Terror or trust
Commentary
As of this writing, Secretary of State Colin Powell is in Israel, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, trying to prevail on him to pull Israeli troops and forces out of the West Bank. Powell also met with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, trying to convince him to condemn and work to stop the terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israel.
This latest piece of a continuing conflict began some 20 months ago, when a Palestinian Intifada erupted after Sharon took a tour of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Since then we have seen attacks and reprisals and revenge. The Palestinians engage in suicide bombings by young people against civilian targets inside Israel. With tanks and soldiers and missiles Israel attacks Palestinian towns and refugee camps inside the West Bank.
What has emerged is a pattern of actions by one side followed by retaliation for those actions followed by yet another retaliation, and it keeps escalating, each attack becoming more deadly than the one that it intends to repay. Who knows where it will end? We don't know what the situation will be when this issue is published or when these lectionary passages are preached. But from the current vantage point, there seems to be little way out of the morass of terror and retaliation that Israel and Palestine have fallen into. And the latest worry is that other Arab nations will be drawn into the war.
An attitude that has arisen through it all is the fear on both sides that an action by one side will go unanswered or unpunished, and that if that happens, that side will have the upper hand, at least on paper and in the eyes of the world. There is a fear of breaking the cycle of retaliation, that somehow our side will be diminished if we don't respond.
And so the terrorism continues, on both sides. Israel would deny that she engages in terrorism, instead calling it defensive military action, but the Palestinians would call it terrorism. Likewise the Palestinians would probably call their terrorists freedom fighters, but Israel knows it to be terrorism.
But it's not the first instance of terrorism in that region of the world. It goes back 40 years, 400 years, 4,000 years.
The Egyptian Pharaoh engaged in terrorism when he ordered all the male children of the Hebrews killed. And why did he do it? Fear. Fear that Egypt would be engulfed by the Israelites, fear that he had to do something or else they would be lost if the Israelites should ever join their enemies. Sound familiar?
And what worked against the Egyptian terrorism? Trust in God.
Exodus 1:8--2:10
For those who know the rest of the story of Exodus, and for those, perhaps, who know only Cecil B. DeMille's version, there are no more chilling or ominous words than these from the first chapter, "Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph."
The verse says a great deal about the vagaries of power and the arbitrariness of such human institutions as a monarchy, and about how little a former status may serve us in the future. No longer could the Israelites rely on Joseph's relationship with Pharaoh. And so with those words as an introduction, the story of the people of Israel comes to the account of their enslavement at the hands of the Egyptians. Obviously the enslavement of a people is a terrible thing, but out of it would come an act of God's grace and power that would define forever afterwards the nation of Israel and the Jewish people.
The reading can be divided into four sections:
1. Verses 1:8-14 tell how the Egyptians increased the labor of the Israelites as a means of keeping them under control, since they had borne children and increased in numbers during their time in Egypt.
2. 1:15-22 is the account of Pharaoh's order that all of the Hebrew male children be killed by the Hebrew midwives, since the male children constituted the threat. But the midwives feared God, and didn't, or couldn't, carry out Pharaoh's order. And the Israelites kept increasing.
3. With 2:1-4 the scene changes. A Levite man of Israel and his wife married and bore a son. They managed to keep the child hidden for three months, but the pressure became too great, and so to protect him, his mother sent him down the river in a papyrus basket. And thus we have the story of how Moses came to be reared by Egyptians.
4. The scene changes yet again in 2:5 to the bathing area of Pharaoh's daughter, who takes the child from the river, and in a bit of strange drama, the child's mother is engaged to nurse him until he is old enough to go live with the daughter of Pharaoh as her son.
The story has a distinctly dramatic quality to it that befits the birth of the liberator, Moses. It is full of irony, that the one who would save Israel would be reared by the king's daughter, even being named by Pharaoh's daughter; that the mother of the child would be the one called to nurse him and care for him; and that Pharaoh's efforts to hold onto the Israelite slaves should bring about the very thing that he feared, their escape from Egypt. Clearly this tale was told with relish over and over long before it was ever written down.
There is a unique place held in this reading by the women: the midwives, who are identified by name, Shiphrah and Puah; the Hebrew women, who are vigorous and so deliver their children before the midwives can get there; the mother of Moses, whose decision it was to put Moses in the Nile; Moses' sister who watched him down the river; and finally, Pharaoh's daughter, who felt pity for the orphan and decided to raise him as her son. Rarely in the Old Testament do so many women play such large roles in such momentous events.
And specifically, it is the faith, the trust, of the women that shines through. The midwives feared God, and Moses' mother trusted her child to the river and the elements, and to the Egyptians, and ultimately to God.
Romans 12:1-8
There are several divisions in Paul's letter to the Romans, breaks where Paul begins a new thought. One of those is between chapters 8 and 9. Another is between chapters 11 and 12. He has been talking about what it means to live as someone in Christ, to live the life of the spirit, to live under the grace of God instead of under the law. Now with chapter 12, he speaks of the specifics of that life.
