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  • Preaching the Advent texts: hope, peace, courage

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    Preaching the Advent Texts: Hope, Peace, Courage

    John Buchanan

    Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois

    Every year ministers are asked, “Why can’t we sing Christmas Carols in December ? Why all those dreary hymns in a minor key?” Advent, it is frequently observed, is the church at its most counter-cultural. Outside it’s bright and cheerful, crowds of shoppers, Silver Bells on city sidewalks, an American holiday in full swing. Inside it’s dark at the very darkest time of year, the color is subdued purple, the same as Lent, and those hymns, droning on about “mourning in lonely exile.” The church I serve sits in the middle of one of the glitziest and most profitable retail shopping districts in the world. Our retail neighbors count on the time between Thanksgiving and December 25 for something like 90% of the year’s profits. They take this very seriously and begin earlier each year. By Labor Day, a few store window displays include holiday items. By Halloween more reds and greens, golds and silvers – and by mid November the Christmas holiday has arrived. So it’s no wonder some people want to sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World” on the first Sunday of December. After four decades, I have softened a bit on this issue. The Advent hymns are some of the best in the book, and I have come to love them and regularly explain why it is important to sing them in hope and anticipation. But I confess that by the second or third Sunday in Advent, we sing one carol at least, chosen carefully so the words aren’t tramping all over the fact that Christmas isn’t here yet. It is a pregnant time for the preacher, made more provocative by the contrast between what is happening outside and the patient waiting inside the church. It is an opportunity to invite the congregation to begin to think about the earth-shattering and history-dividing event Advent anticipates and to connect big, rich biblical themes with contemporary realities. This year particularly, the Lectionary serves up some of the most theologically important ideas and lyrically beautiful poetry in the visions of Isaiah of Jerusalem. The first three passages suggest three strong and relevantly contemporary themes for preaching: Hope, Peace and Courage.

    Hope: Isaiah 2:1-5 Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol may not be the best book he wrote, but I find it retains over the years its capacity for entertainment and thoughtful reflection on the meaning of Christmas. I take it down from the shelf to get myself in a good place to begin preparing Advent sermons, and every time I am delighted by Dickens’ description of Ebenezer Scrooge as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is at his desk working when his nephew and employee Bob Cratchit wishes him a “Merry Christmas, Uncle! God save you.” The innocent greeting prompts a tirade about Christmas, prefaced by the memorable phrase, “Bah! Humbug! . . . . What’s Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for funding yourself a year older but not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books?” Peter Gomes titled a wonderful Advent sermon “Hope or Humbug,” and in The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, Gomes confesses that Advent is his least favorite season because while the major theme of Advent is hope, a lot about the world in which we

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    live is devoid of hope. Every preacher knows how the superficiality and forced jollity of the holiday contrasts with and challenges the Advent theme that hope – hope for a better world, hope for a new world, a world put right, a world as God created it to be – is at the very heart of our Christian faith. The late Joseph Sittler, who taught theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has always defined the authentic, reality based hope of Christmas for me.

    I do not believe we are in a very good situation historically. I do not believe our relationship to the earth is liable to change for the better until it gets catastrophically worse. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destructiveness if there is a profit on the way…. But I do go around planting trees on campus.1

    Sittler wrote that decades before the longest war in American history, which seems even to its supporters a mismanaged and tragic mistake, and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that has decimated some of the richest fishing and spawning waters in the world and that we know now was caused, at least in part, by a corporation willing to risk human welfare for quicker profits. The prophet Isaiah lived in a similarly threatening and frightening geo-political situation. Neighboring states were teaming up to invade Judah. Everyone from the King on down was shivering in dread and fear. Hope is not shallow, but deep. Hope is not naively optimistic, but rooted in reality. Isaiah’s vision is startling:

    They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

    In a geo-political situation every bit as frightening as our own, the prophet sees a vision of something that isn’t here yet, an alternative vision of God’s creation as God intended: healed, mended, reconciled, peaceful. It isn’t here yet, obviously. Furthermore we don’t know when it is coming, according to Jesus. No one knows, not even the angels. God alone knows, in spite of the confident predictions of the apocalypticists. Faithfulness means remembering the vision, never letting it go, hoping for it, praying for it (“Thy Kingdom Come”), and working for it. Hopeful people wait and at the same time work for the coming of the Kingdom. Halford Luccock used to write brief essays for The Christian Century. A collection of his Christmas columns was published years ago under the title A Sprig of Holly. My favorite, which I read annually, is “Living on Tiptoe”: “Nothing really great ever happened without a great many lives being lived in expectation. Those are the kind of folk by which the world moves forward, always standing on tiptoe.”2 To live hopefully is to work hard; to hope relentlessly is to throw yourself into the struggle for the realization of hope. To hope for justice and peace is to work for it. To hope for a time when all the children are fed is to do more than complain about the irony of hungry children in this land of abundance, it is to find some children to feed. Peace, we are regularly reminded, is hard work.

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    We know how the story of human history ends~with God’s creation healed, whole, and all of God’s people, at last, living together in justice and compassion and peace. Advent hope lives in the midst of darkness in every age. It will not be defeated, silenced, or extinguished. The light that is coming into the world shines in the darkness, after all, and the darkness has not and will not overcome it.

    Peace: Isaiah 11:1-9 Nineteenth-century American artist Edward Hicks loved the vision of peace in Isaiah 11 so much that he painted The Peaceable Kingdom more than 100 times. The animals are all there: wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, calf and lion. Hicks gave the animals wonderfully expressive faces that look almost human. The eyes are big, unnaturally big, wide open as if they have just been startled by something. In fact, that was the artist’s intent. Peace is startling. You don’t see it often, maybe ever. In the middle of the picture is a child, a little girl or boy, with her/his eyes also wide open as if startled by this unlikely reality. The yearning for peace is timeless and universal. All people want peace for themselves and for their children. The longing for peace is deep within the human heart, and it is one of the great and enduring themes of the Bible. At Jesus’ birth, angels sing about peace on earth. Old Simeon prays at the infant Jesus’ dedication in the Temple, “Now lettest thy servant depart in peace.” Jesus told his disciples to bless the homes that welcomed them with “Peace be to this house.” The first thing the risen Christ says to his disciples is “Peace be with you.” Contemporary worshippers greet one another by “Passing the Peace.” Isaiah’s vision in Chapter 11 is one of the most eloquent and imaginative articulations of that yearning. Other than a brief period, one hundred years at most, Israel/Judah didn’t have much peace. Isaiah is writing as he looks at a battlefield: the land has been laid waste, trees shattered, Israel’s army has been defeated once again. Isaiah sees a stump on the battlefield, a blunt symbol of)defeat and death. It is the end of the monarchy which has been terminated, cut off, gone. But wait, the Prophet commands. “Look! Out ofthat dried-up stump, a green shoot is growing, a shoot of Jesse, King David’s father.” Incredibly, out of this vivid symbol of death, newness is emerging. The prophet sees a vision of a coming peace “where the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, a child shall lead them, and they will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain.” Americans read the morning paper and hope that there hasn’t been another suicide bomber, that a Palestinian rocket hasn’t precipitated a deadly Israeli retaliation, that more beautiful young Americans have not died in Afghanistan. We live between yearning for peace and the reality of the world in the year of our Lord 2010. And the preacher’s responsibility is to help the congregation remember the promise of Isaiah’s vision and to point to signs, tiny green shoots sprouting in unlikely places – shoots of Jesse. In every community, people of good will, Muslims, Jews, Christians are reaching across the enormous chasm of tragic history to find common ground. Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims, Muslims and Christians are talking to one another more intentionally than at any time recently. In every community people of good will are working for the cessation of violence in the streets by attacking the root causes. In

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    every church, synagogue, and mosque, people of good will discuss systemic injustice and combine forces to oppose i t . . . small, almost invisible green shoots. Will Campbell is a wise, witty, and salty Southern Baptist preacher and social activist. In Soul Among Lions he observes that

    most serious wars today are by people of competing religions. That’s absurd. Let’s do it this way: Judaism is the oldest of the three major faiths, Christianity is the adolescent in the middle, and Islam is the youngest. The youngest is generally the favored in the family. So let’s all go to their house, all kneel on a rug and put our heads to the ground and pray, vowing as we do never to kill one another again in the name of God.3

    Courage: Isaiah 35:1-10 One of the ancient Christmas Carols in Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” concludes with a delightful image:

    This little babe, so few days old is come to rifle Satan’s fold. All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold doth shake.

    Or, as the prophet Isaiah put it:

    Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’ Here is your God.

    A two word distillation of the Bible could be “Fear not.” From cover to cover Scriptures implore “Do not be afraid.” When the night sky shimmered and an angel appeared, the shepherds were terrified. “Fear not. Do not be afraid,” the angel said. “Sore afraid” the King James Version puts it, and I used to think the shepherds were so afraid they made themselves sore from shivering. Jesus constantly encouraged his followers not to live their fears. When he decides to go to Jerusalem, they are afraid and beg him not to go. When he is arrested, they all flee in fear. After his crucifixion they cower in fear in a locked room. And when a few of them venture to the place of burial early Sunday morning and find the tomb empty, the words come again: “Fear not. Do not be afraid.” The Biblical assertion is that when God comes, there will be nothing to fear. Centuries before the birth of Jesus, Isaiah wrote to a nation frightened for good reason. Judah is small, weak, and vulnerable in the face of the threatening armies of surrounding neighbors. The future looks grim. There are a lot of shaking hands and feeble knees when the prophet exhorts, “Strengthen weak hands and make firm feeble knees.” The Bible has so much to say about fear because fear is such an enemy of life. It’s hard to love when you are afraid. It’s hard to care passionately about anything

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    when you’re afraid. It’s impossible to be joyful about anything when you are afraid. Fear limits life, constrains life, pollutes life. Fear can be a good thing when it alerts us to danger. But Peter Steinke writes that when fear becomes overwhelming, alertness diminishes, and adrenalin floods the body, riveting the body on the object of the fear. Tunnel vision occurs and fear takes over.4 That’s exactly what happened to us after 9/11. Fear took over, and its effects are still evident, and tragically, we began to behave in ways that contradict and deny our highest and best values. Striking out in fear, we invaded a nation that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks and found ways to justify torturing prisoners. Robert Frost said that what really frightened him were frightened people. How then shall we live in this dangerous world? Not naively, ignoring clear risk and danger . Maybe Isaiah’s formula is the most relevant: “Say to those of a fearful heart ‘Be strong. Do not fear! Here is your God.’” God’s coming, the prophet proclaims, changes things fundamentally. There is nothing ultimately to fear. The coming of God in Jesus Christ means that final issues have been resolved. The coming of the Christ into human history, to live our life, to die our death, to defeat the power of death in his resurrection means that there is nothing to fear. The final battle has been won. Good friends told me once that when they put their young daughter to bed, said bedtime prayers, kissed her good night, for years she would say, “Make sounds.” She wanted the security of her parents’ presence, the comforting sounds of their voices, dishes being dried, the television set, sounds of home and safety and love. In Jesus Christ, God comes close, in the sound of a human voice. Beyond the beauty of the story of Christmas, Christians believe something cosmic has happened. Everything is different now. Evil and suffering and death have been put in their place. There are, and will be, times when every one of us will be frightened and have weak hands and feeble knees. And across the centuries come the words: “Be strong. Do not fear. Here is your God.” And we will sing with hearts full of joy:

    “Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting light: the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

    Notes 1 Joseph Sittler, Grace Notes and Other Fragments, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1981), 97. 2 Halford Luccock, A Sprig of Holly, (New York, NY: The Pilgrim Press, 1978), 46-48. 3 Will Campbell, Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 49. 4 See Peter Steinke, “Fear Factor,” The Christian Century, (February 20,2007), 20.

  • Halloween: the killing frost and the gospel

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    Halloween: The Killing Frost and the Gospel

    Thomas G. Long

    Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    So, a pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder…. A joke? No. It’s Halloween, and the “pirate” is actually a youngish accountant – you know him well, the one who does your taxes – who has swapped his blue blazer, button-down oxford, and rep tie for a sash, a rubber Macaw, an eye-patch, a hook, and a rare evening of revelry at a local tavern. And he is by no means an exception. The Halloween apparel and candy industry estimates that about a third of all American adults will don a costume this October, about a third will attend a Halloween party, about half of all households will put Halloween decorations in homes and yards, a quarter of us will visit a “haunted” house, nearly three-quarters of the population will dispense candy to “trick or treaters,” and, even in a chancy economic climate, we will spend about $6 billion dollars doing so.1 Halloween has in recent years vaulted ahead of other national holidays to second place in consumer spending, now trailing only Christmas. Six billion dollars is approximately the annual gross domestic product of North Dakota, and the fact that we are willing to spend that kind of cash on orange and black crepe paper, jack-o-lanterns, plastic skeletons, and latex Sarah Palin masks means that something culturally interesting is at work.

    Dollars, Demons, and Open Spaces One obvious implication of all of this money on the table is that Halloween is not merely the happy children’s festival it may appear to be, but a shark tank for marketers. Companies large and small have learned how to milk Halloween for quick profit. For example, one modestly sized novelty manufacturing company, looking for expansion possibilities and finding that they were outmatched in the hyper-competitive Christmas marketplace, stumbled on to Halloween. It was a bonanza; they sold $15 million of jack-o-lantern leaf bags in six months.2 Or again, the retail chain, Spencer Gifts, owns a seasonal company called “Spirit Halloween,” which is the largest Halloween retailer in the nation (700 stores open two months a year, 12,000 employees). Steven Silverstein, Spencer’s CEO, is lobbying to change the name of Halloween to “HalloWeekend” and to move Halloween officially to the last Saturday in October. “Halloween gets lost when it falls during the week,” he says. “It’s also better for our industry and the economy to have Halloween on a Saturday – revenues have ticked up as much as 30 percent when the holiday falls on a weekend versus a weekday.”3 In the mid-1990s, the American Public Health Association, alarmed about the growing connection between Halloween and the consumption of alcohol, joined with other groups in a coalition called “Hands-Off Halloween” in an effort to keep the greedy mitts of beer manufacturers away from a holiday that is primarily for children. What kind of Halloween monster, the coalition asked, would use the symbols of this holiday to exploit the nation’s youth? To do so would be the equivalent of depicting Santa Claus downing a Heineken.4 The beer companies responded with a sneer, in fact accelerating their Halloween marketing. Outside of Germany, October is a slow month for beer sales, so Miller developed a glow-in-the-dark Halloween label for their

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    Lite brand, Coors enlisted a character named “Count Drakula” to pitch their brew, and Anheuser-Busch launched a major “Fright Night” campaign complete with free Halloween masks.5 Princeton University Professor Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Consumer Rites: the Buying and Selling of American Holidays, is persuaded that most of the customs of Halloween – the parades, the parties, the costumes, the trick or treating – have been almost fully co-opted by corporate interests. The big companies are putting on the pressure, he claims, to have a long season of preparation and advance purchasing. For the economic players behind Halloween, Schmidt argues, the sweetness of the occasion is not in the candy, but in millions of children in $25 store-bought costumes carrying bags from door to door. “The shopping bag is the trick-or-treat symbol,” says Schmidt. “It’s appropriate that way: little shoppers in the making.”6 But consumerism isn’t the only interpretation of the cultural upsurge regarding Halloween. Extreme right-wing Christians, if the newspapers and cable networks are to be believed, have a different, more sinister, take. The way the story goes, fundamentalists are passionately convinced that Halloween involves nothing less than a hell-hungry culture locked in a death-clinch with the pagan forces of darkness. The old Druids emerge from the shadows at Halloween to entice us to unspeakable practices in league with the devil. In almost every Halloween news cycle, it seems, some reporter chortles over the assessment of Halloween’s dangers by televangelist Pat Robertson (who seems doggedly intent on providing an encyclopedia of stupid remarks for every occasion). Robertson reportedly snarled, “I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice…. [The children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don’t even realize it.” Several years ago, when I was doing research for a newspaper story on this “Halloween is Satan’s breeding ground” view, I had a difficult time locating people who actually took this tack. I did find a few conservative churches that were holding alternative parties for their youth on Halloween, but almost to a person, the leaders were reluctant to sling charges of pagan rituals or Satanism, eager not to appear as uncultured idiots in whatever story I ended up writing. Indeed, in a recent article in American Quarterly, Ann Pellegrini, a professor of performance studies and religion at New York University, claims that the idea that conservative Christians hate Halloween is mostly old news. It is a mark of conservative Christianity in America to be market savvy, and Halloween, as we have seen, is a tempting market. Evangelical conservatives, Pelligrini argues, have always placed evangelism as their top priority, and evangelists in America, from George Whitfield to Aimee Semple McPherson to Jim Bakker, have consistently been willing to embrace theatrics, the latest technology, and other manifestation of secular culture in the name of soul winning. Halloween is no exception. Conservative Christians have discovered that if they will stop shunning the masks and the ghoulish costumes of Halloween and instead don them as evangelistic tools, they can turn the devil’s antics against him. As a prime example, she describes the emergence among independent churches of Halloween “Hell Houses”:

