here is the sermon i delivered this past sunday. it is not as good as the one below. if i had been thinking more clearly, i would have added the challenge to think about who doesn't seem to fit, who doesn't seem to have done things "right" and the possibility that they may be the new way God is working in and through his church. but i was stressed and a little depressed. and i'm not very good at "application."
Children of God
You know, sometimes Jesus doesn’t make any sense to me. On the other hand, he’s hardly alone in that. The passage today from the gospel of John actually happens after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but of course, we won’t celebrate that until next week. So the people who arranged the lectionary are at least as confusing (or maybe confused? :) as anyone else.
But I think Jesus is especially confusing. Here he is in Jerusalem. He is getting ready to celebrate the Passover with his disciples. And he seems to be getting ready for his death, having been predicting it for a while. He has just been welcomed rather flamboyantly into Jerusalem by people waving palm branches as one would cheer a king returning victorious from battle. And in all this excitement - about Jesus, about the festival coming up - some Greeks want to meet him.
It’s not entirely clear who these people were. They may have been Hellenistic diaspora Jews who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. That is to say, Jews who spoke Greek as their first language and read the Bible in Greek. Or they may have been gentile worshipers of the God of Israel, but one who had not officially and formally converted by the rite of circumcision. My guess is that they’re non-Jews who worship the Jewish God. Either way, it’s clear they lived neither in Jerusalem or Palestine at all and had traveled at some length and some expense to come to the festival.
It’s similar today to how Christians travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Holy Week there. You may know that every year, thousands of Christians from around the world descend on Jerusalem around Easter to follow Jesus’ own path through the city and celebrate with parades, ceremonies and church services precisely the things we are reading in the gospels. Of course, today, we can fly there, whereas in the first century, the journey had to be made much more slowly and painfully by foot, horseback, and/or ship. And whether it was the first century or the twenty-first, it’s not a cheap trip either way.
So these Greeks seek out Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples who probably spoke Greek - he has a Greek name - and told him they wanted to meet Jesus. Philip goes and tells his friend Andrew, and together, they go to tell Jesus, possibly offering to act as translators between the Aramaic-speaking Jesus and the Greeks.
And what does Jesus do? Does he say, “Great! Bring them over!”? No. Does he say, “No, at this really important festival, I need to concentrate on my fellow Jews”? No. He goes off on this bizarre monologue about the Son of Man being glorified, grains of wheat, and his Father in heaven.
What the heck is going on here?
Well, part of what I think is going on here - and this is just me - but I think the author of the gospel narrative has gotten a little distracted. Ok, distracted isn’t quite the right word. I don’t mean to imply that the author here has ADD or something. But what I do mean is that he is trying to make a point, and he’s using the Greeks to make it. We’re the ones who get distracted by this narrative of the Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the festival and get a little off track from the gospel’s larger point. So the Greeks and Philip and Andrew are really just a setup to be able to give Jesus a chance to speak.
This is all standard in the ancient art of writing biography, which is another reason I feel like saying the author got distracted is a bad way to put it. In the ancient world, people expected the story of someone’s life to be given a point, that the narrative would be constructed to communicate a morally edifying lesson by the author. If the author didn’t do this, he would be held to have not done his duty. It was part of the convention of the genre. It would be like today, picking up a newspaper and reading an article about a court case, say, where the journalist had written up the article so that it was embellished and sounded like an excerpt from a novel. It would, in fact, still depict what happened in the courtroom, but it wouldn’t fit our expectations about how the journalist should write her story. She would have defied the conventions of her genre.
So when I say that the author of the gospel is using the request of the Greeks as a setup for Jesus, I don’t mean he invented it. It probably did happen, because we also know from other writers that inventing things was frowned on. But then in proper ancient style, he uses the episode to allow Jesus to deliver an important speech which reinforces the message being given to this account of his life.
But what is the point?
One way we can get to that question is to ask what is it about the fact that people described as Greeks wish to see Jesus. We’ve already seen that Jesus doesn’t seem to answer their request. But what if his strange monologue here is, in fact, an answer?
People have found that among others, some of the major themes in the gospel of John are Jesus’ identity with respect to the Father, and the identity of God’s people. And when you look through that lense, this episode starts to make a little more sense. First, Jesus’ monologue about the glorification of the Son of Man and of the Father’s name fit very nicely within the theme of the relationship between Jesus and the Father.
Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus is put into a very close relationship with his Father. And in this little passage, Jesus’ own glorification is linked to the glorification of the Father’s name. So this very carefully reinforces again that close link between Jesus and his Father. As we’ll discover on Easter, Jesus’ death glorifies both him and the Father’s name.
The other theme that gets pushed here is this gospel’s new definition of the people of God. Jesus spends his time in this gospel talking to just about everyone: his friends and family, Pharisees, fellow Jews, and at least one Samaritan woman. In all of these exchanges, John’s gospel has Jesus pushing on the definition of God’s people, arguing and disagreeing with his fellow Jews about that definition. And here, Greeks come to see him and this prompts him to begin talking about the glory of the Father, which even prompts a response from heaven.
Jesus is pushing a new definition of the people of God. Here it’s being made clear: the new people of God are Jews and Gentiles together, united not by circumcision, but by Jesus’ death. There was always a way for Gentiles to join the people of God: circumcision for men, and eventually baptism for both. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories of Gentiles coming to believe in and worship the God of Israel.
Jesus' radically new way of including Gentiles in God’s family is one of the things that we celebrate on Easter, and indeed every time we take communion. We always pray and thank God that we are made one body when we eat the bread and drink the wine, the bread and wine that were first part of a Passover meal where Jesus made another radical announcement that they were to be the body and blood of Jesus himself. In his death and resurrection, all people are made the children of God.
Amen.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
lenten sermons, part 1.
so either seminary is kicking my butt, or i'm just not cut out to blog about the things i'm most interested in. i think part of my problem is that i'm not used to expressing myself in less than a few thousand words.
so on that note, i am taking my husband's advice and posting my sermons here.
this is the sermon i preached 3 weeks ago for the second sunday in lent. the scriptures are Psalm 22 and Mark 8:31-38.
