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Preaching during ordinary time, year B

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Preaching During Ordinary Time, Year Β

Stephen R. Montgomery and L. Casey Thompson

Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee

Marilynne Robinson was recently asked whether she had ever had a religious awakening. “No,” she responded. “A mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.” 1

Though the “ordinary” in “ordinary time” comes from the word “ordinal” which means “numbered,” ordinary time might also provide numinous moments as the preacher leads the congregation through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who succeed and fail, fail and succeed in their quest to be faithful to the covenantal God of Israel. No one failed as deeply or succeeded as highly as David, whose life is opened up to readers like no others in all of scripture, save for perhaps Moses. Whereas the narratives concerning Moses move in a different, more or less singular direction, the stories involving David take us in every direction possible. We see him pursued and pursuing, in God’s favor and out, in the hearts of his people and out, triumphant and downcast. And no individual in Israel’s history has as many roles—as giant-slayer, shepherd, musician, manipulator of men and women, loyal friend and subject, lover, warrior, dancer and merry-maker, father, brother, son, religious enthusiast, and king! What are we to make of this complex portrayal, and where do we begin? The Sundays in Ordinary Time of Year Β give the preacher the opportunity to dig deep into the fertile soil of David’s life, generating new possibilities for our lives and the lives of our parishioners. Preaching a series on David also addresses some of the leading concerns about preaching from the lectionary. It re-establishes the ancient liturgical practice of “lectio continuo, ” or continuous reading, enabling the preacher to tell the story of faith in a much deeper and broader way than is often the custom, especially during the Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter seasons. In addition, it gives us an opportunity to understand how Jesus Christ and the early church were shaped by the God they already knew in Hebrew scriptures. To neglect the Old Testament, as lectionary preachers often do, is to neglect a vast sweep of the history of the people of God,people who succeed and fail in their relationship with God and with one another. We have many people in our pews (and admittedly in our pulpits!) who ascribe to a modern day Marcionism, believing in a God of wrath and judgment in the Hebrew Scriptures and a God of love and mercy in the New Testament. A series on David would go a long way toward dispelling that heresy and opening up a conversation about the ways we struggle today to be at one with God’s hopes for the world. Thus we turn to David in his rise to power, his managing power, and his death and violence.

Rise to Power The story begins with a sad, poignant transition. In six chapters, Saul has moved from being described as “not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than Saul; from his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people” (I Samuel 9:2), to the moment when Samuel who had talked Saul into being king, had to tell him he

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was through: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you” (I Samuel 15:27-28). Samuel sets out his task of finding a new king, and he thinks he has found him in Eliab, the eldest and tallest of the sons of Jesse of Bethlehem. Samuel looked at Eliab and thought to himself, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before me, ah, that is, before the Lord.” But deep down (and somehow we just knew this was going to happen), the Lord said to Samuel, “Beauty is only skin deep, Samuel. Don’t fall for appearances as you did with Saul. Eliab might look like a king, but I am looking at the inward person. And I do not see a king there, not in his heart.” Samuel had each of Jesse’s sons parade before him, flex their muscles, swing their swords, whatever they had kings-to-be do. Each time Yahweh said, “Nope,” and each time they got smaller and younger, less kingly in appearance. Samuel was almost afraid to ask because he was afraid of the answer he would get. “Any others?” “Well, there is one, but he is out watching the sheep. And he’s the youngest.” In comes the runt of the family, a mere shepherd boy, which, at that time was no recommendation. Shepherds were on the low rung socially and culturally, so much so that their word was inadmissible in court. We have heard the expression “How odd of God/ to choose the Jews.” But just take a look at the Jews God chooses to choose! God seems to have a definite bias for the young, the small, the least, the apparently insignificant. When Saul was named king, he came from the smallest tribe. There was Abel over Cain, Jacob over Esau, Rachel over Leah, Joseph over all the older brothers, the prodigal son over the elder brother. It must be God’s way of reminding us that God is in control of human destiny, that what happens is at God’s beck and call and not ours, that history is, after all, God’s story and not ours. This story, like so many others, stands as a beacon in a dark world that is lost in the shadows of boastful self-importance. We think we have some foreknowledge of how the story will turn out. Even Samuel wonders about the whole vetting process. But he looks David over, and though being warned not to judge by outward appearances, finds that David is rather handsome once the dirt and grime are wiped off. After all, he does have nice eyes! Yahweh gives the word, and David is anointed king-to-be. There is one troubling question left on the table as we turn to the rest of David’s story. Did God really know what was in David’s heart? Did God know of the lust that led to adultery and an arranged murder? Did God see the vengeful bloodthirstiness that led David to slaughter not only soldiers but women and children? Or was God simply taken in by the beauty of David’s music and poetry, by the innocence of a teen-aged boy looking after sheep? We would like to suggest that God did indeed see everything in David’s heart, just as God sees the good and evil, the light and darkness of our hearts. God sees the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And God still chooses us, pulls for us, hoping against all evidence that we will do the right thing. Further, God still loves us when the selfish outweighs the selfless and when the shadows block the light with a love that will not let us go. God’s inverting, subverting ways are evident in our next text with David and Goliath. Most sermons see David as analogous to anyone who ever had to face insurmountable odds, the archetypical Jungian symbol for everyone who had to find her holy grail. David is the little guy, against Goliath, representing every power that has ever imposed itself on us. But that is not what this story is about.

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For forty days the battle line had been drawn. The soldiers of Saul, the Israelites, were dug in on the east. The Philistine warriors were dug in on the west. Between them was the deserted valley floor of Elah. Imagine the scene: The morning birds begin to stir. The guard is changed. Soldiers stretch and stoop over their fires. Suddenly, from the Philistine front comes sound of activity. Boulders begin to slide down from the hillside and tumble along the valley floor. Brush crackles. Armor clangs. From the shroud of shadows—through the morning mist, a figure appears. A blood-curdling laugh echoes through the valley. Then they see him—Goliath of Gath—a giant of a man, unlike any man seen before. His 220 pounds of armor catch the first darting rays of the sun. News spreads like a brush fire, leaping through the ranks and dancing across the countryside to the shepherd tending his flock, the farmer in the field, the craftsperson at a bench. We see King Saul frantically contacting his defense ministry, wiring his scientists: “Get busy. Come up with an anti-Goliath weapon.” It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see those fear-stricken Israelites doing all sorts of strange things, perhaps even changing the popular “Philistine fries” to “liberty fries.” It’ s an old story, but a modern story. After 9/11, we were told there was no other way. We were told through graphs and satellite shots and charts that Goliath is our protector, and the only way to defeat “their” Goliath was to produce a more powerful Goliath of our own, with a more powerful roar. By and large, as a nation we accepted it. By and large, much of the nation has come to see its underlying fallacy. As President Obama stated in his inaugural speech only a few months ago, “Our power alone cannot protect us.” The Philistines were ready for, and hoping for, an anti-Goliath, a carbon-copy of force to come charging out. Goliath wasn’t prepared for a boy. He didn’t know how to handle the unexpected. It is God’s inverting, subverting ways of the world. In another time there was another giant, whose name was Imperial Rome. There were those who were ready to overthrow the giant, forming guerilla bands in the hills. But when God acted, when God spoke, it was in a whimper—through a baby boy. And when he grew up and talked of putting up the sword, the baby whimper couldn’t compete with Rome’s roar, so they rejected him. Nailed him to a cross. But God subverted that as well. The question before us is “Has God’s strategy changed?” Do we have a sneaking suspicion, through all these biblical clues, that God might want us to use our imagination and do the opposite of what is expected? Has God’s method changed since God took the form of a backwoods carpenter and said, “A new commandment I give you—that you are to love one another as I have loved you.” Who can say whom God will or will not anoint to walk out on the plains of Elah in 2009? Who can say what form the New David will take? If history is a witness, we can be sure that it will not be another Goliath. The lectionary then turns to the transition from Saul to David as king. A messenger clearly believes he is bringing good news to David about Saul’s death. Hadn’t Saul’s madness and envy kept David on the run for years? Now David is free to be the one who he was meant to be. He should be preparing for his inaugural parade. But he is unable to do so. He aches with loss and does not turn his face away from any of it. He gathers up his pain and grief and fashions them into a lament of such shattering beauty that the walls of God’s house still reverberate with its passion centuries later. Thus David’s first act as king, his first mandate is that they learn to express their grief so they may know how to speak of their hurt. He commands that all the people

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learn how to sing the song of lament. He bears witness to the truth expressed in the somber Vietnam War Memorial on the mall in Washington D .C. : “There is no healing without acknowledging the wound, no healing without telling the pain we feel.” Recent presidents have had their finest hours when they have led the nation as mourners-in-chief. Ronald Reagan following the Challenger explosion, Bill Clinton following the Oklahoma City bombing, and George W. Bush in the days following 9/ 11 all seemed to understand that only by the open declaration of all we have lost and all that we grieve after will we be able to seek a new beginning. We pastors are often tempted to offer the false comfort which only quiets our parishioners’ hurt. Far from being the David of sweet songs of Israel, here David is standing atop the mountain shrieking his pain and loss to God. Others simply would not understand. “Don’t tell it to the people of Gath or the Philistines,” he instructs. They will only mock us saying, “Where is your God?” and suppose that such lamenting is a sign of our broken faith. Our answer to the question is, “Right here in worship, here among the suffering of the earth, which itself is groaning in travail, here and wherever people cry out in vain.”

Managing Power The next three Sundays in ordinary time center on the story of David’s early monarchy, a time before his ownership of the throne is challenged, either through his own unfaithfulness (2 Samuel 11:1-12:13a) or through his sons’ posturing (2 Samuel 13 ff). The stories in this abbreviated cycle, though, are not bereft of the question of the authority of the throne; they simply cast it on a more fundamental level. Taken together, the three lections remind the hearer that the Lord is the power that stands behind David—and takes pains to show that the Lord is not a puppet for David’s manipulation. The first passage establishes the parameters of the kingship. David makes a covenant with the people before the Lord, continuing his nearly magical ascension to power, “becoming greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts was with him (2 Samuel 5:10).” David is received as king, but the text insists that the kingship is enveloped by the providence of God. The second and most interesting text in the cycle concerns the ark’s movement from its place in Abinadab ‘ s home, a place the ark had resided ever since the Philistines had abandoned it on the highway to Beth-shemesh out of fear of its disruptive power, to a more exalted place in David’s kingdom. Unfortunately, the lectionary excises the most interesting detail in the passage (in the interest of comfortable theology, one supposes): the death of Uzzah, a death which occurs as he reaches out to steady the ark over a rough stretch of road. David reacts to the death in fear, perhaps recognizing that he can not manage the power of God as easily as he managed his ascension to the throne, and—like a Philistine—abandons the ark in the house of Obed-edom for three months. The final passage in this arc (2 Samuel 7:1 -14a) is a much ballyhooed one, marking the moment when the Lord establishes an unconditional covenant with David’s house and promises a familial relationship with David’s sons. In the context of our reading, however, the first half of the passage addresses the truth that God’s power resides behind David’ s and subsequently can not be managed by David for political purposes:

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Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel form Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?” Now you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took you from the pasture…. (2 Samuel 7:5b-8a)

As always, the initiative belongs to the Lord. It is God who will determine where God moves and how God acts in the world. David will become the beneficiary of God’s activity in the world, but just like Uzzah and the Philistines, he will not be able to direct God’s activity in the world. This series of three readings over the summer provides an opportunity to raise questions with our congregations about how we try to manage the power of God (perhaps from a fear of God’s disruptive grace) rather than rightly seeing how our own power emanates from it when we align ourselves with God’s intentions.

The Power of Violent Texts The final set of readings in the David cycle focuses on the legacy of violence that arises from David’s departure from God’s intentions in the incident with Bathsheba. Each of the final four Sundays of the cycle end in death, and in the case of the judgment, Nathan delivers to David the final scripture on which we will focus, the death of a child (2 Samuel ll:26-12:13a). Such a scripture leaves us with a common quandary. We believe scripture is a living word from God. We also believe God is loving. Then we read, “The LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill” (2 Samuel 12:15), and we wonder how to reconcile these things: a loving God and a living scripture. What are we to make of stories where little children die for the sins of the parent? Or to enlarge the question to the whole of scripture, where first-born children die because Pharaoh is hard-hearted? We have standard answers to pacify us for another week: God is loving, but scripture reflects the violent, historical conditions of its writers. Or scripture reflects the rhetorical needs of the story-tellers. For instance, if Pharaoh—the primary symbol in the Old Testament for evil government—is going to initiate his story by drowning the boy children in Egypt, you should expect Moses—the boy who survived—to end it, and the death of Pharaoh’s son and the drowning of his army will be required to do so. Similarly, if David is going to kill Uriah to cover up Bathsheba’s pregnancy, then the child will die when it becomes public knowledge that David is ¿he father. With the allusion to Egypt in the background, the story is rhetorically clear: If you’re a servant of God who thinks he can get away with acting like Pharaoh, then you’ve got another plague coming. That answer doesn’t sit well in our congregations, so we give other answers: God has changed, or our understanding of God has changed. We don’t believe that God would pursue violence against a child. Would Jesus do that? No? Since we claim him as the definitive answer to our questions about God, we may find some peace here, but only if we’ll be quiet and not ask the next question: What about the violence of the cross? What about the Son of Man coming in glory to judge the earth, the violence that

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underwrites the hope of the New Testament? Or what about the rest of the text? If we can’t rely on the revelation of God here, can we rely on it when John writes, “For God so loved the world”? How can we know that John’s claim is not also conditioned by history and agenda? So much violence in a covenant of grace is a problem for us—both as preachers and as hearers. None of the answers really mollify us. The church’s defacto answer has been to dismiss the text altogether as a relic of a day gone by when political aggression could be couched in the language of faith (irony intended). The lectionary follows the same impulse, excising the most troubling verses from this cycle (12:13b15 ), relieving us all of the duty of dealing with the violence. The problem is, we do ourselves violence when we take that option. We remove the unfiltered word of God from our lives, packing it away with the good china and the silver place settings, and it becomes something that we don’t use very often, which injures us, because we no longer hear the word of God, however conditioned it may be. We settle for the watered-down version we call preaching. The dismissal does injury to us because whatever trouble we have reading scripture ; it has no trouble reading us at all. When we remember that, it’s easy to see how this frightening text can be a text to us as well. All we have to do is look around and see what any good therapist knows—the sins of the parent are visited on the child. David’ s sins of violence mean not only that the sword will never depart from his house (2 Samuel 12:10), but that it will rise against him from his own house, his son Absalom bringing the sword to him and dying as a result (2 Samuel 15 ff), fulfilling Nathan’s judgment. His sins of violence mean that at least two of his sons will die at the hand of another son. We don’t need God to punish the child; we’re quite capable of doing it ourselves. The sins aren’t just sins of violence either. When we tell ourselves that we aren’t beautiful enough or smart enough or creative enough, we teach our children that God doesn’t love us just as we are. When we drink too much or take drugs or hit our family, we teach our children habits of dependency and conditional love. When we buy and buy and buy, we teach them the sin of consumption, the notion that things make us happy. We can’t escape sin. It’s all around us. It’s why we speak of total depravity in our tradition. But what can we do with such pervasive sin? The church has always turned to scripture. It’s one reason we can’t forsake it as easily as we are wont. Just like David confronted with Nathan, we have to listen to a word from God and stick with it through the places that make us recoil. I suspect David listens to it because he knows God is in it. Similarly, these scriptures are so important to us, not simply because they were written by our spiritual ancestors, not simply because they give witness to God’s redemptive relationship with them, but because when we read scripture, God meets us in it. It’s in the reading and re-reading of the text, it’s in the arguing about it, it’s in our engagement with it that we meet God most clearly. The text is a location as much as it is anything else. God meets us in the reading—and sometimes, when we’re there, God whispers to us, “Nathan didn’t get that quite right. He was lost in his own sins of violence. He confused them with mine. I didn’t kill the child. I would never kill a child.” It’s in our exploration of scripture that we discover the God who makes sense out of scripture. I know that’s a circular argument, but what a circle once we’re inside. David’ s child dies. God touches him—it’s actually the word forplague—right out of Exodus Just in case we hadn’t connected David to Pharaoh yet. Then there’s another

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child by Bathsheba, Solomon, who inherits the sins of his father in the more traditional way. The biblical writer doesn’t drag his feet in alerting us either. Directly after noting “The kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon,” he writes, “Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh, king of Egypt; he took Pharaoh’s daughter” ( 1 Kings 3:1). Of course, the lectionary during our final Sunday will start right after that verse. But there’s another interesting legacy in this story as well. Scripture informs us that David and Bathsheba had three more sons: Shimea, Shobab and Nathan. It’s a curious act to name your child after your accuser. Every time David called to him or lifted him in his arms or told him a story, he must have been reminded of Nathan leveling a judgment against him. It’s curious, but it also suggests that he must have discovered something in that hard Word of God delivered to him by Nathan—something he never wanted to forget, some element of grace that lingered afterward. In the entirety of the Old Testament, we never hear of the son Nathan again—only in these three parallel verses that list David’s sons (2 Samuel 5:14,1 Chronicles 3:5, 14:4). He disappears, never to speak to his legacy of repentance or grace. He pops up in a surprising place, though. Luke mentions him in the genealogy that traces Jesus back to David (Luke 3:31). Perhaps just as Solomon inherited his father’s sins, whatever revelation David had about God’s grace that caused him to name his son Nathan seems to be a revelation that passed down too—all the way to Christ. This is why we read the hard texts, the ones that make us recoil, because when we meet grace in them, it reverberates in us for generations.

