Sober reflections
Commentary
Object:
My memories of my great-grandmother Bolt are very vague. I was a young lad when my parents took my older sister and me to see her at a retirement home in Willmar, Minnesota. I can remember the strange and mildly irritating smell of the place, and the dim incandescence of the corridor with its waxed linoleum. We tried unsuccessfully to turn down the volume of our clattering steps and shuffled into the room quietly, nervously afraid of arousing death before its time.
"Grandma Bolt" (as we were told to call her) reclined in an oversized lounger, barely aware of us. Her mouth hung open and she wore wrinkled skin several sizes too big over a shrinking frame. A musty afghan draped her carelessly. She couldn't quite catch what my mom tried to tell her in a stage-whisper shout. We touched her hands and she seemed to fumble for ours with fingers gnarled and cold.
I can only recall this single visit to see her, and I know I didn't like it. At the time she was an alien to me, even though I know now that a good deal of her DNA lives on in my own body. When Grandma died my parents didn't take me to the funeral because I was supposedly too young to understand death. Now, some forty years later, I weep inside. I never knew the best of my great-grandma Bolt. I wasn't there when she played as a child with boys like me. I never watched her giggle with friends or flirt with my great-grandfather. I never experienced the changing moods of her face, a barometer of her passions and fears and faith. I never heard her sing in church, though I was told she loved the hymns. All I carry with me is the one scary visit of my childhood.
I am old enough now to attend funerals, and I have gotten well past my early aversion to assisted care centers. What frightens me these days is the thought that there are probably fewer than 25 people alive today who remember my great-grandmother at all. When we couple dozen die she will be truly forgotten -- a near-century of living, breathing, loving, toiling, memorizing, cooking, knitting, talking, aching, laughing, holding, washing, befriending, vapored, and vanished like a 6 o'clock morning mist.
Nicholas Wolterstorff reflected on the death of his son with these words: "There's a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there's now just nothing … There's nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved … The world is emptier" (Lament for a Son). That's true, as well, of my great-grandmother Bolt. True, too, of a host of good people whose gravestone legacies weather to indecipherable under time's polishing.
It won't be long before I join them, erased from life's hard drive by the reprogrammers of a new generation. Some years ago we were comparing ages in our family and one of my daughters remarked to another, "Dad has probably lived more than half his life already." The words shivered through me and robbed me of the fun of the moment. It's true -- I have probably lived half my life already. In the not-so-distant future I will be my great-grandmother, and only 25 minds will retain vague images of a wasted has-been.
This kind of sober thinking is behind all of our lectionary passages today. Through Isaiah God quickly reviews the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, and finds it clattering toward a nasty conclusion. In Hebrews we are reminded that not everything seems to work out well for those who are loved by God, and that the best we can say sometimes is that God works it out in the end, after we have limped away from persecutions and torment. Jesus startles us into remembering that our need for God also means that there is a problem in this world, which requires painful surgery before it is resolved. Sober reflections indeed.
Isaiah 5:1-7
There are several places in the Old Testament where God's work with Israel is compared to that of a farmer or other agriculturalist. Psalm 80 is a prime example, and today's lectionary reading is another. In another form, similar in content and intent, but told from a strictly human relational direction, this passage finds its mirror in the Word of God spoken through the prophet Hosea, especially chapters 1-2 and 10-11.
The image is told as a plotted story, and never more succinctly than here in Isaiah 5. God is the gardener who passionately loves a particular plant. To nurture its health, God creates a special vineyard or orchard for it, and does everything possible to ensure its health and well-being: protection from animals and intruders, tilled soil for good rootage, water and nutrients, and even, one might say, a little love talk.
Unfortunately, the plant displays only its full external beauty as a maturing vine or tree, but it fails to produce any fruit worth keeping or using or selling. It has turned into an ornamental shrub, more in love with itself than with either its gardener or its natural purposes.
The story is similar to that of Narcissus, whose curse for being too fair and beautiful was to fall in love with himself. Pining away above a remote pool of water, he died of starvation and thirst even as he drooled over the image of his face reflected back at him from the surface.
Here the outcome is similar -- Israel will no longer be cared for or protected. If she thinks she is so great, let her look after herself. Of course, the outcome of that divine neglect will be disaster as marauding nations invade, strip, cut down, and destroy. The parable predicts the impending doom that flows in the wake of Assyrian assaults on Israel (through which Judah is miraculously delivered), and later the mighty conquest of Babylon, and the razing of Jerusalem and the temple.