Deconstructing Peter, Deconstructing Death
I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to die.
I suppose that’s not surprising, though. I don’t think many of us do. Some people never learn. They fight to the end, angry, denying, desperate. But some people do learn how to die. Jesus did.
We read the last few verses of Psalm 22 a little bit ago. It’s usually the beginning of Psalm 22 that we read, because that first verse is probably one of the most quoted verses: it became Jesus’ cry of desolation on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In fact, the whole psalm is read on Good Friday.
But Jesus was learning how to die before Good Friday. In Mark chapter 8, which we also read today, he is teaching his disciples and other followers how to die.
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
The impact of this statement from Jesus is often lost, because “to take up their cross” has sort of entered out everyday language. It’s not too common any more, but haven’t we all heard somewhere, “oh, that’s my cross to bear”? It usually means something frustrating or irritating, something long-term that dogs us.
But that’s not what Jesus was talking about. “To take up their cross” does not mean “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” (Hamlet Act III, scene I). The cross was a piece of equipment used in execution, and to carry your cross is to take an active role in your own death. This is why the Romans forced prisoners to carry their crosses. It was an act of psychological torture before the physical execution, which could probably be described as torture itself. Highways in the Roman empire would be lined with crosses hung with dead or dying men as warning to those who would rebel against imperial power, and the Jewish people rebelled often. So this image would have had quite an impact on Jesus’ first hearers. For us today, it’s like being asked to wire up the electric chair or fill the lethal injection needle ourselves.
But what’s interesting here is why Jesus launches into teaching the crowd and his disciples about how to follow him, which is to learn how to die. This passage could be called “Peter’s great reversal.” Only a few verses earlier, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now, Jesus rebukes him and calls him Satan! Wow! What happened there?
After Peter’s confession that Jesus was the messiah, Jesus started teaching that he must “undergo great suffering...and be killed.” And Peter can’t handle this. So he starts to rebuke Jesus. We don’t know what he said, but it’s plain that he disagreed with Jesus’ insistence on suffering and dying.
So Jesus calls everyone together and begins to teach that not only will he suffer and die, but that in order to be his follower, everyone else has to be prepared to go through the same: suffering, rejection, torture and a shameful execution.
The middle of Psalm 22 gives a poetic picture of this in verses 14 and 15:
I am poured out like water;
all my bones are out of joint;
my heart within my breast is melting wax.
My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.
That’s hard to say. I don’t know how to get there.
In 1999, the film, The Green Mile came out, and it was nominated for the Oscar for best picture. When I was in college, my friends and I used to throw an Oscar party every year, where we’d watch the Oscars and complain about who should have one and who had picked which disastrous outfit to wear. I hadn’t seen The Green Mile, but when they announce the nominees for any award, they also show a clip or series of clips from the film. I don’t remember what the whole clip from The Green Mile was, but I do remember part of it was that famous scene where the cell door clangs shut, and from somewhere a voice calls out “Dead man walkin’ on the green mile!”
At the time, I thought it was an impressively dramatic scene. But later, after I’d had time to reflect, I realized that is what Jesus is calling us to as his followers. We are to be dead men and women walking.
The gospel of Mark is widely held to have its basis in the teaching and sermons that Peter gave while in Rome. Some of the writers of the early church recorded that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching so that it could be passed on after Peter was executed at Rome. This explains many of the accounts in Mark that include Peter, and often James and John, but not the other disciples. In this light, though, it’s remarkable that it contains this story of Peter’s private rebuke of Jesus and Jesus’ response of calling him “Satan.”
Not only could Peter not handle Jesus’ own teaching that he would have to suffer and die, he didn’t know how to die himself. Jesus realized that Peter’s own misunderstanding was probably a microcosm of what everyone who was following him was thinking. So he called together not only his disciples, but also the whole crowd who was following them and delivered this graphic teaching on what following him really meant.
This was important enough that Peter kept Jesus’ teaching alive and Mark wrote it down to be passed on to the church as a whole. Another story about Mark is that after Peter was executed in Rome, Mark went to north Africa and founded what would become the church in Alexandria. The whole gospel of Mark seems to be meant for people who are undergoing some kind of persecution, to encourage them to stay fast in their faith and in their commitment to follow Jesus. So this description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus would have probably made sense. It’s not all healings and answered prayer.
And Peter finally had learned how to die. He doesn’t protect his reputation here. He doesn’t put himself out as the insightful, spiritual disciple who was the first person to identify Jesus as the Messiah. Yes, that’s there, but he turns right around and tells of this huge mistake he made, a mistake that caused his teacher to call him Satan.
Peter learned how to die.
And when he learned how to die, he also learned what it meant to live. His teachings ended up encouraging generations of Christians who also had to suffer and die, and we still read them today to teach us what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Because, included in following Jesus, included in the teaching that we learn how to die, is the promise of a new kind of life. Again, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Somehow, learning to die leads to gaining life.
This is the same promise contained in the portion of Psalm 22 that we read today.
My praise is of him in the great assembly;
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the LORD'S for ever.
They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn
the saving deeds that he has done.
After the psalmist has recorded the suffering he is going through, he ends on the promise of life.
Now, as Christians in the United States, the chance that we’ll ever suffer the kind of persecution that Peter and the church in Rome did under Nero is pretty small. But we have other things crowding out the call of Jesus on our lives. Certainly, we have our egos to protect. We might never be party to our own physical execution, but we can learn from Peter how to die anyway.
Lent is often called “the great penitential season of the church.” It is a time when Christians try to learn how to die to prepare themselve for the celebration of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. I just learned this: the word “Lent” comes from the same word as “lengthen.” We call it these 40 days in English “Lent” because now the days are getting longer. Spring is coming! Included in this very season is the promise of life. Easter follows Good Friday. Resurrection and life follow death, and in fact are made possible by death.