Note

1 Marilynne Robinson, The Christian Century, January 13,2009,8.

December 31, 2009
Casualties of destiny

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Casualties of Destiny*

Genesis 21:8-21

Sam Wells

Duke University Chapel, Durham, North Carolina

Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the present Duke of Edinburgh, was the last Viceroy of India under the British Raj. He had many dealings with Mahatma Gandhi and saw the power of Gandhi’s ascetic lifestyle and commitment to simplicity despite his demanding political role. In a moment of exasperation, Mountbatten is reputed to have said, “You’d never guess how many people it takes and how much it costs to keep that man in poverty.” You could say the same about Abraham. Over the past two Sundays we’ve been looking at the grand super highway of Abraham’s story – his call from God and the blessing that came with it, and then the promise of a son for Sarah. Today we notice the soil turned up to make that super highway, the cost of keeping that man in his blessing, the number of people it takes to keep him as a great patriarch. Today we see Abraham as the car driver who says, “I never have road accidents, but I see a good many in my rear view mirror.” Today we read Hagar’s story. Reading Hagar’s story is like looking over the minority report of the Old Testament. Reading Hagar’s story is like peeling an onion. Each layer you take off makes you cry harder. I’m going to start with the bare bones of her story and then peel down two or three more layers to see what we find. God promised Abraham he would be the father of a great nation. But his wife Sarah was old and childless. We peel off the first layer of the onion when we see that Sarah and Abraham didn’t know a way for God’s promise to be fulfilled so they took matters into their own hands. Sarah suggested Abraham sleep with his Egyptian slave girl Hagar and get an heir that way. Hagar conceived and straightaway began to look down on her mistress Sarah. Sarah complained to Abraham, Abraham said “Do what you like,” so Sarah was cruel to Hagar that Hagar ran away. An angel of the Lord met Hagar in the wilderness and told her to return and submit to Sarah and look forward to having a great many descendants. Hagar called the Lord Elroi, or the “God of Seeing,” and she had a son named Ishmael. Later Sarah had a son Isaac, but Sarah still demanded Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out. God backed Sarah up but also promised that Ishmael would become the father of a great nation. Abraham packed Hagar off to the wilderness with meagre provisions, which duly ran out; Hagar placed her son under a bush and wept to watch him die. Feel the tears take effect when you hear Hagar say, “Don’t let me look on the death of the child.” But God heard the boy’s distress and called to Hagar, and she saw a well of water. Ishmael grew up in the wilderness, and Hagar eventually went and found a wife for him from Egypt. That’s the story of Hagar. Now let’s look at the story a little more closely and peel off another layer of the onion. Hagar’s story is Israel’s story. She’s a slave, just as the children of Israel later became slaves under the Pharaoh. Just as Israel became a threat to the Pharaoh when she grew in number, Hagar becomes a threat when she has a son. Just as Israel ran away

* This sermon was preached on June 22> 2008.

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from bondage in Egypt, so Hagar runs away from the cruelty of her mistress. And just as Moses met God in the wilderness, so Hagar meets God in the wilderness. Just as God promises Abraham that Israel will become a great nation, so God tells Hagar that Ishmael will also be a great nation. Hagar’s story is Israel’s story – but there’s a crucial difference. When God tells Hagar she will have many descendants, the prophecy is not accompanied by any promise or any blessing. It’s just a stark foretelling. There’s no guarantee that God will be on Hagar’s side. If the first definitive moment in Israel’s story was the exodus, then the second definitive moment is the exile. Just as Hagar is like Israel in running away from slavery and having her own exodus, so later she’s like Israel in being thrown into exile. Like Israel, Hagar knows both exodus and exile. And just as it is for Israel, exile for Hagar is an agonizing and purifying time. She and her son survive and adapt and meet God there too, just as Israel did in Babylon. And yet, again, God seems not to be on Hagar’s side. As one local biblical scholar puts it, Hagar “experiences exodus without liberation, revelation without salvation, wilderness without covenant, wanderings without land, promise without fulfilment, and unmerited exile without return” (Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror Philadelphia: Fortress 28). But it’s not just in exodus and exile that Hagar mirrors Israel’s story. Genesis 21 and Genesis 22 sit side by side with one another. They’re obviously meant to be read together. In the second story God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him on Mount Moriah. At the last minute God intervenes and provides a ram instead. In Genesis 21, our passage this morning, God allows Abraham to follow Sarah’s wishes and cast Hagar and her son out into the wilderness, where Ishmael is on the point of death when God intervenes and provides water. Over and over again we are being told that Hagar’s story is Israel’s story. And yet there’s this constant irony and paradox that Hagar is the person steamrollered to make Israel’s story possible. It’s as if Israel looked into a puddle and saw reflected back the face of Hagar. It’s time to take another layer off the onion and prepare to cry a little more. The story of Hagar and Sarah is the story of Arab and Jew. Possibly the most distressing line in the whole story comes when Sarah sees her son Isaac and Hagar’s son Ishmael playing together, and she can’t bear it. If ever there were a description of the sins of the parents being visited on the children, surely this is it. Isaac and Ishmael are set at odds against one another because Sarah couldn’t abide any comparison or comradeship between her son and Hagar’s. But again at this point the interpretation of the story is soaked in irony. The force behind the establishment of the State of Israel is that the Jews of history have felt less like Sarah and more like Hagar. It is because they’ve been thrown into slavery, subjected to cruelty, forced to flee and frequently cast out that they came to long for a home to call their own. It is because in the middle of the last century they sat powerless, like Hagar, watching their offspring die, that they came to see a homeland as an unmitigated necessity and its preservation as an absolute good that continues to justify a number of things that are less than good. And yet the sense of grievance in the Muslim world today arises because so much of the Muslim world perceives that the mantle of Abraham has passed to America. Rightly or wrongly the Muslim world does not see itself as the Abraham about to cast out the Hagar that is the State of Israel. Instead the Muslim world sees itself as the Hagar, ill-used and cast aside by the feckless Abraham that it regards as the United States, aided, agitated, and goaded by the jealous Sarah that is the State of Israel. Yet

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again this story comes back to haunt the self-styled children of destiny. Much of the Muslim world says, “America doesn’t have any road accidents – but we are the casualties America sees in its rear view mirror.” Muslims tend to identify with Hagar, seeing America as Abraham and Israel as Sarah. Sure, Hagar wound up Sarah something rotten, but Hagar had far the worst of the deal. And the tragedy is that the children of Hagar and the children of Sarah don’t get to play very much together. If they did, they might forget their parents don’t get on. The paradox of the Middle East is that both sides think they’re Hagar. What are we to do about this disturbing story, this story that shakes us out of any simple notions of God’s call, God’s promises, and God’s faithfulness, and leaves us crying as if we had been peeling an onion? This story is an education in human complexity. No one comes out of it terribly well. We feel sorry for Sarah, dragged half way across the Middle East in pursuit of a destiny revealed to her husband, but never properly to her. I’m sure there are a good number of people among us this morning who know what that feels like. Sarah is childless , and that for many people is an agonizing condition. But when Sarah uses her slave woman for her own purposes and then blames the slave woman for the consequences of what were in fact her mistress’ decisions, we lose sympathy with her. We feel very sorry for Hagar, but be careful before we turn this into a goodies and baddies story. Note that it was when she humiliated Sarah that Hagar’s fortunes took a downturn. Some of us may sympathize with Abraham, wringing his hands as the women in his life outmanoeuvre him. Others may regard him as weak and lacking authority and any sense of justice. As for God, it’s not clear whether God has it in for Hagar or simply allows Abraham and Sarah to face the consequences of their own lack of faith. Who among us hasn’ t doubted God’s promises? Who among us hasn’ t turned our head from injustice and simply wanted not to look? Who among us hasn’t said “Yessss” in a vindictive way when “Yessss” really meant getting one up on someone who has often been mean or cruel to us? Who among us hasn’t blamed God for situations we really got ourselves into? So to read this story is to realize that the story of salvation is not a simple story of progress from wilderness to destiny. It’s a whole lot more human than that. Every character in the story is deeply flawed -just like you and me. Even the description of God the story offers is pretty uncomfortable. It’s very common to see Genesis 22, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac, as a troubling story, because it seems to portray a God who wants distressing things from us. But it could be that this story from Genesis 21 is an even more distressing story, because it seems to portray a God who not only lets people suffer, but actually prefers some people to others. In our desire to celebrate Abraham, it would be very easy to miss the troubling attitude of God to Hagar and our own tendency to identify with Sarah, the one who bought her freedom at terrible cost to another child of God. Why then is this story in the Bible? If the story of Abraham was a simple march to destiny, you’d think this story would have been left out. If it really is the winners who write the history, why would they bother to waste time on the losers, especially the losers they treated so badly? Maybe those who looked back on Israel’s history realized who Hagar really was. That’s why the story notes that she’s the first person in scripture to be visited by an angel and the only person in scripture to give God a name – Elroi, the Seeing God.

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She’s the only woman to receive God’s promise of descendants. She is the first woman to weep over a dying child. So she’s a pretty special woman in many significant ways. But we still have to struggle with why God seems to reject her. And for Christians, the fact that God seems to reject her has to be the key to this story. Think about it. This is a person who was at the heart of God’s covenant. This is a person who embodied Israel’s exodus and Israel’s exile. This is a person whose suffering seemed to be required if Israel was to live. Yet this is a person whose suffering was exacerbated and even brought about by the character flaws in those who were God’s chosen people. This was a person who was cast out, and in her moment of deepest agony, wondered why her God, her God, had forsaken her. This was a person who was despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief. Sound familiar? This is why the story of Hagar is in the Bible. Because her story, the story of exodus and exile and rejection by woman and man and even God, is the story of Jesus. For Christians, the story is in the Bible to make sure we remember that Jesus looks more like Hagar than he does like Abraham. For Christians, the story of Hagar means that there can be no freedom, no good news, no salvation, no gospel, that’s won by treading down and expelling and abusing and exploiting Hagar. But there’s not an ounce of sentimentality in this story. At the very beginning, we’re told that Hagar is no angel. The point is not that Jesus identified with the honest but browbeaten oppressed peoples of the earth. The point is that Jesus is to be found among those who may well have contributed to their own downfall, but are, in all likelihood, more sinned against than sinning, and either way are to be found today wandering, weeping, scorned and rejected. It’s a complicated story with intense feelings, laced with cruelty, betrayal, terror and despair. It’s complicated, but in the light of the gospel, it’s maybe actually quite simple. We’ve a pretty good sense of which kinds of people in which kinds of places read this story and instinctively identify not with Sarah, not with Abraham, but with Hagar. You may have come to the Chapel this morning feeling it was hard to see Jesus, hard to feel close to him, hard to know he was truly alive. We’ve just read a story in which one person seems to have to suffer so that God’s people may flourish. We all know people who are on the underside of life, on the underside of history, who find themselves in car wrecks in the rear view mirror of destiny. You may be sitting here feeling like you’re looking for Jesus. Maybe, in meeting Hagar, we just found out where to find him.

December 31, 2009
Creation and resurrection

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Creation and Resurrection

Holmes Rolston, III

Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado

If I were to find myself resurrected after death, I might be surprised: “A miracle!” But I would be less surprised than I have already been by a miracle that I know has happened. “Oh? What’s that?” ‘That I have been created in the first place. That’s the really big miracle, and my continuing existence after death, however surprising, would be less miraculous.” I often have this sort of conversation with my secular, scientific friends when asked about resurrection. They are almost always taken aback. The story from science, I continue, is of a universe created from some fluctuation in a quantum vacuum, exploding into a huge cosmos, now thirteen billion years old. In that huge cosmos, life emerges on planet Earth, so far the only known planet with life, to generate billions of species over three and a half billion years,. Among those species, one, and only one, Homo sapiens, has enough cognitive powers to marvel over this creation and to wonder whether there is resurrection. So here I am, made of quarks, generated from Stardust, and worried about heaven to come. Our creation is the first staggering fact; life renewed after death would be continuing miracle, but, just that: continuing miracle. My friends puzzle over my claim. “Well, I hadn’ t thought of it like that. You could be right. I agree that creation, or (they may prefer to say) nature is surprising. Still, science leads us to think that nature is all there is. Resurrection is supernatural, and science doesn’t allow us to believe in anything supernatural.” I here explore this further. Let me be clear about my argument. I make the case that, contrary to this seemingly scientific (or “scientistic”) claim that science shuts out any possibility of resurrection, contemporary science leaves open such possibility. What we know from science about creation is compatible with faith in resurrection. I say nothing about “proof.” The word “proof,” many now think, belongs in the realm of mathematics. It doubtfully belongs even in natural science, where the most scientists can get is a well corroborated theory, supported by considerable evidence, coherent, and consistent with other theories. The better word is “plausible.” So my argument is that nothing we know about “creation” (or “nature” if you prefer) makes resurrection implausible. I do claim some theological ancestry. Recalling Ezekiel and the resurrection of the dry bones, Irenaeus remarks: “Surely it is much more difficult and incredible, from non-existent bones, and nerves, and veins, and the rest of man’s organization, to bring it about that all this should be, and to make man an animated and rational creature, than to reintegrate again that which had been created and then afterward decomposed into earth.”1 Tertullian agrees: “On this principle, you may be quite sure that the restoration of the flesh is easier than its first formation.”2 Resurrection, if true, is miracle. The classic evidence is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians must pay careful attention to the evidence.3 That faith does go beyond science. But as background to such faith, those who preach the resurrection

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may take some comfort in signals of transcendence that can already be detected in creation.

