the failure of convention. Her imagination is beginning to move, beginning to guess that God’s hesed is not unilaterally unconditional , and automatically linked to this particular believer. The poem begins to suspect that God’s hesed (if indeed God is faithful!) has other worlds to work and cannot be summoned on demand. God is not on call. There is a probe here that the space between the two partners is dangerous and unknown space. All of that space has not yet been reduced and routinized so that it can be presumed upon. Some of the space between here and God’s throne is untamed, and therefore unpredictable. And if the space is beyond control, it makes one more frantically press for the old, innocent faith which had God encapsulated. This speaker had grown comfortable with the great affirmations of Yahweh, because the great affirmations readily translated into self-serving assurance . But now that is all being blown out of the water. A God who has been reduced to the safe proposals of “a torah so righteous” (cf. Deut. 4:8) now is known to be a God whose “form is not seen” (cf. Deut. 4:12), even if that form is thought to consist in hesed, hanan, raham. The desperate rhetorical questions appear in verses 7-9 after this self-inventory of verses 1-6. The speaker begins to guess that the old sure religion is collapsing.

    II There is a striking move from the “I, I, I,” in verses 1-6 which is still safely rooted and conventional and with no failure of nerve, to the probe of the questions of verses 7-9, which ask new questions. And then there is verse 10. This verse is the crucial turn in the Psalm, exceedingly difficult to translate. This

    Page 10

    verse clearly looks both ways, back to the “I” statements of verses 1-6, forward to the rest of the Psalm (vss. 11-20). It consists in two elements. The first element is a statement about grief or trouble* The second element is a statement of change, presumably that God has changed. The translation is difficult, and there is some variation of nuance. RSV renders:

    It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.

    The Jerusalem Bible renders:

    “This” I said then “Is what distresses me;

    that the power of the Most High is no longer what it was.”

    More poignantly, the New English Bible renders:

    Has his right hand, I said, lost its grasp? Does it hang powerless, the arm of the most high? Kraus comments:6 God’s works and God’s way are for humankind inaccessible (Is. 55:8ff.). They stand in an inpenetratable, burning splendor. He himself, Yahweh, is the Holy One (Ps. 71:22, 89:19) who is “ganz Andere.” His saving deeds evidence his incomparability (Ex. 15:11).

    The speaker has discovered that Yahweh has freedom, will not be on call, not presumed upon. God is not locked into a quid pro quo. And it causes grief, illness, despondency to discern that the partner has changed. Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful. The sure comfort of an utterly obedient relationship is shattered by the awareness that this hidden, free God will not be fully discerned or completely predictable . And the response must be to break out of obedience of a simple kind for the practice of an imagination that seeks to find other ways of relating to this free God. To relate to such a free God requires freedom on the part of the believer, a freedom likely censored by the conventional religion of verses 1-6. The grief here expressed is not unlike the pouting of Jonah over God’s graciousness (Jonah 4:1, 9). Only here the depression is more intense. And the substance moves in the opposite direction from that of Jonah. Jonah is disconcerted that God is gracious when he does not want God to be gracious. Here the Psalmist is dismayed that God is not graciousness when he had fully counted on that predictable graciousness. The discernment of verse 10, anguished as it is, admits of more than one reading. If one is linked to a fiat one-dimensional faith, then this verse is a bitter loss of faith. But if we think in terms of obedience on its way to risky imagination, then this verse is an opening for new faith beyond the conventions and routines which secure but do not reckon with God’s awefulness. This verse stands at a very risky and dangerous place where evangelical faith often stands. And indeed must stand. And as we stand there, we never know in advance if we face loss of faith or opening for new faith. The dramatic substance of verse 10 leaves the issue quite unresolved. And we must not rush past that

    Page 11

    dramatic moment in this speech-pilgrimage.

    Ill So the Psalm makes its desperate way beyond verse 10. We have now the speech of a wounded partner well beyond the old innocence. We do not know how this speaker moves from verse 10 to verse 11. But we can surmise it was not an easy move. We do not know how any faith-speaker makes the leap from the preoccupation with self to an imaginative acknowledgement of the primacy of the other. But that is what happens in this Psalm and in all serious biblical faith. It involves leaving the safety of “the torah so righteous” for “the God so near” who is yet so free (Deut. 4:7-8). The dramatic move concerns the abandonment of self as the primal agenda for the Thou who is out beyond us in freedom. And we make no mistake to observe that that transfer of the agenda, that ceding of concern for self to the other is the crucial move of biblical faith, the sine qua non for covenanting. And we observe what an urgent, difficult task Christian nurture and preaching now is. For the narcissism of our culture (on which see vss. 1-6) is precisely aimed at not ceding self, not relinquishing. This Psalm models the very move of faith which our cultural ideology wants to prevent. The whole consumer perspective concerns retention of self and satiation of self. That is what is given in verses 1-6, and what is relinquished in what follows. Note that this was not the only move possible after verse 10. It is one among some options. After the wonderment of the questions of verses 7-9 and the startling discovery of verse 10, another move could have been made. The speaker could have moved to Psalm 14 and concluded, “There is no God.” The move beyond verse 10 is a hazardous one, for any of us. And the outcome is never sure ahead of time. But the move has been made here, a move which now reckons the free “Thou” as the starting point for life.7 That move, one of several possibilities, concerns us directly as we seek to be faithful and as we seek to live in our culture. On the one hand that move made in verse 11 is a move from a religion of law to a religion of grace. It articulates the awareness that we live by gift and not by grasp. On the other hand, observe that in our society of consumer narcissism, a religion of petty moralistic obedience goes with an economics of satiation. That is, in our secularized version of it, we do not hope for God to satisfy all our desires (Ps. 145:16). But we do expect to have all our desires satisfied, even if by another source. So we are part of a culture which holds together consumer satiation and petty obedience. That tight alliance serves to keep us as the agenda, an excuse for not ceding life beyond self, an inability to transfer attention beyond our needs and appetites. The religious temptation among us is to walk close to the dangerous rhetorical questions of verses 7-9 and to become aware of the hurt and anguish of verse 10. But then not to move on to verse 11, not to move to the “Thou,” but to circle back again to verses 1-6, which permits a preoccupation with self (and selfs program) and requires a numbing.8 Because being numb will do, if there is no deliverance.

    Page 12

    IV

    By the mercy of God, the Psalm does not circle back. And if it did, it would then be only a mirror for our fearful self-preoccupation. It would then not be a model of faith, but only an exercise in self-serving. But it moves on. It says something new and surprising and unpredictable. And that is why we attend to it. It moves on in remarkable fashion, so that verse 11 follows closely after verse 10. We may be glad for that modeling of the move. But we recognize at the same time that we do not know how it is possible. We presume that this move, here or anywhere, is not made easily or quickly. Likely there is a long pause in the Psalm, a desperate resistance, a counting the cost, like standing at the edge of the cold swimming pool, testing it with a toe, putting it off and then the quantum leap into the new icy world of imaginative faith. It is indeed a turning loose of the old self. The move from verses 1-10 to verse 11 is like the move envisioned by Jesus:

    For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.(Mark 8:35)

    The first part, with the series of “I” is about keeping life. And the move to the second part with the series of “Thou” is a readiness to lose life in order to gain it. I do not suggest that prayer and liturgy are the full scope of self-surrender. But I am very sure that unless there are liturgie ways for that move in our lives, we will not make them elsewhere, either with reference to personal maturation or to social change. The very rhetoric of Israel here makes such a move thinkable, i.e., capable of being imagined. There is a waiting, a hoping, a resisting, a yielding, a dying, a being surprised . By verse 11 the speaker has abandoned the preoccupation with self and is able to focus on this one who “has changed,” the same change that caused resentment and loss in verse 10. 1. By verse 11, the speaker is on the way into a new world of imagination. In verses 1-6, the speaker had focused narrowly on “my present” which is all consuming. Now there is a reentry into “our past” which had been bracketed out in self-preoccupation. And in the pondering of that past, the speaker comes to the fresh awareness that it is precisely God’s freedom to change and come and go that is the hope of Israel and the deliverance of folks like the speaker, in this present, or in any present. In the second part of the Psalm, a very different vocabulary is now at work:

    verse 11 deed (ma’alelê) *< 1 wonders (pil'ekä) -< 1 verse 12 work (pa'alekä) -< ' deeds ('alilothikä) -< 1

    These four terms are stated in a concise chiasmus. The key point is made in verse 13:

    Page 13

    Thy way, O God, is holy (qadôsh).

    God’s way is ganz Anders, not to be reduced, not to be accommodated or conformed either to my needs or my expectations. And then, following naturally, there is an assertion of incomparability:

    What god is great like our God?

    The question sounds like that of Deut. 4:8 to which we have made reference. No god like ours, no god so near, no god so free, no god so surprising or exasperating . Here is the end to all analogy. And the bold, liberated speaker of verses Uff., discovers that the self-preoccupied speaker of verses 1-6 was complaining about an idol, for this free God of hesed, hanan, raham will not be treated like a fortune cookie. 2. The remainder of the Psalm, verses 15-20, is like a credo which recites the great deeds of the past. Verse 15 uses Exodus language with the verb ga’al. Verses 16-18 talk about a storm. It could be any storm God. The language is not unlike the Canaanite imagery of Psalm 29. But the language of the storm is regularly drawn toward this people. Verse 16 has echoes of Psalm 114:3-4 which uses sea imagery for Exodus. Verses 17-18 are about a storm. But the point is for Israel in verses 19-20 which becomes completely concrete and completely Israelite at the end, with the mention of Moses and Aaron. Most striking about this Psalm is its abrupt ending. Nothing here about a return to the agenda of verses 1-6. There is nothing about all of that being resolved. It is as though the speaker is left to draw her own conclusions about the condition of verses 1-6 in relation to the statements of verses 15-20. Nothing has been resolved, but everything has been recontextualized. The speaker in verses 1-6 is preoccupied because he is caught in a narrow range in which such personal trouble requires a conclusion that God does not care. That narrow religious agenda is however shattered. It is shattered by remembering, by awareness of God’s incomparability, by reference to Israel’s concrete history, but most of all it is shattered by the utterance, Thou (‘attah). Now I have dealt with this Psalm in detail because I take it to be structurally the story of God’s people who are always trapped and/or on the move. This Psalm knows that all of us live in this battle. We struggle to stay home with the sure company of “I.” We move between a petty religion of calculating obedience aimed at well-being, and a fully liberated imaginative religion of awe and amazement and trembling before the Holy One. In this Psalm, verses 1-6 (7-9) articulate the first; verses 11-20 speak about the alternative. The first is dominated by “I.” The second is governed by “Thou.”

    Thou art God (v. 14) Thou didst redeem thy people with thine own arm (v. 15) the waters saw thee the crash of thy thunder thy lightenings thy way was through the sea thy path through the great waters thy footprints unseen (w. 18-19).

    Page 14

    Thou didst lead thy people (v. 20).

    Note that after verse 12, there is not a single “I.” One can observe that there is a neat contrast between the “my” of the first half—my trouble, my hand, my spirit, my eyelids, my soul, my heart, my spirit—and the “£/ry” in the second half—thy thunder, thy lightening, thy way, thy path, thy footprints. The rhetorical change cannot be accidental. The contrast is total, decisive and intentional . And the turn is in verse 10. Everything is up for grabs in verse 10, waiting for fresh resolution. It is the pastoral moment that could go either way. It is the evangelical moment in which the news may break. It is a moment of deciding, to live in the world where the Most High changes, or to retreat back into a world where “least high” keeps us at the center of things. It is the pastoral task to be present to that moment of terror, a moment which requires enormous imagination.

