Stranger-Love (Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7; Pentecost 17; September 20, 2015)

Stranger-Love

Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7
Pentecost 17
September 20, 2015 

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

I have an icon of the scene described in this story. The word “icon” is in common use. We think of an icon as one of those little pictures on our computer screens. We use our mouse to put a pointer over the icon and click on it to open an application or a file. (Do you realize that if I had said that sentence in 1970 no one in the world would have understood any of it?)

The word icon wasn’t invented for computers, though. It was borrowed from Christians. When we use that word we mean a stylized painted image. Icon means “image” but icons work more like windows, the real kind, the ones that let you see through a wall, not the operating system by Microsoft. Icons are like holes punched in ordinary reality. If you look into them long enough and attentively enough, you’ll eventually be able to see heaven, or at least a little bit of it.

Actually, that’s true of almost anything. Look at the stars, or at a tree, or even at each other long enough and attentively enough, and you’ll be able to see a bit of heaven. It’s just easier for some people to use an icon instead, at least until they’re good at that kind of looking.

Anyway, I have an icon of this scene that is called The Hospitality of Abraham. At the center of the icon is a table. On the far side and to the left and right are three men. They have wings to show that they are angels. They each have a nimbus—what we call a halo—of gold. On an icon made in the traditional way, the gold would be gold leaf, not gold paint. The nimbus of the center figure is more elaborate than the others.

Abraham and Sarah stand to either side, attentive to their guests, bowing slightly. There is an oak tree in the background. On the table itself are several dishes. There is always flat bread. One of the dishes contains a calf’s head. 

The name of the icon as I said is The Hospitality of Abraham, but something is lost in translation. In Greek the word translated “hospitality” is philoxenia and it’s quite a bit stronger than what we usually mean by hospitality. We usually mean that, when someone is coming pay us a visit, we’ll be prepared to offer them coffee and a cookie or two. It may mean something more formidable, like my Grandma Caldwell would offer. I say offer advisedly because she believed that love was something that was produced in the kitchen and served in the dining room. Consequently, no matter when we arrived or when we had last eaten, there would be a meal ready for us, a meal we had better eat.

Philoxenia was a different and more difficult thing. If we break the word into its parts we can see why. The first part comes from the word philos, one of the Greek words for love. The second part comes from the word xenos, usually translated as “stranger.” It appears in our word xenophobia, meaning “fear of strangers.” Philoxenia is the opposite: love of strangers. Not tolerance of strangers, but love of strangers, stranger-love. How can we love someone we have not met? This kind of love isn’t a feeling; it’s a commitment to action. Philoxenia, then, might best be translated as “the readiness to behave lovingly toward strangers.”

We can see that in Abraham. Abraham was sitting in the shade and saw three men approaching. He ran to meet them, bowed down to them, and begged them to let him provide water to wash their feet, a place to sit and rest, and some bread. When they agreed he used this consent as an excuse to set a feast before them. I’m thinking that the meal preparation must have taken some time. “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, kneed it, and make cakes.” That was going to take some time. It’s not like Sarah had a box of Bisquik in her pantry. The same was true of the “calf, tender and good.”

Today, of course, the guests would have wandered off long before the meal was ready. But it wasn’t today and, once they had agreed to accept Abraham’s philoxenia, his stranger-love, they were obliged to wait for it. And so they did.

Anthropologists will tell us that “stuff” goes on in these events. In the first place stranger-love is a way of defusing what could be a dangerous situation. Philoxenia is vitally important to keep strangers from becoming enemies. This partly explains why Abraham’s hospitality was so over the top. 

Abraham offered and the three men received his stranger-love. This placed an obligation on the three to reciprocate, to give back like for like, in some way. The travelers are not really free to continue their journey owing an obligation to someone they are likely never to see again. So they offer a blessing.

If Abraham’s stranger-love was over the top, then the blessing given by the three men is far beyond that: Sarah will, at long last, have what she has desired, a son.

We know how impossible that must have seemed. Sarah thought it was a joke and one in poor taste at that. Her husband had offered exorbitant stranger-love and the strangers replied with an impossible blessing that, since it was impossible, was no blessing at all. Her laughter was a form of disdain. It’s a good thing she kept it to herself, lest these strangers take offense and become enemies after all, despite all their efforts.

At this point, the story takes a turn. The man who has been speaking is revealed to be, not a man and nor even an angel, but the God Yahweh, who wants to know why Sarah has laughed and why she has disdained his blessing since it is not an empty promise.

In our reading the text is interrupted at this point and the reading skips to the birth of Isaac. I understand the choice that was made to do this. We don’t tolerate a three and a half chapter reading very well. It would certainly make recruiting lay readers more challenging. But the events in between the two parts of the reading have their importance in the story. 

The next part of the story tells the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let’s note that these cities were not destroyed because of their alleged homosexuality. That was an idea first proposed in the eleventh century after Christ. Ezekiel says this about Sodom: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”[1] In the story they compound that by their refusal to offer proper hospitality. They do not love their own poor and needy. They do not love strangers. They are destroyed for the failure to love, not for loving the wrong people.