Jesus picks up this same storyline in his teachings, using the image of the vineyard or orchard as the possession of the absentee Lord in Matthew 25 and Luke 20. The only new element added is a focus on the repeated attempts of the Lord to regain custody, including sending his only Son to restore order and propriety. There, again, the plot ends in disaster and destruction follows after.
This is not a pretty parable. It is pointed, harsh, and indignant. Rarely do the prophets voice the divine message in harsher tones. It is impossible, this side of Jesus, to preach only the story with its devastating culmination. We know the rest of the tale, and need to bring back into our homiletic work the dawning of the Messianic age in which healing and hope are a divine gift once again.
Hebrews 11:29--12:2
Whatever one might call the literature, Hebrews is unquestionably built upon the foundation of Old Testament linear thought. There is, in its pages, a sense of progression to God's activities in human history, with clear reference points like the revelations at Sinai, the construction of the tabernacle, and the ministry of the prophets. This unfolding redemptive work of God has recently reached its apex, in the coming of Jesus. Everything -- past, present, and future -- becomes meaningful only as it intersects with Jesus Christ. Jesus' entrance into human time has changed everything, and we are now living in the new, messianic era.
Although there are many smaller sections and parenthetic notes, the thrust of Hebrews as a whole is on explaining the unique identity and role of Jesus, and drawing out the implications this has for all who know him:
Jesus is the Superior Way to God (Hebrews 1-6):
* Angels delivered the Torah, but Jesus is himself the Living Word (chapters 1-2).
* Moses received the Torah, but Jesus is a new and living symbol (chapters 3-4) of God among us.
* Aaron and the priests sacrificed daily and yearly, but Jesus sacrificed himself once for all (chapters 5-6).
Therefore Jesus is like Melchizedek, uniquely filling a mediatorial role (Hebrews 7-10).
So keep following him in spite of challenges and tribulation (Hebrews 10-13).
In making the comparison between the old and new expressions of the covenant, the author does not criticize the former, but turns common perceptions on their head. He assumes that the recent developments related to Jesus' coming were intended all along, with the cultic ceremonies of Israel functioning like a prelude or a preamble (cf. Hebrews 10:1-4).
Since Jesus has entered our history as the definitive revelation of God's eternal plans and designs, he has fulfilled the intent of the sacrificial system and thus made it obsolete. This message, and the divine Spirit, energizes the community of faith that now spreads its witness in this messianic age as the Christian church.
All of this begs the question: Who were the first recipients of this document? There are a number of clues that come through the author's words:
They are second generation Christians (2:1; 2:3; 13:7).
Who had come through tough times (10:32):
Many were publicly ridiculed (10:33)
A number of their leaders apparently were killed (13:7)
At least some of them had their property confiscated (10:34)
Although most had not been martyred, many had spent time in prison (10:34; 13:3)
They knew the Hebrew scriptures well.
They had practiced Hebrew religious ceremonies in the past.
But they were likely Gentile in ethnic background having come into Judaism in the first place by way of conversion (10:32).
When all of these things are considered together, subtle demographic lines emerge. Because they are well-educated, communicate in Greek, and appear to have come to Judaism from a Gentile background, it is likely that these people were proselytes to Judaism who had been seeking moral grounding in an increasingly debauched and debasing Roman society. There were many instances in the first centuries BC and AD where non-Jews became enamored of the rigorous lifestyle found in Jewish communities scattered throughout the major Roman cities. After going through years of non-participating observation and instruction, they were then officially declared to be Jews through ritual entrance ceremonies.
As with converts to any cause or religion, these are often the most zealous for their newly adopted perspectives and philosophies. So it must have been quite exciting and shocking when news about Jesus circulated, announcing the arrival of messiah and the coming of God's final act of revelation and transformation. No doubt many of these Gentile proselytes to Judaism were quick to take the next step in exploring the messianic fulfillments of the religion they had recently adopted.
Of course, it did not take long before tensions within the Jewish community, and later persecutions from without, took the glow off these exuberant times. Now, in the face of renewed threats against Christians by the Roman government, a complicating twist had been added. All Christians, whether Gentile or Jewish in background, were specifically identified as participants in an illegal religious cult, while Jews who did not believe in Jesus retained official protection as part of an already sanctioned religion.
