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Sit & Get or Contend & Send: The Opportunity for the Church Now

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Sit & Get or Contend & Send—

The Opportunity for the Church Now

Mark Ramsey

The Ministry Collaborative, Charlottesville, Virginia

On their year-end podcast for Death, Sex, and Money,

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host Anna Sale was talking with her contributing editors about their pandemic coping habits. Amidst a ﬂ urry of admissions that they were binging TV shows from their youth (“I just don’t have the energy to do anything except enjoy characters I already know….”), contributing editor Aﬁ Yellow-Duke made her own confession: “I just ﬁ nished binging all 121 episodes of Gossip Girl,”1 at which everyone on the podcast immediately voiced their recognition of the need and the beneﬁ t of such an endeavor. The global pandemic has revealed many things that we had managed to keep barely submerged out of sight, and it has accelerated every trend that was even gently active before March of last year. In our personal lives, it has revealed coping strategies of “return”—a return to comfort foods, comfort hobbies, and yes, comfort media consumption. We have found ourselves wanting to return to parts of our lives and histories that worked for us in past moments of crisis and stress. This has also led to a hunger for comfort church or return to a “comfort religion.” The “revealing” aspect of this months-long crisis has impacted faith communities with talk of a “return” of a different kind. Returning to in-person worship has been a priority for many congregations, often pitting pastors and members on opposite sides. While certainly not true of all congregations, the dialogue in many congregations over the last several months has focused on “getting back to normal” or “returning to our worship and what we have lost in the pandemic.” This feels a bit like binging Gossip Girl (or The Ofﬁ ce or The Wire or Buffy the Vampire Slayer—take your pick) to experience something familiar from an earlier time where comfort and clarity were more prominent. But to take refuge in Buffy saving the world one more time is to miss the larger crosscurrents active right now. There is real pain that is driving us to want to “return.” In our year-end message2 to our network of pastors and congregational leaders engaged with The Ministry Collaborative , we tried to address the deep needs revealed by the pain of the last several months:

This is a season to be very gentle with one another. Please, be gentle with your pastor who is probably barely holding on. If you are on your congregation’s church board or council, I hope you strive for deeper places and larger goals in the months ahead, but please do it with grace and good spirit and consideration for others alongside you who aren’t where you are and aren’t moving at the same pace—whether faster or slower—that you are. Congregations need to be gentle and forbearing with one another. No sentence should be uttered that begins with “well, it’s obvious that we should….” The Oxford English Dictionary named several “2020 words of the year, among them: unprecedented, entangled, omnishambled, apocalyptic , and hellacious.”3 Well, nothing is “obvious” in this unprecedented,

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entangled, omnishambled, apocalyptic, hellacious year! We are all looking for the light God will provide for our way forward. And we need all of us together to help ﬁ nd, nurture, share, and reﬂ ect that light.

No wonder each of us in church work is seeking comfort, stability, and ideas that don’t drain us further! However, scripture points us to a different path of “return.” Jeremiah 24:7: “I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.” Joel 2:13: “Rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” Zechariah 1:3: “Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts.’” Hosea 12:6: “But as for you, return to your God, hold fast to love and justice, and wait continually for your God.” And perhaps most crucial for this moment—Jeremiah 15:19: “Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth. It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them.’” From these words of the prophet, to the journey of Mary and Joseph in their return from Egypt, to the return of the Prodigal after “coming to himself” through the disciples’ feeble attempts to return to ﬁ shing when instead they encounter the Risen Christ, Biblical “return” is not engaged in nostalgia or re-composition. For all the yearning of those who wish to return and recompose life as it was in church in 2019 (or 1979, or 1959…), the Bible’s direction is clear. When we “return,” it is to God. We do not return to institutions or structures or “the way we do things.” We return to the author of life. God is always creating, redeeming, healing, and leading. While God may be the same “yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” that is not God’s intention for us nor for the church. “We were once lost and now we are found.” In initiating creation, redemption, and healing with us and with our faith communities, scripture indicates that we are, as the People of God, always on the move. Part of this movement is, in the words of Jeremiah, to “utter what is precious and not what is worthless.” An opportunity for the church in this season is to discern, with the leading of the Spirit, what we have been engaged in that is worthless, and likewise, what is precious in God’s sight. In a conversation about the state of the church in this challenging year, TMC colleague Wil McCall, president of Dallas Leadership Foundation among other ministry roles, said: “The time for churches of sit and get is over. Now is the time of t t contend and send.” We are living in a time when powerful forces are attempting to make the truth negotiable. It is a time when spiritually hungry, institutionally suspicious people are looking for meaning but are often not ﬁ nding it in faith communities. It is time for congregations to face this urgent challenge. Faith communities cannot satisfy themselves with “inviting people to come join us” or with “member services.” Among the most challenging things for a congregation to do are to plan for, give attention and resources to, give priority in mission and ministry to a constituency not yet present. Yet, that is exactly the call to the church in this moment. The tweet I read was posted hours after the insurrection and violent assault on the United States Capitol—that horriﬁ c day where confederate ﬂ ags and “Jesus 2020”

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banners were paraded through the Capitol Rotunda. The words that were posted can stand for scores of other voices that expressed virtually the same thing:

Can I be honest for a moment? Observing Christians combined w/ my study of history the last few years makes me want to distance myself from Christianity altogether. I ﬁ nd it increasingly difﬁ cult to separate Jesus from the manifold *bs* I read, see & experience every day.

A signiﬁ cant reveal for churches in this challenging year has been the reinforcement of a conviction that our study of scripture and theology has long proclaimed, but the church has often submerged in a blizzard of inward-looking activity: God loves the world more than God loves the church. God’s love is abundant, and there is plenty of God’s love for both church and world, but the Biblical witness makes primary “God so loved the world….” Wherever congregations go from here, this love of the world must be a prominent guidepost. The Jesus of the Gospels is needed in the public square. Others with vastly different agendas are placing Jesus there (“Jesus 2020”), and so it is incumbent on faith communities who hold the values of Jesus as demonstrated in the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—to re-introduce Jesus to this spiritually hungry culture who has long since ceased expecting much from most churches. This is the “contend and send” part that will largely supplant “sit and get” as the way churches engage their ministry. We in churches do not have a lot of time to move in this direction. Crises open opportunities, but the windows of opportunity close as quickly as they open. Everything has been accelerated in the past year. Every trend that was slowly working its way through the church is now on triple time. If a church had been exhibiting signs of health within itself, there’s a good chance its health has increased, even in the midst of the unprecedented pressures of the pandemic. If a congregation was actively nurturing good relationships with its neighborhood and larger community before 2020, almost certainly that congregation has been looked to as a trusted partner to help meet acute local needs in this time to help ease the pain of illness, hunger, and unemployment. In the same way, if a church was already struggling by being too inward-looking, too interested in keeping its own machine running, then there’s a good chance that its congregation has watched, helpless, as the machine ran out of the fuel it needed to keep going. There are congregations located near the epicenters of Black Lives Matter marches or Confederate Monument protests who explicitly said, “We don’t want to be involved.” They just wanted to get back to in-person worship and “invite people back in.” The “return” in Jeremiah 15 observes the imperative for churches to be attentive to the needs that are presenting themselves all around us: “If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious , and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth.” The time for modest calculation, of thinking that “sit and get” will carry the

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day, is over. The accelerated pace of this year’s changes brought that time to an end, ﬁ nally. Right now, after a year of pandemic and all that has been revealed, so many are feeling lost, empty, lonely, separated, hurting, and isolated. People in every space are looking and wondering who or what can ﬁ ll their deep need for care, community, connection, depth, and equity. On March 20, 2020, just days after the full force of the pandemic hit this country, Andy Crouch, Kurt Keilhacker, and Dave Blanchard published an astonishingly prescient article,Leading Beyond the Blizzard: Why Every Organization Is Now a Startup.4 The authors asserted that what we were entering into was not a blizzard—something that would pass in a few days, after which we could get back to normal. It was also not a winter—a season we could we anticipate and hunker down through, knowing that spring is coming. Instead, they described it as “an ice age”—something that would last and would reconﬁ gure much of what we understood as “normal.” In that regard, every faith-based organization was now going to have to see itself as a “start-up”: lean, nimble, carrying values of holy risk and courageous exploration for God at the heart of its identity. It is notable the church planters have fared well in these last several months. They and their communities know these start-up values down to their foundations. It’s all a challenge, but none of it is a surprise for them. Likewise, and in some ways more signiﬁ cantly, congregations who have always lived on the margins are largely not feeling the angst of change and de-centering that many majority white and more established congregations are. This is where they have lived for generations. They know that the wilderness is where God is present. The gifts these faith communities have to offer the rest of us are worthy of our attention, investment, and respect. What do they know that the rest of us are working to understand? What do they experience in the regular course of living, loving, and serving that can help us through this ice age? When a prolonged crisis reveals and accelerates our need for, care, community, connection, depth, and equity, there is an unprecedented opportunity for the church to respond as a well-spring of each of these—as an initiator of care and connection, as a model of true community, as a trusted partner in striving for equity for all, and as a collection of women and men, girls and boys who know there are much deeper parts to life and faith than binging Gossip Girl. So what is a church to do in order to move from “sit and get” to “contend and send”? How do we re-introduce ourselves—in our preaching and in our living—to the needs of this culture as a place of care, community, connection, depth, and equity? Here are a few thoughts to get the discussion rolling: Know that the “constituency not yet present” may be in the shadows, watching and discerning who you are. In every church I served, eventually some well-intentioned usher would suggest roping off the often-empty side and back pews “to keep everyone close together.” We never did that roping, for we understood that if someone was going to come into a sanctuary as an institutionally suspicious stranger, that is where they might want to sit, enjoying the safety of being close enough to the exit for a retreat if needed. (Watching online offers an even safer back pew.) Strangers with needs, wondering if the church has anything to say to those needs, are present in our midst. Do we meet them with insider language and internal management demands, or with words and deeds of hope and life?

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If you are in a traditional, established church, consider looking to faith communities on the margin for guidance and resources. They have much to teach. Church folk who have lived in vulnerability and lived with overt oppression and injustice have so much wisdom if we will look and listen. This year has de-centered all of us, and it has de-centered every congregation I know. For some, their word to the rest of us simply is “welcome to our world.” Please take seriously the well-earned institutional suspicionof at least the youngest three generations among us. How can we discern honestly and without defensiveness the traditions that nurture our identity as a people of God versus the institutional infrastructure that seems irrelevant and distracting to those who don’t know the code? Having a discussion within your church on the 2000-year-old question “What is essential ?” (and what, in turn, is not essential) seems, well, essential. Likewise, please take seriously the authentic spiritual hunger of at least the three r r youngest generations among us. People are looking for meaning and hope and life and purpose and connection. If that is met with “We are so glad you are here, we just happen to have our sign-up table in the narthex (the what?) so you can keep our church program machine running,” none of those who are searching for care, community , connection, depth, and equity will stick around for long. And along with that, as preachers, we need to be careful that we are preachers and not pundits. It’s fun being a pundit, offering our passionate and considered opinions on the issues of the day (and what outrageous issues we have been dealing with!). But people come to church to hear about, learn about, be formed by God. Over the last sixty years, culture has picked the carcass of the church clean. It has carried off our “mission statements” and our book studies and our ideas for gathering in fellowship and repurposed them for our consumer society. It seems that all that is left behind is Jesus. They didn’t know what to do with Jesus. Churches who try to keep up with culture by offering a similar menu of “sit and get” aren’t going to be able to engage the needs that surround us. But Jesus…, people are hungry for Jesus. We focus on, proclaim, and model ourselves on Jesus, and from that ﬂ ows engagement in both faith formation and the urgent needs of the day. We renew our commitment to proclaiming Jesus, cruciﬁ ed and risen, and then we work in partnership with all others for justice and peace. In a gift of grace, all the church has to offer the world is what the world does not have—and cannot imagine. Father Gregory Boyle has worked for more than thirty years with the gangs of South-Central Los Angeles. He founded Home-Boy Industries—to create jobs and hope for those who were trapped in the inner city. Father Boyle got diagnosed with leukemia a few years ago, and he observed the wonder of having gang members, one after another, come to his bedside. These gang members, who so often inﬂ icted death or had it inﬂ icted upon them, reacted with uncommon grace to Father Boyle. One of the most memorable was “Grumpy,” a huge guy with “no neck and a ton of tattoos,” who visited Father Boyle in the hospital. Grumpy was the one they all feared. Grumpy got whatever Grumpy wanted. One afternoon, Grumpy appeared—just like that—at Father Boyle’s bedside. Without preamble, Grumpy looked straight into the eyes of the priest and said simply, “What do I have…that you need?”5 There are few better places to start a culture of invitation than with the question “What do I have that you need?”

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In her Baptism of the Lord Sunday sermon, delivered the Sunday after the January 6th assault on Congress, my colleague Kristy Farber told the legendary story from church history about an earlier emperor who had all the soldiers under his command baptized, but told them to hold out their right arm, the arm they fought with, so that they could continue to ﬁ ght, even as the rest of them were subject to their baptism into Christ. Then, she said:

Painfully, awkwardly, gratefully, needfully, everything in our life is subject to our baptism. We don’t get to hold out an arm to reserve for ﬁ ghting. Or a leg in case we want to run. We can’t leave out our pride or our intellect. God claims us—all of us—which includes how we spend our money, spend our time, live as neighbors, use our words, how we vote and even how we view the horriﬁ c events of this week. Wednesday’s tragedy was counter to the ways of Jesus and today; God continues to call us into Jesus’ ministry. We follow in his steps by prayer and by action, by understanding our history, listening for voices that have been ignored, by working for justice on behalf of the oppressed and hurting. Jesus went where people were hurting. He called out the places of idolatry. He refused to worship anyone but God. In baptism, we are called into Jesus’ ministry where boundaries are broken, where we cannot form the Gospel to ﬁ t our preferences and our politics and our comfort and our people. There are no ﬂ ags to represent our faith, only the waters of God’s love and the bread and cup of God’s feast. And the cross—showing us the way.6

Love and hope. Table, font, prayers, and service. Solidarity in moving toward justice and God’s beloved community, against all odds. Cross and Easter life. These are the elements we have to offer. Our world is reeling after this unprecedented year. Everywhere we look, including many days when we look in the mirror, we can see people so hungry for meaning and connection and care. We see those who are yearning for a depth they don’t even know how to describe. Do we have the courage and imagination to ask “What do we have that you need?” There will be no returning to “business as usual” as we emerge from all the dislocations and pain of this global experience. Frankly, “business as usual” wasn’t working too well for the church of Jesus Christ in recent years, so that is gift. A short time before his death in 2013, Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon wrote:

If Christianity is simply about being nice, I’m not interested. What happened to radical Christianity that turned the world upside-down? What happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on ﬁ re, who had no fear, who spoke the truth no matter the consequences, who made the world uncomfortable, who were willing to follow Jesus wherever Jesus went? What happened to the kind of Christians who were ﬁ lled with passion and gratitude, and who every day were unable to get over the grace of God?7

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PentecostThe Spirit, If the church of “sit and get” is over, the time of “contend and send” issues the church an invitation. To contend with all the pain, hunger, and injustice of the world, the church needs to be eager to be sent into the world that God so loves. The invitation is even deeper than that. In her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, for the Presidential Inauguration in 1993, Maya Angelou wrote:

History, despite its wrenching pain Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again.

The church of Jesus Christ does not need to return to the comfort foods of coping with decline. A gift of this crisis is the opportunity to focus instead on reintroducing ourselves to our culture as the very place of hope and life that is so needed. It is Hosea’s invitation that we carry with us a promise and a charge: “But as for you, return to your God, hold fast to love and justice, and wait continually for your God.”

Notes 1 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/deathsexmoney/episodes/death-sex-2020-death-sex-money. 2 https://mministry.org/questions-of-the-year/. 3 https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/. 4 https://journal.praxislabs.org/leading-beyond-the-blizzard-why-every-organization-is-now-a-startupb7f32fb278ff . 5 NPR, “Driveway Moments” Podcast, September 7, 2006. 6 Sermon preached by Kristy Farber at Mercer Island Presbyterian Church on January 10, 2021. 7 Michael Yaconelli, Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith (Colorado Springs: NavPress , 2003).