    One of the most innovative such responses to Halloween and its lurking dangers is the phenomenon of Hell Houses. Hell Houses are evangelical riffs on the haunted houses that dot the landscape of secular culture each

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    Hallo ween…. Where haunted houses promise to scare the bejeezus out of you, Hell Houses aim to scare you to Jesus. In a typical Hell House, demon tour guides take the audience though a series of bloody staged tableaux depicting sinners whose bad behavior – homosexuality, abortion, suicide, and, above all, rejection of Christ’s saving grace – leads them straight to hell.7

    Pat Robertson, far from shooting from the hip at Halloween, now gives suggestions on his Christian Broadcasting Network web site for ways to use Halloween as an opportunity for witnessing. One columnist on the site even mocks Robertson’s former counsel:

    The biggest trick played on Halloween is Christian kids and adults being bottled up inside churches or homes all night. That’s right! Hiding from the devil in the family life center and surrendering the neighborhood to little Ghouls, goblins, and witches is a victory for old Beelzebub. He’s got the church right where he wants it: inside the four walls, hunkered down behind the stained glass.8

    In my own neighborhood each Halloween, there is a small parade of brightly costumed children and their parents, led by a fire truck with flashing lights. The parade winds its way through the streets and ends up at the neighborhood recreation center, where cookies and punch are served. Then in small clusters, the parents and children head back out into the neighborhood for a couple of hours of highly supervised trick or treating. It is a friendly occasion, a chance for children to have a safe Halloween, and for the adults, so often isolated by our life styles, to meet, talk, and catch up. My neighbors would be puzzled to be told that they were being exploited by global corporate interests or that they were exposing their children to demonic forces or that they should use this time for personal witnessing in the name of Christ. In fact, it is precisely the non-controversial, non-ideological character of Halloween among my neighbors that may point to another reason for its rising appeal. In our ideologically contested society, other holidays can be divisive. It provides a seemingly safe and neutral public space for festival. Everyone can put on vestments and dance before Halloween’s godless altar without fear of making a politically incorrect gaffe or doing something that will tick off the Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, or Agnostics down the street. Halloween is a demilitarized zone in the culture wars. It’s Mardi gras without the burdens of Lent. Not everyone, however, is enchanted by Halloween’s neutrality, by the fact that it is a set of rituals seemingly without living roots, profound social meaning, or controlling mythology. Conservative columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon finds the noncommittal nature of Halloween to be expressive of a moral weakness in our culture, and so she carps,

    What gets my sacrificial goat is that Halloween isn’t about anything. It’s not about death, or life, or fall, or The Fall, or family, or patriotic love of country. It is a completely content-free, dark-caped, sugar-frosted bacchanal in a society that already, every day, gives people license to be content-free,

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    sugar-frosted, and to dress however gothically they like – and that includes children.9

    The Killing Frost But is it true that Halloween isn’t about anything, that it is simply a playful secular family festival without ideological value or intent, which, to whatever degree, has become commercialized, like everything else in our society? I think not. I am convinced that Halloween is a complex social phenomenon. It has many sides and meanings, some profound, some superficial, but at one deep level, the emerging rituals of Halloween in our culture form both a critique of and a hunger for the Christian faith. The origins of Halloween are somewhat obscure, and the historical evolution of the holiday is a complicated and contested narrative, but this much seems clear: what we today call Halloween began as an agricultural festival in ancient Celtic society called Samhain (Gaelic for “summer’s end”). It was held at that point in the year when the powers of the sun to provide light, growth, and warmth were waning, and the months of darkness and the killing frosts were encroaching. Samhain was an in-between place – between the light and the darkness, between the warmth and the cold, between the succulent abundance of summer and the killing power of winter, between life and death, between this world and the next. On Samhain the tissue between the natural and the supernatural was thin, and the spirits of the dead and the creatures of the other world were thought to roam the earth. Eventually, as Europe was Christianized, Samhain became tied to All Saints Day and All Souls Day, and was renamed “All Hallows Eve” or Hallowe’en. The festival became a Christian one, but some of the old agricultural and pagan customs remained. The Puritans, who were among the earliest Christian settlers of America, disdained all masses and holy-days, Christmas and All Saints among them. In Puritan America, there was no Halloween. It was only in the early 19th century, when the dire potato famine sent thousands of Irish fleeing to American shores, that the customs of Halloween were introduced into the new world. For the best treatment of the history of Halloween, see Nicholas Rogers’ superb Halloween: from Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford University Press, 2002). What strikes me as important about Halloween’s history is not that the festival was pagan in origin, but that it emerged out of that social and personal anxiety that exists on the border between summer and winter, between life and death, between that which is fully visible in the light of day and the forbidden that lies hidden in the shadows. At its roots, Halloween allowed people to draw close to that which they most feared: to the dead, to their own death, to the powers of darkness. From the beginning in the American context, Halloween always threatened to careen out of control into violence. In 1975, three years before she died, the legendary Margaret Mead took a look at American Halloween customs for Redbook magazine. The aging anthropologist, who was by no means squeamish about edgy social customs, was nevertheless shocked by and disapproving of the debaucheries of Halloween. How did our society move, she wondered, from the gentle children’s festival Mead remembered from her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, when children were given apples and candy by neighbors, and the worst deeds were pranks like unlatching a garden gate, to the vandalism, looting, and arson unleashed by Halloween’s “mischief

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    night” in many urban centers in the 1960s and 70s?10 In fact, the highly organized parade and carefully watched trick or treating in my neighborhood is a local manifestation of a national trend: the social control of Halloween. After decades of urban vandalism, college high jinks and binge drinking, and rumors of razor blades in Halloween apples and poisoned candy (which turned out to be mostly urban legends),11 many communities have made concerted efforts to make Halloween “a safe day for our children.” But the big news, in my view, is that Halloween, which was once a festival for adults and became a festival primarily for children, is being reclaimed by grown-ups. Nearly as many adults (47 million) as children (58 million) now shop for Halloween costumes. Halloween is not just about children’s make-believe, but also about adult fantasies. It is no coincidence that our accountant strides into the local tavern sporting a pirate’s outfit. Vampires, pirates, and witches are hot adult costume choices now, displacing nurses and politicians (and leading one retail analyst to opine that this is because the nation is weary of the health care debate12 – give me a break). Jack Kugelmass, who directs the Jewish studies program at Arizona State University, and who wrote a fascinating book about the mother of all bizarre American Halloween rituals, the Greenwich Village parade {Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, Columbia University Press, 1994), has said of Halloween:

    There is also the issue of dress-up. We live in an age when we all feel that we can be whoever we want to be. This is a holiday that celebrates that. It says that you have the license to imagine yourself as whoever you want to be, and it’s a license to play with the darker, more macabre aspects of your personality…. This is a holiday of transgression-the whole point of dress-up is to transgress rigid categories.13

    A holiday of transgression, I think this gets at the heart of it. As Michele Slung and Roland Hartman, editors of a collection of Halloween horror stories, have observed , Halloween is “a chance to put at least a touch of mystery, a little ‘safe’ danger, into the humdrum fabric of our lives…. [It is] a national monument dedicated to the weird.”14 And herein lies both the critique and invitation of Halloween. Our accountant with the rubber parrot on his shoulder is at one level worthy of ridicule. Here he is, a “manly man,” swashbuckling and brandishing a fake sword down at the corner pub, harmlessly flirting with a woman, who is herself a nurse in a geriatrics ward but tonight is dressed as a tart, when everybody knows that come 9:00 a.m. on the morrow, they will be neither tart nor pirate. She will be feeding stewed apples to her patients, and he will be wearing a green eyeshade and entering some client’s long-term capital gains into Excel. Here he is, downing a few more than he should of Miller Lites with the glow-in-the-dark label, when come tomorrow his quiet sobriety will be his most marketable asset. For this one night, as the killing frost of November threatens, he has made a joke of death, turning his front yard into a makeshift graveyard. Beyond the ridicule, however, here is a man on that most transgressive of holiday s, putting on a silly costume and strewing tombstones in his yard as a way of saying, “I am weary of the boring life I lead. I am weary of my domestication, even of my timid and conventional church. I yearn for adventure. I want to be summoned to a life

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    bigger than I now inhabit. I want to venture into that place where everything is urgent and a matter of life and death, where life is a dangerous risk worth taking.” Down at Bailey’s Tavern, they mockingly call that “Halloween Fright Night,” but over at the real church, this hunger for an adventure, this yearning for a life of size and urgency, this desire to come close to death and to be unafraid is called the gospel; they call it discipleship.

    Notes 1 National Retail Federation study conducted in September 2009 by BIGresearch. 2 Stacey Levinson, et al., “Halloween as a Consumption Experience,” Advances in Consumer Research; 19/1 (1992), 222. 3 Denise Brasse, “He’s Got Spirit: Spencer Gifts CEO talks Halloween, CIT, and Retail Careers,” @NRE, October 23,2009. 4 “APHA joins in Halloween request to Beer Institute,” Nation’s Health, 25/9 (October, 1995). 5 Levinson, 223. 6 Lee Eric Schmidt as quoted in “From Boo to Benign,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 47/10 (November 3,2000), B4. 7AnnPellegrini,”SignalingThroughtheFlames”:HellHousePerformanceandStmcmresofRe American Quarterly 59:3 (September, 2007), 912. 8 Andy Freeman, “The Enemy’s Victory: Darkened Homes and Harvest Parties,” http://www.cbn.com/ spirituallife/onlinediscipleship/halloween/freeman_halloween.aspx 9 Meghan Cox Gurdon, “The Horror, the Horror,” National Review 55/21 (November 10,2003), 26. 10 Margaret Mead, “Halloween: Where Has All the Mischief Gone?” Redbook 145 (October 1975), 31-34. 11 Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Costruction of Urban Legends,” Social Problems, 32/5 (June, 1985). 12 See “Vampires Move Up Top Costumes List; Nurses, Politicians Drop Off a press release of the National Retail Federation, October 1,2009. 13 Jack Kugelmass as quoted in “From Boo to Benign,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 47/10 (November 3,2000), B4. 14 Michele Slung and Roland Hartman, Murder for Halloween (New York: Warner Books, 1994), xiv.

  • No longer strangers or aliens, but members of God’s household

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    No Longer Strangers or Aliens,

    but Members of God’s Household Genesis 19:1-11; Ezekiel 16:48-50; Ephesians 2:17-22; Luke 23:26

    Alan Story Calvin Methodist Church, Midland, South Africa

    What a tragic and traumatising two weeks it has been for our land. The dusty streets of Alexandra, Ramaphosaville, Zandspruit, Reiger Park, Ivory Park, and others are blood stained – stomped by stamping feet of fury. Front page pictures place our humanity in doubt, and our rainbow reputation lies ripped in shreds. I fear that any words I speak will seem terribly shallow in the face of such tragedy. Yet we must remember what we have been taught, that it is especially when our words feel inadequate that we are invited to turn to God’s Word in the Scriptures. So I hope as we enter the Scriptures today, we will find Words that hold our pain, deepen our understanding, dispel our despair, and fill us with hope. The first word that must be spoken is to those of you who are weighed under by the gravity of grief at this time: you who have witnessed the killing and burning and beating of your own family members and friends, you who have lost homes and a sense of belonging in a community as well as the means of making a living, you who have lost documents and photographs that have memorised your history, you who mourn the loss of trust, safety, companionship, intimacy, dreams, and hope. To you God speaks, just as God spoke to the displaced Hebrew people of old: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt (a foreign land); I have heard their cry on account of the taskmasters. Indeed I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:7-8). To you who grieve, I invite you to trust that God has seen your pain and heard your cry. God understands your sufferings like no one else. God promises to be present with you in your pain. God promises action -just and liberating action – that will secure hope and newness for you. The time is soon coming when you will walk across the soil of your birth free of fear and full of food. Trust that God sees, hears, and understands you today. The second word that must be spoken is to those of us who were born in this land. Listen to the Lord through the book of Deuteronomy: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow and who loves the strangers – providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:17-19). God loves the stranger and commands that we do too. God’s argument rests on the fact that we were once strangers in a foreign land, and if only we would remember that, our hearts would be open to the strangers in our midst. And the way we are commanded to love the stranger in our midst is to plan and prepare to care for them by setting aside the tithe every third year for them (Deut. 14:28-29). In other words, our care must be pro-active and not simply reactive ! In fact, we are even commanded not to reap all the profits of our businesses for ourselves (be it grain, olives and grapes, or gold and mobile phones), but instead to leave some of

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    the profits for the vulnerable trinity of widows, orphans, and resident aliens [Deut. 24:19-22]. In other words, according to the Lord, the widows, orphans, and aliens (or the vulnerable equivalent) are legitimate shareholders of every business in the country. And if we give them their rightful shares, the Lord promises to bless us and enable us to live well and long in the land. Again the Lord’s motivation hinges around memory of the fact that we were once strangers in a foreign land. Pastor Mary went to purchase a huge amount of things for the displaced immigrants this past week. Before she could pay for them, the manager found out that they were for the victims of the xenophobic violence, and he gave them to her for free, saying: “I was once a refugee -1 know what it is like to have to flee from everything I value-taking nothing with me.” Memory brings mercy! Memory softens hearts and opens fists! We have heard a number of people reminding us that the rest of Africa opened their doors to our exiles during the Apartheid years, so we should do the same. It is true that we should, but the fact is that the majority of us were not in exile, and so it is someone else’s memory we are being asked to remember. But surely most of us here can remember the forced removals of the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, when homes and land were stolen from a few million people. Let us remember those days and repent of these days We have all heard the angry accusations that foreigners “are the perpetrators of crime and have taken our jobs and our houses.” We have even heard the cry that “they have taken our women,” as if women were men’s property ! Basically we have heard that the foreigners are taking over everything of value. I must tell you that what I have discovered reading the Scriptures these past days is that foreign nationals are everywhere! And don’t think that they are restricted to the book of Deuteronomy – they are not! They have crossed the border into just about every book in the Bible! Remember Ruth? She was a Moabite who married a local boy Boaz, and together they ended up ancestoring Jesus. Yes, Jesus has foreign national blood flowing through his veins, which means that it was foreign national blood that flowed at Calvary. Speaking of Jesus, let us not forget that he was a refugee at birth, fleeing genocide. And remember his first sermon? His text came from the prophet Isaiah, and like any good preacher, he littered his sermon with relevant stories to illustrate his point. When expanding on the rich mercy of God, he spoke of the foreign widow in Sidon and the foreign leper in Syria. And you know what? He was nearly thrown off a cliff for it! Jesus offered living water to a foreigner even when he was prejudicially rejected. And is not Jesus’ most famous parable about a foreigner – yes, the Good Samaritan. A good foreigner – fancy that! And finally, let us not forget that the Cross-carrying-Jesus was assisted by Simon of Cyrene – yes, a foreigner from Libya. Foreign nationals have literally taken over the Scriptures! And most often when they are mentioned, they are surrounded with promise and praise. Surely even this tiny sample of examples should move us all to declare with St Paul: “You are no longer strangers or aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household” (Eph. 2:19). Now let us turn to the Scripture we read earlier in Genesis 19:1-11. I am sure you know this text well. In recent times, the Church has been obsessed with it because the Church has been obsessed with matters of sexuality – suggesting that these verses have some authorative word to say about homosexuality in particular. Seldom has there

