after Pentecost
| Old Testament | Exodus 3:1–15 |
| Psalm | Psalm 105:1–6, 23–26, 45c |
| Epistle | Romans 12:9–21 |
| Gospel | Matthew 16:21–28 |
| Track Two | Jeremiah 15:15–21 · Psalm 26:1–8 |
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
Following you proves demanding at times. Sometimes it costs us something. But we know it proves worth it. When the path becomes difficult, grant us courage. When our faith wavers, strengthen us. Above all, give us hearts that continually say yes to you. You sent your disciples into the world relying solely on your spoken word and empowering strength. They needed nothing more than that, and we need no more than that. Remind us that you provide for us and strengthen our efforts, because you never leave us to work alone. Amen.
▶ | Hear These Lessons Preached St. Cuthbert, Houston · Proper 17A, September 3, 2017 Also on this day’s Exodus lesson: A God of History — Emmanuel, Houston, on Exodus 3:1–15 |
“Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.” — Jesus’ hardest sentence to Peter is not left in the Gospel to be admired. The prayer book puts it in our mouths every Friday morning.
“The kingdom is becoming present in that resurrected life of the Messiah in each of our communities where this confession and life are bound together in the responsible exercise of love and mercy for the world.”
“Peter rebukes Jesus. Jesus rebukes Peter. Calls Peter — or at least Peter’s rebuke — Satan. That is, Tempter, Snake in the Garden, Introducer of Hesitation, Mixer of Motivations, Flaunter of Red Herrings, Side-Tracker of Mission, Setter of One’s Mind on Human Things. Well, fear of pain and death will do that to most people, and Peter was no exception.”
As we read through the Gospel of Matthew we might remember that everything is read through the lens of the concluding Passiontide. This passage is the first of the passion predictions in Matthew. It comes to us following the miracle of loaves and fishes, the stilling of the storm, and Peter’s Gospel proclamation that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.
It is not a surprise to us, because we know the rest of the story, and it is not a surprise if we have been reading along in Matthew’s Gospel. Throughout the narrative we have received images, metaphors, road signs that we are heading towards Jerusalem. Jesus has set his face like a flint to Jerusalem. We know his message of a continuing revelation of God and the new kingdom will be rejected by the religious and political establishment, and that he is to die and rise again.
So the first revelation of this Gospel is one that we as Christians have come to understand. This truth is: Jesus is willing to do this. Jesus is willing to go to Jerusalem and to die there, and to do so on behalf of the vision of the kingdom. He is also willing to do so on behalf of a newly restored creation.
Jesus does this work as a free man, choosing to be faithful to his very nature and faithful to his vocation as a prophet. He willingly chooses for himself this destiny as the divine right of the King of Heaven. It seems important for us to understand that Matthew’s Gospel does not offer a God who requires Jesus’ death, or a society that demands it. On the contrary, the death of Jesus is determined by Jesus himself as an offering for the cause of the kingdom of God. Jesus believes, in my opinion, that if he will go to Jerusalem he will intentionally fan the flames of the religious and political authorities, they will kill him, and he will then usher in the reign of God in this world and the next.
For the author of Matthew, for the apostolic generation, and for every successive faith generation that has followed, Jesus’ will and the divine will are one. His intention therefore is God’s intention. A new order, the creation itself, is being re-made. The plan is a united trinitarian front in the face of the powers of the world that objectify, dominate, and commoditize.