Yahweh tells Abraham about the plan to destroy the cities and Abraham, in a strong display of chutzpah, attempts to strike a bargain with Yahweh to spare the cities. If ten righteous people can be found, Yahweh will leave the cities alone.

But in the event, ten righteous people are not found, though the family of Lot (Abraham’s nephew) is allowed to escape, except for Lot’s wife who famously looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Lot’s daughters—he has no sons—conspired to become pregnant by their father and gave birth to Moab and Ben-amin who became the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, two of Israel’s most hated enemies. Meanwhile Abraham and Sarah go traveling to Gerar. Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister (she was in reality his half-sister) and said nothing to Abimelech the king of Gerar when he took her into his harem, knowing that Abraham could do nothing about it. Luckily for Abimelech and for our story, Yahweh spoke to Abimelech in a dream and Abimelech returned Sarah to Abraham, along with sheep, oxen, slaves, and a thousand pieces of silver. In this way Abimelech was saved from his failure of hospitality.

Then, at long last, Sarah conceived and give birth to a son. They named him Isaac which means “he laughs,” but now it is the laughter of astonished joy, not dismissive disdain. So it was that Abraham was repaid for his philoxenia, his extravagant stranger-love.

This is the end of the text, but it is not the end of the story. When Isaac weaned and safely out of infancy and Abraham’s inheritance through Sarah secure, Sarah’s gaze turned toward Hagar, her slave, and Ishmael, Hagar’s son by Abraham, the heir “just in case,” and Sarah hated them and wanted them gone. Abraham didn’t like it. If philoxenia is the readiness to act lovingly toward strangers, what shall we call the readiness to act hatefully toward the members of his own household, toward his son and the boy’s mother? But “ain’t mama happy, ain’t nobody happy,” so Abraham did as Sarah demanded.

Turned out into the wilderness with only some bread and a skin of water, when those meager supplies ran out, Hagar and Ishmael laid down to die. It would have happened, but for Yahweh’s intervention. God both rescued the two of them and promised that Ishmael would become a great nation.

We don’t hear much more about Ishmael in the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Islamic tradition, however, Ishmael did indeed become the ancestor of a great people: the Arabs. He was a prophet and, in due time, among his descendants Muhammad himself would come to be numbered. But even that isn’t the end of the story.

You’ve heard about Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving, Texas, ninth-grader who made an electronic clock and proudly brought it school to show to his engineering teacher. You may have heard that he was arrested for bringing a device suspected of being a bomb to school. This was not true. The bomb squad was not called. The school was not evacuated. The clock was taken to police headquarters in a police cruiser. No one thought it was a bomb. They did not look at a clock and see a bomb; they looked at one of Ishmael’s children and saw a terrorist. This is racism, pure, simple, and ugly. The officials of one American community were asked the hospitality question and they failed miserably.

Today millions of Ishmael’s children are fleeing violence and severe drought in Syria. They're not trying to get cable TV as one so-called Christian has claimed. They are fleeing for their lives. Four million of them are registered with the UN High Commission of Refugees. Many have fled to other countries in the Middle East. Some have fled to Europe. And now the hospitality question is before us once again. How will Europe and the United States respond? How will Abraham’s spiritual descendants respond? Will Abraham change his mind about his treatment of Ishmael? 

The story is far from over. It waits for us to write the ending. Let’s make sure it’s a good one.

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[1] Ezekiel 16:49.

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Garden Party (Genesis 2:4b-25; Pentecost 16; September 13, 2015)

Garden Party

Genesis 2:4b-25
Pentecost 16
September 13, 2015

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

A myth, I have said, is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. Myths are stories, but they don’t have to be complicated. As long as they have a beginning, a middle and an end, they are long enough. One of our most popular myths is a very short story. It is known as the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It goes like this: A bad person did something bad to good people. A good person attacked and killed the bad person. Everything was good again. The end.

Some myths are more or less true. Others, like this one, are dangerously untrue. When a nation, say, uses this myth as the foundation of its foreign policy, the violence and the suffering never end. 

But what makes a story a myth is not whether it is true or not What makes a story—true or not—a myth is that a groups tells the story to itself to explain itself to itself. We use the Myth of Redemptive Violence, for example, to explain to ourselves why we have gone to war. Without the myth to explain this, most wars would just look like a stupid and shameful waste of life and wealth. With the myth to explain it, war is a holy duty that makes sacred both the effort and the lives lost. Without the myth, war becomes blasphemy against the Creator.

Of course the Garden of Eden story is not a variation on the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It is another and very powerful kind of myth: it is a creation myth. It’s not the only one in the Bible. In fact there’s another just before this one, in Genesis One. Another biblical example of a creation myth can be found in John 1. “In the beginning,” it begins, always a pretty good sign of a creation myth. Another can be found in Proverbs 8 when the figure Wisdom sings, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work...”.[1]

We shouldn’t look to creation myths for scientific accuracy. Scientific myths like the Big Bang or Evolution care about scientific accuracy; biblical myths like the Garden of Eden story do not. Fundamentalists commit a category error when they take the Garden of Eden story as scientifically accurate.