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    ever been such an abuse of a text (perhaps not since some taught that the descendants of Ham were black people – born to be the slaves of white people)! If, however, we allow what we have witnessed as a nation these last few days to be the lens through which we read Genesis 19,1 believe we get closer to the truth of the text. Sodom and Gomorrah were wealthy regions just like South Africa is. We have a per capita income of more than $5,000 per annum, yet we are surrounded by neighbours with less than $1,000 and as low as $100. So Sodom, like South Africa, was an attractive and logical place to visit if one was hoping to better one’s life. Lot does the Godly thing by inviting the foreign visitors into his home. That night, however, every man in the city was banging on his door. We have seen such crowds, haven’t we? They are not orderly delegations, but rather machete wielding mobs. Lot showed great courage to step outside to face them, not too different from the courage shown by many even here today. The other night, I received a call at 1:00 am from a member of this congregation saying, “Alan, they are coming down our street, door to door, searching for foreigners, and I have a woman from Zimbabwe staying with me. I will not let them have her!” She deserves the Nobel Peace Prize! Then in verse 8, we hear Lot’s horrifying suggestion that the mob be satisfied with his two virgin daughters instead of the foreigners. What father would ever suggest such a thing? And to suggest that Lot’s virgin offering goes to prove how evil homosexuality is—as far too many people suggest—is sick. Surely, from the light of these violent days, we have learned that when a homeowner stands up in support of a foreign guest, she or he is exposing her or his entire family to risk. This act of radical hospitality is costly, and it may even carry the price tag of rape and death as we have witnessed by people saying: “Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” (Gen 19:9b). And what was Sodom’s real sin? The prophet Ezekiel tells us that it was “pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49). Guided by Ezekiel’s commentary, I suggest that the men were banging on Lot’s door because they greedily wanted to secure the resources of their region for themselves alone. They, therefore, sought to demean Lot’s foreign guests so that they would leave and never come back. And the worst thing you can do to a man in a staunchly patriarchal society, is to treat him like a woman. In other words, the men at Lot’s door wanted to penetrate his foreign guests, just as a man penetrates a woman – to show them that they are as worthless as women. It may be that that is where the swear word “f… you” comes from. “F… you” only makes sense when we put a pronoun in front of it: “I f… you.” Meaning, I treat you like a woman! The sin of Sodom is greed and the violent lengths that we go to protect our greed! As we now move to try and analyse the causes of the violence, we will see how amazingly accurate Ezekiel’s commentary fits our situation. I believe that there is no single cause of the violence we are experiencing. Rather, there is a cocktail of ingredients. Each of these ingredients is dangerous in its own right, but when mixed together, they are more than dangerous – they are deadly ! I want us to briefly look at six ingredients in this deadly cocktail.

    1. We live in a divided world, in a land with a history of deliberately designed division. The classification of people into categories according to culture, skin colour, nationality , religion, and language is addictive for far too many of us. To reduce anyone’s identity to one of these or any other socially constructed categories is to oversimplify

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    humanity and to miss the truth of who we really are. This categorising of the “other” skills us in looking for the danger in difference and is easily exploited, especially when we are fearful. When politicians wear T-shirts with “100% Zulu Boy” printed on them, they are being highly irresponsible. The only T-shirt slogan worth wearing is “100% human being,” or as the author of the first letter to John would say, “100% Child of God” (1 John 3:1). In other words, we should seek an identity for ourselves that all people everywhere can identify with. The extent to which we leave anyone out of our identity is the extent to which conflict and finally violence will follow. To speak of “our people ” as if some people are not is a lie. As Law Professor Cathi Albertyn says, “Human dignity has no nationality.” As such, let it be known that the Apartheid of nations will crumble one day. 2. We live in a land of poverty and inequality. “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” said Gandhi. It kills in slow and cruel ways. A few years ago, I remember Stats SA saying that there are about 20 million South Africans who live on R354 per month. This is violence! What makes matters worse is that we have islands of unconscionable wealth in the midst of this massive sea of desperate deficiency. This comparative disparity fuels the fire of resentment of the poor majority. This is why, according to Professor Stephen Gelb from Wits, “It is so important for us to make the distinction between poverty and inequality.” They are not the same thing. The SA government has done a tremendous amount of work in addressing poverty through the “social grant system,” but as Gelb points out, “Inequality has actually worsened since 1994.” According to Gelb, “Inequality could only be addressed by the transfer and building of assets such as education, skills, land, and houses. Only asset ownership would persuade people they had prospects and hope for the future. The government hasn’t succeeded at all in asset building and transfer” (Mail and Guardian website 28 May 2008). I have said many times before that unless the wealth gap is dealt with, we will see an unleashing of violence in our land that will make Soweto 76 look like a Sunday school picnic. The violence of the past days has been confined to the poor and desperate attacking each other, but it is only a matter of time before they realise that their equally-struggling-neighbour is not to blame for their hardship, but rather a convenient scapegoat, and then they will turn their eyes and anger to those of us living with “excess food and in prosperous ease.” 3. Inadequate and poor service delivery, especially for the poorest of the poor, is another ingredient for the violence we have experienced. We must be careful when making such a statement not to be seen to ignore or undermine the many and great achievements that we have made in the last 14 years. A miraculous amount has been achieved in our young democracy, but equally a miraculous amount still needs to be achieved, and we must not allow the truth of the one to cover up the truth of the other! With that said, we must put pressure on the State to allocate more and more resources to provide the poor with access to houses, sewerage, water, schools, and healthcare. Let us also all be ashamed that we didn’t protest louder against an arms deal that, in effect, has stolen from the ministries of health, education, and housing, all valuable resources. Our biggest threat is from within and not from without. Submarines have not been able to protect the people of Alexandra. 4. We live on a struggling continent where we are seen as a beacon of hope. Like Sod-

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    om, we are an attractive destination. We therefore have people coming to this land from all over, seeking to better their lives and the lives of their families. They come to contribute and to consume, forming relationships of give and take. We should be proud of this. The high influx of people, however, has no doubt placed extra pressure on the limited resources and services already mentioned. Already overcrowded informal settlements swell further. There are more hands looking for work, and often these hands are more skilled and willing to work for less. Their ability to speak good English is also a key factor in their securing work before their South African neighbour. All of these points were made to us by locals who had chased away all the foreign nationals from one of the soup kitchens we are involved with in town. Added to the many economic migrants, we have the particular case of our neighbour Zimbabwe that adds between three and four million like a raging river flowing into an already bursting sea of poverty. When a roof leaks, the first thing we normally do is put a bucket beneath the leak to save the carpet from getting wet. We may have to change the bucket a few times, but we know that the only long term solution is to get up on the roof and fix the leak. This is what we have failed to do regarding our Zimbabwe. We have failed to fix the leak. And I do not mean border control! I do not mean border control because one does not lock the door of a house when there are people burning inside! I mean that we have not dealt with the oppressive and tortuous reign of the Mugabe regime that has caused an economy to collapse and a once flourishing people to flee in hunger. Our Government has been stubbornly callous in refusing to take a more hard and truthful line against Zimbabwe. Our leaders betray the history of our own liberation struggle each time they refuse to openly condemn the human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. 5. When it comes to Home Affairs and the South African Police Services, we are dealing with a mix of under-resourced, overstretched, inefficient, and corrupt departments. It takes months just to acquire asylum papers, and while one is waiting for them, there is a good chance of being arrested and deported. This long process leads to frustration, which leads to fraud, which leads to fury. Similarly, the SAPS endlessly arrest people and send them to Lindela from which they are deported, only to return again in a few days or weeks time. This process is futile, and it too leads to fraud and further fury. We have a marvellous Constitution and Bill of Rights that is hospitable and compassionate. Our law refuses to put people into refugee camps on our borders and instead allows for the full integration into society. This is boldly biblical. However, this policy of integration seems to have meant “out of sight out of mind” ! And this has allowed the authorities to pretend that there is no crisis in SA and in Zimbabwe. This is why we still hear endless debates about the facts and figures of how many foreign nationals are actually living in SA. There needs to be a proper accounting of foreign nationals, so that their plight can be properly addressed. 6. Criminals have also been involved in the violent attacks. They have surely exploited and piggybacked on the xenophobia. No evidence, however, suggests they were the cause! Now let us turn briefly to the response to the violence that has seen around 50 people being killed and thousands fleeing their homes for safety in church and community halls and police stations around the country. At best, the Government has been lethargic in its response. This reveals just how out of touch it has become. It has been

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    distracted by in-fighting, and its focus has been split by two centres of power. It has forgotten its core business of caring for the people who have given them the privilege of serving them. No matter how humorous Mr. Zuma was attempting to be when he said, “The ANC is even blessed in heaven and that is why we will rule until Jesus comes back,” he reveals an arrogance of government that will backfire if it is not soon addressed. We would do well to remind Mr Zuma that his initials are JZ and not JC ! Yesterday ‘ s struggle credentials have devalued in currency. People are more interested in the delivery of jobs today than whether anyone was a hero yesterday. I do take my hat off to Mr Zuma; at least he finally went to the communities and heard their angry threats with his own ears. It has been distressing to hear some in Government react to the scapegoating xenophobic violence by searching for scapegoats themselves, by first blaming it all on criminals, and then when that ran a bit thin, to blame a third force. These are nothing but distractions from the truth, and those from whose lips these words came should be ashamed for not facing the real issues before us. There has also been a massive outpouring of compassion and courage in our land. The many nameless people in violence-drenched communities who have stood in solidarity with their foreign national neighbours are to be praised. The local leaders on the ground, who have gone door to door as a preventative measure making sure the violence doesn’t spread any further, are to be honoured. The generosity of food, clothing , blankets, and finances has been astounding. It, of course, raises the question of why we have to wait for people to be killed before we learn to share.

    The violence we have witnessed has rightly been condemned. Those responsible have been called savage and barbaric, but we should take care not to allow these violent acts to blind us to the deeper savagery and barbarism that may include many of us. Surely living day in and day out without a care in the world for the hungry when we are over fed and for the homeless when we have empty rooms in our houses is even more savage. We may not run around with blood-thirsty mobs, but we do sometimes follow blood-thirsty markets that excuse justice with the unquestioned rule of supply and demand. If we do not change, we will burn like Sodom. Some have used these attacks to validate long held, but seldom spoken, racism. The phrase “black on black” violence is as primitive as it is prejudiced. We need also to guard against an Afro-pessimism that relies on a selective reading of history and over-generalised assumptions that are never helpful in deepening our understanding of the situation before us. “What can we do?” is a question I have heard a lot lately. Well, we can all start by watching our language. We can learn to speak about people without categorising them, and instead reach for terms of identity that all can identify with. We can be intentional about integration – seeking to establish relationships of rich diversity. We can refuse to exploit the people we employ – paying them liveable wages above the going rate. We can pour some of our profits into educating and teaching people skills with the means to make a productive contribution to the economy, remembering that the vulnerable poor are our legitimate shareholders. We can visit the violence-torn areas and see for ourselves the conditions the majority of people have to live under, lest we forget as soon as this no longer makes front page headlines.

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    In closing, I remind you of the Rabbi who asked his disciples when one knew that the night had passed and the day had come. After thinking for a while, the disciples replied, “Is it when you can spot the difference between a goat and a sheep at a hundred yards?” “No,” replied the Rabbi. The disciples tried again, “Is it when you can spot the difference between an olive tree and a fig tree at a hundred yards?” “No,” replied the Rabbi. “Well, then, you tell us, Rabbi,” they pleaded. “One knows that the night has passed and the day has come when one can look into the face of a stranger and see a sister or a brother!” May the night pass and day soon come in our beloved country!

  • Fourth Sunday of Advent

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    Fourth Sunday of Advent

    Micah 5:2-5; Luke 1:39-55

    Liz Goodman

    United Church of Christ, Monterey, Massachusetts

    There was a time, though perhaps only in the legendary past, when Advent was a somber season, except on Sundays, which is always the day of resurrection no matter what time of year it is. The same was true for Lent, a season when people “gave things up”—made small sacrifices in their lives, like refraining from eating chocolate or sweets—in order to help them remember the season. The one day each week when people could indulge themselves was Sunday because, as I said, this is the day of resurrection no matter the time of year. No matter the season, you celebrate on Sunday. In recent times, though, this has flip-flopped. Our wider context, of course, is no longer presumably Christian; for better or for worse, our culture no longer holds to the church’s calendar and esthetic as a matter of course. Christendom is a thing of the past; for better or for worse, we live in a post-Christian era. One piece of evidence of this is that Advent has come to be kept only in church, if even here. Congregations are often ambivalent at best about spending Advent in sackcloth and ash. Many congregants push to sing Christmas carols during the Sunday services through the month of December. That has many pastors finding themselves in hot water with their congregations as they insist: no Christmas carols until Christmas. Regardless of music, though, the lectionary doesn’t let up. It has us, even amidst this month of merry-making, hearing on Sundays of John the Baptizer and repentance for the forgiveness of sin, and even, on the first Sunday of the season, the end of days. In sum, December is the Christmas season, except on Sundays when we yet wait in the darkness and watch for the dawn. I think this is a blessing the church can offer our wider culture. Amidst all the madness of the Christmas season in its secular forms, this is a crucial way the wider church can serve the people—inviting us all to sit in the gloaming that has a truth to tell and therein to find comfort. Merry-making, after all, can be exhausting, especially when your heart isn’t in it. The expectations that Christmas has come to be about—the perfect gift for everyone you’ve ever met, the perfect meal for all who are spending the big day with you, the perfectly decorated home for all on your street to see, the perfectly planned and executed party for all the people you owe a good time—can leave you feeling defeated before you’ve even begun. So often the word of God comes as a contrast to the din of the larger culture. In this faith, many churches offer a “Blue Christmas” service, for the people who need their experience of the darkness in this life confirmed and blessed. I think this is a fine idea. But I do wonder if a better idea might simply be reclaiming Advent as a season worthy of remembering, and on its own terms. Our culture’s compulsion to pursue happiness borders on the pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich has written a book entitled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, It comes of her experience with breast cancer, a year she spent in fear and pain, and berated by so many people for this be-

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    ing her primary experience of the disease. Surrounded by pink ribbons and teddy bears and greeting cards with cheesy poetry and kitschy illustrations, she suffered for everything being so upbeat. Lance Armstrong calling cancer “the best thing that ever happened to me,” a peer closer to Ehrenreich calling cancer her “connection to the divine,” a contributor to a cancer-support website chiding her for her “bad attitude” with the warning that “it’s not going to help you in the least,” all left her feeling that much more isolated and filled with dread. Addressing now the more general tendency in our culture, according to book reviewer Hanna Rosin, Ehrenreich writes,

    What started as a nineteenth century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressi ve….Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy . America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.

    She focuses in one chapter on this trend in business culture which notes that since Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936,

    motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy. I feel happy. I feel terrific!” Corporate managers have transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments, and hunches.” Corporate America has begun to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling,” and “deep listening,” all now common staples of corporate retreats.