Verses 1 and 2 are really an introduction to the topic. It should be noted that Paul is not speaking about our physical bodies; the word "bodies" should be read "selves." The living sacrifice is opposed to the burnt offering of a dead sacrifice on the altar. That is definitely not the kind of sacrifice we are to make. Instead ours is to be the offering of a life lived in thanks, a thank offering. And what that means is that life is not to be lived conforming to this world, but conforming to the will of God.
In 3-7 Paul becomes even more specific about the kind of life to be lived in community. It is a life of humility, lived in the knowledge that each person within the community has an appropriate role and place in the body of Christ. The theme of the body of Christ and the different gifts of the members are common Pauline themes, to be found also in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians.
The general problem that Paul's theology faces is that his teaching advanced in the first part of Romans doesn't confront the issue of ethical behavior. If, as he says elsewhere in Romans, the law doesn't apply to those living in the spirit, those who have been transformed, well, then, what about proper ethical behavior, where does that come in? Another way to put it is: If we have been saved by God's grace, what does that mean for our actions in the world?
Paul's answer would be that the transformed life, the renewed life that conforms to the will of God, has been changed completely, especially on a moral plane. One commentator speaks of the "compelling ethical power of grace" that motivates new behavior. What Paul is speaking of here is what we would call in later theologies sanctification, becoming more holy through the course of this life. But lest we become prideful about that, it must be remembered that that too is always the work of God in us.
Matthew 16:13-20
In the Gospels we come across the phenomenon of finding common incidents in the life of Jesus or teachings of Jesus located by the different evangelists in different settings and used to make different theological points. When we see that happen, we need to remember that the four Gospel writers were authors in their own right, not simply reporters of fact. Peter's confession is found in all three synoptic Gospels. In this passage we have Mark's version of it (Mark 8:27-30) preserved by Matthew, with the addition of verses 17-19, which are unique to Matthew, and which make a different point from Mark's.
So let's consider first the plain account without Matthew's addition. Matthew and Mark agree that it happened at Caesarea Philippi, a town in northern Galilee. Some commentators have made a big deal out of the fact that in verse 13 Jesus uses the phrase "Son of Man," while in verse 15, with the same question directed to the disciples, he uses "I." Although the contrast might be the basis for a sermon about the public Jesus and the Jesus known to his disciples, or the eschatological Christ and Jesus from the town of Nazareth, there is no solid foundation for choosing either of those interpreations. Matthew adds Jeremiah to Mark's list; which makes sense in light of Matthew's target audience of Hebrew Christians.
Jumping to verse 20, we come to the so-called Messianic Secret, the predilection of Jesus to keep quiet the fact that some regarded him as the Messiah, and to keep the news of the miracles quiet. The danger in proclaiming it aloud, of course, is that people simply wouldn't understand what kind of Messiah he was, and would build him up as some kind of political or earthly Messiah. And people's failure to understand his mission is what carried him to Calvary and it is what continues to trouble the church.
But what do Matthew's additions, verses 17-19, add to Mark's account? Jesus confers on Peter the name that means rock (Greek petra = rock), he promises that Peter will be the foundation for his church, and he hands Peter the keys to the kingdom, with the authority to bind on earth and thus in heaven. And the reason for those things? Peter's faith, which is not something to praise Peter for, since it has been revealed to him from above. What Matthew is saying in his version of Peter's confession is that there is more to it than simply faith in Christ. Faith brings its own authority, which is itself a divine gift.
Application
Are there alternatives to terrorism, whatever the particular kind of terrorism we're talking about? What we see in the Middle East is an escalating war, which is fast becoming a war of attrition. Retaliation builds on retaliation, with no end in sight. Is there something that can take its place?
And lest we think this is a narrow question that will be solved in a few years (an unlikely scenario), the fact is that regardless of how wrenching the Middle Eastern situation is, no matter how terrible the loss of life, the real issue is not about Israel and the Palestinians. It's about all of us.
The desire for revenge and retaliation is a part of us, and it's only by the grace of God that some of us don't act on it.
In other forms, we see it on the streets of the nation's cities, including the nation's capital, where too many young black men put their trust in hardware, the cold, solid, blue steel of a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic, and in the supposed healing power of revenge, person against person, drug gang against drug gang, wars that escalate as much as anything the Middle East has to offer.
We see it in the American home. In the movie The War of the Roses, Oliver and Barbara Rose thought they had a perfect marriage, only to discover that their relationship was skin deep. In their bitter, recriminatory divorce, they wage a war against each other in which the slightest suggestion that one might get the upper hand over the other carries them downward into brutality and madness as they destroy each other. It doesn't just happen in movies.
And where will it all stop?
What can we do in the face of terrorism, if not strike back? What do we do when things look really bad and we suffer unjustly, if not make somebody else suffer? What do we rely on, if not the revenge we can get?
The question here really resolves itself into: Where do we put our trust? Years ago there was a game on television hosted by Johnny Carson called Who Do You Trust? That's the name of the game that is being played in the Middle East.
So whom should we trust, and what should we rely on?