You can travel to Petersburg, Kentucky, and for $29.95 plus tax you can visit the Creation Museum. Once inside you will see a state of the art museum dedicated to demonstrating that the Bible is free from error. Its accounts of the creation of the universe are taken as scientifically true. You can, for example, see exhibits in which humans interact with dinosaurs. The Big Bang and evolution and climate change are all the modern fantasies of godless scientists who refuse to accept God’s Word as true. The Creation Museum wants to persuade its visitors that the Bible is true and anything that disagrees with the Bible is false.

But the Bible itself cares so little about accurate description of events that it has included two creation myths, one after the other in Genesis, that contradict each other in ways that cannot be explained away. This is why the Creation Museum is such a waste of money and devotion. 

The ancient Hebrews did not tell these stories to accurately detail the events. They told these stories to explain to themselves why things were the way they were by telling themselves a story about how things came to be.

So why have I spent all this time on what are, really, introductory matters? Well, because this is a creation myth, there are people who want to use it to press an agenda and back themselves up with the authority of the Bible. Of course I have an agenda, too. We all do. No one comes to the Bible innocent, without hopes or questions or pre-conceived ideas. And, of course we want to make as a persuasive case as I can.

But to use a myth without myth-understanding is to risk misunderstanding. Myths are designed to make the present seem inevitable and necessary, to make it seem natural, to make it seem to be the will of God. Myths are designed to cut off debate, to end the conversation, to win the argument by sleight of hand.

When I was in seminary, long ago during the last century, we were deep in a debate about the place of women in the life and ministry of the church. Traditional notions were being challenged by second-wave feminists. Our seminary had a few of them, including, eventually, me. They brought questions not only about the authority of women in the church but also about the use of gendered language, not only to describe people, but even to describe God. The traditionalists used this story to defend their position. God had clearly placed men in authority over women. Look at Genesis Two. God created the man, placed him in the Garden, and gave him the job of naming all the animals. God gave him the one rule, that is, that he could eat any fruit except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then God made the woman. Adam was responsible for telling her the rule. Adam was clearly in charge and, when he let Eve lead in the next chapter, things went badly wrong. This is how stories get myth-used. 

Feminism in theology brought new insights in biblical studies. This story was certainly on their radar. They noted the rather odd description of Eve’s creation: she comes from Adam’s body. In fact, the story plays on the Hebrew words for man and woman. Man is ish and woman is ishah. Ishah is really just ish with the feminine ending on it, but the teller of this story says instead that ishah is ish with the directional suffix ah, so that ishah rather than just being the feminine form of ish, now means “from the man.” Nice trick.

Of course, one of the things that the Garden of Eden story undertook to explain was why it was that men were in charge. The story could simply have said that men were stronger than women (quite often true) and were quite able to force them into obedience. This was probably pretty close to the historically accurate fact. But that wouldn’t have been enough. A myth wants to show that the present is what is supposed to be, not just how it turned out. Especially in view of the fact that women have one power that men do not and cannot have: women give birth. Without that power, the human enterprise goes nowhere. 

So just saying that men are in charge because they forced the women to obey them seems a rather thin reason. So the story does what myths do: it myth-represents reality; it turns reality upside down to present how things are as if they were completely natural. In this case, we have men claiming priority because Adam gave birth to Eve, when we all know very well that men do not give birth to women; women give birth to men. The story is making a deliberate myth-take. And that’s how it works.

These days the story of Adam and Eve has been trotted out to defend a particular notion of marriage. The argument is framed in this way: It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The biblical view of marriage, the argument says, is marriage between one man and one woman. This is another myth-take: there is no one biblical model of marriage. In some cases, a marriage of one man and two or more women was not only tolerated but commanded by God. At very least we would have to say that, if the biblical notion of marriage is one man and one woman, neither the Hebrews nor God took that biblical notion very seriously.  The Hebrews told the story of Adam and Eve well aware that there were models of marriage that they themselves participated in. But they told the story the way it is because the story is concerned with beginnings. In the story the whole world is virtually empty and is conceived as a home for people. Naturally its concern is with reproduction, with being fruitful and multiplying, so there is a man and a woman and they stand for all men and all women in whatever marital configurations they might be found. Men and women are to make sure that the world is populated. There are 7,300,000,000 of us now.[2] I’d say, mission accomplished and then some.

The trouble with invoking this story as a myth, or maybe I should say, myth-using it, is that this is designed not to further a conversation, but to end it. We have so much work to do to continue to reinvent marriage, not just because marriage in our country now legally includes one man and another man, one woman and another woman, as well as one man and one woman, but because the challenges are greater than ever. 

At various times in history marriage has been primarily political, primarily economic, or some combination. Marriage has mostly been patriarchal. In the midst of all that some men and women managed to love each other. It’s a miracle, really. For us, now, marriage has become about love. That isn’t really very traditional, but it’s what we do. With reproduction and inheritance demoted as motives and reasons for marriage, there really is nothing to prevent these very untraditional combinations. When it comes to love, straight couples have no particular advantage over gay or lesbian couples. Myth-using Genesis won’t change that.