    NOTES

    1. “I commune with my heart” is a statement of religion reduced to self-preoccupation, not unlike the characterization of the Pharisee (John 18:11) who “prayed with himself.” 2. The self-inventory is paralleled to the lamentation of Psalm 22:17: “I count all my bones.” 3. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979) has made important linkages between the myth and the pathology of our time. One of the important ingredients in such immobilizing narcissism is the flattening of imagination so that the person is incapable of thinking of life other than it presently is, or incapable of thinking of life beyond self. 4. J. Gerald Janzen, “Metaphor and Reality in Hosea 11, “Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, 1976 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1976) 413-445. 5. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms II (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979) 214-15, takes the word from hlh, and understands it as “kill,” (pierce) and renders it, “my death.” See the helpful and lucid comment of A. A. Anderson, The Book of Psalms II (Greenwood, S.C.: The Attic Press, Inc., 1972) 558. 6. Hans Joachim Kraus, Psalmen I (Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament 15 Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1961) 532. 7. Worth noting is the argument made.here in sharp distinction from that of Gordon Kaufman in his excellent book, The Theological Imagination (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981) 63-75. If I read Kaufman correctly, he argues that the self-concious assertion of “I” leads to the liberating reality of “Thou.” I believe this Psalm argues that the move is not from a full act of selfconciousness , but from relinquishment of self, precisely what modernity finds so difficult. 8. On “numbing” as the problem of our culture, see Dorothée Solle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975) and especially the important work of J. Robert Lifton, whose major summary is The Broken Connection (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

  • Preaching Options for Easter

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 12

    Preaching Options For Easter

    Albert Curry Winn,

    North Decatur Presbyterian Church, Decatur, Georgia

    In one sense, you have only one option. You must preach on the resurrection . Long ago in seminary some professor remembered to tell you that every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection. That is why we worship on the first day instead of the seventh. You may neglect the resurrection on fifty-one of those resurrection-days. But on this one, the big one, preaching on the resurrection is inescapable, the only option. In another sense, however, your options are immense. The entire New Testament , in old BengePs phrase, “breathes resurrection.” It is a post-resurrection book, and the light of the empty tomb falls across even its pre-resurrection accounts of the ministry of Jesus. The resurrection is implicit in almost every verse of it. And the quite explicit references to the resurrection are more than enough for a lifetime of preaching. Some of your options will come quickly to view in a glance at the threeyear cycle of the Lectionary. The Gospel lessons are Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20. And when those are exhausted, you can go on to Matthew 28 and John 21, which the Lectionary lists for the following Sunday. The Epistle lessons are 1 Peter 1, 1 Corinthians 15, and Colossians 3. The first lessons, after lame attempts at Old Testament passages, fall back on the apostolic preaching in Acts 2, 4, 5, and 10. When after twelve years or so you have dealt with all those passages, you should have grown enough to start through again with new insights and fresh excitement. If not, get out your concordance and you will find an inexhaustible abundance of additional material, notably in the Epistles.

    Some Preliminary Exegeses I would suggest to you that, before plunging into the exegesis of one of these passages, even before selecting which one to exegete, you exegete two other things of great importance. Preaching is the practice of hermeneutics. It is where the rubber of hermeneutics hits the road. And hermeneutics is the interpretation of an ancient document , addressed to a particular group of ancient people in a particular set of ancient circumstances, in such a way that it addresses directly a particular group of contemporary people in a particular set of contemporary circumstances . So you need to make an exegesis of your congregation, the particular group to whom you are preaching; and you need to make an exegesis of 1983, the particular time in which you are preaching. The exegesis of the congregation—an expression for which I am indebted to Fred Craddock—is specially important on Easter, for your congregation will be different. Many people will be present in church for the only time in 1983.

    Page 13

    Why do they come on Easter? Some come, perhaps, to show off their finery. Others come simply out of custom: if it’s July 4 you shoot off firecrackers; if it’s Christmas you give presents; if it’s Easter, you go to church. Some come, I am convinced, out of a profound hunger to hear some good news in a bad-news world. They can’t count on what they may hear on the other fifty-one Sundays. The preacher may simply be up there venting his hostility on the congregation; and of hostility they get quite enough the other six days. The design of the sermon and whole liturgy may be to induce guilt; and they are already virtually paralyzed by it. They may have to sit through an arid skull session or a vapid pep talk. But on Easter they expect to hear strange tidings, too good to be true, or even too good not to be true. They may not be prepared to believe any of it; but at least it will not be dull. What would it be like to be such a tangential person: essentially a nonchurch -goer, but vaguely Christian enough to obey the mandate of a residually Christian culture that one should really go to church on Easter after all? What would have been your encounters with death in the preceding year? What would be your unvoiced anxieties, your inarticulate hopes? Surely you know such people. They live next door; they work across the street. Set one of them concretely before you. You have one chance to tell them the good news of the resurrection. What Scripture passage will you choose? What will you say about it? If the exegesis of the congregation has a special importance on Easter, the exegesis of the times has a special importance in 1983. The unspeakable, unthinkable peril that has hung over our planet like a mushroom-shaped cloud ever since 1945 has finally emerged from our collective subconscious, where we repressed it, into the public arena. Articles, books pour from the press. Church courts issue pronouncements. Physicians are aroused. The proposal for a nuclear freeze becomes highly politicized. While some people are activated by all this, many are paralyzed. As the dire consequences of a nuclear war sink into their consciousness, they see nothing that can be done about it. They see no single ray of hope. The paralysis of despair sets in. They try to put the whole matter out of mind. We may be sure that many of our Easter-only churchgoers are in that group. In my own despair and hopelessness, I find myself driven to Easter all through the year. God’s purposes and promises were not thwarted by the death of Jesus! Contrary to all human expectation, God brought victory out of defeat, life out of death. Can I then believe that God’s purposes and promises will not be thwarted even by the extinction of the human race and the death of our planet, if it comes to that? Can God bring victory out of that incomprehensible defeat? Only if I believe in God who raises the dead can I be freed from paralysis and energized to work, against seemingly impossible odds, for the preservation of the human race and of its one home in space and time, the earth. Strangely enough, when I get the nerve to enter deeply into the fearsome reality of my own times, the ancient words addressed to other times begin to flash and glow with power and light. “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. . . . I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord. . . . Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God

    Page 14

    the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. . . . O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Ex. 15:1, Ps. 118-17; I Cor. 15:24; Lk. 24:25)

    Selecting Your Text

    Now then, how will you address your particular congregation in this particular time? What ancient text will you choose for the hermeneutic task? There are two main kinds of Easter texts available: those that tell the story of Easter morning and of subsequent encounters with the risen Lord; and those that explicate the meaning of the resurrection, as understood by the early church. Your exegesis of the congregation and of the times may lead you strongly in one direction or the other. Much has been published lately regarding the importance of story-telling, the sermon as story, and so on. There is no place where that applies more powerfully than to the Easter stories. Retold with involvement and reverence, those stories stir even the most jaundiced imagination and touch within us depths of hope and joy we did not know we possessed. If ever just the retelling is enough, it is here at Easter. There are, of course obvious differences in the various Gospel accounts. I have heard many an Easter sermon attempt to reconcile or explain those differences . What does your exegesis of your congregation tell you about that? Is that what they are hungry for? My choice would be to select one of the stories and tell it in all its simplicity, beauty, and power. A discussion of the discrepancies between the stories could be useful in a class some time, when we are holding the Scriptures at a distance and speculating about them. But on Easter morning we are holding the Scripture close. It is a matter of hope or hopelessness , sanity or insanity, life or death. Within each story there may be difficulties you will need to clear up and lessons you cannot refrain from pointing out. Let me urge you to do that with restraint. Trust the story to do its work in the hearts and minds of people. Let your work be the removal of false obstructions, not the erection of a proud superstructure of your own. The Lectionary throws up for us this year the most beautiful and artistic of all the Easter stories, the story of the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. Before you do anything to it, sit in front of it, as you would sit in front of a great painting, and see what it does to you. If you have time, run through Luke with an eye for all the occasions on which Jesus is at table. Then you will see how this story is the climax to which all the others point. You may use none of that in your sermon, but you will preach differently from having done it. There are times for stories and there are times for expositions. Your exegesis of your congregation and of the present situation may well drive you toward a passage in which the effect and meaning of the Easter event are expounded . A run at “raise, raise up” in any good concordance will indicate scores of available texts. One may seem to speak so directly to your congregation in this time that you cannot resist it. The Lectionary throws up for us this year the heaviest concentration of

    Page 15

    “raise,” the fullest discussion of the resurrection, anywhere in Scripture: I Corinthians 15. It bristles with difficulties. Before plunging into the commentaries , read it through more than once, underlining the statements you would like to shout from the housetop. What truly moves you is what will move your people. Make one of those statements the center of your study, moving out from it like the ripples from a stone thrown in a pond. When you’ve got it set in its nest of concentric circles, then you can figure out how to let your hearers share in your struggle and in your joy.

    A Check List

    Before your sermon is set in concrete, while it’s still pliable and open to change, you may want to ask yourself some questions like the following. 1. Have you come clean on your theology? What do you really believe about the resurrection of Jesus? Rudolph Bultmann, in his eagerness to demythologize the Gospels, declares that the resurrection is not a second event at all, but an interpretation of the meaning of the event of the cross. “Faith in the resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the saving efficacy of the cross.”1 Karl Barth, on the other hand, refers to the resurrection over and over again as an event, and specifically as a “second event.”2 He says: “We have to do with the concrete, visible, audible, tangible new presence of the man Jesus who was crucified, dead and buried . . . not just a mental appearance in the experience or intellect of the disciples as illumined by a vision or such like. It was His new appearance in the psycho-physical totality of His temporal existence from His first coming.”3 There are, of course, many possible shades of theological opinion regarding the resurrection. These two set opposite poles, as it were, and underline the necessity for a clear decision. Much Easter preaching is turgid, unclear, and weak because the preacher has not come clean with himself or herself on the basic theological issue of it all. 2. Have you made it clear that Jesus was really dead? The resurrection of someone who had not really died is a strange and pointless piece of news. The wisdom of Lent in the church year is to give us time to absorb the reality of the suffering and death of Jesus before we hear the good news of the resurrection . Remember that your once-a-year church-goers have not been through Lent, were not there on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. For this reason you may need, even on Easter, to tell the bad news before you tell the good news, to deal with the tragedy of the gospel before you unveil its breathtaking comedy. 3. Have you dealt plainly and unsentimentally with your own death and theirs? Your hearers do not have to read the existentialist philosophers to know that human being is being-unto-death, that we alone of the creatures can contemplate our own end. However they would articulate that, they know it, and they avoid facing it with a passion. But sitting in church on Easter, they know they cannot always avoid it. The reality and finality of human death need to be there in most Easter sermons. 4. Have you declared God’s victory over death? This is where it’s all been

    Page 16

    heading, whether you are retelling the story or expounding the exposition. God has won! That’s the point, and if you haven’t made that point, you haven’t preached an Easter sermon. Here it comes: your once-a-year chance to preacji to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, to proclaim the gospel wheTe Christ has not already been named. God forbid that they should hear an ancient wonder-story without present value and effects, or a cosmetic masking of death, or cheap grace, or the glorification of some kind of “immortality” which we automatically possess as human beings. May they hear great tidings, so strange they may well reject them—but tidings which, if they choose to believe rather than to be offended , will radically alter their lives, filling them with energy and hope, even in a world where doom hangs over us all by the slenderest of threads.

    NOTES

    1. Hans Werner Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth. (London: S.P.C.K., 1960). 41. 2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV, 1. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956). 304. 3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV, 3. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961). 311-312.

  • The Peace that Passes Understanding

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 23

    The Peace that Passes

    Understanding

    Walter Wink

    Auburn Theological Seminary, New York, New York

    Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Phil. 4:6-7, RSV)

    The Editors have asked me to pause from my stressful life to write a piece about peace. And not just any kind of peace, but the kind that passes understanding . My wife cooly remarked that that was impossible, and I was a fool to get into such a trap—trying to say something understandable about the peace that passes understanding. The very topic burdens me with guilt. I ought to be more at peace. I ought to relax more, meditate more, let up more. I don’t live enough out of the “still point of the turning world,” where nothing moves while everything orbits round it. I ought to trust God more. Am I alone in this? Do I hear a few “Amens” out there? Aren’t we clergy among the most stressed people in our society? Does any group know less about this incomprehensible peace of God? Does any group have less right to preach about it? Then compound that with the greatest threat the world has ever known to peace—nuclear war—and the quandry over this text flips into an absolute proof of its claim: such peace is indeed beyond our understanding. But that is a spot we are accustomed to begin in, week after week. We are not worthy of these things, as Paul says in another place. We never understand fully. Our lives are always light-years from exemplifying the truth we are bound to proclaim. So, once again, we silence our objections, and listen. . . . There is no need to worry. (All subsequent scriptural references will be taken from the Jerusalem Bible.) Right. That’s already part of what worries me—that so many people still aren’t worried! In my travels I have found, especially in the South, many clergy who simply don’t want to face the nuclear threat. Old orthodoxies about deterrence, the logic of which no longer fits a first strike strategy, lull them into a restless sleep. Many of them pastor churches rife with military-industrial employees. They have resolutely resisted the temptation to read Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth or Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness, or anything else that might require rethinking or action. We don’t want to have to worry. We’ve lived with this nightmare for thirty-eight years now; that’s half a lifetime of low-level stress, and you don’t lightly stir up all the radioactive dust of that memory. So we find ways to stay busy. If only that were the whole of the problem! Then we could believe that our efforts to awaken each other would finally pay. Look how fast the nuclear movement has grown in just a year and a half ! Now over seventy percent of