To answer that we look to the plight of Israel in Egypt. Pharaoh got scared, scared that something would happen to his carefully manufactured realm and reign, scared that these proliferating Hebrews in the midst of his nation would take a notion to leave and deprive him of his labor, or even worse, join with his enemies. So what do you do? The answer was simple: Kill all the baby boys. Certainly an act of terror if anything deserves that name.
So where did Pharaoh put his trust when he felt threatened? The answer: might, force of arms, terror, killing children.
But there is a remarkable contrast between what Pharaoh relied on when he was threatened and what the Hebrews relied on. The Hebrew midwives feared -- trusted -- God, and so didn't carry out Pharaoh's design. Moses' mother trusted her baby to the little basket she had made, and to the River Nile, and even to the Egyptians, but in fact she trusted him to God.
It is so tempting when we are threatened to put our faith in the things we have control over, the force of arms, retaliation, the comforting thought of revenge, pay-back time. But ultimately that simply heats things up and brings us down, as it did Pharaoh and the Egyptian army.
The question is: Terror or trust? And the only answer can be: Trust in God.
Alternative Applications
1) Matthew: the Authority of Faith. Peter's faith brought forth from him the impetuous words, "You are the Christ." And his confession brought him Jesus' grant of authority on the basis of that confession alone. There is no doubt that we have certain authority that comes with our profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Does faith grant authority, and if so, what is the authority of faith in the modern world? Do we have the keys of the kingdom as well?
2) Romans: Conformed to the World. Paul is exhorting the Romans not to be conformed to the world, but to find their own way -- God's way -- in the world, the way of the church. And he goes on to describe what it means to be in Christ. It is indeed hard to be in the world and not conform to it. Paul provides a list for first-century Romans about what it means not to be conformed to the word. What would our list include?
First Lesson Focus
Exodus 1:8--2:10
"Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation" (Exodus 1:6). We come now to the longest gap in the history of salvation to be found in the Hexateuch, that is, in the first six books of the Bible. When last we read of Joseph, he and his brothers and their offspring were all living safely in the region of Goshen, that fertile region in the eastern Nile delta where there was plentiful pasture for their flocks. There, we are told, Israel multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, in accordance with the promise of the Lord (v. 7).
But then we come to an ominous statement. "There arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph" (v. 8). And that new pharaoh feared the God-given multiplication of the Israelites. "... let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land" (vv. 9-10). Pharaoh therefore enslaved the Israelites and set them to working on his store-cities of Pithom and Raamses.
That notice allows us to zero in on the dates with which we are dealing. The city of Raamses was rebuilt and again made the capital of the Egyptian empire under the Pharaohs Sethos I (ca. 1309-1290 B.C.) and Ramesses II (ca. 1290-1224 B.C), both of whom carried on extensive building operations. But the city of Raamses was called by that name only until the eleventh century B.C., after which it was called Tanis. So our story is set in the fourteenth or thirteenth century B.C. But the Israelites could not have left Egypt before 1300 B.C., because they encountered both Edom and Moab in the wilderness (Numbers 20-21), and neither of those kingdoms was established before that time. According to an archeaological find called the Stele of Merneptah, Israel was in Palestine by 1220 B.C. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Sethos I and Ramesses II were the pharaohs of Israel's oppression, and allowing for the time in the wilderness after the exodus, we can say that Israel escaped from Egypt about 1280 B.C.
But pharaohs cannot stop the action of God. Even though the Hebrews were enslaved, making bricks in the mudpits of Egypt, they continued to multiply in fulfillment of God's promise. Sethos I therefore called in Israel's two midwives and commanded them to kill any newborn male infant but to let female infants live. "But," says our text, "the midwives feared God" (v. 17), so they obeyed God's will and not the Pharaoh's. They chose life for the Hebrew infants and not death. And that, of course, is the introduction to the story that we often call, "Moses in the bullrushes."
Moses' mother, of the priestly tribe of Levi, hid him for three months after he was born, but the child grew, and she could hide him from the Pharaoh's death-decree no longer. So in an act of blind but trusting faith, she made a little basket of reeds, waterproofed it with pitch and sticky slime (bitumen), and put it among the reeds at the bank of the Nile. At the same time she arranged for Moses' older sister, Miriam, to watch to see what happened to her child. Did the mother know that place was where the pharaoh's daughter and her servants came to bathe? Our text does not say, but surely it was with anguish that the mother set her infant son adrift.
When Pharaoh's daughter heard the infant crying, discovered the basket, and took pity on the Hebrew child, Miriam was immediately on the spot. "Shall I go and call a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" Pharaoh's daughter agreed and Moses' own mother was allowed to nurse him for two or three years. But Moses belonged to the Pharaoh's household, and the royal daughter even gave him his name. She called him Mosheh, which is an Egyptian name, but which in the Hebrew stems from mashah, to draw out, and of course that is a hidden reference also to the fact that Moses will be the one who leads when the Lord draws out his people from Egypt.
How ironic are the acts sometimes of this God of ours! To have the future leader of the exodus brought up in the house of the enslaving pharaoh! The Lord must have chuckled a bit over that fact and his hidden dealings with the king of Egypt. But how risky, too, does the action of God sometimes seem! His protection and preparation of Moses for his future role depends on the piety of two midwives, on the blind faith of a mother, on a basket that does not leak, a daughter of the pharaoh with a tender heart, and a watching older sister. Improbable as it all sounds, God makes all of those things fit together in order to pursue his purpose.