December 31, 2021
How Genesis Faces Chaos

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How Genesis Faces Chaos

Kathleen M. O’Connor

Decatur, Georgia

I am writing in the time of Covid 19, of deep racial protests, political clashes, forest ﬁ res burning up the West, hurricanes at our shores, memories of 9/11 haunting our screens, and now the conﬂ icts following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president’s taxes, and Covid invading the White House. Our churches participate in this chaos and the resulting fears about the future of life in the United States and on the planet. Not knowing about our future life together is our common plight, whether we will face further turbulence or with new energies begin again. Maybe we will regather as worshipping communities, humbly grateful for each other and ready to act in justice and mercy. Maybe we will participate in the further eclipse of our institutions, hardening racism, and deepening divides among us. Even if the intervening election goes as you or I may wish, traumatic wounds and fears among us will remain unhealed. I think the book of Genesis can help us now because it is survival literature.1 I began studying Genesis closely only after working on the book of Jeremiah, a prophet of the Babylonian Period.2 That prophetic book—abounding as it does with images and narratives of disasters, predictions of the end of Judah, and ﬁ re and brimstone from God who punishes the people for their harlotry—vividly depicts traumatic violence and its long-term consequences for the people of Israel. Genesis, by contrast, is a book of life, of creation by Word, of love found and babies born, of returning home, of rebuilding peace in the family. Yet God brings new life in this book only after piercing threats to existence. In this way, the book evokes the well-known path of Christian life, of passion, death, and resurrection, of Lent leading to Easter. Trauma and disaster studies is a loose collection of academic disciplines that investigates effects of violence upon communities and individuals and asks how they can survive. Typically, victims of various forms of disaster are unable to absorb violence because human brains cannot absorb shocking events when they are happening . Violent events overwhelm the senses even though they simultaneously implant fractured memories in bodies and minds of victims. The traces of trauma can dominate communal life until victims or their descendants deal with it. From warfare to natural disasters to profound personal losses, terrifying human experiences typically shut down feelings, meanings, and hope. Traumatic violence spawns social upheaval and destroys traditions, institutions, and the community itself. With the Babylonian invasions and assaults on the nation, for example, the people of Judah lost nearly everything, their king, rulers, temple, and control of their land. Babylon deported the elite, displaced many who remained in the land, and occupied Judah, undermining the economy. For life to begin again after such devastation, survivors must face the wounds of the past, a task best achieved indirectly so as not to retraumatize them in repetitive loops of traumatic violence. Victims need to see what happened to them, to grieve it, and ultimately to begin to interpret their experiences. They require new meanings, reframings of their history , reimagined accounts of their shattered traditions. Survival as a people demands

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interpretation, new narratives that rebuild their broken lives. Even when these interpretations are simplistic, partial, or inadequate to the complexity of events, they can help the community survive until a clearer framework emerges. Without a process of re-narratizing the past, of shaping new stories from old ones, the world will remain chaotic and life thwarted. This is what Genesis does decades after the nation’s fall during the Persian Period. From the perspective of collective trauma studies, Genesis emerges as a work of pastoral care for a suffering and divided people profoundly uncertain about their future. From beginning to end, the book’s stories depict chaos, conﬂ ict, and repeated threats of extinction for major characters and their families. Yet the book breeds hope, for every story in it ends with survivors and new life. I propose that Genesis functions as a form of artistic survival literature that journeys from near death to life again and again. To show how it becomes a book of resilience, I look brieﬂ y to the ﬂ ood story, the binding/sacriﬁ ce of Isaac, and the Joseph novella. My expanding view of Genesis emerged when I started to work on the story of Noah and the ﬂ ood (Gen 6-9). There I anticipated a boring battle with source criticism because the multi-chaptered ﬂ ood narrative, with its repetitions and contradictory duplicate versions of events, most vividly demonstrates pre-existing sources from multiple authors. With trauma and disaster themes still circulating in my head from Jeremiah, however, other features of the text emerged. Beyond the sources, I saw elements of what I call a “disaster narrative,” that is, a literary account of colossal destruction, the seeming end of everything, with unclear causes. Yet amazingly, there are survivors, and nearly from scratch, God creates again. The ﬂ ood presents endings, the destruction of the entire world, of all creation animate and inanimate, a collapse so total that life on earth appears to be over. Only Noah, his family, and their animal companions survive the deluge because God remembers Noah! (Gen 8:1). The ﬂ ood story is a symbolic retelling of the nation’s destruction (probably at the hands of Babylon), with its terrifying loss of all known supports for the nation, here depicted in a mythic world of uncreation. Before videos, the story takes its ancient audience into a spiritual and psychic space of terror and seeming abandonment through an experience beyond explanation. Yet after a colossal build-up of waters, rescue comes when God remembers Noah, and immediately the waters subside at the same steady pace with which they rose until dry land appears. After this destruction and death, God promises to recreate the world and provide a new beginning for the surviving remnant. Similar narrative patterns appear across Genesis. Within this literary drama, the ﬂ ood story presents Judah’s national disaster as if in a stage play about primal events that happen to ancient ancestors and for which the causes are mythic and mysterious. The reason for the ﬂ ood, the text implies, is that the sons of God have intercourse with the daughters of humans (Gen 6:1-8). God overlooks the wicked sexual attack by the heavenly beings and sees only human evil that requires colossal punishment. Yet chaos does not rule the universe, for cause and effect still exist and “explain” the disaster. Pastors and caregivers today usually understand this interpretive process. When people try to deal with the loss of a child, news of job loss, of eviction, of tragic illness , they often ask what did I/we do wrong? Why is God angry with us? Like so many passages in the earlier works of Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel that also propose vague causalities, mysterious and unclear, the cause of catastrophe here is

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human failure. Despite ways this interpretation oversimpliﬁ es suffering, the act of blaming themselves for their disasters can, surprisingly, be a comfort to survivors. It reduces terror because it provides explanation for the troubles—God is punishing us. Cause and effect prevail in the otherwise chaotic world, and humans have some agency, for they can prevent future disasters by being faithfully obedient like Noah. Righteous living can keep terrors of the world at bay. In this interpretation, suffering is our fault. To contemporary theologians, such theological interpretations may seem utterly simplistic and inadequate to explain invading empires, military assaults, the fall of a nation, the dislocation of the population, the deportation of leaders, and occupation by aggrandizing foreign powers and natural disasters. I like to call this self-blaming approach to suffering a “momentary stay against confusion” as Robert Frost called poetry, a theological survival strategy for the moment until broader perceptions can one day emerge.3 When the waters subside, the ﬂ ood narrative concludes with the larger claim of Genesis, that the God who created the world from chaos merely by speaking the words “Let there be” will re-create the world anew, start all over again to establish life after destruction, and by implication, recreate the nation. A rainbow appears, vineyards are planted, children are born, humanity spreads out across the globe….The people of Judah, too, will survive the occupying empires if they cling to God. When Genesis turns away from primal origins to stories about the ancestors (chs. 12-50), it enfolds narratives of near extinction within the divine promises, all of which point toward survival and new life for the nation. The promises relate to the survival of a devastated people. To the nation ravaged by invasions and destruction , God promises children in proﬂ igate numbers, more offspring than the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea. To a people whose land is occupied by foreign empires, God promises land in perpetuity; that is, it is still their land. To a people shamed and humiliated by military assaults and devastations, God promises the honor of a great name. And to a people with a ransacked economy, God promises blessing, material blessings beyond mere survival, ultimately realized in abundance of wealth in animals and households. Yet when the ancestral stories begin, these future events are preposterous, impossible , laughable. Consider the promise of a child to the ancient, barren, post menopausal couple of Sarai and Abram, unable to bear offspring, threatened frequently by famine, by the matriarch’s abduction into foreign harems, until ﬁ nally a child is born who then is immediately threatened with death by God’s command to sacriﬁ ce him on Mount Moriah (Gen 22). The binding/sacriﬁ ce of Isaac is the most vivid and challenging of disaster narratives in Genesis. The promised son whose birth readers anticipate for ten chapters, who miraculously arrives amid overwhelming layers of infertility, is about to be eradicated from the book and the world. Isaac, however, like all the major characters, represents the nation; his death would mean the end of the line, the cessation of the promises, the loss of the family, and the disappearance of Israel/Judah from the face of the earth. At the very last minute, when all hope is lost, the God who commands the sacriﬁ ce intervenes to prevent it. Chapter 22 is a highly structured, ritualized story told in a series of dramatic moments , as if in a divine commissioning with the responsive, obedient Abraham utter-

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ing “Here I am” three times across the chapter (vv. 1, 7, 11). The ﬁ rst verse explains and interprets the scene as well as the nation’s disaster. The command to execute the innocent child-ancestor is a test of Abraham’s faith, not the consequence of anything anyone did. This is a far different interpretation of the nation’s fall than that of the ﬂ ood story, where sin is the cause. In both interpretations, however, God remains in charge of the world. Again, a narrative of proximate death resonates with the plight of the Judean people nearly destroyed by Babylon. Told here in a sharply focused narrative about Isaac, the text is equally terrifying but more realistic than some other disaster narratives in Genesis, such as ﬁ re and brimstone destroying Sodom. Genesis 22 offers a competing interpretation of why the nation nearly disappeared, another approach to suffering well-known to pastors and caregivers. People who have known great tragedy frequently seek a silver lining and declare their loss and pain to have been a test that they have survived and that has strengthened them despite the despair at the time. This interpretation is another human effort to make sense of the senseless, and it also leaves us with a problematic theology. Rather than the equally problematic view of God as an arbitrary Punisher, God appears here as a cruel Tester. These interpretations are inadequate, partial ways to ﬁ nd some redemption after loss and suffering. They are survival strategies. Abraham and Isaac survive the catastrophe no matter the cause, and by implication, the book’s ancient audience will also survive. My favorite male ancestor in Genesis is Joseph. His story is more coherent and longer than other Genesis narratives as if, perhaps, it is offering a symbolic summary of the audience’s present situation. Here is what happened to us, it suggests. In it, the psychological subtleties of characters’ actions seem to call the ancient audience to struggle with motivations and revelations for their own sakes. During the early Persian period, Judah/Israel faces additional threats to their life together including inner conﬂ icts and power struggles, uncertainty about whether exiles should return to the land, disputes about who belongs to Israel, and whether or not conﬂ icts between the exiles and those who were left in the land can be resolved. In the Joseph narrative, all these matters come into play against the background of the catastrophic famine. Will the children of Jacob/Israel survive as a people in this overturned world? After Joseph’s predictive dreams in this well-known narrative, father Jacob unwittingly ignites the plot by failing to grieve the loss of his beloved wife Rachel, a failure that becomes the catalyst for family havoc. Failure to grieve is a common consequence of traumatic experiences, a coping strategy based on heroic determination to get on with it. Jacob gets on with it by transferring his love for Rachel to her sons and so breeding toxic jealousy among the brothers. He gives Joseph alone a special coat and then blindly commissions this chosen son to investigate the peace/well-being of his brothers. When they see Joseph approaching from afar, they plot to kill him, abandon him in a dry pit to die, but after haggling among themselves, they ﬁ nally sell him to passing merchants. Then they trick father Jacob into an interpretation of another unthinkable loss: wild animals must have devoured his beloved son. Readers can wonder if Jacob’s haste to explain Joseph’s bloody garment covers up suspicions about his other sons’ involvement. Later details suggest that possibility. Jacob cannot recover from this loss either, nor perhaps can the survivors of the destroyed nation easily grieve their losses. Back in Egypt, Joseph’s life follows in the pattern of historical suffering and

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success experienced by the Judean exiles in Babylon. Like the exiles, he is a slave deported to Egypt, a stand-in for Babylon and, in his case, sold to the Potiphars. Like the exiles, he prospers (on and off) in his new land, that is, until Mrs. Potiphar abuses him in a sexual assault. She lies about him, belittles him racially, or at least ethnically , as a lowly and despicable Hebrew, and then her husband has him incarcerated in Pharaoh’s prison. Marking the symbolic low point of his captivity, the prison, too, is called a “pit,” like the pit of near death where his brothers put him in the desert, and we again expect him to die. Despite his wrongful incarceration and against expectation, Joseph prospers in prison, and like the exiles, he is captive for a very long time. The tension of imprisonment increases when he wisely interprets dreams of Pharaoh’s servants, and the pleased cupbearer promises to remember him. His release seems imminent, but the cupbearer forgets him. He seems to have no future until years later when, luckily, the Pharaoh has indecipherable dreams. Pharaoh’s dreams involve another threat to survival, this time from a famine overtaking the whole world. As a folkloric hero, Joseph is a wise interpreter of dreams, and Pharaoh immediately recognizes his amazing talents and so elevates him to second in command and gives him control of all the business of the empire. Suddenly “in clover,” Joseph embraces the culture and customs of his new world, as did some Judean exiles. He is there to stay. He gains an Egyptian name, an Egyptian wife, and two Egyptian-born sons whose names reveal his coping strategies in his new reality. He names his ﬁ rst son Manasseh (God has made me forget my father’s house) and the second Ephraim (God has made me prosperous). Typical of immigrants and displaced people, and perhaps of Judean exiles, Joseph “forgets,” that is, he denies his very painful past. Joseph assimilates, thrives, and ﬁ nds honor in his new land, until one shocking day when his denied and repressed life descends upon him in a waterfall of remembrance . His brothers are suddenly bowing before him begging for food. They do not recognize him, so Egyptian has he become, but he recognizes them. This moving, fate-ﬁ lled moment seems to invite all readers to consider how we ourselves would respond if, like Joseph, we were suddenly confronted by our betrayers , people close to us who wanted us dead. In this scene, Joseph, the Judean exile, symbolically confronts the people who remained in the land. Separating them from each other are all the disagreements, jealousies, conﬂ icting memories, and power plays that make life together imaginable. At this moment, Joseph’s dreams come true, for he has vast power over his prostrating brothers and can take delicious revenge, torturing them in any way he pleases. Amazingly, he does not. Instead, he conjures up a set of tests to see if his brothers have changed. Readers may notice that the tests re-enact aspects of Joseph’s own trauma when he imprisons Simeon and then sets a trap with Jacob’s other beloved son Benjamin as bait. No story in Genesis presents a literal representation of the multiple problems facing its ancient audience. Rather, the book approaches profound loss, fear, denial, conﬂ ict, and doubts about the future through indirect pictures of Judean experiences of catastrophe in stories happening to someone else wherein they can see their own suffering, recognize their lives obliquely, and begin to interpret the past anew, to reframe it within a broader reality. The Genesis stories set history before them through the ancestors’ lives. Death threatens them all, but God intervenes in both miraculous

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and naturalistic fashions, and they survive. God brings them again and again to the land, even if only to bury bones of loved ones. After Jacob learns that Joseph is alive, his grief, depression, and hopelessness disappear in an explosion of new life. The father of the nation is exhilarated to reunite with his exiled son. In the lives of these characters, the people of the land reunite symbolically with exiles who are not lost, not dead, but thriving in captivity. So accepting and happy is Jacob with Joseph’s Egyptian family that later he formally adopts Joseph’s foreign-born sons as his own sons, lifting them from grandchildren to the level of his own sons. The restored nation cannot not reject foreign-born children of foreign women as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah propose, and to hammer the matter home, a genealogy of all Israelites in Egypt includes Joseph’s Egyptian wife Asenath, the only woman listed as a wife among the sons of Jacob (46:8-27). If God appears in the ﬂ ood story as a punisher and in the Isaac story as a tester, God is distant and barely mentioned in Joseph’s experience except for comments by the narrator. Unlike his forefathers, Joseph has no direct contact with God. Perhaps he forgets God along with repressing his Israelite identity. The narrator reports that Joseph succeeds in Potiphar’s house and in prison because God is with him, but Joseph does not know this. Presumably he lives a life of unknowing, and possibly, almost certainly, of deep despair, of a hopelessness that is never recorded, never expressed, but is an implied undercurrent of his abuse by his brothers, the Potiphars, and in the pit of a prison. No wonder he forgets his father’s house and becomes an assimilated Egyptian. He does indeed mention God or the gods (Elohim) when he interprets dreams for the other prisoners and Pharaoh, but in both cases, he is speaking to Egyptians who believe in the gods, not YHWH. He seems to have forgotten YHWH. Yet even if the characters are unaware of divine presence, God is not absent. God is there indirectly through dreams across the story, through the narrator’s comments. God’s presence becomes evident to Joseph only after the fact, after all the suffering, the displacement, slavery, wrongful incarceration, and abandonment. When Joseph ﬁ nally recognizes God in his life, he reframes and re-interprets the past. The opening may begin when he sees his brothers bowing before him, holds back from judging them, and devises tests to discover that, yes, they have changed. From Judah’s impassioned speech, he learns that they will not betray Benjamin nor ignore the despair of their father Jacob. Judah’s words reveal him and by implication his brothers to be renewing creatures, and that disclosure makes it safe for Joseph to reveal who he is. He is the brother whom they believe is dead. “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life…, a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen 45:5, 7-8, see Gen 50:19-21). Divine involvement in their survival appears only in retrospect, in interpretation after-the-fact. Joseph’s enlarged vision places their long history of suffering within a beautiful world of divine intention and order. It does not deny the past nor the brothers’ guilt nor his pain, but sets all within a more expansive vision of their suffering, giving their experiences meaning, power, and signiﬁ cance beyond their separated lives. Joseph’s interpretation is a survival strategy not unlike seeing pain and destruction as a test or as divine punishment, but it is perhaps more adequate to the breadth of their experience. God was hidden, Joseph asserts, behind their conﬂ ict, pain, guilt, and denial. There was a reason, even a plan, for devastating experiences that were so

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painful—to keep them alive and create them anew as a people. The exiles and those in the land can ﬁ nd life together, for God has been there all along. Joseph, the dreamer and interpreter of dreams, is above all an interpreter of life, of pain, of struggle. He is the victim of his brothers’ hatred, of Mrs. Potiphar’s assault and racism, and of wrongful incarceration. The victim is able to embrace without condition the very people who acted to end his life. Because he can do this, he saves the family/nation and brings them back together so they can survive conditions where life has seemed impossible. The victim is the hero, the hero the victim, who speaks from his experience. He does not offer abstract doctrine but reframes the past suffering from his own life, and so a way to the future is possible. There is so much more to say about this moving and provocative story of near ending, but Joseph and Genesis itself do the work of preachers; that is, they interpret and reframe suffering within the light of God. The United States is not under military invasion at the moment, so perhaps it is excessive to ask if we will survive as a people in this time of overlapping threats to life and to national unity, yet aspects of Genesis reverberate now. Precisely how preachers can bring new meaning to troubled families and our troubled nation, ﬁ lled as we are with anger, denials, and lies, accusations, and betrayals, is not clear to me, but that it must be done is evident. In the chaos of unknowing, uncertainty, and fear, perhaps today’s challenges invite us to embrace our deeply unsettling circumstances and a future without clarity or much shape at all. Perhaps acceptance of the fears brought to the surface by not knowing can more deeply open us to the divine life yet to be discovered and received in our broken and blighted times. “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” May it be so.

Notes 1 Kathleen M. O’Connor, Genesis 1-25A (Macon, GA: Smith & Helwys, 2018), and Genesis 25B-50 (Macon, GA: Smith & Helwys, 2020). 2 See Kathleen M. O’Connor, Jeremiah: Pain and Promise (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011). 3 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/98513-the-ﬁ gure-a-poem-makes-no-one-can-really-hold.