    Page 24

    the nation favors a freeze. Surely that will begin to translate into policy, and we can go back to other things. But there is a deeper problem. Have you ever met anyone who was not for peace? But the world has known precious little of it. What is it in the human being that makes peace so illusive? We desire peace, but we in fact need war. We have needed wars to end our depressions and get the nations working again. Wars are fabulous consumers. Never mind that they wreck long-term stability; they provide short-term “fixes,” and the profits from them are enormous. We also need wars because we need enemies. As long as people generally remain unconscious of their own shadow-side, they will continue to project out on “enemies.” And where there is no enemy they will invent one. The Soviets are our scapegoat. They catch our projections. We can imagine ourselves to be essentially good if we can find someone else out there whom we can picture as essentially evil. When my wife and I were in South America for four months last spring, it was fascinating to see how the old red-baiting trick that Senator McCarthy taught the world gets used. Everytime priests or nuns or laity organized to protest policies that were exploiting the poor, they were branded “communists .” Marcos uses the same ploy in the Philippines, and now Reagan has ingeniously discovered that all us folks who simply went to survive and secure a future for our kids are “communist inspired”! (He should really be more careful —he makes it sound as if only Communists want the world to survive!). Yes, we need our scapegoats—let’s make Reagan one! We need someone to blame for all this. And since there’s not much sign that folks are ready to abandon this simplistic solution, and face their own darkness, and learn to love the Russians , there’s not much hope for peace. And Paul says, “Don’t worry”! That’s not all. We need war also because it’s been one of the few catalysts powerful enough to shake most people into life. Of course, in war many more die, but that can’t be helped. Why do so many men look back nostalgically at their experience in war—preferably earlier wars that the nation threw itself into without doubt? Because there were moments then when danger drove them to a kind of presence and communion with their buddies or to acts of heroism and selflessness that they had never been able to rise to in their normal lives—and never have since. Is it not the case that most people, most of the time, are all too much at peace—or better, asleep? Is it not the case that when we say “peace” we usually mean an absence of conflict, a state of inertia, the cessation of responsibility, tension, polarity, dynamic: in short, everything that makes life vital? Yet we know from experience that most of our real growth has come through conflict. That operation we had, or illness, or death or divorce or kid on drugs, or alcoholic spouse or disability or danger or social controversy: those were the (unpeaceful) moments when we dared to face and even to let go of our most deeply-seated egotisms, our most selfishly clutched possessions, our need for status, privilege, credentials, even perhaps our fear of death. How many of us, and for how much of the time, are able to live alert to our higher selves, by virtue of inner discipline? And if, or when, we will not, is

    Page 25

    it not the case that we trust in outer events to do it for us? Despite all our prayers for peace, there is an inner wisdom—the part of us that drives for wholeness, individuation, the image of God—that knows it cannot settle for the somnolent life of fractional living. Deep within us there is something that, if it cannot trust us to awaken ourselves to it, calls out for calamities, emergencies, conflict, or war. This is best put in an unlikely source, Geoffrey Hodson’s The Brotherhood of Angels and Men [Wheaton, 111.: Quest Books, (1927) 1982]:

    Your higher selves—your angel selves—strive continually to awaken you, to send a vision through your dreams, and here and there a sleeper stirs and stretches, all too often to return to sleep; your dreams must be disturbed by the force of things external to your selves. Wars come to rouse you, and you pray to God to save you from more wars! Pestilence and famine stride hand in hand across your heedless lives, and only as you see them threatening your repose do you awake, and, for a time, become your greatest selves. Yet from these, you pray unto your Lord, asking Him to deliver you! The deliverer from these is with you all the while, it is your innermost self; but as you will not be aroused by the Self within you, you must be awakened by the Self without. Know that in wars, plagues, cataclysms , you see yourselves, the expressions of your soul, striding torch in hand, through the dormitories in which your bodies lie, to stir you from your sleep, to drive away the dark shadows of self-satisfaction and content . These other selves of yours will come again and again until you yourselves banish them for all time. They go from the nation, from those men, who, answering to the highest, live according to its laws; who seeing the greatest, strive ever to express it, who neither rest nor sleep, filled with a craving which drives them onwards from peak to peak of the mountains of the spiritual world. That is the way to release, brothers, and there is none other. He who tells you that war may cease by act of law, does worse than lie; he covers up the truth, so that men, feeling safe, sink back again into their dreams—and war returns in due season.

    And Paul says “Don’t worry”! If at the conscious level we are intent on blocking all knowledge of the nuclear suicide we are so painstakingly preparing for ourselves, and at the unconscious level still need an enemy to blame all our own problems on, and long for war to ease our boredom and wake us to our own heroic possibilities, what chance has the slim shoot of peace of growing to maturity when the soil is so laced with salt? Don’t worry, indeed! To all of which Paul responds piously, “Pray.” But if there is anything you need, pray for it, asking God for it with prayer and thanksgiving. I have concluded that it makes no sense to argue about whether praying would do any good or not, or telling stories ad nauseum of answered prayer. We simply have to do it. Nothing can save us that is possible anyway. We might as well surrender ourselves to God’s impossible possibility. Nowadays it’s the only game left in town. It is not, after all, inconceivable that humanity could freeze, then reduce, and finally destroy the nuclear stockpiles that we have so long prayed and sup-

    Page 26

    plicated with all thanksgiving to give us peace. It is not at all impossible. It merely seems improbable, unlikely, far-fetched, given our record. So what; everybody God works with has a record. Moses was wanted for murder, Abraham for lying to Pharoah about not being married to Sarah, Jacob for theft of birthright, David for adultery, the prophets for sedition and Paul for disturbing the “peace.” We all have records, some earned in the line of duty, some earned for refusing our duty. God is not picky about who can be used. What if the real heroism of our time were already beckoning to us in the glistening sheen of our lethal warheads? What if we faced the issue dead-on and called people to the longest stride of soul they ever took—to risk everything for peace? What if we got off of generalities down to specifics, and organized levels of involvement all the way from letter writing to jail? What if, in short, we helped prevent war by absorbing that old unconscious need for war to wake us up to our duty before God and the future of our children? And what if, at the same time, we courageously faced that inner shadow, and owned our own evil? What if each church or town were to adopt a similar church or town in Russia, and exchanged letters, even visits, to bond themselves into a common humanity? Then that old need to scapegoat the Russians would stick in people’s throats, or get them laughed off the podium. Because we would know our “enemies” as flesh of our flesh, in the same substantial struggle to survive. And what if we did all this, not with a grim determination and fearful urgency, but bouyed up by thanksgiving, trusting that God can do far more than we can ask or think, living in expectation of miracle? What if we let God bear the issue, and we responded out of grateful hearts that God, in infinite mercy, has freed us from our nuclear paralysis and given us tasks we can do? Then indeed we would work with desperate urgency, perhaps, but not without hope or joy. Then we might incur controversy and even imprisonment, but not the dread sense of impotence. Then we might know what it means to have our hearts and thoughts (or bodies) guarded in Christ Jesus, no longer assaulted by unconscious fear and torn by unconscious needs for war. Then, guarded and thankful, we might even discover the peace of God, which is so much greater than we can understand, which will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

  • The Biblical Hermeneutics of Peacemaking

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 1

    The Biblical Hermeneutics of

    Peacemaking

    W. Sibley Towner

    Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va.

    I. The Centerpoint of Scripture Peacemaking is not an aspect of the gospel. It is not a spin-off of the gospel . It is the gospel. Listen to the gospel as its earliest witness, Paul, recounts it:

    God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation . (2 Cor. 5:19).

    That sentence describes a process of peacemaking even as it describes the heart of the gospel. It contains four components: 1) “God was in Christ . . .” The initiative comes from God. (We have always messed up trying to do it on our own, and now we are at a point in human and technological history where we can’t afford even one more mess-up); 2) “reconciling the world to himself . . .” Peace, not hostility, is the natural and original condition of humanity. (We assume that reconciliation is the same as making peace. God’s work is to restore a right relationship of peace. In peace we find our true selves); 3) “not counting our trespasses against us . . .” Peace springs from God’s forgiveness of our trespasses. (We are most warlike and hostile when we hate ourselves; individual or collective consciousness of inner evil and of guilt are the main barriers to peace); 4) “and entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation . . .” Public peacemaking flows from the attainment of inner peace. (It is an insight which Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King all had; it is an insight which contemporary social psychologists and political scientists have as well. Richard Barnet, for example: It is all important that we “build a society where we can achieve that inner peace that is the precondition of a peaceful world.”) I think that is a realistic position. But why shouldn’t it be? Our faith is a realistic, not an idealistic one, and it takes human nature very seriously. My basic claim, then, is that the reality of peace and the possibility of peacemaking are the heart of the gospel message. Such a claim immediately becomes a hermeneutical or interpretive principle for this reason: It is a centerpoint against which to test other claims and narratives of the Bible. You will recognize it as the great Reformation guide: “Scripture is its own interpreter .” So when people find Jesus saying, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matt. 10:34); or someone finds in Eccl. 3:8, “[there is] a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace”; or someone reads Psalm 137:9, “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”; or someone discovers the holy war in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and

    Page 2

    Joshua, direct them to the centerpoint! Have them read “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. . . . ” Then let them tell which theme of the Bible overbalances and comprehends the other. The fact is that war is out­ flanked by peace! I understand that the emphasis of the church on peacemaking is not in­ tended to make believers out of non-believers in peace, (these being very few exponents of violence) but rather to equip the saints for the ministry of peace­ making. My reflections are more a how to than a stirring call to lay down arms: how to use the Bible to promote peace. In a sense, my job is a methodological one, so that is why I decided to come straight to the point and to set forth the claim that peacemaking and the gospel are fundamentally at one. In every re­ spect, Jesus’ ministry is a ministry of reconciliation and of peacemaking. Paul sums it up in his realistic, fundamental passage in 2 Cor. 5:19. These observa­ tions can be used, as I have done, to establish a centerpoint in scripture. Not all scripture says the same thing about war and peace; not all scripture is of equal significance on the subject. We have a touchstone by which to test the scriptures.

    II. The Problem of Method: A Concordance and the Word Book

    But what do we do next? A temptation would be to take a concordance and work through all the texts in the Bible that contain words like “peace . . . tranquility . . . reconciliation”; and indeed that is instructive. For one thing, it reveals that the really big users of at least the language of peace are not Jesus and Paul at all, but the psalmists and Isaiah. Jeremiah uses shalom a lot, too, but often it is against the false prophets who teach the discredited notion that Yahweh will allow no harm to befall Jerusalem, and so say, “peace, peace,” when there is no peace. But the problem with this concordance approach finally is that it produces too much raw material, too undigested and diverse to have a clear, precise impact on a confused and troubled people. Perhaps the concordance approach should be spread out over the whole year in the manner of daily Bible readings. Another temptation is to take a theological word book like Kittel’s Theo­ logical Dictionary of the New Testament and get into the etymology of the relevant words—shalom, eirene, and the like. Certainly it is helpful to know that at the root, shalom has to do with wholeness, health, and peace arising from inner wellbeing. One discovers that it can even mean “submission to the will of God” as in Job 22:21: “Agree with God, and be at peace; thereby good will come to you.” (You will recognize that this last notion is not far from the fundamental tenet of Islam, which is after all an Arabic noun derived from the same root s-ί-τπ, and which means “submission.”) But this approach has its limitations also. Once you’ve said that shalom means inner peace and wellbe­ ing, what more can you say? Most of the limitations center around the remote­ ness of root meanings from everyday usage. We don’t even know the root meanings of our English words. (For example, when you last used the word “garble,” did you consider that it comes from the Italian garbellare, through Arabic from Late Latin cribellum9 “a sieve”?) Why should we assume, then,

    Page 3

    that speakers and writers of biblical Hebrew and Greek knew what they were saying at the root any more than we do, or that they faithfully carried the same connotations every time they used a word?

    III. An Analogical Method

    The next step in bringing biblical truth to bear upon the question of peacemaking in 1983 seems to me, then, simply to work back and forth between the issues which we know from our context have much to do with making and keeping peace, and the biblical address to those same issues, or at least the ancient version of them. The way in which these texts address us is by analogy. The prescriptions which these texts write for the ills of their own times will serve as illuminating prototypes for the often far more elaborate and sophisticated counterpart prescriptions which we will need to offer our age. I stress this point of analogy, lest we think we can pull texts straight out of the Bible and slap them like Band-Aids or bumper stickers on the woes which beset us and make them all better. There are many ways of talking about this analogical method: prototype and counterpart, or even the well-known distinction pioneered by Krister Stendahl, what the text meant and what it means.

    IV. Nine Biblical Analogues to Aspects of Peacemaking in 1983

    Let me lift up nine texts, each of which addresses an issue which we in one way or another affiliate with the crisis of peacemaking in our own time. This may look like a Roman candle approach, and in a way it is. So much of the Bible bears on the issues of peace, and yet to say peace is everywhere runs the risk of losing the specificity of texts which deal with concrete issues related to peace. In these examples I try to be specific about what the text meant, and by analogy, what it may mean to our peacemaking efforts.

    1. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.” (1 John 4:18).