This heightened the confusion of identity issues for proselyte Jews. If they continued to profess Jesus as messiah, they would be separated from the rest of the Jewish community and persecuted by the Roman government, perhaps losing their property, their families, and even their lives in the process. If, however, they gave up the Jesus factor in their messianic Judaism, they would be able to return to the safety and camaraderie of the general Jewish community with all of its religious rigor and righteousness and, at the same time, escape threats from the Roman officials. The latter option was a very tempting choice to make. This seems, in fact, to be the background of one of the last and most specific exhortation of Hebrews, which serves as our lectionary text today.
The writer of Hebrews points to others, of both Old Testament times and recent difficult circumstances, who chose to keep in step with the messianic progression of God's activities, culminating in the coming of Jesus, the messiah. If these followers of the right way could keep their faith, even when it cost them everything, you can do it too! And look! They are the ones who are cheering you on! They believe you can remain faithful. In fact, Jesus himself stands at the end of your journey and beckons you on to the finish line! So don't give up now, just when you are achieving a newer depth in your relationship with God! You can continue on! You can make it!
Luke 12:49-56
Jesus feeds my cynicism about religion and politics. Did the critics of Christianity get it right when they said that religion is a greater problem in our world than atheism? Here Jesus seems to affirm their cause: "I bring fire on earth! I bring division! I divide families!"
This is not the way to win friends and influence people, as Dale Carnegie would have it. Is Jesus delirious for emphasizing all of this as he speaks to the crowds? Some might say so. It may be, however, that Jesus is only applying the shock therapy necessary for us to make the most of our run for the roses. In my times of great energy and passionate success I never think about death. I was born to live! I entered this world to conquer! I am a child of greatness, and the stars need do my bidding!
Now and again I see my mortality clinging to my steps like a lengthening shadow, and I am caught wondering why I am here at all. A question chiseled in stone over the grave of a child recycles in my brain: "If I am so quickly done for, what on earth was I begun for?"
Yet all of these things will be stripped away from us before we can blink against the wind of time. Recently I cried with a thirty-something fellow who is a glowing testimony of success in our community. He grew up in a close-knit family, wears an athletic body and a movie-star's face, married a beautiful and intelligent woman, lives in a luxurious home and is buying a multi-million dollar business that could become a multi-billion dollar corporation before he retires. He was the envy of the neighborhood, but today it means nothing. A crippling disease, a foolish action, and a disintegrating marriage have tripped him on the run. "I would trade everything to have my wife and children back," he said. "Two weeks ago I thought I had it all. Now I don't know if I have anything."
Jesus is not a killjoy. He is perceptive. It isn't until we begin to die that we begin to live. If Jesus can whet our appetite for what really matters we will find out that the God who taught our cells to divide in our mothers' wombs won't let the sun set forever. After all, it was Jesus himself who rolled back the stone of death on Easter morning.
Application
Although today's lectionary readings seem somewhat scattered and lacking cohesive significance, they can be used together to bring out a common point of contact. It starts, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, in his The Cost of Discipleship, when we recognize that too often we want cheap grace. Here is how he put it: "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ."
In essence, Bonhoeffer said that we want the benefits of intimacy with God without the responsibilities. This is a problem in every community, and today's passages are needed as an antidote to that lingering selfishness that tends to put our sinful selves at the center of the universe.
Alternative Application
Hebrews 11:29--12:2. There are few passages in the Bible more stirring than the "Heroes of Faith" of Hebrews 11, coupled with the incentives of Jesus at the beginning of chapter 12. This passage calls for dramatic preaching, for Olympic-sized illustrations, for motivational speaking.
One writer tells of attending a business conference where awards were being given for outstanding achievements during the past fiscal year. A woman was called to the podium to receive the company's top honor. Clutching her trophy, she beamed out at the crowd of over 3,000 people. Yet in that moment of triumph, she had eyes for only one person. She looked directly at her supervisor, a woman named Joan.
The award-winner told of the difficult times that she had gone through only a few years earlier. She had experienced personal problems and, for a time, her work had suffered. Some people turned away from her, counting it a liability to be seen with her. Others wrote her off as a loser in the company. The worst part was that she felt they were right. She had stopped at Joan's desk several times with a letter of resignation in her hand. She knew she was a failure.
