God's Tattoos (Isaiah 49:8-16, 8th Sunda after Epiphany A)

8th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 49:8-16
February 27, 2011

God’s Tattoos

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

In the big scheme of things maybe it wasn’t so long to wait. But for the people who were doing the waiting, it had been a lifetime, their lifetime. They had been born in exile, in the capital city of the empire that had beaten their parents and led them away in chains. They were a generation that belonged nowhere. They had never seen the home that their parents had described for them in the gathering dark of the evenings in whispers lest there be agents of the empire listening at the windows, informants of the Stasi or CIA or whatever Babylon called its intelligence service. They had been raised on these tales, their parents’ memories and the stuff of dreams.

“Zion!” The name alone conjured images of almost unearthly splendor. The crowds on the holy days paraded through the streets waiving palm branches and singing psalms of praise to the God who watched over them. The smells of roast lamb wafted through the city as the people remembered their slavery in and rescue from the hands of another and older empire. Passersby called greetings to those who were leaning out from the windows of their houses as the Friday sun sank lower in the sky. “Shabbat shalôm!” they cried to each other. “Sabbath peace!”

But, as I say, these were their parents’ memories, not theirs. For them it was a dream. It was the stuff of hope. It was, in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase, “a subversive memory of the future.” The empire did not look favorably on the memories and dreams of this captive people. This vision of the future that found them free, restored to the land of promise, was not nurtured by their captors. These were unauthorized hopes.

That didn’t stop the captives. They told the stories anyway. They dreamed the dream. They held the hope of homecoming. And they waited.

For some that was a problem. How long would they have to wait? How long were they supposed to wait? How long could they bear to wait? It had been fifty years already. Their parents were dying and the ones who were alive would never make the return trip. They themselves were not getting any younger. Their children were grown into adulthood and to them the old stories seemed like the idle chatter of the ancients, magical tales, but tales only with no substance to them.

And, truth to tell, some of them had decided that it wasn’t really worth it, the struggle to remember a place they had never been, to continue to live as exiles in the place they had lived all their lives, even if their parents never let them call it home. Some of them simply quit living as exiles. They wore their hair according to the fashions of Babylon. They wore the clothing of Babylon. They celebrated the festivals of Babylon. They worshiped its gods. They spoke its language, even at home. They were Babylonians. But of them this text knows nothing. Theirs is not a part of this story.

No, we are concerned this morning with the others, those who tucked their children into bed, heard their Hebrew prayers, and lulled them to sleep with words that began, “Let me sing you a song of Zion.”

These others keep the hope alive, but they were frightened. They were afraid to own their dream in public. They saw a vision, but it was a secret one, too precious to risk revealing. It was to them that the words of this morning’s text from Isaiah was written.

Because the day of deliverance was at hand. It was time. “Say to the prisoners, ‘Come out!’ and to those who live in darkness, ‘Show yourselves!’” The tide had turned, the weather broken, the seasons had changed. It was time. It was time to go home, home to the land of their parents and grandparents, home—as John Denver once sang—“to a place they’d never been before.”

It was time to set fear aside. It was time to claim their birthright. It was time to trust that the universe had aligned with their own deepest longings.

In the last several weeks we have been watching this drama playing out among the peoples of the Arab-speaking world. In Tunisia and Egypt, in Libya and Bahrain, even in Jordan and Iraq people have decided that now is the time to realize the dreams that they have kept alive for generations. They tell different stories than the exiles of Judah. They pray in a different language. They have known different captors and different oppressors. But they, too, are dreamers who refuse any longer to shield their dream from the light of day.

Friends, I am the first to admit that not a foreign policy wonk. I know no more of the history of these people than most of you. From the little I know it seems clear that the next few years will be unsettled and unsettling. It is difficult to tell the outcome of the unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other places. Repressive regimes may succeed in defending their power and privilege. Revolutions may be hijacked. People may throw out one set of bullies only to find themselves bullied by another set in turn. It has happened before and there is little to guarantee that it will not happen again.