My recommendation is that we not try. In the meantime we have marriage in three basic configurations. Those of us who have decided to live in marriage have plenty of work to do. The good news is that we will increasingly have two new groups of married folks to consult about what is working and what isn’t. While we’re doing that, my hope is that our denomination will eventually catch up with us.

For now I’ve come to the end of this story of stories about beginnings. The story of Adam and Eve must be tired, from all the work that it has had to do. It’s time to give it a rest. 

[1] Proverbs 8:22a.

[2] "World Population Clock."

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A Call to Repentance (Mark 1:14-15; Pentecost 15; September 6, 2015)

A Call to Repentance

Mark 1:14-15
Pentecost 15
September 6, 2015

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

Let me tell you a story,  and not a particularly pleasant one.  Just so you know.

For convenience’s sake I’ll say that  the story begins in Philadelphia in 1787  in a Methodist church called St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church.   This was just three years after the formation  of the Methodist Episcopal Church  on Christmas Day in Baltimore.  There was a sizable body of free African Americans  living in Philadelphia  and some of them,  including the Revs. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones,  both of whom had been ordained as deacons  by Francis Asbury,  were members of St. George’s.  These African Americans had been attracted  by the simple good news proclaimed by Methodist preachers,  and especially by their insistence  that God’s grace was freely available to all without exception,  regardless of their church membership,  their social status  or their race.  It was an inclusive gospel  and they responded gladly.

Perhaps they expected that  the mostly white congregation of St. George’s  would live up to the promise implicit in its preaching.  But that’s not what happened.

At first they sat where they pleased in the sanctuary of St. George’s,  but then the Trustees began to segregate them.  First they were required to sit near the walls,  rather than in the center of the nave.  Then, when their numbers grew,  a gallery was built in the back of the church  and they were told that they must sit in those seats.  They had already been required to receive Communion last,  after the white people had their turn.  Revs. Allen and Jones were not allowed to preach to whites.  They bore with these indignities and slights,  what some people today refer to as “micro-aggressions,”  part of the cost of being black in the United States.

One day Absalom Jones  (who later became the first black Episcopal priest in the United States)  and William White were kneeling during a prayer meeting,  kneeling with other (white) members of the church.  A Trustee told them they were not allowed to kneel where they were,  but had to go to the gallery.  When they refused, the Trustee returned with a colleague  and began to physically remove them from the building.

Richard Allen and the other African American members of St. George’s  walked out,  never to return.  They met separately for several years.  They asked the Conference for a preacher,  but none was sent.  After several years,  they decided to resign their memberships in St. George’s  and build their own building.  The pastor in the meantime decided  that the root of the problem was that  the African Americans were refusing to keep to their vows  and if they resigned he would have their names read aloud  and they would be expelled. 

Accordingly, the African Americans from St. George’s built their own church, Bethel AME, in 1794.  Still for a time they tried to get preachers from the Conference,  to no avail.  Similar stories had played out in Methodist Episcopal churches  in other cities. 

Finally, in 1821 Rev. Allen organized  the African Methodist Episcopal Church  together with other African American bodies  at the fringes of Methodism in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas.  They planted AME churches up and down the eastern seaboard,  including one in Charleston, South Carolina.

From the very beginning of our denomination’s history,  black Methodists found it impossible  to follow a path of discipleship to Jesus  in congregations unwilling to embrace them  as brothers and sisters in one family of God  and as equal members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  Now, I don’t know that the Trustees were racists  in the way that we usually mean that word.  I’m sure they were nice folks,  good folks.  They might well have sincerely believed that it was better,  less distracting for both white and black folks,  if they sat and knelt separately.  So they had a rule and,  when it came to Rev. Jones and Mr. White,  they were simply acting to enforce the rules,  because the rules, you know, are important  and no one should break the rules.  So Rev. Jones and Mr. White were not removed because they were black;  they were removed because they broke the rules.

Let’s fast forward to the 1930s.  Ecumenism and talks of church mergers were in the air.  The Methodist Episcopal Church  had suffered its own slavery-related split in 1848.  The Methodist Episcopal Church (South) was the result.  But it seemed like time to bury the hatchet.  The talks were going well.  A major sticking point was a large number  of African American Methodist Episcopal churches in the South.  They were typically, but not always, in their own annual conferences.  If the churches merged,  then there was a possibility that  white conferences would have black bishops  or, even worse, that white congregations would have black pastors.  The southern church would not abide this. 

They proposed that,  between the annual conference and the general church,  there be another layer of organization called the jurisdiction.  Jurisdictions would elect and appoint bishops to annual conferences.  There would be five geographical jurisdictions  and a Central Jurisdiction composed  of African American annual conferences.  To our everlasting shame,  the white northern church regarded this as an acceptable price  (for African American Methodists to pay)  for church union.  This how it happened when the Methodist Church was formed in 1939.

