Proper 16A/Ordinary 21A/Pentecost +15 August 24, 2008

Exodus 1:8-2:10

Poussin, Finding of Moses 1651, Lond.Nat

The new Pharaoh feared the power of these Hebrew resident aliens & decided to enslave them, lest they grow so strong as to become a threat to the kingdom.  If Pharaoh is worried about the number of Hebrews, it would seem to make more sense to kill the females.  But Pharaoh associates power with military strength.  If Pharaoh fears male power, God will outwit him through women.  The Bible seems especially to delight in God’s choices of seemingly unlikely agents of salvation.

It is not without coincidence, that the story of the birth of Moses is paralleled in Matthew’s Gospel with the birth of Jesus.  In both stories, the child serves as the not-yet-revealed instrument of God’s gracious intervention, and in both cases the thread on which everything hangs is exceedingly thin. But perhaps that is because most of the history that we’ve been given to read, as Karl Popper has observed, has been written by the “winners,” the people on the top; whereas, God has a tendency to make history from “underneath”.

Even when the thread on which everything hangs appears exceedingly thin – not the oppression of tyrannical despots nor even the overwhelming pressures & demands of everyday life – can thwart God’s design.  God’s grace is sufficient.

But with that grace, also comes a responsibility:

●    for who knows whether or not God is using you as He did those midwives to circumvent some evil or injustice in the world.
●    If God is not using you as God did Miriam to keep a watchful eye on the direction of the life of someone you love.
●    If God is not using you as God did Pharaoh’s daughter to rescue someone who is just barely treading water.

For who knows whether or not God needs you this very day to change the course of history.  For the history that really matters is not that which is made from the top down by the decisions of Pharaohs, kings, presidents or prime ministers, but by decisions made in your life.  Who knows whether or not all of history depends upon your being present for someone else.

Proper 15A / Ordinary 20A / Pentecost +14 August 17, 2008

Genesis 45:1-28

Velazquez, Joseph's Coat 1630

Joseph, who had been sold into slavery by his brothers, now stands before them, & they don’t recognize him. Little brother Joseph has been transformed into a big man in the Pharaoh’s court, & his brothers are in Egypt to beg for food, for back in Palestine famine has taken the land.  By now Joseph has adopted royal ways, succeeded in a sophisticated culture a long way from his family’s nomadic roots. The law of retaliation ought naturally come into play. It wouldn’t be out of character for Joseph to seek revenge.  But this is not the same Joseph.

He says in a regal tone, “I am Joseph”.  Then, his voice cracks, tears cannot be restrained, and he falls upon them saying, “I am your brother, Joseph”.  Official speech, as Brueggemann would have it,  gives way to intimate talk of family.  We have here a story about envy, cruelty, jealousy, love, tenderness and all the other sometimes painful, often blessed experiences of human families.  And the story says, this is where God meets us. God uses even the messy brokenness of our families for divine purposes.  “God sent me before you,” says Joseph, “to preserve life”.

“And he said, ‘I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.  And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life…. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them”.

Joseph is not the same person.  With philosopher, historian, Hannah Arendt, “without forgiveness, our capacity to act would be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover”.  Lie upon lie, deception after deception, when will it all end? When one, who, like Joseph, is manifestly entitled to retribution chooses not to take it.

“I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.  To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also…”.

When will it ever end?   If ever there were one who was entitled to retaliate for the injustice, the betrayals, the scorn, it was Jesus.  But we hear from the cross: “Father, forgive them…”.   He is crucified, so that we no longer need to crucify one another.

Proper 14A / Ordinary 19A / Pentecost +13 August 10, 2008

Genesis 37:1-28

Flavitsky, Children of Jacob Sell Joseph (1855)

“Now Joseph,” the story continues, “was taken down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there.  And the Lord was with Joseph”.  “And the Lord was with Joseph” — Who is this God that abides with slaves?
And then again we read what is truly the shocking thing about the Bible: “And Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison where the king’s prisoners were confined…. and the Lord was with Joseph”.  Who is this God who goes to prison?
What a sad, mixed-up Bible.  And this is only Genesis!  If it continues on like this, it’ll be trying to tell us that
● He was with the later Israelite slaves in Egypt, making bricks without straw,
● or that God was with the Israelite prisoners in Babylon’s deportation camps during the Exile;
● or that when old Herod was killing all the baby boys who might threaten his realm, God somehow got down into one of those cradles.
Then it’ll end up with some story about how God got onto the cross of some itinerant rabbi charged with blasphemy and sedition against the state.
What kind of a God is this who will take our evil and turn it into our redemption?
What kind of God is this that when we crucify the Son of Man, He will make that crucifixion our salvation?

James A. Sanders  “Joseph Our Brother” in God Has A Story Too.

Ordinary 18A/Pentecost +12 August 3, 2008

Genesis 32:3-31

Gauguin, Jacob Wrestling, 1888

In this story, God comes in the form of a stranger - an angel, a messenger - to wrestle with Jacob & to change his name, that is, who he is.   He no longer is Jacob, but Israel, one who recognizes that God is the source of his life & existence.