(I) The Universe: Matter and Energy There is creativity at the primordial big bang, which launches ongoing creativity in continuing expansion, at a critical rate. If the expansion rate of the universe had been a little faster or slower, then the universe would already have recollapsed or the galaxies and stars would not have formed. The various heavier elements (carbon, oxygen, sulphur, nitrogen, silicon, all of the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) are forged stellar furnaces in proportions that make later planets and life possible. If the scale of the universe were much reduced (to galaxy size for instance), there would not have been enough time for stars to form and generate these elements. John Barrow, a mathematical cosmologist, surveys the universe: “Many of its most striking features—its vast size and huge age, the loneliness and darkness of space— are all necessary conditions for there to be intelligent observers like ourselves.”4 John Wheeler, one of the most famous physicists since Einstein, has made a famous claim, enigmatically epitomized in his aphorism ‘Htfrom bit.” (The world of objects, “its,” roots fundamentally in “bits,” information units, a term borrowed from computer memories.) “It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation,… in short that all physical things are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”5 “The whole show is wired up together.” “Will we someday understand time and space and all the other features that distinguish physics—and existence itself—as … a self-synthesized information system?”6 In another metaphor, continuing the idea of a self-synthesized information system, the universe is sometimes described as a computer. The “computational universe” is programmed, as it were, to start simple and generate complexity, in the course of which it generates intelligent output, including life and mind.7 If the universe is a machine, it is still more fundamentally a system tending toward generating information. In the last half century, cosmologists have found dramatic interrelationships between astronomical and atomic scales that connect to make the universe “userfriendly .” These discoveries are commonly gathered under the name “the anthropic principle.” Cosmologists Bernard J. Can* and Martin J. Rees conclude: “The possibility of life as we know it evolving in the universe depends on the value of a few basic physical phenomena—and is remarkably sensitive to their numerical values.” They find it “remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life.”8 Paul Davies, a cosmologist, claims that we hit “the cosmic jackpot,” a universe “just right for life.”9 How the various physical processes are “fine-tuned to such stunning accuracy is surely one of the great mysteries of cosmology.” “Extraordinary physical coincidences and apparently accidental cooperation …offer compelling evidence that something is ‘going on.’…A hidden principle seems to be at work.”10 For example, the rate of expansion of space in the universe depends on the cosmological constant, usually symbolized by the Greek letter lambda, which is quite small (nearly zero, but not zero). This minute constant, expressed in natural units, is less than 10120. If written as an ordinary decimal this would be: o.oooooœoœoœoœoœ^

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0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why it is so tiny. By some accounts, the expected value today is 1060 to 10120 higher than its tiny life-permitting value. Martin Rees, prominent British astronomer, comments: “The cosmic number lambda—describing the weakest force in nature, as well as the most mysterious—seems to control the universe’s expansion and its eventual fate….Our existence requires that lambda should not have been too large.”12 Change slightly the strengths of any of the binding forces that hold the world together, change critical particle masses and charges, and the stars would burn too quickly or too slowly, or atoms and molecules (including water, carbon, and oxygen) or amino acids (building blocks of life) would not form or remain stable. The charges on the light electron and on the vastly more massive proton are exactly equal numerically. A fractional difference and there would have been nothing. John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk calculate that “small changes in the electric charge of the electron would block any kind of chemistry.”13 In this universe at least, these forces, and the particle masses and charges involved, have to be about what they are if matter is to become more complex, a prerequisite for anything still more complex developing. A good planet is hard to find, and Earth is something of an anomaly, so far as we yet know. On Earth, complexity increases again, by (so to speak) many more orders of magnitude. Most planets, even though they contain suitable elements, will not be in a habitable temperature zone. Located at a felicitous distance from the sun, Earth has liquid water, atmosphere, a suitable mix of elements, compounds, minerals, and an ample supply of energy. “It appears that Earth got it just right,” conclude Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee.13 So one of the surprises of contemporary physics is that the human person is composed of Stardust, fossil Stardust! Stephen M. Barr, a theoretical particle physicist, comments: Physicists “cannot get around the fact that our universe is a special kind of place—indeed, doubly special.”14 Roger Penrose, a cosmologist, concludes that ours is “an extraordinarily special Big Bang.”15 Martin Rees concludes: “We should surely probe deeper, and ask why a unique recipe for the physical world should permit consequences as interesting as those we see around us.”16 The start up looks like a set up.

(2) The Earth: Life Nature on Earth has spun quite a story, going from zero through several billion species. M. J. Benton concludes: “Analysis of the fossil record of microbes, algae, fungi, protists, plants, and animals shows that the diversity of both marine and continental life increased exponentially since the end of the Precambrian.”17 Andrew H. Knoll celebrates “Earth’s immense evolutionary epic”: “The scientific account of life’s long history abounds in both narrative verve and mystery.”18 In the astrophysical universe, there were two metaphysical fundamentals: matter and energy. Einstein reduced these two to one: matter-energy. The biologists also claim two metaphysical fundamentals: matter-energy and information. The latter is radically novel. There appears proactive information about how to compose, maintain , communicate, and elaborate vital structures and processes. This is information about directed use, coded in the DNA, which is not present in the previous physicochemical results of the big bang.

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The critical difference is the information breakthrough with resulting capacity for agency, for doing something. Something can be discovered, learned, conserved, reproduced on Earth, but not on the moon. These achievements are, if you like, fully natural—they are not unnatural; they do not violate nature. But they also are novel achievements of “know-how,” of agentive power. Something higher is reached, something “super” to the precedents, something superimposed, superintending, supervening on what went before. Biologists need to be alert to this. George C. Williams, a theoretical biologist, is explicit: “Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter….The gene is a package of information.”19 James A. Shapiro, an evolutionary geneticist, concludes : “Thus, just as the genome has come to be seen as a highly sophisticated information storage system, its evolution has become a matter of highly sophisticated information processing.”20 A genome conserves a form of life, but a genome is equally a search program. Despite the sophistication of the genome as a search program, contemporary biologists are divided across a spectrum whether this creative evolutionary history is entirely contingent or quite probable, even inevitable. At one end, famously, Jacques Monod, Nobel prize-winner, insists: “Chance alone is at the source of every innovation , of all creation in the biosphere.” Evolutionary history is “the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random.”21 But Christian De Duve, also a Nobel prize-winning biologist, concludes: “Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. There is hardly any room for “lucky accidents” in the gradual, multistep process whereby life originated….I view this universe [as]… made in such a way as to generate life and mind, bound to give birth to thinking beings.”22 Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard paleontologist, argued for forty years that evolutionary natural history was quite contingent. “Almost every interesting event of life’s history falls into the realm of contingency.”23 “We are the accidental result of an unplanned process.”24 Life evolves by stumbling around. But again, there is radical disagreement. One of the more philosophically remarkable happenings in contemporary paleontology is the way in which Simon Conway Morris, eminent Cambridge University paleontologist who did the detailed work on the fossil animals in the Burgess Shale which Gould uses, draws conclusions that are the “exact reverse.”25 We almost get slapped in the face with what radically different metaphysical frameworks eminent biologists can read into, or out of, the same evolutionary facts. Conway Morris thinks he can discern “the inevitable and pre-ordained trajectories of evolution.” “Life… is full of inherencies.” “Life shows a kind of homing instinct… given enough time, the inevitable must happen.” “Something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability, and our existence also reaffirms our one-ness with the rest of Creation.”26 Many classical biologists have believed that there is some tendency toward increased complexity across the millennia of natural history and that this is some sort of advance. William Day, a biologist, concludes that “as we arrange the sequences of evolution’s advance, we discover an unsettling implication”: “Each step

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is an evolutionary curve; all steps together outline an accelerating advance for all biological evolution….We are in the middle of something momentous taking place.”27 Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, finds himself amazed at life, at agency: “It is utterly remarkable that agency has arisen in the universe—systems that are able to act on their own behalf; systems that modify the universe on their own behalf. Out of agency comes value and meaning.” “Life is valuable on its own, a wonder of emergence, evolution and creativity. Reality is truly stunning.”27 Momentous in this evolutionary natural history is the appearance of neurons, brains, with the emergence of consciousness. The appearance of sentience is the appearance of caring, when the organism is united with or torn from its loves. The earthen story is not merely of goings on, but of “going concerns.” The evolutionary story could be titled, “The Evolution of Caring.”

(3) Human Mind: Cognitive Spirit Edward O. Wilson remarks of human brain evolution: “No organ in the history of life has grown faster.”29 Steve Dorus and a team of neurogeneticists conclude: “Human evolution is characterized by a dramatic increase in brain size and complexity .”30 J. Craig Venter and more than two hundred geneticist co-authors call the human brain “a massive singularity.”31 Bruce Lahn, a neurogeneticist, puts it pointedly: “Human evolution is, in fact, a privileged process….To accomplish so much in so little evolutionary time—a few million years—requires a selection process that is perhaps categorically different from the typical processes of acquiring new biological traits… .It required a level of selection that is unprecedented….Humans occupy a unique position in the tree of life.”32 Some trans-genetic threshold seems to have been crossed. The human brain is of such complexity that descriptive numbers are astronomical and difficult to fathom. A typical estimate is 1012 neurons, each with several thousand synapses (possibly tens of thousands). Each neuron can “talk” to many others. The postsynaptic membrane contains over a thousand different proteins in the signal receiving surface. “The most molecularly complex structure known [in the human body] is the postsynaptic side of the synapse,” according to Seth Grant, a neuroscientist.33 The result is a mental combinatorial explosion. The human brain is capable of forming thoughts numbering something in the range of io70000000000 thoughts, a number that dwarfs the number of atoms in the visible universe ( 1080).34 On a cosmic scale, humans are minuscule atoms, but on a complexity scale, humans have “hyperimmense” possibilities in mental complexity.35 In our hundred and fifty pounds of protoplasm, in our three-pound brain, is more operational organization than in the whole of the Andromeda galaxy. Human beings have ideational uniqueness that makes cumulative transmissible culture possible. Acquired knowledge and behavior is learned and transmitted from person to person, by one generation teaching another. Ideas pass from mind to mind, in large part through the medium of language. The human transition into culture is exponential, non-linear, reaching extraordinary epistemic powers. The determinants of animal and plant behavior are never anthropological, political, economic, technological , scientific, philosophical, ethical, or religious. The nature and origins of language is proving, according to some experts in the field, “the hardest problem in science.”36 When knowledge becomes “ideational,” these “ideas” make it possible to conceptualize and care about what is not present to

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felt experience. Humans can produce arguments about ideals in the face of the real. The linguistic ideational uniqueness involves complex use of symbols. Ian Tattersall concludes: “We human beings are indeed mysterious animals. We are linked to the living world, but we are sharply distinguished by our cognitive powers, and much of our behavior is conditioned by abstract and symbolic concerns.”37 Molecules, trillions of them, spin round in this astronomically complex webwork and generate the unified, centrally focussed experience of mind. This is a process for which we can as yet scarcely imagine a theory. Life starts up, and, as we already recognized, on many of its trajectories, it smarts up. Blaise Pascal’s “thought” at the start of the Enlightenment is still true: “But, if a universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.”38 Spirited persons are the ultimate marvel. We humans are at once “spirited selves,” enjoying our incarnation in flesh and blood, empowered for survival by our brain/ minds, defending our personal selves, and yet transcending ourselves and our local concerns. Homo sapiens is the only part of the world free to orient itself with a view of the whole. We are not free from either the worlds of nature or culture, but free in those environments. That makes us, if you like, free spirits; it also makes us selftranscending spirits. We alone can wonder where we are, who we are, and what we ought to do. A frequent way of reading the history of science is the displacing of humans from central focus. Earth is a lonely planet, lost out there in the stars; humans are latecomers on Earth, arriving in the last few seconds of geological and astronomical time. We are cosmic dwarfs, trivial on the cosmic scale. Copernicus dealt a cosmological blow: humans do not live at the center of the universe. Darwin struck an evolutionary blow: humans are not divine but animals. Watson and Crick struck a molecular biology blow: humans are nothing but electronic molecules in motion on atomic scales. Freud struck a psychological blow, the most humiliating of all: we persons are not masters of our own minds. But with a gestalt switch, one can read the same natural history to find cosmic genius in humans. In astronomical nature and micronature, at both ends of the spectrum of size, nature lacks the complexity that it demonstrates at the mesolevels, found in our native ranges on Earth. Perhaps we humans are cosmic dwarfs; perhaps we are molecular giants. But there is no denying our mid-scale complexity. We human beings do not live at the range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but we may well live at the range of the infinitely complex. Terrence Deacon concludes: “Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the world, because only one evolved the ability to do so.”39 The natural forces, thrusting up the myriad species, produced one that, so to speak, reached escape velocity, transcending the merely natural with cares superior to anything previously natural. A complement of this eternal mystery is the possibility for better and worse caring, for noble and for misplaced caring, for good and evil. The embodied story is the human legacy of waking up to good and evil (as in Genesis 1-2), or the dreams of hope for the future (as with visions of the kingdom of

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God). This, as much as logic and love, may be the differentia of the human genius. The generation of such caring is as revealing as anything else we know about natural history. The fact of the matter is that evolution has generated ideals in caring. The singularities, if we may use a theological word, might also be “revealing” not simply about human spirit, but about divine spirit, about “Presence.” Science gives us three principal data points: matter-energy, life, and mind. The first is universal, the second is rare, and the third is single and we are it. Is there a subtending field, a deeper source? One conclusion is inescapable: what is “in our heads” is as startling as anything else yet known in the universe. We will be left wondering if this is a key, at cosmological and metaphysical levels, to what is going on “over our heads.” Are we detecting Mind in, with, and under it all? We humans are spirited presence. Are we an icon of deeper Presence, Spirit suffusing the universe story? My secular scientific colleagues will reply again that even if science does not give answers, we should still be naturalistic. Nature proves richer, more fertile, brooding, mysterious, than was recognized before. Such nature is a supercharged nature, but still nature. There is no Supernature, but nature is super. But Christians may want still deeper explanations: a Transcendence in which this self-transcending nature is embedded, a Ground of all Being. Supercharged nature signals TranscendentPresence. There are forces at work that transcend the physical, the biological, the cultural. These spiritual forces sway the future because they have for millennia been breaking through and infusing what is going on. This detects from our present vantage a fourth dimension (Spirit) when three dimensions (matter, life, mind) are already incontestably evident and the fourth is secretly and impressively also at work. Almost anything can happen in a world in which what we see around us has actually managed to happen. The creation has never yet proved simpler or less mysterious than we thought. We wonder if there is a “Logos” in, with, and under the logic of such nature. Maybe our presence is embraced by another Presence. To have faith in resurrection is not, in this view, to be naïve, but rather to be realistic.

Notes

1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.3.2. In Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), vol. 1, p. 529. 2. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, 11. In Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), 553. 3. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 4. John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 113. 5. John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296. 6. John A. Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation: Exploring the Limits of Computers (Reading, Mass: Perseus Books, 1999), 316,321. 7. Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 8. Bernard J. Carr and Martin J. Rees, “The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World,” Nature 278 (12 April, 1979):605-612. 9. Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 10. P. C. W. Davies, The Accidental Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 90,110.

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11. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 98-99. 12. John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk, “The Structure of the Early Universe,” Scientific American 242(no, 4, April, 1980), 128. 13. Peter D. Ward, Peter D., and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Copernicus; Springer-Verlag, 2000), 265. 14. Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 156. 15. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 726. 16. Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 163. 17. M. J. Benton, “Diversification and Extinction in the History of Life,” Science 268 (7 April, 1995):5258 . 18. Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), xi. 19. George C. Williams, quoted in John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 43. 20. James A. Shapiro. “Genome System Architecture and Natural Genetic Engineering,” in Laura F. Landweber and Erik Winfree, eds., Evolution as Computation (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998), 10. 21. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Random House, 1972), 112,138. 22. Christian de Duve, Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth (New York: Basic Books, 1995), xv, xviii. 23. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 290. 24. Stephen Jay Gould, “Extemporaneous Comments on Evolutionary Hope and Realities,” in Charles L. Hamrum, ed., Darwin’s Legacy, Nobel Conference XVIII (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 101-102. 25. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 283. 26. Conway Morris, 24, 8, 20, xv-xvi. ι 27. William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life* s Beginning, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 257-258. 28. Stuart A. Kauffman, “Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 42(2007):903-914. 29. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1978), 87. 30. Steve Dorus, “Accelerated Evolution of Nervous System Genes in the Origin of Homo sapiens,” Cell 119 (2004): 1027. 31. J. Craig Venter, et al, 2001. “The Sequence of the Human Genome,” Science 291 (16 February, 2001): 1347-1348. 32. Bruce Lahn, The University of Chicago Chronicle 24 (no. 7, January 6, 2005): 1, 5. 33. Seth Grant, quoted in Elizabeth Pennisi, “Brain Evolution on the Far Side,” Science 314(13 October, 2006):244-245. 34. Owen Flannagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 35. Alwyn Scott, Stairway to the Mind: The Controversial New Science of Consciousness (New York: Copernicus; Springer-Verlag, 1995), 81. 36. Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby, “Language Evolution: The Hardest Problem in Science?” Christiansen and Kirby, eds., Language Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press), 1-15. 37. Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 3. 38. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées [1670] (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), # 347, p. 97). 39. Terence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W.Norton, 1997), 21.