If we imagine that this sort of racism,  again, as we understand the term,  was confined to the South,  then we will have to explain why,  in the North Central Jurisdiction,  the first black bishop wasn’t elected until 1964  and, when elected, was refused  by every annual conference in the jurisdiction.  Iowa blinked first and that is how we received Bishop James S. Thomas.  Apparently the experience wasn’t so bad,  since of the six bishops we have had since then,  the last three have been African Americans.

So, a happy ending, right?  No more racism in the United Methodist Church, right?  At least in Iowa, right? 

That fails to explain why appointments of racial minority pastors  are still often resisted by our congregations.  It fails to explain why,  when our Annual Conference has committed itself  to finding “new people in new places,”  the Hispanic/Latino Ministries Standing Committee struggles  to keep its very modest budget from getting axed.

Even in the church, our church,  there is racism, ugly and pernicious. 

But right there I have to pause,  because that’s a red flag word.  When we hear the word racism we think  of uneducated, Confederate flag waving white folks using the n-word.  And, to be sure, there are such people.  There are people like Dylann Roof,  the North Carolina man who walked  into a Bible study at Emanuel AME church  in Charleston, South Carolina,  talked with people there,  and then killed nine of them.  He’s what a racist looks like to us,  or at least what we think a racist should look like.

But stopping people like Roof won’t get rid of racism,  because racism is built into our shared life  in more ways than I have time to recount this morning.  It’s reflected in the higher arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing rates  suffered by blacks over whites  for crimes that are committed at the same rate.  It’s reflected in the informal red lines  drawn around high-African American neighborhoods.  It’s reflected in the fact that  an African American man with a clean record and a college degree  has the same chance of being unemployed  as a white high school dropout with a criminal record.  Its reflected in the higher rate of school suspensions  for black and Latino students  than for blacks for the same offenses.  Remember that even a single suspension  doubles a person’s chances of dropping out.

Racism isn’t just built into our institutions;  it’s a part of our language and thought.  A white man who kills nine people in a church  with the intent to terrorize all African Americans  is described as a “troubled loner”  not a terrorist.  The term terrorist is reserved for people with brown skin.  We imagine that most people on welfare are black.  We see black men as scary  and violence against them as justified. 

The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church  have called for this day of  “Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism.”  I am especially inclined to heed their call  because of the shared history of our two denominations.  If we had listened to Richard Allen’s grievances so long ago,  their history and ours would have been different.  Perhaps even our country might have had a different history.

It was a time when the Spirit called to us,  “The time is fulfilled,  and the kingdom of God has come near;  repent, and believe in the good news.”  We didn’t listen then,  but now is another such time.  Racism is no part of God’s dream,  whether the overt racism of a Dylann Roof  or the subtle racism ground into the pores of our cultural skin.  But God’s dream has come near in the Bishop’s call.  It’s time for repentance.  And it’s up to us.  Racism is a system that whites put together for our benefit  and it is a system that we will have to dismantle.  None of it will be easy,  but there is one thing especially that won’t help: guilt. 

When someone says racism,  we white folks either start feeling guilty  or we start getting angry  because we think someone wants us to feel guilty.  Both that anger and that guilt are ways we have  of avoiding dealing with a racist present  and they aren’t helpful;  they don’t move us forward.

In fact, repentance isn’t about feeling guilty.  Jesus wasn’t asking anyone to feel anything.  He was asking them to change,  to change their ways of thinking and acting,  their ways of relating to each other and to the world.  There might or might not be feelings along the way,  but they were not and are not the point.  The point is change.

That’s not easy for nice white folks living  in a segregated community like ours.  I don’t mean to suggest that someone set out  to keep our community white,  but by whatever accidents and/or incidents of history  for all intents and purposes it is nearly all white.  We live segregated lives  so we don’t spend a lot of time with African Americans  or any other racial or ethnic minorities  whether long-time Americans or recent arrivals or visitors.  All the worse because our children have grown up  with a sense of the world that does not correspond to the real world.  Our responsibilities toward them are enormous. 

But first we have so much to learn ourselves.  Fortunately for us, we like to learn.  We just need to turn our love of learning  in the direction of learning uncomfortable things.  We can read.  We can put Ta-Nehisi Coates’s  Between the World and Me on our reading list, or, for the even more ambitious,  Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life,  by Karen and Barbara Fields.  We can read and hear testimony  about what life is like in the United States  for African Americans and others  and, even more importantly, we can believe them.  It’s a start, anyway,  one that would make a huge difference in time.  It’s a first step toward the change of mind and life needed  if we are to trust the good news that God’s dream has indeed come near.

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What Doesn’t Kill Us... (Matthew 6:7-9a, 13; Pentecost 14; August 30, 2015)

What Doesn’t Kill Us...

Matthew 6:7-9a, 13
Pentecost 14
August 30, 2015

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

I’ve never really stopped wrestling with this text. I learned it as, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I struggled right from my Confirmation days: We ask not to lead us into temptation. Does that mean that God would? Why would God do that?