But Joan said, "Let's just wait a little bit longer." And Joan said, "Give it one more try." And Joan said, "I never would have hired you if I didn't think you could handle it!"
The woman's voice broke. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she softly said, "Joan believed in me more than I believed in myself!"
Isn't that the message of the gospel? Isn't that the story of the Bible? That God believed in us while we were still sinners, while we were still failures, while we were at the point in our lives that we couldn't seem to make it on our own?
This is why we run the "Maranath Marathon," as singer Honeytree once called it.
Preaching the Psalm
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19
This psalm finds us in a place that almost everyone comes to sooner or later. It can be the calamity of war and dislocation, or it can be the wasting effects of a terrible disease. It might be the dissolution of a marriage or the loss of employment. The locations and the circumstances vary, to be sure. But the question always comes, and it usually directed to God. "Why?"
Why should my mother die of cancer and never get to know my children? Why God? Why did you let this happen? Why did the planes drop bombs on our home, God? Why? The list of circumstances is enough to break any heart. And when it is our turn to suffer we stand in a very long line and join the chorus of the ages, asking, "Why God? Why?"
It's a reasonable question. If we believe in an all-powerful God who intervenes in history, then clearly this God has the power to save. Whether it's saving the people from the Red Sea waters, or rescuing someone's mom from cancer, this God has the power, right? So, how come God let's bad stuff happen? Or more to the point, how come God let's bad stuff happen to ME? The "big why" challenges our understanding of God and calls us to new levels of understanding and perception. It is the unanswered question on the minds of millions of westerners who have walked wholesale out of our churches.
The historic and easy way out, of course, is to say that God's ways are mysterious and that we puny humans can never understand the deep and manifold purposes of the divine. But tossing off the answer to unknowables will no longer suffice. If Christianity is to morph into a faith that will reach twenty-first-century concerns, the "Big Why" will need to be answered in ways that average folk can embrace.
A first step in this direction might be to help people step away from a God that is created in their own image. We do this without even thinking. God gets a gender and engages in conversation with us every day. We blithely discuss God's will and the things that God wants as though we have an idea about such things.
While we don't want to resort to quick and easy answers of the past, the truth is that we cannot know the mind of God. And a deeper truth in this search is that real faith requires the ability to engage ambiguity and to accept that there are some things we cannot fully know. Perhaps this is why we call it faith.
"Grandma Bolt" (as we were told to call her) reclined in an oversized lounger, barely aware of us. Her mouth hung open and she wore wrinkled skin several sizes too big over a shrinking frame. A musty afghan draped her carelessly. She couldn't quite catch what my mom tried to tell her in a stage-whisper shout. We touched her hands and she seemed to fumble for ours with fingers gnarled and cold.
I can only recall this single visit to see her, and I know I didn't like it. At the time she was an alien to me, even though I know now that a good deal of her DNA lives on in my own body. When Grandma died my parents didn't take me to the funeral because I was supposedly too young to understand death. Now, some forty years later, I weep inside. I never knew the best of my great-grandma Bolt. I wasn't there when she played as a child with boys like me. I never watched her giggle with friends or flirt with my great-grandfather. I never experienced the changing moods of her face, a barometer of her passions and fears and faith. I never heard her sing in church, though I was told she loved the hymns. All I carry with me is the one scary visit of my childhood.
I am old enough now to attend funerals, and I have gotten well past my early aversion to assisted care centers. What frightens me these days is the thought that there are probably fewer than 25 people alive today who remember my great-grandmother at all. When we couple dozen die she will be truly forgotten -- a near-century of living, breathing, loving, toiling, memorizing, cooking, knitting, talking, aching, laughing, holding, washing, befriending, vapored, and vanished like a 6 o'clock morning mist.
Nicholas Wolterstorff reflected on the death of his son with these words: "There's a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there's now just nothing … There's nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved … The world is emptier" (Lament for a Son). That's true, as well, of my great-grandmother Bolt. True, too, of a host of good people whose gravestone legacies weather to indecipherable under time's polishing.
It won't be long before I join them, erased from life's hard drive by the reprogrammers of a new generation. Some years ago we were comparing ages in our family and one of my daughters remarked to another, "Dad has probably lived more than half his life already." The words shivered through me and robbed me of the fun of the moment. It's true -- I have probably lived half my life already. In the not-so-distant future I will be my great-grandmother, and only 25 minds will retain vague images of a wasted has-been.