December 31, 2009
Belonging

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Belonging

Psalm 30:1-8; Luke 11:1-13

Mark Ramsey Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

Several years ago, a family was being interviewed on 60 Minutes. There was a religiously devout mother in her thirties, a somewhat older and painfully shy father, and their ten-year-old daughter bound to a wheelchair by spina bifida. Every single year of their child’s life, this family made the pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, a place where physical healing is said to occur. The interviewer, Ed Bradley, was giving the family a hard time for being so gullible . At one point he turned to the little girl and asked, “When you pray, what do you pray for? ” She replied, “I pray that my father won’t be so shy. It makes him terribly lonely.” Well, that stopped Bradley for a moment, but then he pressed on—questioning the family’s priorities and wisdom, saying to the mother that they spend thousands of dollars every year going to Lourdes and still they have had no miracle. But looking at her loving daughter, the mother answered, “Oh, Mr. Bradley, don’t you get it? We already have our miracle.”1 When you pray, what do you pray for? How do you pray? If you pray, what are you looking for? What do you expect, when you pray? In the 60 Minutes interview Ed Bradley—and probably we—were sharing a fixed set of expectations: that the girl would be able to walk or there would be no “miracle.” As one commentator observed of this scene: “What was missed was the miracle of a daughter’s growing love – “I pray for my father.” He missed the miracle of a family held together in faith. He missed the miracle of joy growing in soil that should not, by all rights, sustain joy. “God does not work in the world in ways we expect, because God’s mercy breaks the bounds of our narrow imaginations.”2 Expectations and blessings. Miracles and faith. Narrow imaginations and holy mystery. The disciples struggled with these same tensions. Finally, as they were going around with Jesus, it got to be too much for them to bear any longer. They had watched Jesus act and heal and teach and preach and move about among the people. And they watched him as he prayed. Finally, they asked him (adding a little peer pressure for good measure): “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” Rarely, if ever, is Jesus asked to teach them something so specific. More important , rarely does Jesus respond by saying: “Do it like this….” Jesus isn’t big on operating instructions. Jesus was, if you will, the Ikea of his time: You want to assemble this complex thing? Here’s a half sheet of abstract drawings. I’m sure you’ll do fine. There are so many times when Jesus is asked—begged—for an equation, for a formula. Time and time again, he re-sists. But not here. “Pray like this….” And no wonder! Is God a God of mystery or the loving presence, ready to meet our needs? Do we ask God on behalf of others, or can we ask for ourselves, or should we ask at all? Does God answer prayer? How does God answer prayer? Will we know if God answers prayer? What is “off limits” in praying to God? “Pray like this….” Of course, as with so many times with Jesus, this “formula” is

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not exactly what it seems.

“Our Father—most tender, intimate one of love and care— —in heaven—holy is your name.”

Which is it? The reachable, accessible, tender parent—or the one who is in heaven, which is decidedly not where we are? We want answers to our questions, and Jesus seems to launch us into more mystery—into even deeper paradox. The word “paradox” comes from two Greek words—para and doxa—meaning “beyond” and “opinion.” It points to a reality that goes beyond our typical, simple, linear thought. Nineteenth-century Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard taught that when thought is driven to its limits, when we attempt to discover what thought cannot rationally comprehend, we are left with the absurd, which can be expressed only in paradox and is the road to faith. A late Archbishop of Canterbury said that the doors of the church ought never to be so low that we must leave our heads outside when we enter. This doesn’t mean that faith is necessarily a reasonable matter. Sometimes our minds cannot comprehend what is happening. This same archbishop once preached a sermon on the end of the world. Following the service, a woman greeted him at the door and said, “Your Grace, I so much enjoyed that sermon,” to which he responded, “But Madam, you weren’t supposed to enjoy it.”3 There is mystery and paradox at the heart of faith. And far from “solving” that for us with this prayer, Jesus seems to embrace it and move us deeper into the mystery of experiencing God. Frankly, I think “mystery” is something we think we’ll like, but secretly despise. We want the equation. We think we need the formula. But Jesus seems to be reminding us that there is great danger in reducing God—or at least our contemplation of God— to manageable size. We seem to want God presented in a neat, packaged way: squared at the corners, neatly folded, everything doable—or never even imagined— everything careful and “verified,” everything “possible,” no stretching of the mind, no surplus of meaning. It’s almost as if we yearn to talk about God as if we’ve been on the tour and walked all around God, taking pictures.4 Jesus knew this was our yearning, our false hope, and Jesus says, “Pray like this….” Far from reducing God to manageable size, Jesus offered paradox, and expansive contemplation, and mystery. That, of course, is not our only problem with the Lord’s Prayer. It is the Lord’s Prayer. It’s everywhere. We pray it in church every Sunday. We pray it at weddings and funerals. It’s uttered in prisons, in hospitals, and by football teams in Texas. This is also a paradox—it’s a two-sided proposition. I think we can agree that something recited in a mindlessly rote way Sunday after Sunday, occasion after occasion—oh, here comes the Lord’s Prayer again—is empty and depleting. At the same time, nothing is more nurturing of our souls, nothing can be more empowering of faith—than habit. While it is helpful to adjust our focus from time to time to keep our imagination alive, we can’t neglect the discipline of habit. In Eugene Peterson’s The Message, he casts our words from Luke’s version of the prayer:

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2 So (Jesus) said, “When you pray, say,

Father, Reveal who you are. Set the world right. 3 Keep us alive with three square meals.

4 Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.

Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.”5

No matter how we say it, whatever words we use, the spiritual discipline and nourishment of habit remains. The father of cellist Yo-Yo Ma spent World War II in Paris, where he lived alone in a garret throughout the German occupation. In order to restore sanity to his world, he would memorize violin pieces by Bach during the day and then at night, during blackout, he would play them alone in the dark. The sounds made by the reverberating strings held out the promise of order and hope and beauty. Later, his son, Yo-Yo, took up the father’s advice to play a Bach suite from memory every night before going to bed. Yo-Yo Ma says, “This isn’t practicing; it’s contemplating. You’re alone with your soul.”6 The truth about our lives is that when it gets deep and hard, and when we are pressed from every side, we simply cannot make up our faith on the fly. We need a reservoir of hope and life and discipline and practice upon which to call when the time is urgent. It shouldn’t be surprising to hear about Jimmie G. Jimmie G was one of the patients highlighted in neurologist Oliver Sack’s book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Jimmie G. was a former sailor who for several decades suffered from a brain disease that involved severe amnesia. Jimmie lost three decades of memory and could not retain isolated items in his mind for more than a fleeting second. Tom Long documents and discusses part of this material in his book, Preaching from Memory to Hope:

“Do you think he has a soul?” Sacks asked the nuns who cared for him in the nursing facility where he lived. The nuns were outraged by the question. “Watch Jimmie in chapel and judge for yourself,” they said. Sacks went to observe Jimmie in chapel and reported on what he saw: “I was moved, profoundly moved—and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen in him or thought him capable of. “I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit and the spirit of the Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, with concentration and attention, he entered and partook of Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed by a feeling. There was no forgetting—no amnesia then— nor did it seem possible that there could be, for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism—that of meaningless sequences and memory traces—but he was absorbed in an act—an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity—so seamless it could not permit any break. He was no longer fluttering, restless,

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bored, and lost, but deeply attentive to the beauty and the soul of the world/

Through his act, he belonged. Just as the mystery of God invites us, not to some creed or doctrine, to experience God, so, too, the discipline of saying these words, praying this prayer—over and over and over—invites us not to some dull, rote exercise, but to an act of love, a daily act of faith and hope. At its best—at our best—we become the prayer we are praying:

God—both intimate and wholly other—reveal who you are. Set the world right. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and evil….

At its best—at our best—we move into the world to act out the prayer we are praying, and in so doing, in a world where we can feel so lost, so hurt or confused, so separated, we belong. We belong to God. Anne Lamott took her two-year-old son to Lake Tahoe where they stayed in a condominium by the lake. That area around Reno is such a hotbed of gambling that all the rooms are equipped with those curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of those rooms, in the pitch dark, and went to do some work. A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room. She got up, knowing he’ d crawled out of his playpen. She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push the little button on the doorknob. He was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and Anne was saying to him, “Jiggle the door knob, darling.” Of course he couldn’t even see the knob to know what she was talking about. After a moment, it became clear to him that his mother could not open the door, and panic set in. He began sobbing. So his mother ran around like crazy trying everything , trying to get the door to work, calling the rental agency where she left a message, calling the manager where she left another message, and running back to check her son every minute or so. And there, in this dark, locked room was her terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there were a few centimeters of space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. And somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, connected, on the floor, him holding her fingers in the dark, and slowly feeling connected, feeling her love, feeling her presence and her care.8 I think prayer may well feel to you or me like being a two-year-old in the dark. God is our mother, and I am not old enough to speak cogent phrases yet, even in the midst of such panic. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, but instead, via my prayers and my church and my awkward faith, I can reach just far enough to hold onto her fingers underneath the door. How can that be enough? It is enough. They had watched Jesus teach and preach and heal and cast out demons and touch the untouchable and love the unlovable. Where did that come from? How did he do it?

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How did he live it? In their desperation, they came to him and said, “Teach us how to pray.” Jesus didn’t give them an equation, and he didn’t offer them a formula. He didn’t solve their problems, or make everything clear.

God—Reveal who you are. Set the world right. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil….

Jesus offered them mystery that drove them deeper. He offered them a call to act out God’s love no matter how lost they felt. He offered them a hand squeezed under a locked door—the most unlikely embrace that met every need they ever had.

Notes

1 Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994). 2 Tom Long, Testimony (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004). 3 Thanks to a devotional written by the Rev. Derek Starr Redwine, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Akron, Ohio, for the basis of this material. 4 This language was used by Fred Craddock in a sermon at the Festival of Homiletics in Nashville in May, 2007. 5 Eugene Peterson, The Message (Nav Press Publishing Group, 1996). 6 As told by Philip Yancey in First Things (firstthings.com), February 2009. 7 As told in Tom Long’s Preaching from Memory to Hope (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 24. 8 Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions, 88-89.

December 31, 2009
The gardener and the groundling: the ecology of resurrection

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The Gardener and the Groundling:

The Ecology of Resurrection

William P. Brown

Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

In the cosmic scheme of things it seems that Adam had a rather modest, even ignominious beginning. No “big bang” was he. Adam was fashioned from dirt, out of watered “dust.” Mineralogists would call it “clay,” whose intricate structure provided the original scaffolding for microbial life. Biologist Lynn Margulis calls it simply “slime.” Nowhere in the garden story is there mention of Adam being made in the lofty “image of God,” an image far too elevated for this down-to-earth narrative. No, in the eyes of the Yahwist, Adam was made in the image of the ground. Instead of the imago Dei, we have here the imago terrae, and that makes Adam a “groundling,” which is in fact his Hebrew name ‘dm, taken from the ‘dmh (“ground”). A child of dust is Adam, the groundling derived from the ground, just as the word “human” is derived from the Latin humus, the fertile, most organic layer of the soil. Adam, in short, is composed of compost. You will not find Adam’s genesis faithfully depicted by Michelangelo, who tactfully portrays Adam and God about to touch fingers. Rather, we read of God performing something more like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (literally mouth-tonose ). Imagine that painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! In this garden tale, God gets tactlessly tactile with creation. We find God’s muddy hands at the potter’s wheel, working the clay and shaping flesh, and God’s mouth infusing breath and animating flesh, thereby creating “a living being,” or as the King James reads, a “living soul” (Gen 2:7). Behold the groundling! No stranger is he to God’s creation. Adam is indigenous to the ground: he emerges from it and shall return to it. But between his genesis and his death, Adam is commissioned with an explicit task. We learn that God not only owns a potter’s wheel, but also wields a garden spade.

The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the ‘dm whom he had formed (Gen 2:8).

God the gardener, King of the compost, not only plants this luxuriant grove, but also transplants this groundling, Adam, with the expressed purpose to “serve it and preserve it” (2:15), a preferable translation to “till it and keep it” (NRS V). This garden requires labor: harvesting the fruit and tending the trees. Not that it was backbreaking work—this is Eden, after all—but it was work nonetheless, and Adam was put there for just such a purpose: to “serve and preserve” the garden. God the gardener, Adam the gatherer. God’s “green thumb” is a widespread metaphor in the Bible, for God plants more than a pristine garden in Eden. God plants a people, and the exodus is, botanically speaking, a transplantation:

You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own

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possession, the place, O LORD, that you made your abode, the sanctuary,

0 LORD, that your hands have established (Exodus 15:16-17).

Or as we find in a psalm:

You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches. It sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the River. (Ps 80:8-11) Or:

1 will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more. (1 Chron 17:9)

And even from the lips of Paul, who credits God alone with growth:

So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. (1 Cor 3:7)

God the gardener. There is nothing particularly innovative about this metaphor. The image draws from the conventional practices of ancient Near Eastern Kings, who prided themselves in their prowess both on the battlefield and in the garden plot. We have historical records of Assyrian kings who boasted not only of conquering foreign territories, of killing and deporting the conquered, but also of carefully transplanting foreign species of plants into their own gardens next to their palaces. Many a king would boast that these exotic plants fared better in his own garden than in their native habitats ! Any king worth his salt could wield both the s woref and the spade with equally effective results. The garden represented the kingdom. One Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal , took the symbolism to heart and hung the head of his defeated enemy (the king of Elam) on a tree next to him and his wife lounging together. Gardening was a kingly thing, for every royal garden was, whether symbolically or literally, a victory garden. According to the biblical witness, Israel was God’s victory garden. Gardening is a quintessentially divine activity that no other analogy or metaphor can fully capture. Savior, deliverer, liberator, redeemer: God is all these, but such titles lack the organic connection with the earth and with a people that only the title “gardener” can fill. Verbs such as save, deliver, redeem, liberate are all “from” verbs. To save is to save/rom, to deliver/rom, to liberate/ram, to redeem/rom. Such actions involve separating or distancing the sufferer from the suffering, and appropriately so. But there is another side of divine activity, of the God who does something with something else. And the metaphor of “gardening” does precisely that. God the gardener works with the soil, with the fecundity of the ground, to bring forth new life. It is perhaps no coincidence that Mary Magdalene took Jesus as the gardener in

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John’ s account of the resurrection (John 20:15). Was it a mistake? Mary, the one who remains in the garden as the disciples returned to their homes disillusioned, the only one who sees the two angels inside the tomb: “Why are you weeping?” they ask. Mary then hears the same question from outside the tomb, from someone she “supposes” to be the gardener. But things are not what they seem. Although she does not immediately recognize the questioner as Jesus, Mary is clearly on her way toward acknowledging the person standing before her as divine. Mary’s initial impression of Jesus is not a false one; it contains a seed of venerable truth about God’s creative role in the world. It seems a bit unusual to accuse a gardener of being a body-snatcher. Or is it? Gardeners are cultivators of life; they work with the old to raise up new life, and only God can raise a body from the soil that is our flesh. Mary’s seeming mistake is no mistake, for the author of John has her testifying to the saving presence of God even before she recognizes Jesus, the resurrected One. Is not cultivation the practice of resurrection, of bringing forth new life from below from out of the ground? “How are the dead raised?” Paul asks the Corinthians and then, as is typical, answers his own question; he points out that the seed must die before it comes to life(l Corinthians 15:35-36). Perhaps that is the best analogy for understanding the resurrection. Resurrection is organic. Consider the seed and the cedar. How more different can they be? But as different as they are, without the seed there would be no tree. New creation emerges out of the old, out of the shell of a seed, out of the organically rich soil, out of the ground of death, of refuse and decay, but all of it necessary for the emergence of new life. Resurrection is not “creation out of nothing,” not creatio ex nihilo anymore than it was in Genesis 1:1-2. Resurrection, rather, is creatio ex vetere, new creation out of the old, new life out of our fleshy, bony, bloody, dusty, dirty selves, cultivated by the hand of God, no less. It is no coincidence, then, that Paul describes Christ’s resurrection organically as “the first fruits” (1 Cor 15:20, 23). There is something boldly bodily about the resurrection. Whether in this life or the next, we have our bodies—everything that makes us who we are. As Paul claims:

It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. (1 Corinthians 15:44-45)

Without the body, according to Paul, resurrection cannot apply. Bodily resurrection is resurrection from the ground up, from the first Adam to the last Adam. The emergence of Adam, infused with the “breath of life” from God, foreshadows the new creation given in the resurrection, which itself is a rising from the ground. “To dust you shall return,” God tells Adam (Gen 3:19). That “dust”—the basic constituents of our bodies, indeed of life itself—will become irreversibly dispersed throughout the earth, ultimately providing the constituents for other living bodies. Such is the cycle of life and death. As the molecules of our bodies become shared with future generations of all life, and as our own living, breathing bodies reflect the evolutionary legacy of life in all its interdependence, then resurrection cannot be limited to the raising up of human life. It must include the whole of life in its vast eschatological sweep, all from the simple fact that we remain now and forevermore inextricably tied to God’s creation. Descartes was wrong. As the biologist S. J. Singer puts it: “I link,

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therefore I am.” Put theologically, a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead cannot be developed strictly from a soteriological, Christological basis. Resurrection has all to do with God the creator, God the gardener. New life, new creation is manifest in many forms, from new ways of living to plant growth to bodily resurrection. As people of faith, we recognize that creation is good, indeed “very good,” created by the living and loving God. But we are also realizing that creation is subjected to a degradation that is unprecedented in geological and hu man history, a degradation entirely of our own making. When Paul describes creation as “subjected to futility not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Romans 8:20), I’ve long felt that Paul was not referring to God, contrary to conven tional exegetical opinion. More interpreters today are considering the possibility that Paul had humanity or ‘dm in mind (see “subdue” in Gen 1:28), as manifested in Rome’s imperial fist. In any case, creation is groaning under the crushing weight of our carbon imprints. We are the Bigfoot of the earth, the most invasive species on Earth, and we must learn to step more lightly, or creation will be irreversibly damaged. Good and groaning is God’s world, a creation that waits with eager longing for its full redemption and its full cultivation, and it is amid the goodness and the groaning that we must work to serve and preserve. Creation care is as much about celebrating resurrection from the ground up, the first fruits of God’s new creation, as it is about working with creation, like Adam in the garden. Such is the ecology of resurrection. May we never forget how Jesus healed the blind man: “He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes” (John 9:6). We find God once again working with dirt, this time to heal and make whole, a foretaste of God’s greatest work of all. May we never forget that the story of salvation is also the drama of dirt. Ε. Β. White speaks of his wife Katherine, an avid gardener, who every year without fail in the fall began to plot and to plant.