During Lent, some people deny themselves a special food or physical comfort. Some people take up a spiritual discipline or a special Lenten devotion. Some still practice the ancient discipline of fasting, as our Jewish and Muslim neighbors also do today. Whatever you choose to do this Lent, including following Peter’s example of learning true humility so that by your mistake someone else might learn something, I would encourage you to join the ancient church in learning how to follow Jesus into death so that we might find life.
And the resurrection promises, in the words of poet and Anglican priest John Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” (Holy Sonnet X)
Amen.
so on that note, i am taking my husband's advice and posting my sermons here.
this is the sermon i preached 3 weeks ago for the second sunday in lent. the scriptures are Psalm 22 and Mark 8:31-38.
Deconstructing Peter, Deconstructing Death
I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to die.
I suppose that’s not surprising, though. I don’t think many of us do. Some people never learn. They fight to the end, angry, denying, desperate. But some people do learn how to die. Jesus did.
We read the last few verses of Psalm 22 a little bit ago. It’s usually the beginning of Psalm 22 that we read, because that first verse is probably one of the most quoted verses: it became Jesus’ cry of desolation on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In fact, the whole psalm is read on Good Friday.
But Jesus was learning how to die before Good Friday. In Mark chapter 8, which we also read today, he is teaching his disciples and other followers how to die.
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
The impact of this statement from Jesus is often lost, because “to take up their cross” has sort of entered out everyday language. It’s not too common any more, but haven’t we all heard somewhere, “oh, that’s my cross to bear”? It usually means something frustrating or irritating, something long-term that dogs us.
But that’s not what Jesus was talking about. “To take up their cross” does not mean “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” (Hamlet Act III, scene I). The cross was a piece of equipment used in execution, and to carry your cross is to take an active role in your own death. This is why the Romans forced prisoners to carry their crosses. It was an act of psychological torture before the physical execution, which could probably be described as torture itself. Highways in the Roman empire would be lined with crosses hung with dead or dying men as warning to those who would rebel against imperial power, and the Jewish people rebelled often. So this image would have had quite an impact on Jesus’ first hearers. For us today, it’s like being asked to wire up the electric chair or fill the lethal injection needle ourselves.
But what’s interesting here is why Jesus launches into teaching the crowd and his disciples about how to follow him, which is to learn how to die. This passage could be called “Peter’s great reversal.” Only a few verses earlier, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now, Jesus rebukes him and calls him Satan! Wow! What happened there?
After Peter’s confession that Jesus was the messiah, Jesus started teaching that he must “undergo great suffering...and be killed.” And Peter can’t handle this. So he starts to rebuke Jesus. We don’t know what he said, but it’s plain that he disagreed with Jesus’ insistence on suffering and dying.
So Jesus calls everyone together and begins to teach that not only will he suffer and die, but that in order to be his follower, everyone else has to be prepared to go through the same: suffering, rejection, torture and a shameful execution.
The middle of Psalm 22 gives a poetic picture of this in verses 14 and 15:
I am poured out like water;
all my bones are out of joint;
my heart within my breast is melting wax.
My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.
That’s hard to say. I don’t know how to get there.
In 1999, the film, The Green Mile came out, and it was nominated for the Oscar for best picture. When I was in college, my friends and I used to throw an Oscar party every year, where we’d watch the Oscars and complain about who should have one and who had picked which disastrous outfit to wear. I hadn’t seen The Green Mile, but when they announce the nominees for any award, they also show a clip or series of clips from the film. I don’t remember what the whole clip from The Green Mile was, but I do remember part of it was that famous scene where the cell door clangs shut, and from somewhere a voice calls out “Dead man walkin’ on the green mile!”
At the time, I thought it was an impressively dramatic scene. But later, after I’d had time to reflect, I realized that is what Jesus is calling us to as his followers. We are to be dead men and women walking.
The gospel of Mark is widely held to have its basis in the teaching and sermons that Peter gave while in Rome. Some of the writers of the early church recorded that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching so that it could be passed on after Peter was executed at Rome. This explains many of the accounts in Mark that include Peter, and often James and John, but not the other disciples. In this light, though, it’s remarkable that it contains this story of Peter’s private rebuke of Jesus and Jesus’ response of calling him “Satan.”
Not only could Peter not handle Jesus’ own teaching that he would have to suffer and die, he didn’t know how to die himself. Jesus realized that Peter’s own misunderstanding was probably a microcosm of what everyone who was following him was thinking. So he called together not only his disciples, but also the whole crowd who was following them and delivered this graphic teaching on what following him really meant.
This was important enough that Peter kept Jesus’ teaching alive and Mark wrote it down to be passed on to the church as a whole. Another story about Mark is that after Peter was executed in Rome, Mark went to north Africa and founded what would become the church in Alexandria. The whole gospel of Mark seems to be meant for people who are undergoing some kind of persecution, to encourage them to stay fast in their faith and in their commitment to follow Jesus. So this description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus would have probably made sense. It’s not all healings and answered prayer.
And Peter finally had learned how to die. He doesn’t protect his reputation here. He doesn’t put himself out as the insightful, spiritual disciple who was the first person to identify Jesus as the Messiah. Yes, that’s there, but he turns right around and tells of this huge mistake he made, a mistake that caused his teacher to call him Satan.
Peter learned how to die.
And when he learned how to die, he also learned what it meant to live. His teachings ended up encouraging generations of Christians who also had to suffer and die, and we still read them today to teach us what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Because, included in following Jesus, included in the teaching that we learn how to die, is the promise of a new kind of life. Again, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Somehow, learning to die leads to gaining life.
This is the same promise contained in the portion of Psalm 22 that we read today.
My praise is of him in the great assembly;
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the LORD'S for ever.
They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn
the saving deeds that he has done.
After the psalmist has recorded the suffering he is going through, he ends on the promise of life.
Now, as Christians in the United States, the chance that we’ll ever suffer the kind of persecution that Peter and the church in Rome did under Nero is pretty small. But we have other things crowding out the call of Jesus on our lives. Certainly, we have our egos to protect. We might never be party to our own physical execution, but we can learn from Peter how to die anyway.