Could it be that such a careful God is also dealing with all of the little happenings in our lives, all of which seem so inconsequential at the time, but which turn out to be important in God's working toward his goal? Maybe God doesn't think anything that happens to us is unimportant, because he's a Lord who deals not only with big events but with very small ones also -- a God of the details. Think of it!
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 51:1-6
Our text is made up of two stanzas of a proclamation of salvation that Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) spoke to the exiles in Babylonia, sometimes between 550 and 538 B.C. It is unfortunate that the lectionary omits the third stanza in vv. 7-8, because those verses have the same structure as vv. 1-3 and 4-6, and actually complete the thought.
Even though these words were proclaimed to the Babylonian exiles, they still are very relevant to our lives, as is seen in the opening verse. "Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance." And of course, that is all of us, isn't it? All of us long for deliverance from the confusions and wrongs of our lives, for a communion with God that gives us some sense of lasting security, for a society and world in which God's order (law) and justice are present (v. 4) and nothing makes us afraid.
Indeed, we're not alone in such longings. Our text says that all peoples look for deliverance, for the establishment of some good order from God, for relief from the burden of guilt and the specters of evil and death (vv. 4-5). All peoples look for a good life without fear, and for security that does not pass away. And the question of our text is: Where can we find such deliverance, such salvation? Where can we find our surety?
Our passage gives two negative answers to that. The first answer, in verses 7-8 which the lection omits, tells us not to look to human beings. But second, our passage tells us not to search for security from anything in this world (v. 6). For this world will pass away, and "there's no hiding place down here." If we put our trust in the things of this earth -- in money, in status, in family, in science, in military might, in human relationships, in any creation of human beings to make us secure -- "the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth wear out like a garment" (v. 6). This world is not permanent but transitory, and any hope founded on this world's permanence is transitory also.
So where should we look, those of us who "pursue deliverance," those of us who struggle to find that which is solid and permanent and everlasting? The answer in our text is surprising. Look back in the history of God's work, recorded for us in the scriptures, it says. Look back to Abraham and Sarah. Why? Because the Lord God Almighty kept his promise to them. He promised that they would have many descendants, and he kept his promise.
In other words, this is just one reference to the main theme that runs all through the proclamation of Second Isaiah. "The word of our God will stand forever" (40:8; 55:10-11). God has spoken promises into human history, and God keeps his word. "My salvation will be forever, and my deliverance will never be ended" (51:6). Heaven and earth may pass away, you see, human beings may turn out to be unreliable, even that which we hold most dear may not support our fondest hopes. But God makes a promise to us that he will save us, and God always keeps his word. If you want security, if you want that which endures, if you want the abundant life that comes from the Lord, if you want deliverance and salvation, then place your trust in his word of promise that will stand forever.
The Political Pulpit
Exodus 1:8--2:10
The story of Joseph being sold into slavery, the entire narrative of Israel's slavery in Egypt, has been in a paradoxical way a source of great comfort to those who have been oppressed. In the African-American community this identification with Israel's plight both helped explain slavery, but also gave hope and comfort that the oppressed were God's chosen people who like the Hebrews would someday be liberated. American Christianity as a whole needs to read this narrative and this pericope in particular, as in the African-American narrative style. It will help us to see how, like the Egyptians, the American system is selling some of the people in its land into slavery.
Clearly the black male has been reduced to this kind of slavery. We have made him one of society's primary scapegoats. The realities of racial profiling by police continue, even after all the brouhaha during the presidential elections of 2000. Perception is also part of the dilemma, the failure of whites to appreciate the depth of persecution which minorities experience. Thus while 66 percent of blacks surveyed in a Gallup 2001 Social Audit Poll believe that African-Americans are treated unfairly by police, only 35 percent of whites agree. Likewise, while less than 1 in 10 of the African-American population believes blacks and whites are treated alike, 4 in 10 whites believe that that reality is already transpiring.
The young black man is a special target in American society. Sixty percent of the prison population is African-American and 44 percent of those 10-17 who are incarcerated are black, the majority of whom are males (though African-American youth only comprise 15 percent of that population). The latest round of unemployment as a result of the recent economic stagnation has hit the African-American community harder than the rest of the population. They are the economy's scapegoats.
Certainly the Native American is no less enslaved to the American system, one of the favorite scapegoats of European-American wrath in regions surrounding reservations. The level of poverty among Indians is crushing. While according to 1998 government statistics more than 34 million Americans were living in poverty (12.7 percent of the population), the percentage of the Native American population in poverty was 31.2 percent (while 26.1 percent of African-Americans are in poverty). We have made the true Americans paupers in their own land, and blamed them for their own poverty. Indians are our long-time scapegoats.
If we can get the people to whom we preach to appreciate that a kind of slavery continues in America, that the upper and middle class among them help perpetuate it by profiting from the system, at the least it might contribute to a more humane, caring society. Remind your hearers of the liberation of the Hebrews by God, that today God may use us his People to liberate the slaves among us.