If it is God who leads us into temptation, isn’t God at least partially responsible for the results? When I leave my bird feeders out overnight and they are raided by our local posse of raccoons, they have acted as their nature dictates. I must reluctantly admit— as my sister the raccoon rehab-er argues— that I have only myself to blame. If you put a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of Brussels sprouts side-by-side on the kitchen counter, told the kids, “Eat all the Brussels sprouts you want, but don’t touch the cookies,” and left for the evening, would you be shocked, angry and disappointed when you returned to find a full bowl of sprouts and a plate with only a few cookie crumbs? Yet when God planted a garden and put a man and a woman in it and told them, “You can eat the fruit of this tree, but don’t you eat from this one,” God is surprised at the outcome.

I suppose it makes a difference that the word we learned as “temptation” translates a word perhaps better translated as “testing.” Testing is no one’s idea of fun, but tests are a part of our world. Tests are gate-keepers. Do you to drive a car? Take a written test and then a road test. Do you want to be a lawyer? Take the bar exam. Do you want to go to college? Take the ACT and the SAT and some AP tests.

I had hoped to be done with tests when I finished my comprehensive examinations for my doctorate. After all, it’s in the name, comprehensive, isn’t it? But now I find I have other tests to take: blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and every middle-aged man’s favorite: the PSA. We’re familiar with tests and testing.

The trouble is that sometimes testing looks an awful lot like temptation. When Jesus was led or driven into the desert by the Spirit to what we call the “temptation in the wilderness,” in Matthew, Mark and Luke this same word is used again.

Mark doesn’t tell us what was on the test that Jesus took, but Matthew and Luke do. “Turn these stones into bread.” It must have been enticing after forty days of fasting. Shortcuts to success like overthrowing the Roman Empire by becoming a cosmic emperor or dazzling the crowd into allegiance with special effects must have been more than test problems with right or wrong answers— they were, well, temptations.

So our prayer seems to be to be spared the path that Jesus walked. This seems odd, since we who pray this prayer are followers of Jesus who, by definition, walk his path.

That may not matter anyway, since this prayer goes largely unanswered, which may be the hardest test of all.

We are, in fact, tested or tempted all the time. We are constantly confronted with choices between the better but harder path and one that is easier but less just. We visit a city and walk around the derelict lives that have washed up on the sidewalks and doorways. We come and home and divide the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor. We avoid genuine conversations with people who disagree with us. We snub some kids because our friends snub them, too. We keep silence when someone makes a racist comment or tells a gay-bashing joke.

Or maybe you aren’t like me and you chose the better path in all these choices. But even so you must have lingered just a little over your choices. You must in short have been tempted.

So here we are, in the midst of testing or temptation or whatever you’d like to call it. That’s the very place we had prayed not to be let to.

We pray to be delivered from evil. Or maybe it’s the “evil one,” you-know-who, he-who-must-not-be-named. Does it make it easier to imagine that our testing isn’t God’s doing, but the work instead of the “evil one.”  Does it matter that God doesn’t test us directly, but delegates or sub-contracts instead? I’ve never thought so, but perhaps you do and you can straighten me out later.

So, when we pray as Jesus taught us, we find that our prayer not to be led into temptation is frequently unanswered. Hmm.

Of course, that is no different that the other five requests in this prayer. Is God’s name hallowed? Are we living yet in God’s dream? Is God’s will being done? Do we have our daily bread? Are we free yet from the debt regime? Neither are we spared from testing.

So here is our prayer, the one that Jesus gave us, the one we pray as Jesus taught us, but it goes mostly unanswered. This confuses us. Why should we go on praying “as Jesus taught us” if it doesn’t work?

That is how we measure things, evaluate things: by how they work. If we have a computer that doesn’t boot or a car that doesn’t start, we get it fixed and, if we can’t get it fixed, we replace it with one that works. If we have a toy, a yo-yo, say, and we can’t get it to work, we set it aside pretty quickly. “It sounds great, but it doesn’t work,” is a good way to kill an idea.

And yet, we keep praying this prayer that (mostly) doesn’t work. To be sure, some of us have given it up. Some of us have said to ourselves, “Well, if it doesn’t work I’m going to stop praying it. I’ll find another prayer or a different God, or no God at all.” I can’t fault the logic of those who decide to quit praying in the midst of this prayer’s massive failure.

But the rest of us keep praying it. Maybe we keep praying hoping that this time will be different, that we’ll say, “Amen,” this morning and we’ll open our eyes and this world will have changed and no one will be hungry and no one will stagger under an inhuman burden of debt and God’s dream will be here and our own troubled dreams will have come to an end.

Or maybe we keep praying because we’re just too stubborn to quit. Two thousand years we’ve been praying. More, actually, a lot more, since this is a very Jewish prayer and Jesus really didn’t invent Jewish prayer. He only focused and distilled it into this essential prayer. More than two thousand years, then, that we’ve been praying. Why stop now? Why not outlast God? We can try, anyway!

Or maybe we’re missing something about prayer. In our technological age, when the worst thing you can say about something is, “It doesn’t work,” we may perhaps be excused for treating prayer as one more technology for getting what we want. Turn the key and the engine starts and your car is ready to take where you need to go. Say the prayer, perhaps in a certain posture, using a certain tone of voice, with the heart and mind focused in a certain way, and an answer should pop out, the answer we want, or at least the answer we should want. And what desires are any more worthy of being granted than those that Jesus himself has authorized?

