Credo: Who Is God? (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Exodus 3:1-15; June 17, 2018)

Credo: Who Is God?

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 3:1-15
June 17, 2018

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

Who is God? Now there's an ambitious question! Maybe I would have been better off to have asked the question next week with everything packed, my car running, ready to hotfoot it out of town before you had a chance to ask any questions.

How to begin...

I can say that my earlier attempts to find an answer to that question mostly involved what we in the "biz" call "doing theology." Part of the reason for requiring a seminary education for clergy is to train clergy as theologians, or at least to make a beginning. We were subjected to various courses in theology that broke it down into its parts: Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, eschatology, pneumatology, anthropology, and theology proper. Theology also got smuggled into courses on Church history, which was framed as a series of controversies, a series of heresies that were battled and defeated (sometimes in literal battles). We learned the general shape of what is acceptable and what is not in Christian thought. We learned about current schools of theological thinking. We found our favorite authors and stuck with them, defending them against all comers.

My mind and personality are suited to this sort of thing, so you can imagine that I did it pretty well. I still do.

But as comfortable and familiar as this path is to me, it has its limits. One of those limits is that doing theology is a matter of abstraction. We might start with the Bible, or, more accurately a small selection of texts from the Bible, and we make general statements about them. We move from the specific to the general. And this applies to the stuff of our lives as well as the stuff of the Bible. Take Karl Barth, one of the more famous theologians of the last century. You can read all thirty-one volumes of his Church Dogmatics and never discover what sort of a marriage he had or whether he liked children.

Theology may tell us about what God is and what God is not, but surprisingly tells us little about who God is. Theology can satisfy us intellectually and still leave us wanting something else.

So I'm not sure I'm even qualified to ask the question. Moses asked the question. He wanted to know God's name, something more than "the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Moses wants a name to give to the Israelites. He knows they will ask. And I suspect he knows why they will ask. Names are like handles that can be used to gain power. In some places in the world, no one's true name is ever uttered out loud. Instead they goes by a nickname, sometimes obscene, always an insult. In that way they are protected from spirits who would use the knowledge of their name to do them harm. Even we, if we are in a conversation in which someone knows our name, but we do not know theirs, feel ourselves at a disadvantage, as if we have given someone else power over us.

So Moses asked, "What is your name?" And God replied, "אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה," which translates to "I am what I am" or "I am who I am."

Traditionally, philosophically-minded theologians have interpreted this as meaning something like, "the One who has no source of existence beyond itself," or "the One who is not dependent on anyone else," or "the self-existent One." I can't blame theologians for this. Like the rest of us they are just trying to understand. They are just trying to get a handle on God. And that may be the problem, the same problem that the Israelites had. They are trying to get a handle on God, too. But God does not wish to be handled.

And that's why I think God response is something along these lines: "When the Israelites demand to know my name, tell them, 'You think you'll have some sort of leverage over me if you know my name? Well, nevermind what my name is! It's none of your business what my name is!' Tell them Nevermind sent you!"

What if I tried--what if we tried--living into the question of who God is without being motivated by any attempt to get a handle on God, but simply to know even as we are known, as Paul put it.

In the last few years I have found myself more and more wandering along the winding and criss-crossing paths of the Bible itself. There are, I testify, wonders to be seen. And in the dazzling details I glimpse hints, if not of God's name, then at least of who God might be known to be.

There is, of course, the next verse, the one after the one in which God skates around the question of God's name, the one in which God tells Moses God's name: "The Lord [that is, Yahweh], the God of your ancestors, Abraham's God, Isaac's God, and Jacob's God." Yahweh might be related in some way to the Hebrew for "I am." So something odd has happened, which to say the very least, is not at all unusual in the Bible. In one breath God has said in effect, I'm not going to tell you my name. In the very next God says, Oh, by the way, my name is Yahweh. But that isn't where I went in pursuit of an answer to the question of who God is.

Where I went is this: We are used to thinking about God in the declarative sentences and philosophical propositions of the theologians. We don't necessary know the lingo, but we think that this is how it ought to be done. But the Bible doesn't present God very often as the object of theology. Instead the Bible presents God as a character in a story. In fact the Bible presents God as the leading character in the story that it contains.