    I experience a lot of fear these days. I assume I am not alone. When I go to the Chesapeake Bay, go out in a boat, and look at the marvelous many-hued sky of evening, the distant lights on the opposite shore, and see the cormorants and gulls, sometimes I feel the peace I knew as a youth. But more often I feel a prevading sense of doom. What will it look like when that horizon in the direction of Washington is lit with a light many times brighter than the setting sun? And then the other horizon in the direction of Norfolk, and then the Richmond horizon? Where will Jane and I hide from the poisonous cloud? Where will our children be? Will all the gulls die, or just go blind because of the depletion of the ozone layer? I know I am not alone in this fear. My children don’t want to bear children of their own. Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatrist , finds the nuclear contradiction of safety through terror a profound psychological burden for thousands of persons in our time. The novelists reflect

    Page 4

    the fear back to us: Morris West in The Clowns of God, where the fear of the upcoming holocaust animates a German professor into social action and causes a pope to abdicate; Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker, all written in a rude, broken English as spoken by primitive descendants of the survivors of the one big one; Walker Percy in Love in the Ruins, a book shot through with a lowgrade sense of terror for an apocalypse that finally doesn’t happen. It even gives rise to gallows humor. When the poet Richard Armour read a news item in the paper, he was moved to write a poem. The newspaper said: “A speaker at a meeting of the New York Frozen Food Locker Association declared that the best hiding place in the event of an atomic explosion is a frozen food lock­ er, where ‘radiation will not penetrate.’ ” The poem he wrote is this:

    “Move over, ham And quartered cow My Geiger says The time is now. Yes, now I lay me Down to sleep, And if I die, At least I’ll keep.” 1

    “Perfect love casts out fear.’ True, the text in 1 John is speaking about the fear of eternal judgment, driven out by the perfect love of God. But the text can serve us as a legitimate prototype to all of our teachings that we can escape the paralysis which emanates from fear of the ultimate, the fear that we finally are not going to make it. The text means more to us than it meant in its own Judgment Day context. It means not only that we can be set free of fear of judgment, but also that—in trust that God will complete his redemptive work in this creation of his—we can be liberated from paralyzing fear of our proxi­ mate doom and get up and come out fighting on behalf of the world and its creatures.

    2. “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

    The very next verse of the 1 John passage reiterates the message which was present in the very first text we examined, 2 Cor. 5:19. God takes the initi­ ative in love—he comes to us, not we to him. And the next step is there, too, “If anyone says Ί love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.” One of the many analogs in our history is the collective peace initiative in the political arena. Allen Geyer points to the call by the 1981 World Council of Churches international public hearings on nuclear weapons and disarmament, held in Amsterdam, for “independent non-negotiated actions” which “invite a corre­ sponding response, but which do not have to depend on the uncertainties of protracted negotiation.” (See Geyer’s Theology and Ultimate Violence: A New Nuclear Agenda for the Churches. Shalom Paper #12, Washington: The Church’s Center for Theology and Public Policy, May, 1982, p. 7.) President

    1. From E. & E. Hubermen, eds., War: An Anthology. New York: Pocket Books, 1969; p.i.

    Page 5

    Nixon’s unilateral moratorium on chemical weapons was one such case. In spite of the fact that there may have been more strategic and practical reasons for this action than we the public knew about, ti was widely perceived as an initiative for peace, and so it was. Let’s think first love, not first strike. How about unilaterally calling off the MX missile? Must everything be a bargaining chip? They have a better chance to love us if we love them first.

    3. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exod. 20:13).

    Students of the Bible soon learn that “kill” in the sixth commandment is not the general Hebrew term mot, but the specialized term rasah, “murder.” In its own context, the commandment was not aimed at socially acceptable forms of killing, like war, capital punishment, and revenge, but simply at murder . However, it is one of the Ten Commandments, those bottom-line laws, those categorical imperatives. These ten are identified by Israel as the laws which must be observed by all if Israelite society is to exist at all. If our society is to exist at all, we cannot engage in nuclear exchanges. If we are to achieve for our society what Israel achieved for its society, our sixth commandment is going to have to mean more than it meant. It is going to have to mean “Thou shalt not kill, and that includes fighting nuclear wars.” That is what I call a functional analogy. Only by saying more than Israel did can the commandment function for us the way it did for them!

    4. “Putting away falsehood, let everyone speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25).

    The writer of Ephesians was giving moral instruction to the Christian fellowship , but truth and peace have kissed each other forever; lying threatens the harmony of all communities ranging from the community of woman and man all the way to the community of nations. One counterpart to this prototypical biblical principle about truth lies in our response to nuclear doctrine. Let’s tell the truth, encouraged by Ephesians. To argue the need for nuclear superiority rather than nuclear parity is to lie; to claim that the policy of mutually assured destruction is a peacekeeping policy is to lie; to claim there is an essential linkage between a Soviet brigade in Cuba and the refusal to ratify SALT II is to lie; to say “better dead than red” is to lie; to say that we must escalate arms production in order to control and reduce arms is to lie. The world is more complex now than it was in New Testament times. Of course we will need to make proximate arrangements with out Soviet neighbors, interim security agreements, comprehensive solutions as we inch slowly and painfully away from the crumbling precipice on which we now stand. But woe be to us if we lose our moral compass and lie! Here is the truth which we must openly tell our neighbors here and abroad. Our goal is not simply to get everyone’s fingers off the red button; it is to get rid of the red button itself.

    5. “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

    Page 6

    neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit every man under his vine and his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken” (Micah 4:3-4).

    The text means essentially what it meant—a reordering of priorities lies ahead. In ancient times this meant beating swords into plowshares. In modern times the analogous reordering of priorities is pretty direct. It might mean beating a B-l bomber into tractors, or a fragmentation bomb into piccolos. Our priorities have gotten sadly out of line. The September 1982 edition of Parade magazine carried the following news item: “Thirty-eight million dollars an hour. President Reagan’s proposed military budget will cost American taxpayers more than thirty-eight million an hour over the next five years—and that’s only if we remain at peace. Should war break out, the cost undoubtedly will be higher.” The five-year total “adds up to about 1.675 trillion dollars. If you’re wondering what your share is, it works out to more than twenty thousand dollars for every taxpayer in the U.S. . . .” Social justice is a high Christian priority. Yet it gets bumped way down when—even if there is no exorbitantly costly war—we spend so much on preventing war that we de-stabilize the very countries we seek to protect, including our own. As Allen Geyer points out (op. cit., p. 8), “One half of one percent of one year’s world military expenditure would pay for all the farm equipment needed to increase food production to the level of self-sufficiency in the world’s food deficit countries by 1990.” This text summons us by analogy to a reordering of priorities.

    6. “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, by keeping his commandments . . . then you shall live and multiply . . , But if your heart turns away . . . I declare to you this day that you shall perish. . . . I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore, choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30:15-19).

    The prophets who wrote the book of Deuteronomy had the gall to say that national security was rooted in obedience to the commandments of God. The claim may have sounded like wishful thinking even then in a time when Israel sought military alliances with Egypt to shore up its tattered defenses against the rising threat of the neo-Babylonian empire. In the political world in which we actually live, concepts like trust in the sovereignty of God and salvation through obedience to God’s law can sound downright vacuous. Do you mean to tell us that we can face off against Soviet or Cuban or God knows what missiles with nothing in our hands except righteous obedience? The answer suggested by the biblical analogy ultimately is, yes. It goes like this: Obedience to torah means standing in a network of just and caring relationships between God and people and between people and people. It inevitably means love of neighbor expressed in obedient acts of healing, compassion, and peace. Obedience means

    Page 7

    attention to matters of justice, a fair shake for the widow and the poor. Obedience to the law of God, and its fruits, love of neighbor, attention to matters of justice, surely do not lead us to construct magnificent arsenals of death, but toward the dismantling of the walls that separate us. In short, national security is served best of all by national obedience to a righteous God who leads us into healed and whole relationships.

    7. “In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage’ ” (Isa. 19:24-25).

    Here is a text which de-demonizes the enemy. One wonders at the scandal the prophet caused by reporting Yahweh’s attitude toward feared Assyria —”the work of my hands”—and toward hated Egypt—”my people.” Jesus, too, scandalized his own age by talking with the woman at the well, and here she was the Samaritan enemy, the great Satan! In her article in the special peace issue of Church and Society (November/December 1980-January/ February 1981), Esther C. Stine makes a strong case for de-demonizing the enemy in our own time and in our own way (see her article ” ‘Would That Even Today You Knew the Things That Make for Peace,’ ” pp. 24-30). As long as the enemy remains a faceless, sub-human cipher, or evil incarnate, it is relatively easy to work up hatred adequate to kill that enemy. On the other hand, as Stine says, “an enemy who is like us ceases to be an enemy.” Technology dehumanizes the enemy by sanitizing war. The enemy becomes a mere green blip on a monitor passing in between the cross-hairs. And even religion can contribute to the demonization of the enemy. This is one of the greatest single negative aspects of the revived biblical literalism which is sweeping our land. When you claim that you can find in scripture texts that predict an attack on Israel by Russians in league not only with Arab allies but with satanic forces as well (see Hal Lindsey’s treatment of God and Magog in Ezekiel 38:1-5), you are inviting people into the ranks of fanaticism. They begin to believe that they are fighting real demons in a war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness . But the truth is that scripture does not invite us to demonize the enemy; our twentieth-century analog to Jesus’ conversations with the woman at the well and the Roman centurion is to enter into combat with the popular lies that the Russians will never bargain in good faith, will never make meaningful concessions, and will violate all treaties. The truth is that the Russians are not all bad and that they are as afraid of nuclear disaster as we are.

    8. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

    Too often this text has been related to notions of valor, laying down our lives in war against our brothers and sisters for the sake of our country, our way of life, our turf. But the international and intercultural ethos in which we now live has rendered those old notions of valor considerably obsolete. Who will really buy the idea, “greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for the oil of the Persian Gulf? Do you still want to talk about valor? Okay, here

    Page 8

    is valor in our time: working together on equal footing with Asians and Africans and Russians to eliminate racism and economic exploitation and war. In the nuclear age valor has nothing to do with the announcement that one is prepared to offer up the lives of fellow citizens in order to save them from godless Communism, because one is talking about hundreds of millions of fellow citizens, about all their cultural triumphs and riches with them, and about all the generations yet unborn which sleep in their sperm and their eggs. Charge up San Juan Hill over nuclear landmines? “Nuke ’em till they glow”? That’s not valor, that’s terminal folly! Valor lies not in pressing red buttons, but in shaking hands and taking hold of the scalpel and the plow. One of those memorable poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen, already saw this in his moving poem, “Dulce et decorum est” (the Latin sentence from Horace with which the poem ends, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, means “sweet and proper it is to die for the fatherland.”)

    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys—An esctasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs. Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

    So the analog to this prototypical biblical teaching, “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” is surely this: Greater love hath no man than to go to the mat on behalf of people everywhere, that

    Page 9

    they may be freed of the scourge of the nukes and all of the scourges leading up to them.

    9. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” (Isa. 11:6).

    The futuristic texts of the Bible are full of oracles like this famous one. In the best of all possible worlds which lies ahead, the writers of both the Old Testament and the New Testament primarily hoped for peace. It is a dynamic peace, not mere entropy; it is a peace of fruitfulness and joy in which children don’t just sit, but play, in which creatures live and move, in which knowledge of God pounds like the surf of the sea. For the life of me I cannot see how texts like this one, or Isaiah 65, or Daniel, or Revelation, can encourage anyone in our time to become passive and quiet. True, these texts make clear that we do not build the new Jerusalem with our own hands, and that only God will bring it in. What does the vision of the peaceable kingdom that lies ahead encourage us to do? Why, it encourages us to live peaceably now in order to give a foretaste of that coming age. And that is where the analogs will emerge abundantly in our own living out of our own interim ethic. God grant us that our study of the biblical bases for peace will lead us, as individuals and as communities, toward the kind of lives that will so shine forth in advance the peace that characterizes the age to come that people can point to us and say, “Look, there is what life is like in the kingdom of heaven.”

  • Job and God

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 2

    Job and God

    Shirley Guthrie

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.

    Heresy

    I want to warn you in advance that what I have to say is heresy. It is biblical, but it is heresy—which by definition is not falsehood but a one-sided half-truth. Consider the book of Job. Here is a story that does not fit in the main stream of biblical history: the story of a human individual and of God without a single reference to the convenant community. No remembrance of God’s saving work among his people in the past. No hope for the coming of a promised Messiah to redeem his people and bring a new heaven and a new earth. No history of salvation at all. On the contrary, the story of an isolated believer who does not act like believers in the Bible are supposed to act. The story of an isolated God who does not act like the God of the Bible is supposed to act. Heresy. Yet Job is part of the canon, the inspired Word of God. What it has to tell us about God and the human situation is far less than what the rest of the Bible has to tell us, but it is a part of the whole. And whoever will not hear this heretical part will not be able to hear the rest either. So let us risk the heresy and take a closer look at Job and God.