December 31, 2021
Preaching the Gospel of Mark: The Power of Love Among Us

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Preaching the Gospel of Mark:

The Power of Love Among Us

Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm

Bethany Theological Seminary, Richmond, Indiana

In the shadow of empire, the Gospel of Mark speaks of the powerful presence of God in bold and challenging ways. Known for its brevity and swift pace, Jesus’ journey to the cross, and his abrupt absence from the tomb, Mark expects a great deal of its readers and hearers–but not without offering hope and comfort as well. Composed near the time of the Jewish-Roman war amid circumstances of great hardship and sustained trauma (66-70 CE), we hear good news proclaimed as a new kind of power let loose in the world. It is a power that is both tender and resolute in following its course; sometimes subtle yet always dynamic; seldom understood and often feared; sturdy and loving. While desolation is real, consolation is also felt through the compassionate words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Mark’s provocative and unsettling stories permeate the weeks following Pentecost in Year B of the lectionary. With the promise of Christ’s comforter and guide among us, we make our way through this season keenly aware of ongoing political discord, COVID and its variants, race-related violence, climate crises, and economic hardship bearing down upon us. Conspiracy theories and fear mongering ﬂ ood the internet. Relief packages come and go. Political parties rise and fall. Amid the chaos and grief, we need One who not only knows us but loves us, whose steadfast love and spirited presence guide us, whose wisdom and strength empower us. It is clear from the opening chapters of Mark that the reign of God comes through the ministry of Jesus Christ (1:14-15), and by the end of its pages, Christ’s messengers are summoned to seek him time and again (16:6f). Among the themes represented in the Markan texts designated for Proper 5-28, the most important for the church and wider world today include the nature of divine power, the reign of God, ministries of exorcism and healing, the reality of suffering, and running through all of these is the steadfast love of God calling us to serve one d another. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, power is understood differently than what much of r r the world and society teach us. Stripped of economic security and political clout, Jesus does not pursue possessions, proﬁ t, or prestige. He does not vie with others for personal inﬂ uence or social position but uses parables, divine wisdom, and healing touches to engage those around him. Jesus’ acts of mercy also stir controversy and concern. Our ﬁ rst encounter with Mark in Proper 5 reveals the highly contentious nature of Jesus’ power (3:20-25). Having witnessed his mighty acts of healing and exorcism, his family members suspect that Jesus is insane, while scribes accuse him of being possessed by the ruler of demons. In his response, Jesus warns of a house divided, and his words strike an ominous tone in our current U.S. political climate as we witness the disintegration of cherished norms of civility. Just as Jesus acknowledged the bitter reality of dissension at home, if we look past these verses to what follows, we hear the gravest warning of all: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is an eternal sin. Denying Jesus’ divine, life-giving power and the ongoing movement of God’s

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Spirit among us forecloses all hope of moving beyond our self-enclosed enclaves and entrenched systems of oppression. In contrast to the power plays we regularly witness among politicians and local authorities and as anxious eyes seek solace in record-breaking stock prices, the power that Jesus exerts is not based on political maneuvering, big money, or transactional relationships. Largely discounted by his own townspeople (6:1-6, Proper 9), Jesus’ ministry of compassion and that of his disciples nevertheless caught the attention of King Herod. The king’s lustful pursuits and arrogant self-assertions resulted in one of the greatest abuses of power imaginable: the beheading of John the Baptist who dared question Herod’s judgment and decry his abuses (6:14-29, Proper 10). Insecure and fearful of divine retribution, Herod imagined John revived in the person of Jesus who, like his deceased cousin, embodied entirely different standards of behavior than those of the selﬁ sh and violent king. Leadership meant something entirely different to Jesus who foretold the inevitability of his own suffering (8:31-33, Proper 19) and instructed his disciples to take up their cross and follow him (8:34-38). Urging humility , Jesus taught them that true greatness resides in those who do not seek the highest places of honor but the least places of notice and who act as servants of all (9:33-37, Proper 20). Nearly every chapter of Mark and several of the lectionary readings for this season continue the theme of power upended. In 4:35-41 (Proper 7), Jesus rebukes the wind during a storm at sea, demonstrating his power over natural forces. In chapter 5, he overcomes demonic forces (5:1-20), illness, and even death itself (5:21-43, Proper 8; see below). As Jesus and his disciples are about to enter Jerusalem, James and John want to sit at his right and left hands in glory, but Jesus insists that they do not know what they seek (10:35-40, Proper 24). After they enter the city, Jesus warns his followers against religious attention-seekers adorned in ornate clothing and performing lengthy prayers, none of which count as anything in the divine economy compared to the widow’s copper coins (12:38-44, Proper 27). Even the great stones of the Temple itself will be overturned just as the monuments and structures of our own greatest achievements are forever subject to divine judgment and recall (13:1-8, Proper 28). All of this points to a radically different understanding and embodiment of power, both divine and human. Jesus teaches that leadership and discipleship are acts of servanthood grounded in humility. There is no place for counterfeits or pretenders–which is good news indeed for emerging generations and others in the church who long for religious and spiritual integrity among our leaders and members. Calls for authenticity and the careful consideration of how our words match our deeds and how our minds follow our hearts resonate deeply with Jesus’ teaching that we are not deﬁ led by what appears on the surface of things but what lies deep within our hearts and intentions (7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, Proper 17). The corruption of relationships, churches, and communities comes from the poison we carry within. It is not enough to accept platitudes or propositions of faith far removed from the concerns of this aching and ailing world: we must partner with God who is the source of life-giving power and whose Spirit breathes within our hearts, urging us to love and care for all creation and its creatures. God knows that we cannot address the needs of this blessed and broken world without partnering with our surest source of life-giving, loving power already moving in our midst, the Spirit of Christ. The various teachings that challenge the powers that be are ﬁ rst prefaced by Jesus’

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opening announcement of God’s reign (1:14-15). In the fullness of time, Jesus has come to proclaim God’s intentions and inaugurate the kingdom of God in sure and surprising ways. The good news that he heralds is as near as his breath, as sure as his stride. But his upsetting message calls for rhetorical strategies that ﬁ t the kingdom’s subversive and sometimes enigmatic nature. Thus, Jesus preaches with parables to those who have ears to hear. Like seeds scattered on the ground that mysteriously sprout and grow and the tiniest of mustard seeds that produce the largest of bushes, Jesus’ words and deeds will bear fruit and multiply, confounding those who refuse to notice the impending harvest (4:26-32, Proper 6). The very few parables recorded in Mark provide us with more than metaphors for unveiling the hidden meaning of God’s reign: Jesus’ parabolic teachings about the kingdom are a necessary means of accessing its elusive nature since part of their power is to reveal our own resistance to divine rule. Our need for further explanation (from Jesus as well as today’s preachers ) testiﬁ es to our ongoing participation in its fullness and dissemination among us (3:33-34, Proper 5). For those who have become inured to visions of economic prosperity, religious purity, and social or political prestige, as well as those who ﬁ nd themselves on the outside of such standards, Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign and new manifestations of divine power exercised through servanthood and acts of loving kindness are good news indeed. The reign of God that Jesus Christ proclaims not only challenges the powers that be but offers hope to everyone hounded by hopelessness, fear, and/or despair. It is a call to respond to divine love and mercy by following Christ’s standards of outreach and care for others. God’s will and ways on earth are grounded in compassion not only for those who follow (6:30-34, Proper 11) but for all who suffer and need divine aid (6:53-56, Proper 11). Remarkably, Jesus teaches that the reign of God belongs to those who embrace it like a child (10:14, Proper 22). They do not belong to the kingdom, but the kingdom belongs to them. This much-overlooked reorientation to the reign of God confounds those who believe that we become its citizens by proving our worth or paying our dues. God does not look for outward signs of success but a heart ﬁ lled with love and a willingness to live as vulnerably as children who daily realize their dependence on others. Immediately after Jesus embraces children, Mark tells us of another who seeks his guidance and a place in God’s realm. A wealthy man kneels before Jesus to ask the Good Teacher what he must do to inherit eternal life (10:17-22, Proper 23). Jesus rebukes the title and reminds him of the last six commandments of the Decalogue, all of which focus on right behaviors (cf. the ﬁ rst four commandments honor God’s sovereignty). After the man confesses that he has fulﬁ lled all of these teachings since the time of his youth, Jesus evidently senses the man’s sincerity as he looks at him and loves him (10:21). It is the only occasion in Mark’s Gospel when we are told of Jesus’ love for a particular person. No doubt because of this love, Jesus further teaches the man that he lacks one thing: with ﬁ ve imperatives he challenges him to go, sell, and give away his wealth to the poor, then come and follow him. His insistent tone commands our attention as Jesus challenges the man to reach beyond the Decalogue to reorient his life anew. Eternal life (or, as Jesus calls it in 10:23, “the kingdom of God”) is not inherited but freely given by God just as we, too, are called to freely give all of ourselves to others. If all of this seems too costly or difﬁ cult to do, we are not the only ones to think

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so. As the man walked sadly away, Jesus declared that it is indeed difﬁ cult for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God (10:23-26). When his disciples asked who can possibly hope to be saved, Jesus proffered one of the gospel’s greatest promises : “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible”1 (10:27). It is God alone who assures our well-being. There is no earthly sign of success that guarantees our salvation, no accomplishment that proves our worth. In fact, whatever goods we possess–whether material, social, intellectual, or spiritual–may come to possess us unless they are freely given in service to God and others. Among the surest signs of Jesus’ divine sovereignty are his acts of exorcism and healing. As expressions of care and compassion, they permeate Mark’s account which includes three summaries of his healing power (1:32-34; 3:7-12; 6:56, Proper 11). Throughout the Gospel, several events bear witness to God’s rule by overcoming the forces of chaos (4:35-41, Proper 7), Satanic possession (5:1-20; 9:14-29), illness (1:40-45), and death (5:35-43, Proper 8). Among the readings scheduled for Year B, the story of raising Jairus’s daughter from her deathbed is interrupted by that of the woman healed of her twelve-year hemorrhage (5:21-43, Proper 8). Power winds its ways through both healing events concurrently, each in its own way. Whereas Jairus is named, the suffering woman is not; while he is a respected leader of the synagogue, she holds no title or ofﬁ cial status; Jairus confronts Jesus face to face, but the woman approaches him surreptitiously from behind; he is a man of considerable means and social capital, but the woman lost whatever she possessed in pursuit of healthcare and has no one to advocate on her behalf; Jairus speaks freely, but the woman holds her tongue until Jesus calls on her.2 Most intriguing of all, while both characters seek Jesus’ aid, the hemorrhaging woman risks crossing boundaries of many kinds to touch his cloak. In doing so, we realize that Jesus is not contaminated by her (as social and religious conventions would have assumed) but is a means of divine healing and transformative power as she is restored to health and speaks “the whole truth” of what she has suffered from fraudulent medical practitioners. The brief delay en route to Jairus’s home may at ﬁ rst seem to have had disastrous consequences for the young girl who lies on her deathbed. But there is no shortage of divine power as Jesus moves from healing the hemorrhaging woman to taking the girl by her hand and urging her to rise. What little is recorded of their responses to Jesus suggests that both the girl and woman were divinely blessed in their longing for life. Amid the passion and suffering they endured, a sacred eros moved through them: their love for life was met by divine touch, and both girl and woman embody the gospel of divine mercy as it encounters human suffering. “The charge of energy that moves through Jesus and the woman with the chronic blood disease and the intimate connection he makes with the young girl who has died embody the power of divine eros through these generative encounters.”3 Their stories are not only about healing but compassion and love as well. Two other healing stories appear side by side in the lectionary, one of exorcism and the other of physical healing (7:24-37; Proper 17). As the Gospel reports Jesus moving among Gentiles, the ﬁ rst story recounts his being confronted by a Syrophoenician woman who pleads on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter. When Jesus announces that food belonging to the children of Israel should not be thrown to Gentile “dogs,” the woman is undeterred by his cruel rebuff. She accepts the priority of his mission to the people of Israel but is not satisﬁ ed with his vision. She proposes

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instead an alternative, more expansive vision of ministry that includes her daughter and other Gentiles as well. Helping Jesus to see beyond the conﬁ nes of what he has assumed to be his mission, the woman’s understanding of divine rule exceeds that of even Jesus himself. She helps him to see what he has resisted and to extend the range of divine love to those outside the house of Israel. Her words have a powerful effect: Jesus commends the woman for speaking to him; he not only frees her daughter from demon possession but continues in ministry to other Gentiles as well. The second story immediately following is that of a deaf man with a speech impediment whom Jesus encounters in the region of the Decapolis. When his friends plead on his behalf, Jesus takes the man “aside, in private, away from the crowd.” The intimacy of their encounter is further underscored by the immediacy of his touch. Following ancient healing practices, Jesus puts his ﬁ ngers into the man’s ears, spits and touches the man’s tongue, then insists that they “be opened” by divine command. No sooner does the man speak than Jesus orders him to be silent. But like others who are told to hold their tongues, the man shares the good news widely (e.g., 1:44f; 3:11f).4 Following Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and his teachings about discipleship and servanthood (8:22-10:52, spanning Proper 19-24), the ﬁ nal healing event in Mark’s Gospel is the story of blind Bartimaeus. Here it is evident that the blind man can see what the disciples cannot: that Jesus is the long-awaited Son of David whose mission is to bring mercy to God’s people (10:47f). When Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” (10:51), he repeats the same question that he asked of James and John in the preceding story (10:36). But unlike the brothers of Zebedee who sought positions of privilege, Bartimaeus seeks the restoration of his sight. And unlike the rich man who sought to inherit eternal life while clinging to his possessions (10:17-22), Bartimaeus gives up his beggar’s cloak and whatever coins are scattered upon it to receive Christ’s gift and follow him. In their brief and powerful exchange, Bartimaeus identiﬁ es the source of his hope as the Son of David, the Messiah, and in response to his healing, he eagerly follows Christ whose mercy and love are intended for others as well. Throughout his encounters with all who are possessed, ailing, despised, and hungry , we learn that Jesus perceives the suffering of those around him. Whether gazing intently (e.g., 8:25; 10:21) or listening carefully (e.g., 10:49), he does not turn away from those in need. This is perhaps one of the most important and least appreciated dimensions of his ministry: Jesus does not overlook others. He looks in our eyes and listens to our hearts. In today’s culture with nearly unlimited access to different entertainment streams and ceaseless distractions, we would be wise to remember that none of Jesus’ acts of kindness, healing, and exorcism would have been possible had he not simply been available to look and listen to others. Jesus’ readiness to respond and his attunement to suffering were not simply innate, but chosen: time and again, he could have turned away but leaned in closer instead (e.g., 3:1-6; 6:34-44). For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the reality of suffering is always close at hand. Little wonder, then, that mercy, pity, and compassion are often spoken of by Mark: Jesus describes the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac as an act of divine mercy (5:19); a father pleads desperately for pity on his possessed son (9:22); Bartimaeus calls out for divine mercy (10:47); and in feeding the multitudes, Jesus speaks of having compassion for the crowds (6:34; 8:2).

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Just as disturbing as the pervasive presence of suffering is its inevitability. After Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus begins teaching his disciples that he must undergo great suffering and death before rising again (8:31-32, Proper 19). He offers two other predictions of his suffering as well (9:30-40, Proper 20; 10:32-45, Proper 24), and in all three instances, his disciples either rebuke or resist his words. Neither do they and the crowds understand what it means to take up their crosses and lose their lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel (8:34-38, Proper 19). These are painful words to hear, and they raise many troubling questions: What kind of God would require the violent death of his beloved son as the means of our salvation? How does our own suffering relate to that of Jesus’? It is only in light of the entire gospel that such questions can be addressed: it is only in light of Jesus’ powerful acts of ministry and his teachings about the surprising nature of God’s reign that we begin to grasp the inevitability of his suffering at the hands of religious and political power-holders and our own suffering as we follow him. Jesus does not propose escapism, fatalism, or a superior vindication of those who take up their cross and follow him. The cross has not only been misunderstood, but diminished: more than denying oneself chocolate during Lent or a religious icon fashioned into jewelry, the cross was a form of public execution that is closer to losing one’s living, being abandoned by loved ones, or going to prison. Jesus clariﬁ es the costliness of our choices and describes what is at stake when we follow his way and live according to God’s reign: “Those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it proﬁ t them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (8:35b-36). While cancer, earthquakes, and economic disasters may threaten us, Jesus knows that other kinds of suffering will come as the result of our weighing what is central to our lives and living in accordance with his kingdom priorities. Just as God’s love for all people was freely and fully given through Jesus Christ, so will those who follow him experience his suffering as well. But if the cross is inevitable for followers of Christ’s way, so is the resurrection. The tomb stands forever empty, and its quiet hallelujah echoes through the ages. Suffering is not all that we ﬁ nd in God’s heart, for at the heart of the gospel is the good news of God’s life-giving intentions for all. No doubt that is why Jesus was careful to warn us against hardness of heart..5 In 3:5, he grieves over the people’s hardness of heart as they complain about his healing a man on the Sabbath; in 6:52 the disciples seem not to recognize Jesus as he walks towards them across a stormy sea because their hearts are hardened; when religious leaders question his standards of cleanliness and those of his disciples in 7:1-7, Jesus accuses them of hypocrisy and quotes Isaiah’s warning against distancing our hearts from God; and in 8:17 Jesus attributes the disciples’ inability to see and understand the miracle of multiplying the loaves to their hardness of heart. Jesus is most explicit in teaching about love when a scribe approaches to ask him “Which is the ﬁ rst commandment of all?” In this momentous exchange, Jesus enters into dialogue with one who, in distinction from Matthew and Luke’s accounts, does not seek to entrap him but instead seeks his counsel regarding a question that is central to religious faith. Jesus’ reply is direct and succinct: he ﬁ rst quotes Deut. 6:4-5 and then a second command from Lev. 19:18. Unlike the parallel versions in Matthew and Luke, Mark includes the opening verse of the Shema announcing that “God is one.” Jesus gives an holistic account of what is required of us: to love the one

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God with the fullness of our lives, including heart, soul, mind, and strength.6 Without invitation or interruption, Jesus continues to say that the second commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” is part of God’s foremost call as well. He posits the two commands as one concern. “Together they comprise the heart of faithfulness, so that religion is a matter of divine and human relationships, of personal devotion and public consequence.”7 The love that God commands and Jesus embodies is the power that permeates God’s reign, enables ministry, and transforms our suffering into newness of life. The powerful love of God is on the loose in the world, awaiting our proclamation in word and deed.