This kind of sober thinking is behind all of our lectionary passages today. Through Isaiah God quickly reviews the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, and finds it clattering toward a nasty conclusion. In Hebrews we are reminded that not everything seems to work out well for those who are loved by God, and that the best we can say sometimes is that God works it out in the end, after we have limped away from persecutions and torment. Jesus startles us into remembering that our need for God also means that there is a problem in this world, which requires painful surgery before it is resolved. Sober reflections indeed.
Isaiah 5:1-7
There are several places in the Old Testament where God's work with Israel is compared to that of a farmer or other agriculturalist. Psalm 80 is a prime example, and today's lectionary reading is another. In another form, similar in content and intent, but told from a strictly human relational direction, this passage finds its mirror in the Word of God spoken through the prophet Hosea, especially chapters 1-2 and 10-11.
The image is told as a plotted story, and never more succinctly than here in Isaiah 5. God is the gardener who passionately loves a particular plant. To nurture its health, God creates a special vineyard or orchard for it, and does everything possible to ensure its health and well-being: protection from animals and intruders, tilled soil for good rootage, water and nutrients, and even, one might say, a little love talk.
Unfortunately, the plant displays only its full external beauty as a maturing vine or tree, but it fails to produce any fruit worth keeping or using or selling. It has turned into an ornamental shrub, more in love with itself than with either its gardener or its natural purposes.
The story is similar to that of Narcissus, whose curse for being too fair and beautiful was to fall in love with himself. Pining away above a remote pool of water, he died of starvation and thirst even as he drooled over the image of his face reflected back at him from the surface.
Here the outcome is similar -- Israel will no longer be cared for or protected. If she thinks she is so great, let her look after herself. Of course, the outcome of that divine neglect will be disaster as marauding nations invade, strip, cut down, and destroy. The parable predicts the impending doom that flows in the wake of Assyrian assaults on Israel (through which Judah is miraculously delivered), and later the mighty conquest of Babylon, and the razing of Jerusalem and the temple.
Jesus picks up this same storyline in his teachings, using the image of the vineyard or orchard as the possession of the absentee Lord in Matthew 25 and Luke 20. The only new element added is a focus on the repeated attempts of the Lord to regain custody, including sending his only Son to restore order and propriety. There, again, the plot ends in disaster and destruction follows after.
This is not a pretty parable. It is pointed, harsh, and indignant. Rarely do the prophets voice the divine message in harsher tones. It is impossible, this side of Jesus, to preach only the story with its devastating culmination. We know the rest of the tale, and need to bring back into our homiletic work the dawning of the Messianic age in which healing and hope are a divine gift once again.
Hebrews 11:29--12:2
Whatever one might call the literature, Hebrews is unquestionably built upon the foundation of Old Testament linear thought. There is, in its pages, a sense of progression to God's activities in human history, with clear reference points like the revelations at Sinai, the construction of the tabernacle, and the ministry of the prophets. This unfolding redemptive work of God has recently reached its apex, in the coming of Jesus. Everything -- past, present, and future -- becomes meaningful only as it intersects with Jesus Christ. Jesus' entrance into human time has changed everything, and we are now living in the new, messianic era.
Although there are many smaller sections and parenthetic notes, the thrust of Hebrews as a whole is on explaining the unique identity and role of Jesus, and drawing out the implications this has for all who know him:
Jesus is the Superior Way to God (Hebrews 1-6):
* Angels delivered the Torah, but Jesus is himself the Living Word (chapters 1-2).
* Moses received the Torah, but Jesus is a new and living symbol (chapters 3-4) of God among us.
* Aaron and the priests sacrificed daily and yearly, but Jesus sacrificed himself once for all (chapters 5-6).
Therefore Jesus is like Melchizedek, uniquely filling a mediatorial role (Hebrews 7-10).
So keep following him in spite of challenges and tribulation (Hebrews 10-13).
In making the comparison between the old and new expressions of the covenant, the author does not criticize the former, but turns common perceptions on their head. He assumes that the recent developments related to Jesus' coming were intended all along, with the cultic ceremonies of Israel functioning like a prelude or a preamble (cf. Hebrews 10:1-4).
