Note: This was a special interfaith prayer service. The first part of what follows here is the Welcome at the opening. The second part is my homily on Jeremiah 18:1-11, which is the Old Testament lesson for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. I am sorry that I do not have here the other sermon we heard, which was by Dr. Gazi Erdem.
Opening Welcome
Today we commemorate 9-11. That day made all the difference. We need to interpret that day in terms of God and to pray to God about the repercussions of that day. That day made all the difference to Muslims in America, and so it’s fitting that we do this together with Muslims. We Jews and Christians and Muslims pray to the same God. We tell different stories about God, and our stories don’t all match up, but God is One, and our God is the truest unity we have, so it’s in praying together that our best unity is found.
It was in 2002 that Rabbi Jerry Weider challenged me to use 9-11 to make contact with the Muslims of Brooklyn. Since then we have welcomed here Imam Abdallah Allam of the Dawood Mosque, and then Wa’el Mousfar of the Arab Muslim American Federation, and then Faruq Wadud of the Bangladeshi Baitul Jannah Mosque, and then Debbie Almontaser of Women of Islam.
Today we are pleased to welcome the Universal Foundation, which represents the Turkish community of Brooklyn. But their hospitality was first. They welcomed us to their Ramadan Iftars. It was at the Mosque of the Crimean Turks that I was first invited to join the prayers. That was profound for me. While they prayed in Arabic I knelt beside the wall and I prayed as a Christian, and there, in prayer, I discovered that it was the same God we were praying to. It was in prayer that I found our deepest unity, because the Spirit of God was present there.
Today I am most pleased to welcome Dr. Gazi Erdem, from the Consulate General of Turkey, who is the Mufti or chief Iman of all the Turkish Imams in North America. Sort of like a Muslim archbishop. It’s an impressive office but Dr. Erdem carries it with gentleness and a great sense of humor. I love his laughter and his joy. I have heard Dr. Erdem address a thousand people at the Waldorf-Astoria, but I’m really looking forward to what he has to say within a house of prayer.
Today we are praying side-by-side. Our Christian prayers will be Christian and our Muslim prayers will be Muslim. Our unity is not some unnatural amalgamation. Or unity is in the One God that we worship, and in the loving hospitality that we practice with each other.
Homily
On the basis of Jeremiah, you might get the impression that God was behind 9-11, that God sent the evil against America. That was the claim of some fundamentalist Christians, and ironically, that put them very close to Al-qaeda, as if 9-11 was what God wanted.
On the one hand, we do believe that God has the freedom and authority and sovereignty and power to do whatever God wills to do, and we believe that God is the great judge of the world, and that God judges the nations, but on the other hand, we also believe that ever since Jesus, at least, the way God judges us is not through violence or disaster or weapons or by making use of criminal actions but simply and directly by means of God’s Word.
God’s public Word. God’s open and straightforward Word. In the prophets. In the Book. We are people of the Book, we are people who honor the prophets, because through the Book and the prophets God speaks to us and judges us, and the reason that God judges us is in order for us to hear and learn and turn and live.
The judgement of God is a privilege and a gift. People make judgements all the time, pundits and politicians, police chiefs and generals, CEOs and CFOs, regulators and mortgage lenders, we make judgements all the time, and our judgements affect our freedom and our lives, and amidst the clamor and tumult of all these voice, to get the judgement of God is a privilege and a gift.
And the judgement of God is simultaneously good and bad for us. It is good for us if we honor and accept it and it is bad for us if we refuse it and ignore it. It justifies us if we affirm it and it condemns us if we deny it. It’s up to us whether it’s for evil or for good. God gives us such freedom and responsibility.
This prophecy from Jeremiah combines what many people find paradoxical, the freedom and responsibility of humanity with the total sovereignty of God. But the truth of this, in different ways, is a common conviction of both the Reformed Church and Islam. And so, to push the metaphor, we say to God, "Thou are the potter, I am the clay, mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still." That’s a Christian song, but it perfectly describes the physical attitude of "islam," which is to wait on God, yielded and still.
The enduring significance of 9-11, for us, at least, is not how many died, though that is hugely important. The enduring significance of 9-11 is not why Al-qaeda did it, though we need to be clear about that for our foreign policy. The enduring significance of 9-11 is that we learn from it, that we learn from it rightly and not wrongly, that we interpret it rightly, not on our own, but with God’s wisdom, and that in response to it we examine our own selves, that we search ourselves, and the way that we search ourselves is by means of the judgements of God, and the judgements of God are given to us faithfully and lovingly in the Word of God.
In a moment we will do just that. We will pray selections from Psalm 139, in which we open ourselves to the searching of God. I wish that our lectionary editors had not taken out the last few verses, which are both the most severe and most liberating, but we do with what we have. Psalm 139 is one of the great prayers in the Bible, it’s a profound expression of the religious consciousness, and remarkably modern despite its antiquity, and, as far as I can tell, it’s a prayer that can be said equally by Jews and Christians and Muslims.
We will take a few moments of silence in order for you all to look it over, and then I will invite you to rise together and pray it with me. Our custom here is to do it responsively; I read the first part, and you read together the part in bold print. After the Psalm will come the traditional Gloria Patri, and would the Muslims and Jews be so kind as to indulge the Christians as we sing it with the hospitality of your listening? I thank you in advance.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Watching the Episcopalians
I remember during the heady days of ecumenism that one of the top Lutheran bishops was happy for the prospect of full communion with the Episcopalians because it took them one step closer to Rome. Well, the next step will have to be like Neil Armstrong’s, because right now the Episcopalians are even in trouble with Canterbury.
As I write this, Bishop Gene New Hampshire (that would be Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson) has been uninvited to the next Lambeth Conference, which is a big deal for Anglicans. Is the Archbishop of Canterbury not in full communion with the Bishop of New Hampshire? Shall the rest of the Episcopal Church accept this half of an excommunication of one of their own?
Did Rowan Williams expect this when he became Archbishop? I wonder if he looks back with longing on his quiet days in the see of St. David and the primacy of Wales. All this Anglican Communion politics, when what he’s best at is encouraging the church in a secular England and winsomely representing the gospel there. Canterbury is the head of the Communion, but he’s only the first among equals, and he has little clout compared to Rome and even Constantinople.
We grieve for the Anglican Communion right now. I don’t see how they can work this out, considering the parties and positions. The Nigerians versus the Americans. The Americans are the Nigerians of the Western hemisphere and the Nigerians are the Americans of Africa. Or some would say, the Germans, but Germans are not Anglicans.
From a Reformed perspective, you have to ask, why is Bishop Robinson such an issue when Bishop Spong never threatened the Anglican Communion? I have met Bishop Robinson and heard him speak. He loves the Lord Jesus. He worships the Trinity. He confesses the faith once delivered and he testifies to the gospel. He believes in the Resurrection and the Atonement and the Exodus from Egypt, for Heaven’s sake.
Bishop Spong is still called a Christian only because he calls himself that. He’s an impressive man, especially to himself. Bishop Robinson exhibits repentance, humor, and self-deprecation.
But the Anglicans don’t think from a Reformed perspective. When you finally come down to it, apparently the cliche is true, that for Anglicans it doesn’t matter what you believe. Well, it does, of course, but not enough to pose a threat.
What matters is your ritual. What you celebrate and how you celebrate. This has its virtues. If you attend any Anglican church, the sermon might be thin, but the liturgy will give you a Creed, the Trinity, the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus and his coming again, some repentance from sins, some real prayers, some real blessings, and some real miracles — the sacraments. During the sermon you can read the Thirty-Nine Articles in the back of the Prayerbook and thank God for the Belgic Confession.
Anglicans found it problematic when some Canadians and Americans began celebrating gay weddings, or holy unions, or whatever, but even this was tolerable. It used to be the case that all Anglicans, worldwide, were united by the Book of Common Prayer. But since the ’60’s the various provinces have developed their own Prayerbooks, and the New Zealand book is now very different from the British ASB. Liturgical disunity may distress Anglicans, but they’ve been living with divergence for some decades now, and it hasn’t threatened their Communion’s unity.
But a gay bishop! Anglicans are fundamentalists about one thing, and one thing only, and that is the hierarchical episcopacy. In the Seventeenth Century their motivation was political — "No bishop, no king." What their motivation is nowadays is open to question. But as we saw in the process of full communion with the Lutherans, everything is negotiable, except episcopacy.
And when an out gay man is elevated to the episcopacy, then Anglicans are threatened.
What matters is not what he believes but what he is, because a bishop is. The symbol of an hierarchical bishop is not his pulpit but his chair. When he’s just sitting there, holding his staff, he’s at the center of his job. Celebrating Eucharist and baptizing and preaching can be done by mere priests. Only bishops can confirm, but since a Prayer Book Study in the ’60’s it’s agreed that this is not essential but political. It gives the bishop something special to do when he or she visits a parish. Otherwise a bishop has nothing distinctive to do.
A bishop just is. The chief role of a bishop is to represent the church, and, with such Incarnational theology, to represent Christ himself. Well!
The Anglican Communion is at heart a communion of bishops. This communion is objective and linear, like a family tree. They may or may not take the Bible literally, but they are literal about their hierarchical network.
Your ordinary American and Canadian laity are not really in communion with each other. They are in communion with their respective bishops, who are in communion with each other, provided their communion is guaranteed by being in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The crisis shows us what Anglicans are fundamentalist and literalist about!
This past July I attended three different Anglican churches in Canada. The first week I went to the tiny parish near our cottage, where we have prayed for eighteen years. Our lay reader preached on the gospel, and he was good; he preached the text. The next Sunday I had to be in Kingston so I attended the cathedral. An archdeacon preached on the gospel, and he was excellent; he preached the text. The third week our little parish had a union service with the parish in the next town, so with four other locals I went there. I heard another archdeacon preach on the gospel, and he was very good; he preached the text.
Not once did I hear a peep about the troubles of the Anglican Communion. I heard about the Lord Jesus, and his death, resurrection, and coming again, and we confessed our sins, and we praised the Trinity, and we repeated the Creed, and we gave thanks and ate his precious body and blood. I was quite satisfied each time.
As I write this, Bishop Gene New Hampshire (that would be Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson) has been uninvited to the next Lambeth Conference, which is a big deal for Anglicans. Is the Archbishop of Canterbury not in full communion with the Bishop of New Hampshire? Shall the rest of the Episcopal Church accept this half of an excommunication of one of their own?
Did Rowan Williams expect this when he became Archbishop? I wonder if he looks back with longing on his quiet days in the see of St. David and the primacy of Wales. All this Anglican Communion politics, when what he’s best at is encouraging the church in a secular England and winsomely representing the gospel there. Canterbury is the head of the Communion, but he’s only the first among equals, and he has little clout compared to Rome and even Constantinople.
We grieve for the Anglican Communion right now. I don’t see how they can work this out, considering the parties and positions. The Nigerians versus the Americans. The Americans are the Nigerians of the Western hemisphere and the Nigerians are the Americans of Africa. Or some would say, the Germans, but Germans are not Anglicans.
From a Reformed perspective, you have to ask, why is Bishop Robinson such an issue when Bishop Spong never threatened the Anglican Communion? I have met Bishop Robinson and heard him speak. He loves the Lord Jesus. He worships the Trinity. He confesses the faith once delivered and he testifies to the gospel. He believes in the Resurrection and the Atonement and the Exodus from Egypt, for Heaven’s sake.
Bishop Spong is still called a Christian only because he calls himself that. He’s an impressive man, especially to himself. Bishop Robinson exhibits repentance, humor, and self-deprecation.