Lent is often called “the great penitential season of the church.” It is a time when Christians try to learn how to die to prepare themselve for the celebration of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. I just learned this: the word “Lent” comes from the same word as “lengthen.” We call it these 40 days in English “Lent” because now the days are getting longer. Spring is coming! Included in this very season is the promise of life. Easter follows Good Friday. Resurrection and life follow death, and in fact are made possible by death.
During Lent, some people deny themselves a special food or physical comfort. Some people take up a spiritual discipline or a special Lenten devotion. Some still practice the ancient discipline of fasting, as our Jewish and Muslim neighbors also do today. Whatever you choose to do this Lent, including following Peter’s example of learning true humility so that by your mistake someone else might learn something, I would encourage you to join the ancient church in learning how to follow Jesus into death so that we might find life.
And the resurrection promises, in the words of poet and Anglican priest John Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” (Holy Sonnet X)
Amen.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
the song of the sea.
i just realized in the last few posts i mentioned this sermon, so i thought i might as well post it.
The Song of the Sea
It’s actually very fitting that the final teaching in our exodus series was cancelled by a hurricane. Exodus chapter 15, the last in our series, is often called “The Song of the Sea.” At its basic level, it is a song sung by the Israelites on the far shore after the sea has let them walk through but drowned the Egyptian army that followed.
It may be helpful for you to know a we go through this that Hebrew poetry is written in couplets. This applies as much to the song tonight as it does to most of the psalms and other pieces of Hebrew poetry in the bible, such as the Song of Songs, or much of the prophecy. Two images or statements are put next to each other to either reinforce each other or to oppose each other and be resolved later in the poem. So when you see two statements that look redundant in English, or seem to be stating the same thing in a slightly different way, that’s part of the poetry.
I have also included for you tonight a copy of the song as it is written in the Hebrew bible. I assumed that most of you don’t have one, but, like we did in the series earlier this year when we went through some of the songs that we sing here at Encounter, I wanted you to see what the song looks like in Hebrew. It is always written like this. This is a photocopy out of my Hebrew bible, but here on screen is a picture of it as it is written in a torah scroll.
Hebrew, by the way, is read right to left. The larger letters which is actually the 15 for the chapter, should be in your top right corner. I only say this because once Chris was working for an internet advertising company and they were asked to do an ad for an Israeli company who sent them the advertising copy in Hebrew. When Chris sent them back the ad, they said, “why are all the letters upside down and backwards?” :) So just in case, I thought I would explain what you’re looking at.
You can see it is written down roughly in 3 columns, which over lap slightly. The traditional interpretations of this are that 1) it represents the bricks that the slaves had to make and build in Egypt, so it reminds us of what we were freed from 2) it is what the sea looked like when it parted or 3) the left and right side are the walls of water and the center is the Israelites walking between. You can pick whichever one you like best :) For me, what I thought was worth thinking about is that in the middle of the bible, there is this poem that is not only a verbal work of art, but is also a visual one as well, and both aspects are created to glorify God.
But, as with most pieces of ancient writing, there is more going on here than just a joyful song.
First, I would like to point out that it is poetry and it is worship. It is a theological statement, and interpretation. To try and force the song of exodus 15 to match up with the prose account in exodus 13 and 14 is to try and force it to say something it doesn’t say. Peter Enns, in his commentary, says it is asking something of the song that the ancient author did not put there. Because one is the prose account and the other is a highly stylized worship song, we should not expect the details to match exactly. That is a mistreatment of the text.
I say this because often things like this, discrepancies in multiple accounts of an event in the Bible, are often used to “prove” that the Bible is nonsense. The bible is not concerned with giving us some kind of pure historical account. The bible is the story of god and god’s people, and it includes theological interpretation and emotional expressions of worship because it tells us who god is and who his people are. If this just sticks in your craw, please come talk to me afterward - I’d love to keep this conversation going, but I did agree to cut my teaching down tonight :)
The other thing that we might miss in our twenty-first century reading is that the sea in the ancient world was thought of a the source of chaos and disorder. In many of the ancient myths, the gods or heroes are told of battling the sea or the monsters it produces. We can see the frightening, and in fact, chaotic power of water simply demonstrated today by hurricane Irene. The flooding in New Jersey has been devastating and it has even killed people. Imagine what floods and storms from the ocean would do to people three and four thousand years ago. No electricity, no radio, no twitter :) houses built simply of wood and mud.
Also, the near east is located on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Without electricity, the sun was the major source of light, and of course, warmth. In most cultures, it was worshiped as a god who brought life. The sun sets, as we all know, in the west. Today, we know the earth is round and in fact circles around the sun, which is why it seems to rise and set and we have seasons. But the ancient world thought the earth was flat and the sun traveled around it. To someone living a couple thousand years ago in the middle east, it looked as though the sea ate the sun every night. The sun would set into the sea and darkness and danger would come.
beyond our science, this can actually be a strange viewpoint for us here, just because we’re on the east coast. I had never seen the sun setting into the ocean until 2006 when Chris and I went on vacation to California. For the first couple nights there, we were staying in a hotel in santa Monica, which is a suburb between Los Angeles and the pacific ocean. Our first night, I said to Chris, “I want to see the sun setting into the ocean.” So despite the fact that we had been traveling for like 9 hours, we got back in the car and drove to the beach so that I could see it. It really is a beautiful sight, but I can also understand the fear in the ancient world as the sun sinks and everything first gets red and then goes dark. The sea seems to be even more powerful than the sun.
However, in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH, their god, is universally described as having power over the sea.
First, in Genesis 1, God creates simply by speaking and by telling the waters what to do. There is no mighty cosmic battle here that you often see in other ancient stories. YHWH simply speaks, and the sea and land obey.
In the story of Jonah, God sends the storm and calms it. It’s not even really the point of the story, but God being more powerful than the forces of the sea is just part of the background for the author.
And here, in this song, the sea is just another tool of God, especially in verses 6-8:
“Your right hand, O LORD,
was majestic in power.