Notes 1 This and all other biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version. 2 Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm, Preaching the Gospel of Mark: Proclaiming the Power of God (Louisville, d KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 93-101. 3 Ibid., 98. 4 Both silence and disclosure are key to understanding Mark’s narrative. At the beginning of the twentieth century, William Wrede drew attention to the “messianic secret” as a motif running throughout the Gospel of Mark. More recently, biblical scholar Joan L. Mitchell argues that when several unnamed and lesser-known characters speak freely and publicly of Jesus and his ministry in Mark, these instances of gospel proclamation by marginal characters contribute to the reversal of expectation that occurs when Jesus’ closest disciples fail to speak of him when they should have (e.g., 14:66-72; 16:8). Joan L. Mitchell, Beyond Fear and Silence: A Feminist-Literary Reading of Mark (New York, NY: Continuum, k 2001), 80. 5 To be sure, ancient understandings of the human heart and Jewish calls to love God with all one’s heart were not touched by romantic notions of love’s sentiments and feelings but instead focused on what we today would call the “will” or determination to direct one’s life according to God and God’s teachings. Thus, to love with all one’s heart is a call to center one’s attention and intentions on God. But neither does it contradict this understanding: to give one’s heart is not only an act of will but of compassion and affection, as demonstrated by Jesus’ own ministries of mercy and love. 6 According to the Gospel of Mark, the call to love with one’s mind is added by Jesus to the call of Deut. 6:5 (which speaks of loving with heart, soul, and strength/possessions), perhaps in accordance with Hellenistic values. 7 Ottoni Wilhelm, op.cit., 213.

December 31, 2021
Virtue Signal

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Virtue Signal

John 12.1-8

Will Willimon

Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

Thousands of us preachers receive encouragement from Jason Micheli’s podcast Crackers and Grape Juice. Here’s my commentary on one of Jason’s Christ the King sermons—two preachers thinking together about the challenges of doing politics in the pulpit with Jesus.

For God’s sake, don’t lie. Admit it. You think Judas is right. You know that you’re not supposed to identify with Judas the traitor, the villain. Judas is the Judas, the bastard who turns around right after today’s text to rat out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, which according to the prophet Zechariah was about a day’s wage. A day’s wage. But be honest. If you saw a line item in our church operating budget for nard, you’d be po’d too. Nard was a perfume from the Himalayas. 300 denarii is what Judas guesses it would go for on the open market. 300 denarii was the rough equivalent to $45,000.00. You think Judas is right on the money about the money. Considering the cost of nard, it would be better to rub Jesus down with some $5.99 Old Spice and give the remaining $44,990.00 for do-gooding. And doing good is what it’s about, right? Way to go, Jason. Lure them into the sermon by naming their secret sympathy with Judas. Treat ‘em rough. After all, Matthew’s account of this anointing occurs right after Jesus lays down every liberal Methodist’s favorite parable—clothing the naked, giving drink to the thirsty, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the prisoner. So who blames Judas for wanting to be reckoned a sheep rather than a goat? Matthew 25, favorite text (they think) of all Methodist do-gooders. Nice juxtaposition between Matthew and John. Move them from a text they think they know to consideration of a text they probably don’t know, allowing scripture to interpret scripture. If we’re honest, it’s hard for us to see what Judas got wrong. Christians ought to be on the side of the poor. The world sees our inability to live up to Christ’s teachings about the poor and judges us accordingly. Isn’t Judas’s the better strategy for the Church to survive in a pagan nation like America? After all, Americans may not believe that Jesus is Lord, but they at least believe we ought to help the poor. Serving the poor is a way for us as Christians to win friends and inﬂ uence people. Interesting link with the American church’s insecurity about our status in the culture. Why does the mainline church “help the poor”? Because it’s the last socially acceptable thing the church has left to do. It took a while, but now I get the title of your sermon. In ﬁ rst century Israel, poor was a political category. The poor weren’t lazy or r left behind. The poor were the oppressed. Read your Old Testament. The poor were

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poor because they were oppressed. If you don’t understand the relationship between poverty and oppression, you won’t understand Palm Sunday when the “Messiah” turns out to be Jesus. Judas isn’t simply suggesting that this down payment’s worth of perfume should’ve been shared with the poor; he’s arguing that it’d be better spent on the cause. The money should have been used to free the poor, liberate the oppressed. Judas’s point is not just about charity. It’s about justice. After all, he’s named for Israel’s most famous armed revolutionary. “Why was this nard not sold for almost ﬁ fty grand and the money given to the Democratic National Committee?” “Why was this perfume not sold and the money donated to Make Israel Great Again?” “What a waste! Don’t you people know your Micah 6.8?! The change we could work with that much cash!” Politics! You make an adept connection—concisely, without a lot of academic throat-clearing—between our notions of “poor” and “politics,” “charity” and “justice.” You’re taking a risk in your association of Judas and his particular brand of betrayal with the DNC and MIGA. No risk = boring sermon. Now your sermon is beginning to move toward Christ the King with your reference to Palm Sunday. I bet the congregation, who knows you well, expects that you are on your way to a Micheli move: “Jesus Christ is Lord; Caesar is not.” Which puts Judas (and thus, puts us) in the same camp as Caiphas. In the text just before today’s, John tells us that a crowd of Jews, having witnessed Jesus speak Lazarus forth from the dead, began “believing into Jesus.” Some of these bystanders tattled on Jesus to the Pharisees, and the Pharisees went to the chief priests, and the chief priests went and tattled to the Chief Priest, Caiphas. Caiphas, who in a few short chapters will be outing himself with the words “We have no King but Caesar.”“If we let him go on like this,” Caiphas worries, “everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our nation.” When the chief religious leaders of God’s people hear about Jesus’ power over the Power of Death, their worry is not religious. It’s political. Sit with that for a second. Like we do, Caiphus had been towing the God and Country line, but as soon as the Living God shows up, our true colors come out. When Caiphas hears Christ can raise the dead, two things worry him: currency and country. Jesus is hiding out in Bethany because just after Jesus produces Lazarus alive from the tomb, Caiphas plots to kill Jesus. Why? Because Caiphas worries that Christ’s power over the Power of Death will upset the political arrangement of the powers-that-be. This section of the sermon requires fancy hermeneutical footwork. You’ve introduced another ﬁ gure, Caiphas, reminding us of his infamous “We have no king but Caesar.” It’s doubtful that your listeners know much about Caiphas. You are also adding to your sermon’s complexity with your assertion of a linkage between the “power of Death”and politics. The political signiﬁ cance of resurrection is a powerful point to make on Christ the King, but it’s a dense theological thought. I very much like your reminder of Lazarus and the way that his resuscitation leads Jesus’ critics to murderous thoughts based on their deadly politics. Still, I wonder if you risk losing them here. You seem aware of these possible pitfalls with your words “Sit with that for a second.” Nice signal: folks, we are about to take a dive into the deep end of the pool.

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Don’t forget: This is the same Caiphas who on Good Friday will condemn Jesus to a cross while pledging to Pontius Pilate what no Jew should ever say: “We have no King but Caesar.” Messiah, King, and Caesar all name the same word. Caiphas is saying, “We have no Messiah but the King you call Caesar.” “Forty-ﬁ ve grand! We could’ve donated that money to MoveOn.org—think of the justice work we could do,” Judas says. “Power over Death? Death makes our economy of scarcity possible and gives us authority over the people. Resurrection will ruin the nation,” says Caiphas. You see— Judas and Caiphas’ failure is not faithlessness. Their failure is a failure of political imagination. Use a phrase like “a failure of the political imagination,” and watch their eyes glaze over. You’ve got your work cut out for you keeping them on board. Yet I see that’s exactly what you intend to do in the rest of the sermon. By setting an (at ﬁ rst glance) offensive text next to the text you’re exploring, then by giving us some speciﬁ c instances of the politics of resurrection at work, you are doing all you can to keep your listeners with you on this journey. In order to see their failure as a failure of political imagination, however, we must ﬁ rst admit our embarrassment about what Jesus says to Judas: “You’ll always have the poor with you; you don’t always have me.” Try that verse out on a woke, Bernie supporter. What Jesus says to Judas seems to legitimate the non-Christian critique of apathetic, pie-in-the-sky Christianity. But please note: The one who said “You’ll always have the poor with you; you don’t always have me” is himself poor. Jesus is poor. Jesus is oppressed. And very soon, Jesus will be the naked, parched, the stranger shunned, the prisoner abandoned by all but his mother and a single disciple. Surrounded by goats, they’ll be the only sheep at his side for the Last Judgement that is his Cross. This is why Caiphus plots to kill him. We think Judas is right, but we miss how right Caiphas really is. Jesus is a threat to our politics, the end of the world as we know it. Mary upends our categories of helping the poor and the oppressed by her extravagance toward a poor person (who also happens to be the incarnate God). Jesus praises her for doing a good and joyful thing that shall always be remembered. Judas has got his mind stuck in the grave—he still thinks that change-making comes in terms of charity and campaign contributions, but Mary’s response to Jesus’ power over the Power of Death is to shower two-thirds of our entire mission budget on a solitary poor man living on borrowed time. Judas lacks Mary’s imagination. I love watching your interpretative imagination at work. “Poor” is not a sociological , economic category; poor is what God did to be among us as the Christ. We shall worship and serve God as the kenotic, impoverished Jesus or not at all. Jesus does not imply that we should be resigned to the way of the world. On the contrary, we will always have the poor with us because the Church, the Body of Christ, is put in the world so that the world may know, by the sacrament of the resurrection, how the poor and the prisoner, the naked and the shunned, are to be celebrated. The Church is the People of God in the world who know that we can afford to love the poor with lavishment because Christ is a gift that can never be used up. So of course we’ll always have the poor with us because the Church is the Body of him who is

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poor. We will always have the poor with us because the Body of Christ is for them. “Leave her alone,” the poor man said to Judas. “She bought it [all $45K!] for me.” Jesus praises Mary because Mary understands that Jesus makes a different politics possible. She-and-her-nard constitutes the different politics which God has made possible in the world in Jesus. As Bonhoeffer said, “The church is the way the risen Christ has chosen to take up room in the world.” Thanks for the reminder of the lavishness of God in action in the Body of Christ. Karl Barth wrote: “Whenever Christians use a construction like Christianity and politics, they open the door to every devil.” Barth pointed out that when the devil tempts Christ in the wilderness by offering him the governments of this world, the implication is that the governments of this world are the devil’s to give. Barth was one of the few German Christians to stand up against Hitler’s Nazi regime. As soon as the church begins to ponder how its Christianity can be helpful to politics, Barth argued, such a church might have great sincerity and zeal, and good works of charity, but it will be a church that’s failed to understand that the church is the peculiar way God has chosen to love and redeem the world. Thanks for invoking Barth, though again, I’m unsure that your listeners will appreciate the revolutionary impact of Barth’s warning against conjunctions. You are making me evaluate my own preaching. Am I demanding too little work from my listeners? How I love the way you take your listeners seriously. You engage deadly serious matters in a playful, beguiling way, and you don’t waste our time with cliché and cant. Kudos for preaching a deeply “political” sermon without saying “Since God is either dead or retired, let us go forth to defeat racism, sexism, ageism, classism . It’s up to us to do right or right won’t be done.” God has chosen not the House or the Senate. Neither POTUS or SCOTUS, not bills, billboards, or hashtags. But his People. The Church. The Body of Christ, sent by the Spirit, is God’s virtue signal; that is to say, the Church doesn’t have a politics; the Church is a politics. What do I mean by “the church is a politics”? Now the sermon touches down upon the Body of Christ otherwise known as Annandale UMC. Nice. Yesterday afternoon we celebrated a Service of Death and Resurrection for a man in the community, Gordon. Gordon was a Vietnam vet. The cancer that killed him likely came from Agent Orange that killed others. A couple of days before he died, he called me to his bedside. In addition to wanting to profess that Jesus is Lord and give to Christ what remained of his life, Gordon also wanted to confess his sins. “I want to confess,” he told me, staring at the ceiling, “what I had to do in the war—it was necessary, but it was still sin.” Think about it—he was dying. Time was a precious, valuable commodity to him. Time was a gift, and Gordon wanted to give it, to lavish it—some would say waste it—by giving his confession to Christ. In a culture that ships our soldiers off to do what is necessary and then, when they return home, we insist that they not tell us about what we’ve asked them to do, Gordon’s confession— what the Church calls the care of souls—that’s a politics. “Say something political on Christ the King, church.” Church says, “Church.” You and I will never be able to get Stanley Hauerwas out of our sermons, thank God. It’s how God has chosen to care for the world.

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During the funeral service, Gordon’s son spoke candidly about his often difﬁ cult, sometimes estranged relationship with his father. In a culture of sentimentality and pretense , the sort of truth-telling that this sanctuary makes possible—that’s a politics. Later this afternoon, a group from church will go up to Sleepy Hollow Nursing Home to worship with elderly residents who may not be able to hear it or comprehend it. In a culture like ours that is determined to get out of life alive—a culture that worships at the altar of youth and achievement—the old are cloistered away and cast-off. It’s a simple thing some of you will do at Sleepy Hollow. But make no mistake, it’s a politics. Bring it home. All politics is local. Well done. The way God has chosen to heal the world is the Church—that’s what we forget whenever we argue about the Church and Politics. The politics of Christians ought to be unintelligible if God has not raised Jesus Christ from the dead. We’re the nard that God has purchased at great cost to lavish Christ upon the dying world.

Note Preached on Christ the King Sunday, 2020, at Annandale United Methodist Church, Annandale, Virginia.

December 31, 2021
The Spirituality of the Church

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The Spirituality of the Church

Thomas W. Currie

Georgetown, Texas

In discussions about the contemporary mission of the Church it is often said that the Church ought to address itself to the real questions which people are asking. That is to misunderstand the mission of Jesus and the mission of the Church. The world’s questions are not the questions which lead to life. What really needs to be said is that where the Church is faithful to its Lord, there the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the question to which the gospel is the answer. And that, I suppose, is why the letters of St. Paul contain so many exhortations to faithfulness but no exhortations to be active in mission.1 Lesslie Newbigin

“Most theologians in the modern West are utopians. God is not.”2 Ephraim Radner

In 2012, it was my privilege to lead a group of students on a Reformed Heritage tour. We began in Paris, journeyed to Noyon (Calvin’s birthplace and where there is a delightful, small museum honoring him), and then headed to Geneva, and later to Basle, Budapest, Debrecen, and Sarospatok, Hungary. Between Paris and Geneva, however, we spent half a day in a little town up in the mountains south of Lyon. Le Chambon sur Lignon is not much bigger now than it was in 1940 when the French Reformed congregation there began sheltering Jewish children, saving some 3,000 or more from the ovens of the Nazis.3 The congregation’s pastor in 2012 was a German, who gave us a brief tour of the “temple” where the church worshipped. Its architecture was almost severely Reformed: no stained glass, no liturgical trappings, only an open Bible on a raised pulpit facing a gathered congregation. There was, however, one piece of architecture that might have been described as ornamental. Over the entrance to the church these words were etched in stone: “Aimez-vous les uns les autres.” Love one another. In some ways those words seem to express the most threadbare of sentiments. Is there any word in the English language more used and abused, more empty of substance than the word love? Yet here in this particular context, the words not only seemed unbearably heavy with sacriﬁ ce and meaning but also seemed to be the words that only the church could dare to say in the face of such a deep darkness. Love one another. How does one learn to say that in our day and time? How does one learn to proclaim that, not as a kum ba yah strategy to make warring parties settle down but as the conﬁ dent witness that only church can render, a witness to the risen Lord’s victory over death itself? And ﬁ nally, how does one proclaim this word as the joyful gift that describes the nature and course of Christian discipleship? These questions are not easy to answer. No doubt the Holy Spirit must shape and re-shape both our questions and answers, drawing us more deeply into the life of the

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living Lord Jesus Christ. Yet even to confess that is to acknowledge there is no easy way or even self-evident strategy for “following after.” For life in the Spirit to be more than a pious sentiment, one must look to the source and character of that Love that the Spirit reveals in him who bids us to love one another.