In the story I've chosen for today's text we have, in a way, God's self-introduction to the Israelites after a considerable period of absence. The absence is not explained. It's just there. Abraham had a God. Isaac had a God. Jacob had a God. Joseph and his brothers had a God, the same God as their father, grandfather, and great grandfather. In that story Joseph and his brothers God arranged for them to settle in Egypt as guests of Pharaoh and so escaped a regional famine.

But then God seems to have disappeared. A different Pharaoh emerges, one who didn't know Joseph or his brothers, one for whom the Israelites were just a subject people the labor of whose bodies could be commodified and exploited. Pharaoh enslaved them. But God is absent. God even disappeared from the memory of the Israelites; they have forgotten. They have become just another band of miserable slaves. When they cry out, they don't even have an address toward which to direct their prayers.

But that doesn't seem to matter to God. Whatever God's absence meant, it had not meant that God had ceased to notice what happened to the Israelites. As God said to Moses, "I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain."

There is more. Not only has God noticed, God is now on the scene to deliver the Israelites. God has not forgotten the covenant that even Israel can no longer remember.

"I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them."

God has seen, God has heard, God knows, God has come down to deliver, God has come to bring them to a good land.

In the story, we know God as one who sees, who hears, who pities, and who comes down to save. It's a story to be sure. We could say that it's just a story, only a story. We could say that, except that, since we are Jesus-followers, we are part of that "just a story." We are on the inside of the story. We are characters in this story in which God is also a character. Inside this story we can never be sure that God will not see. We cannot rule out the possibility that God will hear. We cannot categorically state that God does not pity the oppressed. And so we cannot ignore the possibility that God will come down to save.

Does this answer the question of who God is? Will you accuse me of a sleight of hand if I say, Yes, it does? I haven't proven anything, even that God exists. But if this story is any part of our story, then that changes things.

We don't know that God will act this way in similar circumstances. But God has done it before. So neither can we know that God will not act in these ways again. We hope that God will, because there are people who are being oppressed now, people who have fallen into Pharaoh's hands, people who had fled life-threatening conditions in their home for the hope of refuge in another land and who have been denied that hope. But not simply denied it. They have been arrested and charged with crimes. And if that were not bad enough, their children have been taken from them, two thousand or more of them taken and held hostage. Pharaoh has never dared to be so callous and cruel and cold.

But this is acceptable because Pharaoh has decreed it. Pharaoh imagines that there is no higher authority who can disagree. Pharaoh even imagines that he may invoke God as the authority behind his decree. Pharaoh imagines that he can carry out a cruel and callous policy and claim that he ought to be obeyed because God says so. I don't know what story Pharaoh thinks he's in. But it's not our story.

In our story there is One who notices such things, and who has a record of responding savingly and sometimes savagely. for the sake of two thousand underage hostages. The God of Abraham cannot be counted on to be absent. When the God of Abraham is present, the oppressed go free and the oppressors answer for their crimes. And that's my answer to the question. This is Who God Is.

If Pharaoh is sleeping well these days, it's only because he doesn't understand the situation.

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.

Credo: What Is the Bible? (2nd Sunday after Pentecost; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; June 3, 2018)

Credo: What Is the Bible?

2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
June 3, 2018

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

I've always been partial to this text of Scripture. I guess it's because of the solemnity and power of the rite that lies at the center of it. At the first harvest, the people of Israel are to take some of the harvest in a basket and they are to go before Yahweh and present the basket to the priest. They are to declare to God and God's priest:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me."

We recognize pretty quickly that this is not the one-off that it appears to be. There are signs in the text that it is meant, not just for that first generation that entered the land of promise, but for all generations to come. Each year they are to present an offering of the first harvest and make this statement as if they were their own ancestors. Or rather, they take their ancestors' words and make them their own. In much the same way that, when we break bread at the table and use the words that Jesus gave us to use, in a liturgical sense we become the followers of Jesus eating with him when he broke the bread and blessed the cup. Under the pressure of these words, time ceases to be a barrier and becomes instead the carrier of a deep connection.

The story at the center of these two rituals is powerfully told, powerfully reenacted. And we are bound ever more deeply into the story itself, the story of the God who hears the cry of distress, who sees our struggles, and who comes to bring us out with a "mighty hand and an outstretched arm."

So that they would never lose touch with the story of origins, the story that makes them who they are, this isn't a suggestion. It is God's commandment forever. The text is story. The text is liturgy. The text is commandment. I love this text for its layered effect.