Your right hand, O LORD,
shattered the enemy.
In the greatness of your majesty
you threw down those who opposed you.
You unleashed your burning anger;
it consumed them like stubble.
By the blast of your nostrils
the waters piled up.
The surging waters stood firm like a wall;
the deep waters congealed in the heart of the sea.”
This is not a god who has to fight against the chaos of the sea, but a god who simply commands in power as the creator.
The crossing of the sea seems to be written to deliberately evoke the language of Genesis 1 - again the waters are divided, and again, dry land appears to sustain life. The passage of the sea and the completing of the freedom from Egypt mark a new start for god’s people.
The song continues to celebrate god’s power and creation a little further down in verses 11 through 13.
“Who among the gods is like you, O LORD?
Who is like you—
majestic in holiness,
awesome in glory,
working wonders?
You stretched out your right hand
and the earth swallowed them.
“In your unfailing love you will lead
the people you have redeemed.
In your strength you will guide them
to your holy dwelling.”
There is no god like this one and we are his people! This song is a triumphant announcement.
also, look at the turn there in verse 13. Suddenly, the verbs are in future tense! You will... you will... Worshiping God always has a future aspect to it, not just past and present.
It’s not really completed until God establishes his temple in Jerusalem, and then, if you know the story, Israel keeps turning away from God to worship other gods. The prophets often look back to the exodus to remind Israel who they should be Worshiping and why. Not just because he delivered them from Egypt, but because he is the powerful creator god whom even the sea obeys.
And god’s people keep going. As Christians, we worship the same god.
And so we are part of this story. The God that we worship is the powerful creator God who not only controls the chaotic forces of the sea, but who loves us and takes care of us.
This is seen most clearly in Jesus, who was God, and who came and died for us to conquer the ultimate power of chaos, sin. Sin is anything that does not worship God. And we also have a promise of new creation when he comes back. Right now, we are still broken people in a broken world that is only partly healed. Jesus has come, but things still aren’t right yet. We have the promise that in the future someday they will be.
But you know, sometimes, because we are broken people, and we turn away from God the same as the Israelites did, we get confused about sin. In the history of the church, visual art, music, dance, and many other creative endeavors of people have been declared sinful. That is why I love so much that there is, among other things, a piece of visual art in the bible.
There is not just one or two ways to worship God, there are as many ways to worship God as there are people who worship him. But the other thing this song teaches us is that we worship together. Moses and the Israelites sing this song, and Miriam leads the women of Israel in dancing as they sing together the song to worship God. The other name for this sing is “The Song of Moses and Miriam.” God is worshiped both in our individual expressions and in our expressions together as his people. In both ways is his wonderful, amazing creative power shown.
What inspires you to worship?
I asked Darren Campbell, a member of the encounter community and a very good poet and artist to write a poem for the community tonight. It is here on the easel. But I also wanted to give everyone a chance to worship god in your own creative way. So on the back of the song handout or on your program, or wherever, maybe you will write your own song to god. Or maybe you will go to the pillows in the back and pray or kneel or dance to God. You can feel free to get up and go wherever, or come up here and read Darren’s poem as well.
Then I will call everyone back together, and we’ll do some worshiping together. This will be our community building tome tonight, and you can choose two things (I’ll repeat this later so don’t worry). If you want to, you can share what inspires you to worship and what expression you used tonight. Or you can just discuss what you want to take away from this whole teaching series.
So I am going to release you all now to just... worship God however you want to for a few minutes.. Write, pray, kneel, dance, draw, whatever it is you do.
The Song of the Sea
It’s actually very fitting that the final teaching in our exodus series was cancelled by a hurricane. Exodus chapter 15, the last in our series, is often called “The Song of the Sea.” At its basic level, it is a song sung by the Israelites on the far shore after the sea has let them walk through but drowned the Egyptian army that followed.
It may be helpful for you to know a we go through this that Hebrew poetry is written in couplets. This applies as much to the song tonight as it does to most of the psalms and other pieces of Hebrew poetry in the bible, such as the Song of Songs, or much of the prophecy. Two images or statements are put next to each other to either reinforce each other or to oppose each other and be resolved later in the poem. So when you see two statements that look redundant in English, or seem to be stating the same thing in a slightly different way, that’s part of the poetry.
I have also included for you tonight a copy of the song as it is written in the Hebrew bible. I assumed that most of you don’t have one, but, like we did in the series earlier this year when we went through some of the songs that we sing here at Encounter, I wanted you to see what the song looks like in Hebrew. It is always written like this. This is a photocopy out of my Hebrew bible, but here on screen is a picture of it as it is written in a torah scroll.
Hebrew, by the way, is read right to left. The larger letters which is actually the 15 for the chapter, should be in your top right corner. I only say this because once Chris was working for an internet advertising company and they were asked to do an ad for an Israeli company who sent them the advertising copy in Hebrew. When Chris sent them back the ad, they said, “why are all the letters upside down and backwards?” :) So just in case, I thought I would explain what you’re looking at.
You can see it is written down roughly in 3 columns, which over lap slightly. The traditional interpretations of this are that 1) it represents the bricks that the slaves had to make and build in Egypt, so it reminds us of what we were freed from 2) it is what the sea looked like when it parted or 3) the left and right side are the walls of water and the center is the Israelites walking between. You can pick whichever one you like best :) For me, what I thought was worth thinking about is that in the middle of the bible, there is this poem that is not only a verbal work of art, but is also a visual one as well, and both aspects are created to glorify God.
But, as with most pieces of ancient writing, there is more going on here than just a joyful song.
First, I would like to point out that it is poetry and it is worship. It is a theological statement, and interpretation. To try and force the song of exodus 15 to match up with the prose account in exodus 13 and 14 is to try and force it to say something it doesn’t say. Peter Enns, in his commentary, says it is asking something of the song that the ancient author did not put there. Because one is the prose account and the other is a highly stylized worship song, we should not expect the details to match exactly. That is a mistreatment of the text.