    The Story

    Job was a good man. We are told that he obeyed the commandments of God and loved his word (23:llff.). He helped the poor and helpless and defended the cause of the oppressed against their oppressors (21:12if.). He was a law abiding, God-fearing, generous, compassionate, just man. And he was what he should have been by the standards of the ancient Near East and by the standards of modern American piety—successful, rich, happy, a respected leader in the community, with a warm, loving family life at home. But then there happened what never should have happened by the standards of ancient Near Eastern and modern American piety. Through no fault of his own, bad things happened to this good man: all of his children were killed in a storm; he got a loathsome, excruciatingly painful disease; his wife turned against him and treated him with contempt; his friends deserted him; he was the laughing stock of the community (which is always maliciously glad to see the mighty fall); he ended up sitting alone in the dirt scratching his hideous itching body with a broken piece of pottery. And as if all that were not enough, some well-meaning but incompetent pastoral counselors came around to tell him that he must have done something really bad or God wouldn’t have punished him so severely.

    Page 3

    And how did Job respond to all his misery? Well, he did not say, “This will be a good learning experience for me when it is all over.” Or “God must have some good purpose in mind for me through all this suffering.” Or “God will never give me a greater burden than I can bear.” Or “If I only have faith enough, God will make everything come out right.” Nor did he say: “Thy will be done.” Or: “Your grace is sufficient for me.” Or “J rejoice in my suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope.” He didn’t say or do anything of the things pious people are supposed to say and do in the midst of suffering. He was not patient; he complained bitterly . He was not calm and resigned in his misfortune; he treated himself to an orgy of whining self-pity. He did not “turn his life over to the Lord”: he was literally mad as hell at the Lord. He did pray, but his prayers were sheer blasphemy: “It’s all your fault. You are the one who is doing all this to me, and it’s not fair. I have trusted you and obeyed your commandments, and look what I get for it. I may not be perfect, but I certainly don’t deserve all this. Why do you make good people like me suffer and let all those wicked people get along so well? You are cruel and unjust, and I wish that you would just go away and leave me alone. But no, you won’t even leave me alone long enough for me to swallow my spit. Or better yet, why don’t you come down out of your safe heavenly heights and give me a chance to lay my case before you instead of hiding up there like a coward.” And God answered Job. But if Job did not act like a pious believer is supposed to act, neither did God act like the God of Israel (not to mention a compassionate Friend who understood the pain and misery that led to Job’s blasphemous outbursts); he responded with what one commentator calls “a great heavenly sneer”: “Who do you think you are questioning me and the way I run the world? What right does a little pip-squeak like you have to find fault with almighty God? Shut up for a minute and / will ask you some questions: where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth—tell me about it, since you know so much? who rules the seas and provides for all the animals? who controls the rising and setting of the sun, and governs the coming and going of the seasons, and makes it rain so that the desert blooms? who placed the constellations in the heavens? who controls the powers of chaos and destruction and darkness? what makes you think you are wise enough and powerful enough to do any of these things?” Then Job surprises us again. He does not come back to God with the obvious answer: “I admit that you are bigger than me and can do anything you want. And I admit that you are smarter than me and that I can’t beat you in an argument. But you still haven’t answered my question. You still haven’t told me why bad things happen to good people and why good things happen to bad people. And I still don’t think that a God who is loving and just could let that happen.” Instead of the resentful surrender we might have expected, Job suddenly begins praising God: “I know that you are all-powerful and that you can do

    Page 4

    everything you plan. I have spoken about great things I do not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. In the past I knew of you only what I heard, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. So I am ashamed of all I have said, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:lff.).

    The Word Now what shall we make of this strange unsatisfying story of a man who in one moment screams his blasphemous protest against God’s injustice—then suddenly turns around and praises God, even though his terrible suffering was still there and his questions about it still unanswered? What shall we make of this strange story of a God who seems to be such a harsh, unfeeling, sarcastic bully? Well, I don’t know either. Job remains a great out-of-place puzzle in the Bible. But I believe that we are told at least four things here, and that in a kind of back-handed way they contain good news for suffering people.

    The Possibility of Prayer Let me say the easiest thing first. The good news of Job is that we are free to pray, no matter how bad our prayers are, and God will listen and answer. We may feel that it is necessary to keep up a pious and orthodox front in the presence of other people, but we don’t have to be pious and orthodox in the presence of God. In his presence we can be honest about how we really feel. We can even dare to be blasphemous in expressing our outrage about what he is doing or not doing in our lives and in the world around us. God will not reject us, or punish us, or withdraw from us because we have approached him with the wrong attitude and a bad theology. He will stick with us and answer our prayers—even though what he says and does may be what he knows we need most and not what we think we need most.

    The Center of the Universe The second point is not so easy, nor is it in itself good news. But it is the first thing that has to be said to get to the good news: we are not the center of the universe, and what happens to us is not all that important in God’s grand scheme of things. We and our families are not all that important. When I think of the millions of people who have lived and died before me, and the millions of people throughout the world who are living and dying around me, and the millions of people who will live and die after I am gone (if we don’t blow up the earth or make it uninhabitable by our exploitation and fouling of the natural environment )—when I think of those countless millions of people, my little life and death and the life and death of those I love doesn’t make all that much difference. In fact the whole human race is not all that important. When I think of

    Page 5

    how quarrelsome, violent, self-destructive, and rapacious the human species is, I am not so sure that we “rational” animals are so superior after all to those socalled “lower species” who at least live in accordance with their own nature and the purpose for which they were created. When I think of the great oceans and rivers and mountains and forests and plains that were there before any of us came along and will still be there after we are gone, and when I look up and see the vast expanse of the heavens, it seems absurd to believe (as Calvin taught) that God created all things for the well-being of us self-important little human beings. Indeed, our whole planet is not all that important. When I consider that it is only a tiny little speck among the billions of celestial bodies and that like them it too will sooner or later run down or blow up (if we don’t blow it up first), then not only all the tragedies and triumphs of my little life but even those of whole nations and civilizations seem almost comically pretentious and trivial. In other words, long before Copernicus learned it, Job learned that we do not live in a “geocentric” universe. He also learned what even we modern people have not yet learned, that we do not live in an anthropocentric universe either. No, it is not good news to see how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. It might or might not help a little to put our little problems and needs and suffering in larger perspective. It might or might not free us from a narcisstic preoccupation with ourselves and make us more sensitive to the needs and problems and suffering of other people. It might or might not make us a little more willing to use our natural environment in such a way that there is at least a chance for there to be future generations who live in a life-sustaining world. But it would finally lead to a bleak, weary stoicism if we all learned from Job is how unimportant we are. Unless we learned a third thing from him.

    God Endures While it is true that we do not live in a geocentric or anthropocentric universe , it is also true that we do live in a theocentric universe. God was there and in charge of things long before we came along, and he will continue to be there and in charge long after we are gone. I and my family, with all our little or great joys and sorrows, disappointments and achievements, failures and successes—we come and go, but God remains. Republican as well as Democratic administrations, times of economic depression as well as times of economic prosperity, unjust as well as just societies, little and big wars—they all have their day, but God outlasts them all. The United States of America and Russia, capitalism and Marxism, the whole of modern technological civilization like all the great civilizations of the past—they rise and flourish and decay and die, but God has no beginning and no end. Our planet earth, it too will sooner or later come to an end whether or not

    Page 6

    we commit cosmic suicide—but even then the Creator and ruler of the universe will still be there. And like Job, when he got that point, strangely enough we too can praise God. Despite all our hard work, our pursuit of education, our political involvement , our insurance policies and investment plans, what we can do to guarantee our own and our families’ security and well-being is very limited. Even though we have learned through medical science to prolong life in miraculous ways, death still catches up with all of us sooner or later. Despite all the combined efforts of theologians and preachers and philosophers and teachers and youth workers and conservative and liberal and revolutionary political leaders, our world is no closer than it was 5000 years ago to controlling the demons of greed and lust and hatred in the human heart. Despite all our religious and political and economic theories and plans and programs and institutions, we are no more able than people in Job’s day to achieve enduring justice and order and peace in the human community. But the good news is that we are free of the terrible burden and necessity of being ultimately responsible for what happens to us and the world around us. And we don’t haue to make sense out of it all and grasp why things happen as they do and how everything fits together. There is a God who always has been, and is, and always will be at work preserving and ordering and ruling individual lives and the world of nature and human history—the whole universe —within the limits he has set for all creaturely reality according to his good and wise and just and powerful will. And that brings me to my last point.

    The Chief End of “Man”

    Long before Calvin and the Reformed tradition came along to echo it, Job learned that the chief end of “man” is to glorify and serve God. God is not there to answer our questions, solve our problems and give us everything we want and think we need. He is not there to serve us; we are here to serve him. God is not there to give us personal happiness, health and success, or even to save us from our sins so that we can go to heaven instead of hell when we die. God is not even there—and this is the hardest thing of all for me to say—to guarantee the success of our quest for political and economic justice for the poor and oppressed, the success of our quest for a life-sustaining environment for our children and future generations, or the success of our attempt to avoid a nuclear holocaust and achieve world peace. God is not there to serve even the highest and best of our concerns. We are there to serve him in joy and in sorrow, in health and in sickness, in success and in failure, in life and in death. And that is good news. It is the good news of freedom from self-centered utilitarian religion that instead of worshiping God only uses him for our personal or social self-interest. It is the good news of freedom to love God for himself and not for what he can give us or do for us—even when we do not

    Page 7

    understand or approve of the way he runs the universe. Perhaps it is not enough to pray the prayer of the old rabbi who said, “I do not want your paradise. I do not want your coming world. I want you and you only.” But until we learn to pray at least that much, then we will never come to know and honor and love and serve the God who alone is the alpha and omega, the source and meaning and goal not only of our lives but of all creation. Much more needs to be said, of course. But any of us who are too sure that we can say more had better be careful that we do not in fact say far less.

    A Prayer Lord of the universe, help us to have the faith of Job, knowing that we need not be afraid that we and our fellow human beings will lose out if we love you above all else. In Jesus Christ you have shown us that your power over us (and all people everywhere) is also the power of your love for us (and all people everywhere).

  • Deriding the Devil in American Political Caricature and Preaching

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 15

    Deriding the Devil in American Political

    Caricature and Preaching

    Doug Adams

    Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California

    The Kings of the earth set themselves,

    and the rulers take counsel together,

    against the Lord, and against his annointed,

    saying, Let us break their bands asunder,

    and cast away their cords from us.

    He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh:

    the Lord shall have them in derision. (Psalm 2:2-4)

    And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto

    the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying,

    Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war

    with him? (Revelation 13:4)

    As those supported by “the moral majority” speak for military expansion and deregulation and decontrol of many powers “to preserve freedom and prevent war,” it is time to remember earlier American preaching that derided the military expansion and the sanctity of “the majority” and identified the devil with a quest for unfettered freedom by the powerful. After reviewing how the devil was identified and derided in American political caricature and preaching , we will return to contemporary American issues that preaching may address with a similar strategy of ridicule. When ridiculing leading political powers and identifying them as the devil, eighteenth and nineteenth century American sermons frequently cited Psalm 2 or Revelation 13. As much humor in the Old and New Testaments is prophetic use of derision or ridicule often directed against idolatries, it is understandable that many preachers used ridicule to lay low the idolatries of power, wisdom, and wealth they identified in American life.1 The identification of the devil with those idolatries had biblical precedent in the temptations to Jesus. But to see the king or the president as the devil was distinctive to American expressions when compared to European expressions of the same period. In European caricature, the political leaders might be seen as in league with the devil but not the personifications of him. And the devil appeared much more often and much more centrally in American expressions invariably directed against those presidents associated with military expansion and power. The continuing dominant Protestant character of American religion accounts for those associations of power with the devil. While the devil had become an insignificant ape-like trickster who trafficked in less public sins during late medieval Catholicism, the Reformation identified the devil not only with

    Page 16

    more elevated human aspirations but also with powerful institutions and persons such as the papacy and the pope himself. And by 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost had raised the devil still further as the embodiment of the highest desires for freedom and liberty subject to no limitations.2 American Puritans read Revelation in a way that differed from the Catholics or the Anglicans. While Catholics were inclined to see Revelation describing periods before the dominance of the papacy, the Anglicans saw the papacy as one of the final beasts in the book (and saw the Anglican church as standing blissfully at the end of the book). But the Puritans who had fled the “beastly” Anglican church saw Revelation describing the persistent demonic nature of human leaders and institutions. In his sermon on Revelation 13, Boston’s leading seventeenth century divine , John Cotton, observed, “All rulers are the beast. . . . If you tether a beast at night, he knows the length of his tether in the morning.”3 The moral was to make short tethers and keep them tight in relation to leaders of all institutions. In nineteenth century preaching, humor is directed most often at powerful presidents and politicians as the devil or as in potential league with the devil; but less significant presidents receive little or no attention. Thomas Jefferson’s strong political organization that dominated the first quarter of that century evoked the following prayer from Massachusetts’ Congregational minister Samuel Eaton: “O Lord, Thou hast commanded us to pray for our enemies, we would therefore pray for the President and Vice-President of these United States.”4 Less partisan is the comment of Peter Cartwright, a Methodist who supported Andrew Jackson for president but nonetheless was willing to ridicule another minister’s efforts to honor Jackson who arrived during a worship service:

    My fastidious preacher whispered a little loud, said: “General Jackson has come in, General Jackson has come in.” I felt a flash of indignation run all over me like an electric shock, and facing about to my congregation , and purposely speaking out audibly, I said, “Who is General Jackson ? If he don’t get his soul converted, God will damn him. . . .5

    And New Englanders could also ridicule those for whom they voted as Yale’s champion of new theology, Nathaniel Taylor, showed in supporting Whig Henry Clay against Democrat Polk:

    If two devils are candidates for the office, and the election of one is inevitable , is it not one’s duty to vote for the lesser devil, in order to secure the greater good?6

    Polk went on to win the election and to be portrayed as a devil in political caricature; but Clay’s power in Congress qualified him to be portrayed as a devil also as we will see later in this essay. Only those with strong popular followings needed to be ridiculed, for as Unitarian Theodore Parker noted, “Men are continually led astray by misplaced reverence.”7 For instance, Jackson, Polk, and Jefferson Davis were all portrayed as the

    Page 17

    devil while other important political figures are portrayed as influenced by the devil. In one lithograph of 1834, Jackson’s facial characteristics identify him as the devil flying overhead to the acclaim of his enormous popular following to whom he distributes the spoils of office. The artist clearly drew upon Delacroix ‘s sensual illustration of Mephistopheles from an edition of Faust.8 A dozen years later, Polk becomes the chosen child of the devil in a lithograph where Jackson’s features are simply a facade behind which the devil plots war to expand American power.9 Less powerful presidents are seen as merely worshippers of the devil; for instance, President Pierce kneels and bows before the devil.10 Other politicians such as Henry Clay sometimes appear as in the pay of the devil or as the devil’s lawyer.11 The non-presidents who came closest to being the devil were those who threatened the union seriously. Tom Paine, who did much to undermine the Federalist government of John Adams, is portrayed as so intwined with the devil in pulling down the pillar of government that he is half devil;12 and Jefferson Davis was portrayed as the devil ruling over the earth.13 When George McClellan’s campaign against Lincoln in 1864 was at the height of its potency, that general was portrayed in a prominent position with the devil at center stage; but after Lincoln’s re-election, the devil and McClellan are shown to the side of lithographic attention.14 In the nineteenth century, the last portrayal of the devil at center stage is with Senator Sumner during the height of his power over reconstruction in the southern states. (And that portrayal was a copy of another Delacroix illustration of the devil in Faust.) The devil virtually disappeared from political caricature during the decades of inconsequential presidents and politicians from Grant through McKinley; and the devil reemerged in political caricature along with the next powerful president, Theodore Roosevelt.15 As powerful presidents were usually associated with increased military might and territorial expansion to the acclaim of the American majority, a few leading preachers extended their ridicule to the military and finally to the supposed virtue of the majority. In “A Sermon On War” given at the onset of the Mexican American War, Theodore Parker ridiculed every aspect of military glory from recruits to generals.16 Of previous military ventures, Parker noted the glorious war with Florida Indians which he estimated cost the country between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000 “in fighting five hundred invisible Indians!”17 And Parker used ridicule to reduce to infamy the famous “victories” which General Zachary Taylor won in destroying villages when he invaded Mexico even before Congress declared war:

    To butcher men and women and children, when they are coming home from church, with prayer books in their hands, seems an aggravation even of murder; a cowardly murder, which a Hessian would have been ashamed of. “But ’twas a famous victory.”18

    During the same war, Horace Bushnell used a different imagery in ridicule:

    One race there is that figure in these heroics of war, in a small way, viz., the tiny race of ants whom God had made a spectacle to mock the glory and magnificence of human wars.19

    Page 18

    And Bushnell traced the cause of war to idolatry of self; for on the ruins of war, man raises “himself into the attitude of a god, before the obsequious ages of mankind; for who of us can live content, as we are tempted, without some hero to admire and worship.”20 While Parker and Bushnell ridiculed war at a time they opposed a particular war, Henry Ward Beecher ridiculed the glories of warriors at the time of the Civil War that he supported. As the smartly uniformed troops marched off to war and were cheered as heroes by crowds along the streets, Beecher noted:

    The papers do represent them as being made up of quite another class of men and that they will leave New York wonderfully purified when they go forth. . . .21

    Reflections for Today

    For the contemporary preacher, the foregoing survey of derision in political caricature and preaching suggests these strategies. We should direct ridicule at the most powerful politicians including those we support. We should use little ridicule toward those of little power. Those idolized by large popular followings need especially to be ridiculed along with any claim of a mandate in virtue of numbers. Arguments based on what is normal or abnormal should attract sharp ridicule in an age when it is abnormal to be a church member in the world. And in an era when church reunion is obstructed by polity differences (and a final nuclear war is threatened to protect democracy), we should ridicule any claim that the Bible ordained our form of government in church or state. Albert van den Heuval, who served in the 1960’s as secretary of the division of communications for the World Council of Churches, observed that that at which we cannot laugh has become for us an idol. He urged churches to develop “liturgies of ridicule” to put down potential idols.22 Because it is the essence of idolatry to be too serious about the idol, ridicule is the needed strategy. As Methodist Sam Jones observed, “Some men open their mouths to laugh, and you can drop a great brickbat of truth right in.”23 Amen.

    NOTES

    1. Cf. Doug Adams, Humor In The American Pulpit From George White field Through Henry Ward Beecher, Rev. ed. (Austin, The Sharing Company, 1981), 54ff., 109ff., passim. 2. Cf. Christopher Hill, Antichrist In Seventeenth Century England, (London, Oxford University Press, 1971); Craig Harbison, The Last Judgment In Sixteenth Century Northern Europe: A Study of the Relation Between Art and the Reformation, (New York, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976); and Aletha Gilsdorf, The Puitan Apocalypse: New England Eschatology In The Seventeenth Century, Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, 1965. 3. John Cotton, Exposition on the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation, (London, 1656), 77. 4. Letter, Alpheus Packard to William Sprague, (January 18, 1855), Annals of The American Pulpit, ed. William Sprague, (New York, Robert Carter & Brothers, 1857), 1:616.

    Page 19

    5. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, The Backwoods Preacher, W.F. Strickland, ed., (London, Arthur Hill, Virtue and Company, n.d.) 192. 6. The power of Daniel Webster in the senate evoked similar ridicule. Adams, Humor In The American Pulpit, 118-122. 7. Theodore Parker, “Daniel Webster,” in Historic Americans, Samuel A. Elliott, ed., (Boston, American Unitarian Association, 1908), 7:275. 8. “Office Hunters For the Year 1834,” lithograph published by Imbert, 1834. 9. “Polk’s Dream,” lithograph published by J. Baillie, 1846. 10. “Position of the Democratic Party In 1852,” lithograph entered by William Leach, 1852. 11. “Old Harry Senior and Old Harry Junior,” lithograph, 1843; and “Whig Appeal For An Excuse,” lithograph by J. Baillie, 1844. 12. “Mad Tom In A Rage,” etching, 1801. 13. “I adjure All Men To Obey The Behests of King Cotton Under Penalty of Hell Flames,” lithograph by F. Meier, 1861. 14. “McClellan’s Crafty Policy With the Traitorous Chicago Platform In Full Bloom,” lithograph (Harry MacNiell Bland), 1864; and “The Great Majority,” lithograph (Harry MacNeill Bland), 1864. 15. Victoria Woodhull was one woman portrayed as the devil with her free love campaign : “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!” Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872, 140. 16. Theodore Parker, “A Sermon on War,” Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons , I, (New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1864), 75-76. 17. Ibid., 78. 18. Ibid., 149. 19. Horace Bushnell, “Dignity of Human Nature Shown From Its Ruins,” Sermons For The New Life, (New York, Charles Schribner, 1858), 56. 20. Ibid., 57. 21. Henry Ward Beecher, Freedom and War, 144. 22. Albert van den Heuval, Celebration, (Chicago, Argus Communications, 1970), tape recording No. 4136, Tape I, side 2. 23. Sam Jones, Sermons: Wise and Witty, (New York, Cheap Publishing Company, 1885), 34.

  • The Fall of the House of Uzzah…and Other Difficult Preaching Texts

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 13

    The Fall of the House of Uzzah . . . and

    Other Difficult Preaching Texts

    by Thomas G. Long

    Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

    Recently, in a seminar on preaching from the lectionary, one of the participants raised an interesting query: can every biblical text be preached? In this particular case the question was a keenly practical one since the questioner had spent the night before trying unsuccessfully to extract some sermonic blood from a rather stony set of lections. But the question is an interesting one to bounce around more broadly and theoretically. Are there biblical texts so historically remote, so theologically conflictural, or so hermeneutically intractable that they are simply not legitimate texts for preaching? Rather than dissecting that problem at length, let me be bold and suggest my own response, namely: yes, there probably are biblical texts which cannot, or better should not, be preached, but they are fewer in number than one might think. Moreover, I would go on to suggest that it is precisely those texts which seem most difficult or unfruitful to a preacher which may provide the arenas for the most liberating preaching. At one level I am simply restating the old canon-within-a-canon problem. Most of us who preach have, admittedly, a rather limited set of biblical documents which forms the basis of most of our sermons. That much is obvious. What is often not so obvious is that underlying and governing that “little canon ” is usually an implicit biblical theology, more or less personal and systematic , which not only pushes us to select certain texts over others, but also to highlight particular aspects of the texts we do choose at the expense of other features of those texts. The preacher who looks at the Magnificat (Luke l:46ff), for example, and sees only interior spiritual issues at work and not the social justice matters which are clearly there in the text as well, does so because of a prior disposition to see the faith in personalistic terms. We see what we allow ourselves to see, that is, we tend to choose certain texts and then to see only certain things in those texts because of our exegetical and theological presuppositions . That’s not entirely bad, of course; in fact we have known at least since Bultmann that exegesis without presuppositions is impossible. But our presuppositions should be challenged, our range of hermeneutical vision expanded , and one good way to begin doing that is self-consciously to select on occasion a preaching text which might otherwise be rejected. At another level, though, I want to suggest that many biblical texts appear unproductive for preaching because of the exegetical methods we have been taught to practice. Most of our exegetical processes are built upon the notion that each biblical text contains one or more meanings. The task of exegesis, then, is to pull the plum out of the pie, that is, to probe around in the text with word studies and the like long enough to come up with at least one signifi-

    Page 14

    cant “meaning” in the passage. This sort of close examination of the conceptual structure of single texts, which might be called “micro-exegesis,” does work, of course, and it works often enough and well enough that the practice of it has become virtually de rigueur in biblical preaching. A problem arises, however, when the method encounters a text which seems to contain “meanings” which are either of little current interest (e.g., how to make a cereal offering) or in some way “substandard” in regard to gospel proclamation (e.g., “Go to the ant, O sluggard . . .” or “Happy are they who dash the heads of infants against the rock.”). Micro-exegesis yields meanings from such texts all right, but they are meanings we can just as well do without and so we move on to greener pastures. Before we rush to do so, however , it would be good to acknowledge that there are other ways to wrestle with texts. Biblical texts “mean” not only by virture of the idea they contain, but also by virtue of the roles they play in the literary and cultural fabrics in which they are found. Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, to use a contemporary example, obviously contains a number of ideas, the sum of which might be termed, from a certain vantage point, the meaning of that speech. The fact of the matter, though, is that the internal ideas of that speech are of relatively little interest compared to its larger meanings in such areas as the manipulation of the television medium, the career of Nixon, the socio-political environment of America in the 50’s, and so on. What does the “Checkers” speech mean? It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that what it means is not so much what is said, but rather what it did and what it symbolized in the cultural context. To get at this aspect of a text’s meaning requires that the interpreter stands back from the text and ask questions of function rather than merely questions of content, to perform in essence a kind of “macro-exegesis.” In order to demonstrate how this might work for a biblical text and for preaching, I want to report on my own efforts to prepare a sermon on a decidedly difficult, and in many ways offensive, text: the story of Uzzah and the ark found in 2 Samuel 6:1-7.