    Though I’m far removed from this culture, I’ll confess to enjoying one cynical remedy for it all—the demotivational posters prompted as a response to those motivational ones. You’ve seen them—the beautiful color photograph of a sunset or a mountain or a bird in flight with a big-fonted word printed below meant to inspire and a snappy aphorism printed underneath it all in finer print. The demotivators are deliciously cynical. A hiker at the foot of a mountain all silhouetted by sunrise, and written underneath, “Challenges,” and in the fine print: “I expected times like this—but never thought they’d be so bad, so long, and so frequent.” An eagle in flight over snow-capped peaks evokes, “Leaders,” and in the fine print, “Leaders are like eagles. We don’t have either of them here.” A wind-bent tree on a shoreline calls to mind the word “Adversity,” and in the fine print, “That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.” A snowball and the path that led to its making are explained, “Teamwork ,” and in the fine print, “A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.” This trend that Ehrenrich names and explores has found a perfect handmaid in the Christmas holiday now stripped of its religious significance and considered merely a happy celebration of happiness. But there’s something saddening about it—as the

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    attempts at happiness so often don’t make us happy, as the din of merrymaking seems only to distract or even deny the fact of darkness both outside and in. Don’t get me wrong; I love Christmas with all its trappings, and I don’t object to its secularization on religious grounds. I regret its secularization on the grounds of human need. Christmas is an answer to a human need. Christmas is God’s answer to our deepest need—our need for God in our lives, our need for God as the thing that endures and abides, our need for God as what’s true and life-giving, our need for love and forgiveness , mercy, and peace. But Christmas as we’ve come to celebrate it in our culture is a mere reaction to human fear—and a pathetic reaction at that (pathetic meaning arousing of compassion ). This is why the so-called and self-proclaimed defenders of Christmas strike me as mystifyingly off the mark. In their defense of a public school’s right to distribute candy canes to the children or an airport’s right to play Christmas tunes over the sound system or a town’s right to turn off the Christmas lights along Main Street after most of the shoppers have gone for the night (all of which are factual occurrences in recent years), they’re defending ,the least meaningful aspects of the holiday and perhaps even the most deceptive, the very things those of us who are sitting in the dark waiting for the Christ might want to be done with all together. Really, all the fuss strikes me as an increasingly furious attempt to recover something that’s been lost in the season’s secularization and in our culture-wide confusion about all things religious. And what’s been lost isn’t the right to candy or fake snow or images of flying reindeer or even a plastic likeness of a baby in a plastic likeness of a manger on town land, but a language—a language that names what’s real for all people, a language that speaks not of happiness, but of hope. When Elizabeth, surprised by her cousin Mary’s visit and filled herself with the Holy Spirit, said to Mary, “Blessed are you among women,” Mary responded in a remarkable way. The song she sang, often called “The Magnificat,” is a recalling of Hannah’s song as she rejoiced in her son Samuel who would be a great prophet for Judah and Israel and who would anoint David king. Lovely on its own terms, this song so at the ready on Mary’s lips also signals that the culture Mary was steeped in was a rich one. It was flawed, to be sure, as we’ve remembered these last two weeks in our hearing John the baptizer rip into it with fanged words, and as she herself pointed out in these words of hope—hope that takes an honest accounting of all that’s out of balance and envisions a time of justice and equanimity. “The Lord has scattered the proud, brought down the powerful and lifted the lowly; the Lord has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.” Yes, of course her culture was flawed, like every culture. But it had its richness as well, such that when something beyond the beyond began to happen for Mary, she had a way to express it. She had a means to name and come to terms with what was happening—a means of communication that is also a means of communion. Really, it might be said that she conceived with the Holy Spirit the moment she began to speak—to sing!—the language she’d inherited from her tradition that had power enough to rise to such an occasion. What language have we at the ready today to come to terms with great and terrible things that happen in this life? Having none is a sort of poverty that all the wealth in the commercial world can do nothing to compensate for. If we have none, we might well be said to be rich and sent empty away. And this too is a blessing the church

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    can offer our wider culture, for it’s the church’s privilege to have this wealth to give away. An image of birds in flight, circling the sun evoke “Hope,” but in the fine print comes the qualifier, “may not be warranted at this point,” and a closer look at that motivational photograph reveals that these circling birds are vultures. This, of course, is the cynical answer to the bright-sided culture whose glare blinds us to the light that overcomes darkness for good. I find it amusing, of course, just as I find our cultural Christmas happy-making. But none of it satisfies for more than a little while. None of it magnifies my soul. Besides, hope is indeed warranted at this point. Hope, if not happiness, is indeed warranted and moreover welcomed, as the seed of the Spirit by which Christ is in us conceived. Hope that plumbs the dark depths of our lives is the womb of new life that death cannot overcome. Its challenge is that we dive so deep. Its promise is that we won’t come up empty.

  • Preaching through Pentecost

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    Preaching through Pentecost

    Lillian Daniel First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

    Let me be honest and say that when my better angels are not in charge, summer preaching can bring me down. Back when I lived in New England, this was the season that the congregation, and sometimes the minister, simply took off. Some congregations merged for worship. The Unitarian minister down the street left town, and lay people preached, to a much smaller crowd of course. In my current church outside Chicago, we switch from two services to one. Attendance drops, and the reason, we all claim, is that people are vacationing and travelling. Summer cottages in Michigan and Wisconsin pull them away, although I’m not convinced my members are boosting some other church’s attendance those Sundays that I don’t see them. In addition, I always worry that we in church leadership send people the message that they don’t need to be there – by reducing services, giving the choir a break, and by the preacher preaching less, or, in some cases, preaching worse. Why would your preaching get worse? Admit it, aren’t you more likely to prepare more for the bigger crowd? So I am always looking for new ways to keep my preaching energy up when worship attendance goes down. I remind myself that first time visitors tend to put a tentative foot in the door in those summer months, and I remind the congregation that they need to be here to greet that person who has not yet arrived. Rather than focusing on the missing choir, I look forward to the soloists we don’t get to hear from during the program year. And lastly, I remember that some of the best stories in scripture show up in summer time. In year C, there are some real gems from the gospel of Luke. On June 13, you have the story of the woman pouring ointment from an alabaster flask all over Jesus’ feet, while judgmental men look on in disgust. Jesus then tells the parable of the creditor who cancelled the debts of two men. The one who had been forgiven the most, loved most extravagantly. This is the perfect Sunday to remind people that church is a school for sinners, not a club of saints, and to speak to some of those first time visitors who think that they may not belong in God’s house. On July 11, in Luke you get the story of the Good Samaritan, perfect for a time when people may be travelling themselves, and may find themselves in need of a stranger’s kindness. And on July 25, Jesus teaches us the Lord’s Prayer. There’s so much to work within Luke in the summer months. This year July 4, American Independence Day, falls on a Sunday. Given how seldom that happens, as one who is not a lectionary fundamentalist, and as one who has really looked ahead in order to prepare this article, I would be mightily tempted to steal the Hebrews reading from August 8. “If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” I’d love to play with that while talking about our nation. You could address the issue of immigration, the way in which we

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    Americans conveniently forget that most of us descended from immigrants, and how that amnesia allows us to tolerate policies that are downright cruel. Or you could remind folks on this day that our real citizenship is in heaven. I realize that some readers will object to a secular holiday finding its way into church, especially in this case, since it offers the preacher a huge temptation to leave the lectionary, but to my mind the realities of the outside world are teaching opportunities. To pick a text that critiques our sentimental nationalism and also confronts our hard-hearted immigration policies is a far cry from asking the congregation to bow down before the American flag. And for those of you who would never think of deviating from the lectionary, for those of you who faithfully read every lesson, finally you get your reward. On August 15, in Hebrews, you can find the name “Barak.” How cool is that? Let me take a moment here to reflect on the lectionary. Clergy from more liturgical traditions are sometimes surprised to discover that people in my tradition, the United Church of Christ, do in fact follow the lectionary. Quite strictly these days, it seems. Unless we have a better idea. In an ecumenical divinity school, I was taught to feel badly about such lapses. I was taught that lectionary preachers were more faithful to the text than topical preachers. Supposedly, by following the lectionary, we would be less tempted to preach on our pet themes, over and over again. We would be less likely to preach cheesy sermon series on how to fix your marriage, your life, your church, and your dog, all in six weeks based on the Lord’s Prayer. By following the lectionary, we would be less likely to sprinkle scripture, like seasoning, over what we were already planning to say. For much of my ministry, I bought into this. To be honest, I also appreciated the structure. I work much better with an assignment than with a completely blank page. And I found what many lectionary preachers find. The word for the day, or at least one of the four, often speaks right to the heart of what is happening. But sometimes there might be other scriptures that speak to the heart of the preacher as well. Maybe the lectionary passage “works” while some other passage might allow the sermon to truly soar. In cases like these, I will deviate from the assigned text. And to be honest, the long season of Pentecost is when I am most likely to do this. The lectionary is many good things, but let’s not elevate it to the status of canon. The lectionary can do many things, but it cannot bear the whole freight of protecting preachers from our own subjectivity. We will still preach our pet themes, and part of that is because the lectionary itself is a product of human subjectivity. For example, if your pet theme is that divine wrath judgment should not have much place in the church, the lectionary will work marvelously for you. September 5 offers both the promise and the difficulty of the lectionary. Here is the promise. Right before the program year gets going, the lectionary gives you the chance to tell the congregation about a powerful little epistle they, and perhaps their preachers, may never have heard of. In Philemon, you can examine Paul’s embrace of a slave as his brother in Christ and the rhetorical moves he makes to get his reader to do the same. It’s a gem I often miss because I’m on vacation, but what a great tie in to Labor Day weekend. Americans dress our children in adorable, cheap tee shirts made by other people’s children overseas. Workers struggle to make it working more

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    than full time, but they are invisible in their fast food uniforms or on the factory floor. Who are the sisters and brothers in Christ Paul might urge us to claim? Yet if you are always on vacation on Labor Day weekend and miss this passage, would it be the worst thing in the world to preach on it another Sunday? Particularly if you had a guest preacher who came that weekend and didn’t choose Philemon. This is where I break the lectionary rules the most. It’s not that I am unwilling to preach on something that the lectionary has challenged me to confront. In fact, much that is most challenging has been left out of the lectionary. It is more the case that I feel deprived of the opportunity to preach on something. For example, if the children’s musical program takes up the sermon time on a Sunday devoted to the kids, and there’s a lectionary text assigned for that day which I feel moved to preach on for the good of the body but that could not be preached on that day, I will use it another Sunday. I think of the lectionary as a series of puzzle pieces without which I would be missing a large picture, but it is not the only picture, and part of the fun of a puzzle is playing with the moving parts. And now back to the lectionary with that great sacred high festival day of the church, somehow not accounted for in the lectionary, the gospel stories or in many church calendars – Rally Day. Never heard of Rally Day? It seems to pop up in many main line Protestant churches on the Sunday after Labor Day weekend, around the time the kids are going back to school, which this year will be September 12. People call it different things (I’ve heard “Gathering Sunday” or “Homecoming”), and it may occur at different times based on the local school schedule, but it’s basically the Sunday when we say to our members, “Of course you should have been in church all summer, but on September 12, we’re going back to two services, bringing back the choir, starting Sunday school again and having a picnic.” No wonder they take the summer off. If you’re feeling peeved and under-cherished as a pastor who really brought her preaching Α-game all summer long while some of your members were taking the summer off, you could welcome the slackers back with the wrath of God toward the stiff necked people in Exodus. But you may go with the image of Jesus welcoming sinners and eating with them and his story about the shepherd’s generous delight in finding the lost sheep. I’ve spent a lot of time on summer readings; because that’s the season I need encouragement for. But the fall preaching season has its own perils. The program year ramps up, committees are meeting again, and in our own personal lives, the summer breeze and ease gives way to hyper scheduling and the return of the school night. Therefore, in the fall, many of us have more enthusiasm than actual time to bring to the preaching project. Every summer, I tell myself I will map out the fall sermons. But I’ve learned that I can only hold about four upcoming sermons in my head at any one time. So here are a few things you can look forward to and consider in advance. On September 26, you get to remind people that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Yes, I am perfectly willing to quote from the letter that states that my sisters and I do not belong in the pulpit. Because this week when you pair the 1 Timothy passage with Luke, you can deliver a one-two punch to materialism well before stewardship season. On October 3, you get the parable of the mustard seed, on October 10, nine lepers

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    forget to say thank you, and on October 17, Jacob wrestles with God, receiving the world’s first non-surgical hip replacement. October 24 offers the chance to consider some prophetic poetry from Joel. “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” I love the way Joel plays with the generations and the different ways they might experience God. A preacher can expand upon that and remind the congregation that we are not all of one generation in the church, and as such we will see things differently. But the older generations do not have to be stereotyped as the “old guard” or the young people as the dreamers. In my own congregation, the retirees are much more open to change than some young parents in their thirties. Lay leaders will worry, “What will the older members think about this new thing?” But the older members are sometimes the most likely to support change, having survived a fair amount of it themselves. They are willing to dream. But you may be serving a congregation where the older members see the younger generation as wildly tampering with tradition. In that case, the church may need to be reminded that young people can indeed be holders of the vision. In practicing discernment in community, you never know whom God might choose to speak through. This line from Joel may sound familiar to many of us, but I have seldom heard it interpreted next to the line that directly follows it: “Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.” Can we imagine a world in which the last person you expect to be God’s chosen really is? Who is the last person we would expect God to choose today? It is remarkable that Joel, in his time and context, makes the point that both male and female can receive the spirit, even male and female slaves. This year not only does July 4 fall on a Sunday, but Halloween does too. On October 31 the lectionary sheriffs allow you to use the All Saints readings of November 1 (if you don’t have a separate All Saints service) that presents the intriguing idea of preaching on the Beatitudes on a day when most of the world is hooked on images of violence and gore. The dead can be remembered in many ways, but the Beatitudes remind us that how we live makes a difference to how God remembers us as well. On a Sunday when kids dress up as serial killers and are rewarded with candy, it may be worth giving them a counter cultural word like this: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other one.” I’ve seen pregnant nuns and televangelists even, but no trick-or-treater has ever shown up on my doorstep dressed up like Jesus. On this Sunday morning, the congregation can get a dose of prophylactic goodness before the ghosts and goblins take the main stage. In November, we near the end of this long season. Lent and Advent make sense to the average worshipper, but the season of Pentecost doesn’t seem to have much to make it hang together. By now, I personally am getting tired of the color green and anticipating the next season. So a look ahead in November offers a reason to stay focused, because there are still more golden nuggets to be found in the gospel of Luke as well as the epistles. November 7 presents one of the more confusing passages in scripture, with a comical conundrum. A woman’s husband dies and his brother marries her, as was his duty back in the day. Then he dies, and the next brother marries her, and on and on until she dies. Will she have seven husbands waiting for her in heaven? Here let me be honest and say that if I had seven husbands waiting for me, I would be pretty sure I had

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    gained admission to the other place down below. This is most women’s worst nightmare . It’s hard enough to keep up with one husband, but seven? And for eternity? While Jesus reassures us that it won’t be like this, his further musings on marriage confuse me to this day. Is he saying that we would be better off not marrying in this life? Or is he saying that our marriages, good, bad, or indifferent, will not exist in heaven? Being happily married to one man and gratefully not married to any of his siblings, I don’t want to hear that angels and children of God have no need of marriage. For those who see marriage as a gift, this is not an easy passage, although it may be deeply comforting to those who do not wish to spend eternity with their ex or perhaps even with their current spouse. Jesus was privileging and lifting up single people as special. Today’s society does quite the opposite. We want everyone partnered up for Hollywood happiness. Those who are not partnered get treated as objects of pity or “projects” who need to meet your cute unmarried nephew in order to be complete. Jesus sees them as future angels, full of possibility, not just in this life, but the next. Perhaps Jesus is saying here that marriage in and of itself does not get the last word, and neither do any of our earthly social arrangements. It is our relationship to our creator that will make us special in heaven. That relationship with God will also be the great social equalizer. The mother of three will be just as happy as the woman who wanted children but couldn’t have them. The couple that fought and hurt each other over the years will no longer be able to do so. The single person and the happily married will not be lonely, but have companionship that dwarves anything we dream about on this earth. And it is my hope that whether we are married in heaven or not, the happily married spouses will experience this joy together, at the heavenly banquet that does not require any of the guests to bring a date. November 14 provides us all with the opportunity to celebrate my ordination anniversary. Ok, so maybe I will be the only person in the world thinking about my seventeen years in the ministry that day. The point is that in working with the lectionary and the church calendar, we always bring our own stuff to it. If I’m having a good time that week and feeling good about the church, I would go with Isaiah’s beautiful words about how God is creating a new heaven and a new earth, and delight in that vision for justice in the world and for the church. But if I didn’t get my way at the last committee meeting, I’ll go with Malachi and announce, “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble.” But wait. The people at the committee meeting might think that one applied to me. Back to Isaiah. Is there a way that preaching actually improves us as people? I am sure that I am a little less evil and a little less arrogant because I get to spend time with all these texts, whether I preach on them or not. What a rarefied privilege it is to spend time in four different readings each week, asking God to reveal which one the congregation needs to hear, or, more commonly, which one the preacher needs to hear. On an occasion like an ordination anniversary, such time with the texts will cause me to reflect on those years I have labored in this odd and wondrous calling and the gift that preaching is to the one doing the preaching. God is always busier during sermon writing time than I am. I just have to craft a word for the day. God has to deal with all those preachers. The last Sunday in the season, November 21, is Christ the King Sunday, but again, it’s one where we may sometimes veer off, in this country at least, to readings with a Thanksgiving theme, such as the Nov 25 reading from Deuteronomy, when the people