But the Anglicans don’t think from a Reformed perspective. When you finally come down to it, apparently the cliche is true, that for Anglicans it doesn’t matter what you believe. Well, it does, of course, but not enough to pose a threat.
What matters is your ritual. What you celebrate and how you celebrate. This has its virtues. If you attend any Anglican church, the sermon might be thin, but the liturgy will give you a Creed, the Trinity, the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus and his coming again, some repentance from sins, some real prayers, some real blessings, and some real miracles — the sacraments. During the sermon you can read the Thirty-Nine Articles in the back of the Prayerbook and thank God for the Belgic Confession.
Anglicans found it problematic when some Canadians and Americans began celebrating gay weddings, or holy unions, or whatever, but even this was tolerable. It used to be the case that all Anglicans, worldwide, were united by the Book of Common Prayer. But since the ’60’s the various provinces have developed their own Prayerbooks, and the New Zealand book is now very different from the British ASB. Liturgical disunity may distress Anglicans, but they’ve been living with divergence for some decades now, and it hasn’t threatened their Communion’s unity.
But a gay bishop! Anglicans are fundamentalists about one thing, and one thing only, and that is the hierarchical episcopacy. In the Seventeenth Century their motivation was political — "No bishop, no king." What their motivation is nowadays is open to question. But as we saw in the process of full communion with the Lutherans, everything is negotiable, except episcopacy.
And when an out gay man is elevated to the episcopacy, then Anglicans are threatened.
What matters is not what he believes but what he is, because a bishop is. The symbol of an hierarchical bishop is not his pulpit but his chair. When he’s just sitting there, holding his staff, he’s at the center of his job. Celebrating Eucharist and baptizing and preaching can be done by mere priests. Only bishops can confirm, but since a Prayer Book Study in the ’60’s it’s agreed that this is not essential but political. It gives the bishop something special to do when he or she visits a parish. Otherwise a bishop has nothing distinctive to do.
A bishop just is. The chief role of a bishop is to represent the church, and, with such Incarnational theology, to represent Christ himself. Well!
The Anglican Communion is at heart a communion of bishops. This communion is objective and linear, like a family tree. They may or may not take the Bible literally, but they are literal about their hierarchical network.
Your ordinary American and Canadian laity are not really in communion with each other. They are in communion with their respective bishops, who are in communion with each other, provided their communion is guaranteed by being in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The crisis shows us what Anglicans are fundamentalist and literalist about!
This past July I attended three different Anglican churches in Canada. The first week I went to the tiny parish near our cottage, where we have prayed for eighteen years. Our lay reader preached on the gospel, and he was good; he preached the text. The next Sunday I had to be in Kingston so I attended the cathedral. An archdeacon preached on the gospel, and he was excellent; he preached the text. The third week our little parish had a union service with the parish in the next town, so with four other locals I went there. I heard another archdeacon preach on the gospel, and he was very good; he preached the text.
Not once did I hear a peep about the troubles of the Anglican Communion. I heard about the Lord Jesus, and his death, resurrection, and coming again, and we confessed our sins, and we praised the Trinity, and we repeated the Creed, and we gave thanks and ate his precious body and blood. I was quite satisfied each time.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Sermon for August 5: Security and Greed
Proper 13, Hosea 11:1-11, Psalm 107:1-9, 43, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21
08/05/07
Jewish religion was all about the Promised Land, and the possession of the Promised Land, so the laws of property and inheritance were very important. The rule was that the property went to the eldest son, who could keep most of it but had to divvy the rest out among his brothers. In case of a conflict, they could take it to a rabbi.
And a rabbi was not just a teacher but also a lawyer and a judge. He was expert in Biblical law and its manifold interpretations in order to issue opinions and decisions. A rabbi’s decision was binding. So this guy takes it to Jesus.
Jesus answers, "Friend, who set me to be a judge and arbitrator over you," and he means that he’s not been officially ordained as a rabbi, so his opinion would not be binding. He also means this: "Do you know who I am? I don’t issue opinions; I have no opinions. I have only the total Word of God. I don’t decide disputes, but my message demands your decision. And I make no judgments but all of you must judge yourselves by what I say."
And his message is this: "Take care, be on your guard against all kinds of greed: for your life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Jesus means both brothers, the older one who has it, and the younger one who wants it. The property in question is an expression of the heart.
Whenever we deal with material possessions, we must always examine our hearts. "What’s up, why do I think I need this, why do I think it will make me happy, what burden does it cause my life, and what about people who have less. Every time. Every single possession, every single material good. No exceptions.
Not because material possessions are not important. They are very important. Not because we should not value them. We are to value material possessions as much as God so loves the world and the earth is the Lord’s. God has made us stewards of our material possessions, God has put the earth in our care and given us gifts to develop it. But the question is their claim on us, and where we get our agendas, and where our hope is, and what we think will make us happy, and give us security.
In the case of the property in dispute between the brothers, it was a matter not only of current income, but also future security, and the security of their own sons. It was a matter of justice. Material possessions are not unimportant, they are matters of justice and love.
Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool. This parable reminds us that you can’t take it with you, and, more, that even in this life you don’t have real control. You think you control your future, but you don’t control the most basic thing about yourself, and that is your own life.
As usual with parables, there is a more subtle point. This parable has a sharp edge. Jesus has God do what he tells us elsewhere we may not do, which is call a person a fool. Of course God may say things we may not say, because God is the perfect judge. But Jesus means to raise our hackles here. He means to make everyone feel uncomfortable, even if we are not rich.
The rich man is prudent. He’s wise in terms of economics. He’s got a long-term business plan. He’s planning his long-term capitalization. He is the kind of guy in whom you might invest. So why is he a fool? What does his behavior have to do with greed?
There’s a connection between security and greed. What we feel as security is functionally greed. We good and decent people don’t feel our greed as greed. We think of rich people as greedy, or nasty people. But how our greed works is in our need for security, both actual and emotional. And our systems of economic security end up as systemic greed. We have to examine as greed our systems of security, both individual and corporate, both personal and national.
The rich man had more abundance than he had planned on. So by building new barns he thought he could secure the unexpected. But of course our future is always unexpected. And why not share his unplanned abundance with all the impoverished peasantry around him?
There was no middle class back then, there were rich landowners and poor share-croppers. By keeping his abundance in his barns, he did not share it with the people who actually worked his land.
The only way he could have gotten so much was by owning lots of land, which meant either buying the land of the poor or holding it in collateral for debt. But according to the law of Moses, every seven years those debts would have been forgiven, and every forty-nine years the land would return, free of charge, to the family of its original inheritance. According to the law of Moses, this man could be comfortable, but he’d never have so much wealth for himself.
The forgiveness of debt and the return of property to the poor expresses a whole different approach to security. Not by storing but by sharing; not by defending but by befriending. In the Promised Land the land belonged to God, and God had lent it out to the families of Israel on long-term leases to see what they would do with it, to see if they would use it for justice and for love. It’s a message for us. The planet Earth belongs to God, and God has lent it out to the nations of humanity to see what we will do with it, and whether we use it for justice and love. We’ll only do so if we trust the providence of God.
In this regard, don’t mistake what St. Paul means in our reading from Colossians. When he says, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth," it’s not a call to super-spirituality and a disregard for earthly life, the life of the world and things of the world.
When he says the "things that are above," his meaning is dynamic, not static. He means the things that are above which in the future will come down, when Christ comes in his glory, and our own hidden glory will be revealed, and the earth is renewed to what it should be. We pray this every week: "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven."
St. Paul means that we should set our minds on what’s already true in heaven in order to live that way on earth. Set our minds on the policies and patterns and projects of the kingdom of heaven, instead of the policies and patterns and projects of the kingdoms of the earth, which by comparison are prejudices and prohibitions, dividing the slave from the free, Gentiles from Jews, brothers from brothers, and the rich from the poor. A brother is a brother for his brother, the Jew is a Jew for the Gentile, and the rich are rich for the poor. Seek what is above precisely for what is below.
We can’t avoid the world in which we live. We don’t live in villages any more, where people took care of each organically. For better and worse we live in a culture where the market governs everything, even your long-term healthcare. Social security will not protect you. You have to provide for your own security. And yet our prosperity is huge; but as a society we will not pay the price of sharing the bounty for everyone, not if that price is to restrict our individual freedom and initiative.
That’s not going to happen in America, that’s not how we are constituted. Immigrants come here having left their villages in order to seek their own prosperity and security. So if our need for security ends up functionally as greed, then greed is always at issue for Americans.
Is there a remedy? Yes, it’s very simple. Did you get the remarkable image in Hosea? God is the roaring lion whose fearful voice is what chases you back from exile to the Promised Land.
The remedy: Always confess your greed. Everyone, always, no exceptions, even when you can't see it in yourself. It’s always an accurate confession, even when you’re making economic sense, even when it’s for security, it has greed in it. Confess it in the knowledge of God’s hair-raising grace and forgiveness. When you come to accept yourself as God does, with no exceptions or excuses or rationalizations, you can decrease your greed by finding your security in God’s grace, in God’s gracious provision for your life, which is not revealed to you, but hidden with Christ in God. Set your mind there, and the way to set your mind there is through praying it to God. A simple remedy.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
08/05/07
Jewish religion was all about the Promised Land, and the possession of the Promised Land, so the laws of property and inheritance were very important. The rule was that the property went to the eldest son, who could keep most of it but had to divvy the rest out among his brothers. In case of a conflict, they could take it to a rabbi.
And a rabbi was not just a teacher but also a lawyer and a judge. He was expert in Biblical law and its manifold interpretations in order to issue opinions and decisions. A rabbi’s decision was binding. So this guy takes it to Jesus.
Jesus answers, "Friend, who set me to be a judge and arbitrator over you," and he means that he’s not been officially ordained as a rabbi, so his opinion would not be binding. He also means this: "Do you know who I am? I don’t issue opinions; I have no opinions. I have only the total Word of God. I don’t decide disputes, but my message demands your decision. And I make no judgments but all of you must judge yourselves by what I say."
And his message is this: "Take care, be on your guard against all kinds of greed: for your life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Jesus means both brothers, the older one who has it, and the younger one who wants it. The property in question is an expression of the heart.
Whenever we deal with material possessions, we must always examine our hearts. "What’s up, why do I think I need this, why do I think it will make me happy, what burden does it cause my life, and what about people who have less. Every time. Every single possession, every single material good. No exceptions.
Not because material possessions are not important. They are very important. Not because we should not value them. We are to value material possessions as much as God so loves the world and the earth is the Lord’s. God has made us stewards of our material possessions, God has put the earth in our care and given us gifts to develop it. But the question is their claim on us, and where we get our agendas, and where our hope is, and what we think will make us happy, and give us security.
In the case of the property in dispute between the brothers, it was a matter not only of current income, but also future security, and the security of their own sons. It was a matter of justice. Material possessions are not unimportant, they are matters of justice and love.
Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool. This parable reminds us that you can’t take it with you, and, more, that even in this life you don’t have real control. You think you control your future, but you don’t control the most basic thing about yourself, and that is your own life.
As usual with parables, there is a more subtle point. This parable has a sharp edge. Jesus has God do what he tells us elsewhere we may not do, which is call a person a fool. Of course God may say things we may not say, because God is the perfect judge. But Jesus means to raise our hackles here. He means to make everyone feel uncomfortable, even if we are not rich.
The rich man is prudent. He’s wise in terms of economics. He’s got a long-term business plan. He’s planning his long-term capitalization. He is the kind of guy in whom you might invest. So why is he a fool? What does his behavior have to do with greed?
There’s a connection between security and greed. What we feel as security is functionally greed. We good and decent people don’t feel our greed as greed. We think of rich people as greedy, or nasty people. But how our greed works is in our need for security, both actual and emotional. And our systems of economic security end up as systemic greed. We have to examine as greed our systems of security, both individual and corporate, both personal and national.