We cannot miss the very important theological propositions here. I refer again to Allison and Davies, upon whose scholarship I very much depend to help us remember and think through the deep meanings intertwined in this passage. Here is their offering regarding Peter’s witness and Peter’s relationship with the Christ:
To begin with, Peter’s pre-eminence makes his misunderstanding in effect universal: if even the favored Simon, rock of the church and recipient of divine revelation, did not grasp the truth, then, we may assume, that truth was hid from all. God’s intentions for Jesus were so dark and mysterious that they simply could not, before the event, be comprehended. This in large part explains why Jesus is such a lonely figure in Matthew, and why he is trailed throughout the gospel by misapprehension and even opposition. God’s ways are inscrutable. … Another lesson is to be found in this, that Peter’s fall from the heights shows him to be anything but an idealized figure. Like David and so many other biblical heroes, the apostle serves as warning that privileges and even divine election will not keep a body from evil mischief. Finally, Peter must also, again like David and so many others, be intended to stand as a symbol of God’s ever-ready willingness to bestow forgiveness on the imperfect. For as soon as Peter has been quickly dismissed for words better left unsaid, Jesus selects him, along with two others, to be witnesses of the transfiguration. Thus Peter, so far from being punished for his misguided thought, is immediately granted a glimpse of the glorified Christ. Is the reader not expected to see in this a triumph of grace?
Heavenly Father, help our unbelief! One of the beautiful things that has always intrigued me about the Gospel, and about God’s willingness to be in relationship with us, is God’s ability to commit no matter how often we get it wrong. Certainly we, as individual followers and as a Church, have not always gotten it right. We don’t have to meditate long upon our personal and corporate sinfulness, wherein we have attempted to create a kingdom and a revelation that supports our own human and individual power and authority over and against the divine wishes of the Godhead, or the clear revelation of Scripture to create a different kind of order.
We celebrate together as the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion the reality that God’s will is accomplished in spite of ourselves — despite our best and our worst efforts. The beauty of the passage is Peter’s complete obstruction to God’s plan, one that is overcome by the grace and single-minded vision and actions of Jesus Christ.
Can we trust that we are buoyed up by the grace of God, and that somehow our efforts work into the greater work of the Godhead?
Are we able to accept grace for ourselves, and — more importantly — can we claim enough grace to withstand the reality that those who disagree with us may also receive the vision of Christ glorified?
These are the questions Peter faces in this moment, and in his own missional life lived after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.
We must read the whole Gospel and claim its revelation of truth for the whole body of faithful people. We must be the community of life and love where the fallen are invited into the greater celebration of the triumph of grace. There is, in the end, the truth that grace allows you and me, and all those who agree and disagree with us, the opportunity to see the Christ lifted high upon the cross, delivered into the depths of Hades, and risen on the third day — transfiguring not only his own body but the whole creation into the kingdom and reign of God.
“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” — “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” I will, with God’s help. — Paul’s “bless those who persecute you” is not advice we may take or leave. We have already promised it, out loud, at a font.
“Without reconciliation or acknowledged difference, there can be no balance. Paul is also realistic. Peace is not always possible (12:18). We need to bear that in mind when Paul urges submission to the structures of authority in society in the next chapter. Sometimes it is not possible.”
“The Good News that you heard included an invitation: right now, as you are, you can be a part of something — specifically, a member of the Body of Christ. … The tricky part is that the Body of Christ includes an awful lot of people who are every bit as difficult as we are.”
In our passage today Paul reminds us of the conversation thus far. We understand God’s love, that our response is gratitude, and that we are to give up ourselves and our lives to the Spirit. Moreover, in so doing, we are transformed — as is the world — by God’s efforts through us. We are the very members incorporate in the body of Christ, as the Eucharistic prayer reminds us.
In order for this all to be of true and lasting value, we must understand that just as God’s saving work is rooted in his love for us, so our work in the world must also be genuinely set upon the foundation of love. We are to be about the work of loving others as Christ loves us. We are to be for others as Christ was for us. Therefore we are to love our fellow Christians, to deal with them with honor. In so doing we are serving God. We are to practice hospitality even to those who test us, even to strangers. Paul here literally means to let them into your home.