I've alluded to how the text plays with time, but there is more even than that happening here. The story is set in the time just before Israel enters the land of promise. Since their marvelous deliverance from slavery in Egypt, they have wandered for more than a generation. They have wandered for so long that there are only three people left alive who remember the Exodus: Joshua, Caleb, and Moses himself. The Israelites are no longer connected to those events by personal memory; their only connection now is the collective memory of story.

But the text was not written then. No doubt the core of the story goes back to distant memory, But it was not written in this form until centuries later during Judah's exile in Babylon. And the story was written in this way to speak to the circumstances of Judah's exile. Once again, God's people found themselves living as aliens in a strange place--Babylon this time instead of Egypt. Once again they found themselves "few in number." The audacity of this text lies in its confidence that the pattern of Israel's past is the pattern of Judah's future. Exiled Judah will--like enslaved Israel--once again become "a great nation, mighty and populous." Once again, God will see "[their] affliction, [their] toil, and [their] oppression." Once again, God will bring them out with "signs and wonders." Once again, God will bring them to "a land flowing with milk and honey."

When Jesus read this text, how could he not have thought of his own beloved people and their subjugation by Rome? When our friends in Potrerillos read this text, how can they avoid claiming this hope for themselves as they struggle against the dehumanizing and culture-destroying forces of global capitalism? When our African-American sisters and brothers read this text, how can they not claim the dream of the day when they will be free from the official violence that targets them in particular?

You see how this works? How a simple story like this has power not only to celebrate deliverance in the past, but to unsettle its readers. Just when we thought it was safe to stop hoping, just when we thought it was wise to give in to the world as it is, this story congers hope out of nothing. It foments rebellion against a world that has commodified us as just one more resource to use up and discard. As Walter Brueggemann suggests, "[It] funds the post-modern imagination." And the imagination is where every revolution begins.

It is, I am convinced, this matter of layers within the text that gives the Bible its power to transform first the world of "the imaginary," then the world of social relations, and finally the physical planet itself.

I have always thought the Bible was important and powerful. There was once a time when I thought this was the case because it was "inerrant," that is, that God so guided its production that it was preserved from all errors. Oh, there were the marks of human personality on its pages. I wasn't so foolish as to believe that its human writers were merely stenographers, writing down God's words. But I believed that each part of it was true, in the factual and historical sense of the word.

I changed my mind over the years. It's hard to say precisely when or precisely why. I had a growing sense that treating the Bible this way was actually disrespectful. It became a collection of theological data that could be cataloged and manipulated. It became an armory stockpiled with ammunition for doing battle with the unbeliever and the heretic. The text became flat and uninteresting. Gradually, I became horrified by what I and others did to the Bible in the name of defending it.

When I decided that the Bible didn't need defending, the texts started to come alive. The Bible was filled with the hopes and dreams, the sufferings and disappointments, of real people who lived their lives in times that were both like and unlike mine. Historical background began to become even more important to me.

The Bible went from being a book to being a library. Like any good library, there were books about different things, by different authors. Each of them displayed a unique outlook on the world. Each of them was shot through with their own personality. When I read them carefully, I realized that sometimes the writers disagreed with each other. That realization freed me from having to force their disagreements into harmony. I could then admit that, when Paul says that works without faith is dead and James says that faith without works is dead, they are not really saying the same thing. And, as a reader, I did not have to bring them into harmony. Both of them were trying to give faithful testimony to their own experience and understanding.

The next realization was that even the individual writings of one author contain internal disagreements. Or another way to say that is to say that each text contains multiple voices. This is especially true of writings like Deuteronomy that were produced over a period of time by many writers and incorporated material from many sources. I knew these things when I came here eight years ago.

What I realized in the course of the time that I have been here is that it is more useful to image the Bible not as a single book or even a library of books. I have said that the Bible is a conversation, but even that image is lacking. The Bible is more like a conference. In the academic version of a conference there are speeches that are given to the whole body. There are question and answer sessions and they are often lively. There are meetings of smaller groups. Panels present papers. Questions are asked and answered or evaded. Debates break out, sometimes the continuation of long-term disagreements. People stay after to engage in further conversation with the presenters of papers. There are side conversations about all sorts of things, two or three people with their heads together over cups of coffee. You can't hear what they are saying, but they are all animated with vigorous gestures and head-shaking or nodding. There are others whose conversations are with authors of the books they are skimming through at the book sale tables. In some of these conversations the speakers are discovering unsuspected areas of agreement. In others, speakers are trying to clarify just what it is that they disagree about. There is a surprising amount of mutual respect. Even students with their less nuanced and more naive questions or assertions are given the space to speak their minds.