    The Text

    A simple reading of this text makes it clear why this passage has more often than not ended up on the homiletical rubbish heap. The passage tells the story of the moving of the ark of God, by David and his men, into the newlycaptured city of Jerusalem. As the ark processional arrives at the threshing floor of Nacon,the oxen stumble, the cart bearing the ark tips, and an obscure character named Uzzah reaches out to steady the ark. According to the text, God immediately strikes Uzzah dead for touching the ark. The text itself, then, seems to provide the preacher little to go on other than a superstitious view of the ark and a vengeful and punitive understanding of God. We can appreciate the fact that this text gives traditional commentators no little discomfort, and we can hardly blame a scholar like David F. Payne when he swings out of the jungle on the nearest vine:

    Page 15

    Uzzah, with the best of intentions in the world, instinctively put out a hand to steady the ark, and having done so was horrified at his own action , and overcome by fear suffered a heart attack or something of the sort.1

    That explanation of the text is amusingly touching. Amusing because it is so far-fetched, so clearly an attempt to wriggle out of a tight spot. Touching because it is no less clearly an attempt to keep up the good appearance of the faith with the egg of this text all over his face. And, come to think of it, what else can you do with this text other than somehow explaining it away? One possibility, of course, is to jettison the text in favor of some other more amenable to preaching, and, for some texts, that might be the best option . Before doing that to the Uzzah story, though, I wanted to explore a macro-exegetical approach, to examine the passage from larger and more functional points of view. This did not mean, I hasten to say, that I became disinterested in what the Uzzah text said per se, but rather that I now focused my attention on how the story was used in various contexts. We use the story of “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” as one piece of the larger mythic view of Washington’s character. Freud claims for the Oedipus story a much deeper cultural use than one can imagine if one remains inside the narrative itself. Just so, when this or that ancient Hebrew told the Uzzah story, to what use was it put? This standing back from the text, the macro-exegetical approach , produced several interesting insights:

    1) It has been suggested by some that the Uzzah text functioned primarily as a piece of political rhetoric. R. A. Carlson, in his book David, the Chosen King, advances the notion that the Uzzah story is the narrative manifestation and explanation of what was probably a turbulent change in priestly command .2 In the same way that the narrative of the fall accounted theologically for the various miseries of human existence, the story of Uzzah, in smaller fashion, accounted theologically for the decline of the priestly family of Abinadab (to which Uzzah belonged). Regardless of what may have been the more secular reasons for their loss of power, the Abinadab clan was removed because of violations of the sacred rituals of holiness and at the perogative of God, or so the story insists.

    2) The possibility has also been advanced that the Uzzah story functions as a piece of liturgical drama. The notion here is that among the festivals of the Hebrews there was a seasonal re-enactment of the coming of the ark ta Jerusalem . On its way into Jerusalem the ritual procession would pause, curiously enough at the site of a former shrine of Baal (namely, the house of Obededom the Gittite, mentioned in 2 Sam. 6:10ff). The Uzzah story would then be recited , giving an “interpretation” of the ceremonial pause and providing liturgical expression of the idea that God sometimes blesses that which lies outside the cultus (i.e., the “pagan shrine”) over that which lies inside (i.e., Uzzah). J. R. Porter extends this argument even further, suggesting that the Hebrew festival was a replacement for the Babylonian Akitu festival, a ceremony which included the ritual slaying of a criminal.8 The Uzzah story, which involves a “crime” against Yahweh, become a narrative replacement for what was once a

    Page 16

    real act of religious capital punishment.

    3) In my view, however, the most fruitful macro-exegetical insight came from Anthony F. Campbell’s article in Journal of Biblical Literature “Yahweh and the Ark: A Case Study in Narrative.”4 Campbell views the Uzzah story as one of the final episodes in a larger “ark narrative,” which begins in 1 Samuel 4. Though scattered throughout 1 and 2 Samuel, the “ark narrative” can nonetheless be identified as a coherent story with its own theological purposes and a unified inner logic. Rather than seeking to find the meaning of the Uzzah story in its political or liturgical context, Campbell seeks to discover its place and function in the overall structure of this “ark narrative.” “As a case study,” he writes, “the ark narrative is a useful example of narrative functioning as a vehicle for theology . . . (and) where such theological narrative is concerned, every element of the total narrative must be explored for its contribution.”5 What Campbell finds is that the whole “ark narrative” is built out of repeating “up-down-up” (or “success-failure-success”) plot sequences. The Uzzah story, clearly one of the “down” movements of the plot, is a piece of narrative machinery serving to advance the plot toward its ultimate upward thrust. Moreover, the narrator attaches consistent theological value to the various movements of the plot, namely, the plot moves “up” when the ark is recognized as a revelatory symbol of the power and presence of God, “down” when that symbol is comprised. The “down” movement of the Uzzah story in particular serves theologically to strip away any notion of human causality in the progress of the ark and to prepare the reader for the claim that the ark enters Jerusalem “only as a result of Yahweh’s favorable will.”6 Moving beyond Campbell to a homiletical use of his insight, it seems then that the Uzzah story, as a piece of the larger “ark narrative,” presents two narrative symbols, Uzzah and the ark, and draws the dramatic tension between them. “Uzzah” represents all human effort to manipulate divine presence and favor; the “ark,” as it does throughout the “ark narrative,” symbolizes the free power and presence of God, above all human control. The story celebrates the triumph of the “ark” symbol over the “Uzzah” symbol. A sermon, which utilizes this vantage point, must present the same symbols in contemporary terms and develop the same tension as does the original narrative. It must do this while, at the same time, acknowledging, and dealing with, the inevitable puzzlement and sense of repulsion which the story, in and of itself, is sure to create for modern hearers. Those are, it is clear, staggering tasks, and no sermon will be up to them fully. But sermons must be preached, and here is my attempt to be faithful to this extraordinary and difficult passage:

    The Sermon “Just in Case” A Sermon based upon 2 Samuel 6:1-7

    Anyone who has taken a serious trip through the Old Testament knows that there are some rough neighborhoods to be found there. One does not have to go very far before running up on some brutal war being waged, some blood

    Page 17

    being spilt, or even some children being gobbled up by bears, often in the name of God. Mark Twain, whose negative views on all this Old Testament carnage are well known, once wrote:

    (In the Old Testament) God is always punishing . . . punishing innocent children . . . punishing unoffending populations . . . even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs. . . . If God had a motto, it would have read, “Let no innocent person escape.”

    Touché . . . and case in point: the story we have just read about Uzzah and the ark. As the story goes, King David having just captured Jerusalem and made it his capital, wished to make the city a religious center as well as a political and military one. So, he decided to bring the ark of the covenant, the symbol of God’s holy presence and power, from the town where it had been housed, into Jerusalem itself. David and his men loaded the ark onto an ox cart and headed out. On the way, however, the oxen stumbled, the cart tipped, and Uzzah reflexively reached out to steady the ark. Thoughtful. . . responsible . . . prudent. . . except that Uzzah was rewarded for his prudence by being struck dead by God on the spot. Now this is clearly something of a mean street as biblical avenues go, and it is interesting to see how the Old Testament commentators attempt to travel on it. Some of them act like tour guides on a Gray Line bus tour, trying to divert our attention to the lovely skyline of Jerusalem just ahead, as the driver tears through this particular slum. Others wrinkle their noses at the ancient Hebrews and their crude legends, while an occasional unsuspecting scholar, arriving in Uzzah’s neighborhood before having the chance to roll up his windows and lock his doors, is forced to look at the story itself in open-mouthed shock. One I read finally blubbers out, “An encounter with the living God is a terrible thing . . . cf., Annanias and Sapphira.”! Well, to be sure there is some rough-edged legend mixed in with history here, and the critics are right: the first impression of God given here is out of “synch” with the God we meet in Jesus Christ. But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss this story with the wave of a hand as a piece of moldy barbarism . The very fact that it rubs us the wrong way may, in fact, be a sign that we have outgrown it . . . or it may be the sign that it brings some needed corrective to the way we understand ourselves, our faith, and God. Like Jacob wrestling beside the river, we should not let this story go until it has at least the chance to bless us. The only place I know to begin wrestling with this story is to ask the question , “What did Uzzah do that was so bad?” I mean he’s walking along beside the ark, the cart tips, he spontaneously reaches out to steady the ark and . . . But maybe there is a deeper question to ask: “What does that spontaneous, impulsive action reveal?” We sometimes reveal more of the truth about ourselves by what we do and say reflexively, spontaneously, than by our calculated statements and arranged positions. A spontaneous gesture an reveal a universe. For example, some of my students in the seminary who are women are kind enough to tell me that, when I depart from my lecture notes and begin to speak extemporaneously, my language is often very male-oriented. Most of the

    Page 18

    time, in my spontaneous speech, ministers are “he,” and church workers are “laymen” and God is always “He.” Of course I respond to all this: “Don’t blame me. I’m simply using spontaneously, reflexively, the language which I have inherited from my forefath . . . ” Ah . . . a spontaneous word, a spontaneous gesture can reveal a universe . . . a universe dominated by male power and masculine modes of thought. Or again, a mother takes her two-year-old to visit the new neighbor who has just moved in down the street. After only a few minutes of getting acquainted , the child grows restless and begins to explore the room. The mother says, “Honey, don’t bother things.” To which the new neighbor responds, “Oh, don’t worry about him. There’s not a thing in this house he can hurt, and even if he did, they’re just things. He’s a lot more important than any old thing.” Just at that instant, however, the child brushes up against a vase and tips it off the end table. The new neighbor lunges across the floor like a wide receiver, catching the vase a millimeter before destruction. “They’re just things. . . .” but, a spontaneous gesture reveals a universe. Or, closer to the point: a short time ago I was riding a public bus in Denver . As the bus slowed down I noticed that waiting at the stop was a man in a wheel chair, his body severely paralyzed and twisted. When the bus stopped, the driver pressed a lever, and a mechanized ramp extended from the side of the bus and lowered it to the curb. With great skill the man rolled his wheel chair onto the ramp. He’d done this before and was an expert at it; you could tell. The driver pushed the lever again, and the ramp raised up to the door of the bus. The man rolled his chair forward. As he took out his fare, however, the chair suddenly began to roll back toward the still open doorway. With no problem at all the man quickly grabbed one of the wheels and brought the chair to a halt . . . but not before the bus driver had reflexively lurched forward to grab the man. When the man looked at the driver his first expression was not of gratitude, but of sadness and of having been betrayed. It was a look that said, “So, you really didn’t think I could handle myself after all, did you?” A spontaneous gesture reveals a universe. So, here we have Uzzah walking along side the ark. If we had interviewed him he would probably have been able to rattle off the orthodoxy of his day. Do you believe in God? Yes. The God above all gods? Yes. Whose holiness is above the heavens and whose majesty shames earthly kings, who holds all time in his hands, who laid the foundations of the earth? Yes . . . yes . . . yes. And when the oxen stumbled, and with a spontaneous gesture that revealed a universe , Uzzah confessed his real faith: a God so impotent that if the box falls God falls; a God so weak that this God needs the help of the likes of Uzzah to dotter across the street; an empty shell of a God trapped inside fragile religious symbols. Do you see Uzzah reaching out now?

    —I see Uzzah reach out to steady the ark every time somebody turns down the rheo-stat in the sanctuary so that worship will “work.” —I see Uzzah reach out to steady the ark every time we trade good theology for some sure-fire gimmicks to keep the stewardship program from falling off the cart. —Every time we compromise the gospel with a little pop sociology to get the

    Page 19

    church to grow, Uzzah steadies the ark once again.

    R. E. C. Browne once noted that part of the trauma of preaching is that the gospel seems to be too little for people to live on. The temptation, says Browne, is to go beyond the authority of the gospel to make our authority strong and clear, to become a dispenser of wise thoughts and helpful advice. But Browne nails that on the head when he says, “That going beyond is always the outcome of an atheistic anxiety” (The Ministry of the Word, 40). We believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . but just in case, we reach out to steady the ark. The first church I served, right after seminary, was a troubled congrega­ tion, not so much internally as externally. We were, to put it mildly, in a bad location, right next to a busy airport and in a formerly residential neighbor­ hood rapidly becoming commercial and industrial. We had a strong spirit, but our neighborhood was disappearing before our very eyes. One night we were having one of those “What-are-we-going-to-do?” session meetings, brainstorm­ ing ideas to keep the church on the ox cart. Maybe we can move . . . no, too expensive; and where are we going to move? Maybe we could hire a youth leader and jazz up the youth program. Maybe we could advertise in the Satur­ day paper. Maybe we could do a neighborhood canvass . . . maybe, maybe, maybe. Finally one elder who had been silent spoke up. “Look, we’ve been here a long time as a church, worshiping, preaching, teaching, visiting the sick, try­ ing to do God’s work. Many people have been touched by this church. I think we just ought to keep on doing the best we can to be the church, and if this congregation dies, let it die. God’s work will still get done in this place.” Be­ cause he believed in a God who works in the world even when congregations falter, and institutions wither, and oxen stumble, he didn’t have to reach out his hand to steady the ark. As for Uzzah’s story, I am as bothered as anyone by the violence in this passage, but, all things considered, I think we need a God whose presence and power are to be taken seriously more than a god who has to be helped across Church street.