If we are to pursue what is good out of love, then that will make of us — demand of us — a hospitality beyond the boundaries of the hospitality which is prevalent in the world around us. This is the meaning of the Good News. Those who know the teachings of Jesus know that Jesus challenged us to bless those who persecute us or cause us suffering. We are to honor even them, because we are to be like Christ. We are to live peaceably no matter what comes. We are not to desire revenge upon them, or deal with them as we think God should judge them. What! This completely undoes the church’s role throughout much of its history. That is correct. Paul says we are not to be in charge of God’s judgment, but rather to love and be hospitable to all people — even those who don’t agree with us, even those we don’t like, even those who seek to undermine us. Everyone. No exceptions. Moreover, we are to leave the handling of sin to God. We are always to do good.
I often wonder about those who decide to judge on God’s behalf. I am curious about those who have decided to take an inerrant stance on Scripture and yet never seem to take this requirement of kinship and hospitality as God’s word. It is a constant reminder to myself and to the church that we are to read the whole text, and not just the parts of the text that give us power over others or the ability to shame and judge others. It seems to me that we would do far better to be hospitable and welcoming to one another as a church than our current way of being with each other — and with those desperately seeking this amazing, loving, and profoundly giving God.
As funny as it is, we might say that putting away the judgment seat and taking on the servant’s mantle of hospitality may be the cross most of us must take up in order to find our life in Jesus Christ.
Gregory of Nyssa reads the bush that burns without burning up as the pattern of every true knowing of God, and then hears in it the Annunciation: the light of divinity, he writes, “did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of her virginity was not withered by giving birth.” Moses must take the sandals off his soul before he can stand in that light.
“In ministry we are called, often enough, to look more closely. Listen more intently. And search out the nooks and crannies of the world around us, and hear the cry of people we might not normally hear.”
“Don’t be fooled by your dim recollections of Charlton Heston’s Moses. This passage isn’t about a timid exile’s reverent first meeting with the God of his ancestors. Rather, this story is about a no-holds-barred encounter between a wily, even conniving outlaw and a God who’s more than up to the challenge of transforming him into an instrument of salvation.”
I have been thinking about this passage and the passage from Matthew a lot as we approach our time to put pen to paper. I am struck by the notion that in Peter’s case he has an image of God and how God might act in his life. The orientation for Peter, as he makes both his confession and his mistaken assumption, is that God is part of Peter’s narrative. The same might be true of Moses in some way. What we learn, what is made very clear, is that we are involved in God’s narrative. In order to think about this some more, we might turn to the passage from Exodus, which is a reminder of this narrative reversal from a human-centric perspective.
What we might think, from our human perspective, is that a God who acts in history is merely myth-making. We might believe more in a divine watchmaker who wants good things for us but isn’t really going to act on our behalf. We are alone to figure it out. We have to make the most of it until we die. Then God will act after death to raise us from the grave. But really, here and now, we are on our own. These feelings may be especially true in the midst of a hurricane or a pandemic.
This really is not much different from how the Israelites may have felt in the midst of the story we know from Exodus. I very much like how Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaks about this moment in the history of both the Torah and the people of Israel. He writes:
The Torah is preparing the ground for one of its most monumental propositions: in the darkest night, Israel was about to have its greatest encounter with God. Hope was to be born at the very edge of the abyss of despair. There was nothing natural about this, nothing inevitable. No logic can give rise to hope; no law of history charts a path from slavery to redemption. The entire sequence of events was a prelude to the single most formative moment in the history of Israel: the intervention of God in history — the supreme Power intervening on behalf of the supremely powerless, not (as in every other culture) to endorse the status quo, but to overturn it.
This is essential in that for Christians, as Stanley Hauerwas likes to quip, “We believe in the God who raised Jesus after first having raised Israel out of Egypt.” What this reveals to us is that God had engaged with the patriarchs and matriarchs through a vision of doing a new thing in creation — recreating a garden imaginary of kinship and faithfulness that is a blessing of shalom to the world, and that this blessing would spread. Here in the God who is to be Hashem we are receiving a revelation that the God who walked in the shade and cool of the day with the first humans will now engage in history. This engagement is one that makes Jesus’ birth, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension part of the arc of this action. This is a historical engagement which raises our eyes to an eschatological vision of God’s garden imaginings at the end of time.