This latest piece of a continuing conflict began some 20 months ago, when a Palestinian Intifada erupted after Sharon took a tour of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Since then we have seen attacks and reprisals and revenge. The Palestinians engage in suicide bombings by young people against civilian targets inside Israel. With tanks and soldiers and missiles Israel attacks Palestinian towns and refugee camps inside the West Bank.
What has emerged is a pattern of actions by one side followed by retaliation for those actions followed by yet another retaliation, and it keeps escalating, each attack becoming more deadly than the one that it intends to repay. Who knows where it will end? We don't know what the situation will be when this issue is published or when these lectionary passages are preached. But from the current vantage point, there seems to be little way out of the morass of terror and retaliation that Israel and Palestine have fallen into. And the latest worry is that other Arab nations will be drawn into the war.
An attitude that has arisen through it all is the fear on both sides that an action by one side will go unanswered or unpunished, and that if that happens, that side will have the upper hand, at least on paper and in the eyes of the world. There is a fear of breaking the cycle of retaliation, that somehow our side will be diminished if we don't respond.
And so the terrorism continues, on both sides. Israel would deny that she engages in terrorism, instead calling it defensive military action, but the Palestinians would call it terrorism. Likewise the Palestinians would probably call their terrorists freedom fighters, but Israel knows it to be terrorism.
But it's not the first instance of terrorism in that region of the world. It goes back 40 years, 400 years, 4,000 years.
The Egyptian Pharaoh engaged in terrorism when he ordered all the male children of the Hebrews killed. And why did he do it? Fear. Fear that Egypt would be engulfed by the Israelites, fear that he had to do something or else they would be lost if the Israelites should ever join their enemies. Sound familiar?
And what worked against the Egyptian terrorism? Trust in God.
Exodus 1:8--2:10
For those who know the rest of the story of Exodus, and for those, perhaps, who know only Cecil B. DeMille's version, there are no more chilling or ominous words than these from the first chapter, "Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph."
The verse says a great deal about the vagaries of power and the arbitrariness of such human institutions as a monarchy, and about how little a former status may serve us in the future. No longer could the Israelites rely on Joseph's relationship with Pharaoh. And so with those words as an introduction, the story of the people of Israel comes to the account of their enslavement at the hands of the Egyptians. Obviously the enslavement of a people is a terrible thing, but out of it would come an act of God's grace and power that would define forever afterwards the nation of Israel and the Jewish people.
The reading can be divided into four sections:
1. Verses 1:8-14 tell how the Egyptians increased the labor of the Israelites as a means of keeping them under control, since they had borne children and increased in numbers during their time in Egypt.
2. 1:15-22 is the account of Pharaoh's order that all of the Hebrew male children be killed by the Hebrew midwives, since the male children constituted the threat. But the midwives feared God, and didn't, or couldn't, carry out Pharaoh's order. And the Israelites kept increasing.
3. With 2:1-4 the scene changes. A Levite man of Israel and his wife married and bore a son. They managed to keep the child hidden for three months, but the pressure became too great, and so to protect him, his mother sent him down the river in a papyrus basket. And thus we have the story of how Moses came to be reared by Egyptians.
4. The scene changes yet again in 2:5 to the bathing area of Pharaoh's daughter, who takes the child from the river, and in a bit of strange drama, the child's mother is engaged to nurse him until he is old enough to go live with the daughter of Pharaoh as her son.
The story has a distinctly dramatic quality to it that befits the birth of the liberator, Moses. It is full of irony, that the one who would save Israel would be reared by the king's daughter, even being named by Pharaoh's daughter; that the mother of the child would be the one called to nurse him and care for him; and that Pharaoh's efforts to hold onto the Israelite slaves should bring about the very thing that he feared, their escape from Egypt. Clearly this tale was told with relish over and over long before it was ever written down.
There is a unique place held in this reading by the women: the midwives, who are identified by name, Shiphrah and Puah; the Hebrew women, who are vigorous and so deliver their children before the midwives can get there; the mother of Moses, whose decision it was to put Moses in the Nile; Moses' sister who watched him down the river; and finally, Pharaoh's daughter, who felt pity for the orphan and decided to raise him as her son. Rarely in the Old Testament do so many women play such large roles in such momentous events.
And specifically, it is the faith, the trust, of the women that shines through. The midwives feared God, and Moses' mother trusted her child to the river and the elements, and to the Egyptians, and ultimately to God.
Romans 12:1-8
There are several divisions in Paul's letter to the Romans, breaks where Paul begins a new thought. One of those is between chapters 8 and 9. Another is between chapters 11 and 12. He has been talking about what it means to live as someone in Christ, to live the life of the spirit, to live under the grace of God instead of under the law. Now with chapter 12, he speaks of the specifics of that life.
Verses 1 and 2 are really an introduction to the topic. It should be noted that Paul is not speaking about our physical bodies; the word "bodies" should be read "selves." The living sacrifice is opposed to the burnt offering of a dead sacrifice on the altar. That is definitely not the kind of sacrifice we are to make. Instead ours is to be the offering of a life lived in thanks, a thank offering. And what that means is that life is not to be lived conforming to this world, but conforming to the will of God.