I say this because often things like this, discrepancies in multiple accounts of an event in the Bible, are often used to “prove” that the Bible is nonsense. The bible is not concerned with giving us some kind of pure historical account. The bible is the story of god and god’s people, and it includes theological interpretation and emotional expressions of worship because it tells us who god is and who his people are. If this just sticks in your craw, please come talk to me afterward - I’d love to keep this conversation going, but I did agree to cut my teaching down tonight :)
The other thing that we might miss in our twenty-first century reading is that the sea in the ancient world was thought of a the source of chaos and disorder. In many of the ancient myths, the gods or heroes are told of battling the sea or the monsters it produces. We can see the frightening, and in fact, chaotic power of water simply demonstrated today by hurricane Irene. The flooding in New Jersey has been devastating and it has even killed people. Imagine what floods and storms from the ocean would do to people three and four thousand years ago. No electricity, no radio, no twitter :) houses built simply of wood and mud.
Also, the near east is located on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Without electricity, the sun was the major source of light, and of course, warmth. In most cultures, it was worshiped as a god who brought life. The sun sets, as we all know, in the west. Today, we know the earth is round and in fact circles around the sun, which is why it seems to rise and set and we have seasons. But the ancient world thought the earth was flat and the sun traveled around it. To someone living a couple thousand years ago in the middle east, it looked as though the sea ate the sun every night. The sun would set into the sea and darkness and danger would come.
beyond our science, this can actually be a strange viewpoint for us here, just because we’re on the east coast. I had never seen the sun setting into the ocean until 2006 when Chris and I went on vacation to California. For the first couple nights there, we were staying in a hotel in santa Monica, which is a suburb between Los Angeles and the pacific ocean. Our first night, I said to Chris, “I want to see the sun setting into the ocean.” So despite the fact that we had been traveling for like 9 hours, we got back in the car and drove to the beach so that I could see it. It really is a beautiful sight, but I can also understand the fear in the ancient world as the sun sinks and everything first gets red and then goes dark. The sea seems to be even more powerful than the sun.
However, in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH, their god, is universally described as having power over the sea.
First, in Genesis 1, God creates simply by speaking and by telling the waters what to do. There is no mighty cosmic battle here that you often see in other ancient stories. YHWH simply speaks, and the sea and land obey.
In the story of Jonah, God sends the storm and calms it. It’s not even really the point of the story, but God being more powerful than the forces of the sea is just part of the background for the author.
And here, in this song, the sea is just another tool of God, especially in verses 6-8:
“Your right hand, O LORD,
was majestic in power.
Your right hand, O LORD,
shattered the enemy.
In the greatness of your majesty
you threw down those who opposed you.
You unleashed your burning anger;
it consumed them like stubble.
By the blast of your nostrils
the waters piled up.
The surging waters stood firm like a wall;
the deep waters congealed in the heart of the sea.”
This is not a god who has to fight against the chaos of the sea, but a god who simply commands in power as the creator.
The crossing of the sea seems to be written to deliberately evoke the language of Genesis 1 - again the waters are divided, and again, dry land appears to sustain life. The passage of the sea and the completing of the freedom from Egypt mark a new start for god’s people.
The song continues to celebrate god’s power and creation a little further down in verses 11 through 13.
“Who among the gods is like you, O LORD?
Who is like you—
majestic in holiness,
awesome in glory,
working wonders?
You stretched out your right hand
and the earth swallowed them.
“In your unfailing love you will lead
the people you have redeemed.
In your strength you will guide them
to your holy dwelling.”
There is no god like this one and we are his people! This song is a triumphant announcement.
also, look at the turn there in verse 13. Suddenly, the verbs are in future tense! You will... you will... Worshiping God always has a future aspect to it, not just past and present.
It’s not really completed until God establishes his temple in Jerusalem, and then, if you know the story, Israel keeps turning away from God to worship other gods. The prophets often look back to the exodus to remind Israel who they should be Worshiping and why. Not just because he delivered them from Egypt, but because he is the powerful creator god whom even the sea obeys.
And god’s people keep going. As Christians, we worship the same god.
And so we are part of this story. The God that we worship is the powerful creator God who not only controls the chaotic forces of the sea, but who loves us and takes care of us.
This is seen most clearly in Jesus, who was God, and who came and died for us to conquer the ultimate power of chaos, sin. Sin is anything that does not worship God. And we also have a promise of new creation when he comes back. Right now, we are still broken people in a broken world that is only partly healed. Jesus has come, but things still aren’t right yet. We have the promise that in the future someday they will be.
But you know, sometimes, because we are broken people, and we turn away from God the same as the Israelites did, we get confused about sin. In the history of the church, visual art, music, dance, and many other creative endeavors of people have been declared sinful. That is why I love so much that there is, among other things, a piece of visual art in the bible.
There is not just one or two ways to worship God, there are as many ways to worship God as there are people who worship him. But the other thing this song teaches us is that we worship together. Moses and the Israelites sing this song, and Miriam leads the women of Israel in dancing as they sing together the song to worship God. The other name for this sing is “The Song of Moses and Miriam.” God is worshiped both in our individual expressions and in our expressions together as his people. In both ways is his wonderful, amazing creative power shown.
What inspires you to worship?
I asked Darren Campbell, a member of the encounter community and a very good poet and artist to write a poem for the community tonight. It is here on the easel. But I also wanted to give everyone a chance to worship god in your own creative way. So on the back of the song handout or on your program, or wherever, maybe you will write your own song to god. Or maybe you will go to the pillows in the back and pray or kneel or dance to God. You can feel free to get up and go wherever, or come up here and read Darren’s poem as well.
Then I will call everyone back together, and we’ll do some worshiping together. This will be our community building tome tonight, and you can choose two things (I’ll repeat this later so don’t worry). If you want to, you can share what inspires you to worship and what expression you used tonight. Or you can just discuss what you want to take away from this whole teaching series.