The rich man had more abundance than he had planned on. So by building new barns he thought he could secure the unexpected. But of course our future is always unexpected. And why not share his unplanned abundance with all the impoverished peasantry around him?
There was no middle class back then, there were rich landowners and poor share-croppers. By keeping his abundance in his barns, he did not share it with the people who actually worked his land.
The only way he could have gotten so much was by owning lots of land, which meant either buying the land of the poor or holding it in collateral for debt. But according to the law of Moses, every seven years those debts would have been forgiven, and every forty-nine years the land would return, free of charge, to the family of its original inheritance. According to the law of Moses, this man could be comfortable, but he’d never have so much wealth for himself.
The forgiveness of debt and the return of property to the poor expresses a whole different approach to security. Not by storing but by sharing; not by defending but by befriending. In the Promised Land the land belonged to God, and God had lent it out to the families of Israel on long-term leases to see what they would do with it, to see if they would use it for justice and for love. It’s a message for us. The planet Earth belongs to God, and God has lent it out to the nations of humanity to see what we will do with it, and whether we use it for justice and love. We’ll only do so if we trust the providence of God.
In this regard, don’t mistake what St. Paul means in our reading from Colossians. When he says, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth," it’s not a call to super-spirituality and a disregard for earthly life, the life of the world and things of the world.
When he says the "things that are above," his meaning is dynamic, not static. He means the things that are above which in the future will come down, when Christ comes in his glory, and our own hidden glory will be revealed, and the earth is renewed to what it should be. We pray this every week: "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven."
St. Paul means that we should set our minds on what’s already true in heaven in order to live that way on earth. Set our minds on the policies and patterns and projects of the kingdom of heaven, instead of the policies and patterns and projects of the kingdoms of the earth, which by comparison are prejudices and prohibitions, dividing the slave from the free, Gentiles from Jews, brothers from brothers, and the rich from the poor. A brother is a brother for his brother, the Jew is a Jew for the Gentile, and the rich are rich for the poor. Seek what is above precisely for what is below.
We can’t avoid the world in which we live. We don’t live in villages any more, where people took care of each organically. For better and worse we live in a culture where the market governs everything, even your long-term healthcare. Social security will not protect you. You have to provide for your own security. And yet our prosperity is huge; but as a society we will not pay the price of sharing the bounty for everyone, not if that price is to restrict our individual freedom and initiative.
That’s not going to happen in America, that’s not how we are constituted. Immigrants come here having left their villages in order to seek their own prosperity and security. So if our need for security ends up functionally as greed, then greed is always at issue for Americans.
Is there a remedy? Yes, it’s very simple. Did you get the remarkable image in Hosea? God is the roaring lion whose fearful voice is what chases you back from exile to the Promised Land.
The remedy: Always confess your greed. Everyone, always, no exceptions, even when you can't see it in yourself. It’s always an accurate confession, even when you’re making economic sense, even when it’s for security, it has greed in it. Confess it in the knowledge of God’s hair-raising grace and forgiveness. When you come to accept yourself as God does, with no exceptions or excuses or rationalizations, you can decrease your greed by finding your security in God’s grace, in God’s gracious provision for your life, which is not revealed to you, but hidden with Christ in God. Set your mind there, and the way to set your mind there is through praying it to God. A simple remedy.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Summer Vacation
I will be taking a break from posting to this blog through the end of July. I will be on vacation in Canada (or as we say it there, "on holidays in Canada"). Thank you, Old First, for this time off (with my wife) to rest and recuperate.
We had another full week at Old First, hosting young people from Drayton and Cambridge, Ontario, as part of our Project Samuel program. They came to live in our church for a week, and volunteer at CHIPS and at Neighbors Together in Bedford-Stuyvesant (two blocks from where I grew up). They said they had a great week. They learned a lot, such as how to use Metrocards on subways and buses, how to get anywhere in New York, and how to express their Christian faith in service to the poor.
Catch you in August, eh.
We had another full week at Old First, hosting young people from Drayton and Cambridge, Ontario, as part of our Project Samuel program. They came to live in our church for a week, and volunteer at CHIPS and at Neighbors Together in Bedford-Stuyvesant (two blocks from where I grew up). They said they had a great week. They learned a lot, such as how to use Metrocards on subways and buses, how to get anywhere in New York, and how to express their Christian faith in service to the poor.
Catch you in August, eh.
Sermon for July 8: Lambs Among Wolves
Proper 09, 2 Kings 5:1-14, Psalm 30, Galatians 6:1-16, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Naaman has leprosy, which makes him untouchable, and shame will keep him in hiding at all the banquets and parades. But his nameless slave girl has compassion. The powerful are supposed to have compassion on the weak, but here the weak has compassion on the powerful. Isn’t it true that the people on the bottom are able to love the ones on top, and not the other way around? I call it "trickle up."
Now Naaman is so important to the king of Aram that the king asks for help from his enemy, the King of Israel, and he sends along lavish gifts of gratitude.
There’s a joke in the story. They are assuming that if there is a powerful prophet in Israel, then of course the king of Israel will honor and support him. But the king of Israel hates the prophet and has cut himself off from the prophet and from the power of God. So when he reads the letter he is terrified. He makes himself unable to accept the lavish gifts. The joke is on him, the king of Israel is the loser here. The humble slave girl knew better than the proud king.
But just as the slave girl had compassion for Naaman, the prophet Elisha has compassion for the king of Israel. He sends a message, "Let him come to me, that he may learn there is a prophet in Israel." Another joke. Even if our own king refuses to honor the prophet, as least the pagan will see it. There is an underlay of irony and humor in this story, and much of the Old Testament.
The mighty foreign general pulls up in front of Elisha’s house, horses and chariots, a retinue of servants, wagons loaded with 700 pounds of silver ingots, 130 pounds of gold, and twenty royal robes. This guy is somebody.
Elisha, however, is doing a crossword puzzle. He never comes to the door. He sends out his servant with instructions: "Go, wash seven times in the Jordan, your flesh shall be restored, you shall be clean."
Naaman is twice insulted here. That Elisha never came out to show him honor, and that he should have to wash in a dirty river with everybody watching him. That was very shameful. You never showed your nakedness. And Naaman is angry because this is no decent kind of miracle. Miracles are supposed to be about power, like his own military power.
Well, two things. First, the power to heal is not Elisha’s, the power is God’s, and healing happens by obedience to God’s word. Indeed, healing is obedience to God’s word. To obey God’s word is to be healed. If you can obey God’s word, you are perfectly healthy enough. Second, you can’t have God’s healing without an experience of God, and that experience must also be a conversion, a repentance, a dying away of your old self and the coming to life of the new. (Heidelberg Catechism 88.) You strip off your armor and your robes, exposing your condition, and entering the water as naked and helpless as a baby.
Nobody wants to repent, nobody wants to be converted, nobody likes to die to one’s self. In one sense it’s very easy, washing in the river, on the other hand it’s almost impossible. Undressing ourselves, becoming so vulnerable, so exposed, and to be seen as powerless.
When our circumstances are difficult, then we ask God to change our circumstances. But what if we have to change ourselves as well?
Once again, it the servants who are compassionate and wise. They’re used to being near the bottom. "Look, Father, just swallow your pride and do it." How hard it was for him. To be a great man, and to show his skin to other people who don’t have leprosy, people way beneath him who pity him, he doesn’t want their pity.
They help him take his clothes off and they see the shame of his disease. And up on the banks the locals are watching, curious onlookers, whispering what’s going on, turning their heads whenever he looks up. In he goes, and bathes, and comes back out. What a process this is. Will he go through with it? This gives him lots of time to think.
Six more times. Everything he stands for counts for nothing. now
Five more times. "Then I am crucified to all the world and all the world is crucified to me."
Four more times. He can imagine what his servants are thinking. What an insult to his office and his station, what an ordeal this simple washing is.
Three more times. Maybe he got angry.
Two more times. Maybe he got scared.
One more time. Maybe this might not work.
The last time is the hardest, but he comes out clean.
More than that, he is converted, he is a believer. He has passed through the Jordan, like Israel in the days of Joshua. He is one of God’s people, not by virtue of his birth, not by circumcision, but by his faith, by believing in the promise of God’s word. He has joined the people of the slave girl in his house. This was Naaman’s baptism. He was born again into the people of God.
What is faith? Faith is investing your life in the promises of God. (Heidelberg Catechism 22.) Faith is when you risk your life with God’s promises. Faith is not your own religious courage, or your own religious power, it is rather trusting in the power of God, God’s will, God's judgment, God’s time, God’s patience.
In this story the humble servants all live by their faith. The King of Israel does not, and that leaves him living in fear. Naaman has to learn to live by faith; he almost blows it by giving in to his pride. So when he conquers his pride and surrenders to the promise and enters the waters, that was his act of faith. Of course he doubted, but he invested his life in the promise of God.
I preached on this story three years ago, and much of what I have just said I told you then. But this year I see something new, and that is thanks to the Gospel reading we have also read. I want to say more about that little girl.
You know when I was a kid in Sunday School, we were always told that the point of this story was for us kids to be like that slave girl, and witness to our faith in every situation. They were always trying to get us to be young evangelists, junior Billy Grahams.
Well, this time round I have a new appreciation for that nameless girl. She is an example of what Jesus was talking about in the gospel, she was a lamb among wolves. She was an agent of peace in the house of war. She was an agent of peace in the house where she had been put against her will. She had no power except her word. And her little word is what got it going, and just her word is what brought this pagan general into the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God.
We are sent into the world like the seventy in the Gospel, freely choosing where we want to go. And we are sent into the world like the little girl, captured, against our will, bought and sold, compelled. Either way, we are to speak a word of peace. We have no power but our word of peace, the peace that comes from God. The powers of this world need conversion, yes, the powers of this world need to be unmasked, and the suffering of this world needs healing, and we have so little actual power to accomplish this except our word of peace.
At the end of every service, I speak the Benediction, which is a word of peace. I speak it as an instrument of God’s own speech, because I believe that God’s word of peace is more than information, that when God speaks peace it brings peace. And in every service we exchange the peace. We do this not just to say hello. When we say, "The peace of God be with you," it’s more than a wish, it’s more than information, it’s a gift, it’s the beginning of an energy and movement that you can keep in motion through the week, whenever you repeat the words, whether in places where you choose to be, like the seventy sent by Jesus, or in places you are compelled to be, like the little girl.
Jesus gives us fair warning. If you represent Jesus in speaking peace, you will live like a lamb among wolves. Peace is dangerous for those who speak it. Peace means you will not be on top. Peace is risky, peace is counterintuitive, peace is impossible. You can’t do peace in your own strength. You have to risk it, you have to risk peace as a promise of God. But we invite you to believe it and speak of it. And where and when you speak of it, that word begins to be.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Naaman has leprosy, which makes him untouchable, and shame will keep him in hiding at all the banquets and parades. But his nameless slave girl has compassion. The powerful are supposed to have compassion on the weak, but here the weak has compassion on the powerful. Isn’t it true that the people on the bottom are able to love the ones on top, and not the other way around? I call it "trickle up."
Now Naaman is so important to the king of Aram that the king asks for help from his enemy, the King of Israel, and he sends along lavish gifts of gratitude.
There’s a joke in the story. They are assuming that if there is a powerful prophet in Israel, then of course the king of Israel will honor and support him. But the king of Israel hates the prophet and has cut himself off from the prophet and from the power of God. So when he reads the letter he is terrified. He makes himself unable to accept the lavish gifts. The joke is on him, the king of Israel is the loser here. The humble slave girl knew better than the proud king.