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    remember that after wandering, they finally arrived in the land of milk and honey. Now, this reading begs the particularly American question, just whose milk and honey was it before the newcomers arrived? The Pilgrims may have found milk and honey here, but surely God didn’t intend it only for them. What of those who were here first? In order to avoid a triumphalist reading of this in which the Pilgrims get to be the only chosen people, you do have some options. If you are not a lectionary fundamentalist, you could have this November 25 Old Testament reading be in conversation with the Jeremiah reading from Sunday, November 21, which reads, “‘Woe to the Shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture ! ‘ says the Lord.” On Christ the King Sunday, it might be worth remembering that Jesus did not die for one nation over another and that the ruler takes no pleasure in the scattering of his sheep, even in the name of progress or religious freedom. Speaking of religious freedom, let’s get back to that lectionary issue, and where you as a reader might fall. Having walked through this chunk of ordinary time, do you believe in it absolutely? I ask this because there are lectionary-preaching clergy who would sooner die than be called fundamentalists and who would laugh at any one who believes Moses actually wrote any scriptures. Yet these same people judge the nonlectionary preacher with disdain, with an attitude that looks a lot like fundamentalism. Apparently we are not to take scripture literally, for that would be anti-intellectual and naïve, but the lectionary may not be questioned. So, who’s being naïve, now? This issue of the journal offers my own reflections on the lectionary as one who does not always follow it, and I suspect that I am not alone. We all know the pitfalls of going it alone. We know there are plenty of cheesy topical sermons out there that read like the latest psychological self help book with scripture added as a condiment by the preacher as iron chef. But sometimes those topical preachers get to play with a deep idea several Sundays in a row or delve deeply into a practice or concept that the lectionary would not permit. Topical does not mean shallow, any more than lectionary guarantees deep. Having said that, the lectionary is like a restraint that I don’t always care for but can still believe that I need. I wear it like I wear a winter coat, something I suspect is good for me, but that also makes me feel hemmed in when the weather suddenly changes. It keeps me from preaching sermons that are nothing but vehicles for my own cute stories. It also occasionally forces me to deal with Biblical stories that are far from cute. But given that I always have three other choices, I’m not sure I take on those hard texts with more enthusiasm or practice than the topical preacher. In these pages you will see creative ideas for how to preach a thematic sermon series with integrity, how to take a side road off the lectionary highway without the wheels coming off the bus. Not every sermon series has to be about fixing your relationship , your bank account, or your dog ‘ s obedience problems. Even among our own “lectionary” of acceptable main line sermon series topics, not every sermon series on the seven deadly sins, the Lord’s prayer, or the seven last words will be the same — as surely as one preacher’s preaching in ordinary time will not be the same as another’s. The lectionary can be rendered corny, and the topical sermon can go deep. Conversely, the lectionary week after week can offer excitement, and the sermon series can seem dull and disjointed. Just as fine Biblical preaching comes out of many methods, so does poor, manipulative preaching. God and the devil seem to be enormously flexible in this way.

  • When hope and history rhyme: leadership in a time of adversity

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    When Hope and History Rhyme:

    Leadership in a Time of Adversity*

    Ambassador James A. Joseph

    Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

    In a few days, people around the world will literally stand still for a moment as the President of the United States takes the oath of office. This American ritual will be greeted with great excitement, not just within our national borders, but within every culture and among every color on the globe. Some will celebrate the African American connection. Others will celebrate the dawning of a new era in our struggle to form a more perfect union. Still others will celebrate it as a reminder that the best way to demonstrate the efficacy of our system of government to critics abroad is to demonstrate that it can work equitably for all of our citizens at home. Those of us who worked in the civil rights movement and those who gather annually to celebrate the legacy and honor the memory of Martin Luther King may even shed a tear as we remember the hoses and cattle prods in Alabama, the killing fields in Mississippi, and the resistance to change in places as distant and as different as Cicero, Illinois and Atlanta, Georgia. But let us also remember that in the midst of adversity we had some great victories; and as it was then, so must it be now that our euphoria is tempered by the realization that while our society has taken a giant leap forward, we have not yet formed the more perfect union of which our founders dreamed. Our message today, therefore, is about leadership in a time of adversity. On the day after the election of the 44th president of the United States, some of my friends in South Africa called the election “A Mandela moment in the United States.” At first, I was rather dubious about the utility ofthat kind of comparison and saw it as a form of misplaced euphoria; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to offer some profound insights as well as some very useful cautions. So I did what most academics do and subjected the idea to a more definitive analysis. Of course, I am not just an academic. I am a practitioner and a preacher, so I searched the Scriptures to find a text that might help us think about leadership in a time of adversity, yet still a time when hope and history seem to rhyme. The Apostle Paul could have been speaking to this moment when he wrote his letter to the Romans in which he observed, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail, not only the creation, but we ourselves.” Yet, he said, “The sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us…. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he already sees” (Romans 8: 18 – 25). These words are a fitting backdrop for our own thoughts over the next week as we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King and the inauguration of President-elect Barak Obama. Paul said of his time that the whole of creation had been groaning in travail. The dominant mood of our time is what psychologists call a “free-floating anxiety.” The immediate aftermath of 9/11 was such a moment. The period following the assassina-

    * This sermon was preached on January 18, 2009.

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    tions of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy was such a moment. Americans and, indeed, people around the world are feeling that sort of anxiety again. It is not the result of an event, but a confluence of events. Some feel a deep level of concern about what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing to our soul as a people. For others, the anxiety may come from the near collapse of the economy, the increasing divide between work and reward, the almost daily announcements that medicines we thought were safe are not, the frequency of natural disasters that remind us of how what we once considered abnormal is now the new normal. We have reached the point where anxiety feeds on anxiety, and we become anxious about the fact that we are anxious. When Maya Angelou, the great poet, author, and playwright, reflected on the tragedies in her early life, she wrote that the spring of hope is often immersed in the winter of despair. She spoke as a kind of street theologian when she said, “You see a young black boy, fourteen, fifteen years old, semiliterate, maybe the third generation on welfare. But he walks down the street as if he has oil wells in his backyard. If I had come from Mars or Pluto, I would look at people on the planet like him and say, ‘Who are these people? How dare they hope with their history?’” Maya is reminding us that there is something so unique and irresistible about the ability to transcend history, to see reality and yet be able to look beyond it and see something different and deeper.

    Hope and Optimism Americans, like South Africans in 1994, are desperately looking for some reason to be optimistic about the future. But the first message of our text is that hope and optimism are not the same. Paul wrote that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” He was reminding the faithful in his letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:1) that hope grows out of an openness to the unknown, the unexpected, and the unexplored. It is a sense, sometimes with considerable certainty, but often with lingering doubt, that we are not here alone, that each of us is a part of something bigger and more mysterious than the self. Martin Luther King said to those of us who were about to launch a new movement in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1963 that while we must “accept finite disappointment, we must never lose infinite hope.” “Basic to our philosophy,” he said, “is a deep faith in the future. Ours is a movement based on hope because when you lose hope the movement dies.” That is why the movement song stated “We shall overcome, deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome.” When we faced hostile mobs, when we were thrown in jail, and when our families faced the threat of physical death because of our involvement, there was something special about being able to sing; “We are not afraid. We shall overcome some day.” We have not yet overcome, but it is great to be able to sing again with gusto, we are not afraid, we shall overcome some day. This is not the time, however, to give in to a kind of good morning in America sentimentalism. In his 1997 book Restoring Hope, Cornel West wrote that optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Hope, on the other hand, enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to make things better. Hope is not optimism based on what you see. Hope allows us to see beyond what

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    is and to imagine what can and what ought to be. It is not so much an act of memory as it is an act of imagination and faith. It is an acknowledgement that what you can imagine you can probably create.

    Leadership and Hope So the second message of our text is that hope is a way of being; that society is best served by leaders who in times of adversity can call us to our better selves and persuade us that an alternative future is indeed possible. And here is where the South African reference to a Mandela moment in the United States begins to make sense. This perception of the presidential election last November was not about just the long lines and the long wait at the voting places that reminded us of South Africa in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected. It was not just the magnitude of the moment that spoke so loudly about a leap forward in our efforts to form a more perfect union. It was not just the caution that what some proclaimed a miracle in South Africa when the new democracy was launched was in reality the beginning of a process that will continue long into the future. The South Africans were saying something fundamental about the requirements of leadership in a world that is integrating and fragmenting at the same time. They were commenting on the qualities we were now highlighting and to some degree validating as critical to leadership at a complex, interdependent, and almost apocalyptic global moment. They were saying that the leader who is likely to be effective must be both an agent of reconciliation and a purveyor of hope. For a long time we in the United States were united in seeking to identify leaders who called us to a higher purpose, inspired us, informed us, and elevated us. But we have been through a period in which many people seemed to be looking for the ordinary, someone in whose image they saw themselves, someone who looked like them, thought like them, and acted like them. This romanticizing of ordinariness lost some of its hold on the American society on November 4, but it has not been fully extinguished from the American mind. Think again about why my friends in South Africa called this a Mandela moment in the United States. Mandela went from prison to president in a small country on the tip of the African continent. Yet, heads of state and royalty from around the world beat a path to his door to seek his advice and counsel and, sometimes, for a photo op to prove that they had once been in the presence of this global icon. President Clinton said of him that when he enters a room, we all feel a little bigger and a little better, because on our best days we all want to be like him. It is remarkable to realize that Nelson Mandela was in prison while the internet was being developed. He was in prison while we were learning the many uses of the cell phone. He was in prison while we were becoming dependent on new technologies, and the world economy was becoming more and more interdependent. But he came out of prison, took over the leadership of his party and his country without missing a beat, because for him, leadership was a way of being rather than simply a set of skills or a set of experiences. Both his attractiveness and his influence came from the power of his personality, the elegance of his humanity, the loftiness of his ideals, the wisdom of his judgment, the calmness of his temperament, and the power of his commitment to the well being of others. Nelson Mandela emerged from prison at a time when effective leadership was

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    portrayed by many as the ability to bluff, buy, or bully one’s way into influence. Even the projection of state power beyond national borders had come to be seen largely as the domain of what Arthur Schlesinger called the “warrior caste.” Yet, Mandela’s influence at home and his standing abroad went far beyond what might be suggested by the size of the military or the Gross Domestic Product of South Africa. Even before the flood of recent writings in the United States about soft power, Mandela understood that seduction is likely to be more enduring than coercion. Earlier this week in Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing before the United States Senate, she used Joseph Nye’s notion of smart power to describe the Obama foreign policy. This is precisely what Mandela had in mind when he said, upon his ascendancy to the presidency, that if we do not resolve conflicts with our brains, we will eventually have to resolve them with our blood.

    History and Hope Let me end with a third message from our text. What the South Africans called a Mandela moment in the United States seemed to be a moment where hope and history came together in a very special way. Like the character in Sophocles’ play, we could almost hear in the distance these lines:

    History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.

    So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And cures and healing wells.

    If there is fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Of new life at its term.

    Next Tuesday, you and I will see hope and history rhyme. Yet, we are in danger of speaking double talk, of seeing new life at its term not as birth, but as fulfillment and finality. Like the South Africans in 1994, we will need to remember that the election of our 44th president was indeed an extraordinary leap forward in our effort to form a more perfect union, but it was simply a remarkable turning point in a process that will continue long into the future. In the 1970s, I used to joke that African Americans only got a chance to run predominantly white institutions like cities, nonprofit organiza-

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    tions, and even business corporations when they were near collapse. It now seems that history has willed the same sort of fate for Barak Obama, but this time there are reasons to be more hopeful, because it does seem that this is a moment when the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme. This could indeed be a Mandela moment in the United States. So as the euphoria of next Tuesday returns on Wednesday, or at least by the weekend , to the dominant mood of free anxiety, remember what Paul said to the Romans: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail, not only the creation, but we ourselves.” And then he added, “The sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us…. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he already sees.” When on Tuesday we bend history and say “Yes we can,” let us also say that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is yet to be revealed, for we serve a God who’s got the whole world in his hands. We Christians can say yes to the moment because we know that after Good Friday comes Easter and that even in the midst of great adversity, justice can rise up again and nations can beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more. We Christians can say yes to the moment because we believe that when there is fire on the mountain and our God speaks from the sky, this means that someone is hearing our cry. This may indeed be the moment when hope and history rhyme.

  • ‘Do justice’: Micah 6:8

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    “Do Justice”

    Micah 6:8

    Martha Moore-Keish

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    How is Israel to come before the Lord, when they have wandered so far away? What can they do to restore the relationship that has been fractured by their own unfaithfulness? As Walter Brueggemann points out in his essay, verses 6-7 leading up to this well-known passage present a series of inappropriate answers to this question, escalating to the offer of the first-born child to pay for the “sin of my soul.” God rejects all of these and instead gives three requirements: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. The first command that the prophet delivers to the people of Israel seems simple: “do justice,” or in some versions, “act justly.” Do mispat. But what does this mean? How is this injunction to do mispat related to the rejection of sacrifice in verses 6-7? Does justice simply replace sacrifice, or is there something else going on?

    God’s justice Mispat in Hebrew scriptures describes both God’s activity and some human activity. Job’s friend Elihu presents the common view of justice as one of God’s attributes when he says, “The Almighty—we cannot find him: he is great in power and justice {mispat), and abundant righteousness he will not violate” (Job 37:23). Psalm 89 similarly affirms that “righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you” (89:14). These are two examples of the way that justice {mispat) and righteousness {tsedeqah) are usually paired in the Hebrew, underscoring God’s character as just. But what sort of justice is this? Psalm 82 gives a fuller picture. God speaks to the other gods in the divine council: “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and destitute… ” (82:3). Mispat, then, is connected with caring for those who are poor and unable to care for themselves. An even fuller picture of God’s justice emerges in Isaiah 58-59, a passage which is similar in tone to Micah 6. The prophet there is told to shout out to the people of Israel, to tell them of their sins in spite of their apparent piety. “Announce to the people their rebellion,” says the Lord (58:1). The people continue to seek God “as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance {mispat) of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments (mispat), they delight to draw near to God” (58:2). Yet their worship is misguided: “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes” (58:5)? In contrast to this kind of worship, the prophet paints the following picture of God’s justice: “Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin” (58:6-7)? God’s justice, God’s mispat, is manifested not in public displays of piety, but

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    in care for the neighbor, in simple acts of clothing and feeding and setting free those who are oppressed and poor. It is in this context that we can better understand the condemnations that follow in the next chapter: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance” (59:14), and as a result “according to their deeds, so will he repay; wrath to his adversaries, requital to his enemies … so those in the west shall fear the name of the Lord, and those in the east, his glory; for he will come like a pent-up stream that the wind of the Lord drives on” (59:18-19). Isaiah’s condemnations resemble those that follow our Micah text in 6:9-16, which likewise describe God’s vengeance on those who have not followed the law. Such threats of deadly force in both passages must be held together with the reason for God’s fearsome judgment: the people have not followed the law, which clearly told them to care for the weak and powerless. Preaching about divine punishment always needs to be handled carefully, so as not to invoke the preacher’s own prejudices against imagined enemies of God. But prophetic texts like Isaiah and Micah show that failure to exercise God’s justice in providing for others brings the consequence of God’s wrath, even upon the chosen people.

    Human justice People in scripture, however, are not uniformly condemned for failure of justice. Abraham and Gad are both praised for showing mispat, as are David and Solomon (2 Sam.8:15; 1 Kings 10:9). In almost every case, the mispat shown by patriarch and king is explicitly God’s mispat. In speaking of Abraham, it is the Lord himself who says, “I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice . . .” (Gen. 18: 19). Moses praises Gad because “he executed the justice of the Lord” (Deut 33:21). The queen of Sheba praises Solomon by saying, “Because the Lord loved Israel forever, he has made you king to execute justice and righteousness” (1 Kings 10:9). In each of these examples, the justice which is praised in the person is an expression of God’s justice. In one notable exception, Absalom cries out, “If only I were judge in the land! Then all who had a suit or cause might come to me and I would give them justice” (2 Sam. 15:4). According to this text, there is no connection between the judgment Absalom wishes to render and the justice exercised by God. Mispat, throughout the Hebrew scriptures, belongs first of all to God and secondarily to humans who express God’s justice.