Since Jesus has entered our history as the definitive revelation of God's eternal plans and designs, he has fulfilled the intent of the sacrificial system and thus made it obsolete. This message, and the divine Spirit, energizes the community of faith that now spreads its witness in this messianic age as the Christian church.
All of this begs the question: Who were the first recipients of this document? There are a number of clues that come through the author's words:
They are second generation Christians (2:1; 2:3; 13:7).
Who had come through tough times (10:32):
Many were publicly ridiculed (10:33)
A number of their leaders apparently were killed (13:7)
At least some of them had their property confiscated (10:34)
Although most had not been martyred, many had spent time in prison (10:34; 13:3)
They knew the Hebrew scriptures well.
They had practiced Hebrew religious ceremonies in the past.
But they were likely Gentile in ethnic background having come into Judaism in the first place by way of conversion (10:32).
When all of these things are considered together, subtle demographic lines emerge. Because they are well-educated, communicate in Greek, and appear to have come to Judaism from a Gentile background, it is likely that these people were proselytes to Judaism who had been seeking moral grounding in an increasingly debauched and debasing Roman society. There were many instances in the first centuries BC and AD where non-Jews became enamored of the rigorous lifestyle found in Jewish communities scattered throughout the major Roman cities. After going through years of non-participating observation and instruction, they were then officially declared to be Jews through ritual entrance ceremonies.
As with converts to any cause or religion, these are often the most zealous for their newly adopted perspectives and philosophies. So it must have been quite exciting and shocking when news about Jesus circulated, announcing the arrival of messiah and the coming of God's final act of revelation and transformation. No doubt many of these Gentile proselytes to Judaism were quick to take the next step in exploring the messianic fulfillments of the religion they had recently adopted.
Of course, it did not take long before tensions within the Jewish community, and later persecutions from without, took the glow off these exuberant times. Now, in the face of renewed threats against Christians by the Roman government, a complicating twist had been added. All Christians, whether Gentile or Jewish in background, were specifically identified as participants in an illegal religious cult, while Jews who did not believe in Jesus retained official protection as part of an already sanctioned religion.
This heightened the confusion of identity issues for proselyte Jews. If they continued to profess Jesus as messiah, they would be separated from the rest of the Jewish community and persecuted by the Roman government, perhaps losing their property, their families, and even their lives in the process. If, however, they gave up the Jesus factor in their messianic Judaism, they would be able to return to the safety and camaraderie of the general Jewish community with all of its religious rigor and righteousness and, at the same time, escape threats from the Roman officials. The latter option was a very tempting choice to make. This seems, in fact, to be the background of one of the last and most specific exhortation of Hebrews, which serves as our lectionary text today.
The writer of Hebrews points to others, of both Old Testament times and recent difficult circumstances, who chose to keep in step with the messianic progression of God's activities, culminating in the coming of Jesus, the messiah. If these followers of the right way could keep their faith, even when it cost them everything, you can do it too! And look! They are the ones who are cheering you on! They believe you can remain faithful. In fact, Jesus himself stands at the end of your journey and beckons you on to the finish line! So don't give up now, just when you are achieving a newer depth in your relationship with God! You can continue on! You can make it!
Luke 12:49-56
Jesus feeds my cynicism about religion and politics. Did the critics of Christianity get it right when they said that religion is a greater problem in our world than atheism? Here Jesus seems to affirm their cause: "I bring fire on earth! I bring division! I divide families!"
This is not the way to win friends and influence people, as Dale Carnegie would have it. Is Jesus delirious for emphasizing all of this as he speaks to the crowds? Some might say so. It may be, however, that Jesus is only applying the shock therapy necessary for us to make the most of our run for the roses. In my times of great energy and passionate success I never think about death. I was born to live! I entered this world to conquer! I am a child of greatness, and the stars need do my bidding!
Now and again I see my mortality clinging to my steps like a lengthening shadow, and I am caught wondering why I am here at all. A question chiseled in stone over the grave of a child recycles in my brain: "If I am so quickly done for, what on earth was I begun for?"
Yet all of these things will be stripped away from us before we can blink against the wind of time. Recently I cried with a thirty-something fellow who is a glowing testimony of success in our community. He grew up in a close-knit family, wears an athletic body and a movie-star's face, married a beautiful and intelligent woman, lives in a luxurious home and is buying a multi-million dollar business that could become a multi-billion dollar corporation before he retires. He was the envy of the neighborhood, but today it means nothing. A crippling disease, a foolish action, and a disintegrating marriage have tripped him on the run. "I would trade everything to have my wife and children back," he said. "Two weeks ago I thought I had it all. Now I don't know if I have anything."