I…used to marvel at how unhesitatingly she would kneel in the dirt and begin grubbing about, garbed in a spotless cotton dress or a handsome tweed skirt and jacket. She simply refused to dress down to a garden: she moved in elegantly and walked among her flowers as she walked among her friends—nicely dressed, perfectly poised. The only moment in the year when she actually got herself up for gardening was on the day in fall that she had selected, in advance, for the laying out of the spring bulb garden—a crucial operation, carefully charted and full of witchcraft…. Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion…her

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studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring,…sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

So it is with God the gardener, who refuses to dress down to the garden of creation and yet grubs about in the dirt to bring forth life, who cultivates within each of us an organic sensibility and raises us to new life, like saplings bursting through the crust of concrete sidewalks, growing ever onward and upward toward the light, miraculously drawing energy from the sun and from the Son of God.

Note

1 E. B. White, “Introduction,” in K. S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, ed. Ε. Β. White (New York: New York: Farrar Straus Giroux / Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), xvii-xix.

December 31, 2009
Pray constantly

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Pray Constantly

1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

Martin B. Copenhaver Wellesley Congregational Church (UCC), Wellesley, Massachusetts

A year or so ago, about a week after what we refer to in our family as my “unfortunate little episode”—a brief hospital stay to treat a racing and irregular heartbeat— I went to see my doctor for a follow-up exam. He’s been my doctor for about ten years, and I like him very much. He’s very competent and thorough and, as a charming bonus, he has a thick Irish brogue. After checking my blood pressure and that sort ofthing, he spent quite a bit of time going over the records that were sent from the hospital. Without looking up from those records, he asked me questions about my eating, drinking, and exercise habits, which I rather awkwardly answered, knowing that my answers were not in every instance what he would want to hear. Then he asked if I experience any stress in my life, and I said something like, “Well, sure.” I wanted to add, “Doesn’t everyone?” He expressed some surprise that someone who, in his words, “spends his days caring for souls,” could experience anything like stress. Then he closed my file, and for the first time, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Here’s the most important question. Are you praying?” Finally there was a question I could answer without feeling self-conscious or inadequate. “Why, yes, I pray every day.” But then came his follow-up question: “Half an hour every day, uninterrupted , no distractions?” “Uh.. .well, uh.. .hmmm.. .not exactly. Not every day, at least.” Without shifting his gaze a bit—he wasn’ t about to give me any wiggle room— he went on to say, “It’s the most important thing. For some people I might suggest meditation, but for you it’s prayer.” My first thought was, “This is not the prescription I’m used to getting from a doctor.” But then I thought, “Half an hour a day, uninterrupted , no distractions? Does he have any idea what my life is like?” I used to love to quote the spiritual advisor who said that we should each spend a half hour a day in prayer, with this exception: if the day is really jam packed with too many things to do, then half an hour is unrealistic. On such days it should be a full hour devoted to prayer. I used to love to quote that. But now my doctor was saying something like that to me. “Hey, that’s supposed to be my line!” That’s what I thought. What I said was, “I’ll try.” And I have, with some success. Some. But my life, perhaps like yours, is messy much of the time. It doesn’t stay in neat compartments, at least not for long. I have my plans and my intentions, but then life, in all its messiness, intervenes , and interrupts. Now, if half an hour a day for prayer, uninterrupted, no distractions, sounds hard to pull off, what are we to make of Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians that we are to “pray continually”? Or, as other translations have it, “Pray without ceasing,” “Pray constantly.” Pray all the time. Put in that way, the challenge suddenly becomes more than trying to fit prayer into our lives, but actually more like trying to conform our lives to a spirit of prayer. Perhaps the first thing to say is that in order to pray without ceasing, it is not enough to set aside time to pray. Clearly, Paul had something else in mind here. In order to

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pray constantly, prayer has to be something other than an isolated activity. In order to pray constantly, it has to be woven into the fabric of our lives. But how does one do that? That’s the question I want to explore with you. First, I want to define prayer. I once wrote a book in which the chapter on prayer was entitled “Conversing with God.” At the time that was how I thought of prayer. But I now think that is too narrow a definition. Talking with God is part of what prayer is, as is listening to God—both talking and listening are parts of conversation, and both are parts of prayer—but there is also silent prayer and meditative prayer. So I now think of prayer more broadly as consciously spending time with God. Obviously, we are always in God’s presence, every moment of our lives, but much of the time we are focused on other things, we are not consciously relating to God. Prayer, then, it seems to me, is what happens when we come alive to God’s presence. Through prayer we are not only in God’s presence, but we know we are. So prayer is consciously spending time with God, consciously relating to God. It may involve talking and listening, as we do in conversation, or it may involve just being aware that God is with us, like taking a walk with God, neither of us saying a word, just enjoying one another’s company. That’s not where you begin, of course. Prayer begins, as most relationships do, perhaps with a bit of shyness and almost certainly a measure of self-consciousness. I remember a visitor to one church I served telling me about how she was making some initial, tentative gestures toward God in her life. Saying a prayer seemed like too big a step, and she didn’t feel ready for it. So, instead, at various points during her day, she would pause and say, “Hello,” and then quickly go back to what she was doing. Just that—a shy little “Hello,” nothing more. And I remember thinking, “Well, that’s how a lot of relationships start.” Anything more can be too much at the beginning. You know how it is when you first meet someone? It’s not as relaxed as seeing someone you know well. There are more conventions about what happens in a conversation between people who don’t know one another well than, say, a conversation between close friends. You say certain expected things like “Good to meet you,” and you do certain things like try to follow your father’s often-repeated advice to always look someone in the eye when you shake her hand. So there’s a certain self-consciousness about relating to someone you don’t know well. You are careful about what you say. You don’t want to say the wrong thing. You want to put your best foot forward, make a good impression. So you weigh your words. And silence! If you don’t know someone well and there is silence in the conversation, it’s awkward, to say the least. The silence feels like an emptiness that needs to be filled, and you’ll say just about anything to fill the silence. Now contrast that with spending time with a dear friend who knows you well, perhaps in some ways better than you know yourself, a friend who, after all these years, knows all of the back stories and all of your secrets, who has seen you at your best and at your worst, who knows your weaknesses as well as your strengths, who was there with you in times of joy and with you in times of despair, the one from whom you cannot hide how you are really feeling, because this friend knows you so well and can read you like an open book. Think about the kinds of conversations you have with a friend like that. The conversations will not be self-conscious. They will not follow any established conventions , except perhaps those that you have established yourselves over the years. With

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a friend like that you have all different kinds of conversations. Some will be long, heart-to-heart conversations—that is, after all, how you got to be such good friends— but other conversations between the two of you will be on the run, perhaps just a few sentences to check in, almost using a kind of shorthand or perhaps using incomplete sentences because the friend knows you well enough to know how you would complete those sentences, so you don’t have to. And those fragments of conversations on the run can nurture a relationship. It’s not all about long heart-to-heart talks. But, if it has been some time since you last had an extended conversation in which you were able to go deeper, beyond the day to day, to the places in your heart and mind that you would share only with your friend, you will say, “We must spend some good uninterrupted time together, no distractions.” Silence between dear friends is a different kind of silence from the silence shared by those who do not know one another well. Silence between dear friends is not awkward, but actually, in its own way, can be savored, as you enjoy the satisfactions of just being together, a companionship beyond the need of words, at least for a time. You can probably see where I am going with this. I think there is a similar dynamic at work when we first start relating to God in prayer and when that relationship deepens. When we begin to relate to God through prayer, there is a certain selfconsciousness about it. There are conventions one follows, even a kind of formality. You say certain things like, “Dear God,” and you do certain things like bow your head. You are careful about what you say. You weigh your words. The silences feel empty. And that’s okay. That’s what happens in the early stages of a relationship. But if the relationship is nurtured, all of that begins to change. Prayer becomes more like spending time with a dear friend who knows you well. You interact in all kinds of ways. The relationship is not measured or self-conscious; the more formal conventions just seem to fall away because they are no longer needed. There are a lot of words that are shared and a lot of things that can go unsaid because they are just understood. I love how Francois Fenelon put it. He was a French Christian author of the early eighteenth century. Here’s what he wrote:

If you pour out to God all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say; you will never exhaust the subject; it is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want subjects of conversation; they do not weigh their words, because there is nothing to be kept back. Neither do they seek for something to say; they talk together out of the abundance of their heart—without consideration, just whatever they think.

Prayer approached in this way, as spending time with someone who knows us so well, frees us from the notion that every word must be carefully weighed. God is not concerned with the words we use. We can let participles dangle and leave sentences incomplete, because God knows us well enough to know how to complete them. Or, sometimes, if we use the language of the heart, we may even abandon words entirely and instead merely open our hearts and invite God to take a tour of all that resides there—the half-formed thoughts, the elusive longings, the inescapable, yet indefinable sense of need. And silence, instead of an emptiness that begs to be filled, can itself be deep and rich, something to be savored, and words just don’t seem necessary. If one

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has nurtured that kind of relationship with God, prayer can take as many forms as there are ways to relate to a friend—sometimes in long heart-to-heart conversations and other times in incomplete sentences that sound like shorthand. And that is how we begin to do something like pray constantly. You wake up in the morning and, with God, you think about what awaits you in the day ahead. You pre-live the day as a kind of prayer. At the breakfast table, you open up the newspaper. Another day of horrific stories from Iraq and Darfur, and as you read, you simply think, “God, be in that place, be with those people.” You get in your car and the traffic is terrible, so you say to God, “The traffic…” and you don’t need to say any more because God knows that the way that sentence ends is, “and traffic always makes me tense, because I will be late and I hate to be late, and I have a hard time not taking out my frustration on the first person I meet when I get there.” When you arrive, there is a message from your mother. She sounds more confused than ever, and before you pick up the phone, you say to yourself, “God, you’ve got to help me here.” And on like that through the day. Jimmy Carter once said that he probably prays a hundred times a day, and I think these are the kinds of prayers he was referring to, very few with his eyes closed, perhaps very few that begin with “Dear God,” and end with “Amen.” Rather, I imagine that his prayers are more seamlessly woven into his life, like spending time with a friend who knows him well. In fact, his life and his prayers are so interwoven that you can’t separate the two, which I think is what Paul had in mind when he told the Thessalonians, “Pray constantly.” And then, if you are Jimmy Carter or someone else who has that kind of relationship with God, at the end of a full, messy day, with many distractions and a hundred short prayers, you give a deep sigh and say to God, “Really, we must find a time to get together for a real heart-to-heart.” And, in reply, God says, “Thirty minutes, uninterrupted , no distractions?”

December 31, 2009
Preaching the 2009 Easter texts

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Preaching the 2009 Easter Texts

James S. Lo wry

Great Falls, South Carolina

Several years ago, while serving as interim pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Bern, North Carolina, I bartered a deal with a gifted artist in the congregation. In return for something-or-other I created for her in my woodworking shop, she created for me a cross stitch sampler. I got the better end of the deal. The sampler yet hangs in my study. It’s kind of in the tradition of Home Sweet Home and Bless This House, O Lord, We Pray only unlike those usual sampler sentiments, my cross stitch says / Have Focused on Disputatious Testimony That Refuses Closure. It’s a Walter Brueggemann quote.1 I like that thought. Among other things, it helps me deal with Easter realities, especially as those realities are presented to us by the Gospel of Mark. In my view, Mark’s Gospel, more than all others, forces the church to deal with the disputatious testimony that surrounds Easter and Easter faith. Mark, like the conflicted world in which we live, will not let us slither off to easy Easter answers scented with banks of white lilies. For that reason, and since Mark is the centerpiece of the Lectionary Gospel Offerings for Year B, I am suggesting that we preach from the Mark selection (16:1-8) for Easter Day, and even though there are no other Lectionary suggestions from Mark for Eastertide, I am suggesting that we let Mark’s Easter narrative be the lens through which we view all of the texts for our Eastertide preaching in 2009. Having said that, in the interest of full disclosure, I should make a true confession. Without the least shame or embarrassment, I confess that, among the four evangelists, the Gospel of Mark is my hands-down favorite. If it were not otherwise the case, Mark’s Easter narrative and the way Mark ends his Gospel would make it my favorite. His ending fits right in with my painful delight in focusing on disputatious testimony. Without a doubt, the Easter narratives and conclusions of the other three Gospels are filled with their own wonder. How utterly inspiring that Matthew tells of an Easter earthquake, of breathless women running to tell disciples that Jesus has risen, and then of a conspiracy among the guards not to tell what they had witnessed. Mark’s Gospel ends with the often echoed refrain of the risen Christ commissioning disciples to go into all the world and baptize. Luke takes a different but equally inspiring tack. The women find the tomb empty, two strangers remind them that this is the way Jesus had said it would be, and they run to tell the disciples who at first think the women made it all up. Peter goes to see for himself. Then, following the Emmaus Road communion liturgy in which the risen Christ is recognized in the breaking of bread, there is the ever-so earthy scene where the risen Christ appears to disciples, shows them his scars, invites them to touch him, has breakfast with them, and then, in stark contrast to things earthy, ascends into heaven. For John, Mary Magdalene goes alone on Easter to the tomb, finds it empty, and runs to tell the disciples, Peter and John run to see and find it true, and Jesus appears first to Mary in the garden and later to disciples. After that the Gospel of John has a little trouble actually coming to an end. There are, of course, several important appendices tagged onto the end, but it appears John’s narrative once ended with the