    Justice against sacrifice If we return to Micah with this fuller understanding of mispat and particularly with the words of Isaiah ringing in our ears, we hear very clearly the contrast that the prophet offers. God rejects the visible sacrifices that the people offer, and instead calls them back to justice, which means caring for the poor and needy, the widow, and orphan. This is nothing other than the second table of the law, which explicitly connects care of the neighbor with devotion to God. What does the Lord require? Provide for your neighbor, says the Lord through Micah. Stop offering sacrifices to me and start offering sustenance to those who need it most. It is a sharp critique of the ways humans seek to encounter God and a particularly sharp critique of some human efforts at worship. Though we do not typically offer God burnt sacrifices anymore, or rivers of oil, we do pour ourselves into developing

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    worship that is lively, engaging, and relevant. We seek to bring God our best offerings of music, visual arts, and elegantly composed prayers and sermons. Preachers and other worship leaders invest great time and energy into public worship in efforts to attract worshipers and please God. Micah provides a critique of such efforts, reminding us that the point is loving our neighbor, not offering more and more impressive sacrifices. What then are we to do? Is all liturgical action, all “coming before God” in worship rejected? Does Micah call us to abandon our efforts to worship and invest our energy instead in acts of justice?

    Reconsidering the relationship of justice and sacrifice Such outright rejection of worship in the name of justice, I think, is too simple. Micah does not condemn all worship of God, but he does condemn misguided sacrifices. The sacrifices listed in verses 6-7 draw attention to the one sacrificing, and one does not contribute to the care and well-being of the neighbor, but consumes vast resources rather than devoting those resources to those who need it most. This surely is a word we need to hear in a day when shrinking resources force us to make hard decisions about where to budget the church ‘ s money: worship or justice? Micah would say unequivocally that justice holds the trump card here. But there is more to Micah’s critique than this. Notice how the subject in these sentences changes from verses 6-7 to verse 8. In verses 6-7 the basic subject is “I”: “with what shall / come before the Lord? . . . shall / come before him with burnt offerings …? Shall / give my firstborn … ?” The focus is on what we do, and the tone of desperation (or is it self-aggrandizement?) rises as the speaker goes on. “Look how remarkable I am!” the speaker seems to be saying. “I will do whatever it takes to show you how much I love you!” Yet verse 8 dramatically shifts the subject: ”He has told you … what is good; and what does the Lord require of you ” Suddenly, “I” is no longer the subject; God is. Micah speaks in the voice of a patient parent here, calling the people to stop being so preoccupied with themselves and their overactive imaginations, and listen. This provides an important clue in reconsidering the relationship between justice and sacrifice, or justice and worship. Micah does not reject all worship, but the wrong kind of worship, that which begins with ourselves, with our gifts and our goodness, rather than with God. Notice that this passage we have been considering comes after a summary of God’s saving acts to the people of Israel. God cries out, “O my people, what have I done to you? … I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam” (6:3,4). So often in the Hebrew scriptures, this exodus event of deliverance reveals most clearly who God is: one who leads the beloved people from darkness to light, from oppression to freedom. In other words, God has shown justice in caring for a people who were nothing and making them into God’s own people. It is in light of this proclamation of God’s mispat that the people, too, are called to “do justice.” In other words, it is only in light of verse 4 that we can rightly understand verses 6-8 and begin to make sense of the stark contrast between sacrifice and justice. The beginning point is God’s activity, God’s peculiar saving justice. The proclamation in verse 4, in fact, is liturgically cast, a ritual proclamation that is repeated many times throughout the Old Testament. What we see here is not a simple condemnation of

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    liturgical action, but a critique of liturgical action that begins in the wrong place. The good news of God’s saving justice is at the center of our right worship and our justicemaking endeavors. We are called to do justice out of knowledge of God’s saving justice which has been shown to us. This then provides an implicit critique not only of some liturgical practices, but of some justice-seeking. As in the case of Absalom, “justice” that emerges from our own desires alone is not truly justice. We do not motivate our own pursuit of justice; it comes from beyond ourselves, from God’s justice which has first come to us. In 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech that points to this connection between human justice and divine justice. In “The Power of Nonviolence,” he says,

    I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as a unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God. There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship. And this was one of the things that kept the people together, the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.1

    “Something in the universe that unfolds for justice.” Though King does not confine his remarks to a Christian audience, he is clearly speaking out of the long prophetic tradition of Isaiah and Micah which emphasizes this very point: that God, the power that created the universe, is on the side of justice. Human struggles for justice take their power from precisely this. God’s mispat is the ground for our own. But how do we know this justice, this divine mispat! This brings us back again to worship. At its heart, true worship of God proclaims to us this justice in vivid and life-changing ways. True worship emerges not from our own religious impulse, but from deep listening to God, to that power in the universe whose justice is deeper than our own, whose puzzling mercy pushes against the boundaries of our limited love. Worship need not fall into the traps that Micah describes in his indictment of sacrifice; instead, it can move us to “do justice” as called for in 6:8.

    How might liturgical actions form us for justice? In recent years, many books have been written on this very question.2 In this brief essay, inspired by Micah’s own discussion, I will suggest just four acts of worship that might shape people to “do mispat.” First,proclamation. Though proclamation in the narrow sense is not the first act of worship, proclamation broadly considered is the heart of what Christian worship means to be. That is to say, worship for Christians (as also for Jews) proclaims the good news of God’s saving acts. Micah does this in 6:4: “I brought you up from the land of Egypt ” Sometimes in our rush to enrich worship, we forget that this is the central point: to recount and make real the justice of God, which is different from our own. The Passover seder is a good example of such proclamation in a Jewish setting, retelling each year the story of God’s deliverance of the slaves from captivity

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    into the freedom of the promised land. Christians, too, have a story of deliverance at the heart of our identity: the Good Friday-Easter narrative of Jesus Christ, who came to lead people from darkness into light, from captivity to sin into the freedom of God’s reign. Micah’s instinct is instructive here: proclamation of God’s saving justice comes first. In song or reading, sermon or movement, compelling proclamation of God’s astonishing mispat is the first way that we might shape worshipers to do mispat of their own. Second, confession. In 6:5, Micah moves from proclamation of God’s deliverance to a listing of Israel’s unfaithful ways. So too in our worship, we need time to admit our failures to do justice, the ways in which we have worshiped false gods and neglected the needy all around us. The language of Micah 6:3 actually inspired an old Christian liturgy that, at its best, does precisely this. Since the medieval era, many Christian churches have included a litany on Good Friday called the “Solemn Reproaches of the Cross.” In words patterned after this verse in Micah, God speaks to the people, declaring the ways in which God has been faithful, while the people have been unfaithful. One contemporary version of the Reproaches begins this way:

    0 my people, O my church, What have I done to you, or in what have I offended you? Answer me. 1 led you forth from the land of Egypt And delivered you by the waters of baptism, But you have prepared a cross for your Savior.3

    The Solemn Reproaches do have a dark history linked to anti-semitism, which Christians today need to confess and which has led to revision of the older texts. But telling the truth about our shortcomings, whether in this or another form, is a practice we need to retain. Confessing our sin reminds us that the world is broken and still in need of God’s deliverance. In this way, we may be ever reminded of the aching need for us to do justice. Third,forgiveness. In the passage we are considering, forgiveness is not explicit, but it does come eventually in 7:18: “He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency.” But even in 6:8, forgiveness is implicit, because God is still speaking to the people. In spite of their faithlessness, God has not abandoned them, but continues to call them into new life of justice, kindness, and humility. So too in our worship, confession of sin is always followed by declaration of God’s forgiveness. This declaration sets us free from the bondage of guilt so that we may seek God’s justice, not out of fear, but out of joyful gratitude. Finally, and perhaps most strange to contemporary ears, the law. Few churches practice this today, but for centuries in some Reformed churches, the declaration of forgiveness was followed by a reading (or better, a singing) of the law. Including the law at this point in a worship service makes the clear point that those who have been forgiven and freed by God are now governed by the law of love. This is actually good news: by God’s grace, we have moved into a realm in which love of God and neighbor is a new possibility. To invite a congregation to sing the law (whether Decalogue or Jesus’ summary) is to follow Micah’s own pattern: knowing God’s justice, and having

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    confessed and been forgiven of our own injustice, we now hear what the Lord requires. Do justice. No longer a fearsome command to perform an impossible feat, the word comes now as grace. In these ways, worship and justice need not be portrayed as enemies, but as two terms that require each other. God’s justice is the originating point and the criterion of worship; worship proclaims this justice and forms us to go out and do justice in response.

    Notes 1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Power of Nonviolence” (June 4, 1957), found at http:// teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=l 131. I am grateful to Dr. Marcia Riggs for drawing this speech to my attention. 2 Examples include Liturgy and Justice: To Worship God in Spirit and in Truth, edited by Anne Y. Koester, Pastoral Liturgy Conference 2001 (Liturgical Press, 2002); Let Justice Sing: Hymnody and Justice, by Paul Westermeyer (Liturgical Press, 1998);and Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God, edited by E. Byron Anderson and Bruce Morrill (Pueblo Books, 1998). 3 Book of Common Worship, Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 288.

  • Preaching in a context of Christian-Muslim tensions

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    Preaching in a Context

    of Christian-Muslim Tensions

    John Kelsay

    Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

    Has there ever been a context when Christian-Muslim relations were not characterized by tension? Allowing for degrees, so that some contexts show more tension and others less, it seems the answer is “no.” In thinking about the task of preaching, it is worth considering why this is so. The reasons are complex and do not admit of straightforward distinctions between religious, political, or other causes. Christians and Muslims participate in communities whose basic narratives inscribe a universal vision. When the author of Ephesians wrote about the “one new humanity” by which previous distinctions between Jews and Gentiles had been “abolished” in Christ, or when contemporary Christians sing “In Christ There is No East or West,” the thought is one familiar, yet somehow disconcerting , to Muslims. Familiar, because Muhammad’s declaration “the foremost among you shall be the foremost in piety” also set aside racial and tribal divisions, so that anyone accepting the call for active submission to the guidance of God should regard other Muslims as brother or sister. This is somehow disconcerting, because the universal church rests its case on claims about the person and work of Jesus Christ. According to Islamic norms, these have been corrected by the Qur’an and the practice of Muhammad, the seal or last and greatest of the messengers sent by God. When it comes to Christian-Muslim relations, even the things we share contain seeds of division. Consider the following tale, which at first blush suggests possibilities for good relations. According to standard accounts, a small group of Muslims left Arabia early on in the history of the movement (about 615 CE.) They sought refuge in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Invited by the Negus—a kind of bishop-king—to explain themselves, these believers related stories of the hostility with which the citizens of Mecca (Muhammad’s home city) expressed hostility to the prophetic message. The Negus asked, “What does your prophet say?” and a member of the Muslim party recited the Sura or Chapter of Mary (Qur’an 19). The passage takes its title from verses 16-34, which relate the story of Jesus’ birth. Moved by the performance, the Negus threw his staff (the symbol of his authority) to the ground and declared, “By God, there is not so much separating you from us as the width of this stick!” The request for refuge was granted, and the believers lived under the protection of Abyssinia for a short period, after which they returned to Mecca. Anyone reading Qur’an 19 will have reason to wonder about this, however. For the verses following on the account of Jesus’ birth proclaim:

    A statement of the Truth about which they are in doubt: It would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that: when He decrees something, He says only “Be,” and it is. God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him: that is a straight path. But factions have differed among themselves. What suffering will come to those who obscure the truth when a dreadful Day arrives!

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    As Muslim exegetes have it, these lines correct the Christian “innovation” by which the man Jesus is identified by the title “son of God.” Perhaps we should ask just how wide was the Negus’ staff? In some contexts, the answer has been “very wide indeed.” By 616 or 617, the believers mentioned in the story returned to Mecca. The hostility of the residents became more pronounced, and by 622, Muhammad ordered the migration to Medina. From this base, the Muslims launched a religious, military, and political campaign that would ultimately unify Arabia under the banner of Islam. But at the high point of the struggle, the following verses were revealed:

    Fight those of the People of the Book who do not believe in God and the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice, until they pay the tribute and agree to submit. The Jews said, “Ezra is the son of God,” and the Christians said, “The Messiah is the son of God”: they said this with their own mouths, repeating what earlier disbelievers had said. May God confound them! How far astray they have been led ! They take their rabbis, their monks, and Christ, the son of Mary, as lords beside God. But they were commanded to serve only one God: there is no God but Him; He is far above whatever they set up as His partners! (Qur’an 9:29-31)

    It is worth noting that these verses from the “sura of the sword” feature prominently in the various declarations and treatises authored by Usama bin Ladin, Ayman alZawahiri , and other contemporary militants. Lest we think expressions of hostility come only from the Muslim side, consider the long history of Christian pronouncements against Muslims, from Urban IPs justification of the First Crusade in 1095 as a way of retaking holy lands from a “vile and despicable race, worshippers of demons” to the characterization of Muhammad as a “demon-possessed pedophile” in the Caner brothers’ Unveiling Islam (Kregel, 2002). The latter formed the basis for the Rev. Jerry Vines’ remarks to the Southern Baptist Convention in 2002, and certainly did little to help dissuade those convinced with Franklin Graham, Charles Colson, and other prominent evangelicals that Islam is an “evil and wicked” religion by which those involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington could only be viewed as heroes of faith. That said, the divide suggested by the Negus’ stick has not always seemed quite so wide. The story of the Muslims in Abyssinia suggests that the Christians there deemed it appropriate to provide sanctuary to a beleaguered community. No doubt, the recollections of this story provide the background to various sayings attributed to Muhammad in which Muslims are encouraged to “find friends among the Christians” when they must reach outside of their own community. In medieval Spain, we have records of extended collaboration between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars engaged in the translation and interpretation of the approximately 500,000 volumes collected in the Cordoba library during the 10th century. The “Arab renaissance” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought Christians and Muslims together in the service of revitalizing Arabic as a language of scholarship, journalism, and literature. Not least important in this regard is the fact that Lebanese Christian scholars such as Boutros al-Bustani (1819-1883) collaborated with American mis-

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    sionaries to translate the Bible into Modern Standard Arabic, as well as to found educational institutions recognized as a resource by both Christians and Muslims in the region. My own experience in 30 years of interactions with Muslims suggests that the issues presented by Christian-Muslim difference need not prevent useful exchange and can even provide occasions for collaboration that call forth something unexpected. When I left Columbia Seminary in May 1980 to begin graduate study, I found it interesting that the program in religious ethics at the University of Virginia encouraged students to take a “minor” in a tradition other than Christianity. I did not anticipate that I would find so gracious a sponsor for the study of Muslim ethics as Abdulaziz Sachedina, however. With the encouragement of this historian, himself a devout practitioner of the form of Shiism Muslims know as Ithnavashvari or “Twelver” Shiism (one subset of which is established as the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran), I took courses, studied Arabic, wrote a dissertation on the development of appeals to divine commands or revelation as a source for Muslim ethics, and collaborated on a short book outlining Muslim and Christian understandings of religious liberty. When I came to Florida State in 1987, it was Sachedina’s encouragement (along with that offered by other scholars) which led me to focus on the relationships between Christian and Muslim thinking about just war and jihad. That this always controversial topic would become a central aspect of scholarly and interreligious exchange is, I confess, a somewhat mixed blessing. To those who say that my topic has become exceptionally interesting, I often reply that I liked the subject better when it was less so. Even after 9/11 —certainly a period of strong tension—exchanges characterized by mutual respect are possible, and my own participation in the Malta Forum and other less formal settings provides one example.1 Now, as to preaching in the current context, what ought Christian pastors to say? I hope it is uncontroversial to begin by saying that the kind of polemics illustrated in statements by Vines, Graham, and others are not helpful. As even a cursory analysis of these pronouncements will show, the references are to a standard, select set of verses from the Qur’an and incidents from Muslim history, all without reference to contexts, Muslim arguments about interpretation, or relevance to our current situation. Reading these “reflections,” one is tempted to think they all draw from a common source—perhaps the book by the Caner brothers already mentioned. In any case, they do not show the kind of effort that conscientious approaches to preaching should employ. That Muslims engage in similar kinds of polemics is true, and an examination of leading twentieth century publicists from the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) to the South Asian Abuv 1 av la Mawdudi (d. 1979) will demonstrate an equally truncated engagement with Christian practice. Serious preaching ought not encourage such approaches . While it is important to know about them and to take their not inconsiderable influence into account, we should aim for something better. Specifically, Christian preaching should provide help for those struggling to understand the situation we are in, with the aim of reaching out to Muslims ready to make common cause. With respect to the former goal, we can begin by noting the variety of settings in which Christians and Muslims interact. Thus, we can distinguish (1) the historically Muslim regions like the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, in which Christians are a distinct minority; (2) areas in which both communities constitute long-suffering