Jesus is not a killjoy. He is perceptive. It isn't until we begin to die that we begin to live. If Jesus can whet our appetite for what really matters we will find out that the God who taught our cells to divide in our mothers' wombs won't let the sun set forever. After all, it was Jesus himself who rolled back the stone of death on Easter morning.
Application
Although today's lectionary readings seem somewhat scattered and lacking cohesive significance, they can be used together to bring out a common point of contact. It starts, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, in his The Cost of Discipleship, when we recognize that too often we want cheap grace. Here is how he put it: "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ."
In essence, Bonhoeffer said that we want the benefits of intimacy with God without the responsibilities. This is a problem in every community, and today's passages are needed as an antidote to that lingering selfishness that tends to put our sinful selves at the center of the universe.
Alternative Application
Hebrews 11:29--12:2. There are few passages in the Bible more stirring than the "Heroes of Faith" of Hebrews 11, coupled with the incentives of Jesus at the beginning of chapter 12. This passage calls for dramatic preaching, for Olympic-sized illustrations, for motivational speaking.
One writer tells of attending a business conference where awards were being given for outstanding achievements during the past fiscal year. A woman was called to the podium to receive the company's top honor. Clutching her trophy, she beamed out at the crowd of over 3,000 people. Yet in that moment of triumph, she had eyes for only one person. She looked directly at her supervisor, a woman named Joan.
The award-winner told of the difficult times that she had gone through only a few years earlier. She had experienced personal problems and, for a time, her work had suffered. Some people turned away from her, counting it a liability to be seen with her. Others wrote her off as a loser in the company. The worst part was that she felt they were right. She had stopped at Joan's desk several times with a letter of resignation in her hand. She knew she was a failure.
But Joan said, "Let's just wait a little bit longer." And Joan said, "Give it one more try." And Joan said, "I never would have hired you if I didn't think you could handle it!"
The woman's voice broke. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she softly said, "Joan believed in me more than I believed in myself!"
Isn't that the message of the gospel? Isn't that the story of the Bible? That God believed in us while we were still sinners, while we were still failures, while we were at the point in our lives that we couldn't seem to make it on our own?
This is why we run the "Maranath Marathon," as singer Honeytree once called it.
Preaching the Psalm
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19
This psalm finds us in a place that almost everyone comes to sooner or later. It can be the calamity of war and dislocation, or it can be the wasting effects of a terrible disease. It might be the dissolution of a marriage or the loss of employment. The locations and the circumstances vary, to be sure. But the question always comes, and it usually directed to God. "Why?"
Why should my mother die of cancer and never get to know my children? Why God? Why did you let this happen? Why did the planes drop bombs on our home, God? Why? The list of circumstances is enough to break any heart. And when it is our turn to suffer we stand in a very long line and join the chorus of the ages, asking, "Why God? Why?"
It's a reasonable question. If we believe in an all-powerful God who intervenes in history, then clearly this God has the power to save. Whether it's saving the people from the Red Sea waters, or rescuing someone's mom from cancer, this God has the power, right? So, how come God let's bad stuff happen? Or more to the point, how come God let's bad stuff happen to ME? The "big why" challenges our understanding of God and calls us to new levels of understanding and perception. It is the unanswered question on the minds of millions of westerners who have walked wholesale out of our churches.
The historic and easy way out, of course, is to say that God's ways are mysterious and that we puny humans can never understand the deep and manifold purposes of the divine. But tossing off the answer to unknowables will no longer suffice. If Christianity is to morph into a faith that will reach twenty-first-century concerns, the "Big Why" will need to be answered in ways that average folk can embrace.
A first step in this direction might be to help people step away from a God that is created in their own image. We do this without even thinking. God gets a gender and engages in conversation with us every day. We blithely discuss God's will and the things that God wants as though we have an idea about such things.
While we don't want to resort to quick and easy answers of the past, the truth is that we cannot know the mind of God. And a deeper truth in this search is that real faith requires the ability to engage ambiguity and to accept that there are some things we cannot fully know. Perhaps this is why we call it faith.