But just as the slave girl had compassion for Naaman, the prophet Elisha has compassion for the king of Israel. He sends a message, "Let him come to me, that he may learn there is a prophet in Israel." Another joke. Even if our own king refuses to honor the prophet, as least the pagan will see it. There is an underlay of irony and humor in this story, and much of the Old Testament.
The mighty foreign general pulls up in front of Elisha’s house, horses and chariots, a retinue of servants, wagons loaded with 700 pounds of silver ingots, 130 pounds of gold, and twenty royal robes. This guy is somebody.
Elisha, however, is doing a crossword puzzle. He never comes to the door. He sends out his servant with instructions: "Go, wash seven times in the Jordan, your flesh shall be restored, you shall be clean."
Naaman is twice insulted here. That Elisha never came out to show him honor, and that he should have to wash in a dirty river with everybody watching him. That was very shameful. You never showed your nakedness. And Naaman is angry because this is no decent kind of miracle. Miracles are supposed to be about power, like his own military power.
Well, two things. First, the power to heal is not Elisha’s, the power is God’s, and healing happens by obedience to God’s word. Indeed, healing is obedience to God’s word. To obey God’s word is to be healed. If you can obey God’s word, you are perfectly healthy enough. Second, you can’t have God’s healing without an experience of God, and that experience must also be a conversion, a repentance, a dying away of your old self and the coming to life of the new. (Heidelberg Catechism 88.) You strip off your armor and your robes, exposing your condition, and entering the water as naked and helpless as a baby.
Nobody wants to repent, nobody wants to be converted, nobody likes to die to one’s self. In one sense it’s very easy, washing in the river, on the other hand it’s almost impossible. Undressing ourselves, becoming so vulnerable, so exposed, and to be seen as powerless.
When our circumstances are difficult, then we ask God to change our circumstances. But what if we have to change ourselves as well?
Once again, it the servants who are compassionate and wise. They’re used to being near the bottom. "Look, Father, just swallow your pride and do it." How hard it was for him. To be a great man, and to show his skin to other people who don’t have leprosy, people way beneath him who pity him, he doesn’t want their pity.
They help him take his clothes off and they see the shame of his disease. And up on the banks the locals are watching, curious onlookers, whispering what’s going on, turning their heads whenever he looks up. In he goes, and bathes, and comes back out. What a process this is. Will he go through with it? This gives him lots of time to think.
Six more times. Everything he stands for counts for nothing. now
Five more times. "Then I am crucified to all the world and all the world is crucified to me."
Four more times. He can imagine what his servants are thinking. What an insult to his office and his station, what an ordeal this simple washing is.
Three more times. Maybe he got angry.
Two more times. Maybe he got scared.
One more time. Maybe this might not work.
The last time is the hardest, but he comes out clean.
More than that, he is converted, he is a believer. He has passed through the Jordan, like Israel in the days of Joshua. He is one of God’s people, not by virtue of his birth, not by circumcision, but by his faith, by believing in the promise of God’s word. He has joined the people of the slave girl in his house. This was Naaman’s baptism. He was born again into the people of God.
What is faith? Faith is investing your life in the promises of God. (Heidelberg Catechism 22.) Faith is when you risk your life with God’s promises. Faith is not your own religious courage, or your own religious power, it is rather trusting in the power of God, God’s will, God's judgment, God’s time, God’s patience.
In this story the humble servants all live by their faith. The King of Israel does not, and that leaves him living in fear. Naaman has to learn to live by faith; he almost blows it by giving in to his pride. So when he conquers his pride and surrenders to the promise and enters the waters, that was his act of faith. Of course he doubted, but he invested his life in the promise of God.
I preached on this story three years ago, and much of what I have just said I told you then. But this year I see something new, and that is thanks to the Gospel reading we have also read. I want to say more about that little girl.
You know when I was a kid in Sunday School, we were always told that the point of this story was for us kids to be like that slave girl, and witness to our faith in every situation. They were always trying to get us to be young evangelists, junior Billy Grahams.
Well, this time round I have a new appreciation for that nameless girl. She is an example of what Jesus was talking about in the gospel, she was a lamb among wolves. She was an agent of peace in the house of war. She was an agent of peace in the house where she had been put against her will. She had no power except her word. And her little word is what got it going, and just her word is what brought this pagan general into the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God.
We are sent into the world like the seventy in the Gospel, freely choosing where we want to go. And we are sent into the world like the little girl, captured, against our will, bought and sold, compelled. Either way, we are to speak a word of peace. We have no power but our word of peace, the peace that comes from God. The powers of this world need conversion, yes, the powers of this world need to be unmasked, and the suffering of this world needs healing, and we have so little actual power to accomplish this except our word of peace.
At the end of every service, I speak the Benediction, which is a word of peace. I speak it as an instrument of God’s own speech, because I believe that God’s word of peace is more than information, that when God speaks peace it brings peace. And in every service we exchange the peace. We do this not just to say hello. When we say, "The peace of God be with you," it’s more than a wish, it’s more than information, it’s a gift, it’s the beginning of an energy and movement that you can keep in motion through the week, whenever you repeat the words, whether in places where you choose to be, like the seventy sent by Jesus, or in places you are compelled to be, like the little girl.
Jesus gives us fair warning. If you represent Jesus in speaking peace, you will live like a lamb among wolves. Peace is dangerous for those who speak it. Peace means you will not be on top. Peace is risky, peace is counterintuitive, peace is impossible. You can’t do peace in your own strength. You have to risk it, you have to risk peace as a promise of God. But we invite you to believe it and speak of it. And where and when you speak of it, that word begins to be.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Sermon for July 1: Chariot of Fire
Proper 8 C, 2 Kings 2:1-14, Galatians 5:1, 13-25, Luke 9:51-62
Wednesday is July 4, and today is Canada Day (and we have fifteen Canadians visiting today, from the Drayton Reformed Church in Ontario), so I want to talk about freedom today. "O Freedom, O Freedom, O freedom over me."
I want to talk about freedom that is spiritual and freedom that is moral and freedom that is political. My text is from Galatians, "For freedom Christ has set us free." I want to address some issues of Christian citizenship. This sermon will start out as a history lesson. And we will have a little fun.
Freedom is precious in America, even more than in Canada, because of slavery and how long in America so many people did not have it, even though the Bible told them it was what God wanted for them, and the Bible gave them hope, and you can hear it in Negro Spirituals, which came out of the slavery experience. "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land, tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go."
Listen to these words which introduce the Ten Commandments. "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." The house of bondage. God had given the people of Israel political freedom from Pharaoh, and spiritual freedom from the gods of Egypt, in order to practice moral freedom from their own inner bondage to sin, and for the purpose of practicing that freedom God gave them the Ten Commandments.
In the Bible, the Law is not the opposite of freedom, it is for freedom, it tells us how to live in freedom, the freedom God has won for us. The Law of God was given to Israel to help them do their job as a "Kingdom of Priests and Holy Nation," both during exodus and in the promised land.
The Ten Commandments and the other laws and statutes that expanded them were the law-code of a brand new nation, the Kingdom of God. And this nation was unique. It was all former slaves. It had no royalty, no nobility, no hierarchy, no army, no police, no landowners, no masters, no slaves, everyone was equal, so who was going to tell you what to do? The Law of God. In order to practice freedom, you have to have law.
You see how Israel was the world’s first "constitutional" nation? Abraham Lincoln could have been talking about Israel in his Gettysburg Address (and in certain ways I think he was) when he talked about "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Let me say in passing that we were taught in public school that we got democracy from the Greeks. Maybe. In part. But I think if you ask the descendants of the slaves in America where we got democracy, they would know better and more accurately, that we got it from Exodus.
A little more history. The Book of Judges tells us how Israel, once in the Promised Land, kept going after other gods and goddesses, and in doing so they surrendered spiritual freedom, and, in St. Paul’s words, they "submitted to a yoke of slavery." Inevitably they fell off on their moral freedom, and they kept losing their political freedom to the Amorites and Moabites and Midianites and Philistines. God would keep sending judges to set his people free. Finally God sent them David, to set his people free.
Our Old Testament lesson today comes from after Davids’ time, the time of Elijah and Elisha, when Israel kept putting itself under the yoke of slavery to Baal. Elijah’s mission was to set his people free.
In Jesus’ day, the Children of Israel had lost their political freedom to the Roman Empire and to the Jewish puppets in power by Rome. The people were hoping for the Messiah who would come, like the judges, like the prophets, like David, to set his people free.
So you need to read our text from Galatians in Jewish terms: "For freedom the Messiah has set his people free. Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
But where Jesus himself and St. Paul take it is a different direction than the political direction the people were expecting. The freedom Jesus won for them was not from the bondage of the Romans, but the power of sin, and their own "flesh." He won that liberation not on the field of battle, but on the cross.
He won the spiritual freedom for the practice of moral freedom, and that moral freedom was the distinctive mark of the early church, even when they had no political power at all, especially so. Indeed, they refused political power, at least through the first three centuries, till Constantine.
More history. The spiritual freedom from the Gospel, and the moral freedom which expressed it, gradually, over the centuries, worked its way through the nations of the world, in fits and starts, though highs and lows, but it is always there, like leaven in a loaf, like seeds in the ground.
I could take just two examples, the liberation of the Netherlands from Spain, which led to the founding of our own congregation, and Great Britain, the first great Protestant empire. Our second hymn was that famous one, And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time, with words by William Blake. It’s been a patriotic hymn in England, and it makes use of that image of the Chariot of Fire from our first lesson. (And it’s where that movie got its name.) That hymn actually challenges England to live up to its Christian pretensions.
Canada, like Great Britain, was legally a Christian nation. They do not have the separation of church and state. The United States, by contract, in legal terms, was never a Christian nation. But historically it certainly was. The idea that human beings have an "inalienable right to liberty" is a Biblical idea. And yet our slavery showed how much repentance we had to do.
There is no question that the USA is a special nation in the world. We are special because of our ideals. It’s why so many immigrants are trying to get here. But political freedom cannot endure without moral freedom, which is a problem for America. And moral freedom requires spiritual freedom, which is our part in the whole equation. Because freedom requires discipline, and humility and repentance.
Our President said that America is God’s divinely chosen instrument to bring freedom to the world. He’s hardly the first person to make that claim. But he’s wrong. I mean if he’s speaking as a Christian he’s wrong. It’s not America, it’s the church. The church is God’s divinely chosen instrument to bring freedom to the world. Through the preaching of the Word and practice of Christian discipline. I don’t mean the organized church, but the church as the community of people who have been set free by Christ for freedom.
I’m not saying it’s only Christians who offer freedom to the world. Can other religions develop freedom too? Why not. But now I’m speaking to you who are under the Lordship of Jesus. You are called to be citizens of your own nation, and to contribute to it, to sustain its ideals by your speech and your community and discipline.
Now look at Luke’s gospel. He shows us how not to do it, and he shows us the temptation that is attracting to so many in the religious right, to be oppositional, to call for judgment on those who disagree with us. Jesus tells his disciples it’s hard enough yourselves to follow him, don’t judge other people. Look to yourselves, challenge yourselves and your own commitment. Challenge yourselves to exhibit the Fruits of the Spirit. They’re listed in Galatians.
And so it’s for the sake of our nation that we be a community of love. It’s for the sake of the USA that we exhibit joy. Our nation needs us to model peace. It’s for America that we practice patience. The world is desperate for models of kindness, and for demonstrations of generosity and exhibitions of faithfulness, democracy requires gentleness and citizenship requires self-control. There is no law against such things. For freedom Christ has set us free.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Wednesday is July 4, and today is Canada Day (and we have fifteen Canadians visiting today, from the Drayton Reformed Church in Ontario), so I want to talk about freedom today. "O Freedom, O Freedom, O freedom over me."