This passage reveals to us a new God — one who acts. Rabbi Sacks points out that until this point God was known only through creation. But now what we begin to see is a revelation of a God who intervenes.
It seems revelatory to note that this intervention is not simply to free people from slavery. This revelation is about a God who enlists prophetic voices to say: “People and their bodies matter. They cannot be destroyed or enslaved for the purpose of individual gain.” This is a revelation that shows that the mimetic murder of Cain and Abel had now grown to exponential proportions, and that the murderous Cains of this world objectified, commoditized, and dismembered whole people — whole tribes.
It is easy for us to think that history has no meaning, or that the meaning of history is defined by the perspective of the individual. The cycles of a natural understanding of God are undone by a God who intervenes in history. This was true for the Israelites who now knew God as Hashem. This revelation goes for us today in our fractured understanding of history. Life is more than living, working, paying taxes, and dying. It is nihilistic to believe we are alone amidst a sea of people, and that the cosmos itself cares nothing for us. Like the ancient world, we worship various American demi-gods and believe in the rebirth of Greek heroes through the genres of entertainment, politics, and wealth. Recognizing that we are part of God’s narrative, and that this God is known as Hashem, a history-intervening God, is a rejection of neo-Darwinian notions that life is no more than the operation of “chance and necessity” (Jacques Monod) or “the blind watchmaker” (Richard Dawkins). In their worldview, “time seems to obliterate all meaning. Nothing lasts. Nothing endures.”
The massive shift in thinking here cannot be underemphasized. Religious philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote:
For the first time, the prophets placed a value on history. … For the first time, we find affirmed and increasingly accepted the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. … Historical facts thus become situations of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God.
Moses, in his invitation by God in this moment, has his eyes opened to the fact that his life is no longer an indistinct series of cyclical events or disconnected moments. In the revelation to Moses, and eventually to the Israelites, they see that they are part of God’s narrative. They have a glimpse of what we call history. We also note that for Moses and the Israelites is born the notion that things may happen again. The revelation of Hashem means that there is a God active in history. This is the revelation of a God who interacts, frees, liberates, and unbinds.
It is here that we turn to a vision of who God is, and the oft-mistranslated words spoken out of the fiery bush to Moses. I am going to continue to lean on Rabbi Sacks here.
There is first the translation of 3:14, where Moses asks God’s name. The Greek-to-Latin filtering through the theologians ends up with an ontological thought as the answer: “I am who I am,” or, “I am he who is.” Aquinas says that God is “true being, that is, being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principle of every creature.” Rabbi Sacks points out that Ehyeh asher ehyeh means none of these things. It means “I will be what, where, or how I will be.” These are words in the future tense.
This reveals to us an important part of God’s nature, often missed in the translation of God as an unmoved mover. Here is the God who will act in history now and in the future. Here is the God of Israel and the God of Jesus and the first followers. Here is a God who will continue to participate in and within the arc of creation. We have here too a revelation of creation and history as an environment of change. It is making its way from God’s garden social imaginary to God’s eschatological future.
Here too is hope. Here is the idea that God will continue to act. Here is the idea of a God who will journey with us as we make our own pilgrimage. Here is the God who interacts for justice. Here is a God who desires kinship and faithfulness in time, and not only in one moment. Here is the God who has created humanity to be engaged in future thinking. Rabbi Sacks reminds us too that “the future is the sphere of human freedom, because I cannot change yesterday but I can change tomorrow by what I do today.” Science speaks only of the present and the present past. There are Christian theologies and philosophies that deny the future and our openness to it. Sacks writes, “Freedom will be seen as an illusion. The best we can hope for is Karl Marx’s definition of freedom as ‘consciousness of necessity.’”