This is how I imagine the biblical conversation. And, I'll add this: when we take the Bible seriously, when we listen in that conversation, when we really try to understand, in the process we join the conversation. This really changes how I read the Bible. It's not like the old days when learning was mostly by rote. I don't read the Bible to find out what I'm supposed to think or do. I read the Bible to be a part of the its conversation. Sometimes I just listen. But if you have ever met me, you know I can't stay quiet for long. I ask a question. I talk back. I push. Sometimes I even agree. As in the best conversations, sometimes new knowledge arises, not just new to me, but new, period.

It's not that I've had to learn a new thing in order to read the Bible this way. I was actually doing this all along, but I was doing it in the background, all the while thinking that I wasn't supposed to be doing it. It turns out I was wrong to think that I was wrong.

We've been taught for all our lives that the Bible as "God's Word" is just supposed to be accepted and believed. I think we've been wrong about that in the church. In the first place, nowhere does the Bible call itself "the Word of God." There are bits and pieces that are described as "the word of Yahweh." They are found in the prophets mostly. Jesus Christ is described as "the Word of God." But Bible is not.

We could say then that at least the parts marked "the world of the Yahweh" should be obeyed without question. But in fact that's not what the prophets did. Moses, in particular, known as a great law-giver, was known for refusing to follow blindly. His arguments with God are famous. And he won most of them.

So I've come to the conclusion that God is not really interested in readers of the Bible who will simply obey rather than enter whole-heartedly into the conversation. God is not really interested in being a dictator; God expects push-back. If that wasn't God's idea at the beginning, God should know by now that that's the way it is.

There are people in the United Methodist Church, and perhaps there are even people here, who would conclude that I don't accept what they call "the authority of the Bible." When pressed, they might say that the authority of the Bible is expressed in three sentences: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." These are three sentences not to be found in the Bible, but that doesn't stop them. It is as if they were in an Army, not like ours, in which orders are to be obeyed without question and without exception, never mind that the actual enlistment oath requires disobedience to some orders and requires that each soldier exercise judgment about whether the conditions that require that disobedience have been met. In any event, to disagree with these folks is to deny the authority of the Bible.

But I do not deny the authority of the Bible. I simply do not agree about what that authority is and how it works. For me the authority of the Bible lies in the conversations that it authorizes. Especially in those areas where the biblical conversation is contentious and unsettled, the Bible authorizes our intelligent and faithful engagement in the discussion and argument. "When are we most faithful to the covenant we have with God: when we are at home and running our own affairs? or when we are in exile and threatened in our very existence?" "How do we who are followers of Jesus live in midst of a militaristic, violent, pleasure-seeking, and acquisitive culture?" These are two of the great questions around which contentious disputes rage in the Bible. We are authorized to enter into those debates. We are to listen respectfully to the other voices, but then we are to raise our own and give testimony to our own experience and to what we think that experience means.

A careful reading of Jesus shows that this is precisely how he treated the Bible. So, we cannot be followers of Jesus without doing the same thing, without participating in the on-going, disputatious, life-giving conversation that swirls within and around this old book.

That is the tentative conclusion I've come to. You have helped me form that conclusion. Where my thinking will go from here, I have no idea. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the conversation will go on. I will leave the destination in God's hands and see where that takes me.

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.

Credo: Pressing On (Trinity; 1 Samuel 7:3-6, 12-17; May 27, 2018)

Credo: Pressing On

Trinity
1 Samuel 7:3-6, 12-17
May 27, 2018

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

Long ago, when what is now Iowa was covered by a shallow inland sea and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a seminary student preparing for ordination as a deacon. As part of that process I had to write responses to the ordination questions and submit them to the Probationary Membership Committee of the Board of Ordained Ministry. They required me to lay out my theology in a more or less systematic way. I had to tell the Committee what I believed. They would judge whether I was close enough to the mainstream to be acceptable to serve as a pastor in the United Methodist Church.

True to my personality type, I wrote a theology that was consistent throughout, almost crystalline in its purity and beauty. I was proud of it. I had pulled together much of my thinking about the church, about God, about the world, and about my calling into a single work of art, an impressive architectural edifice. Did I mention that I was proud of it? This, I thought, will serve me well as I continue this journey of faith and ministry. I was certain and confident that these answers and the theology that I expressed were stable and perhaps even everlasting. I knew the truth.