I do not know what would be the prudent thing for my country to do, the wise way for it to act to protect what it calls its “vital interests.” I am not a foreign policy wonk. But to paraphrase Bishop Gregory Palmer, let me be clear: I may not be a foreign policy wonk, but I am a Jesus wonk. I am a Bible wonk. I am a God wonk. And the God whom I have met in the person of Jesus as he is found in this book sponsors dreams like the dreams of those who have risen up across the north of Africa and the Middle East. Their visions spring from God’s vision for human life. Their hopes for lives of dignity and freedom for themselves and their children are grounded in the character of God. Anyone—and that includes my country that I have loved so deeply for so long—anyone who stifles that dream, anyone who frustrates that hope, anyone who forecloses that vision is on the losing side of history.

It will certainly be a hard journey for these people who, like the ancient Jews of our text, have harbored a subversive memory of the future. It will be especially hard for those who have sung their secret song in the very public light of the midday sun. It may be that the hardest journey of all will be for those who have succeeded in throwing off the yoke of oppression. But these people who journey home to a place they’ve never been before will have unexpected help. At least this is my hope and my prayer. My earnest prayer is that in years to come when they look back on these days they will be able to tell their children that they found unexpected springs of water along the way so that they never thirsted, that they found shelter from the scorching heat, that the mountains became highways.

But my sermon is not just about the nations who have been summoned in our time to come out of captivity. And it’s not just about ancient Jews who were summoned in ancient times to stop hiding in the Babylonian dark and show themselves. It’s also about us. For we, too live in captivity. In an age that values the quantifiable above all else, that judges everything by the “bottom line,” that hails the ruthless and the cruel as its heroes, we may believe that our ancient dream—the one about a way that Jesus showed us, the one we whisper to our own children—we may believe that our ancient dream is useless today. We may believe that dreams of justice and visions of peace are simply unrealistic and that it’s time to be realists. We may believe that it is time to give up and give in, time to stop calling it exile and to start calling it home.

But it is to us, too, that God speaks through the words of the ancient prophet, overriding our doubts and objections. “We are forgotten, we are forsaken,” we complain. God no longer dreams these dreams and we must shift for ourselves. It’s easy enough to believe that now, just as it was easy enough to believe it then.

But God is not done speaking to us. “Can the nursing mother forget her child?” God asks. Listen, I have spent the last week with a nursing mother and I can tell you that the answer to that question is No. God can no more forget us than Beth can forget Diana.

God even has us written on the palm of God’s hand. I’ve used this little trick when there was something I wanted to remember but I didn’t have any paper. Then I had to remember to transfer it to some more permanent medium. And I also had to hope I didn’t sweat. God has us written on the palm of God’s own hand. This is on God’s part a commitment to remember. But if I read this right, we’ve not only been written, we’ve been tattooed. God has behaved impetuously and in an unguarded moment God has gotten a tattoo of our names. Even if God wanted to, God cannot deny us. God has committed to us in public and we are now undeniably God’s. Not only does God love us and there’s nothing we can do about it. God loves us and there’s nothing God can do about it.

So it’s time. It’s time to hear God’s call. It’s time to be set free from whatever has made us captive. It’s time to step out of whatever darkness overshadows us. It’s time to show ourselves in the light. It’s time for unauthorized hopes to be realized. It’s time for subversive memories of the future to take shape in our world. It’s time trust that the world in which we live is one in which God’s will can be done and is being done. It’s time to come home. It’s time.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Tranformers (Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18)

7th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
February 20, 2011

“Transformers”

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

A long ago time in a far away place, I set out to read the Bible from cover to cover. I probably had any number of reasons for doing this. My conscious reason for reading setting out on this quest was a criticism from the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung which I took for advice. He criticized Europeans for their taking over the mystic traditions of Asia while neglecting their own. He used words that I remember as, “They cannot fittingly occupy Eastern palaces until they have learned to live in their own cottages.” I took this for advice to leave behind—at least for the time being—my messing around with the Hindu tradition, even though it was the sixties and Hinduism was all the rage, and instead learn a little more about the Christian tradition which I had abandoned.

