A Church with No Authority (Pentecost 19; World Communion Sunday; Exodus 1:8-14; 3:1-15; October 4, 2015)

A Church with No Authority

Pentecost 19
World Communion Sunday
Exodus 1:8-14; 3:1-15
October 4, 2015

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

There are some stories that are so powerful, so life-giving, so truth-generating, that we come back to them again and again. For the Jewish and Christian traditions, this is one of them. The story of Israel's oppressive life of slavery in Egypt and their deliverance from Egypt under Moses was a story that Israel told itself again and again. It is a classic myth: a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.

Of course, when I say that this story is a myth many people—and maybe some of you are among them—many people will hear that I'm saying that this story is false. But a myth is not a myth because it's false; a myth is a myth because of what it does, how it works and why it is told.

In choosing this story, Israel chose well. The pattern of oppressive slavery transformed into covenant freedom by the God who “[has] observed the misery of [the] people who are in Eygpt, [has] heard their cry...[who knows] their suffering...[and who has] come down to deliver...” became the pattern that Israel used to understand itself. It was the pattern to which they returned centuries later when they were in exile in Babylon. They reflected on their experience of exile by returning to and reworking their family story.

Centuries after that, the small band of the followers of a prophet from Galilee saw in their experience of Jesus' death and resurrection the pattern of the story of Exodus once again: Slavery/exile/death/Good Friday by the action of God yields to freedom/home-coming/resurrection/Easter.

So there's a lot at stake in this story, not just for the ancient Israelites in Egypt, or the exiled Judeans in Babylon, or even the early Christian movement, but for us. Our lives and our life together know those times of slavery/exile/death/Good Friday when only the God who sees, hears, knows, and comes down can bring us—quite aside from our own powers, abilities, or techniques—to freedom/home-coming/resurrection/Easter.

However much we are protected and sheltered, we are not immune. Slavery/exile/death/Good Friday affects us all. We may enjoy many forms of privilege. Take me for example: I am white, male, straight, born to middle-class parents in the United States, and highly educated (perhaps even too educated). All of that means that I play life, as I read in the comments of some blog, on its lowest possible difficulty setting. I'm not immune. I find a spot on my back and I want to see a doctor now. (I'm fine, by the way.) Or I have a lapse of memory so that I leave the grocery store with three bags of groceries and arrive at home with two and no idea of what happened and suddenly all my shapeless anxieties coalesce into one very specific terror from which none of my privilege and no amount of planning can possibly protect me.

A job is eliminated, or a marriage collapses under the strain of an economy that no longer works for most people and we find that it's Good Friday and we are in exile.

It happens to the church as well, as our models of ministry no longer gain traction in a changed culture. We knew what to do and we knew how to do it and seemingly overnight these things no longer “work” and we can't think of anything except to do harder what no longer works. The world around us changes and it no longer wants what we think we have to offer. The church, in short, finds itself in slavery/exile/death/Good Friday waiting for God to see, hear, know, and come down.

Nations, even nations like ours, go through exile and death as well. We find that we no longer command the respect abroad to which our sense of ourselves entitles us. We find that we no longer control the world's markets. Other nations openly reject our plans. Our friends lose the allegiance of their own people. And on top of all that, the course we have plotted for ourselves will, if we persist in it, end in making our world on unlivable place in the not so distant future.

What shall we offer to people and a world that has entered into slavery/exile/death/Good Friday? This story suggests that now, as before, we announce and proclaim the God who see, who hears, who knows, and who comes down to deliver. After all God sent Moses rather than speaking out of the blue. As Moses was sent so are we.

Naturally enough, though, like Moses, if we are going to announce freedom/home-coming/resurrection/Easter—news that seems unlikely at best and a world-class delusion at worst—we'd like to be able to have some authority, show a letter of introduction, or flash a badge...something!

But the story suggests that we have no such thing. Moses asks for God's name, so he will have an answer for the Israelites when they demand to know. And what does God say? “Tell 'em I am who I am.” That's no answer. It's a refusal to answer, as if God had just said, “My name is 'None of your business.” Moses is supposed to say, “'None of your business' has sent me.” I don't think that will get Moses very far. 

When Moses himself wants some evidence, some sign that he is on the right track, God tells him that the sign that will authorize his mission will come after the mission is already mostly done. “This shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” 

Moses has a mission, but he must execute this mission without any sign of authority that he can offer either to his people or even to himself.

We, like Moses, have little authority. If anyone is in doubt about that, tell me how the school system managed to schedule practices for middle school athletic teams on Wednesday afternoons over the objections of the churches. No, we have little authority.

Our mission is to announce the brutal reality of our world, to name it, to speak it out loud, to acknowledge it as the truth of our lives. Our mission is also to announce in the same breath that God has seen, has heard, knows, and has come down to overturn, to save, to bring to new life, to set free. We are to announce freedom/home-coming/resurrection/Easter to all, but especially to those whose lives have been made bitter with hard service because of the ruthlessness of the system of slavery/exile/death/Good Friday.

This is our mission for which the only sign of authority is that once God has acted, we will know that it is God who has acted in us and through us.

Perhaps that prospect is not very attractive. Why us, after all? I'm sure Moses had a few of those thoughts, but whatever he thought, whatever he said to God, it failed to deflect God's purpose.

We might as well make up our minds to embrace God’s purpose, because this is our story, this is our God, and this is our mission.

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.

A Wrestling People (Pentecost 18; Genesis 32:22-30; September 27, 2015)

A Wrestling People

Pentecost 18
Genesis 32:22-30
September 27, 2015

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

Long ago, when woolly mammoths still roamed the banks of the great inland sea that covered Iowa and I was a high school student, my most dreaded class was physical education. I was tall and skinny. Skinny, any way.