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remarkable scenes of the risen Jesus entering twice through closed doors with superhuman powers to show disciples his very human scars. The second such interchange was directed especially to Tom, Tom the Doubting one, back from who knows where. For Matthew, Luke and John, their gospel story ends quite dramatically. AU ofthat drama is really nice and filled to overflowing with colorful preaching fodder. But this Mark fellow? He would have none of it. In Mark, the drama is altogether different. For Mark, the Easter narrative ends abruptly. There is no epilogue, at least not originally.2 The women who went to the tomb, according to Mark, were confronted by an unidentified young stranger dressed in white, who told them that Jesus had risen from the dead and that they must run and tell the disciples. Mark then ends not only his Easter narrative, but his whole account of the gospel, with the women, dumb struck and lips sealed, fleeing from the tomb. Mark’s last remarkable words on the lifechanging subject of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead are these: “(the women) said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” I like that. Think of it. Mark, the first of the four to write it all down, left the story dangling in mid air with all the “disputations testimony” left unaddressed. Because that is so, more than all others, he left it to the church to grapple with what it means to believe the frightening truth that Jesus in fact was raised from the dead. And, of course, to continue once more to use Brueggemann’s language, the real disputatious testimony runs much deeper than disagreement among the evangelists as to details of what actually happened on Easter and in its aftermath. The real Easter quandary is that, by all accounts, the testimony as to the impossibility of viable life after rigor mortis has set in cannot be reconciled, by any usual logic, with the testimony of the Easter women. Nevertheless, notice that the women, according to Mark, were stunned to silence, not by wondering whether it really happened. They were struck dumb by the frightful wonder at what it might mean that Jesus was raised from the dead. Mark, by his narrative method, more than all others, left the church to the wonder the same frightful thing. I am suggesting, therefore, that this Easter and Eastertide we focus not only on boldly proclaiming our belief that Jesus is our risen Lord, but most especially I am suggesting that we focus on what it means to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. Our believing it, of course, will not make it true, but our testimony as to the real effects of believing it will bear witness not only to the truth that it happened, but also to the truth contained in its happening. I further suggest that, proceeding in this way, we use the same strange logic that Paul used in the verses that follow immediately on the heels of the epistle lesson for Easter Day (I Corinthians 15:1-11). “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (15:14). After that bold assertion, what is not stated, but is clearly implied, is something like, “And, of course, it is plain to see our proclamation and your faith are not in vain.” It must be admitted that some folks are not particularly enamored of that kind of logic. It even angers some. For most, however, it’s about the best we have to offer, and the best way to proceed through Eastertide with that logic, in my view, is to rehearse our narratives, our biblical narratives, of course, but also the narratives of the believing community. This, then, is what difference it makes to believe Jesus was raised from the dead:

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in the dark of a hot night in the summer of 1958, just weeks before I was to leave home for the first time to let Presbyterian College make its mark on me, my father was awakened by an unexpected phone call. It was the chief of police of our small town in the Piedmont of South Carolina. The chief reported that one of his officers, Bean Pole Hammond by name, had caught Billy Β , flashlight in hand, pilfering through the merchandise in my father’s hardware store. Billy, as it turned out, was a twelveyear -old throw-away yard child of a hard-living, down-on-her-luck woman who lived with her brood on the wrong edge of the wrong side of town. Characteristically, even before asking about the condition of the store and its merchandise, my father’s first question was what they had done with Billy Β . They had taken him twenty miles away to the county jail. The next morning after breakfast, as was his unshakable custom, Pappy read from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. In 1958 it was yet a cutting edge thing to read from the RS V rather than the KJV. It was also a cutting edge venture that on that morning our father broke from his custom of reading straight through, a chapter a day, from Genesis through Revelation skipping only the various genealogies (an omission I later learned was unfortunate). Pappy left his book mark in the place he had left off the day before and skipped to Matthew 25. He slowed down in his measured reading when he got to the verse where it says Jesus said, “I was in prison and you visited me.” He slowed down again when he got to the verse where it says Jesus said, “In as much as you have done it to the least of these…you have done it unto me.” After that, without comment, he offered our family’s morning prayer, including prayer for Billy Β . Then he got up and, after kissing Mom goodbye, drove the twenty miles to the county court house and talked his friend, the county judge, into “sentencing” Billy Β to live with us for three months. Thus it was that Billy Β , with neither shoes nor shirt and only one pair of highwater pants, came into our lives. He was welcomed as a son and brother with, as they say, all the rights and responsibilities appertaining thereunto. He lived with us for three months because he had to. For several years after that, mostly until he had graduated from high school and was old enough to live on his own, he lived with us as often as he needed or wanted a clean bed, clean clothes, and a place at the table. By most recent accounts, Billy, his wife, children and grandchildren are all getting on quite nicely. What my father did, of course, was based on upside-down logic. Nobody invites the one who has demonstrated that he wants to steal from you to live with you. Nobody, that is, except maybe the one who ate with sinners and those who by faith follow after him. What Pappy did for Billy was based on the same kind of upside-down logic that comes from believing the Jesus narrative really is true, including most especially the part where it says he was raised from the dead. The worst that could be dealt this man Jesus would not be allowed to defeat him. Would not be allowed, that is, by the God who sent him. Using Paul’s strange but strangely believable logic, it follows: if Christ has not been raised, then my father’s faith was in vain; and, as anyone who cares to notice can see from the story of Billy Β (and countless others like it), my father’s faith was not in vain. And that’s what it means that Jesus was raised from the dead, rigor mortis be damned. It’s not the only route to believe in resurrection, but it’s a good one. And that’s not all. The grace and truth which brought redemption to Billy Β have the power to bring redemption from Bagdad to the family room; from Darfur to Wall

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Street, and from Congo to Capital Hill. Now, take that upside-down logic, use it as the lens through which to view the Easter and Eastertide lections, and, before you know it, you’ll have yourself a barrel full of dandy sermons for the season. With two exceptions, I find the Acts selections for Eastertide to be compelling. Happily, there are powerful alternatives standing close by. For the Second Sunday of Easter, the Acts text dishes up the radical story of shared possessions (the lection is Acts 4:32-35, but I see no reason not to continue through 37). Using Mark’s Easter narrative as the lens through which to view the text, what we learn is that for those with Easter faith, the economy by which we believers are called to live is radically different from the economy of everyone around us. As I write this (in early November, 2008) the “R” word {recession) is being widely used as a worldwide reality and the “D” word {depression) is even being bandied about. Un bridled greed, especially as expressed in the last two decades, has finally caught up with us, and the fallout is international in scope. Of course, by Eastertide there will be great need to hear a prophetic word contemning that greed. But there will also be need for a pastoral word of redemption coming from the same upside-down thinkers who dare to live out ” an economy based on generosity,” 3 and call on the world around

us to do the same. The first exception to the useful Acts texts offered up for Eastertide in Year Β appears on the Third Sunday of Easter (Acts 3:12-19). It’s Peter’s tirade against the Jews. For that text, making the hermeneutical shift from the first to the twenty-first century may be possible in the quiet of one’s study or even in a classroom, but doing so adequately as an act of worship could become quite tedious. Happily, the text just before it (3:1-10, which, by the way, does not appear anywhere in the Lectionary) is an excellent alternative. In it, Peter, in the name of the risen Jesus, brings healing to a crippled beggar who was stretched out just beside the gate to the temple singled out to be called Beautiful. What a hideous contrast to the beautiful gate the crippled man must have made. One can assume hundreds of people passed him daily without much notice. Then Peter and John came by, and, with eyes born of Easter faith, they not only noticed him, but in the name of Jesus, they did something about his plight. That also is what it means to believe Jesus was raised from the dead. Like Peter and John, we have eyes to see the broken humanity all around the beautiful doors to our houses of worship. Not only that, in the name of Jesus, we are committed do what is necessary to bring healing. The Acts lection for the Fourth Sunday of Easter is listed as 4:5-12, but we really must begin reading with verse one. Acts 4:1-12 is the first part of the story of Peter and John’s trial before the Council. On the surface, the issue before the court has to do with last Sunday’s episode of the man healed by the beautiful gate of the temple. However, as is made particularly clear by verses one through four, the real issue that got Peter and John in hot water was their belief in the resurrection of Jesus and their proclamation of the promise of resurrection in him. Five thousand converts to that way of upside-down believing presented quite a threat to the powers that were. Seen through the lens of Mark’s resurrection narrative, what this text tells the people of God is that we who believe in Jesus will always pose a threat to those who govern by fear. At this writing, just days after he was elected, it is far too early to know if Barack Obama is going to be able to reverse the recent trend in the United States to govern by

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fear. In all events, the Fourth Sunday in Easter can be used prophetically to call the hand of any and all who do govern by fear and to speak pastorally to our people saying to them that, even if we must live in a fearful time, because of our Easter faith, we need not be governed by fear. For the Fifth Sunday of Easter, from Acts the lectionary gives us the remarkable story of the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch (8:26-40). We know little of the fellow beyond what is told us in the story. Being an Ethiopian traveling in those parts made him a foreigner, being a Eunuch in those parts made him unclean, and being in those parts to worship made him a convert to Judaism before he was a convert to Christianity. That is about all we know about him. By contrast, as biblical characters go, Philip is a fellow we know pretty well. He’s the one chosen to minister to the growing church (6:5), he was known as an evangelist (21:8), and he had to hightail to Samaria to escape persecution. We also know that while in Samaria he did some powerful preaching (8:4ff). Having said that, neither the Ethiopian nor Philip is the main character in the story. The star player is the Holy Spirit who, quite dramatically sometimes, moves people around so they will be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to say and do exactly the right things. Seen through the lens of Mark’s Easter Story, one of the things it means to believe in Jesus is that we’d better be ready. By the power of the Holy Spirit we may wind up in some very strange places and be called on to do some very strange things with some very strange people. The Acts text for the Sixth Sunday of Easter is as powerful as it is brief (10:44-48). It is the story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit and being included. As hard as it is to imagine, we Gentiles were once the outsiders who were welcomed in. Using the Mark lens to view this text, one of the things it means to believe in Jesus is that those of us now on the inside cannot exclude from our communion anyone who shares our faith. Moreover, we are to extend hospitality even to those who do not share our faith. The full inclusion of homosexual people in the life of the church is, of course, a hotbutton issue just now, and it must be addressed. This would be a good Sunday to do so, but there are many others who are, in effect, excluded. With an African American in the White House, this may be an opportune time to address the fact that 11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in the week. That’s not all. Virtually every congregation is engaged in some form of feeding the hungry and housing the poor. Yet, how many of those who benefit from our generosity are truly welcome to our communion tables? This list can go on and on, but the Sixth Sunday of Easter gives us an opportunity to address all such pressing questions of inclusiveness. The Acts offering for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (the Sunday after Ascension) is the second of the unfortunate Lectionary offerings for the season (1:15-17,21-26). If Luke had seen fit simply to tell us that it was necessary to replace Judas and spare us the details of Judas’ burst bowels, this would be a useful text from which to say that one of the things it means to believe Jesus was raised is that we are now bold to believe God speaks through the voice of the church. That sermon, of course, can still be preached (and just think of the possibilities the text provides for the children’s sermon!). I am suggesting, however, that since most congregations do not gather for worship on Ascension Day, and since most congregations do not elect officers in May, the ascension narrative (1:6-11) be used on Easter Seven. I further suggest that the preceding introductory verses (1:1-5) be included. They, of course, make the crucial tie of resurrection to ascension. The problem with making this selection for Easter

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Seven is that, in some configuration or other, the verses are suggested by the Lectionary every year for Ascension Day and for Easter Seven in Year A. Those unfortunate overlaps notwithstanding, we cannot ignore the fact that the Fundamen talists of (at least) three of the world religions (Jewish, Muslim and Christian) are all making noises that sound a lot like declaring holy war. The ascension text in Acts calls for some clear and definitive word to be spoken on the subject of what it means to be witness to Christ starting at home and then, moving outward in concentric circles to the ends of the earth. The earth with all of its diverse cultures and narratives is shrinking. Moreover, our nation is growing in its diversity. More and more people are bringing their narratives with them to our shores. For example, since his Christian faith means so much to Barack Obama, it is unfortunate that so very many people persist in believing that he is a Muslim. What is worse, however, is that many (all?) of those same people believe that if he were a Muslim, it would disqualify him to be President of the United States. If ever that assertion could be made, it certainly cannot be made now. According to the ascension text, with the risen Lord ascended (i.e., no longer with us as he once was), what it means to believe he was raised is that we must live faithfully at home and around the world. Like Jesus before us, before we speak, we must listen, really listen. Of course we will tell the story of good news, and, if conver sion happens, we will sing glad songs of welcome, but our task is not to convert, at least not to convert by coercion. Our task is to be witnesses. In addressing these texts through the lens of Mark’s Easter story, it will be absolutely essential to share and interpret the narratives as they are given to us. We have a rich tapestry for Easter and Eastertide, 2009. First, of course, there is Mark leaving us to wonder what it all means. Then, using the Acts texts, we have the story of the radical sharing of wealth that confronts greed head on; we have the story of the healing of the pain that is all about the doors of the house of worship; we have the story of the confrontation of governance by fear; we have the story of the Holy Spirit putting a believer in the strangely right place at exactly the right time; we have the story of radical inclusion in the community of faith; and, at last, we have the story of the commission to be witnesses. Telling and interpreting those stories is of vast impor tance. Of almost equal importance, as I attempted to do with the story of my father and Billy Β , the church’s living narrative should be interwoven with the ancient texts of the Biblical narrative. Then, taking a leaf from the notebook of Paul’s logic, by doing so, the message will be, of course, my preaching is not in vain, and of the congregation, the message will be, of course your faith is not in vain. Anybody can see that.

Notes

1 Theology of the Old Testament, Fortress, 1997. ρ 717. In as much as Professor Brueggemann, in his capacity as editor of this journal, will surely be reading this article, I hasten to add, in the lower right corner of the sampler, the initials WB are carefully stitched. 2 It is, of course, all but universally accepted that Mark’s Gospel ends with 16:8. 3 This quote is from John Winthrop’s famous shipboard sermon. The quote most often cited from that sermon is about establishing “a city set upon a hill.” It is almost never noted that Winthrop also said in that sermon, “We are going to establish a nation with an economy based on generosity.” 4 One preaching from this text in the twenty-first century must, of course, be careful not to be or appear to be anti-Semitic. The polemic is against all who govern with fear.

December 31, 2009
A Palm Sunday sermon

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A Palm Sunday Sermon

Agnes W. Norfleet

Shandon Presbyterian Church, Columbia South Carolina

“…stepped, as he had to, forward.”

Mark 1:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

In Mary Oliver’s recent collection of poems, a book entitled Thirst, she reflects on this Palm Sunday story from the gospels in a poem called “The Poet Thinks about the Donkey.” Listen to how she imagines this scene.