    NOTES

    1 David F. Payne, 1 and 2 Samuel, The Daily Study Bible (Philadelphia: The Westminster

    Press, 1982), 184-5. 2 R. A. Carlson, David, the Chosen King (Stockholm; Almquist and Wiksell, 1964), 84.

    3 J. R. Porter, “The Interpretation of 2 Samuel VI and Psalm CXXXII,” Journal of Theologi­

    cal Studies V (1954): 172. 4 Anthony F. Campbell, “Yahweh and the Ark: A Case Study in Narrative,” Journal of Bibli­

    cal Literature 98/1 (1979): 31-43. 5 Ibid., 43.

    β Ibid., 42. See also J. M. De Tarragon, “David et L’Arche: II Samuel, VI,” Revue Biblique,

    LXXXVI (1979): 514-23, which takes a theological approach similar to Campbell’s.

  • Preaching and the Family Paradigm

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 17

    Preaching and the Family Paradigm

    Peggy Way

    Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee

    Introduction The preaching task of interpreting human existence in the light of Scripture and inviting persons to live out of such illumination is nowhere more promising than in relation to family life. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann states the centrality of the family as a powerful learning paradigm for all human beings: the family is the primary unit of meaning which shapes and defines reality.1 Throughout human history, the worlds of story telling and of literature have disclosed those familiar and yet frightening complex worlds of family relationships where persons learn the very nature of love, hate, remorse, reconciliation, power and promise. No wonder that our faith centers around images and metaphors of family which make direct connection with these primary human experiencings, and promise fulfillment as the household of God, or oikoumene, the whole inhabited world as one family. Thus it should come as no surprise that preaching on family life intersects with rich veins of response, touching immediately into the differing empirics of personal pilgrimages, the touchy pluralisms within each parish, denomination and ecumenical faith grouping, and even the politics of contemporary hermeneutical schemes. Within a therapeutic culture, individuals as well as couple or family groupings are self-conscious about their families of origin, that is blood kinship groupings, as well as perplexed about the shifts even in definitions of what constitutes a family that are occurring to them as well as around them. With such intensities and passions, it is also not surprising that discussions of family life have become politicized—remember the recent White House Conferences on the Family. Indeed, within the United Church of Christ, the denominational selection of Peace and Family Life as co-equal priorities recognized the hopefully creative tensions between those advocating broad justice concerns, on the one hand, and care and concern for the primary human unit on the other. Thus preaching about family life is as risky as it is necessary, for real issues are at stake and cultural change is frightening. It is not always clear what the central interpretive principles are, or even what the invitation is to! These brief remarks begin by assuming, with Brueggeman, that family life is the central paradigm out of which we interpret the world, including our use of religious language, and the central location for learning how to live in the world. Further, the family is both historical, that is, living out its ordinary existence within the dynamic tensions of the real world, and an organism, continually shaping and re-shaping itself over time. The pastor, then, who is addressing those has both a stake in the subject and a hunger after being able to understand or “name” what is going on. In daring the family paradigm, the pastor is

    Page 18

    preaching the dynamics of human history and invitations as to how humans are to learn to live together, over time, in the midst of complex cultural tensions. The next three sections offer insight into what is being interpreted, what is being invited, and what are some helpful resources, including the pastor’s own wisdom and creativity. But first let us note some of the rich Scriptural resources and interpretations that await us:

    Families come in all sizes and types. There are big, extended families like the family of Lot, with children, and aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and grandparents, and grandchildren. There are small families like the family of Elizabeth and Zechariah, who were of advanced years when John, their only son, was born. There are multi-generational families like Timothy’s, whose mother Eunice and grandmother Lois shared the responsibilities of child-rearing. Some families are made up of single persons like Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus. Others are single-parent families like the widow and her two sons whom Elisha befriended. Some families remain childless and, like Priscilla and Aquila, lead rich, full lives. Some broken families, like Naomi and Ruth, know the pain of loss and the joy of new family ties. All persons do not experience being part of a family in the same way. Some, like Joseph and his brothers, find themselves caught in unpleasant or painful situations. In other families, a shared hope or an unfilfilled dream draws loved ones closer. Abraham and Sarah knew the frustration of waiting, and wanting, and waiting . . . together. Who are the people you call family?2

    Interpretations The preacher as interpreter speaks to what is being experienced, looking with depth beneath surfaces to the dynamics of family life that allow the sermon to disclose the truthful intersections with Scriptural and theological meanings. At best, the hearers will respond by saying: yes, that’s it! I’d never seen it before. And with the interpretation “true,” the invitation is taken more seriously. But first let us consider three such central interpretations.

    First The wise and experienced pastor/preacher knows how hard family life is. In Neuhaus’ language about community and family “Real community is not homogeneity. It is the discipline and devotion of disparate peo-

    Page 19

    pie bearing with one another in the hard tasks of love.”3 Liberals and conservatives alike recognize the reality of this. Brothers and sisters are at odds; enmity and treachery exist within living parish families and within Bible stories. Members of families let one another down; they go away from one another in the very processes of growth and of aging; they miscommunicate; they are on opposite sides of wars and of elections, and hopelessly and helplessly keep trying to control one another. This is data from the family paradigm that discloses central preaching issues. How are we to stay together over time, dealing with our differences ? What is the meaning of a relational creation? What does fidelity mean at its depths, and are there ways in which covenants differ from contracts? This relatively simple notation of the realities of family life invites an interpretation of historical existence that takes the data with full seriousness, while placing it in some perspective and inviting creative response. And because the data are so real, so concrete, they cannot be preached away with niceties or static pictures. Perhaps the second crucial interpretation will help.

    Second

    In both blood kinship systems and those families that form in other ways, a central task is learning how to deal with others. Moreover, these “others” cannot ultimately be controlled; they do not yield lightly to what we desire them to be, or collapse neatly into our expectations. Anyone who is or has a parent or a child has intimations of this! Nor do spouses or even roommates continually fulfill our needs—or give up their own in which we are expected to participate! The family paradigm is truly one of learning to deal with “otherness.” And, in a world of shifting authorities, by what Authority do we stay together to negotiate our competing worlds? What power of the self is necessary in order to receive another self without having to take it over? Is it possible that power within family life is as much the power to receive as it is the power to control? Such ponderings surely lead to theological interpretations of the nature of God as Other—whom we also try to control—as well as the Stranger within our midst. Such interpretations begin with pastoral wisdom and probe beneath the surface of family life to those profound and truthful dynamics of strangers learning how to live together in history, in the Name of an Authoritative Power, who seeks to have them covenant together in fidelity. The family paradigm is a paradigm that opens up opportunities to preach about living in the world. A third interpretation, however, must here suffice.

    Third

    Family life, like social and national life, is continually changing. The

    Page 20

    children grow and the parents age; new opportunities open for women and economic challenges beset men; the compliant eight year old becomes the rebel teen-ager; a middle aged wife seeks ordination; a decent husband wanders astray; a child becomes that which is not valued; one is widowed prematurely and singles celebrate rather than bemoan their status. The perspectives of the Faith claim to be able to interpret change and even crisis. Humans are finite, not in control; despair and sadness push even the Psalmist to the limits; life doesn’t work out as we had planned; and yet . . . . Within the family paradigm the dynamics between varying needs to be dependent and to be independent or autonomous are continually shifting , and in the midst of such change the Presence of the One who promises remains at least an intimation of hope. Indeed the interpretive possibilities are almost endless, for the Scriptures themselves speak of an historical people, living in history with their eyes on promised futures, caught always in contradiction and struggle, but accompanied always by the One who came to live amidst the same history and the Spirit which remains.

    Invitation

    Because of the almost primordial status of the family paradigm, it invites expansion. Interpretation is not only pastoral but prophetic. It makes eminently good sense that the United Church of Christ should have selected Peace and Family Life not as competing, but rather as complementary , priorities. Again let us note three interpretations that here become, more clearly, invitations.

    First

    The biological family of the Scriptures is to become more and more inclusive of others, of strangers, even. It is to demonstrate hospitality to those outside the household. Indeed, even as the self is to experience enough power in order NOT to have to control others, the family is to become comfortable enough with its own roots and values not to be threatened by others. But these must not just be nice words that the preacher utters! For everyone within the biological family knows just how hard it is even to receive the Stranger among them! Yet the paradigm opens itself up to the continuing proclamation of the oneness of the human family—and a continual embodiment of this intent as the “hard tasks of love.” And so the family paradigm opens up ecumenical interpretaion, the struggles between nations, the patience of leaders who keep communication open and the structures that allow for real differences to be explored through human process and contact. Surely the issues of Peace and Family Life

    Page 21

    intersect. Surely preaching about either transcends the simple categories of conservative and liberal and moves toward those dynamics of human beings struggling together in history which are so powerfully disclosed in Scripture and our theological traditions.

    Second

    There are of course those situations where “otherness” cannot be received . Divorce occurs. Siblings become estranged. Nations rise up against nations. Within the dynamics of living, complex organisms within history, interpretations can occur as well as invitations toward new response. Forgiveness can be viewed as a radical act—perhaps the most radical of all, whether of family member or political opponent. Perhaps new imperatives can be raised to care for the “other” even through estrangement. A family example might be the struggles to retain communication following divorce, so that enmities need not be carried on in the lives of the children . Certainly preaching can seek to modify the triumphalism of estrangement , and focus on the oft neglected dynamic of human sadness that may even lie behind the more obvious expressions of anger. How is one to live thru such times? Once again, simple answers or formulae must not substitute for more profound interpretations and scripturally based prophetic injunctions. And wise pastors may offer prophetic styles that intersect personal and justice issues in ways that no one else can accomplish.

    Third

    Because such issues are so human, so historical, so perennial, we might say, the preacher can offer prophetic interpretations that have to do with Kairos and chronos, God’s time and human time, and such devotion that one, at least, does not “go away” or remove oneself from history. The energies to take on the “hard tasks of love” may be dissipated by burn-out or a retreat into moralisms without an underlying theological base and spiritual enrichment that keeps humans not only “hanging in there” but faithful to the promises. Again the wise pastor will see the rich interpretive/prophetic opportunities to address the human situation in both its stark realism and its nevertheless joyful promises.

    Resources These brief remarks have themselves been meant to be invitational to wise and creative pastor/preachers to use their own rich resources of pastoral experience and personal faithfulness. The pastor/theologian and the pastor/Biblical scholar is rooted in the richest interpretive scheme of all—and one that always invites new perceptions, new actions, new ways of being in the world. Perhaps the best beginning at preaching out of and

    Page 22

    to the family paradigm is ecclesial existence itself, where pastor and people stand and live in the middle of history, at those complex intersections of existence where God comes to the human and there is intentional struggle to live in the promised ways. There are, of course, other resources. The United Church of Christ is offering its pastors more specific ideas than these to enrich their personal offerings. A simple outline suggests four topics: Family, Including the Excluded (Psalm 46; Ephesians 2:12-22); Where Are Our Children? (Matthew 18:1-6; 19:13-15); Marriage Today: Bring On Fidelity (Deuteronomy 30:11-20; Luke 16:10-13); and The Individual vs. The Family (Genesis 1:26-2:3; Galatians 3:23-37).4 Family therapists offer profound insight into the family as dynamic organism, and developmental psychology (in particular relationship to faith development) offers perspectives on change, as does crisis thought. But the confidant pastor/preacher is her or his own best resource as we ponder our own pastoral experiences with families in relation to our own Scriptural awareness, theological stance and faith pilgrimage.

    We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world, to tame its savageness, to be compassionate of all, including ourselves. Then, in the time left over, to repeat the Ancient Tale and go the way of God’s foolish ones. Peter Byrne, S.J. The family paradigm is crucial to such interpretive and invitational tasks and opportunities. Fulfilling them is, after all, what our Calling intends.

    NOTES

    1. Brueggemann, Walter “The Covenanted Family: A Zone for Humanness,” Journal of Current Social Issues, Vol. 14, No. 1, (Winter, 1977), 18-23. 2. “The Common Lot,” published by the UCC Coordinating Center for Women in Church and Society, November, 1982, No. 23, 1. 3. From Richard John Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry, page 112. 4. From Keeping You Posted, a UCC newsletter, 1/15/83. The sermon series is available from the Division of Health and Welfare, U.C.B.H.M.-17th Floor, 132 West 31st St., New York, NY 10001, Att: Faith Johnson. Other titles include: “What the Church Says to Men”; “The Evangelical Feminist in the Family”; “Is There a Place for Me in the Family.” Such resources are viewed as stimuli to one’s own creative interpretation/invitation. 5. From the invitation to the ordination of a Jesuit priest.