Fast forward thirty-four years. I don't remember any of my answers. I don't even remember the questions. What happened to my certainly, my confidence, and the assurance that all the really hard thinking was already behind me?

To make a short answer of it, my faith was misplaced. I had missed the point of the exercise pretty much completely. Oh, I had done the assignment well enough it turned out. At least the Committee didn't hold me back or ask for revisions. What I had failed to see was that they were not all that interested in the results of my thinking (although it needed to be located somewhere within the limits of the Christian tradition). They were much more interested in the thinking itself. What was my process? Did I reason soundly? Did I consider the things that needed to be considered? Was there room for growth? In short, could I carry on a theological conversation in the Church, both with my colleagues and with lay people?

To use a different metaphor: Was I ready to step out of theological apprenticeship? Did I know how to use the tools of the trade? Would the results of my work embarrass the guild? Did I know how to continue to learn as I practiced my craft?

I had regarded the writing that I did for the Committee as a goal to be accomplished. And it was, in a way. Because I did that, and because my later conversations with the Committee went well enough, I was admitted to Probationary Membership in the Conference and ordained as a deacon. Three years later a similar thing happened and I found myself a Full Member of the Conference and an ordained elder. Mission accomplished.

As we know now that using the phrase, "mission accomplished," is risky. Did I really understand the mission? Had I really "accomplished" it? And, as it turned out, the answers to both of those questions were, No. No, I didn't understand the mission. And, No, I hadn't accomplished it in any meaningful sense of the world.

What I had done—and it wasn't a small thing—was to set up an Ebenezer. When Samuel set up a stone and called it Ebenezer, it didn’t mark any destination. It was a waypoint on an itinerary, a place marked “Yahweh has helped us get this far.” Israel couldn’t live in it.

I don't want to give the impression that writing a theology is a waste of time. As long as we don't imagine that we are building a place to live out our days in comfort rather than setting up a waystone to mark where we have been, it will be a useful thing to do. Thomas Aquinas spent a lifetime writing his theology. He called it a "summary" of all the theological questions and his answers to them. They were arranged beautifully and addressed with crystalline clarity. They exerted and still exert a powerful influence on the Catholic church. The Dominican Order has never quite left the shadow of its most famous member. The Summa theologica was a work to be proud of. And yet, legend has that shortly before Thomas finished it he came from his evening prayers and told his servant that he had seen in a vision "such things as rendered all of his work into straw." He died a few days later without finishing the Summa. He had mistaken a waystone, an Ebenezer, for a place to live.

If beginning work of the ordained is a waystone, then so is retirement from that work. So you'll not be terribly surprised that I've been thinking about where I've come from, where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going. And not just in terms of the places, although there has been some of that. It's been more about the questions that I've wrestled with (so far), the ways that I've thought about them (so far), and what I've learned (so far).

Although I didn't wait until then to begin to think about theology, I started serving as a pastor in 1980, thirty-eight years ago. I've been here in Decorah for nearly a quarter of that time. Let's just say that you have been an important part of my own journey.

I'll have just three more chances to stand here and share my thinking with you. I have to resist the temptation to squeeze too much into them. And, of course, this waystone is not the same in my life as it is in yours. You get a new pastor. You've done that many times since Rev. Bishop knocked on the door of a house in Decorah, introduced himself with the words, "I am seeking the lost sheep of Israel," and received "You have found them!" as the answer from within. And you will do it many times.

I was told that I will go through what I am going through alone. And that's true in one sense. But in another it is not. For the next month I am still your pastor and "what I am going through" will have its effect on our relationship. So I've decided to let it do that out loud, on purpose, and in front of God and everybody.

My intention during my next three trips to this pulpit is to share with you some of what I have learned during our shared journey. I will finish where I started by asking some questions and risking some answers. One of the things that I have learned should be obvious: the life of following Jesus is never a finished thing, not in our thinking, not in our doing, not even in our feeling. It is an on-going thing. There are Ebenezers but, short of the end of our lives, there is no final destination. We may rest for a while, but then we press on. God is at work in us and we are at work.

There are three other learnings that are the result of the questions that have been my nearly constant companions for three and half decades. Here they are (You might want to make a note of them.):

What is the Bible?
Who is God? and,
What is the church?