Jacob moves on to face his crisis as one who has been changed by an encounter with God.  It’s a new person who crosses Jabbok brook.  He no longer moves with the old self-confident, cocky gait.  There’s a noticeable limp; his power is no longer in himself.  He is healed by being wounded.

What difference did it make the next day when Jacob crossed the river & stood face to face with his brother?  Well, Jacob wasn’t the same person anymore.  Even though he was limping, he wasn’t running away.  And when the two brothers met, instead of unleashing the years of pent-up resentment, hostility &  guilt, they threw their arms around each other & wept with joy.  These two, twins who were the half parts of one, were now together.

It just might make a difference that God comes to wrestle with us in our doubts & fears, in our strained relationships & our ever-present crises.  By such an encounter, God may not necessarily remove the overwhelming problems & obstacles which confront us, but God may make us different enough to deal with them, not merely with our own resources, but in faith.

The God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob; the God whom we know as the Father of Jesus Christ, will come to in the face of crisis even if we’ve tried to do without God in the past, if we’ve pretended, like Jacob, that we could handle the problems of life on our own, God will still come.

God will come to encounter us even if we’ve made such a mess of things that they seem beyond repair.  God will come when we don’t know who we really are; when we don’t, figuratively, know our own names, & are separated from our true selves.  God will come when there’s a deep gulf, a wide abyss, between us & someone we love.

God comes to you to wrestle with you, so that this time you might be different.  And when the struggle is over, He’ll send you forth with His blessing to face the problems and obstacles of your lives that stand in the way of your peace and wholeness as changed persons.

It is in that encounter that we come to know the distinction made by the poet Rilke: “How small, that with which we wrestle, but how great, that which wrestles with us.” And it is also in that encounter that we become, to borrow the phrase of Henri Nouwen, the “wounded healer.”

Ordinary 16 / Pentecost +10 July 20, 2008

Genesis 28:10-19a

Tiepolo, Jacob's Ladder

The story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel suggests at least two things about our encounters with that which is holy.  The first is that the world is the place in which we meet the divine.

Jacob experienced what is known in Celtic spirituality as a “thin place”. Places & times in life when the veneer is so thin that some experience of God or some revelation becomes available to us. Thin places are where this world and others meet; places where a sense of the holy is virtually palpable.

The second is that the Lord may come, not in wakeful control, but in a time of vulnerable yielding, as in a dream while sleeping.

The Lord may come, as the story says, when we are “between places,” that is, in our every day comings and goings. God encounters us when we are running away from something, especially when that something is an unresolved part of our lives. God encounters us when we are betwixt & between, at a threshold (L. limen), at a liminal place. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes such liminality as “an interval, however brief… when the past is momentarily negated… & the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance”.  They are times of confusion, vulnerability, of questioning who we are, but also times of potentially profound transformation - of finding our identity

The Jacob who fled into the wilderness (that liminal place) is not the same Jacob who emerges.

We too, may find ourselves in the wilderness with all that is unresolved in our hearts. Our wakeful worlds may be fraught with loneliness, fear or guilt. We may have come to have known too many broken promises, broken hearts, & broken homes. We too, may find ourselves “between places”. We may be running away from our past, from the shadows in our lives, from what we have become, or from what lies ahead.

But then God comes where God is not anticipated. In actuality, however, God has been there all along, only like Jacob, we did not know it - missed it, were blind to it, too busy and ignored it. But the world is a thin place, and God is close, closer than we ever imagined.

Then, as the Lord looked down upon Jacob; God looks down upon us with a blessing. And gives us the promise: “I am with you and I will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you safely home”.

Ordinary 15 / Pentecost +9 July 13, 2008

Genesis 25:19-34

When we turn to the stories of the twin brothers Esau & Jacob in Genesis, one wonders why they are included as part of holy writ. Here are two brothers for whom - from the very moment of conception - there existed tension, jealousy, & deception. Two brothers for whom each parent, Isaac & Rebekah, had their favorite. Why did the storyteller “hang out the dirty laundry” of the family tree? Why does the Bible have to tell stories that sound so familiar and personal? Why do ‘their’ stories sound like ‘our’ stories?

Why tell these stories of such a dysfunctional family? Why include them in sacred literature? Not merely to say that what goes around comes around. Nobody in the situation is entirely guilty, neither are they wholly blameless. Perhaps we tell & retell these stories precisely because they are our stories too.

● Which of us has not been alienated from a brother or a sister, a parent or child?

● Which one of us isn’t living with a gulf which separates us from another family member, harboring some past resentment which we are unwilling to forget let alone forgive?

● Which one of us hasn’t suffered from apparent parental favoritism or tried or is still trying, even into our own adulthood, to secure the blessing, that is, our parents’ approval?

Fortunately, as Buechner [Peculiar Treasures. p.56] has it, God doesn’t love people because of who they are, but because who God is. God doesn’t withhold God’s love because of what we have done, but loves us in spite of ourselves. It’s known as grace.