Of all the units in gym class my least favorite was wrestling. Long arms and legs with no muscle gave every opponent a mechanical advantage over me. Invariably a practice match involved my face being either mashed into the mat or shoved into my opponent's armpit.

So it surprises me that this passage is one of my favorites even though there is a wrestling match at its center. In my defense, it is a fascinating story.

Jacob's story began, as most of our stories do, at his birth. He was the second born of twins but when his brother Esau was born Jacob had a firm grip on Esau's heel. That's why they named him Jacob, “the grasper.”

Jacob was the class clown, a trickster. But that didn't make him immune to a trick or two himself. His uncle Laban talked him into working for seven years in exchange for his daughter Rachel, but substituted her sister Leah on the wedding night. So Jacob had to work for seven more years before he could marry Rachel.

He had, let’s call it, a troubled relationship was with his twin brother Esau. By taking advantage of his father Isaac's near blindness he cheated Esau out of his father's deathbed blessing. The brothers separated in anger, Esau swearing vengeance if they ever met again.

When our reading begins that meeting is about to happen. Esau is on his way. In spite of not having his father's blessing, life has been good to Esau. He has prospered. But Jacob is taking no chances. Jacob has asked Esau to meet him and has been sending him gifts, hoping to soften him up before the meeting.

Jacob has reached the Ford of the Jabbok and has sent the rest of his household ahead. Maybe for the first time in his life, Jacob is alone: alone with the desert darkness, alone with his conscience, alone with God.

This is when the wrestling match begins, the wrestling match between Jacob and...? Who exactly is Jacob's foe. It's hard to say. The passage says “a man” wrestled with him. Jacob says he has wrestled with God. Our tradition splits the difference and says that Jacob wrestled with an angel. I don't know. The story feels old to me, old enough that in an even older version, Jacob may have wrestled with a night demon that haunted the crossing of the Jabbok. This might explain the “man's” uneasiness as dawn approached. 

But who Jacob the grasper wrestled may matter less than how.  He wrestled and would not let go until he got a blessing. 
I’m sure Jacob would have preferred a shortcut to a blessing. It's in the nature of things, or so it seems, that we don't like a struggle. We want a shortcut, an easy path.

There is, for example, a kind of Christianity that offers a shortcut. All you have to do is to be sorry for your sins, believe Jesus died for your sins, and accept him as your Savior, and the God-, sin-, religion-issue is settled. No matter what happens, no matter what you do after that, you're going to heaven and that's what counts. Those who don't, aren't , and that's too bad for them, but we don't make the rules.

Such a simple answer to such a question, such a shortcut past the Christian life, has never been a part of our Methodist tradition. At its best our tradition has always had an element of moral struggle to it, a seriousness about our actions and about the condition of this world. In an earlier day we called it “going on to perfection,” peculiar language to be sure, and easy to misunderstand. A series of question on this theme is still put to our ordinands. Bishop Clymer, in a meeting with my class of deacons, put it this way: “If you are not going on to perfection, tell me just what is it you are going on to?”

By the power of God's love at work within us, we are perfectable. Or at least we can be better than we are. We can learn to love more as Jesus loved. And we are expected to wrestle for that for as long as it takes, for a night or for a lifetime. 

We live as Jesus' people in a broken world. We know God's dream of justice for our world. It is our part to wrestle to make a space for that dream and to keep on wrestling if it takes all night or a lifetime.

There are folks who want a quick fix for whatever is wrong in their lives. They want an Oprah solution. They want to be able to go to the self-help section of the nearest bookstore and find a book with the fix. They want to talk to their doctor today about the drug they saw advertised last night to see if it is right for them. Some skip their doctors and go straight to their unregistered free-lance pharmacist on the street.

But Jacob found it doesn't work that way. There is no quick fix. There is only the long struggle and the determination to hang on and never let go, if it takes all night or a lifetime.

The Bible gets dragged into this, too. There are lots of Christians who want a Bible with answers to their questions. Who is God? How can I get what I need from God? Who is in? Who is out? They want straight answers and rules that are clear.

But those of us who have shared Jacob's path and wrestled in the night watches by the Ford of the Jabbok know the Bible doesn't have many answers—and the answers it has aren't mostly to the questions we asked. Instead, it has questions for us for which we have no answers. The Bible is an invitation to a wrestling match that may last all night, or, more likely, a lifetime.

This business of being a follower of Jesus: it's hard! It's hard to be a faithful congregation, too. We want easy answers to our questions. You should see the Cokesbury display these days: rows upon rows of book that give seven steps to this and five principles of that, all offering shortcuts that skip the wrestling, skip the terrifying darkness by the Ford of the Jabbok, skip the face-to-face encounter with God that gives a Jacob the blessing of a changed name.

Jacob wrestled until dawn. The angel demanded that Jacob let go. Jacob refused. The angel dislocated Jacob's hip. Jacob still hung on. “Let go,” the angel demanded. “Not until you give me a blessing,” Jacob shot back. “What is your name?” the angels asked. “Jacob.” “Not any more. From now on you are not Jacob—the grasper—but Israel—the one who wrestles with God.” 

Jacob became Israel. He gave that name to his children. Paul gave the name to us. And that's who we are. We're not the saved, the chosen, the elect, the faithful, the superior, the holy, the ones who have the truth. We are the people who wrestle with God. It doesn't sound like much of a blessing. But don't underestimate how much of a blessing it is to know who we are, to know our true name. Jacob knew his true name from then on.

The first rays of sunlight broke over the horizon and night was banished once more from the Ford of the Jabbok, from the place where Jacob met God face-to-face and yet lived. The angel—or whatever it was—vanished.

And Jacob—no, it's Israel now—faced the sun, waded across the Jabbok, and set out limping to meet his brother.

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.