Be warned that these will not be my final answers, only snapshots that are blurry because their subjects don't sit still.

And let me leave you with a suggestion: Take your own snapshots. Try your hand at answering the questions yourselves. My dissertation advisor told me, "Until you have written it, you haven't thought it." She stretched the truth a bit, I think, but she wasn’t completely wrong, either. At least writing a thought forces us to be more clear. It tends to reveal faulty logic and inconsistencies and encourages us to deal with them head-on. There is something about the empty page (or the empty computer screen with its cursed blinking cursor) that holds us accountable in ways that day-dreaming or reverie do not. That's my invitation. Write your own answers to those questions:

What is the Bible?
Who is God? and,
What is the church?

And may the God of wandering, exile, and return be with us as we reflect on our shared journey now approaching the place where our shared path will divide and--in faithfully following the same God--we will take different forks.

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.

Your Daughters Will Prophesy (Pentecost; Confirmation (Part II); Acts 2:1-21; May 20, 2018)

Your Daughters Will Prophesy

Pentecost
Confirmation (Part II)
Acts 2:1-21
May 20, 2018

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

Here it is: the Day of Pentecost, the day of the Great Fifty (as our Orthodox siblings call it). It's fifty days after Easter. Like many of the earliest Christian practices, we didn't come up with this ourselves. We "borrowed" it from the Jewish tradition. On the second day of the Passover, which celebrates the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt with the festival of Unleavened Bread, the Jewish people were commanded to begin a count of days. On the fiftieth day they are to observe another festival, Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks.

Like many Christian festivals, Shavuot took over another festival and imported a new meaning. It had been a festival celebrating the barley harvest. On top of that meaning, the Jewish tradition has overlaid a celebration of God's gift of the Torah. To me it is a wonderful thing that the Scripture that is read on Shavuot is not a text that describes Moses going up the mountain and being given the tablets of the Law. Instead, the reading for Shavuot comes from the book of Ruth. The story of Ruth is set during the barley harvest. Do you remember? Ruth is a stranger to Israel. In fact she is a Moabite, Israel's bitterest enemies. But she decides to embrace the Torah and the God who had given it. In that way she resembles the people of Israel, the people who were no people until God delivered them from slavery and gave them the Torah. So it sort of works. It also connects to the barley harvest, as I just said.

I don't know how much you remember about the story of Ruth, but part of it hinges on the righteous actions of Boaz who is a relative of Ruth's husband who has died. There are two things that the Torah requires that farmers not do at harvest time. They are not to harvest right up to the edges of their fields. I once knew a farmer who calculated what portion of his harvest came from the end rows and--in a gesture toward the principle of this law--donated that portion of his harvest to charity.

The second thing farmers are not to do is to go back over their fields and pick up the grain that might have fallen to the ground in the course of the harvest. Instead the landless poor may gather it. It was this second law that was good for Ruth. She joined the poor in gleaning the fields behind Boaz's harvesters. Further, Boaz ordered his own workers not to be too careful about gathering the grain. They were to deliberately let some grain fall to the ground near where Ruth was.

In both of these cases, as far as the Torah is concerned it is not a matter of doing a nice thing. What gets dropped during the harvesty belongs to the poor. It is theirs as soon as it hits the ground. A farmer who hires gleaners steals this grain from its rightful owners. What grows in the margins of the fields belongs to those who live marginal lives. Farmers may not steal this grain from the marginalized by harvesting right up the edges of their fields. This is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of justice.

Why have I mentioned all this? Partly, it's just me being me, but it is also because of the fact that this year is one of those rare times when the Christian and Jewish calendars coincide. The first day of Passover began at sunset on Holy Saturday. Accordingingly, the Festival of Shavuot began at sunset last evening. In both the Christian and Jewish reckonings, then, today is the Great Fifty, Pentecost, fully arrived!

Many people in the Christian tradition have made of Pentecost a sort of birthday for the Church. And, I suppose, they are at least partly right. We do celebrate at least a beginning of the Church with the gift of the Holy Spirit. But I'd like to ask this question: If we are celebrating the birth of the Church, what do we imagine that the Church was born for? The older I get, the more it is true for me that birthdays have become more than milestones, more than a marker that I have traveled another 584,226,000 miles around the sun while the sun traveled some 394,200,000 miles relative to the center of the galaxy. (Wow! No wonder we feel tired sometimes!)