In 3-7 Paul becomes even more specific about the kind of life to be lived in community. It is a life of humility, lived in the knowledge that each person within the community has an appropriate role and place in the body of Christ. The theme of the body of Christ and the different gifts of the members are common Pauline themes, to be found also in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians.
The general problem that Paul's theology faces is that his teaching advanced in the first part of Romans doesn't confront the issue of ethical behavior. If, as he says elsewhere in Romans, the law doesn't apply to those living in the spirit, those who have been transformed, well, then, what about proper ethical behavior, where does that come in? Another way to put it is: If we have been saved by God's grace, what does that mean for our actions in the world?
Paul's answer would be that the transformed life, the renewed life that conforms to the will of God, has been changed completely, especially on a moral plane. One commentator speaks of the "compelling ethical power of grace" that motivates new behavior. What Paul is speaking of here is what we would call in later theologies sanctification, becoming more holy through the course of this life. But lest we become prideful about that, it must be remembered that that too is always the work of God in us.
Matthew 16:13-20
In the Gospels we come across the phenomenon of finding common incidents in the life of Jesus or teachings of Jesus located by the different evangelists in different settings and used to make different theological points. When we see that happen, we need to remember that the four Gospel writers were authors in their own right, not simply reporters of fact. Peter's confession is found in all three synoptic Gospels. In this passage we have Mark's version of it (Mark 8:27-30) preserved by Matthew, with the addition of verses 17-19, which are unique to Matthew, and which make a different point from Mark's.
So let's consider first the plain account without Matthew's addition. Matthew and Mark agree that it happened at Caesarea Philippi, a town in northern Galilee. Some commentators have made a big deal out of the fact that in verse 13 Jesus uses the phrase "Son of Man," while in verse 15, with the same question directed to the disciples, he uses "I." Although the contrast might be the basis for a sermon about the public Jesus and the Jesus known to his disciples, or the eschatological Christ and Jesus from the town of Nazareth, there is no solid foundation for choosing either of those interpreations. Matthew adds Jeremiah to Mark's list; which makes sense in light of Matthew's target audience of Hebrew Christians.
Jumping to verse 20, we come to the so-called Messianic Secret, the predilection of Jesus to keep quiet the fact that some regarded him as the Messiah, and to keep the news of the miracles quiet. The danger in proclaiming it aloud, of course, is that people simply wouldn't understand what kind of Messiah he was, and would build him up as some kind of political or earthly Messiah. And people's failure to understand his mission is what carried him to Calvary and it is what continues to trouble the church.
But what do Matthew's additions, verses 17-19, add to Mark's account? Jesus confers on Peter the name that means rock (Greek petra = rock), he promises that Peter will be the foundation for his church, and he hands Peter the keys to the kingdom, with the authority to bind on earth and thus in heaven. And the reason for those things? Peter's faith, which is not something to praise Peter for, since it has been revealed to him from above. What Matthew is saying in his version of Peter's confession is that there is more to it than simply faith in Christ. Faith brings its own authority, which is itself a divine gift.
Application
Are there alternatives to terrorism, whatever the particular kind of terrorism we're talking about? What we see in the Middle East is an escalating war, which is fast becoming a war of attrition. Retaliation builds on retaliation, with no end in sight. Is there something that can take its place?
And lest we think this is a narrow question that will be solved in a few years (an unlikely scenario), the fact is that regardless of how wrenching the Middle Eastern situation is, no matter how terrible the loss of life, the real issue is not about Israel and the Palestinians. It's about all of us.
The desire for revenge and retaliation is a part of us, and it's only by the grace of God that some of us don't act on it.
In other forms, we see it on the streets of the nation's cities, including the nation's capital, where too many young black men put their trust in hardware, the cold, solid, blue steel of a 9-millimeter Glock semi-automatic, and in the supposed healing power of revenge, person against person, drug gang against drug gang, wars that escalate as much as anything the Middle East has to offer.
We see it in the American home. In the movie The War of the Roses, Oliver and Barbara Rose thought they had a perfect marriage, only to discover that their relationship was skin deep. In their bitter, recriminatory divorce, they wage a war against each other in which the slightest suggestion that one might get the upper hand over the other carries them downward into brutality and madness as they destroy each other. It doesn't just happen in movies.
And where will it all stop?
What can we do in the face of terrorism, if not strike back? What do we do when things look really bad and we suffer unjustly, if not make somebody else suffer? What do we rely on, if not the revenge we can get?
The question here really resolves itself into: Where do we put our trust? Years ago there was a game on television hosted by Johnny Carson called Who Do You Trust? That's the name of the game that is being played in the Middle East.
So whom should we trust, and what should we rely on?
To answer that we look to the plight of Israel in Egypt. Pharaoh got scared, scared that something would happen to his carefully manufactured realm and reign, scared that these proliferating Hebrews in the midst of his nation would take a notion to leave and deprive him of his labor, or even worse, join with his enemies. So what do you do? The answer was simple: Kill all the baby boys. Certainly an act of terror if anything deserves that name.