But maybe we misunderstand what prayer is. Maybe it’s not a technology for getting what we want, even if we meet all the conditions.

No, maybe prayer is speech that is less like, “Please do the dishes,” than it is like “I love you.” Sometimes speech is not about making something happen, but about telling a truth that must be told. It’s not about dirty dishes— or clean dishes, for that matter. It’s about affirming that, in a world of dishes that need washing, bills that must be paid, and overgrown lawns, there is a foundational truth and the name of that truth is love. Carol and have been telling each other that for over four decades and we’re not going to stop. Does it “work”? What does that even mean, anyway? I have no idea. It’s just the truth and it’s a truth needs to be said.

Maybe praying as Jesus taught us is that kind of speech. It’s not the speech of submitting a request to some divine bureaucracy and waiting for the wheel to turn so we can get our application approved. Prayer is truth-telling. The truth of this prayer is that all is not well with our lives nor with the world in which we live. Some of us are hungry. All of us live in a world in which it is possible to eat well or to sleep well but not both. Some of us are crushed by hopeless debt. All of us live in a world of lenders and debtors where human relations are defined and quantified by principal and interest. Some of us are being tested past the breaking point, what engineers call “tested to destruction.” All of us face the choice at every moment of our lives between justice and convenience.

And none of this is as it should be. We know it; it’s the truth. And we direct this speech toward God because we want the world to be different and because God wants the world to be different. We long for justice and God longs for justice. We speak from the depth of our hearts to the depth of God’s heart. Whatever it is that prevents the changes we long for, these things are true and we and God must speak them to each other.

Will it work? What does that even mean, anyway? Does that even matter?

We say these things simply because they are true and because we need a changed world if we are going to be fully human and because our relationship with God is based on mutual truth-telling. That is the only rule that governs our relationship with God. We listen for God’s truth and we tell God our truth. And that, finally, is what it means to pray as Jesus taught us.

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Debt Relief (Thirteen Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 6:7-9a, 12; August 23, 2015)

Debt Relief

Thirteen Sunday after Pentecost
Matt 6:7-9a, 12
August 23, 2015

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

When it comes to the Lord’s Prayer we Methodists—like the Church of England before us—trespass rather than debt. Presbyterians debt and so do Congregationalists. When we get together with our neighbors across the street we either each do our own thing, in which case they have to wait for us to catch up, or we compromise and agree together to sin instead.

I have joked that Methodists trespass instead of debting because we will forgive trespasses, but we won’t forgive debts. But it’s not as if Presbyterians take this very literally. I can’t image a group less likely to forgive a debt than lowland Scots. They point with pride to the biblical basis for their version, but they live with their choice by spiritualizing debt until it has nothing to do with mortgages or credit card statements.

They say, and we are quick to agree, that “debts” refers to the guilt we have piled up by our sins. We are praying that God will overlook our sins and let bygones be bygones, because, Look! that’s how we are treating each other.

I could certainly preach this and it would be enough of a challenge for all of us. We’d like a clean slate with God. But we find it hard to let go of an injury done to us. The Lord’s Prayer holds up the prospect that we will get from God as we have given to others. It might be time, in Taylor Swift’s words, to “shake it off” and let go of our grudges and score-keeping. It is harmful to us and each other to hold on to old hurts.

I think the Lord’s Prayer can mean that. But I think it means something else first. Just as the clause, “give us this day our daily bread,” means first of all real bread for real bodies, so the clause that asks for forgiveness first of all means the forgiveness of debt, material and monetary debt, before it means anything else.

The abolition of debt as a way of relating to others lay at the heart of Jesus’ message. I am convinced of it. Of course many if not most of you are not so convinced. I don’t imagine that I’m going to change that in the next ten minutes, so I’m going to limit myself to planting a seed and whether it takes root and grows I will leave in other hands.

The first thing that points me toward debt relief in the Lord’s Prayer, other than the fact that the language is the language of debt relief, is the fact that Jesus did not make this up. The laws of Jubilee were part of his Jewish inheritance. In Jewish thinking, in the prophets and in the Torah, vast social inequality was deeply wrong, a corrupted and corrupting violation of the covenant. It was just plain wrong for some to have more and for others to have less. It was just plain wrong for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

At least in Israel's imagination in Israel everyone started out with an equal amount of wealth in the form of land for tilling and grazing. But you know how it is. Life doesn’t happen the same for everyone. One man lives a long life and has children who can keep the farm going. Another dies young, leaving a widow to raise her children while her neighbors scheme to get control of her land. Bad harvests and good harvests never happen the same to everyone. And, yes, some people work harder and make smarter decisions than others.

Even starting in the same place, the fortunes of one family will rise and another’s will fall. But at some point wealth inequality becomes socially intolerable. It can only go so far until folks show up at the laird’s house with torches and pitchforks. Popular uprisings very often begin with the destruction of the records of debt, whether these records were written on clay tablets, papyri, or leather-bound journals.