On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited. Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited. Then he let himself be led away. Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds! And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen. Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave. I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.1

As I have pondered this poem in the light of Mark’s gospel, I have been struck by the poignancy of its closing image of movement, of the donkey lifting one dusty hoof as it “stepped, as he had to, forward.” We tend to celebrate Palm Sunday as a triumphant festival day, with our parade of choirs and scores of children coming down the aisle singing “All Glory, Laud and Honor,” waving palm branches in the air. As we celebrate the triumphal entry from our side of the resurrection, we easily fail to see the dead seriousness of Jesus’ entering the city gates that day. However, the other side of Jesus’ resurrection, at the beginning ofthat week we have come to call “Holy” and before the Friday we have come to know as “Good,” there must have been great trepidation as the donkey, with Jesus upon him, stepped, as he had to, forward. The church, you see, has borrowed details from all four gospel accounts to enlarge the drama of Palm Sunday. The gospel of Matthew pictures the children by saying a

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very large crowd gathered around Jesus singing, and such a crowd surely would have included children. John is the one who makes mention of the palms. Luke even notes that if the crowds were silenced, the stones themselves might start singing! And all of the gospels except Mark describe the whole parade going with Jesus into the streets of Jerusalem. Only Mark stops the procession at the city gates and says that Jesus went ahead, by himself, to the Temple. The cheering is a bit muffled in Mark, the greater emphasis on humility rather than triumph, the tone here more somber, as if Jesus already knew how the sad events of the week were about to unfold. Jesus saw where he was headed, and there could not have been a lot of joy in his own approach into Jerusalem. Three times he had told his disciples, not once but three times, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him and kill him; and after three days he will rise again” (Mark 10:33-34). Jesus knew where he was going on that humble donkey ride into town. The religious leaders had long been after him — with his healing on the Sabbath, his amassing crowds wherever he went, his teaching of a new kind of covenant with God not based simply upon the Law, but open now to grace. Likewise, the political authorities always worried about an uprising in this heated corner of the Roman Empire, and when the crowds gathered for Passover, they were accustomed to posting armed soldiers around town and keeping the peace by fear, threat, and intimidation. Jerusalem was on the edge of chaos, and Jesus knew it when he sent two disciples ahead to fetch the colt because the Lord had need of it and would send it back when its use was over. With the great Passover Hymn of Psalm 118 in mind, and that ragtag band of followers singing “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever….Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord….The Lord is God, and he has given us light. Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar….O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever,” Jesus also knew that the very symbolism of the donkey spoke volumes against the backdrop of the customary welcome of a newly arriving king. This was no triumphant warrior entering the city in a chariot pulled by strong and muscular horses, no political regent surrounded by the captives of war enslaved in chains, his heralds not soldiers leading the way before him in a great demonstration of power. Instead, here was Jesus, riding into town on a donkey in peace, quietly fulfilling an ancient prophecy. This was God’s steadfast and enduring love entering Jerusalem in person and looking beyond his imminent death toward God doing some new and unforeseen thing. As the poet imagines the donkey’s hesitant step, Jesus had to move along, his fears and concerns aside, because he knew he had set in motion the events that would do him in. And so Jesus stepped, as he had to, forward. I have been intrigued the last couple of months by a piece of artwork on public display here in Columbia, because of how it captures a similar kind of moment. Our local folk artist, Ernest Lee, is commonly known as the Funky Chicken Man, because that is what he paints mostly, chickens. Recently, however, he has had this unusually large painting clearly visible on his corner at the intersection of Harden and Gervais streets. I would guess that many of you may have noticed it too, propped up and facing the street along with his usual folk art chickens and Palmetto palm trees. It is a painting

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of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, made famous by the photograph taken just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., 40 years ago. Most all of us have etched in our minds that familiar picture of King’s friends standing on the balcony, their heads raised and their arms pointing to the window from where they heard the shots come. But Ernest Lee has painted the scene just before the shots rang out. Looking back now, we all know that Dr. King knew he was on a dangerous road forward. In a sermon just the night before he died, he likened himself to Moses on the mountain top, saying that he himself would never get to the Promised Land. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place,” King told the crowds on the night of April 3,1968. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” As if he had known, the very next day Dr. King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Ernest Lee’s picture of the balcony of the Lor-raine Motel that day is of those very same people as in that familiar photograph, yet all four are standing: Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Andy Young and Dr. King himself upright on his feet before the bullet was fired. What the artist Ernest Lee has imagined is the moment when Dr. King was stepping, “as he had to, forward.” The painting is called, “1968 in Memphis – Before.” I stopped by there recently to talk to Ernest Lee about it. I said, “You didn’t paint the picture of the photograph most of us know so well; you painted the scene just before he was shot, so I’m curious why.” He responded saying of King, “He was a great man. He changed the world. I just wanted to paint that moment of hope and promise while he was still alive.” That is why all the gospel writers went into such detail about this Palm Sunday procession. Looking back, they wanted to remember him while he was still alive. They wanted to remember who was there and what the weather was like and the last hymn they all sang together. Of Mark’s particular account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, even when they were not yet sure exactly who he was, they looked back later knowing the cross was already being hewn on the far side of town. They realized Jesus left the crowds at the city gates, and from there he made his way alone to the Temple, then to the Mount of Olives, to Bethany, into the guest room for supper with the Twelve, on to Gethsemane, before Caiaphas and Pilate, and ultimately Golgotha. Sure, others were with him here and there, but mostly he seemed so alone. Looking back later, they wanted to hold on to the hope and promise they had come to recognize in this man, as each day during that awful last week Jesus stepped, as he had to, forward. While you and I live without the kind of life-threatening concern that Jesus, or even Martin Luther King, Jr., faced, we too, nonetheless, find ourselves at moments in our lives when we step forward into a fearful unknown. A diagnosis comes back from the doctor, surgery is the only answer, we know we’ 11 have to go under anesthesia, and we’ 11 hurt when we come to, and then the long road of rehabilitation will come after that. And yet, we step, as we have to, forward. We come to a moment in our lives when we have some huge and critical thing that needs to be faced, and we’ d rather not address it because it would be easier not to, and yet we know our life and wellbeing demands we deal with it, and so we step, as we have to, forward. Someone we love beyond words gets so sick, and we have the hardest time letting that person go, but because we know that the time for treatment is over and the end is coming for sure, we call in hospice care, and we step, as we have to, forward. What Jesus was doing on the first day of that week, when the donkey took that

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hesitant step forward, was above all else stepping into our lives, into the things we face, into our own suffering, even into our death. Jesus rode into town on God’s behalf, a humble human being sent to see it from our side, to enter the pain, to join us in our suffering, to take upon his own body our most profound affirmation of faith that nothing, nothing in life or in death, nothing at all will be able to separate us from the steadfast and enduring love of God. The poet, Mary Oliver, likes to imagine that the donkey “loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.” I like to imagine that, for the love of God, we do too.

Note

1. Mary Oliver, Thirst, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2006) 44.

December 31, 2009
Preaching that welcomes the stranger

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Preaching that Welcomes the Stranger

Justo L. and Catherine Gunsalus González

Decatur, Georgia

“Preaching that welcomes the stranger”? The very fact of being asked to write on this subject is already an indictment on our preaching. What is the gospel, if not the good news that, even though strangers, we are all welcomed by God? Ephesians puts it bluntly: “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:12-13). At the Lord’s Table—and therefore always in the church—we are never hosts, but always guests. The church whose worship is built around such a table never belongs to its congregation, to its board of trustees, or to any other governing body. It belongs to the Lord by whose gracious hospitality we are received as welcome even though we are unworthy guests. Thus, all preaching must welcome the stranger, because otherwise there is no place in the church for any of us—not even for the preacher. Preaching on this basis is not an easy matter. After all, the congregation raised the money, did the necessary work to have the building built, the rooms furnished, the staff hired. Of course there is a sense that this is “our church.” Several decades ago, a white, Anglo Methodist church in Miami had such a building, but the membership was elderly and dwindling, and the building needed a lot of repairs the congregation could not afford. Nearby was an ethnic minority congregation of the same denomination that had a church too small for its rapidly expanding numbers. By agreement, this congregation sold its building, joined the older group, and used the money to make the necessary repairs. A few years later, there were conflicts between the two groups. Much to the chagrin of the minority group, when the bishop came to try to settle the dispute, he began by reminding them that they were guests of the original congregation in the building. The bishop was wrong on two counts. First, he did not know the history of the merger, that both congregations had invested in the building, but simply allowed his stereotypes to determine his agenda. But much more important, he forgot that both congregations were guests of the true owner of the church. There is no possibility of a congregation truly welcoming the stranger unless its members have divested themselves of any thought that the church is theirs. Romans 15:7 reads: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” To view ourselves as the hosts and not as guests destroys the very foundation of the church and its mission. Making sure that this is understood is the first task of the preacher. In the Old Testament, Israel was commanded to love and respect the alien on the basis of Israel’s own history of being aliens: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:30). The very land of the promise does not belong to Israel, but to God, and Israel is permanently an alien in it: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). The people of God are always aliens repeatedly welcomed by a hospitable God. Israel is an alien in the land of promise, and all Christians are aliens and strangers even in the

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church in which they worship regularly and in the places of worship they have built and now support. We are all aliens, but aliens welcomed by God. We are therefore no different than the strangers we seek to incorporate into our membership. Therefore, for Christians as for Jews, remembering that we are God’s guests, that our place in the community of faith is God’s doing, and that the others who are strangers to us are not strangers to God, means that a look backwards into our own history is necessary for our present openness to the strangers now in our midst. Both Israel and the church are instructed to remember that they were once aliens. Remembering is essential in order to go forward into the present. Remembering the past is only the beginning, however. In the present we must be clear about the actual identity of the strangers who could be in our midst. The first question must be: What in our congregation would make others feel like strangers? It is easy to jump immediately to the obvious: culture, language, etc. But there are subtler and more insidious ways in which we, often quite unwittingly, make others feel unwelcome. A student recently told us of her visit to a church when she moved to a new city to attend seminary. People greeted her in a very friendly manner, as they did all other visitors. She had attended services for several weeks when the church began a large capital-funds campaign, and the pastor declared that he knew that every family in the church could contribute at least five thousand dollars to the campaign. To this particular student, struggling with covering the expenses for her studies, this clearly meant that she could never belong there. She left and never went back. It is not always the obvious that makes our churches places where strangers do not feel welcome. It is often more subtle matters. We deceive ourselves if we believe that, because we shake hands with everyone at the door, or because we greet one another when passing the peace, we are a welcoming church. There may already be some in the congregation who do not feel welcomed because of social or economic distinctions of which we are not sufficiently cognizant. It would be a helpful exercise for a pastor to list what he or she believes to be characteristics of members of the congregation: income and education levels, types of work, family structure, medical issues, etc., and then think about how many in the congregation do not fit that pattern. Perhaps the single mother or the older bachelor does not feel included in the kind of examples the preacher uses or the problems the pastor discusses. If the “strangers” already in the congregation do not really feel welcome, it is not likely that those outside of the fold will feel welcome. What else, then, does all of this mean for our preaching? It means, first of all, that the theological points made above must always be part of our preaching. We must preach the gospel of grace, the gospel of our being received into the people and the household of God, not because of who we are, but because of who God is. We need to hold before the congregation who is truly the Lord of the church, and therefore on what basis we are included and others are invited. We may say at the communion table that this is the Lord’s Table and not the church’s, and therefore all are welcome; but that is true of everything in the church, not only the Table. Secondly, it means that, even though our preaching must be concrete and deal with the specific issues of our community and congregation, it must also be catholic, constantly reminding us that we are part of a larger body spread throughout the world. Concretely, preaching that welcomes the stranger must always be preaching as in the presence of the absent stranger. If one would not say something in the presence of a

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multicultural congregation, one should not say it in the presence of a monocultural congregation. If one would not say on a Cherokee reservation that God took away the surrounding land from their ancestors and gave it to its present owners, one should not imply it in a Thanksgiving service in downtown Atlanta. And the preacher should be up-front about this, constantly reminding the congregation that the people of God includes people of different cultures, nationalities, political persuasions, educational backgrounds, etc. A congregation that repeatedly hears this from the pulpit and comes to appreciate the preacher’s sensitivity for the world-wide church will be ready to be more open and welcoming when that world-wide community appears at its doorstep. Thirdly, preaching that welcomes the stranger affirms the particularity of peoples and cultures and then relates that particularity to other similar particularities. It is not a matter of forgetting about our culture or of saying that our culture is of no particular value. Those who cannot appreciate their own culture cannot appreciate other cultures. It is rather a matter of appreciating and affirming who we are and yet doing it in a manner that appreciates and affirms who others are. Recently we attended a service at a Presbyterian church whose congregation includes a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The highlight of the service was the “kirking of the tartans.” It was a beautiful and moving event, with bagpipes, kilts, and the like. People marched in, each carrying the tartan of their ancestors. One could feel their pride in such ancestors. In marched the McClouds, the Campbells, and the McDavids, and we all stood and greeted them. Still, for those of us who were not of Scottish descent, something was missing. It was not that there was no González tartan—one could hardly expect that! It was rather that there was no acknowledgment that, just as the McDavids have elements in their culture and traditions which have made an important contribution to the church and to who we are, so have the Gonzalezes and the Kims and the Changs. Nor was there anything about the history of oppression in the midst of which the church in Scotland had been a strength and resource, pointing to the parallels in the history of Christians in other cultures. A very brief word would have sufficed. But that word was never spoken, and we were left looking in from the outside at what is without doubt a beautiful tradition, but not ours. It is possible to affirm the value of different cultures and traditions without undervaluing others. When this happens, all gain something. Some years ago, in a Catholic church in Appalachia that was having great difficulties negotiating the tensions resulting from the influx of immigrants from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, a Vietnamese member declared that a certain traditional hymn in the Mass was particularly meaningful to him, because that was the last hymn he heard his father sing before he was taken away by force, never to be seen again. Deeply moved, the congregation learned the words in Vietnamese. When they sang these words that they did not even understand, the hymn itself gained new meaning for the entire congregation. They welcomed the stranger, not by condescending to him, nor even by telling him, “you are as good as we are,” but by sharing his pain and by accepting and celebrating his contribution to the life of the whole. Fourthly, preaching must be supported by the whole of worship. The entire service must be an act of welcoming the stranger—even of welcoming the stranger who for the present is absent. A crucial place where this can be done is in prayers of intercession. For whom do we pray in church? Do we pray only for our ill and our bereaved? Or do we pray for the entire church, catholic, present, and absent, and for

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all of God’s creation? Recently, we were at a service in a Disciples church in Puerto Rico. When the time came for the prayers of intercession, the pastor led us in prayer not only for his congregation, but also for every other church in the community, Catholic, Pentecostal, and Independent. We prayed for any who might be visiting the church for the first time, and we prayed for ourselves, that we might know how to receive them in our midst and show them the love of Christ. In an island where tensions between Catholics and Protestants have been intense, this church was teaching itself how to welcome the stranger. A congregation that is concerned about welcoming the strangers that are in the neighborhood needs to undertake a study of who is actually there. A look at the census tracts, at the school population, at the clerks in stores as well as the customers, could begin to tell us who are the newcomers in our midst. Then we could see what needs these new neighbors have—help with English, transportation, tutoring for children, legal services, help with governmental agencies, etc. Are there resources in the congregation that could assist? Are these new neighbors Christians? Do they need a place for worship in their own language, or would they like to participate in our worship? Do they need pastoral care (which could be provided by more than the pastor)? And, equally as important, what will they bring with themselves—beyond numbers and perhaps money—that would enrich the life of our congregation? What is God offering us through them? By asking these questions we become ready to receive them with true hospitality, without condescension or patronizing. Only after some clear awareness of who the strangers are that we wish to welcome can concrete plans be made. Often it is by a chance encounter of a member with someone who is part of the new population in the community that contact is begun, but the preaching can be the cause ofthat member’s openness to seeing the new neighbors and bringing their concerns to the congregation. We have spoken of the need to look to the past, to remind ourselves that we are all guests, aliens brought into the People of God through Christ. We have seen the need to look around us in the present, to make the congregation open to see these new neighbors and how we can welcome them. That leaves the future, the ultimate future of the city of God, as the rationale, the cause of our behavior toward the stranger now. It is not at all difficult to find such a rationale. Think of the words of Jesus, that in the future people will come from east and west and north and south to sit at table in the kingdom (Luke 13:29). In the vision of John of Patmos, repeatedly the future city is to be populated by people from every tribe and language. If the future for which we hope, the kingdom whose coming we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer, is to be such a multicultural place, then surely we should begin to practice for our future abode by experiencing a multicultural church to the degree which is possible in the present. When we look at today’s events in the light of God’s promised future, we might even view the present enormous migration of peoples, tragic as it is in so many cases, as an opportunity we have been given to experience even now the future God has for us all. In fifth-century Spain, at the time of the Germanic invasions, which threatened much of what he cherished, Christian writer Paulus Orosius declared that, if through this means God was bringing Goths and Vandals, Suevi and Alani, into the household of faith, and thus giving the church a glimpse of its truly catholic calling, this was reason to praise the mercy of God! Our situation is different than that of the fifth century. Many of our new neighbors are Christians, and the reason they are here is not