*** One place to look is at scripture itself. In his Church Dogmatics IV/2, Karl Barth attempts a close reading of scripture in regard to the depiction of Jesus Christ as the “royal man.” Barth is particularly interested in how scripture describes the nature of Jesus’ mission as he engaged with religious, social, and political realities of his day. What does love incarnate look like in such a world? Barth notes that

Jesus was not in any sense a reformer championing new orders against the old ones, contesting the latter in order to replace them by the former…. He did not represent or defend or champion any programme—whether political, economic, moral or religious, whether conservative or progressive . He was equally suspected and disliked by the representatives of all such programmes, although he did not particularly attack any of them…. And he did this simply because He enjoyed and displayed, in relation to all the orders positively or negatively contested around him, a remarkable freedom which again we can only describe as royal.4

The love revealed here is seen as both revolutionary and royal, according to Barth, a fearsome love whose Lord “breaks all bonds asunder, in new historical developments and situations, each of which is for those who can see and hear — only a sign, but an unmistakable sign of His freedom and kingdom….”5 This royal freedom and revolutionary superiority take a strange shape. For example, the gospels often describe Jesus as almost a passive conservative. As Barth notes, Jesus accepted the temple as self-evidently the house of God. He worshipped on the sabbath at the synagogue, Luke tells us, “as was his custom” (Lk.4:16). He taught not in the streets but in the temple; he “was obedient” to his parents (Lk.2:51) and even insisted that caring for them took precedence over cultic obligations (Mk.7:11ff.). Moreover, the gospels never depict Jesus as directly opposed to the economic conditions of his day and time. He is not faithfully portrayed as either a capitalist or communist. Politically, Jesus also remains elusive. As Barth notes, the Gospels do not contain the “slightest trace either of a radical repudiation of the dominion of Rome or Herod, or for that matter, of any basic anti-imperialism or anti-militarism.”6 A passive-conservative, then? Except for some disquieting threads that mar such a pleasant tapestry. Though no reformer, Jesus’ recognition of the “powers that be” seems provisional at best and aloof at other times, as if he were indifferent or even superior to them. His recognition of the temple in Jerusalem has to be seen in the context of his insistence that something greater than the temple is present in himself. And as for faith in the temple, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another…” (Lk.21:6). His severe rejection of the family as a divinely ordained order in the kingdom (“Who are my mother and my brothers?” Mk.3:33) indicates something beyond a passive-conservative stance. And it gets worse. Jesus’ disciples do not fast, he violates the sabbath, as do his disciples, and he even claims to be the Lord

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of the sabbath (Mk.2:28). His stories and parables depict quite unrealistic economic practices: precious seed sown on rocky soil, a hardened path, among thorns; paying the same wages to workers hired at different times; calling an enterprising businessman a fool because he built bigger barns to house his increased possessions. And all of this, not to mention his counsel to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor…” (Mk.10:21. Or, “Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth,” and “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink…,do not worry about tomorrow…” (Mt.6:19, 25,34). What kind of conservative is this? After noting similar political contradictions (his refusal to make a defense before Pilate, his cavalier attitude toward paying taxes, his labeling of Herod as a “fox”), Barth concludes that the characteristic relation between the kingdom of Jesus and the kingdoms of this world is best captured in the disparity to be seen between old and new pieces of cloth, old and new wineskins.

For Jesus, and as seen in the light of Jesus, there can be no doubt that all human orders are this old garment or old bottles, which are in the last resort quite incompatible with the new cloth and the new wine of the kingdom of God. The new cloth can only destroy the old garment, and the old bottles can only burst when the new wine of the kingdom of God is poured into them. All true and serious conservatism, and all true and serious belief in progress, presupposes that there is a certain compatibility between the new and the old, and that they can stand in a certain neutrality the one to the other. But the new thing of Jesus is the invading kingdom of God revealed in its alienating antithesis to the world and all its orders.7

Such an “alienating antithesis,” which is at the heart of Jesus’ gospel, not only expresses the remarkable freedom with which Jesus confronts the powers of his day (and ours!) but also represents the shaking of the foundations of every political, economic, and social order. The gospel has ever and always been an unreliable ally. Indeed, the love proclaimed here threatens not just the totalitarian or patently unjust regimes of every age but also calls into question the basis of all the legal justiﬁ cations of rights and duties so carefully cultivated and prized by more consensual orderings of society. So, does this “alienating antithesis” dissolve into such a radical transcendence that all we can do is hail it from afar, conﬁ ning ourselves to a “spirituality” that never touches the conﬂ icts, miseries, or even joys of this world? That is one kind of “spirituality of the church” that has sometimes been afﬁ rmed. And it is true that the freedom with which Jesus engages those who are settled in their status, whether it be religious or political or social, should not be overlooked. He is almost scary that way, and the gospels make it clear that the wisest of his opponents (e.g., Herod, the Pharisees, Pilate, not to mention the demons, and sometimes even the disciples themselves) perceived that freedom quite clearly and found it unnerving, always trying either to soften or domesticate it or in the end extinguish it altogether. Yet what expresses his freedom most concretely and keeps the “alienating antithesis” of his gospel from being reduced to some impenetrable transcendence is Jesus’ strange and unembarrassed embrace of his own poverty, and his welcoming of the poor and miserable and least of these as his own, indeed, as reliable signs of his kingdom. The

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freedom of his love is scary not just because it is “alienating” to the orders we might think well-established, but even more because it is so joyful in its embrace of those hungry for good news (Lk.4:18). The “fear nots” that accompany his birth and so often announce his message reveal the deeply joyful character of his kingdom, a kingdom not just of God but of the God who will not be God without God’s children. Such a joyful covenant is at the heart of this “alienating” freedom, and it is a joy that cannot be taken away from those to whom it is given (Jn.16:22). Accordingly, the joy of Christ’s embrace of this world is an earthly joy, whose Spirit, far from seeking some ethereal realm beyond the ﬂ esh, ﬁ nds its pulse beating amidst the miseries and hurts and hopes of our quite ﬂ eshly lives. Such joy is the fruit of that Spirit that witnesses in its own way to the freedom of Jesus’ presence among us, inspiring the strange and even unnerving conﬁ dence that he is Lord and that taking no thought for the morrow might prove the most faithful form of discipleship.

*** To return to Le Chambon and the witness rendered there during World War II, what is striking is not the remarkable shelter the congregation provided to those in great need or even the courageous love exhibited in those dark days, but rather the freedom and conﬁ dence that enabled that congregation to be the church of Jesus Christ. The “spirituality” of this church knew something of the incarnate Christ and the way in which his scary freedom compelled those who followed to embrace the quite ﬂ eshly needs of this world. In his company, the church discovered what it meant to be, and to receive, a neighbor. Just so, the conﬁ dence manifest in the witness of this congregation made it dangerous to the orders of its day, not through any overt threats but merely (!) through the rehearsal of the story that sustained its life. That story is as dangerous as it is joyful. It makes space for the other where there is none. Indeed, in the worship called forth by this story, that little congregation in the mountains of southern France found the spiritual gifts and conceptual tools to imagine acts of love as incommensurable as they were evangelical. Here, in their worship and life, the unsettling freedom of Jesus sounded an echo in the liberating welcome of the stranger and refugee. Just so, the “fear nots” that once accompanied the birth of a little Jewish boy born in a stable 2000 years ago were heard again by Jewish children facing the darkness of a 20th century evil. Whatever else the gospel of Jesus Christ means for the church, it means at least this much: that it is given the Spirit of freedom to be the church. The question before the church today is not programmatic. The question is not how to dismantle, re-educate, or otherwise eliminate various evils. To think such were a human possibility would be to engage in a “spirituality of the church” that ignores the depths of human sinfulness and reduces our plight to one of attitudinal change and appropriate language. Were that our dilemma, we would hardly need Jesus Christ or the liberating grace of his Spirit-ﬁ lled humanity to discover a life together that is not so much a platform for our agendas as it is a formative presence that shapes us into a new people. Despite the divisions in our culture that we take so seriously and whose agendas are all too ready to deﬁ ne us, our foundations remain quite unshaken. Our rhetoric only conﬁ rms our satisfaction with our self-chosen tribes. But what if these divisions don’t really deﬁ ne us? What if our identity is to be found elsewhere? What we lack today is that freedom that is conﬁ dent in the victory of Jesus Christ

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over sin and death, a freedom that neither howls with the wolves of popular culture nor is captive to its various political agendas. Such a freedom creates a culture of forgiveness, practices disciplines of love, ventures concrete actions of hope. Such a freedom will dare to be the church, risking silence when others demand that we speak, and speaking when others would have us be silent. Such a freedom will not allow the guilt and shame for the church’s own daily (and historical) failures to drive it either to despair or into some utopian “spirituality” untethered to the miseries and the joys of this ﬂ eshly life. Though we may well not see everything in subjection to our efforts and in fact see only how often we have failed to live out the gospel, still, as the author of Hebrews insists, “we do see Jesus” (Heb.2:9). He is the one who deﬁ nes us. Indeed, that is what the Holy Spirit helps us see, opening our eyes to see him who claims us for his own, liberating us from our own loneliness, anger, and despair, enabling us to see beyond ourselves to our neighbor. This is how we are formed in Christ and by Christ, not by insulating us from the world but strengthening us to be the kind of community whose witness is capable of loving that world in all its brokenness and otherness. It is Jesus who makes for redemptive community, and it is as the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see him that we learn again, and yet again, how to become his community . The mistake is to think that we can do this in some easier way, perhaps by looking to ourselves or burnishing our credentials that will justify our piety, politics, or program. No, one must pray for such a gift of the Spirit, even long for it and risk becoming that community that ﬁ nds its meaning, hope, and joy not in popular slogans or pious phrases but in the life Jesus Christ forms and shapes among us. Such a risk will entail more than prayer and longing, however. Just as the freedom of Jesus’ love was exercised out of his poverty and his ministry was largely among and for the poor of his day, just as he expressed again and again the lethal threat that wealth poses to our souls, just as so much of our anger and divisiveness are driven not by a depressed economy or impoverished church, so in order to risk today the moral and spiritual formation that makes for saints, we will have to become poor again and discover the ligaments and ties that truly bind us to this One who will not be without us or our neighbor. I am not sure what all this might mean, and indeed, I frankly ﬁ nd the prospect unsettling and scary. But I suspect that there is something deep within the heart of Jesus’ gospel that is inimical to comfortable afﬂ uence, and that to practice a Christianity unacquainted with real need is to engage in a pose, a religious pose, even a quite “spiritual” pose, but one that is entirely empty. And worse, such a pose tempts one to ﬁ nd meaning not in the life together that is ours in Jesus Christ but in other realms that are in the end less forgiving: politics, social media, and the lonely accumulation of wealth. Is it too much to say that the narrow way of the church offers an alternative to the many broad roads the culture provides to realize ourselves? Is it too much to say that the tribal identities on offer today end only in misery? Is it too much to say that it is a joy to be the church today? Those who preach and teach regularly in congregations riven by pandemic, racial unrest, and cultural and political divides might commit to such a proposition only with tongues pressed ﬁ rmly in cheek. It is so much easier to be wisely cynical or prophetically angry, allowing the culture and its divisions to form and shape our identity. It is so much easier to celebrate our individual righteousness while deprecating the wickedness of institutions and their many deceits. How strange

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that the proclamation of Jesus resulted in, of all things, the church.8 Surely Jesus could have done better than that. Yet this Savior never seemed to do much except in the company of others. Even in death he is depicted as being surrounded by sinners. That, evidently, is where he chooses to do his work, and not only chooses to do so, but to do so by joyfully embracing the gift of life together. “Fear not, little ﬂ ock,” he tells his disciples, “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Lk.12:32). One can hear in such words exactly the kind of freedom that sustains what might well seem paradoxical: a humbly conﬁ dent church.

*** In his little book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that those “who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions be ever so honest, earnest, and sacriﬁ cial.”9 It is enough to be the church. It is not enough to be only the church or to be the church preoccupied with itself. Neither is it enough to pretend to be dragging the church toward “the right side of history.” Bonhoeffer knew how radical a thing the church’s own life is and how disruptive its presence can be in a world bent on its various schemes of salvation. The lives that are shaped by the life Jesus Christ forms in his life together are lives that dare to love one another and dare even more to be held accountable for their many failures to live up to that calling. Just so they risk the embarrassment and shame that a twitter culture is so eager to heap upon them. How much less embarrassing it would be to never risk loving like that, never risk being exposed by a story that daily threatens to reveal our sinful failures. But just there do we ﬁ nd that mercy that is so “alienating” to a more virtuous and efﬁ ciently driven culture. And it is that mercy, as Bonhoeffer knew, that gives life. The title of this rambling little essay is taken from the great though un-prosecuted heresy of the Southern Presbyterian Church: “the Spirituality of the Church.” That heresy sought to insulate the church and shield it from the embarrassing claims posed by racial, economic, political, and social conditions, so many of which contradicted the life together that Jesus Christ has made in his own body. It was thought that the gospel could only be proclaimed by conﬁ ning it to “spiritual” matters, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having to be held accountable to a more incarnate word. One can only be grateful that this particular heresy, though not dead, has ceased to plague the church with the same intensity as in previous times. But, heresies are useful things in part because they are so instructive. And embedded in nearly every heresy is an evangelical truth that has been distorted. In this heresy that truth is the fact that the gospel is not captive to any political, social, economic, or racial ideology, and that the church possesses a freedom that only it can exercise. It is that freedom, the freedom to listen and hear and tell of One who loves sinners and calls them into his life and makes of them, dare one say it, a new creation. Out of his love, such new creatures dare to love one another, even when loving one another is hard, not obviously proﬁ table, and altogether uncomfortable. Yet that is the church’s particular gift, and it is that freedom that constitutes the radical nature of the church’s own life. Such a “spirituality of the church,” rightly understood, is what makes events like those that occurred at Le Chambon possible. And when the church faithfully and

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conﬁ dently risks being the church, then its witness will voice that “Fear not” which is at the heart of its own life and the message it bears to the world.

Notes 1 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 119. 2 Ephraim Radner, A Profound Ignorance, Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2019), 9. 3 There have been a number of books and at least one documentary describing this remarkable undertaking . The documentary is entitled “Weapons of the Spirit” by Pierre Sauvage, a beneﬁ ciary of that congregation’s efforts. A good place to start reading about this church and its pastor and his wife is Philip Hallie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). d d 4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 171-172. 5 Ibid. 173. 6. Ibid. 175. 7 Ibid. 177. 8 The famous quote is from the Roman Catholic modernist and biblical scholar Alfred Loisy: “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom and what arrived was the church.” 9 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 5 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 36.

December 31, 2021
Do Not Be Afraid

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Do Not Be Afraid

Agnes W. Norﬂ eet

Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. That’s what the angel of the Lord told those terriﬁ ed shepherds out in the ﬁ eld keeping watch over their ﬂ ock while the glory of the Lord lit up the night sky bright as day. We have heard it before in this season of angels appearing to all the leading characters: to Zechariah whose wife Elizabeth was far too old to have a baby; to the betrothed, but not yet married, Joseph; and to Mary who, despite her virginity, was beginning to feel the ﬂ utter of new life down in her belly. Do not be afraid. In the coming months, during Lent, we will hear those same words again from the lips of Jesus. On his way to the cross, just after Jesus assures his disciples that they will join him where he is going on that promised day of resurrection, he showers them with compassion saying, “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.”1 Then on Easter, when we show up at dawn outside the empty tomb, it is the very ﬁ rst thing the angel will say to us there.2 Do not be afraid. Of course, every time we hear this refrain in the New Testament, we remember many times it was spoken in the Old. As we slowly emerge from the long and difﬁ – cult pandemic season, what a welcomed word to hear from one of this year’s Advent prophets, Zephaniah, who assures us, “You shall fear disaster no more.”3 Zephaniah proclaims a glorious salvation when God’s judgements are gladly removed, the people will be renewed in God’s love, and songs of praise will resound throughout the earth. As the people return from exile, their long season of trauma comes to an end. Likewise, our favorite Christmastime prophet, Isaiah, repeatedly invites our trust in God to triumph over fear. During the many months of offering pastoral care at a distance to isolated congregants, I often recalled Isaiah’s promise, “Thus says the Lord: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.”4 Those words are engraved on the four sides of the stunningly beautiful baptismal font in the Salisbury Cathedral, which became one of the ﬁ rst public vaccination sites in the United Kingdom. Throughout that lofty worship space, people waited in rows around that central font, an ever-ﬂ owing reminder that Christian baptism is an immersion into deep waters and from which we are raised by the gracious hand of God who repeatedly invites us not to fear. I have not done the count myself, but I have read in a number of places that the words, “Do not be afraid,” appear in the Bible three hundred and sixty-ﬁ ve times. Once for every day of the year, and this has certainly been a year when we needed to hear that chorus over and over. Do not be afraid.

When fear is a good thing Now, of course, fear is not an altogether unwelcomed emotion. It can be a rational reaction to an identiﬁ able danger or threat. Fear of getting or spreading the coronavirus led us to maintain our distance, to wear face masks, and to get vaccinated in order to try to keep ourselves and those around us safer. That behavior is a good and

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appropriate use of fear. Psychologists tell us that when we come into the world, we have innate, built-in fears. Fear of falling helps us adapt safely to our surroundings; fear of abandonment is an important protection enabling us to admit our dependence on others for survival. My young adult son who hikes with his rescue dog in the Blue Ridge Mountains recently had to take her to a sensitization class so that she would learn to fear rattlesnakes and copperheads. A positive reinforcement approach to snake avoidance is a good thing for the dog as well as our son. At a basic level, fear heightens our senses and awareness, guiding our ﬁ ght or ﬂ ight response as an important means of protection. Similarly, the Biblical concept of fear relates to a broad array of emotions, many of which are commended to us by God and God’s messengers. The Book of Proverbs begins with the common aphorism, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,”5 and this meaning of fear is often synonymous with reverence, awe, faith, and wonder, the kind of postures the children of God are encouraged to assume. In the Acts of the Apostles, Cornelius is described as just such a devout person characterized by his giving generously and praying constantly.6 Psychologically then, realistic fear can be a healthy thing; it keeps us from making foolish mistakes or taking dangerous risks. Likewise, biblical connotations of fear encompass a wide range of complex emotions, postures, and experiences appropriate to the human and divine relationship. These forms of fear build up the character and deﬁ ne the call to discipleship.

The fear addressed by the angels So what kind of fear are Advent’s angels trying to get us to relinquish as they hover in the sky repeating for the shepherds what Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says is the primary, fundamental, and persistent message of the whole Bible? The angels are addressing the kind of fear that overwhelms us. They are neither singing about the fear that keeps us safe and alive nor the fear that is better translated as awe and faith and wonder. They are proclaiming a power stronger than anything that might have a stranglehold on us in order to embolden us to let go of the fear that keeps us from living into and up to our calling. They are addressing the kind of fear that impedes our trust in God and prohibits our responding to God’s abundant gifts with joy and generosity, with faith and hope, with passion and compassion for others. What is unique and timeless about Christmas is the celebration that God entered a moment in human history in person, doing a new thing to reveal God’s abiding love and care for us. God decided to make a full and unreserved investment in the created order and among the human family so that we might become more fully human for the glory of God and the good of creation. In the midst of a fearful world, God draws close to us so that we might be drawn closer to God through Jesus, once a vulnerable child through whom we are shown that we can put our trust in God. We are invited to remember always, come what may, that we are not alone. In everything that makes us human, even unto death, God’s love, mercy, and peace are greater than human fear, greater than any seemingly debilitating emotional state. As if returning from a kind of exile, we slowly emerge from a long season in which we have monitored daily the pandemic death toll ticking higher and higher, a time when we have wept as strangers said their farewells over cell phones held up by ICU nurses, and more than a year in which we have been isolated from people we love and the community we treasure as our church family. Amid these and every form of

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loneliness and isolation, we are never alone. That’s the knowledge those angels wanted to impart to Zechariah and Joseph in their unique predicaments, and to Mary and the shepherds by their annunciations. From their holy script, they now wing their way toward us, inviting us to perceive that when they say “Do not be afraid,” we might understand that through the person of Jesus Christ, in life and death and life eternal, we are companioned and redeemed by a good and gracious God. Do not be afraid.