The fact is that my faith stopped growing when I was twelve and finished confirmation. Sixth grade faith cannot possible meet the sort of challenges that a college student will throw at it. And there was no one around to help me take the next steps. The Hinduism I met in books was a lot more sophisticated and elegant than the sixth grade Christianity I was carrying around in my head.

But Jung warned me. Let me say that I did not know Jung personally—I’m not that old!—but I had at that point read fifteen or sixteen of his twenty-some volume collected works and I thought I knew the man a little. He seemed like a wise guide. So I took the advice behind the criticism and set out to explore the Christian faith, which I thought to do by reading the Bible in its entirety.

It looked like a book, so I began at Genesis 1:1 where its opening words “In the beginning” seemed to confirm my plan. Genesis was interesting, well, except for “the begats.” And Exodus was, too, although God in Exodus seemed testy.

Then came Leviticus. Leviticus begins by discussing burnt offerings, grain offerings, offerings of well-being, sin offerings, and offerings with restitution. There are instructions for keeping various holy days and festivals. There are lists of animals which may be eaten and animals which may not. We learn that grasshopper is okay to eat, but pork, rabbit, and lobster are not. We find rules for how to deal with what the text calls “leprosy,” but they include such things as mold growing on the walls of houses and mildewed clothing. We find rules about sexual relations, one of which is being used in the current debates about same-sex marriages. But we also learn that we may not wear clothing made of more than one material, a cotton-polyester blend for example.

What do we make of a book like this with its equally serious laws about diet, fabric and social justice? We are fortunate that the book of Leviticus is only read once every three years. Even so, it is in front of us today and we still have to do something with it.

Leviticus is not my favorite book, but that doesn’t mean that there are not Christians for whom it is very dear indeed. Robert comes to mind. In a previous lifetime I was a Christian educator. Robert was one of the students in the Sunday School of one of the churches I worked for. Robert was an important and challenging part of my work there because he was autistic. We had to work hard to design our curriculum so that he and his classmates were all able both to benefit and to contribute as much as possible.

One of the things I remember about Robert is that his favorite book of the Bible was Leviticus. The fact that it is a list of rules—far from being a reason to set it aside—was the reason that he loved it. Leviticus is straight forward. All the possibilities are covered and nothing is left to guess-work or chance. Leviticus lays out clear instructions. It avoids all the messy ambiguity that seems to arise whenever things are left up to people to figure out. The last time I talked to Robert he was a college student majoring in computer science. That makes perfect sense to me.
Robert warns me that I had better not be too quick to dismiss this book of laws. Maybe it helps to step back a bit and look at the broader picture. You remember that I said that the Bible looked a book, so I read it like one? There is a flaw in that understanding of the Bible. The Bible may be found between two covers of a single volume, but it is most certainly not a book. It is a collection of books, written and rewritten over centuries by many people.

I think that it is fair to say that each of the books was written by a person or people each of whom had a particular vision of what it meant to live faithfully as God’s people. Each book sets out at least one vision. These various visions are distinct from each other. Sometimes the visions clash. The Bible is a conversation. The conversation is always vigorous. Sometimes it’s even heated. The authority of the Bible does not consist in its telling us the one way to live faithfully as God’s people. The authority of the Bible consists in authorizing a vigorous and sometimes disputatious and many-sided conversation about how to live faithfully as God’s people. It poses a question and requires us to respond in dialogue with the many voices that speak in the Bible.

One of those voices can be heard in the book of Leviticus. The vision of the book is a priestly one, concerned with festivals and rituals. Leviticus looks at life through the lens of sacred time and sacred acts. Life is seen as divided between the holy and the profane, between the sacred and the ordinary. Boundaries are important for Leviticus. Skin is important. What goes into and comes out of bodies are important. As Mary Douglas argued, Leviticus uses the human body with its boundaries and its openings as a way of thinking about the social body of the covenant people that also has boundaries and openings.