I want to talk about freedom that is spiritual and freedom that is moral and freedom that is political. My text is from Galatians, "For freedom Christ has set us free." I want to address some issues of Christian citizenship. This sermon will start out as a history lesson. And we will have a little fun.
Freedom is precious in America, even more than in Canada, because of slavery and how long in America so many people did not have it, even though the Bible told them it was what God wanted for them, and the Bible gave them hope, and you can hear it in Negro Spirituals, which came out of the slavery experience. "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land, tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go."
Listen to these words which introduce the Ten Commandments. "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." The house of bondage. God had given the people of Israel political freedom from Pharaoh, and spiritual freedom from the gods of Egypt, in order to practice moral freedom from their own inner bondage to sin, and for the purpose of practicing that freedom God gave them the Ten Commandments.
In the Bible, the Law is not the opposite of freedom, it is for freedom, it tells us how to live in freedom, the freedom God has won for us. The Law of God was given to Israel to help them do their job as a "Kingdom of Priests and Holy Nation," both during exodus and in the promised land.
The Ten Commandments and the other laws and statutes that expanded them were the law-code of a brand new nation, the Kingdom of God. And this nation was unique. It was all former slaves. It had no royalty, no nobility, no hierarchy, no army, no police, no landowners, no masters, no slaves, everyone was equal, so who was going to tell you what to do? The Law of God. In order to practice freedom, you have to have law.
You see how Israel was the world’s first "constitutional" nation? Abraham Lincoln could have been talking about Israel in his Gettysburg Address (and in certain ways I think he was) when he talked about "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Let me say in passing that we were taught in public school that we got democracy from the Greeks. Maybe. In part. But I think if you ask the descendants of the slaves in America where we got democracy, they would know better and more accurately, that we got it from Exodus.
A little more history. The Book of Judges tells us how Israel, once in the Promised Land, kept going after other gods and goddesses, and in doing so they surrendered spiritual freedom, and, in St. Paul’s words, they "submitted to a yoke of slavery." Inevitably they fell off on their moral freedom, and they kept losing their political freedom to the Amorites and Moabites and Midianites and Philistines. God would keep sending judges to set his people free. Finally God sent them David, to set his people free.
Our Old Testament lesson today comes from after Davids’ time, the time of Elijah and Elisha, when Israel kept putting itself under the yoke of slavery to Baal. Elijah’s mission was to set his people free.
In Jesus’ day, the Children of Israel had lost their political freedom to the Roman Empire and to the Jewish puppets in power by Rome. The people were hoping for the Messiah who would come, like the judges, like the prophets, like David, to set his people free.
So you need to read our text from Galatians in Jewish terms: "For freedom the Messiah has set his people free. Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
But where Jesus himself and St. Paul take it is a different direction than the political direction the people were expecting. The freedom Jesus won for them was not from the bondage of the Romans, but the power of sin, and their own "flesh." He won that liberation not on the field of battle, but on the cross.
He won the spiritual freedom for the practice of moral freedom, and that moral freedom was the distinctive mark of the early church, even when they had no political power at all, especially so. Indeed, they refused political power, at least through the first three centuries, till Constantine.
More history. The spiritual freedom from the Gospel, and the moral freedom which expressed it, gradually, over the centuries, worked its way through the nations of the world, in fits and starts, though highs and lows, but it is always there, like leaven in a loaf, like seeds in the ground.
I could take just two examples, the liberation of the Netherlands from Spain, which led to the founding of our own congregation, and Great Britain, the first great Protestant empire. Our second hymn was that famous one, And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time, with words by William Blake. It’s been a patriotic hymn in England, and it makes use of that image of the Chariot of Fire from our first lesson. (And it’s where that movie got its name.) That hymn actually challenges England to live up to its Christian pretensions.
Canada, like Great Britain, was legally a Christian nation. They do not have the separation of church and state. The United States, by contract, in legal terms, was never a Christian nation. But historically it certainly was. The idea that human beings have an "inalienable right to liberty" is a Biblical idea. And yet our slavery showed how much repentance we had to do.
There is no question that the USA is a special nation in the world. We are special because of our ideals. It’s why so many immigrants are trying to get here. But political freedom cannot endure without moral freedom, which is a problem for America. And moral freedom requires spiritual freedom, which is our part in the whole equation. Because freedom requires discipline, and humility and repentance.
Our President said that America is God’s divinely chosen instrument to bring freedom to the world. He’s hardly the first person to make that claim. But he’s wrong. I mean if he’s speaking as a Christian he’s wrong. It’s not America, it’s the church. The church is God’s divinely chosen instrument to bring freedom to the world. Through the preaching of the Word and practice of Christian discipline. I don’t mean the organized church, but the church as the community of people who have been set free by Christ for freedom.
I’m not saying it’s only Christians who offer freedom to the world. Can other religions develop freedom too? Why not. But now I’m speaking to you who are under the Lordship of Jesus. You are called to be citizens of your own nation, and to contribute to it, to sustain its ideals by your speech and your community and discipline.
Now look at Luke’s gospel. He shows us how not to do it, and he shows us the temptation that is attracting to so many in the religious right, to be oppositional, to call for judgment on those who disagree with us. Jesus tells his disciples it’s hard enough yourselves to follow him, don’t judge other people. Look to yourselves, challenge yourselves and your own commitment. Challenge yourselves to exhibit the Fruits of the Spirit. They’re listed in Galatians.
And so it’s for the sake of our nation that we be a community of love. It’s for the sake of the USA that we exhibit joy. Our nation needs us to model peace. It’s for America that we practice patience. The world is desperate for models of kindness, and for demonstrations of generosity and exhibitions of faithfulness, democracy requires gentleness and citizenship requires self-control. There is no law against such things. For freedom Christ has set us free.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Turtles Are Still Singing
The grackles, like Presbyterians, are fly-fishing. Well, that’s not true. They’re eating the flies, not tying them. My cottage is on a rocky shore, and this morning there is a hatch of damselflies. They appear on the surface like sudden memories. If they can keep still, they have a chance. If they flutter too much, the fish are watching, and suddenly it’s over. Some of them get off the water and make it to shore. But the grackles have more experience than damselflies. One has just landed in the grass. A grackle watched it, and leisurely goes over to get it.
On my cottage windows are the proof that some of them survive. I am not up on what they will do now — how they mate, how long they live. They sit on my windows like sages. They take it all in, this exposure to the air and sun, and they try to make sense of the world. They have faint intimations of prior incarnations as larvae under the rocks. They think how beautiful is life, and how short. They wonder at the meaning of it all. One day is a thousand to a damselfly.
Meanwhile the turtles have taken their stations just offshore. For hours they tread water and gaze up at my property. I suppose it has do with the eggs they’ve laid in the road behind my kitchen. Are they calling to their children, telepathically? Singing an ancient song of where the water is? I heard the turtles singing each to each. Is it a song of comfort and grief? At night the raccoons come and dig up the eggs. The raccoons are nothing if not thorough. I am amazed we still have turtles. Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, "How long?"
What would turtles tell the damselflies? The lives of turtles are as long as damselflies’ are short. Flight in any form they do not understand. But for all their armor and protection their reproduction is tragically vulnerable. Turtles are conservative, they have been doing it this way since the Triassic, before there were raccoons, and mammalian innovations will not make them change. How stubborn they are. Or maybe how little they expect from life, and how content.
The fortunes of damselflies and turtles are opposite. The damselflies’ lives are mostly spent as nymphs, in relative safety under the rocks beneath the lake, while their adult lives are nasty, cold, brutish, and short. The turtles live long as adults, sort of carrying their rocks on their backs, and their vulnerability is in their youth. Maybe that’s why they are so conservative. They are convinced that youth is dangerous.
The damselflies on my windows never learn to sing but they can understand the turtles’ songs, if not the words, then at least the tunes. We are born to trouble, as bugs fly upward. Life is fragile, no matter how hard you are or how long you live. We have our different strategies for managing risk, but we cannot escape danger, we can only shift it around. We bear up. The turtles’ favorite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. All the damselflies know is the Jesus Prayer.
On my cottage windows are the proof that some of them survive. I am not up on what they will do now — how they mate, how long they live. They sit on my windows like sages. They take it all in, this exposure to the air and sun, and they try to make sense of the world. They have faint intimations of prior incarnations as larvae under the rocks. They think how beautiful is life, and how short. They wonder at the meaning of it all. One day is a thousand to a damselfly.
Meanwhile the turtles have taken their stations just offshore. For hours they tread water and gaze up at my property. I suppose it has do with the eggs they’ve laid in the road behind my kitchen. Are they calling to their children, telepathically? Singing an ancient song of where the water is? I heard the turtles singing each to each. Is it a song of comfort and grief? At night the raccoons come and dig up the eggs. The raccoons are nothing if not thorough. I am amazed we still have turtles. Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, "How long?"
What would turtles tell the damselflies? The lives of turtles are as long as damselflies’ are short. Flight in any form they do not understand. But for all their armor and protection their reproduction is tragically vulnerable. Turtles are conservative, they have been doing it this way since the Triassic, before there were raccoons, and mammalian innovations will not make them change. How stubborn they are. Or maybe how little they expect from life, and how content.
The fortunes of damselflies and turtles are opposite. The damselflies’ lives are mostly spent as nymphs, in relative safety under the rocks beneath the lake, while their adult lives are nasty, cold, brutish, and short. The turtles live long as adults, sort of carrying their rocks on their backs, and their vulnerability is in their youth. Maybe that’s why they are so conservative. They are convinced that youth is dangerous.
The damselflies on my windows never learn to sing but they can understand the turtles’ songs, if not the words, then at least the tunes. We are born to trouble, as bugs fly upward. Life is fragile, no matter how hard you are or how long you live. We have our different strategies for managing risk, but we cannot escape danger, we can only shift it around. We bear up. The turtles’ favorite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. All the damselflies know is the Jesus Prayer.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Club Loco at Seventh Heaven
Who are these young people in the lower picture? Why are they hanging out at Old First Reformed Church?
I love this picture, because it tells us what Club Loco has accomplished. (Thanks for the photo, Hugh Crawford.)
The kids on the steps are not church members or from our church families. But they have come to think of Old First as a place for them. The band is “Cool and Unusual Punishment,” one of the bands that plays at Club Loco, the hang-out place that Old First hosts for neighborhood young people on Saturday nights. All we want to give them is Sanctuary.
The band is playing out into the street, which is crowded with a hundred people. It’s taking place on Sunday afternoon, during the Seventh Heaven Street Fair. For a full report, scroll down the page at http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/.
The kids on the steps are not church members or from our church families. But they have come to think of Old First as a place for them. The band is “Cool and Unusual Punishment,” one of the bands that plays at Club Loco, the hang-out place that Old First hosts for neighborhood young people on Saturday nights. All we want to give them is Sanctuary.
The band is playing out into the street, which is crowded with a hundred people. It’s taking place on Sunday afternoon, during the Seventh Heaven Street Fair. For a full report, scroll down the page at http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/.
This is just one of the Club Loco bands. Others played as well. We had music on our steps all afternoon, whether a vocal chorus, a dance group, a woodwind quintet, or a folk singer. We had church people at tables with our stuff: Handcrafting Justice, Chocolate Chip Chamber Festival, Julia’s cartoons, and info about the church.
Thousands of people walk pass the church during this street fair. And I’m happy to say that this year we were able to make Old First one of the chief locations of the fair. Our volunteers worked hard. And that included volunteers from the community who are not church members.