What freedom from fear might look like The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is anchored by a central room in which Rockwell’s original oil paintings of the four freedoms hang. Referring to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, in which he outlined essential human rights that should be universally protected, these paintings were reproduced for The Saturday Evening Post during consecutive weeks in 1943 alongside essays by leading intellectuals of the day: “Freedom of Speech,” “Freedom of Worship,” “Freedom from Want,” and “Freedom from Fear.” On a recent visit to the museum, as my husband and I moved from painting to painting, I was struck by how those essential freedoms, lifted up during World War II, feel so relevant today while we reckon with the assault on our nation’s Capital building, the rise of white supremacy, the bitter legacy of our nation’s institutional racism, current legislation to limit voters’ rights, the dissemination of lies as truth, the widening gap between those who have more than enough and those who have not enough, and the cultural divisions that creep into the church and chip away at our sense of genuine communion. There is so much going on in our world, nation, community, and even our churches that makes us afraid. As we rounded the room from painting to painting in order, my husband said, “The last one not only speaks for itself, but it sums up all the others.”

Freedom from Fear You may remember how Rockwell painted the lovely bedtime scene of a mother leaning in and pulling up the covers up over two sleeping children. There are some cast off clothes and a doll on the ﬂ oor. The father’s head is bowed toward his little ones as he holds in hand his eyeglasses and a folded newspaper from which the headlines scream of bombings and horror abroad. The open door beyond this family shows a stairwell going down, conveying the relative afﬂ uence of a white midcentury American family typical of many of Rockwell’s subjects. The Norman Rockwell Museum is intent on preserving Rockwell’s unique artistic depictions of American life over his long career, as well as the depth and breadth of his interest in humanitarian causes for justice. Many remember his picture of young Ruby Bridges bravely integrating her public school in Louisiana, but probably don’t know he also painted the lynching of a black man that no one would publish. Just last year the museum hosted a special exhibition entitled Reinventing Rockwell, in which another resident of the Berkshires, the artist Pops Peterson, remade some of Rockwell’s iconic paintings from his contemporary African American perspective. Reimagining Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear,” his “Freedom from What?” pictures a black mother tucking two children into bed while the father, clutching a newspaper with the headline shouting “I Can’t Breathe!” looks out the window. The similarities and differences between Rockwell and Peterson are striking. Rockwell’s painting

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describes the London Blitz bombings being played out on a foreign shore, a good distance from those midcentury white American parents. Peterson’s painting recounts Eric Garner’s last words, now heard in the haunting echoes of George Floyd as he died under the knee of a police ofﬁ cer. While the two paintings share a similar bedroom setting and family conﬁ guration, Peterson draws a sharp contrast to Rockwell’s white, afﬂ uent family by conveying his subject’s source of fear is just outside that family’s bedroom window. We who continue to contend with the insidious effects of racism in every aspect of our history, culture, and institutions are called to be mindful of how fear is contextual and often inequitably wrought. Womanist biblical scholar Wilda Gafney addressed this nature of fear proclaiming the Christmas gospel message to a largely African American Philadelphia congregation saying,

We do not walk alone among the shadows of earth because God is Immanuel, God with us. In our brokenness, in our fullness, God is with us. God is with us when the bullets are ﬂ ying, when the ground is shaking, when the planes are crashing, when the waters are rising, when the ship is sinking, when the winds are howling, when death is knocking, when the shadow of death stretches out and touches even Christmas–God is with us! God is with us when we are falsely accused and unjustly imprisoned. God is with us when we are raped and tortured and murdered. God is with us when our children, our precious children, are stolen from us. God is with them in their fear and horror! God is with us in our rage and sorrow and grief! God is with us! God is with the suffering and the dying, comforting and accompanying through that valley of death that we cannot yet enter. This is the Gospel, not that we’re untouchable, not that we’re inviolable, for even the Son of God was violated. But that we are never alone, never forsaken, never absent from the Divine presence is the Gospel of light and life.7

This is the gospel indeed. In every generation and across the wide diversity of human experience, the angels’ “Do not be afraid” is a strong invocation of God’s abiding love, mercy, peace, and justice. We cannot ultimately be overwhelmed by fear because we are never alone, never forsaken, never absent from the Divine presence. This is the message of Advent and Christmas when we receive God’s gift which inspires us to faith and to hope and to joy. Do not be afraid, for unto you is born a Savior. That blessed refrain transports us to the place where our fears meet their answer, where God’s unconditional love awaits our trust. The gospel truth hovering in the night air over Bethlehem’s shepherds hovers over us and awaits its entry into our hearts.

Notes 1 John 14:27. 2 Matthew 28:5. 3 Zephaniah 3:15. 4 Isaiah 43:1-2. 5 Proverb s 1:7. 6 Acts of the Apostles 10:2. 7 Wilda Gafney, “When the Shadow of Death Touches Christmas,” Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd, East Falls Philadelphia, December 30, 2012, wilgafney.com.

December 31, 2021
Palm Sunday

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Palm Sunday

Matthew 27:39-50

Shannon Kershner

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois

Here we are again, gathered as one body yet not in one place, separated by physical distance but still woven together in the power of the Spirit—the church, the body of Christ, doing what we can for the healing of the world. I am thankful for you—to just know you are out there—and I hope that during this time of worship you might pause from time to time to realize that people are joining in this time of worship from coast to coast, even from different places around the world. So even if you are sitting in front of your computer or iPad by yourself, you are not alone. You are joined by friends and strangers alike, all of us searching for God’s presence in our days, all of us trying to make some meaning or sense out of our current experience, all of us waiting for the season of recovery and healing to begin. Even in our waiting, God is at work. We might not always see it or feel it, but God is knitting together new ways of being church and community even now. That is what God does. It is who God is. Yet the promise that new possibilities always emerge from seasons of suffering and struggle does not and cannot deny the suffering and struggle that occur. This is why we must now move from a Palm Sunday focus, a moment of celebration, into the Passion story, a story that reminds us Jesus emptied himself out, all out, for us and for this world, fully plunging into suffering and struggle. Our scripture today is a text—whose context is the time of Jesus’ cruciﬁ xion—usually read at our Maundy Thursday Tenebrae service or during a Good Friday service. But we are reading it today because it contains our next question that Jesus asks. I almost changed the selection of the text. I came very close to deciding to scrap my original plan of focusing on this passage about Jesus’ death to instead focus on a different passage, one that did not contain such pathos and torment. “Don’t we have enough of that right now?” I asked myself, “Enough suffering, enough pain, enough grief, enough death?” It did not help that I had been checking in on clergy colleagues in New York only to ﬁ nd out that the memorial services are starting to pile up for them, that some of them have COVID-19 themselves, and that all of them are tired and rather overwhelmed. “Get ready,” one of them told me out of genuine concern. Get ready. Honestly, though, how does one “get ready” for a prolonged season of suffering, pain, grief, and death? You can’t. You can only face it when it comes, relying on the promise of our faith that there is a better day on the horizon. The promise of our faith is that God is not done yet. And that truth, that promise, is why I chose to stick with the original plan to preach this text from Matthew—the one that contains Jesus’ last question in his earthly life, the stark and bracingly honest question “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is the question Jesus painstakingly posed right before he breathed his last, according to both Matthew and Mark. Martin Copenhaver points out that it only seems ﬁ tting for Jesus to have a question on his lips as he approaches death. Jesus asked 307 different questions throughout his

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ministry. Yet this one is different from all the others we’ve heard. This last question is not meant to teach, like the question of compassion: “Do you see this woman?” It is not rhetorical, like the question about worry: “Are you not of more value than they?” This question from the cross is not offered for the beneﬁ t of those listening, like the questions about identity or purpose: “What is your name?” and “What are you looking for?” Rather, Copenhaver claims this question, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me,” is an expression of isolation. It is raw and threatening, like an open wound. And, like Jesus hanging on the cross, it hangs in the air unanswered.1 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This question, however, is not simply a question either. It is the beginning of a prayer, the beginning of a psalm, Psalm 22, a psalm Jesus would have known from his Jewish tradition. Perhaps a rabbi in his hometown taught it to Jesus when he was a young man. Maybe his mother Mary or his relative Elizabeth taught Jesus to pray it. Regardless of how or when he learned this holy prayer, it had apparently lodged down deeply inside him, so deeply that it formed the language he used as he took his ﬁ nal breaths. In my ministry I’ve seen that kind of thing before. The congregation I served prior to this one was chock full of retired Presbyterian ministers and seminary professors . In my time with those retired ministerial colleagues, I noticed that they tended to die with a perceptible sense of peace about them. I soon realized that peace often came because, as their ﬁ nal days unfolded, they regularly recited scripture passages they had memorized after preaching on them so often or teaching them in Sunday school classes. Furthermore, it wasn’t just scripture that would spring to their minds. I would often enter their hospital or hospice rooms to ﬁ nd them quietly singing verses of familiar hymns that had taken root in their souls. Those sacred times were teachable moments for me, faith-shaping experiences. Those women and men taught me the criticality of immersing myself in the sacred stories and hymns of our faith, so much so that those scriptures and hymns could become almost second nature to me. I would see how, when these pastors or teachers found themselves struggling or facing moments of pain, these words of faith always bubbled up to the surface, reminding them they were not alone and that God was indeed with them in the middle of it. “Great is thy faithfulness,” they would sing. “I shall lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence shall my help come,” they would recite. “I once was lost but now am found,” they might hum. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; death and mourning and pain will be no more,” they would pray. These words of scripture, these melodies of faithfulness, had so become a part of the terrain of their souls, a part of the geography of their memories, that when other words failed them, these words, these songs, did not. Could that be what happened with Jesus? As he hung there, actively dying, did different scripture passages or Hebrew songs from his youth come into his mind? And if so, then why did he have to use this one? After all, this whole text from Matthew would feel differently if Jesus had uttered a different passage. What if, instead of the ﬁ rst line of Psalm 22, Jesus had prayed the ﬁ rst line of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd”? Or what if he had prayed words from the prophet Isaiah: “Do not be afraid for I am with you”? Either of those passages on the lips of a dying Jesus might have given this narrative of Jesus’ ﬁ nal hours a more comforting tone for us disciples.

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That is what happens in the Gospel of John. John goes out of his way to portray Jesus as being in complete control of the entire Passion story, even up to the very last moment when he takes his ﬁ nal breath. “It is ﬁ nished,” Jesus says in John’s telling of the story, before giving up his spirit. There is no cry of abandonment. There is no voice of lament. Not in John’s Gospel. But here, in both Mark and Matthew, Psalm 22 is what we get. We listen as Jesus cries out with one more question, one not directed to us this time, but only to God—a question as to why the one he had always called Father had not stopped his suffering, had not prevented his pain, had not taken the cup away from him as he had prayed for God to do in the Garden of Gethsemane. As theologian Raymond Brown has written, in this passage “Jesus is portrayed as profoundly discouraged at the end of his long battle because God, to whose will Jesus committed himself at the beginning of the Passion, has not intervened in the struggle and seemingly has left Jesus unsupported….Jesus cries out, hoping that God will break through the alienation he has felt.”2 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries as his breathing becomes more and more labored. So what are we to make of it? What are we to make of the claim that the ﬁ rst scripture that came to Jesus’ mind, the prayer that best expressed how he felt at the end, was a cry of lament, a prayer expressing abandonment and discouragement? Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor takes some comfort from that truth. In her book of sermons entitled God in Pain, she puts it this way:

Christ speaks, not from some safe place outside of human suffering but from the very heart of it. He is the trampled one, the crushed and soiled one whose loyalty to humankind leads him to endure all that we endure—right up to and including the silence of God. When Jesus howls his last question from the cross, it is God who howls—protesting the pain, opposing it all with his last breath. Only this is no defeat. This is, contrary to all appearances, a triumph over suffering. By refusing to avoid it or to lie about it in any way, the cruciﬁ ed one opens a way through it. He hallows it by engaging it.3

The late William Sloane Cofﬁ n always preached a similar sentiment: We see in Jesus that God gives us minimum protection but maximum support. Minimum protection but maximum support. That support shines forth as we sit with this last question Jesus asks before he dies, for how many of us have also traveled though seasons in our lives when praise felt like a distant memory and lament was all we had the energy to do? How many of us have experienced our own dark nights of the soul, when God’s presence felt so hidden to us that we wondered if any of it was real at all, if any of it could be trusted? I have no doubt that our current global pandemic is having this effect on people right now, maybe even on you. “My God, why have you abandoned me?” must be the question on many lips as loved ones suffer and die in isolation and family members cannot be anywhere near. That is part of what makes Jesus’ very last question so powerful. This last question he asks, formed by a prayer of his faith, tells us that if even Jesus felt that way, then there really is nothing in life or in death that can separate us from God’s love, not even seasons of lament and feelings of God-forsakenness. Jesus has even been

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there and cried out honestly about it, refusing to avoid it or to lie about it, thereby making a way through it, hallowing it, demonstrating for us that nothing is outside the reach of the Holy. Furthermore, through his cry of abandonment, God internalized into God’s own memory what it is to feel forgotten and left. Hallowed it. Made a way through it. Minimum protection but maximum support. One last thing: this psalm that Jesus prays, Psalm 22, while it is indeed a prayer of lament, it is also a prayer that does not get stuck forever in lament. After the psalmist vividly expresses his despair and sense of abandonment for the majority of the verses—twenty-one out of thirty-one total—he then moves into praise. We are not told how or why; we just see that the move happens. And that move from lament and God-forsakenness to praise and gratitude telegraphs to us that somehow, in some way, God did indeed hear and respond and intervene. God did indeed lift the psalmist up out of the pit, providing a way out of no way, bringing hope and healing and a new future for the one who could not imagine it on his own. That is how Psalm 22 ends—with thanksgiving for God’s faithfulness and God’s commitment to being his God. That shift from honest lament to honest praise causes me to wonder if that might also be another reason why this particular prayer, this particular scripture, was what Jesus chose to speak with his last breath. After all, he knew the whole psalm. Jesus had undoubtedly prayed the entire prayer. Jesus knew what happened near the end and how God, in God’s time, did respond to the psalmist’s suffering and struggle with liberation and healing. Therefore, might it be that Jesus, by using this question from Psalm 22, was also trying to remind all who would have heard him cry that there would be more to the story, more to his story too? That somehow, even in the middle of agony, even in the middle of honest-to-goodness real suffering and struggle, Jesus still trusted that the pain he endured would not be the end? Might that also be why these words of scripture sprang into his mind and out of his mouth? Was he hoping that we would remember the whole psalm and take courage? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus asked, the very last question of his earthly life, a question, though, that did not only express what was, but for those who had the ears to hear, a question that also held out the resilient hope of what would be. For God was not done yet. And God still isn’t.

Notes 1 Martin Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 109. 2 Jon Mecham, The Hope of Glory: Reﬂ ections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (New York: Penguin Random House Press, 2020), 66. 3 Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 114.

December 31, 2021
Getting into the Habit of Hope

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Getting into the Habit of Hope

David S. Cunningham

Hope College, Holland, Michigan

“All shall be well.” Few of the sayings of the medieval mystics are as well known to Christians as is this brief phrase from the fourteenth-century English anchorite Julian of Norwich. Many may even know the slightly longer phrasing: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Of all the memorable language of the Christian tradition, this phrase might best express the sense of hope to which we are called as followers of Christ. Sometimes, of course, the language of hope can devolve into a sappy optimism in which the whole world is seen through rose-colored glasses. When faced with a personal tragedy or experiencing a sense of deep sadness about the state of the world, it may not help for others to quote Julian’s words in a sunny, positive voice, as though singing the ﬁ nal number from a musical comedy. It may indeed be the case that “all shall be well,” but we will not understand the truth of that phrase if we fail to acknowledge everything that has been faced: the carnage and the mayhem, the pain and the suffering, the loss and the emptiness. In this respect, a good place for us to begin is with the larger context of Julian’s words, which are part of her Showings, a series of ﬁ fteen divine revelations that she received and recorded when she was—so she thought—on her deathbed. She was gravely ill and in considerable pain. So we can be certain that for Julian at least, her words of assurance were neither felt nor meant as sunny optimism. She had experienced pain and suffering and loss, so it must have caused her a certain amount of existential angst to write that “all shall be well.” But the context of this language goes well beyond her personal experience. She understands this phrase to be a response to a much broader concern: the fallen state of the world. Here are the sentences leading up to the famous phrase:

In my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the onset of sin was not prevented: for then, I thought, all should have been well. This impulse [of thought] was much to be avoided, but nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed because of it, without reason and discretion. But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: “It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

We might not use Julian’s language to describe how we feel, but we too are puzzled by “the onset of sin.” And not just in a broad, theoretical way, in which we might wonder “why bad things happen to good people” or “why God lets tragic events occur.” Right now, in this time and place, we have experienced the fallen state of the world quite concretely. Why did a mysterious disease break out and kill millions of people? Why are we experiencing a political divide that has rent the bonds of our

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common humanity, setting parents against children and destroying longstanding friendships? Why have the markers of racial and ethnic identity become ﬂ ash points once again, just as we had begun to imagine that genuine healing was possible? The Earl of Gloucester’s words in Act II of King Lear could have been written in direct response to the heartaches of the past two years:

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there’s son against father: the King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.