The older I get the more that birthdays become occasions for reflecting on the what and the why of my life. It's nice to bask in the good wishes of my family and friends. I'm certainly not too old to enjoy presents. But more and more birthdays are a reminder that I am alive for a reason and I'd best be getting on with it. And that means that the first thing to do is to clarify the "why?" of my life.

So, I think, for the Church, if Pentecost is indeed a birthday, it is for us to reflect on the why of our existence. Not that I don't like cake and ice cream, you understand. But if that is all it is, we're just throwing ourselves a party and patting ourselves on the back.

If Pentecost has anything at all to do with Shavuot, then perhaps the purpose of the Church has something to do with the Torah, especially in its summary forms, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandment, and the one that is like it. “The rest,” as Rabbi Hillel, is said to have said, "is commentary. Go and learn it."(Talmud Shabbat 31a) If that is the case then the text that offers the most pointed and emphatic commentary must be Deuteronomy 16:20, צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף, "Justice, justice you shall seek."

We might have known. We might have known from the story of Ruth. We might have known from the selection from the prophet Joel that Stephen took as his sermon text on Pentecost. Look at what Joel does in this short passage. He lifts up ancient divisions in humanity, those that seem to plague us at all times. When he says that the Spirit will be poured out, he deliberately includes sons and daughters. Maleness and femaleness are no longer categories to which the Spirit is bound. Joel deliberately includes the young and the old. Generations, as different as their outlooks and experiences might be, are no longer categories to which the Spirit is bound.

And, to add to that, the outpouring of the Spirit is no longer bound to the divisions of language and culture. The long list that Ken read--and bless his heart, this is the hardest reading of the year!--is no longer a list that bars or privileges anyone when it comes to God's love.

Joel is right to go on to talk about the day when the sun turns dark and the moon shines red. Dissolving the categories of male and female, of young and old, of American and non-American is a world-shattering event. The world as people have fashioned it, the interior world that we take for granted, the socially-constructed world that gives some of us advantages over the rest of us lives on borrowed time. The Church is born as a foreshadowing of the new world that will emerge from the ashes of the old one. It is a first attempt to fashion a world characterized not by the divisions that we are so fond of, but by justice and peace. It is, as a number of early theologians declared, a third ethnos, a third people, that is neither gentile nor Jew, but something different, something new. That community that seeks justice is what we celebrate and commemorate today.

Today, Emma, we confirm you in this community. That is, we strengthen the bonds of allegiance and love that bind you and us together. That is, we together make them more firm, we con-firm them. Like us, from this moment on you will be publicly identified with the Church's purpose; together with us you will seek justice; and, together with us you will seek to be God's presence in the world.

That not only seems like a lot to load onto the shoulders of one young woman, it is a lot. It's far too much, really, if you were to attempt to do it alone. I don't doubt that your generation will make steps in the seeking of justice that mine has been unable or unwilling to do. But we will encourage you. We will be encouraged by you. You don't have to do it alone.

And more than this, the Spirit is still here just as on that day in Jerusalem so very long ago. The Spirit of Jesus is quite alive. It moves among us, but it will not be restrained by us. We give it freely to you. But the Spirit doesn't wait for us. It is there around you and within you, to make you strong, to give you a clearer vision of God's dream, to give you the power to become a place in the world where people may see the love of God at work.

So, may God the Spirit work within you and all of us so that the love of God, revealed to us through Jesus Christ, may transform you, and all of us, and our world, that we may come to live together as a part of God's dream come to life among us. Amen.

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.

Privilege Poured Out (Seventh Sunday of Easter; Confirmation Sunday; Mothers' Day; Philippians 2:1-13; May 13, 2018)

Privilege Poured Out

Seventh Sunday of Easter
Confirmation Sunday
Mothers' Day
Philippians 2:1-13
May 13, 2018

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

The Sundays in May are a little over-scheduled. Mother's Day is celebrated today. It's a tricky observance. If we fail to give full-throated praise to motherhood itself, someone may take offense. If we fail to recognize that the notion of motherhood is complex and many-sided and that not all of the sides are sweet, we will hurt others. We are grateful and glad for all the women who take their responsibilities to the next generation seriously: the mothers who care for their own children, the step-mothers who care for the children of their spouses, the foster mothers who care for children whose safety would otherwise be in jeopardy, and the countless women who nurture children, watch over them to keep them safe, and make sure that they have food, clothing, shelter, and--above all--the love they need in order to thrive.