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    minorities whose well-being depends largely on the view of governments that are officially “uncommitted” (say, in China); and (3) areas to which Muslims migrated for economic and political reasons during the period after World War II (thus, Western Europe and the U.S.). Each of these settings poses a particular set of issues. With respect to the U.S., for example, it is significant that the largest percentage of Muslims arrived as immigrants following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War (June, 1967) and that the standard set by U.S. policy resulted in a high proportion of those having professional skills (doctors, engineers, and the like). This means that the members of our congregations are most likely to know Muslims who are well-educated, relatively prosperous, and who provide important services to their communities. It also means that American Muslims have many reasons to hope that they and their children may enjoy the blessings of liberty associated with American society. While these Muslims have many complaints about U.S. policy in the historically Muslim regions, or with respect to the protection of minorities under duress, they are typically hopeful about their adopted—for younger Muslims, their native—country. To push this further, one should say that Muslims in the U.S. are likely to see the religious and political context provided by the First Amendment as a protection and an opportunity. The combinations of autocracy and militancy presented in the “old country” are not to be forgotten—here is one reason for the very high percentage of American Muslims who dissent from U.S. support of Israel and from various aspects of the war on terror. Despite a number of well-publicized examples of “home-grown” radicalism, the majority of Muslims in the U.S. remain hopeful. We should expect them to take their place in the pantheon of religious actors contributing to the American experiment. Our preaching, then, should try to distinguish various contexts in which Muslims and Christians interact, and insofar as our focus is on the United States, it is appropriate to speak about themes that encourage cooperation. Muslims and Christians in the U.S. share interests in social and political fairness; in developing ways to address issues in education, economics, and environmental policy; and in the attempt to encourage a foreign policy that combines realism with a sense of justice. Christian preaching should encourage themes that underwrite these interests, so that members of congregations are ready to seek common ground with their Muslim neighbors. Among the many possibilities, let me mention two. The theme of natural law and the framework provided by the just war tradition provide important and creative ways by which preaching may speak to the U.S. context. I know that many readers will think of these as old-fashioned or even outworn. In my judgment, though, natural law and just war are two of the most neglected aspects of Christian tradition. The reasons for this neglect are plain. With respect to natural law, the influence of Barth looms large. Here, the insistence that Christian ethics must construe “the right” with obedience to the command of the living God issued in a particular situation works against the regularities of judgment associated with natural law. More recent trends in theology and ethics stress that all human knowledge is constructed, and thus that appeals to a fixed or enduring “nature” of human beings run the risk of instantiating particular (and often oppressive) institutions or norms. As John Calvin had it, however, the idea of natural law provides a Christian way of talking about the persistence, even the universality of certain kinds of norms. These represent standards of propriety in every society we know: do not murder, do not

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    steal, do not bear false witness. Following a common trope, Calvin identified these “minimum standards for cooperation” with the Second Table of the Decalogue, that is, with those commandments having to do with relationships between human beings. As such, the natural law does not represent the full panoply of Christian morality. It does, however, suggest that Christians ought not be surprised to find Muslims ready to honor, defend, and apply basic standards of justice and equity. Indeed, we ought to expect this. Preaching on a text like Romans 2:14-16, meditating on the pronouncements of Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9, or reflecting on the meanings of the Decalogue provides an important message for our time. For such texts point to things that Christians and Muslims share. Interestingly, Islamic sources bear witness to a similar theme, in this case associated with al-fitra (“nature” or “natural morality”) and with al-aman (“the trust” by which human beings are constituted as viceregents of God). For Muslims and Christians alike, basic moral precepts are recognizable by all human beings. Reason (or in the parlance of the Qur’an, “reflection”) provides the means for this. To return to Barth, natural law does not represent the entirety of God’s specific commands. It does represent a starting point for Christian-Muslim cooperation, however. And Christians should be ready to build on this in conversations with their neighbors. Similarly with the just war framework. Recent denominational pronouncements and some theological writing suggest serious reservations about this old tradition, which had in fact enjoyed a remarkable revival among American and British theologians, philosophers, and military personnel during the latter half of the twentieth century. Particularly among ecumenical or “mainline” Protestant denominations, however, the situation was somewhat different. While no one quite wanted to commit to pacifism, no one was really comfortable with the notion of just war. Thus developed the late twentieth century emphasis on peacemaking or the “just peace” notion, envisioned as a way of saying that Christian preaching ought really to encourage modes of behavior designed to delimit the occasions when people might be tempted to think of military action as an apt way of dealing with conflict. The evidence suggests that 9/11 and its aftermath fostered a stronger and more determined emphasis on this trend. This is not the place for a full criticism of the peacemaking programs of the various Protestant denominations. I will suggest, though, that the lack of attention to just war thinking in Christian preaching ultimately constitutes a kind of neglect by which members of congregations are deprived of an important resource. Unless the standard position of the churches comes to be identified with pacifism, members of congregations need to hear about, rehearse, and argue in terms of the criteria by which Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and a host of others tried to adjudicate these questions: When is war justified? By whose decision? Who should fight? And how should war be conducted? For those earlier interpreters, discussion of just war often involved close attention to Romans 13 or to attempts to show that the Sermon on the Mount did not in fact rule out Christian participation in the military. In our day, one might be inclined toward the view that a full airing of the theme of God as warrior is necessary, so that preaching should point toward the way that the celebrations of God’s fighting for the people in Judges 4-5 and Exodus 15 are complemented by texts like Deuteronomy 20 (an early expression of the law of war), Amos 1-2 (where the Divine Judge deals with nations in terms of their war conduct), or Isaiah 9 and 11 (where the peaceable kingdom is actually brought about

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    by means of war). The Bible, in short, presents us with resources to talk about the full panoply of just war issues. Interestingly enough, this is also a discussion in which Muslims can join. The framework of ahkam al-jihad, “the judgments pertaining to armed struggle,” provides a set of criteria analogous to those of just war tradition.2 The just war framework, then, points to ways that Muslims and Christians can meet one another, as well as their Jewish and other neighbors, in deliberating about the pros and cons of U.S. and allied attempts to deal with issues raised by the conduct of al-Qavida and similar groups. To foster such discussion is no guarantee of agreement, of course. But preaching designed to encourage serious just war thinking can encourage healthy argument in the context of concerns common to citizenship, and that is no small contribution. Finally, a few words about religious difference—that is, with respect to the width of the Negus’ stick. In suggesting that preaching emphasize themes designed for Christians to engage Muslims on the plane of citizenship, I do not wish to deny important differences between these two traditions. The Muslim critique of the doctrine of the Trinity, the divine sonship of Christ Jesus, or the denial of Christ’s death on the cross all point to significant differences in the ways Christians and Muslims understand God’s way of dealing with human beings. I think it is possible for individuals or small groups of Christians and Muslims to address these issues and to make some headway—at least, in the sense of enlarging mutual self-understanding. I am not confident of such matters on any larger scale, however. The vocabularies by which Christians and Muslims speak of God are entrenched in scripture, in liturgical practice, and in the institutions of faith. These are difficult matters, and even if one approaches them with an exemplary combination of empathy and critical distance, it is not clear how far one will get or even precisely where one should go. It is important, though, to speak against the kinds of polemics mentioned previously in this essay. And one way to do this will involve an acknowledgement of those things Christians, Muslims—and also Jews—share. Walter Brueggemann’s Old Testament Theology (Augsburg, 1997) outlines an approach to Old Testament theology by which difference and commonality are taken into account. The texts are thus understood in terms of claims and counterclaims, of “testimony, dispute, and advocacy.” Taking Bruggemann’s insight and extending it, we might say the three monotheistic communities constitute a diverse set of witnesses to the one God. If each has reason to believe that its testimony is more faithful than the others, each also has reason to recognize the power of the others’ claims. In this case, Christians are those whose testimony is framed by that gospel referenced by Paul when he wrote: “I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation….” To begin from this point and then to find a way to include—not in the sense of full agreement, but in the sense of recognizing spiritual power—the testimony of Jews to the unity of a community able to say “a wandering Aramean was my father…” or to Muslims who “bear witness that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s prophet”—this is the challenge. In this sense, the challenge of Christian-Muslim relations, or more broadly of Christian relations to other religions, is to find ways to engage in argument that exhibits respect, even as it stands its ground. How to preach in a context of Christian-Muslim tensions? In this case as in others , Christian preaching must testify to and be consistent with the story by which God made the world, inclusive of human beings, and called it good, and by which God

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    perseveres in the attempt to bring human beings into relationship with God’s self, laying out the lines for human cooperation in the maintenance of social order even while preparing the way for Christ to come in the fullness of time and redeeming the world and thus bringing human beings to their destiny: to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.

    Notes 1 Those interested will find pertinent information at http://religion.fsu.edu/john_kelsay.html. 2 John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007), as well as materials at http://religion.fsu.edu/john_kelsay.html.

  • We need more love

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    We Need More Love

    1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

    Lillian Daniel

    First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

    How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. 1 Thessalonians 3:9-12

    Just so you know, I wrote the title to this sermon long before I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my extended family; so it is neither a reflection on how things went for us with my family in South Carolina, nor was it a prediction of how things might go. We actually had a wonderful time, but as we all know, you can’t take that sort of holiday experience for granted. This sermon title comes not from either the glory or the carnage of the Thanksgiving table, but from Paul’s letter to the early church. He wrote, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in your love for one another, and for all.” Not just increase, but abound. Don’t just have more love, but really overflow with it. Who should you love? Not just one another. Not just your church, your family, your friends. No. Abound in love for one another and for all. Everyone. It’s hard to love everyone, so let’s start with the low hanging fruit – the people we are closest to, the ones we already presumably love, the people who might have been sitting with you over Thanksgiving dinner this year – our friends and our families. Picture the holiday family gathering. Can you honestly say you love all the people there? Perhaps you loved them all before they got there, loved them in theory, back when they were all promising to bring one dish or another, before they showed up without the thing they said they’d bring. Perhaps you loved them before you found out that two were newly vegetarian, and one could eat no carbs, but no one told the cook. Perhaps you loved them before you realized how many of them there were. But once they all got there you began to wonder, “Who invited all these people?” Or perhaps there was just one short little moment when you wondered, “Why did I come all this way? If I were not related to them, would I be here with them?” So Paul reminded everyone, even the church, that we always need to work on increasing our love for one another. And not that increasing it is enough. We are to abound in love. And not that loving the people we know is enough. We need to love everybody. The world needs more love, and we are the only earthly suppliers of love God has to work with. There is a Norman Rockwell painting of a family gathered around the family Thanksgiving table, and the table is laden with all sorts of delicious things. The father leads the family in prayer, and all the children have their heads bowed reverently. But what are they really praying for, that perfect looking family? Out loud the father may

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    have been thanking God for the food, while one child may have been praying, “Oh please let me get to the sweet potatoes first,” while mother may have been praying that her husband would get through the meal without yelling at his son. The son may be praying for a stress-free meal and the chance to listen to the game on time. An auntie may be praying that her marriage improves, while her husband may be praying that it ends without too much drama. Underneath the veneer of holiday photos are complicated realities, deep desires, and real life. If you had a moment of tension over the holiday, you are not alone. You are like the Norman Rockwell family, with the picture they present to the world on the one hand and the simmering psychological realities that bubble underneath on the other. And if that’s family life, what about the life of the early church, where they weren’t even related, but worshiped together in people’s homes, really got to know each other like families? To them Paul says, “How can we thank God enough for you? Night and day we pray to see you face to face.” Now that Thanksgiving is over, are you praying for the next time you can be together face to face, or are you perhaps ready for a little break? Or perhaps both emotions at the same time. Today’s reading suggests that both of those things can be true at the same time. You can pray for and love one another and also recognize that it isn’t always easy. If love were easy, we wouldn’t have to work at it. Last Thanksgiving, we were not with any of our relatives. Last year was one of those years when some relatives gathered in smaller groups instead of as a large one, and our little nuclear unit in Glen Ellyn found itself with nowhere to go. Comparing notes with friends, we discovered they were in the same boat, with a matriarch who no longer wanted to pull everyone together, but no clear leader in the next generation ready to get the job done. So we got our two nuclear families together in Indianapolis and celebrated the day together as friends, both swearing it would be the most stressfree Thanksgiving ever, since nobody was related: no family dynamics. Well, we really did have a nice time, but what do you think happened? After a day or two in each other’s company under the same roof, our two unrelated families started having family dynamics with each other. After the turkey was put away and naps and walks had been taken, the rest of the early Thanksgiving evening stretched out in front of us, and we realized we had pretty much run out of conversation as well as the politeness of being with friends rather than family. Suddenly, there was the division of family dynamics. Suddenly there were two opposing groups, one who wanted to go out and see a movie, and one who didn’t. But the group that wanted to see a movie was divided about what movie to see. And the group that didn’t want to see a movie was divided between those who wanted no one to see a movie, because that’s not what you do on a holiday, and those who didn’t care if some people left for a movie, since they were ready for some introvert time anyway. Each of the two groups divided by movie were divided as to whether seeing two different movies was acceptable or if we really all needed to see the same one in order to make this a holiday. All these groups and there were only seven people involved. Family dynamics come up whether any relatives show up or not. People, put together for long periods of time over nothing but brown food. Any group will have tensions that take even the most love-focused person and frustrate their good intentions . Why? Because we all bring different expectations to the table. We all bring

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    different histories and different family stories, even when we’re in the same family. Love is not a feeling. It is hard work. Our culture tells us that love is a feeling, an emotion that we either feel or don’t feel. But not so for the followers of Jesus. When it comes to love, if we want to follow Jesus, we don’t get to say, “Sorry I’m just not feeling it.” Because in this spiritual tradition, with wisdom gained many thousands of years before the recent therapeutic age, love is not a feeling, but a practice. And before it’s a regular practice, it’s a decision , as in “I am going to do this. I am going to overflow, to abound in love.” That’s why Paul reminded us to do it, and reminds us still. He says we need to increase in our love because God knows just by looking at us we do not already have enough. And don’t just increase, he says, but abound. So how do you do that? There’s a clue in the reading that connects nicely to the holiday we just celebrated. Before talking to us about increasing our love for one another and for all, Paul models the way to get started. Do you remember the first thing he said in today’s reading? “How can we thank God enough for you? In return for all the joy we feel before God because of you?” Paul sets the stage for more love with one simple move – gratitude . That’s how you prepare to increase in love. First gratitude, for the person and the people you already know. So you begin by giving thanks for the people around the Thanksgiving table, those who were here this year, and those who were here in years past. After gratitude and love for the people you know, you’re just about getting ready for loving all the people you don’t. It sounds so simple. I find it very easy to be grateful for the people I have lost. When I am alone at the table, feeling lonely and far away from the people I love, I am very grateful, almost to the point of being maudlin. It’s a little harder to be grateful for people in the flesh, especially with those family dynamics. But that’s where it all starts. Our nearest and dearest, our family, or those closest friends who are our chosen family – that’s the farm team for the major leagues of loving everybody. We have to start there, in our family friendship farm teams, with gratitude. I heard a very wise and kind man tell a surprising story about his home life. Every night he would come home from work, say goodnight to his wife who was an early bird, and then look forward to a few hours alone, watching television, reading a book, and just winding down from the day. He was a night owl, his wife was an early bird, and the arrangement worked beautifully in the marriage. But as his little daughter grew up, she turned out to favor her dad in this regard. She was a night owl too. And so after his wife went to bed, his daughter would join him in the family room. Suddenly it was her hand on the remote and not his. “Go to bed,” he would tell her, which ceased working as she got older. If he got to pick out a show, now as a teenager, she was there spreading out her lap top, taking over the coffee table, listening to music on her headphones so loud that he could hear it too. To show his annoyance, he would abruptly turn off the television as if to demonstrate to her how difficult she had made it for him to enjoy his show. He would throw open his book dramatically, as if to say, “See what you have made me do? Read this book, when I really wanted to watch TV.” But clueless, she would then pick up the tossed aside remote and tune into her favorite show. “You’re staying up too late,” he barked. “Don’t you have homework?” “I’ve done it,” she said. It would be the same conversation night after night.