And yet, this is not the worst: by Act V, Gloucester may think back on this distinctly pessimistic speech as insufﬁ ciently attentive to just how bad things can get. As his son, disguised, will remind us in a pair of asides:

O gods! Who is’t can say “I am at the worst”? I am worse than e’er I was…. And worse I may be yet. The worst is not So long as we can say “This is the worst.”

In response to this, are we genuinely ready to say “All shall be well”? Can we really generate that level of hopefulness? The word hope is a popular one during the Advent season, running the gamut from selﬁ sh desires for a particularly expensive Christmas present to a genuine feeling of exultation and joy in anticipation of the coming of the Christ child. Across its full range of connotations, hope is often portrayed as a feeling: a person’s inner disposition toward the world. Understood in this way, it is easy to understand the usefulness and the disadvantages of hope. Those who can cultivate a feeling of optimism about the future are appreciated for their positive attitude and, at the same time, roundly criticized for their inattention to everything that has transpired since “the onset of sin,” as Julian would put it. And in a parallel way, those who cannot muster up feelings of hope are lauded for their clear-sightedness, and yet also disparaged for being killjoys and making us feel guilty for any trace of optimism that we might have left. To use a season-speciﬁ c analogy: we certainly don’t like Scrooge at the beginning of the story, but he’s a little hard to take at the end as well. We all breathe a little sigh of relief that Dickens didn’t add a couple more stanzas to this “Carol”; too much of the starry-eyed Ebenezer might have been a little hard to take. Our difﬁ culties here may spring from a misunderstanding of hope. As long as we think of it as a kind of inner feeling of optimism, it will always face the challenge of being too much or not enough. But over the long course of the Christian tradition, hope has not been understood primarily as an inner feeling. It is, rather, a virtue, which is often deﬁ ned as a particular character trait, developed over time by certain good habits. Many people are familiar with the cardinal virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence. These are not merely feelings; they have to be instantiated in action. We don’t call people courageous just because they talk a good game; they have to

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prove their courage by doing courageous things. Doing so takes practice: one can’t spend one’s life having never been in a dangerous situation and then be expected to be courageous without the slightest degree of preparation. The brave soldier, the brave athlete, the brave citizen—all have cultivated courage by doing courageous things. And this requires all kinds of training: instruction and mentoring, extensive practice, and a genuine commitment to rise to the challenge when the situation demands it. Theologians have long recognized that some of the most important ethical demands of the Christian tradition also have the nature of a virtue. Paul’s list of the fruits of the spirit, for example, are not simply inner feelings that we can generate in ourselves if we try very hard. To express joy (even when there doesn’t seem to be anything to be joyful about), to be patient (even when there’s no good reason to be), to show forth gentleness (when you just want to hit something)—these are not things that we can do by a quick snap decision. The “fruit” metaphor is a good one: trees do not produce fruit instantaneously or by mere force of will. They require cultivation, and the growth of their fruits takes time. So we develop the habit of patience by being shown what patience looks like (by others who are good at it), by practicing it (particularly in situations where being patient is difﬁ cult or may even seem foolhardy), and by reinforcing the habit by how we think and what we do. Stories of patient people can help; role models are important; and nothing substitutes for practice, practice, practice. Two of the fruits of the spirit are love and faithfulness, and these two ideas show up in slightly different form in Paul’s well-known hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. Here we learn that “these three abide: faith, hope, and love.” These were also recognized in the tradition as virtues; St. Thomas Aquinas calls them “the theological virtues.” Again, we tend to think of these three words as naming feelings or inner states of being; we love people by feeling love in our hearts, and we have faith in God by choosing to do so. But a closer look at both of these elements of Christian action will quickly reveal them to be “more than a feeling.” Dorothy Day did not come to love her fellow human beings just by “falling in love” with them; it took years of wrestling with the realities that other people face and struggling through her own “long loneliness.” John Wesley spoke of his heart being “strangely warmed” with a sense of trust in God, but this did not appear out of nowhere. He had been studying the Bible and church history, meeting with other Christians, and contemplating the work of God in Christ for a good part of his life. Love and faith are virtues, just as courage and patience are. We need to be taught them by story and example; we need to pay attention to how well we are embodying them, recognizing that we will sometimes fail to do so; and we need to practice them by loving others (even when we might prefer to do the opposite) and by believing in God (even when unbelief seems the more sensible choice). And so it is with the theological virtue of hope. Not a mere feeling—not something that we can summon up on the spot, just because we think it would be good to be hopeful from time to time. Being hopeful requires practice. It requires us to be in distinctly un-hopeful situations, committing ourselves to whatever degree of hope we can manage—remembering Abraham, who believed in God’s promise while “hoping against hope” (Rom. 4:18). When we face such difﬁ culties and make it through to the other side, whatever hope we have been able to generate will nudge us toward hope as a good habit: a positive character trait, a virtue. Paul understood this well. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance pro-

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duces character, and character produces hope” (Rom. 5:3–4). Too often, we read this passage as if hope were something of a consolation prize: “Too bad about your suffering , but it builds character, and as a result you’ll at least have hope.” What if we turned that around and understood that “getting in the habit of hope” was the goal of the Christian life rather than some kind of weak silver lining around some nasty grey cloud? Then the passage would have a different sense altogether—worthy of the “boasting in our suffering” with which Paul precedes it. Not that suffering is good, nor that we should invite it, and certainly not that others should feel free to inﬂ ict it on us. The emphasis here is on voluntary suffering; after all, Paul has repeatedly put himself in situations where suffering is likely. But it is much easier to take such risks, for a good cause, when one knows that the suffering itself—and the endurance and character that it produces—will in turn lead to the best possible life: a life lived in hope. And we really do need that endurance and character in order to be hopeful, precisely because there are so many good reasons not to be. The onset of sin, the sorry state of the world, the terrible things that we do to one another: all are good reasons not to have hope, and therefore, all are good reasons to redouble our efforts to cultivate it. And this is where the season of Advent can make a difference, because it does provide us with some of the tools that we need to cultivate hope—even when we are surrounded by so many reasons not to be hopeful. I will mention some Advent resources under three headings: story, song, and action. First, story. No shortage here: in the Bible, in short stories and novels, in poetry and plays, stories of hope are everywhere. The birth narratives are particularly rich in this regard, with shepherds in the ﬁ elds and Magi on the move. But, recalling that hope is more than a feeling, it’s important that the stories that we choose demonstrate how people develop hope. So it’s important that we not be overly reliant on the biblical stories surrounding Jesus’ birth—at least in their bare form—because they provide so little backstory. To understand why the shepherds might have had hope, one would need details about the difﬁ culties of their lives and the ways that they have built up hope as a habit. The sages from the East must have repeatedly experienced the wisdom of the stars, or they would not have risked a long journey in order to follow this one in particular. Mary and Joseph must have developed habits of hope in their young lives, or they would not have been able to respond to the angels with “let it be” and “yes, I will.” A creative storyteller can “ﬁ ll in” some worthy backstory to the Christmas narratives , and many have done so.1 But we all have access to many parallel stories, advent-themed and otherwise, that are already written and ready for our use. I have my own assortment of such stories, and I will mention some of them here; you will have your own to contribute. For me, the stories that seem most likely to cultivate hope are those that present characters with a challenging situation in which it would be easy to feel despair. This in turn means that the hope that they are able to generate is hard-won and has probably come at some cost. Indeed, in many cases, these hopeful persons have been criticized by other characters in the story for their naïveté and their fruitless expectation that “all shall be well.” Importantly, it does not matter whether the thing that they have hoped for actually comes to pass. We learn how to be hopeful by observing the ways that someone else is hopeful and how that hopefulness makes them into a better person—the kind of person that we would like to

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be—regardless of the ﬁ nal outcome. If I watch a production of King Lear, I want to be Cordelia rather than either of her sisters, even though Cordelia’s hope of restoring her father to his rightful place is completely vitiated by her sisters and in-laws. I love the hopefulness of so many of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s stories—Mary Turpin and O.E. Parker and even Francis Tarwater—all of whom get pulled up short and discover that they’ve been hoping for the wrong things. How can the characters in Toni Morrison’s Beloved possibly be hopeful, given the torments that they have endured? And yet they are. And if they can be hopeful, surely I can learn to do the same. Second resource: music. Again, particularly at this time of year, we are not faced with a shortage. It really doesn’t matter whether your tastes run to the classical (Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio), the hymnic (even accompanied by arguments over whether to sing Christmas hymns during Advent!), or the popular (and yes, that includes the music in A Charlie Brown Christmas—even, or maybe especially, the piano jazz). From early in the Christian era, theologians recognized that music affects the soul and can thereby inﬂ uence how we think, feel, and act. Augustine’s treatise De Musica is not an easy work to plow through, but its general message is that pleasing rhythms move us forward into an appreciation for order (which is good for the soul) and orient us toward God as the creator of all things—including sound. In some sense, all music is hopeful, simply because its rhythms put us in positive anticipation of what will come next. While I certainly consider some music more “hopeful” than others (I cannot experience Beethoven’s Ninth or Mahler’s Second in any other way), I recognize that this is a matter of individual taste and training, and I will not attempt to be prescriptive. (Still, if you’ve never heard the song “Icarus—Borne on Wings of Steel” by the rock group Kansas, give it a try sometime. I ﬁ nd it hopeful, in spite of the fact that we all know how that particular story ends!) Singing is a particularly hopeful musical practice—and one that is easily accessible at this time of year. In an article titled “Singing Our Way to Hope,”2 Mel Williams reﬂ ects on the beauty of congregational singing. He writes, “I’ve reﬂ ected often about why singing captures us and won’t let us go. What I’ve concluded is that singing inspires hope. In these times of tumult and strife, where do we ﬁ nd hope? I think that when a poetic text is set to a lovely melody, that combination becomes irresistible—and motivational.” He makes the provocative claim that the songs “sing us.” This way of thinking is particularly useful in the context of hope because it is also a good description of the cultivation of hope—and of all the virtues—in our lives. This does not take place simply by our own strength of will (as though we could do it all alone), but by something working in us from the outside. The medieval writers on the virtues were quick to point out that the good that is cultivated in us is ultimately God’s work, not our own. We need to allow God to do the work (thought we often set up obstacles to it, whether intentionally or otherwise). When we are attentive enough to “get out of God’s way,” we ﬁ nd ourselves doing things that are far above our poor power to add or detract. Williams mentions many great hymns and songs in his article, but perhaps the one that most connects singing with hope is this one:

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No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that rock I’m clinging. It sounds an echo in my soul, How can I keep from singing?

And of course, during Advent and Christmastide, we know so many songs that “sing us,” over and over again. In our current public health circumstances, opportunities to sing may be more limited than we would like. But we have all learned a great deal about technology during the Covid pandemic, and if that hasn’t yet included virtual choirs, it’s time to try. It’s an amazing experience to sing alone in the quiet of one’s room and then to watch one’s work blend into a beautiful chorus on a computer screen. Tools to make this happen are widely available, and we owe it to our choirs and our congregations to make this experience accessible to them. Williams’s article concludes with the following remarks:

Theologically, it seems clear to me that God has chosen music as a primary vehicle to reach us. God rides on music. Singing becomes a spiritual practice ; it wakes us up and gives us a surge of life and hope. This speaks even to those who have difﬁ culties with church. One Sunday , a stranger appeared in worship. At the church door, he said, “I used to go to church a lot, and now I don’t. The only thing I really miss is the singing.” I understand what he was saying. In our worship, Scripture, the liturgy and the sermon can bring insight and inspiration. But as my aged mother once said to me, “I’ve been listening to sermons all my life, and I don’t remember a one of them.” Yet she remembered many hymns and sang them often from memory. Those hymns sang her—and sustained her—through many ups and downs. And after a lifetime of deriving hope and joy from the music, how could she keep from singing?

Even if we can’t do it together, let us sing. And a third Advent resource: action. As noted above, we cultivate the virtues by doing the things that require them as aspects of our character. We become courageous through acts of bravery; we become people of faith by believing; we become hopeful people by doing hopeful things. All through the year, we have the opportunity to take action in hopeful ways: plan a trip, even though you might not be able to take it; greet strangers, despite the meager chance that they will become your friends; plant a tree, knowing that you will not see its fruits for many years, if ever. But the season of Advent is particularly rife with hopeful practices, because it is—after all—about practicing hope. We look for the coming of the Messiah, and our actions during this season are right about cultivating that hope. But there is a ﬂ aw in this notion. We speak volumes about Advent hope, but we already know what will happen. December 25 will follow December 24 just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow; we are not really in doubt about this fact. We do not experience this hope in the way that the people of Israel experienced it 2,000 years

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ago, nor as Jews around the world experience it today: wondering when, or perhaps whether, it will happen. It has already happened, and we celebrate it every year, but our experience of Advent is usually more about preparation than about hope. We know what’s coming, and we need to get ready; and then, sure enough, it happens. Quite frankly, these are not the best possible circumstances for the cultivation of hope. And this is not to mention the fall of the entire season of Advent and Christmastide into the mire of commercialization—a travesty that we criticize and rue every year, while every year it gets a little worse.3 So I encourage Advent practices that are more than just preparation for an event that we know is about to happen. Of course, we can do all kinds of good deeds: donate to good causes, serve meals to the needy over the holidays, and adopt a kindlier demeanor. But keeping in mind that the habit of hope takes practice, allow me to offer a few smaller, less obvious ideas: • Buy presents for people you don’t know and give them anonymously. You’ll never know if they liked them, never know whether they are thankful, never anticipate something in return. But you will hope for all these things. • Find a book by a Christian writer who wrote more than a century ago and read it at a pace that will allow you to read the whole thing during Advent. On the day you ﬁ nish, decide whether you’d recommend it to others. If yes, celebrate; if no, deny yourself something that you want. The book may turn out to be terrible, but you can always hope. • Make your own Advent calendar, putting items in unmarked identical boxes with no dates attached, and scatter them randomly about the house. Don’t count how many you’ve done; just ﬁ ll them until you run out of things and leave a few completely empty. Open one box each day—hopefully. If these ideas strike you as too small and a little silly, that’s okay. The virtues are not cultivated by single, large, heroic acts, but by a thousand small practices—each of which contributes just a bit to the development of a good habit. I’ll close by returning to Julian of Norwich and offer one more thought about her famous words of assurance—a thought that is actually related to the Advent resources of stories, music, and action. First: her words are more meaningful if I remember the whole of her story; these words, which might be seen as overly optimistic, grew out of a life of hardship and pain. So if you don’t know her story in detail, it’s worth a read. Second: the rhythm of her words has a musical quality that drives them forward and affects their meaning. This is perhaps more obvious if they are set out in verse, which makes certain words receive an accent:

All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing f f shall be well.

The ﬁ rst line tells me: well, the second emphasizes all, and the third line propels that all into a more profoundly comprehensive reality: l all manner of thing. There is nothing that will not be well, nothing that will not ultimately be redeemed. This is, I think, at the very foundation of the Christian faith. And if I am convinced of this, I should have no trouble generating ideas for the third resource that I mentioned: action. Knowing that all shall be well, we do not really need to know whether Christmas will

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come on December 25 or not. All shall be well, regardless. Can we imagine celebrating Advent as though we did not know whether anything will happen? Julian did not know; she was sick and seemed to be dying. Cordelia did not know; she had been cast out of her own kingdom by the very father that she was now trying to save. Beethoven did not know; by the time he wrote the Ninth, his deafness was profound. And yet they had hope—not a sunny optimism that elides tragedy and death; not a refusal to recognize the onset of sin and the fallen state of the world, but a clear-eyed, well-cultivated hope that nothing—nothing at all—is outside the loving embrace of God.

Notes 1 To mention two examples among very many: Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors and Tom Hegg’s The Mark of the Maker. 2 https://faithandleadership.com/mel-williams-singing-our-way-hope. 3 Yet here too, there are hopeful resources available. One of my personal favorites (and not exclusively focused on religious issues) is Jo Robinson’s Unplug the Christmas Machine, revised edition (William Morrow, 1991)—which, despite its publication date, withstands the test of time.