So where did Pharaoh put his trust when he felt threatened? The answer: might, force of arms, terror, killing children.
But there is a remarkable contrast between what Pharaoh relied on when he was threatened and what the Hebrews relied on. The Hebrew midwives feared -- trusted -- God, and so didn't carry out Pharaoh's design. Moses' mother trusted her baby to the little basket she had made, and to the River Nile, and even to the Egyptians, but in fact she trusted him to God.
It is so tempting when we are threatened to put our faith in the things we have control over, the force of arms, retaliation, the comforting thought of revenge, pay-back time. But ultimately that simply heats things up and brings us down, as it did Pharaoh and the Egyptian army.
The question is: Terror or trust? And the only answer can be: Trust in God.
Alternative Applications
1) Matthew: the Authority of Faith. Peter's faith brought forth from him the impetuous words, "You are the Christ." And his confession brought him Jesus' grant of authority on the basis of that confession alone. There is no doubt that we have certain authority that comes with our profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Does faith grant authority, and if so, what is the authority of faith in the modern world? Do we have the keys of the kingdom as well?
2) Romans: Conformed to the World. Paul is exhorting the Romans not to be conformed to the world, but to find their own way -- God's way -- in the world, the way of the church. And he goes on to describe what it means to be in Christ. It is indeed hard to be in the world and not conform to it. Paul provides a list for first-century Romans about what it means not to be conformed to the word. What would our list include?
First Lesson Focus
Exodus 1:8--2:10
"Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation" (Exodus 1:6). We come now to the longest gap in the history of salvation to be found in the Hexateuch, that is, in the first six books of the Bible. When last we read of Joseph, he and his brothers and their offspring were all living safely in the region of Goshen, that fertile region in the eastern Nile delta where there was plentiful pasture for their flocks. There, we are told, Israel multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, in accordance with the promise of the Lord (v. 7).
But then we come to an ominous statement. "There arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph" (v. 8). And that new pharaoh feared the God-given multiplication of the Israelites. "... let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land" (vv. 9-10). Pharaoh therefore enslaved the Israelites and set them to working on his store-cities of Pithom and Raamses.
That notice allows us to zero in on the dates with which we are dealing. The city of Raamses was rebuilt and again made the capital of the Egyptian empire under the Pharaohs Sethos I (ca. 1309-1290 B.C.) and Ramesses II (ca. 1290-1224 B.C), both of whom carried on extensive building operations. But the city of Raamses was called by that name only until the eleventh century B.C., after which it was called Tanis. So our story is set in the fourteenth or thirteenth century B.C. But the Israelites could not have left Egypt before 1300 B.C., because they encountered both Edom and Moab in the wilderness (Numbers 20-21), and neither of those kingdoms was established before that time. According to an archeaological find called the Stele of Merneptah, Israel was in Palestine by 1220 B.C. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Sethos I and Ramesses II were the pharaohs of Israel's oppression, and allowing for the time in the wilderness after the exodus, we can say that Israel escaped from Egypt about 1280 B.C.
But pharaohs cannot stop the action of God. Even though the Hebrews were enslaved, making bricks in the mudpits of Egypt, they continued to multiply in fulfillment of God's promise. Sethos I therefore called in Israel's two midwives and commanded them to kill any newborn male infant but to let female infants live. "But," says our text, "the midwives feared God" (v. 17), so they obeyed God's will and not the Pharaoh's. They chose life for the Hebrew infants and not death. And that, of course, is the introduction to the story that we often call, "Moses in the bullrushes."
Moses' mother, of the priestly tribe of Levi, hid him for three months after he was born, but the child grew, and she could hide him from the Pharaoh's death-decree no longer. So in an act of blind but trusting faith, she made a little basket of reeds, waterproofed it with pitch and sticky slime (bitumen), and put it among the reeds at the bank of the Nile. At the same time she arranged for Moses' older sister, Miriam, to watch to see what happened to her child. Did the mother know that place was where the pharaoh's daughter and her servants came to bathe? Our text does not say, but surely it was with anguish that the mother set her infant son adrift.
When Pharaoh's daughter heard the infant crying, discovered the basket, and took pity on the Hebrew child, Miriam was immediately on the spot. "Shall I go and call a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" Pharaoh's daughter agreed and Moses' own mother was allowed to nurse him for two or three years. But Moses belonged to the Pharaoh's household, and the royal daughter even gave him his name. She called him Mosheh, which is an Egyptian name, but which in the Hebrew stems from mashah, to draw out, and of course that is a hidden reference also to the fact that Moses will be the one who leads when the Lord draws out his people from Egypt.
How ironic are the acts sometimes of this God of ours! To have the future leader of the exodus brought up in the house of the enslaving pharaoh! The Lord must have chuckled a bit over that fact and his hidden dealings with the king of Egypt. But how risky, too, does the action of God sometimes seem! His protection and preparation of Moses for his future role depends on the piety of two midwives, on the blind faith of a mother, on a basket that does not leak, a daughter of the pharaoh with a tender heart, and a watching older sister. Improbable as it all sounds, God makes all of those things fit together in order to pursue his purpose.