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    And finally, he said, “Never mind your homework. You need to be alert for school the next morning. Staying up late will set you back tomorrow.” “It doesn’t seem to be affecting you, Dad,” she said. “You hold down a successful job and stay up late every night. You don’t sleep much, but people talk about what a great guy you are. What makes you think you’re different?” “I am different, I’m an adult, and I’m the dad,” he said, thus shutting off all conversation. “You need sleep or your grades will slip, and you’ll get into trouble, and.. .you just need to get out of here and go to your room.” Tears filled the girls eyes. “I get good grades, Dad. I don’t fall asleep in class. I just don’t need much sleep. The truth is I’m a lot like you, and because of that, I actually look forward to our time together, and the only time I can get that is late at night. But clearly you don’t feel the same way. You just want to get me out of here.” And as she marched off, her shoulders shaking with tears, he realized to his surprise that she was right. He did want her out of there. He had treasured that time alone over the years. It was his time. He was a good man, well known for his kindness and compassion, but those late night hours were the only time he didn’t have to cater to other people. He stayed up all night considering his reaction to his daughter’s presence in the family room over the last year, as she was growing into her own personality, which in so many ways resembled his. She was a night owl. But at night, she did not reach into herself. She reached out to him. And then he stopped to take a moment for thanksgiving and gratitude. He gave thanks for his daughter, that as a teenager she wanted that time in the same room with him. He gave thanks that she had so many interests and prayed that all that multitasking that drove him crazy might serve her well some day. He gave thanks for his wife the early bird, and for the daughter who took after him, and he found his love increase, and even abound. The next morning he sat his daughter down and talked to her about being a night owl, and this time he did not focus on her grades, but upon his own childhood, what his average work day was like, the number of meetings and the difficult tone of them, and because he was thankful for her, he was honest and talked about the longing, all that it had created in him for just a little bit of space. As for his daughter, she listened. The next night she did not come to the family room, but stayed in her room, and her father’s heart ached with the pain of a great loss he had not known he would have ever missed. Nights went by, and he had all the time to himself that he needed, and he felt indescribably lonely instead. Finally, after a week, she came into the family room one night. He did not react outwardly, not wanting to overreact. So instead he watched her out of the corner of his eye, catching her reflection in the television set, listening to her flip the pages of her magazine and giving thanks for it, knowing that in just a few years this would be happening in some college dorm room far away. If you had asked him a week before if it was possible for him to love his daughter any more than he did, he would have said, “Impossible. I couldn’t possibly love her more than I do.” But out of a conflict and an argument, he went to gratitude, and against all odds, increased his love.

  • Gilligan as glutton

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    Gìllìgan as Glutton

    Mark Ramsey Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

    Editor’s Note: The JP asked Mark Ramsey to reflect briefly on his experience of preaching a series of sermons on the “Seven Deadly Sins” and to provide an example of one of the sermons. We hope you won’t be envious.

    The Seven Deadly Sins seem to be everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except in the church. A while back, Brad Pitt starred in a movie that featured a serial killer basing his attacks on gluttony, sloth, lust, wrath, pride, greed, and envy. A national travel magazine recently included an advertising supplement helpfully outlining the “Seven Deadly Sins Guide to Las Vegas.” A couple of years ago, Forbes Magazine gave us a ranking of “America’s Most Sinful Cities” that included rankings based on each of the seven deadly sins.1 Using statistics on consumer purchases and preferences, they were able, for example, to identify the “Top Ten Lustful U.S. Cities.” Congratulations Denver, San Antonio, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City?!), Boise, Washington D.C., Cincinnati, Columbus, and Baltimore. There seems to be a cottage industry that has grown up around connecting each of the seven deadly sins to the seven characters on the I960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. The interpretations shift, depending on which source you consult, but there does seem to be consensus that Gilligan is the glutton, Ginger represents lust, Mr. Howell embodies greed, Mrs. Howell is slothful, Mary Ann demonstrates envy, The Skipper is prone to wrath, and The Professor falls prey to pride. Seventy years ago, Gandhi tried to recast a form of “seven deadly sins” into seven things that will destroy us: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce (business) without morality (ethics), science without humanity, religion without sacrifice, and politics without principle. In March of 2008, the Vatican issued its own “seven modern social sins” in an attempt to update the formula. These included environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, obscene wealth, infliction of poverty, drug trafficking, morally debatable experiments , and violation of the fundamental rights of human nature. For all the work that others seem to invest in seeing the Seven Deadly Sins as represented in daily life, most protestant churches tend to be silent on the subject. Is it too Roman Catholic for reformed sensibilities? Perhaps, it just seems too out-dated a subject for serious conversation in church, even with the attempted updating both within and beyond the Christian tradition. There were whispered groans in one Presbyterian church when the pastor suggested the seven deadly sins as a sermon series and companion adult education series to begin the program year. What can we do with that? What anthems does the choir sing? And yet, as the series got underway, the topic of gluttony turned to issues of control, and the world food crisis brought forth articles that parishioners had read deposited in the pastor’s box. Prayer requests changed and focused in on the plight of those who live with food anxiety. Families suffering alongside a bulimic daughter started showing up in adult education. As this was happening in the fall of 2008 with

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    the economic crisis careening out of control, conversations about greed and pride took on greater depth, and scripture texts were brought into the conversation started by the series, but by no means brought to closure. A stroll through the narthex of the church after a Sunday focused—in pulpit and classroom—on lust brought forth the most interesting snippets of conversation. Things that are never spoken of in Presbyterian churches were being discussed in mixed company. Using the prism of the seven deadly sins, scriptural texts are offered to deepen the conversation. What does it mean to deal with gluttony in the context of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:2-21), but also the Christological hymn of Philippians 2? Can we go deeper into our own choices for living in the light of the lust that permeates the account of Bathsheba’s treatment by David (2 Samuel 11:1-15) and also Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount proclamation about adultery (Matthew 5:27-30)? Can we attempt a fresh discussion about greed in the midst of our own economic portfolio meltdowns by the light of the rich man who presented himself to Jesus who went away shocked and grieving (Mark 10:17-31), but also by David’ s full-throated thanksgiving and praise to God for God’s abundance (1 Chronicles 29:10-17)? Whatever the crisis and uncertainty of the moment, a crucial part of faithful living is to constantly develop the resources—within ourselves and in our communities of faith—to name our struggles and bring the light of the Gospel to shine on those challenges in ways that move us forward. The Seven Deadly Sins lay bare our idols of distraction, illusion, control, and isolation. Speaking then into the room when the people of God are gathered allows for freedom and for power to go up against gluttony, sloth, lust, wrath, pride, greed, and envy in whatever contemporary dressing they come to us—and seek together God’s deeper truth and hope.

    Mark 10:35-45 and Matthew 6:25-34 When Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, Maureen Dowd, his New York Times Op-Ed columnist colleague was quoted as saying: “Around here, we usually just compete for the ‘most emailed story of the week’ —but the Nobel Prize? How am I to compete with that? Not that I’m envious, of course,” she quickly added.”2 I have a friend whom I attend a baseball game with at least once a year. When I go to a baseball game, I try to get a ticket on the street, never paying more than face value. Once, when my friend and I were trying to get into a game in Los Angeles to see the Dodgers, I managed to get us tickets three rows behind the Dodger dugout. When we walked to our seats, I moved into our row, thrilled by the view. I’d never had tickets three rows from the field! My friend, however, kept walking, down to the first row, the one where you can see the players spit between innings.. .and he looked back at me and said, “I’ve always wanted to sit here—do you think we can sneak down here and sit so we can have better seats?” Sometimes we envy the things other people have: I raise this in so public a forum, but two of you—at least two of you—there may be more—but two of you (you know who you are) are actively leading me into temptation. The two of you have iPhones. I see you at meetings. All I see is your iPhone. All I can think about is your iPhone. I’m so…envious. Envy can come at us from all sorts of angles, but I think envy is heightened at least four times a year, when any of us receive that petri dish of envy—the quarterly college

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    alumni magazine. Every college alumni magazine I know has a section called “Class Notes.” In these pages, you can read about all your classmates and what they’ve been up to lately. It’s always interesting to me that these notes never say something like, “Jim reports he ‘ s had a hard time this past year. His marriage broke up, and he has been in rehab,” or, “Susan has been treated for depression over the last six months but is doing better now.”… No, that’s not how these work. This is the place for promotions, achievements, success, and fame to be on display. So, I read that Malcolm has just been promoted to CEO of his company that builds industrial elevators and is rehabbing a home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Or, Kerri is now the US Attorney in North Dakota and was just nominated for a seat on the Federal Court. It doesn’t matter that I don’t want to work with industrial elevators (though the house on the Eastern Shore sounds nice). It doesn’t matter than I’m not a lawyer and don’t want to live in North Dakota. All of a sudden, I read this and I feel… envy! Maybe it’s just that I remember them in college. They weren’t that special, were they? So now I make the snap judgment that somehow they are unworthy of the fame and fortune? Even though I am perfectly happy with the course of life—maybe it’s just the enticement of a road not taken? Maybe it is that home on the Eastern Shore? I don’t know.. .but just like that—I am swimming in envy ! Although we might want to regard envy as a mere human foible, there is a good reason to take it more seriously. For one thing, it’s one of the few deadly sins that has a direct counterpart in the Ten Commandments — “Do not covet.” Murder, adultery, and theft are things that we do. Envy is, like many of the other Seven, something we feel. That doesn’t lessen the seriousness, though: to think or feel is to do it, Jesus said, when he equated lustful thoughts with adulterous acts. Matters of the heart matter. Our dispositions and inclinations are, at least to Jesus, as significant as our actions.3 (By the way, I can see that some of these seven might be fun for a while. A good day of gluttony, or a little lust—it might fun for a moment. But envy? Who enjoys envy—even for a minute. It’s miserable.) But it goes deeper than that. Contrary to what some might think, Christians regard desire as good. We believe that God has created humanity with restless hearts, imbuing us with an insatiable desire that can only be satisfied and find rest in the arms of the God who created us. Desire is good. Envy, however, is poisoned desire. It’ s what happens when, failing to alight on the true object who is the source of our deepest desire—God—we consume everything else that we can get our hands on. Things,people, relationships, achievement—we’ll try anything as a substitute for God. Often, the most well-lit shopping aisle for such substitutes is whatever you have. Like our text this morning. Closeness to Jesus? Looks good. “Hey Jesus, how about one of us on your right hand, one of us on your left? Great seats—right next to the dugout, er, next to the Son of God.” That looks like a great perk, ignoring the cost of discipleship, the call to serve. That’s the thing with envy—it never has the right tone or the proper perspective on whatever it is going after. It’s always a distortion that promises more than it ever delivers .Certainly, there is an element of twisted competition in envy. It takes two to envy. H.L. Menken once said that, in America, contentment is knowing that you make $10 a week more than your brother-in-law. When Jesus told us to “love your enemies,” or even to “love your neighbor,” his teaching was nowhere more against our inclination. Envy makes even our good

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    friends into our competitors, our enemies, at least in our own minds. If I didn’t have a neighbor—someone whom I can observe in proximity and lay alongside my life with their iPhones and homes on the Eastern Shore—then I would have no object of envy. To be human is to be in community and to be in community is to be in hierarchy, a pecking order in which one constantly positions and repositions oneself in relationship to others. Some have found it surprising that hate is not listed among the Seven Deadly Sins. Hate seems so much more robust and vigorous than envy. Think of envy, in its fully developed form, as a sort of refined, subtle form of hate. Envy is less obviously sinful than crude, public hate, but it can be no less deadly. Twisted desire, jealousy, competition, scorekeeping, hate—all help us here, but I think the word that comes closest to fully describing envy is sadness. The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas looks upon envy as a sort of sorrow ,4 saying, “The object both of charity and of Envy is our neighbor’s good, but by contrary movements, since charity rejoices in our neighbor’s good, while Envy grieves over it.” Aquinas described envy as that sin of constantly wishing that things were other than they are with your life. Is there a better word than sad to describe going through every day wishing your life was other, saying “if only.. .if only.. .if only….” If that is not utter sadness, I don’t know what it is. But that really describes all seven deadly sins. These are not “trap door” sins—you get caught bursting with pride and you ‘re sent down a chute to eternal punishment. It’ s not that you display some wrath and you get zapped by God, or a slothful day finds you left in the dust by God. There is such sadness in the heart of God when we get caught in lust or gluttony or greed.. .because we get so lost, so far from happiness, so far from who we were created, in JOY, to be. Gluttony.. Lust.. Sloth—all lead us into distraction and have us chasing an illusion of what truly satisfies us, but never really does. Greed.. Pride.. .Wrath.. .and yes, envy—deceive us that we can control our life. Each leads us to obliterate community. If we are going to score our life by these sins and how they get us off track, we have no hope of joy. But of course, that is not the only option. Because the God who created us has made it abundantly clear that God does not keep score. Paul’s “score-keeping” had it this way:

    Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

    Love never ends, but more than that, God’s love saves us. It does not leave us in our sad state of jockeying for position and vainly trying to play every angle. It lifts us out of all our distraction and all our illusion and all our fake control and all our isolation that destroys community, and it finds us and brings us home and knows us through and through and yes, loves us without condition. In his book, A Whole New Life,5 Reynolds Price describes how, right after he

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    learned that he had a terrible form of spinal cancer, he began to dream each night. The third night was worst, but that dream finally stated its point with brute candor.

    I was walking the seventy miles from Durham to Warren County, North Carolina—to find my birthplace When I found the house and searched the rooms, it proved abandoned and sadly empty. But once I was outside again in the dark, a small young black-haired man appeared like a cringing demon, writhing around me in a sinuous dance; then saying “Now you must learn the bat dance.” I suddenly knew that his bat dance was death, death from cancer. Still dreaming, I summoned my strength to refuse him. Weeks later I’d preserve that third nightmare in a poem:

    I will walk all night. I will not die of concern. Nothing will make me dance in that dark. I will walk all night. I will not die of concern. Nothing will make me dance in that dark.

    Reynolds Price did not play on the pride of his reputation to prevail. He did not shrink in sloth and give up on his life. And he did not simmer in envy—looking in veiled hate at everyone around him who didn’t have cancer, everyone he met who wasn’t trapped in a wheelchair. He was not trapped and he was not envious. He was God’s, and God’s love was everything. You are not trapped in the darkness, the trap, the sadness of the Seven Deadly Sins. You never have to be trapped in distraction or illusion or control or isolation. At the very end of Reynolds Price’s account of his illness, his pain, his near death, he expressed his amazement that he had not abandoned God, and God had not abandoned him. He expressed his astonishment that even cancer, even confinement in a wheelchair, even a near death sentence of prognosis, still found him living in hope. He concluded the book this way: “I sleep long nights with few hard dreams, and now I’ve outlived both my parents. Even my handwriting looks very little like the script of the man I was (before my illness). Cranky as it is, it’s taller, more legible, with more air and stride. It comes down the arm of a grateful man.” Exactly. Set free from the traps of greed and envy and all the rest, all God desires is our gratitude. Our flat out wonder and awe and thanksgiving that, with God, through God, in God, we are free and we are whole, and we are loved.

    And so, to all the sins we call “deadly,” we say,

    We will walk all night, We will not die of concern. Nothing will make us dance in that dark.

    Notes lhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/02/14/c^^ 2 Maureen Dowd, New York Times blog, October 15,2008. 3 William Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian, (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2000), 49ff. 4 Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, II, 2, Q.36. 5 Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing, (New York: Scribners Press, 1995).