December 31, 2021
Protagonist Corner: The Healing Survivor: A Model of Vulnerability for the Modern Preacher

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Protagonist Corner The Healing Survivor: A Model of Vulnerability for the Modern Preacher

Peter Bynum Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

In the 1970’s, Henri Nouwen offered ministers a radical new way to understand our vocation. He encouraged us to see our individual brokenness not as a ﬂ aw to be eradicated or a hindrance to be overcome, but as a holy space for ministry where God’s people might ﬁ nd healing. The work of a minister, Nouwen wrote, “will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks. Thus nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.”1 The book was aptly titled The Wounded Healer. As a pastor, I agree with the premise that my personal vulnerabilities can be a powerful resource in my Christian calling. As my seminary professor Dr. Charles Brown taught us repeatedly, “The greatest tool you have for ministry is yourself.” However, I do have some questions about the lengths to which Nouwen would have us go in the exposure and utilization of our vulnerabilities. In Nouwen’s view, a minister cannot hope to help another “without entering his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the d d process.”2 By this measure, each and every pastoral encounter presents the possibility of martyrdom. If that is true, then we as pastors owe it to ourselves to consider whether some reasonable boundaries should be erected around such “all or nothing” vulnerability. Personally speaking, I come to this question in the midst of a particularly challenging period of pastoral ministry. I expect I am not alone in this. The angry polarization of American culture has turned weekly preaching into a regular stroll across the eggshells of raw nerves, jangled spirits, and stressed-out people in the pews. Some of them are demanding bolder and more prophetic statements from the pulpit, while others have their noses permanently cocked for the slightest whiff of anything “political .” Even the most optimistic church leaders concede that attendance is dropping, giving is dropping, baptisms are dropping, and morale is dropping. And in March of 2020, when the burden of a global pandemic was added to this already burgeoning load, some experts predicted “a tidal wave of pastoral departures,” as even the most committed and faithful clergypersons struggled to keep their heads above water.3 These experiences are almost universally shared by contemporary pastors. Some ministers, however, face an additional and far more personal challenge. I would call them wolves in sheep’s clothing. Pastor, consultant, and author Dennis Maynard calls them “antagonists.” In his work with hundreds of congregations in the U.S. and Canada, and after his speciﬁ c study of forty churches across four Protestant denominations, Maynard has identiﬁ ed a pattern of dysfunctional behavior in some congregations, where small groups of members commit themselves to grabbing power and marginalizing pastors. “Antagonists” he writes, “are easily spotted. They thrive on being critical. They enjoy conﬂ ict. They have extremely controlling personalities. They get their feelings hurt easily and turn those hurt feelings into anger, bitterness, resent-

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ment, and ultimately revenge. They are bulldozers fueled by a full tank of grudges. They will take down anyone that gets in their way. They exist not to build up but to tear down.” And, Maynard ominously adds, “Their ultimate goal is the destruction of the shepherd.”4 In these environments, Nouwen’s advice that ministers must commit to the point of being hurt, wounded, or “even destroyed” becomes all too real. A pastor in such a context is forced to balance a call to stay and protect the ﬂ ock on the one hand, against the survival of his or her own health, happiness, family, and even faith on the other. A heavy thumb on the scales is the example of Christ, who accepted the humiliation, the whip, and even the cross willingly and quietly, “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.”5 As human shepherds called to follow the example of the Good Shepherd, we have always known that martyrdom is a possibility, especially when there are wolves around. My hope in this article, however, is to put at least some weight on the other side of the scale by suggesting that in certain circumstances, a choice for survival can be a faithful and viable spiritual option for pastors. In fact, Jesus opened the door to this option the very ﬁ rst time he sent the Twelve out in ministry. “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts,” Jesus said, “no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.”6 Without armor or defense, the ﬁ rst pastors went out “like sheep into the midst of wolves.”7 However, Jesus’ initial instructions also granted the disciples considerable discretion to guide their own ministries. “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words,” Jesus explained, “shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.”8 In other words, even though his lambs would be vulnerable, Jesus never asked them to lie down indiscriminately before predators. If they were not welcomed or respected in any place, Jesus authorized his disciples to make the decision to stand up, brush off, and walk away so that they might live and witness another day. As servants of Christ, our call to be as “innocent as doves” has always been counterbalanced by the expectation that we will be as “wise as serpents” regarding how, when, and where to commit ourselves to ministry.9 To any pastors who may be struggling with wolves in your own congregations, I can attest that a new openness to survival as a faithful option has borne welcome fruit in my own ministry. One of the greatest gifts has been a renewed sense of resilience. Whenever I begin to feel a little beaten down by the difﬁ culties of ministry, I think of an image that my friend and counselor Dr. Monty Knight once shared with me. He reminded me about those plastic inﬂ atable punching bags many of us had as kids. No matter how hard we hit it, or how often, that smiling clown would just bounce right back up, steadied by the anchor of sand in its base. Ironically, that image does not make me feel like a punching bag. On the contrary, it allows me to access the sensation of bouncing right back up again, buoyed by the Christ who lives in me—the One who took the world’s punches but refused to stay down. The image of the pastor as “survivor” can also be empowering. Once we acknowledge that the choice between continuing to commit to a difﬁ cult situation or opening ourselves to a more welcoming context for ministry is ours and ours alone, that freedom gives us license to reframe old deﬁ nitions of success and failure. In a sense, it taps us into the gritty energy of Teddy Roosevelt, who, through a life of glorious highs and tragically painful lows, discovered the truth that in all great causes, the real credit, he says,

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belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms , the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.10

In my estimation, Roosevelt’s powerful statement does not speak to the difference between winning and losing, but to the difference between surviving and, well, not surviving. It is the experience of a person who, like Paul, is “afﬂ icted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”11 It helps those who dare to strive for a cause greater than self to know that every blow is a chance to push themselves up, brush themselves off, and mutter back to the adversary, “Is that all you got?!?!” When I utter those deﬁ ant words to myself, I confess my inner voice may not be without sin. But our God is a forgiving God… and our God is also a survivor. This last point—that human shepherds can be survivors because that is what the Good Shepherd was—is perhaps the greatest legacy left by the late Nancy Eiseland. Born with a painful congenital bone defect, Eiseland went on to become a leading political and spiritual voice for people with disabilities. In her best-known work, The Disabled God, she describes two distinct poles of Christological understanding. At one end of the spectrum is the “overcomer” Christ who bears no marks or scars from his earthly passion. This vision of Christus Victor claims his triumph but seems to have no memory of his earthly struggles. He is seen in the heretical memes of those who imagine their Jesus with six-pack abs, an AR-15 in one hand and an American ﬂ ag in the other. This view of Jesus, Eiseland argues, is clearly repudiated in scripture when the risen Jesus unabashedly presents his wounds for inspection by the disciples.12 At the other extreme stands a hapless, passive Savior. A reverse image of Christus Victor , the suffering of this servant is apparent, but so is his lingering defeat. Eiseland’s epiphany came when she realized that the Christ she knew could be neither of these things. From her own bodily perspective, she “saw God in a sip-puff wheelchair…. Not an omnipotent, self-sufﬁ cient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant.”13 The Christ standing before Eiseland was, to use her words, the “disabled God”—scathed but not defeated, weathered but not tragic, fully and utterly human, but also fully and miraculously God. “In that moment,” she wrote, “I beheld God as a survivor.”14 As pastors, we are called to bring the fullness of who we are to this wonderful, confounding, inspiring, and sometimes crushing call that we have answered. God knows better than anyone that we all have both strengths and weaknesses, aptitudes and handicaps, and, for some reason beyond my pay grade, God has called all of us to use all of who we are, both the beautiful and the not so beautiful, as tools for healing . On the way, we will all carry our crosses, but not every hill is meant to be our Golgotha. As Brené Brown says, our heart is the most valuable thing we have to give. For that reason, the people we encounter in ministry “have to earn the right to see [our heart], and they have to know when they are seeing it that it’s an absolute honor and

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privilege for [us] to have let them in.”15 If that respect is not being extended to you, remember that Christ has given you a powerful choice, a right to discern for yourself whether the hill you are currently occupying is really one to die on, or if the more faithful choice is to shake the dust off your feet and survive (or thrive?) for another day. Either way, in the meantime, keep bouncing up. And if it helps you, every now and then, you might try muttering with both power and resilience, “Is that all you got?!?!”

Notes 1 Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Image Books Doubleday, 1972), Loc. 91 of 1257, Kindle. 2 Nouwen, p. 71 of 97 (emphasis added). 3 Laura Stephens-Reed, “The Coming Tidal Wave of Pastoral Departures,” September 8, 2020, Internet online, Available from https://www.laurastephensreed.com [September 26, 2020]. 4 Dennis R. Maynard, When Sheep Attack (Published by the author, 2010), 14. k k 5 Isaiah 53:7. 6 Matthew 10:9. 7 Matthew 10:16. 8 Matthew 10:14. 9 Matthew 10:16. 10 Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech given at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910, printed in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol XIII, pp. 506-529, Internet online, Available from http://www.leadershipnow.com/tr-citizenship.html (November 10, 2014). 11 2 Corinthians 4:7-9. 12 Nancy L. Eiseland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 100. 13 Ibid., 89. 14 Ibid., (emphasis added). 15 Lynn Okura, “Brené Brown: The Most Valuable Gift You Can Give To Another Person (video),” October 2, 2013, Internet online, Available from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brene-brown-trustvulnerability -oprah_n_4022765 [September 26, 2020].

December 31, 2021
Protagonist Corner: Do the Numbers!

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Protagonist Corner

Do the Numbers!*

Walter Brueggemann

Traverse City, Michigan

Meet Amos Wilder. Wilder was a pastor, a poet, and a long-time New Testament scholar at Harvard. He was also the brother of Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town. I introduce him to you, dear reader, in order that you may, along with me, savor his wonderful enigmatic dictum: “The zero hour breeds new algebra.” Every element in this sentence evokes careful attentiveness as each element is thick with intent. The zero hour is the moment when we reach the nadir of possibility and have no r r reason to anticipate any good prospect. The zero hour is devoid of capacity and brings us into the depth of despair. In ancient Israel, the zero hour was the exile of defeat, destruction, and displacement when the holy city and its temple were destroyed and God’s promises had run out. Israel had no possible future:

My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God. (Isaiah 40:27)

But Zion has said, “The Lord has forsaken me, My Lord has forgotten me. (Isaiah 49:14)

They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” (Ezekiel 37:11)

That moment of despairing resignation is reiterated in the New Testament narrative in the execution of Jesus. In the wake of that Friday, the disciples could assert: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). The verb hope is in the past tense. Now hope is gone. That same moment of hopelessness arises for us personally and publicly when our lives are broken beyond repair. Just now, of course, amid economic meltdown and the virus, we are, in our society, at something of a zero hour. Our leaders continue to assure “We will get through this” or “We will get through this together.” But there is for now no light at the end of the tunnel. To be sure, none of these moments of failure are comparable to the depth of the cosmic shut-down of that cruciﬁ xion Friday (see Matthew 27:51-54, Luke 23:44-45), but we do imagine by analogue. The work of faith is the embrace of that zero hour. Wilder has chosen the rich and suggestive verb breed. He does not say “make” or “produce,” or “evoke.” Breed suggests something organic to the zero hour that is d d itself generative of the possible we have taken to be impossible. The Bible does not use the verb breed, but in Numbers 11:12, Moses suggests that YHWH has “conceived” Israel (see Isaiah 49:15 as well). Thus the notion of “breed” is not far from the way in which the Bible speaks of the emergence of the inexplicably new. For the male

*First published in Church Anew Blog: https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/walter-brueggemann-columnthe -god-of-the-secondwind.

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party in the birth process, the verb is beget, and for the female, we get birth. In the pairing of “beget” and “birth,” we get something like “breed,” a hidden, inscrutable, inexplicable emergence of new life that is impelled we know not how. The Bible is perforce reticent about the process, but clearly understands that hidden emergence of new life is within the governance of God’s holiness. It is for that reason that Isaiah can have God voiced in the speciﬁ city of the quotidian process of birthing: “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant” (Isaiah 42:14). The Bible does not and cannot explain the breeding process, but marvels: “By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and him as good as dead, descendants were born, as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore”(Heb 11:11-12). The capacity of God to deliver newness is given more grand doxological articulation by Paul: God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). The capacity for newness from the zero hour is peculiarly in the gift of God. What emerges in this hidden process, according to Wilder, is “new algebra.” The newness does not accommodate any of our old calculations or our usual explanations. What we get is a new world of reality that does not answer to our old certitudes. In the zero hour, what is “bred” is a wonder that deﬁ es our old controls. The over-used word for such a wonder is miracle. That word works, however, when we refuse the notion that it is a “violation of the natural order.” No, “miracle” is a disclosure of the holiness of God, an event, says Martin Buber, that is laden with “abiding astonishment .” So consider Wilder’s formulation—Zero hour: a moment without possibility; Breed: a hidden process of newness laden with holiness; New algebra: a way of conﬁ guring reality beyond all of our old certitudes. I could think of three instances in scripture when the new algebra arrives as a surprise. (You may think of others.) In the book of Judges, Israel reaches a very low point of helplessness before the incursive power of the Midianites who violently seize their life resources. This is indeed a zero hour for ancient Israel:

They would encamp against them and destroy the produce of the land, as far as the neighborhood of Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel, and no sheep or ox or donkey. For they and their livestock would come up, and they would even bring their tents, as thick as locusts; neither they nor their camels could be counted; so they wasted the land as they came in. Thus Israel was greatly impoverished because of Midian. (Judges 6:4-6)

After some extended negotiation, Gideon is dispatched by YHWH to rescue Israel from the Midianite threat: “Then the Lord turned to him and said, ‘Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you’” (v. 14). Gideon can do the numbers quite well. He knows that Israel is outnumbered and outmanned for any challenge to the Midianites: “But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (v. 16). But after he is given assurance of YHWH’s backing, he issues a general order of mobilization to

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all the tribes. The call to recruit was effective, in all, 32,000 men. The number could be overwhelming for the coming confrontation. There is, however, a catch: The Lord said to Gideon, “The troops with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand. Israel will only take the credit away from me, saying, ‘My own hand has delivered me’” (7:2). Such huge numbers would remove any hint of vulnerability and detract credit from YHWH who has pledged to save Israel. Consequently Gideon, in response to YHWH’s insistence, pares down his number of troops. He sent away the fearful: “Thus Gideon sifted them out; twenty-two thousand returned, and ten thousand remained” (v. 3). He is very good at numbers! That, however, does not yet satisfy YHWH: “The troops are still too many” (7. 4). Gideon is acting by the old calculus. But the zero hour with the Midianites evokes from YHWH a new algebra that Gideon must ﬁ nally embrace. By the use of the wisdom of guerilla war, the number of troops is cut to 300. That new algebra in which Gideon is instructed turns out well in the end with only 300 warriors: “They seized the waters as far as Bethbarah, and also the Jordan. They captured the two captains of Midian, Oreb and Zeeb; they killed Oreb at the rock of Oreb, and Zeeb they killed at the wine press of Zeeb, they pursued the Midianites. They brought the heads of Oreb and Zeeb to Gideon beyond the Jordan” (7:24-25). No one could have foreseen the outcome of the zero hour; the new algebra has prevailed! An even more spectacular case of the new algebra is narrated in II Kings 6:8-23. In this zero hour for Samaria, the threat of Aram (Syria) is acute. The king of Syria regards Elisha as an intelligence “leaker” and so surrounds his home with his troops. As Elisha’s attendant is alert to the danger of this threat, he cries out in fear, “Alas, master, what shall we do?” v. 16). The guy can count: two of us, a host of them! Elisha, however, is a master of the new algebra: “Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them” (v. 16). His servant is quite bewildered because he lives by the old math. He knows that “two” is a very small number. He wonders about “more with us.” How could that be? But then the servant has his eyes wondrously opened to what could be seen only when YHWH gives vision, he was able to “do the numbers” in a fresh, very different way: “So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw: the mountain was full of horses and chariots of ﬁ re all around Elisha” (v. 17). The hidden resources of God were decisive in moving Israel beyond the zero hour of threat to a new algebra. That new algebra, for Elisha, ended in a “great feast that for an instant turned an enemy into a neighbor” (v. 24). Among most spectacular instances of the new algebra on the horizon of Christianity is the twice reiterated narrative of food. The zero hour was that a great crowd was in the wilderness that was “like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34), “without anything to eat” (8:1). The “breeding” of the new algebra, for Jesus, was that he was “moved with compassion” (6:34, 8:2). That is, his innards were in turmoil with the urgent need he saw. In response to that desperate need, he took from the crowd “ﬁ ve loaves and two ﬁ sh” (6:38), “some bread and a few small ﬁ sh” (8:5-7). He performed his dominical act in four steps: he took, he blest, the broke, he gave. The outcome of that “breeding” moment was variously twelve baskets of surplus bread for the twelve tribes of Israel (6:43) or seven loaves of bread for the stereotypical “seven nations” (8:8); that is, in both cases, ample for all! The disciples had of course not understood: “How can one feed these people with bread here in the

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desert?” (8:4). How could such a small amount of food feed so many? What they then glimpsed, well beyond their expectation or explanation, was the new algebra of abundance. And when the church reperforms that “breeding moment” of his four transformative verbs, we are led to the new algebra. Every time we remember and participate, moreover, we are recruited into the new algebra that supersedes and deﬁ es the old math of parsimony. And now, we are heirs of Gideon, Elisha, and Jesus—always again learning the new algebra while we remain stuck in the old math. The old math is informed by fear, scarcity, greed, and hostility. The old rule is a practice of “doing the numbers” according to shortage and surplus, predation, and vulnerability. We have had, twice, glimpses of the new algebra in ample bread, and every once in a while, we observe its transformative practice among us. Just now, surely, in the midst of the virus, we are at a deﬁ ning zero hour in our society and in the world. That zero hour evokes fear, anger, and even hoarding. In that moment of fear, anger, and hoarding, however, when we have eyes to see, we see the new algebra working the numbers in fresh ways. In the new algebra, the silenced and the invisible among us count. In the new algebra, there is no parsimony in the face of deep bodily need. Through the new algebra, we may notice the emergence of new neighborly policies that treat others like neighbors. The old rule continues to have a deep grasp on our imagination. As a result, someone somewhere will get something for nothing. In the old math, we regard “mine” as “mine,” not ever to be shared. In the old math, we protect privilege and advantage. But the new breeding goes on in spite of us! And then, from time to time, we are amazed as was Gideon, as was the servant of Elisha, as were the disciples and the crowds around Jesus. Amos Wilder would have us do the numbers. But the numbers in the new algebra let 300 with Gideon prevail against a large military host, let Elisha and his servant host a transformative feast, let the 5,000 and the 4,000 feast on ﬁ ve loaves and a few small ﬁ sh. Those nubs get our attention and cause us to marvel: 300, two, and a few loaves with two ﬁ sh that eventuate in victory, feast, and surplus bread! The numbers evoke in us wonder. It is a wonder that the holy generosity of God is not contained in our conventional arithmetic. It is, moreover, a wonder when we are so inured in the old math and yet are invited beyond our calculations. Jesus conducts a review session with his disciples so that they can engage the new algebra:

“When I broke the ﬁ ve loaves for the ﬁ ve thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” They said to him, “Twelve.” “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” And they said to him, “Seven.” Then he said to them, “Do you not understand?” (Mark 6:52)

I suspect that if Amos Wilder had narrated this exchange, he would have had Jesus ask, “Do you not yet understand about the new algebra?”

December 31, 2021