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their strength and our weakness, but rather the poverty and oppression in other parts of the world and the relative abundance and freedom here. But the sentiment can be the same. Civil wars, famines, poverty, lack of opportunity even for basic survival have led to the greatest displacement of peoples that history has seen. The reasons for these migrations are not good. In fact, they show the fallenness and evil in the world. Yet God is able to bring something good, something that is a foretaste of the final goal of history, out of that evil. And because of that, we and other Christians around the world have the opportunity to experience a foretaste of that final banquet in the City of God for which we pray. The future for which we hope and out of which we must live puts both our past and our present under a different light. Our past is not just the glorious deeds—and egregious errors—of our ancestors. It is also the manner in which God welcomed them and us, our culture and our traditions, strangers though we were. The present is not just the moment in which we happen to live—good or bad as such a moment may seem to us. It is also the opportunity God gives us to witness to the promised future and to catch a glimpse of it. In this season of Pentecost, we must see the outpouring of the Spirit as God’s gracious act of welcoming the stranger and preparing the church to be equally welcoming. Part of what happens in Acts 2 is that strangers are welcomed in an unexpected, unexplainable way, and this happens by the power of the Spirit. Parthians and Medes, Elamites and all the rest, hear “about God’s deeds of power” in their own tongues. The “great deeds of power” are told amidst a miracle of communication that is in itself a great deed of power. This is one side of the coin. The other side is that the Spirit empowers the small community of the disciples to be welcoming in ways that would enrich their faith and experience, but would also change the church forever. The language of the disciples would now share its place with many other languages. This is something the disciples could not have done on their own. Furthermore, probably if asked, at least some of them would have preferred to keep things as they were, neat and tidy—decently and in order. But the presence and power of the Spirit enables both the original disciples and the latecoming Medes and Elamites to hear and share in the same great deeds of God. Eventually, others would hear and praise in English and in Swahili and in countless other tongues and other ways. And all of this, by the power of the same Spirit. Finally, returning to our first comments on the theological grounding for all of this, it may be well to capitalize our theme in a way that makes it clear who the stranger is whom we really welcome: “Preaching that welcomes the Stranger!’ Our preaching and our church life must welcome this Stranger who is none other than the One who said, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me”! It is in welcoming the stranger that Christ comes into our worship service. He is there, both as the Lord of the church and as the stranger whom the congregation truly welcomes. He is the one who is hungry and thirsty, but also the one who is in need of help adapting to a new and different culture, the one whose children need help in school or help negotiating the many bureaucracies that govern our life. In the stranger that comes to our door, our loving God gives us a glimpse of the Stranger who one day will say to us, the great multitude of believers from all tribes and nations, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, for I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

December 31, 2009
Forging an old hymn anew

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Forging an Old Hymn Anew

Brian Wren

Chilmark, Maine

I can’t remember when I started wondering about the first line of the hymn we were singing. I had been teaching it for three years in the Worship segment of my seminary ‘ s foundation course on Worship and Preaching.1 To prepare for the sessions on congregational song, I had the students learn and sing unaccompanied a Gloria from Peru, one or two Taizé chants, and John Mason Neale and Henry Williams Baker’s translation, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” to the plainsong melody Divinum Mysterium. The short songs were learned entirely by ear. “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” was learned by ear with help from the melody line printed British and Australian fashion above the text printed in poetic form. After singing the songs several times, we offered an experience in the acoustics of congregational song by singing them first in the classroom, then in a curtained and carpeted space, then in procession monastic style along the hard surface corridor past the administrative offices, and finally in a stone and glass stairwell that showed the power of unaccompanied voices in a resonant space. “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” seemed particularly memorable: once the tune was familiar, the singing took on a quality of meditative concentration. Somewhere along the way I glanced at a hymnal that credited the original author and gave what appeared to be the first line of the Latin text: Corde Natus ex Parentis. “Ex Parentis?’ Though my Latin is sketchy, I felt sure that the noun here was “Parent” (Parens, parentis), not “Father” (Pater,patris). If so, perhaps I could find the original, get help with the Latin, and contemplate making a new translation.2 A quick web search for “Corde Natus ex Parentis” yielded two identical Latin versions containing nine stanzas of three lines each, attributed to Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348-413) .3 Martha Lewis, a member of Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, and a retired teacher of Latin was kind enough to give me a literal translation, of which the first stanza reads “Born from the heart of the parent before the beginning of the world; Alpha and Omega, synonymous (of the same meaning) he himself is the source and conclusion of all things that are, have been, and will be afterward.” Clearly then, for reasons poetic perhaps or theological, the author had chosen to say “born” not “begotten” and “Parent” not “Father.” A further search revealed that Prudentius’ hymn was considerably longer than the stanzas initially found: thirty-eight three-line stanzas totaling 114 lines.4 The ninestanza selection uses lines 10-21,25-27,22-24, and 106-111, concluding with a later Trinitarian doxology not in Prudentius’ text. Current English versions derive from the translation by John Mason Neale, 1854, and Henry Williams Baker, 1861. According to Carlton Young,5 a nine-stanza version of their translation was included in Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1861. Neale’s first stanza was retained, but the rest were by Baker.6 To translate Prudentius’ poem entails making a selection from the original and shaping it in the forms of English poetic meter. The Neale-Baker translation opts for

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a Christmas hymn by selecting Prudentius’ verses on Christ’s incarnation, birth, judgment of humankind, and creation’s response of praise and adoration. From the concluding phrase of the post-Prudentius doxology (saeculorum saeculis) comes Neale’s resonant chorus, “evermore and evermore.” Singing the Neale-Baker translation to the plainsong melody Divinum Mysterium gives a powerful nonverbal signal of links with the past. Michael Hawn points out that singing it is a cross-cultural experience. A portion of a fourth century Latin poem, translated into English by nineteenth century Anglicans hoping to reclaim the presumed glories of the medieval Church, is sung to a melody from medieval Italian and German trope (chant) collections.7 And, as Hawn also observes: “England also left other cultural marks on this text when the previously monophonie, unaccompanied melody was harmonized and accompanied on the organ, and when it was sung not by choirs at monastic gatherings , but by congregations.” For Neale and Baker, rendering Corde natus ex parentis with “Of the Father’s Love begotten” probably seemed an obvious choice, given Prudentius’ Trinitarian faith and their own classic Trinitarianism whereby “Father” means the First person of the Trinity, who eternally originates the Second (“the Son”) and through whom (or from whom) proceeds the Third (“the Spirit”). “Begotten” (“fathered”) derives from the ancient and erroneous biology whereby the male parent’s sperm was thought to contain the entire personality and physique of the child, for which “seed” the mother’s womb was merely the seedbed.8 In classic Trinitarian theology and in the Neale-Baker translation, “begotten” is used in its abstract technical sense meaning “generated, originated,” a meaning that probably escapes most modern singers of the hymn. The Neale-Baker translation has been widely influential and appears with fewer stanzas and minor other alterations in several recent denominational English language hymnals.9 To weigh possibilities for a new English version, I went back as near as I could get to the source, using Martin Pope’s 1905 translation as my guide to the Latin original, which even to my limited knowledge clearly has vivid imagery and strong rhythms. It is time to meet the author. Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius was born in CE 348 at Saragossa (Caesaraugustus) in the Roman Province of Hispania (modern Spain). His life spanned the establishment of Christianity (CE 380) by the emperor Theodosius. He was named after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Emperor CE 161 -180), a notable writer, stoic philosopher, and legal reformer also originally from Hispania. His middle name, Clemens, means “kind, merciful,” while Prudentius suggests someone who is experienced, prudent, discreet and judicious. Prudentius practiced law and was twice provincial governor before Theodosius summoned him to the Imperial court. At age 57 he retired from public life to become an ascetic, fasting until evening and abstaining from animal food. Prudentius later collected his Christian poems and added a preface, which he himself dated CE. 405. His book, Cathemerinon Liber, Hymns for the Christian’s Day, contains an autobiographical poetic preface and 12 hymns: for cock-crow, matins, before and after eating, the lighting of the lamps, before sleep, for all hours, fasting and after fasting, Christmas, Epiphany, and the burial of the dead. In the Preface, Prudentius looks back on his life, youthful sins, eloquence and skills, public achievements, and promotion to high rank. Recalling the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21), he applies it to himself, as motivation for his change of course:

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Yet what avail the prizes or the blows Of fortune, when the body’s spark is quenched And death annuls whatever state I held? This sentence I must hear: “Whate’er thou art, Thy mind hath lost the world it loved: not God’s The things thou soughtest, Whose thou now shalt be?” Yet now, ere hence I pass, my sinning soul Shall doff its folly and shall praise my Lord If not by deeds, at least with humble lips. Let each day link itself with grateful hymns And every night re-echo songs of God.

My source, as it was for Neale and Baker, is Prudentius’ “Hymn for All Hours,” which narrates the glorious deeds of Christ. A major portion of the hymn is devoted to Jesus’ earthly life, focusing on his deeds of healing power. To give an idea of the scope of the work, here is an outline: Born eternally from the Parent’s heart, the One who created all worlds becomes incarnate to teach us God’s ways and save us from eternal death. Foretold by Spirit-inspired prophets, the promised Savior is born of the virgin Mary as heaven sings his praise. Successive stanzas narrate how he changes water into wine, cleanses a leper, heals a blind man using clay softened with spittle, stills the stormy sea, heals the woman with a hemorrhage as she touches his robe, raises a widow’s son from death, raises Lazarus, walks on the water, heals the demon possessed man among the tombs, feeds the five thousand, and heals the paralyzed man carried by friends. When Jesus is crucified the sun veils itself in mourning. Blood and water flow from his pierced side. By dying to wash our guilt away, he wins the ultimate victory, foiling the great Serpent of evil and robbing it of its power over us as he breaks its hissing neck. He goes down to the dead to break their chains of sin and bring them back to life. Triumphantly risen, Christ raises ancient patriarchs and saints and leads them up to heaven into God’s presence. Old and young, male and female unite to sing Christ’s praise, joined by the elements of creation: storm and sunshine, stream and sea, forest and wind, night and day. Prudentius’ story in song is both Catholic and Evangelical, catholic in its universal vision and evangelical as it uses the power of poetry and song to proclaim the good news of Jesus. In the fourth century words spoken or sung without accompanying visual expression had far more impact than they would today. In such a culture the hymn’s length, 114 lines, was probably unremarkable. Today, though a multi-media event might compellingly communicate its vision, no modern congregation could sing a hymn of that length. Like Neale and Baker before me, I had to make a manageable selection. Since the 1960s, English language hymnody has paid more attention to the ministry of Jesus. I resolved to do likewise. Moved by the power and scope of Prudentius’ work, I decided to try to convey it in six stanzas. I kept continuity with Neale and Baker by using Divinum Mysterium and treating the last line of each stanza as a refrain. Since “evermore and evermore” derives from a later hand than Prudentius, I dropped it and honored his Christ-centeredness with a refrain using variations on “Jesus (Christ) our Savior.” My rendering can be accurately described as a distillation

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and partial translation. It begins from Christ’s life, asking, “Who is this?” (Not in Prudentius, but a prominent question in the Gospels 10) and ending with the “answer” that Prudentius places near his beginning. Thus, after narrating Christ’s life and death, we come to the early Christian conclusion (John 1, etc.) that Jesus is the eternal Word made flesh. In crafting the hymn I kept close to Prudentius cosmology and included some Biblical women among the saints of old who “in their dust no longer wait.” “Who is this?” should be sung unaccompanied, in a key (D?) accessible to congregations. Adding harmonization muddies the plainsong melody and empties the singing of its meditative power. The words should be printed in poetic form, as here. They should not be interlined with music. Doing so is in this case unnecessary and impairs comprehension and appreciation. Teach the melody first, without words. When it has become familiar, demonstrate how an italicized syllable indicates two musical notes, as in “changes water m-to wine.” Then sing the hymn.

Who Is This? By Brian Wren A distillation and partial translation of “Corde Natus Ex Parentis” by Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348-413) Poetic Meter: 9.7.9.7.11.7.7. Shaped to fit the plainsong melody, Divinum Mysterium. The text should, if possible, be printed in two columns. Syllables in italics have two notes of music. Probably best sung in D, not as here in E flat

fi Ll ι ι • 1 ‘ ι η / J J J “J η J» f ι

Who is this, who gives the blind their sight, changes water m-to wine, cleanses lepers, brings the dead to life, calls the outcasts in to dine, feeds the hungry, calms the raging of’the sea, human, yet with power divine? This is Jesus Christ our Savior!

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Who is this, who bleeds upon a cross while the darkness hides the day, pierced by loneliness and pointed spear as disciples run away? Who goes down to meet and liber-ate the dead? Who can raise us from our clay? – Jesus Christ our living Savior!

Raised in glory from a guarded tomb, Christ returns through Aetf-ven’s gate. Sarah, Abraham and Miriam in their dust no long-ei wait. Moses and Elijah sing with all the saints, free from sorrow, death, and fate, led by Christ our risen Savior.

Now we know who lived as one of us, born of Mary, /0-seph’s child, bright with goodness, Word at home in flesh, tempted, tried, but not beguiled, going bravely into shame and dread-ful death, flogged, rejected, and reviled: Jesus Christ, our Friend and Savior.

Born forever from the Parent’s heart, seeing worlds not yet begun, speaking, birthing water, sea and land, earth and heaven, moon and sun; Praise the Origin, Conclusion, Aim and End, member of the Three in One: Word of life, our hope and Savior.

Angels join the singing universe. Girls and boys, come lead our praise. Every language shall be gladly heard telling God’s a-maz-ing ways. Acts of loving-kindness shall ful-fill our song, till our re-awakened gaze worships Christ, our joy and Savior.

Brian Wren. Completed April 2005. With thanks to Martha Lewis. Dedicated August 2007 to Don Hustad, scholar, musician and friend, who like Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius is both evangelical and ecumenical. Copyright © 2005 by Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, IL 60188. All rights reserved.

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To reproduce this hymn in worship, use it under the terms of a CCLI or OneLicense copyright license or get permission from the publisher: 1-800-323-1049; email hope@hopepublishing.com; or online at http://www .hopepublishing .com.

Notes

1 Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA, Course P151. 2 Not having enough Latin to work directly from original source(s), my research on this topic is at a “secondary” level only. 3 From the cyberhymnal http://www.cyberhymnal.org/non/la/cordenat.htm. And from http:// www .arlt .co .uk/dhtml/carols .php#corde 4 Go to http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile7fk_filessl68118&pageno=60 Prudentius’ poem is available free from Project Gutenberg, a library of 17000 free e-books whose copyright has expired in the USA. Go to http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page 5 Carlton R. Young, Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Abing-don Press, 1993) 540 (“Of the Father’s Love Begotten”). 6 A nine-stanza version said to be from Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1922 is available at http:// www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/ and http://www .hymnsandcarolsofchristmas .com/Hymns_and__Carols/of_the_fathers_love_begotten Jitm. An online source for Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1861 has seven stanzas, however. Go to < http:// www .oremus.org/hymnal/o/o739.html> and < http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/aml861.html> 7 C. Michael Hawn, “Singing with the Faithful of Every Time and Place: Thoughts on Liturgical Inculturation and Cross-Cultural Liturgy “(Yale Institute of Sacred Music online Colloquium Journal), http://www.yale.edu/ism/colloqJournal/vol2/hawnl Jitml.Hawn’sdescriptionofPrudentiusasa”Spanish poet” is anachronistic. The Roman provinces of Hispania and Gaul were historical antecedents of modern Spain and France. They spoke forms of Latin that developed into Spanish and French. 8 Thus, infertility was the fault of the woman (whose womb was called “barren”). Such male-centered views were impervious to problems posed by the fact that children often resemble their mothers 9 In Australia – Together in Song, Australian Ecumenical Hymnal, 1999,# 290; In Canada – The Book of Praise, 1996 , #163 (Presbyterian Church in Canada) and Voices United, 1996,# 61 (United Church of Canada); in Britain – The Church Hymnary IV, 2005 ,#319 (Church of Scotland) and Rejoice and Sing, 1991, #181 (United Reformed Church); and in the United States – The Chalice Hymnal, 1995, #104 (Disciples of Christ), Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 2006, #295 (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), The Presbyterian Hymnal, 1990, #309 (Presbyterian Church USA), The New Century Hymnal, 1996,118 (United Church of Christ), and The United Methodist Hymnal, 1989,184 (United Methodist Church). The Chalice Hymnal and Voices United offer asterisked first line alternatives “Of eternal love begotten” and “Of God’s Very heart begotten,” which are likely to be sung only as often as anyone attends to asterisks. The New Century Hymnal offers its own translation, which mixes fine phrases (e.g. “One there was with no beginning/ One who is eternally -Source and Ending of all things that have been/ and all things that are to be” with archaisms or church-talk (“luminance,” “seers,” “shines forth”) and oddly follows “Of the Parent’s heart” with “begotten:9 10 See Matthew 21:10; Mark 1: 27,4:41; Luke 8:49,9:9; John 12: 34.

December 31, 2009