Thousands of people walk pass the church during this street fair. And I’m happy to say that this year we were able to make Old First one of the chief locations of the fair. Our volunteers worked hard. And that included volunteers from the community who are not church members.
What I like about the upper photo is that it shows how this great ark of a building, for all of its burden, is the center of our community.
What I like about the lower photo is that shows how Club Loco expresses both our Third and Fourth Missions: “To offer sanctuary” and “To offer hospitality.”
Oh Canada
I'm off to Canada on Tuesday, June 19, for nine days. It's a study and writing week. Thank you Old First for giving me this privilege.
No internet, no cell phone, no email, no blog. No Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, no Brooklyn Jews, no Tugster, no Gibbsville Transformers.
No use checking this blog, the average-of-29-per-day who do so, there will be no entries for a while.
The lake, my white pines, white oak, white ash, loons, eagles, the odd beaver, turtles laying eggs in the afternoon for raccoons to eat at night.
An old dial telephone, CBC on the radio, digestives, mosquitos at night, Nabob coffee in the morning and porridge if it's cold. Orville on his dock and on my deck.
Prayer on the rocks at dawn. The Anglican daily office. (Not "The Office!") The laptop and eight new talks (lectures?) for the fall on "Why Be a Christian."
Don't wish me luck. Calvinists don't like luck, and are embarrassed by good luck when they get it. Wish me Godspeed.
Schrijf niet even spoedig terug.
No internet, no cell phone, no email, no blog. No Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, no Brooklyn Jews, no Tugster, no Gibbsville Transformers.
No use checking this blog, the average-of-29-per-day who do so, there will be no entries for a while.
The lake, my white pines, white oak, white ash, loons, eagles, the odd beaver, turtles laying eggs in the afternoon for raccoons to eat at night.
An old dial telephone, CBC on the radio, digestives, mosquitos at night, Nabob coffee in the morning and porridge if it's cold. Orville on his dock and on my deck.
Prayer on the rocks at dawn. The Anglican daily office. (Not "The Office!") The laptop and eight new talks (lectures?) for the fall on "Why Be a Christian."
Don't wish me luck. Calvinists don't like luck, and are embarrassed by good luck when they get it. Wish me Godspeed.
Schrijf niet even spoedig terug.
Sidewalk Trees of Park Slope
My favorites are the great Red Oak on President Street, down by the Berkeley Carroll pool, and the American Elms on Third Street. There's one across the street from my friend Jerry's house, just up from Seventh Avenue. There's another great one almost at PPW, on the inside of the sidewalk. My wife Melody calls it an eight-story elm.
Third Street is especially wonderful for sidewalk trees.
I grew up in a part of Brooklyn that had no sidewalk trees. Herkimer Street, the eastern end of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our streets were hot, hot, hot in the summer. Of course we didn't care, we were too busy running around and having fun. I can remember the pavement kind of soft beneath our Skelly game. The only coolness we got was from opening the hydrants, till the cops came around.
But my dad was a preacher, so we had a parsonage and the only big yard on the street, and inside our spiked iron fence we had apple trees in the back and a maple tree on the side. The apple trees were thick with branches and great for just sitting in (you could even read the Hardy Boys up there). And our friends used to gather in our yard, mostly for the trees.
The maple tree was the only big tree on our block. It reached out over the sidewalk and part of Dewey Place. It had a long branch just high enough that you could climb up our fence and swing up to it and then, if you had guts, jump down to the ground. (I think I was nine before I finally jumped.) We found scraps of wood and old nails and pounded ladders up the trunk and built a fort, of course.
It was a Norway Maple. Now it's considered a weed tree, but that tree inspired my love of trees. I think it's why as a child I liked maples best, thought now it's white pines that I love.
Compared to the R.O.B. (the rest of Brooklyn) we have so many sidewalk trees in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. We're spoiled. What they add to the quality of life is incalculable.
I never see any kids climbing these trees. Insurance? Health? Safety? I never see kids building ladders up their trunks. Maybe it's illegal now. Maybe they do it in their backyards. Of course, the trunks of those sidewalk elms and oaks are lofty and daunting; I'd have been afraid of them myself. But I think the sycamores would have drawn our crowd of kids to enter them.
Blecchh. Too much nostalgia here. There's a big ailanthus right outside my window as I write. It judges me. I have always hated them. (In Bed-Stuy dialect we called them "shumac".) Its species did not ask to be imported to America, but once it was brought here, its genes decided to flourish. Its genes are generous to a fault, and tolerant, and tough. They judge me. I repent beneath its coolness, greenth, and shade.
I wonder how far up it I could get.
Third Street is especially wonderful for sidewalk trees.
I grew up in a part of Brooklyn that had no sidewalk trees. Herkimer Street, the eastern end of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our streets were hot, hot, hot in the summer. Of course we didn't care, we were too busy running around and having fun. I can remember the pavement kind of soft beneath our Skelly game. The only coolness we got was from opening the hydrants, till the cops came around.
But my dad was a preacher, so we had a parsonage and the only big yard on the street, and inside our spiked iron fence we had apple trees in the back and a maple tree on the side. The apple trees were thick with branches and great for just sitting in (you could even read the Hardy Boys up there). And our friends used to gather in our yard, mostly for the trees.
The maple tree was the only big tree on our block. It reached out over the sidewalk and part of Dewey Place. It had a long branch just high enough that you could climb up our fence and swing up to it and then, if you had guts, jump down to the ground. (I think I was nine before I finally jumped.) We found scraps of wood and old nails and pounded ladders up the trunk and built a fort, of course.
It was a Norway Maple. Now it's considered a weed tree, but that tree inspired my love of trees. I think it's why as a child I liked maples best, thought now it's white pines that I love.
Compared to the R.O.B. (the rest of Brooklyn) we have so many sidewalk trees in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. We're spoiled. What they add to the quality of life is incalculable.
I never see any kids climbing these trees. Insurance? Health? Safety? I never see kids building ladders up their trunks. Maybe it's illegal now. Maybe they do it in their backyards. Of course, the trunks of those sidewalk elms and oaks are lofty and daunting; I'd have been afraid of them myself. But I think the sycamores would have drawn our crowd of kids to enter them.
Blecchh. Too much nostalgia here. There's a big ailanthus right outside my window as I write. It judges me. I have always hated them. (In Bed-Stuy dialect we called them "shumac".) Its species did not ask to be imported to America, but once it was brought here, its genes decided to flourish. Its genes are generous to a fault, and tolerant, and tough. They judge me. I repent beneath its coolness, greenth, and shade.
I wonder how far up it I could get.
Sermon for June 17, Eminent Domain
Proper 6 C, 1 Kings 21:1-21a, Psalm 5:1-8, Galatians 2:15-21, Luke 7:36-8:3
The Old Testament lesson comes from the time after Solomon, when Israel was split between the kingdom of Judah in the south, under the House of David, and the kingdom of Israel in the north, with a succession of violent dynasties.
The most effective of the northern kings was Ahab, who was strong enough to marry a foreign princess, Jezebel. King Ahab worked to make Israel behave like other kingdoms, and stop being such a peculiar nation. He imported the more typical gods and goddesses, who seemed both more sensible and more effective than the God of Moses. He ignored the laws of Moses, which tended to stifle the use of power and restrict development. He was contested by the prophet Elijah, the conscience of Israel.
The laws of Moses gave every family in Israel a permanent piece of ground. Private property was sacred as a gift from God. The kings had no right of eminent domain. If you had to sell your property to make ends meet, every forty-nine years it would return to your family, for free.
This gave poor people economic security. What if even the poorest people in Brooklyn owned their apartments, and on one could take them from them. You can imagine this was a disincentive to development. It kept capitalism small. It wasn’t socialism, because all property was private, but it tended to equalize the wealth. And it kept the kingdom decentralized and weak compared to other nations around them, and to survive against their armies they had to trust in the God of Moses. Which King Ahab thought was unrealistic.
Naboth was a casualty. If King Ahab could not get his plot of ground by eminent domain, he would find some other way to get it. And he got it. God did not prevent it. We kind of wish God would, right? But God does not prevent us from doing what we do. What God does is judge us; God does not send punishments, but lets us suffer the misery we bring upon ourselves.
The Bible limits the power of government. This depresses Ahab, and so Jezebel tells him that if he can’t act like a normal king, she’ll do it for him. And so she does a back room deal to manipulate the process, and justice is perverted, and eventually they get their way.
This is what governments tend to do, they gather power and they use that power to gather capital and give it to themselves and their friends. But the message of the prophets throughout the Old Testament was consistent: the role of the king is to follow and enforce the laws of God, especially the laws to defend the poor, the orphan, and the widow.
That meant not charity, but justice, and specifically their rights of property. While the glories of the other nations might be their monuments and pyramids and temples and empires, the glory of Israel would be every little family with a piece of ground to call its own, a sacred right and privilege from God.
The application to the Atlantic Yards is inescapable to me. I know that the laws of this land are not the laws of Moses, but we can still infer the values of the laws of God. The laws of Moses do not have legal currency in America, but I hope they have ethical currency.
It’s not a matter of chiseling the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall, it’s the community learning from these laws, especially the less familiar ones which are less familiar because they are more challenging. Like hospitality to foreigners. Respect for the soil. Not cutting down trees. Limitations on armies. Relief of debt. Regular cancellation of indebtedness, especially among the poor. We think of as secular what the Bible treats as religious. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
The Biblical bias in development is always small of scale, and close to the ground. It prefers to see what small property owners do with their own resources. Its bias for the creation of wealth is the sharing of capital, not the amassing of it. And what’s the bottom line? Not money. Love. The laws of Moses are the pragmatic applications of the law of love into the areas of economics, security, and development. It’s our job as Jews and Christians to represent this to government.
Now let me bring it closer to home. We can hardly be witness to the government if we do not practice it ourselves. And that’s what the gospel lesson addresses. It’s what Simon the Pharisee found difficult. He was a good man. He was trying to be righteous. He was trying to practice the laws of God.
The Pharisees were one of the movements in Israel in Jesus’ day. They opposed the government of Rome as being like Ahab’s. They wanted to reinstate the kingdom of God in all its former purity. And their strategy was to be very strict—if they kept the laws of God in strict and scrupulous purity, then God would forgive the sins of Israel and God would come back, and kick out the Romans, and give them the Kingdom of God again. But what kept this from happening was these sinners. Like this woman. Simon believed that as long as the Jewish people kept on sinning, God would not forgive them and not come back.
And Jesus was not helping. The Pharisees thought he was giving exactly the wrong message. This tolerance of impurity, this cavorting with sinners. And Jesus’ loud criticism of their movement. Yet Simon was a good man, and personally generous, and he invites him to dinner.
Jesus is reclining on a dinner couch. He reclines on his side, his feet out behind, away from the table. The servants and women are waiting on the men. The doors of the house are open, and some of the poor have come in for a handout, because Simon is a good man.
But Jesus is notortiously unkosher, so Simon has to keep from touching him. Simon cannot give the signs of hospitality, like kissing the rabbi’s hand, or washing his feet, or showing him honor by anointing his head with oil. Jesus could take offense at this, but he’s being a good guest, and he accepts it graciously.
A woman of the street is grieved at this patronizing hospitality. How dare they treat Jesus like this? This rabbi does not look down on her, he does not make her feel like dirt. Like all prostitutes she hates her life, she is ashamed enough of her condition, and this man of God has compassion on her. He deserves to have his feet washed. Her tears will have to do. For a towel she has her hair. And she can’t reach his head, so she anoints his feet.