General debt forgiveness was an ancient middle eastern strategy for keeping peasants from getting rebellious, especially when times were hard. Debt relief was used to ease social tension.

Israel’s law went a step further. Instead of waiting for inequality to become intolerable, it required a periodic “reset” of wealth. Every fifty years there was a Year of Jubilee. If land had been sold to raise money or settle a debt, it would be returned to its original owners. If someone had been sold into slavery, they were released and could go home again, free. In theory at least, Jubilee would prevent permanent classes of the rich or the poor. In theory. We don’t know how often or even whether years of Jubilee were actually observed. We can imagine that rich people looked for ways to postpone or eliminate the Jubilee altogether, an ancient case of the rich using their power to change the rules of the game in their favor.

Still, Jubilee held up the ideal of economic equality as God’s expectation for the covenant community. The theme runs through the prophets. Jesus invoked Jubilee when he announced in Luke that God had sent him “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus told parables about debts, the best-known of which is the Parable of the Unjust Overseer in which an overseer has an enormous debt forgiven by his master but then refuses to forgive the much smaller debts owed to him by his fellow servants.

The debt regime was crushing the people Roman Palestine in Jesus’ day. Part of his ministry was to undermine that regime. Christians since then, though, have worked to shore that regime back up, beginning with the biblical text itself. Luke for instance has “forgive us our sins (not debts), for we ourselves have forgiven everyone indebted to us,” in its version of the Lord’s Prayer, a little move away from debt.

I have what is called A Reader’s Edition of the Greek New Testament. It footnotes short definitions of the less common words of the text. This lets someone like me with a working knowledge of Greek read without a great deal of flipping back and forth in a dictionary. For the word that means “what someone owes” it offers “wrongdoing” while a line later it has “debtor” for “someone who owes.”

The notes of my trusty New Oxford Annotated Bible tell me that “debts” is a metaphor for “sins,” and sends me for proof to the Parable of the Unjust Overseer, pointing me for proof that debt is a metaphor to a parable which it asserts is about debt as a metaphor!

Our reading from the Common English Bible had, “Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you, just as we also forgive those who have wronged us.” The idea of debt has disappeared altogether! A lot of people have gone to a lot of effort to make sure that we don't get this right!

Our tradition resists the idea that “debts” means “debts” for a simple reason: it doesn’t want to offend the rich. But just because our tradition has gotten cozy with the rich doesn’t mean that Jesus did, or has. Jesus’ attitude may be an embarrassment to the tradition, but I think we are still obligated to remember what he said, not what we wish he had said. When we pray “as Jesus taught us” we are praying for the downfall of the debt regime.

I’m not sure I can even imagine what that would look like, any more than we can imagine what the rest of God’s dream would be like fully fleshed-out among us. I can point to some examples, though, some hints.

For example, when the Great Recession hit and the real estate markets tanked in late 2007 and early 2008, there was a wave of foreclosures that lasted for the next five or six years.  Over four million families had their homes taken away from them.[1] The lenders were rescued; the home-owning families were not. That’s the debt regime at its most malevolent.

Right now there are 1.3 trillion dollars in student debt. Students and their parents believed the current version of the American Promise: If you go to college, study hard, and stay out of trouble, you will be able to get a good job that will support a comfortable standard of living for you and your family. The Promise neglects to mention two things: 1) There aren’t very many of those jobs, far fewer than the number of people who held up their end of the Promise; and, 2) unless you are rich you will have to borrow money to go to college. A lot of it. An average of more than $30,000 of it. Many people with student loans will still be paying them off in retirement. Student loans are very profitable and virtually risk-free for the banks. Our society has sold most of a generation of young people into debt slavery from which there will be no release, no Year of Jubilee.

In the midst of examples like these, though, there have been occasional glimpses of hope, hints of Jubilee. Early Christian congregations used to collect money to buy their enslaved members’ freedom. So did pre-Civil War African American churches.

Recently, Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico, two former debt collectors, formed a company that buys medical debt that hospitals have labeled as uncollectable.  This is what debt collection companies do. They buy debt at pennies on the dollar and they collect and keep whatever they can. Only Ashton and Antico’s company buys the debts and then forgives them. They’ve managed to forgive four hundred thousand dollars of medical debt in the last year and hope to be able to forgive over seventeen million in the next year. That’s Jubilee for Paola Gonzalez, a 24-year old student with lupus who had a hospital debt of $950. Imagine her getting a call to tell her that her hospital bill had been settle and she owed no money!

Beyond that, life out of the debt regime is hard to picture, so much a part of daily life debt has become. Would our economy be able to operate without debt? Maybe not. If not, is that an indictment of Jubilee or of our system?

Maybe without debt our whole system would erupt in the sort of holy chaos out of which God’s dream emerges. Who knows? We will know that God’s dream is realized, that God’s will is done, that God’s name is made holy when debt is forgiven and the debt regime is no more. Until then, we’ll keep praying.

[1] "Home Foreclosure Statistics," *Statistic Brain*, 2014, http://www.statisticbrain.com/home-foreclosure-statistics/. Accessed August 22, 2015.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.