The prohibition against eating a lobster, for example, has a certain logic. A lobster is an animal that lives in the water. It is therefore a sort of fish. But it looks like a bug and bugs live on land. So what is it? Is it a fish or not? This may strike us as primitive biology, but it was an urgent matter for Leviticus. A lobster is neither a fish nor a bug. Fish can be eaten. Bugs—at least some bugs—may be eaten. But something that is neither one nor the other? It violates the clear categories by the which Leviticus organizes its world. At stake in this is the concern that God’s covenant people know who they are and who they are not. Are they Babylonians or are they Jews? Jews are good and even Babylonians are okay, but something that is has characteristics of both but is clearly neither, what is it? Leviticus sees the hybrid—the in-between, the both/and, the neither/nor—as a threat to the identity of God’s covenant people. How can God’s covenant people maintain their identity if they imitate Babylonians? Leviticus answers that they cannot.

The questions that Leviticus poses to us are these: “What makes us Christians? How do we form Christian identity in ourselves and our children? How do we interact with people who are not formed in this way?” We may come up with different answers than Leviticus. We may smile at the thought that wearing a cotton-polyester shirt would somehow compromise our integrity.
But not all of Leviticus is about fabric and lobsters. At the heart of this book about what it means to be God’s people is a notion of neighborliness. And, I might point out that it is a vision of neighborliness that is threatened in Washington, DC, and Des Moines and in many other state capitals as elected officials wrestle with and make decisions about closing budget deficits.
Neighborliness involves treating each other in certain ways. Some of those ways are obvious: we don’t steal, we don’t lie, we don’t make promises we don’t intend to keep, and we don’t make up things to accuse each other of. These are obvious.

But there are others that seem to be up for grabs. Leviticus tells us that we may not reap our fields to the very edges, nor go back to pick up grain that has fallen. We don’t harvest our vineyards twice so that we harvest all the grapes and we don’t pick up those that have fallen to the ground. Now most of us are not farmers and I don’t know that any of us own vineyards but a principle seems to be clear: we are not supposed to use for ourselves everything we produce. There must be some provision left for the poor and the undocumented worker. They, too, must be able to live in the land. Harvesting to the edge of the field or picking up fallen grapes may seem like simple efficiencies to apply especially in hard times when resources are scarce. But Leviticus seems to regard these measures as theft against the poor. What does this argue about the cost-saving measures we think we need to enact? What damage will we do to neighborliness in the course of balancing our budgets?

Leviticus doesn’t have an answer to that question and neither do I, but if neighborliness is central to our integrity as God’s people, then it’s a question we can’t ignore. This is especially true since at the heart of this book’s vision of neighborliness is nothing else than the covenant God, Yahweh. Again and again, we hear the same refrain.

“You shall not strip your vineyard bare.” Why not? “I am Yahweh your God.”

“You shall not steal.” Why not? “I am Yahweh.”

“You shall not hold back a worker’s wages, not even overnight.” Why not? “I am Yahweh.”

“You shall not make a profit on death.” Why not? “I am Yahweh.”

“I am Yahweh” is not an answer, but it is the only answer. At the heart of Leviticus’ vision of the world lies the vision of neighborliness. At the heart of neighborliness is Yahweh who when we were strangers became our defender, who when we were orphaned became our next of kin, who when we were imprisoned or sick became our liberator and healer. At the heart of Leviticus’ vision is Yahweh, the God with a massive ego and an unquenchable passion for justice who will see us be neighbors to the poor, the sick, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. We may find much of Leviticus’ vision quaint. We may even reject it altogether. We are allowed to disagree.

But we must remember that once a Teacher was asked to summarize the entire Torah—the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—in a single statement. He replied with the ancient summons known as the Shema’: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one; you shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” But then he had to add a citation from the odd and oddly powerful book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

This document is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/.