All of a sudden it’s sexual. Letting down her hair and kissing his feet are the tools of her trade. Simon takes offense at this within his house, but a good host never openly criticizes his guest. And a good guest ever openly criticize his host. So it’s not polite of Jesus to mention what Simon has failed to do for him.
But Jesus wants Simon to know that it’s not just the woman he’s forgiving; all along he’s been forgiving Simon too, just by accepting his patronizing hospitality. Jesus accepts the woman’s love, despite the impure way that she expresses it. Jesus accepts the Pharisee’s hospitality, despite his condescension. "Simon, Simon, the kingdom of God is already here. Here I am. I already am forgiving sins." The law of God is already here, it already is the law of the land, despite the presence of the Romans. The constitution of the kingdom of God is love.
The eminent domain of God is love. All the laws of Moses are summarized in love. Love of God above all, and love of neighbor as yourself. Of course it is impossible to impose the laws of Moses in our context today. Those laws were designed for a strictly agricultural situation and a specific time and place. Not even orthodox Jews want to apply them to America. But we can study and learn and represent the spirit and ethic of those laws. And we can use them as the conscience of our nation and a challenge to ourselves.
If you are wealthy, like Simon the Pharisee, then you can love the poor around you not as charity but as you love yourself. If you have power like king Ahab, then you can love your neighbor Naboth as yourself, and rejoice that he has what you desire. If you are righteous and good then you can love the dirty people as part of you.
You can do this if you acknowledge in humility how much God has forgiven you. You admit how much you are in debt yourself, in debt to the love of God, and having received such mercy, every day, how can you not love God most of all. Isn’t this what you want? Isn’t this what you want for the world?
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
The Old Testament lesson comes from the time after Solomon, when Israel was split between the kingdom of Judah in the south, under the House of David, and the kingdom of Israel in the north, with a succession of violent dynasties.
The most effective of the northern kings was Ahab, who was strong enough to marry a foreign princess, Jezebel. King Ahab worked to make Israel behave like other kingdoms, and stop being such a peculiar nation. He imported the more typical gods and goddesses, who seemed both more sensible and more effective than the God of Moses. He ignored the laws of Moses, which tended to stifle the use of power and restrict development. He was contested by the prophet Elijah, the conscience of Israel.
The laws of Moses gave every family in Israel a permanent piece of ground. Private property was sacred as a gift from God. The kings had no right of eminent domain. If you had to sell your property to make ends meet, every forty-nine years it would return to your family, for free.
This gave poor people economic security. What if even the poorest people in Brooklyn owned their apartments, and on one could take them from them. You can imagine this was a disincentive to development. It kept capitalism small. It wasn’t socialism, because all property was private, but it tended to equalize the wealth. And it kept the kingdom decentralized and weak compared to other nations around them, and to survive against their armies they had to trust in the God of Moses. Which King Ahab thought was unrealistic.
Naboth was a casualty. If King Ahab could not get his plot of ground by eminent domain, he would find some other way to get it. And he got it. God did not prevent it. We kind of wish God would, right? But God does not prevent us from doing what we do. What God does is judge us; God does not send punishments, but lets us suffer the misery we bring upon ourselves.
The Bible limits the power of government. This depresses Ahab, and so Jezebel tells him that if he can’t act like a normal king, she’ll do it for him. And so she does a back room deal to manipulate the process, and justice is perverted, and eventually they get their way.
This is what governments tend to do, they gather power and they use that power to gather capital and give it to themselves and their friends. But the message of the prophets throughout the Old Testament was consistent: the role of the king is to follow and enforce the laws of God, especially the laws to defend the poor, the orphan, and the widow.
That meant not charity, but justice, and specifically their rights of property. While the glories of the other nations might be their monuments and pyramids and temples and empires, the glory of Israel would be every little family with a piece of ground to call its own, a sacred right and privilege from God.
The application to the Atlantic Yards is inescapable to me. I know that the laws of this land are not the laws of Moses, but we can still infer the values of the laws of God. The laws of Moses do not have legal currency in America, but I hope they have ethical currency.
It’s not a matter of chiseling the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall, it’s the community learning from these laws, especially the less familiar ones which are less familiar because they are more challenging. Like hospitality to foreigners. Respect for the soil. Not cutting down trees. Limitations on armies. Relief of debt. Regular cancellation of indebtedness, especially among the poor. We think of as secular what the Bible treats as religious. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
The Biblical bias in development is always small of scale, and close to the ground. It prefers to see what small property owners do with their own resources. Its bias for the creation of wealth is the sharing of capital, not the amassing of it. And what’s the bottom line? Not money. Love. The laws of Moses are the pragmatic applications of the law of love into the areas of economics, security, and development. It’s our job as Jews and Christians to represent this to government.
Now let me bring it closer to home. We can hardly be witness to the government if we do not practice it ourselves. And that’s what the gospel lesson addresses. It’s what Simon the Pharisee found difficult. He was a good man. He was trying to be righteous. He was trying to practice the laws of God.
The Pharisees were one of the movements in Israel in Jesus’ day. They opposed the government of Rome as being like Ahab’s. They wanted to reinstate the kingdom of God in all its former purity. And their strategy was to be very strict—if they kept the laws of God in strict and scrupulous purity, then God would forgive the sins of Israel and God would come back, and kick out the Romans, and give them the Kingdom of God again. But what kept this from happening was these sinners. Like this woman. Simon believed that as long as the Jewish people kept on sinning, God would not forgive them and not come back.
And Jesus was not helping. The Pharisees thought he was giving exactly the wrong message. This tolerance of impurity, this cavorting with sinners. And Jesus’ loud criticism of their movement. Yet Simon was a good man, and personally generous, and he invites him to dinner.
Jesus is reclining on a dinner couch. He reclines on his side, his feet out behind, away from the table. The servants and women are waiting on the men. The doors of the house are open, and some of the poor have come in for a handout, because Simon is a good man.
But Jesus is notortiously unkosher, so Simon has to keep from touching him. Simon cannot give the signs of hospitality, like kissing the rabbi’s hand, or washing his feet, or showing him honor by anointing his head with oil. Jesus could take offense at this, but he’s being a good guest, and he accepts it graciously.
A woman of the street is grieved at this patronizing hospitality. How dare they treat Jesus like this? This rabbi does not look down on her, he does not make her feel like dirt. Like all prostitutes she hates her life, she is ashamed enough of her condition, and this man of God has compassion on her. He deserves to have his feet washed. Her tears will have to do. For a towel she has her hair. And she can’t reach his head, so she anoints his feet.
All of a sudden it’s sexual. Letting down her hair and kissing his feet are the tools of her trade. Simon takes offense at this within his house, but a good host never openly criticizes his guest. And a good guest ever openly criticize his host. So it’s not polite of Jesus to mention what Simon has failed to do for him.
But Jesus wants Simon to know that it’s not just the woman he’s forgiving; all along he’s been forgiving Simon too, just by accepting his patronizing hospitality. Jesus accepts the woman’s love, despite the impure way that she expresses it. Jesus accepts the Pharisee’s hospitality, despite his condescension. "Simon, Simon, the kingdom of God is already here. Here I am. I already am forgiving sins." The law of God is already here, it already is the law of the land, despite the presence of the Romans. The constitution of the kingdom of God is love.
The eminent domain of God is love. All the laws of Moses are summarized in love. Love of God above all, and love of neighbor as yourself. Of course it is impossible to impose the laws of Moses in our context today. Those laws were designed for a strictly agricultural situation and a specific time and place. Not even orthodox Jews want to apply them to America. But we can study and learn and represent the spirit and ethic of those laws. And we can use them as the conscience of our nation and a challenge to ourselves.
If you are wealthy, like Simon the Pharisee, then you can love the poor around you not as charity but as you love yourself. If you have power like king Ahab, then you can love your neighbor Naboth as yourself, and rejoice that he has what you desire. If you are righteous and good then you can love the dirty people as part of you.
You can do this if you acknowledge in humility how much God has forgiven you. You admit how much you are in debt yourself, in debt to the love of God, and having received such mercy, every day, how can you not love God most of all. Isn’t this what you want? Isn’t this what you want for the world?
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Gibbsville Transformers
What a wonderful week it was at Old First. We hosted the Transformers, a young adults group from the Gibbsville (Wisconsin) Reformed Church. They refurbished our main chandelier, and did eight other projects too.
There are 108 light bulbs in that chandelier, but God's love shone through 63 young adults from Wisconsin this week, filling our old church building with light and life and love. And music. And laughter. And scripture. And joy.
Let me recommend you to their blogs. Go to http://www.gibbsville.org/Default.htm, and check out their two links. The first is the running journal, by Chris Wensink. The second is their photo record. You can also check out the comments in Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, by Louise Crawford. http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/
I loved having these folks here this week. I love their leader and pastor, the Rev. Luke Schouten. Thank you. And God bless you.
I should add what else they did. They built a new staircase to the tower room. They cleaned out the steeple and put wire mesh on the louvers. They painted the steeple stairwell. They built a new inner door for our handicap entrance. They redid the floor of our handicap washroom. They cleaned and graded and gravelled our back alleyway. They repaired the front steps. They witnessed to people in NYC. They praised God and studied scripture and talked to our neighbors, passersby, and visitors.
That was the week that was.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
From Pentecost to Trinity
This is the famous Icon by Anton Rublev. It's called The Divine Hospitality, and it's based on the story of the three visitors to Abraham in Genesis 18. Christians have always seen in this Torah story an intimation of the Holy Trinity.
I love this picture of God (I know we're not supposed to picture God). But it's healing for us if imagining God this way breaks the hold that more common images have on our imaginations (like Michelangelo's).
Here God is androgynous, both masculine nor feminine, or maybe neither. (This is Orthodoxy!) Here each person is identical in face, essence, and substance, but discrete in position, office, and attributes.
The Father is on the left, the source and the object of adoration.
The Son is in the middle, wearing a robe of brown and blue for earth and sky --- the Incarnation. He is celebrating Communion.
The Spirit is on the right, wearing a robe of sky and air. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and looks back to the Father by way of the Son.
And we, the world, are represented by that little rectangle on the fall of the tablecloth, which makes us included in the circle of their fellowship.
The icon is constructed with circles and triangles, to represent not only threeness but unity and eternity. They love each other, they are a community.
There is room inside God. God is not a compact substance. There is dynamic and movement inside God. Sorry, Aristotle, but God is not the unmoved mover. God has movement deep inside God's self. And yet it's a movement that's always at rest.
Love is built into God. The three persons love each other. When we say God is love, it is not self-love, but other-love, which is a deeper love than self-love. Other-love wants the other always to be other and stay that way, but in fellowship. There is community in this unity.
The love that God has for us and for the world is an expansion of the love that is dynamically active deep inside God.
And yet each person is of a single essence with the other persons. There are not three Gods, but one God fully in each person.
The reading from John's Gospel for this Pentecost Sunday sets this out this mystery. And next week Sunday celebrates this mystery, the Sunday of the Holy Trinity.
The Trinity cannot be fully understood, nor can it be completely comprehended, but sufficiently so to be loved and worshiped. And aren't love and worship the goal of our human relationship with God?
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The Humor of John Calvin
That would be a very short book. John Calvin, one of the founders of the Reformed Church, is a crab. It's true. He's a great theologian, and a great scholar, and a wonderful commentator on scripture, and, more than anyone else, the father of modernity (really!), but he just ain't very charming. Everyone considers him a monster. Well, he had irritable bowel syndrome, or something, and he was so damn smart that everybody bugged him. Poor guy.
He gets the worst press in the world. He gets dumped on for everything. The poor suck. He gets mistreated by pundits and ignored by historians. The public school curriculums have been telling students for years that we get democracy from Athens, when actually we get it from Geneva. Oh well.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson considers herself a Calvinist. She lives in Iowa; there are many Calvinists in Iowa. I consider myself a Calvinist. Am I the only Calvinist in Park Slope? I don't think my wife is a Calvinist.