Moses stands before the burning bush a murderer, a person who has absented himself from the cause of his people and the family that raised him. He stands there hiding, and in some way rejecting the notion of going and multiplying blessing, kinship, and faithfulness. God, Hashem, interrupts him and all of history. Even Moses is given, in that historical interruption, an opportunity. I believe in sinfulness and the human mimetic desire for sibling rivalry. I believe in humanity’s capacity for the oppression and murder of our fellow humans. I believe in our insatiable appetite for individual self-preservation, and that the new economies have given us new forms of enslavement.
But like Moses, we stand at the precipice of tomorrow with a God of the future. We are given an opportunity to change. We are given the opportunity to work beyond our own individual flourishing for the flourishing of others. We are given the chance tomorrow to do good and to change our lives and the world around us.
God does not promise that this work of interrupting our lives and history is easy work. In fact, in the person of Jesus we discover that the work is always cruciform in nature. Yet, like Moses, we discover that God will be with us, God will not abandon us, and God will help us find others who will walk with us and share our burden.
“The incongruity between this summons to the pursuit of justice and the reality that Jeremiah faces is deeply disturbing. The prophet is justifiably indignant: great suffering has come about because the people have persistently failed to hear God’s word. Jeremiah is hardly the first prophet sent to convey this to the people; their corruption is a long-term, systemic problem.”
“Repeatedly throughout the Bible, imprecatory words help the utterer work through and find healing even in the most difficult situations. Suppression and denial of such feelings allows feelings of bitterness, even actions that harm others, to take root. Acknowledging these types of feelings in front of God allows God to step in and heal the woundedness and release the giftedness that lies beneath the hurt.”
In this passage we turn to Jeremiah the prophet with his critique of the nation. From Jeremiah 2:2 we hear the words of God to the people: “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown.”
Jeremiah’s prophetic contribution is one that is defined by life in diaspora. He makes quite a radical suggestion about the work of the people of Israel. He writes in 29:7, “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its prosperity you shall prosper.” On the one hand, Jeremiah is echoing God’s garden imaginary that all people be a blessing of peace to each other and to the world — regardless of where they find themselves. They are to see others as kin and respond with faithfulness. Moreover, Jeremiah offers this prophetic view of life to the minority living within a diverse context not of their own making. Rabbi Sacks reflects: “Why did this universal perspective matter? Because those who care only for their own people are chauvinists. They create false expectations, narrow and self-regarding emotions, and bravado rather than real courage.”
It is through these eyes that we might approach our text. We begin with a lament and the promise to endure. This endurance is based upon the notion of remembering God’s purposes as provided in God’s vision of blessing and peace. He suggests that though he is in a foreign land, he will not succumb to their ways but hold fast to God’s vision.
God’s prophetic word is that they had forgotten God’s ways, forgotten the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and that this has brought them great pain. God promises, though, to receive them because of God’s faithfulness. In turning, in continuing to remember and act on God’s vision, they will find strength in God. Ultimately they will be delivered out of the diaspora. But it is their ways that will determine their future.
This is a struggle — thus the failure, and the lament. We feel this even now. Here we might turn again to Crouch, who wrote:
Jeremiah’s struggle speaks to us today more than ever. Then, as now, the powerful sought to silence those who champion God’s vision of a more just society: those who speak out on behalf of the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the displaced — those whose suffering is a living condemnation of our original sin. Surrounded by ignorance and opposition, the dream of a society ruled by God’s justice, righteousness, and steadfast love appears deferred — even impossible. In the face of exhaustion and despair, God affirms that the work must go on. Everything is at stake.
Peter is rebuked and then, almost immediately, taken up the mountain to see the glory. Where have you assumed that being wrong about God disqualifies you from being shown God?
Moses stands at the bush a murderer, hiding. What have you absented yourself from, and what would it mean for God to interrupt you there?
No comments:
Post a Comment