So I am going to release you all now to just... worship God however you want to for a few minutes.. Write, pray, kneel, dance, draw, whatever it is you do.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
constructing faith.
this was recently posted
the fact that this letter had to be written makes me angry. part of this is because my first semester in seminary, i had to sit through my pentateuch professor taking 2 1/2 hours out of a 3 hour lecture to plead with the students in the class not to hate him, hate the institution, ignore the class, or lose their faith because of what he was teaching.
and at orientation at princeton this week, i sat through a faculty panel where they all openly acknowledged that biblical studies classes were the hardest on students' faith. that a little bit of deconstruction took place that then had to be recovered from.
if pastors, teachers, and church leaders wouldn’t teach people ways of misreading or mishandling the bible in the first place (e.g. the-bible-as-handbook, the-bible-as-literally-true, the-bible-as-perfectly-open-and-understandable, and quite frankly, just not encouraging people to read the bible), we wouldn’t have to deal with students in seminary having a faith crisis. as far as i am concerned, it is irresponsible to build people’s faith on these things.
having a crisis of faith in your biblical studies class shouldn’t have to be a rite of initiation in seminary.
i happen to have an undergrad degree in ancient literature and critical theory, so i didn’t have this crisis, which probably makes me somewhat unsympathetic. but i just don’t understand why the things presented in these classes can’t be part of the teaching of the church at large. we don’t need to protect people or protect their faith. if we who take these course can retain our faith in and love for the living God and in his kingdom and in Jesus, then i fail to see why people seem to be convinced that it can’t be taught outside of grad school.
i also put my money where my mouth is :) 2 weeks ago, i taught in my worship community on exodus 15. i was asked to chop my teaching in half so a special announcement could be made. of the half i kept, an aknowledgement of the ambiguity/diversity of the exodus narratives and why this doesn’t destroy the authority of the bible stayed in. i thought it was that important.
the fact that this letter had to be written makes me angry. part of this is because my first semester in seminary, i had to sit through my pentateuch professor taking 2 1/2 hours out of a 3 hour lecture to plead with the students in the class not to hate him, hate the institution, ignore the class, or lose their faith because of what he was teaching.
and at orientation at princeton this week, i sat through a faculty panel where they all openly acknowledged that biblical studies classes were the hardest on students' faith. that a little bit of deconstruction took place that then had to be recovered from.
if pastors, teachers, and church leaders wouldn’t teach people ways of misreading or mishandling the bible in the first place (e.g. the-bible-as-handbook, the-bible-as-literally-true, the-bible-as-perfectly-open-and-understandable, and quite frankly, just not encouraging people to read the bible), we wouldn’t have to deal with students in seminary having a faith crisis. as far as i am concerned, it is irresponsible to build people’s faith on these things.
having a crisis of faith in your biblical studies class shouldn’t have to be a rite of initiation in seminary.
i happen to have an undergrad degree in ancient literature and critical theory, so i didn’t have this crisis, which probably makes me somewhat unsympathetic. but i just don’t understand why the things presented in these classes can’t be part of the teaching of the church at large. we don’t need to protect people or protect their faith. if we who take these course can retain our faith in and love for the living God and in his kingdom and in Jesus, then i fail to see why people seem to be convinced that it can’t be taught outside of grad school.
i also put my money where my mouth is :) 2 weeks ago, i taught in my worship community on exodus 15. i was asked to chop my teaching in half so a special announcement could be made. of the half i kept, an aknowledgement of the ambiguity/diversity of the exodus narratives and why this doesn’t destroy the authority of the bible stayed in. i thought it was that important.
Friday, September 9, 2011
consumers in the church.
it's the end of my second full week of unemployment.
my first full week of unemployment was spent driving my sister and her dog to phoenix, somewhat ironically, because she has a new job there.
so for a week, i was mostly off the grid, and completely away from "church."
in some ways, it was a good break. in others, it was completely exhausting and not really what you could call a break.
i came back and taught my community my first day home.
then yesterday, i met with the pastor who is taking back the community after the young pastor he handed it off to a couple years ago was fired back in july (see previous post, etc).
i want to say we had a good conversation, but i think he is so excited at the prospect of teaching regularly that he can't hear my concerns that the overall church is losing its voice to speak to those with a postmodern mindset (often also called the "emerging generations"). we talked about reading and background and research when preparing a teaching, and he very firmly believes that the difficult questions should be avoided so that the faith of the hearers isn't trampled.
i can't do that. my teaching last week was on exodus 15, and i had to point out that the events in the song of 15 both don't completely match each other and don't match the prose account in chapters 13 and 14. i took it as an opportunity to point out to people how we read our bible and how it was written to be read differently. that we shouldn't expect poetry to match word-for-word a prose account.
i can't believe that a church should let people stay consumers, giving them what they want to hear and never disturbing their comfortable, middle class existence. the church should challenge them, it should make them question their faith and be a safe place to ask those questions and be real about struggles.
my husband said that if you don't give people what they want, you'll very quickly find yourself without a livlihood. i don't know if it's the voice of the idealistic seminarian or the prophet who answered, but i said, "i don't care! you preach the gospel. and if they kill you for it, then they kill you for it, but you don't stop preaching the gospel." he said i crossed the line from passion to anger.
i don't know. i guess i am angry about the consumer-oriented church. i'm sick of self-help christianity with a theraputic god who you only call on when your own ingenuity and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attempts fail. christianity isn't about making you a happier and better person. it's about living a new, resurrected life that makes no sense by the old rules so that you can show the world that there is a better way and it's coming, and let's be part of it!
the american church is dying because we give selfish people what they want. we need to give them what they don't want, what they can't want until their lives are full of Jesus and his Spirit.
my first full week of unemployment was spent driving my sister and her dog to phoenix, somewhat ironically, because she has a new job there.
so for a week, i was mostly off the grid, and completely away from "church."
in some ways, it was a good break. in others, it was completely exhausting and not really what you could call a break.
i came back and taught my community my first day home.
then yesterday, i met with the pastor who is taking back the community after the young pastor he handed it off to a couple years ago was fired back in july (see previous post, etc).