Could it be that such a careful God is also dealing with all of the little happenings in our lives, all of which seem so inconsequential at the time, but which turn out to be important in God's working toward his goal? Maybe God doesn't think anything that happens to us is unimportant, because he's a Lord who deals not only with big events but with very small ones also -- a God of the details. Think of it!
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 51:1-6
Our text is made up of two stanzas of a proclamation of salvation that Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) spoke to the exiles in Babylonia, sometimes between 550 and 538 B.C. It is unfortunate that the lectionary omits the third stanza in vv. 7-8, because those verses have the same structure as vv. 1-3 and 4-6, and actually complete the thought.
Even though these words were proclaimed to the Babylonian exiles, they still are very relevant to our lives, as is seen in the opening verse. "Hearken to me, you who pursue deliverance." And of course, that is all of us, isn't it? All of us long for deliverance from the confusions and wrongs of our lives, for a communion with God that gives us some sense of lasting security, for a society and world in which God's order (law) and justice are present (v. 4) and nothing makes us afraid.
Indeed, we're not alone in such longings. Our text says that all peoples look for deliverance, for the establishment of some good order from God, for relief from the burden of guilt and the specters of evil and death (vv. 4-5). All peoples look for a good life without fear, and for security that does not pass away. And the question of our text is: Where can we find such deliverance, such salvation? Where can we find our surety?
Our passage gives two negative answers to that. The first answer, in verses 7-8 which the lection omits, tells us not to look to human beings. But second, our passage tells us not to search for security from anything in this world (v. 6). For this world will pass away, and "there's no hiding place down here." If we put our trust in the things of this earth -- in money, in status, in family, in science, in military might, in human relationships, in any creation of human beings to make us secure -- "the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth wear out like a garment" (v. 6). This world is not permanent but transitory, and any hope founded on this world's permanence is transitory also.
So where should we look, those of us who "pursue deliverance," those of us who struggle to find that which is solid and permanent and everlasting? The answer in our text is surprising. Look back in the history of God's work, recorded for us in the scriptures, it says. Look back to Abraham and Sarah. Why? Because the Lord God Almighty kept his promise to them. He promised that they would have many descendants, and he kept his promise.
In other words, this is just one reference to the main theme that runs all through the proclamation of Second Isaiah. "The word of our God will stand forever" (40:8; 55:10-11). God has spoken promises into human history, and God keeps his word. "My salvation will be forever, and my deliverance will never be ended" (51:6). Heaven and earth may pass away, you see, human beings may turn out to be unreliable, even that which we hold most dear may not support our fondest hopes. But God makes a promise to us that he will save us, and God always keeps his word. If you want security, if you want that which endures, if you want the abundant life that comes from the Lord, if you want deliverance and salvation, then place your trust in his word of promise that will stand forever.
The Political Pulpit
Exodus 1:8--2:10
The story of Joseph being sold into slavery, the entire narrative of Israel's slavery in Egypt, has been in a paradoxical way a source of great comfort to those who have been oppressed. In the African-American community this identification with Israel's plight both helped explain slavery, but also gave hope and comfort that the oppressed were God's chosen people who like the Hebrews would someday be liberated. American Christianity as a whole needs to read this narrative and this pericope in particular, as in the African-American narrative style. It will help us to see how, like the Egyptians, the American system is selling some of the people in its land into slavery.
Clearly the black male has been reduced to this kind of slavery. We have made him one of society's primary scapegoats. The realities of racial profiling by police continue, even after all the brouhaha during the presidential elections of 2000. Perception is also part of the dilemma, the failure of whites to appreciate the depth of persecution which minorities experience. Thus while 66 percent of blacks surveyed in a Gallup 2001 Social Audit Poll believe that African-Americans are treated unfairly by police, only 35 percent of whites agree. Likewise, while less than 1 in 10 of the African-American population believes blacks and whites are treated alike, 4 in 10 whites believe that that reality is already transpiring.
The young black man is a special target in American society. Sixty percent of the prison population is African-American and 44 percent of those 10-17 who are incarcerated are black, the majority of whom are males (though African-American youth only comprise 15 percent of that population). The latest round of unemployment as a result of the recent economic stagnation has hit the African-American community harder than the rest of the population. They are the economy's scapegoats.
Certainly the Native American is no less enslaved to the American system, one of the favorite scapegoats of European-American wrath in regions surrounding reservations. The level of poverty among Indians is crushing. While according to 1998 government statistics more than 34 million Americans were living in poverty (12.7 percent of the population), the percentage of the Native American population in poverty was 31.2 percent (while 26.1 percent of African-Americans are in poverty). We have made the true Americans paupers in their own land, and blamed them for their own poverty. Indians are our long-time scapegoats.
If we can get the people to whom we preach to appreciate that a kind of slavery continues in America, that the upper and middle class among them help perpetuate it by profiting from the system, at the least it might contribute to a more humane, caring society. Remind your hearers of the liberation of the Hebrews by God, that today God may use us his People to liberate the slaves among us.