Right now I am reading Calvin on the Gospel of John in preparation for my sermon this coming Sunday. And I've been laughing out loud. He's the Don Rickles of theology. This is what he writes, and tell me if you don't think it's hilarious:
John 14, v. 12. Verily, verily, I say unto you. All that he had hitherto told his disciples about himself, so far as it regarded them, was temporal; and therefore, if he had not added this clause, the consolation would not have been complete; particularly since our memory is so short, when we are called to consider the gifts of God. On this subject it is unnecessary to go to others for examples; for, when God has loaded us with every kind of blessings, if he pause for fourteen days, we fancy that he is no longer alive.
He gets the worst press in the world. He gets dumped on for everything. The poor suck. He gets mistreated by pundits and ignored by historians. The public school curriculums have been telling students for years that we get democracy from Athens, when actually we get it from Geneva. Oh well.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson considers herself a Calvinist. She lives in Iowa; there are many Calvinists in Iowa. I consider myself a Calvinist. Am I the only Calvinist in Park Slope? I don't think my wife is a Calvinist.
Right now I am reading Calvin on the Gospel of John in preparation for my sermon this coming Sunday. And I've been laughing out loud. He's the Don Rickles of theology. This is what he writes, and tell me if you don't think it's hilarious:
John 14, v. 12. Verily, verily, I say unto you. All that he had hitherto told his disciples about himself, so far as it regarded them, was temporal; and therefore, if he had not added this clause, the consolation would not have been complete; particularly since our memory is so short, when we are called to consider the gifts of God. On this subject it is unnecessary to go to others for examples; for, when God has loaded us with every kind of blessings, if he pause for fourteen days, we fancy that he is no longer alive.
Monday, May 21, 2007
The Art of Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer's paintings have always gripped me. But I find it hard to explain why.Here is Christ Carrying the Cross, from 1920, oil on canvas, at the Tate Gallery in London.
He has set the scene in Cookham, his village in England.
I try different ways to understand it. Is it possibly how the event looked to angels who were looking on? Almost jaunty, crazy, with the people actually in the form of souls, as we must look to angels? (Can angels even see our physical bodies?)
But that's just today's attempt to understand its grip on me. There's a sense of longing, or sehnsucht, that I feel in it, it draws me in, and I want to be in it.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
A.D.L. against the defamation of Debbie Almontaser
I was so glad to see this letter by the Anti-Defamation League to the editor of the New York Sun. As the letter states, the New York Sun published unfounded attacks against the Kahlil Gibran Internation Academy (on whose Advisory Council I sit) and its principal-to-be, Ms. Debbie Almontaser.
The ADL is the most influential organization in America in the fight against Anti-Semitism. If they be for us, who can be against us?
Letters to the Editor, The New York Sun, Monday, May 07, 2007
To the Editor:
The recent controversy over the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn, set up to teach Arabic language and culture in addition to the usual courses, has unleashed unfounded attacks against the NYC Department of Education's new high school, accusing it of being a madrassa and a haven for Islamic extremism ("A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn," April 24 and "Madrassa Plan Is Monstrosity," May 1).
These attacks have also been personally directed at KGIA's principal, Debbie Almontaser. The Anti-Defamation League has a long history of working with Ms. Almontaser through our anti-bias workshops.
Through joint coalition work in Brooklyn against hate crimes, she has demonstrated her support for the civil liberties of all people. She is deeply committed to creating an inclusive learning environment that embraces the unparalleled diversity in New York City.
To help support this goal, we are in discussion with Ms. Almontaser about implementing our A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute anti-bias training in KGIA.
The school's Arabic language requirement, combined with conflict resolution and international diplomacy training, opens the possibility of creating a well informed generation of leaders.
The Khalil Gibran International Academy is just one of several in the New York City school system devoted to teaching a specific language and culture; the others include Russian, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
These schools are open to all students and those who choose to attend can be enriched by the added dimension.
Sincerely,
Joel J. Levy
New York Regional Office
(And thank you, Louise, for posting this in Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn)
The ADL is the most influential organization in America in the fight against Anti-Semitism. If they be for us, who can be against us?
Letters to the Editor, The New York Sun, Monday, May 07, 2007
To the Editor:
The recent controversy over the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn, set up to teach Arabic language and culture in addition to the usual courses, has unleashed unfounded attacks against the NYC Department of Education's new high school, accusing it of being a madrassa and a haven for Islamic extremism ("A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn," April 24 and "Madrassa Plan Is Monstrosity," May 1).
These attacks have also been personally directed at KGIA's principal, Debbie Almontaser. The Anti-Defamation League has a long history of working with Ms. Almontaser through our anti-bias workshops.
Through joint coalition work in Brooklyn against hate crimes, she has demonstrated her support for the civil liberties of all people. She is deeply committed to creating an inclusive learning environment that embraces the unparalleled diversity in New York City.
To help support this goal, we are in discussion with Ms. Almontaser about implementing our A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute anti-bias training in KGIA.
The school's Arabic language requirement, combined with conflict resolution and international diplomacy training, opens the possibility of creating a well informed generation of leaders.
The Khalil Gibran International Academy is just one of several in the New York City school system devoted to teaching a specific language and culture; the others include Russian, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
These schools are open to all students and those who choose to attend can be enriched by the added dimension.
Sincerely,
Joel J. Levy
New York Regional Office
(And thank you, Louise, for posting this in Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn)
Monday, May 14, 2007
"Those Trees Were My Friends"
I forget who said it, an ent or an elf, but I think it was somewhere in the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion. It was after the destruction of many trees by orcs.
That thought came to me last Friday as I was hiking with my wife Melody through some woods upstate, woods that once knew very well. It was grievous to me, because many trees were dead that once had been my friends. A whole long hillside of hemlocks was dead. It was ghastly and ghostly.
Between the trunks a strange and unhappy sunlight shone down. The death was so recent that there was no new growth yet. The ground was a mess of broken hemlock branches and leaves from nearby oaks and birches and beeches. The life had been sucked out of the place.
I had known specific trees from when I used to take care of the trail that we were hiking. There was one against a wall of rock that I used to like, and there was a particular grove in which I used to sit. There was the great big hemlock over that bend in the trail below the ridge, and the other one that stood senty at a little clearing. They all were dead.
They were all killed by the hemlock blight. It has been coming north for years. I learned of it back in 1995 when I was leading a backpacking group along the Appalachian Trail. We were taking a rest in a hemlock grove and the through-hiker who was with us told me about it. I had hoped it wouldn't come this far north, or that we had more time. Nope.
The trail I used to take care of is in the Wawayanda Hills upstate. Not very far upstate, just across the border from New Jersey, near Warwick, New York. The Reformed Church has a conference center there, at the northern tip of many square miles of forest in Passaic and Bergen counties. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of hemlocks have died this last decade?
Will the hemlocks come back? Will resistant ones survive and breed and spread their young? The chestnuts have never come back from the chestnut blight. A very few elms have survived Dutch Elm Disease. These tend to be isolated ones, like a huge one I know if hidden inside a Park Slope block, or the great one that used to live at the main downtown intersection of Sayville, Long Island. My brother and I found its saplings in the alley behind the stores, so we transplanted them in our yard, and one of them still thrives; you can see it on Google Earth. Those trees were our friends.
When my brother Henk and I were kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant we spent a good deal of our time in trees: the Norway Maple on the side of the house and apple trees in back. And it wasn't just us. Our whole gang of kids was always up in trees.
Yep. I pray for the elms and the hemlocks. Right now the oaks and maples don't seem to need our intercessory prayers. So far nothing seems to be killing white pines, apart from human beings. I have some particular white pine friends in Brooklyn, Hoboken, and Ontario. But I tell you, if something were ever to happen to the white pines, I don't know if I could take it.
That thought came to me last Friday as I was hiking with my wife Melody through some woods upstate, woods that once knew very well. It was grievous to me, because many trees were dead that once had been my friends. A whole long hillside of hemlocks was dead. It was ghastly and ghostly.
Between the trunks a strange and unhappy sunlight shone down. The death was so recent that there was no new growth yet. The ground was a mess of broken hemlock branches and leaves from nearby oaks and birches and beeches. The life had been sucked out of the place.
I had known specific trees from when I used to take care of the trail that we were hiking. There was one against a wall of rock that I used to like, and there was a particular grove in which I used to sit. There was the great big hemlock over that bend in the trail below the ridge, and the other one that stood senty at a little clearing. They all were dead.
They were all killed by the hemlock blight. It has been coming north for years. I learned of it back in 1995 when I was leading a backpacking group along the Appalachian Trail. We were taking a rest in a hemlock grove and the through-hiker who was with us told me about it. I had hoped it wouldn't come this far north, or that we had more time. Nope.
The trail I used to take care of is in the Wawayanda Hills upstate. Not very far upstate, just across the border from New Jersey, near Warwick, New York. The Reformed Church has a conference center there, at the northern tip of many square miles of forest in Passaic and Bergen counties. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of hemlocks have died this last decade?
Will the hemlocks come back? Will resistant ones survive and breed and spread their young? The chestnuts have never come back from the chestnut blight. A very few elms have survived Dutch Elm Disease. These tend to be isolated ones, like a huge one I know if hidden inside a Park Slope block, or the great one that used to live at the main downtown intersection of Sayville, Long Island. My brother and I found its saplings in the alley behind the stores, so we transplanted them in our yard, and one of them still thrives; you can see it on Google Earth. Those trees were our friends.
When my brother Henk and I were kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant we spent a good deal of our time in trees: the Norway Maple on the side of the house and apple trees in back. And it wasn't just us. Our whole gang of kids was always up in trees.
Yep. I pray for the elms and the hemlocks. Right now the oaks and maples don't seem to need our intercessory prayers. So far nothing seems to be killing white pines, apart from human beings. I have some particular white pine friends in Brooklyn, Hoboken, and Ontario. But I tell you, if something were ever to happen to the white pines, I don't know if I could take it.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Squad One
Hooray for Squad One. Park Slope people know. But do Park Slope people know how far they go?
I sit at my window in the mornings, at home in Windsor Terrace, looking out over Prospect Park Southwest, almost in Kensington. Often I'll see the Squad One truck racing down P.P.S.W., off to somewhere south in Brooklyn.
Did you know they go this far? Of course you had an inkling, you knew they went to the World Trade Center, one of the first, and that fourteen died there. But then they weren't the only truck that went there, so maybe you thought it was extraordinary.
But apparently it's normal for them. I don't know how often they go to Manhattan, but I do know, from my perch above Prospect Park Southwest, how often they to to places in Brooklyn most Park Slopers have never been to.
John Wesley said, "The world is my parish." Well, for Squad One it's not the world, but it is a lot of Brooklyn. Hooray for Squad One.
I sit at my window in the mornings, at home in Windsor Terrace, looking out over Prospect Park Southwest, almost in Kensington. Often I'll see the Squad One truck racing down P.P.S.W., off to somewhere south in Brooklyn.
Did you know they go this far? Of course you had an inkling, you knew they went to the World Trade Center, one of the first, and that fourteen died there. But then they weren't the only truck that went there, so maybe you thought it was extraordinary.
But apparently it's normal for them. I don't know how often they go to Manhattan, but I do know, from my perch above Prospect Park Southwest, how often they to to places in Brooklyn most Park Slopers have never been to.
John Wesley said, "The world is my parish." Well, for Squad One it's not the world, but it is a lot of Brooklyn. Hooray for Squad One.
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