i want to say we had a good conversation, but i think he is so excited at the prospect of teaching regularly that he can't hear my concerns that the overall church is losing its voice to speak to those with a postmodern mindset (often also called the "emerging generations"). we talked about reading and background and research when preparing a teaching, and he very firmly believes that the difficult questions should be avoided so that the faith of the hearers isn't trampled.
i can't do that. my teaching last week was on exodus 15, and i had to point out that the events in the song of 15 both don't completely match each other and don't match the prose account in chapters 13 and 14. i took it as an opportunity to point out to people how we read our bible and how it was written to be read differently. that we shouldn't expect poetry to match word-for-word a prose account.
i can't believe that a church should let people stay consumers, giving them what they want to hear and never disturbing their comfortable, middle class existence. the church should challenge them, it should make them question their faith and be a safe place to ask those questions and be real about struggles.
my husband said that if you don't give people what they want, you'll very quickly find yourself without a livlihood. i don't know if it's the voice of the idealistic seminarian or the prophet who answered, but i said, "i don't care! you preach the gospel. and if they kill you for it, then they kill you for it, but you don't stop preaching the gospel." he said i crossed the line from passion to anger.
i don't know. i guess i am angry about the consumer-oriented church. i'm sick of self-help christianity with a theraputic god who you only call on when your own ingenuity and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attempts fail. christianity isn't about making you a happier and better person. it's about living a new, resurrected life that makes no sense by the old rules so that you can show the world that there is a better way and it's coming, and let's be part of it!
the american church is dying because we give selfish people what they want. we need to give them what they don't want, what they can't want until their lives are full of Jesus and his Spirit.
Friday, July 29, 2011
giving and guilt
it's a frustrating day at work.
this week, the church laid off two people: one young pastor and our tech director. both of these guys were only-breadwinner-fathers, so the emotional fallout on the people they led has been pretty intense. also, the emotional fallout on the congregation realising that the church organization is in a state where layoffs are the only option to keep going has been somewhat strong.
what we are also getting is a lot of people saying they feel guilty because they can't give more than they already are.
this is a problem.
our database tells us that at least 50% of the people that tell us they call this their church home do not give financially at all. these are not the people coming to us and saying they feel guilty. it's the people who already give.
part of the problem is that we have an un-theologically sophisticated senior pastor who has decided that everyone ought to give 10%, the end. arguments that the 10% number aren't held up by the new testament do not sway him. 10% is easy to say, easy to prooftext, and easy to calculate.
the other part of the problem, it seems to me, is our culture of "take care of yourself first." now, absolutely, pay your mortgage and feed your kids before you give. but keep in mind the macedonians in 2 corinthians 8-9, who gave out of their poverty, and even more than they could afford, Paul says.
why?
because giving for a christian should not come from a sense of guilt or obligation, and it especially shouldn't come from a sense of having to atone for sins. what it should be is a joyful, ecstatic outpouring of generousity in response to the generousity of the cross. if God died for us, how can we not give from our finances to his body? he gave it to us anyway. it's not our money to begin with.
some of it is trust. the macedonians and the poor widow are examples to us of the trust we need to have in material terms. we don't need to take care of ourselves first. we do, i'll say, need to take care of our families, our children. and one of the obvious early ethics of the church, which they inherted from the jews, was to take care of their poor. there should be no one in the church that can't get food or pay rent.
but the new testament is pretty clear, i think... give what you can, and give out of a sense of gratefulness and joy for what you gain from the cross.
if you know you should be doing this, and you're still not, then that's the only proper place for guilt.
this week, the church laid off two people: one young pastor and our tech director. both of these guys were only-breadwinner-fathers, so the emotional fallout on the people they led has been pretty intense. also, the emotional fallout on the congregation realising that the church organization is in a state where layoffs are the only option to keep going has been somewhat strong.
what we are also getting is a lot of people saying they feel guilty because they can't give more than they already are.
this is a problem.
our database tells us that at least 50% of the people that tell us they call this their church home do not give financially at all. these are not the people coming to us and saying they feel guilty. it's the people who already give.
part of the problem is that we have an un-theologically sophisticated senior pastor who has decided that everyone ought to give 10%, the end. arguments that the 10% number aren't held up by the new testament do not sway him. 10% is easy to say, easy to prooftext, and easy to calculate.
the other part of the problem, it seems to me, is our culture of "take care of yourself first." now, absolutely, pay your mortgage and feed your kids before you give. but keep in mind the macedonians in 2 corinthians 8-9, who gave out of their poverty, and even more than they could afford, Paul says.
why?
because giving for a christian should not come from a sense of guilt or obligation, and it especially shouldn't come from a sense of having to atone for sins. what it should be is a joyful, ecstatic outpouring of generousity in response to the generousity of the cross. if God died for us, how can we not give from our finances to his body? he gave it to us anyway. it's not our money to begin with.
some of it is trust. the macedonians and the poor widow are examples to us of the trust we need to have in material terms. we don't need to take care of ourselves first. we do, i'll say, need to take care of our families, our children. and one of the obvious early ethics of the church, which they inherted from the jews, was to take care of their poor. there should be no one in the church that can't get food or pay rent.
but the new testament is pretty clear, i think... give what you can, and give out of a sense of gratefulness and joy for what you gain from the cross.
if you know you should be doing this, and you're still not, then that's the only proper place for guilt.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
why another blog?
i was recently accused of being a purist, but i decided it's more that i don't really have an integrated personality.
basically, i have several groups of friends, they don't all overlap, and the blog posts that some would be interested in reading would not at all be interesting to others.
this blog is going to kind of be my theological scratchpad... as i try to work out ideas or come to conclusions, i'm going to use this blog as a dump. we'll see how long it lasts.
basically, i have several groups of friends, they don't all overlap, and the blog posts that some would be interested in reading would not at all be interesting to others.
this blog is going to kind of be my theological scratchpad... as i try to work out ideas or come to conclusions, i'm going to use this blog as a dump. we'll see how long it lasts.
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