At the same time we recognize that the day serves as a painful reminder to those who could not have children. It can imply that there is something not quite right about the women who chose not to have children. It also picks open the not-really-healed wounds of those who never had the sort of mothering that we celebrate, those who were neglected and abused by mothers who were--to put it plainly--failures as mothers. So there is a very narrow road to walk today with deep ditches on either side.

Then conversations with the parents of our confirmands revealed that this day was the only day for weeks in either direction available as a possible date for Confirmation. So, we're doubling up on the day. It's okay, really, since our confirmands remind us that they have come to this step in their journey with the help of many adults, their mothers and fathers among them.

And it became apparent that even today would not work for all of our confirmands and their families. One of the members of this year's class is with her family today attending the graduation ceremony of her brother at the University of Iowa. So she will be confirmed next Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, Sunday School teacher recognition, and commencement for Decorah High School. Like I said, the Sundays of May are a little over-scheduled.

Then, of course, there is today's text that contains the well-known hymn to the humility of Jesus that begins:

Christ was truly God.But he did not try to remain equal with God.Instead he gave up everything and became a slave,when he became like one of us.

Most scholars believe that this hymn is not Paul's work. Rather he is using a hymn that was known to the church in Philippi, quoting it at length in the service of his argument. His argument seems to be that we should not put ourselves first. We shouldn't even try to get what we are entitled to have. Instead, we should be submissive and humble. God will eventually reward us, I guess in the afterlife, just as God rewarded Jesus for his humility.

That argument has a sorry history. It has been used against slaves who longed for freedom: There are those who are born free and those who are not. You shouldn't seek to rise above your place. Instead, submit to your master's desires and obey them. In this way God will reward you, counting your obedience to your masters as obedience to God.

The argument has been used against women: Women have their place from the beginning of creation as "helpmates" for men. They should obey their husbands, fathers, or other male relatives. God will reward them for this humble submission.

The argument has been used against the poor. In El Salvador, for instance, the Church preached that poor people should accept their fate. It had pleased God for them to be born into poverty and they should submit to that life. They should obey their social betters. They should work hard. Above all, they should not question the fact that some people work hard and have nothing and others don't work at all and are rich. They shouldn't demand better wages. They shouldn't demand land of their own. They shouldn't demand decent health care. They shouldn't demand at all. They should be like Christ and humble themselves in the hope that they would be rewarded in the next life.

When priests in El Salvador taught people that God wanted justice for them in this life, well, it's not too hard to see why rich people became nervous. It's not too hard to see why powerful people in El Salvador organized the killing squads to kill those priests and the rebellious people with their impudent demands. It's not too hard to see why powerful people in the United States on both sides of the political aisle were willing to send hundreds of millions of dollars to El Salvador to pay for killing those priests and the rebellious people with their impudent demands. It's not hard to see why, when the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, went to Rome to plead with Pope John Paul II, the Pope refused to listen to him: Romero should encourage his people to be humble and submissive, rather than rebellious and demanding. They should be like Christ and humble themselves in the hope that they would be rewarded in the next life. That's how this hymn has been used. Or I should say, That's how this hymn has been abused.

There is a clue left in the hymn that should alert us. Paul was not talking about private morality here. The hymn is what I will call a theo-political hymn. That is, it is theology with a political connection. Or, it is politics seen through a theological lens. It's the last line that gives it away: "Jesus Christ is Lord!" We are so used to reading the phrase, the Lord Jesus Christ, that we no longer notice how politically charged it is. There was only one person in the ancient world about whom people said that they were Lord. That was Caesar. "Caesar is Lord!" was what loyal citizens said. "Caesar is Lord!" was the pledge of allegiance, the loyalty oath, that allowed people to do business in the empire, to pass without challenge as obedient subjects of Roman power.

To say, "Jesus Christ is Lord!" instead was treason, a declaration that Caesar's power and authority were not supreme. The presence of this phrase at the end of the hymn set out Jesus and Caesar as figures to be compared with each other.

We know how Caesar used his power. He announced his power, asserted his power, showed his power, used his power. And all this for the purpose of increasing his power. Caesar's mandate from the gods was to exercise his power and, as long as he gave proper honors to the gods, they were fine with how he used it. And, when it came to proper honors, Caesar demanded and received divine honors. It was his right to be given worship "as to a god."

This is a pattern we understand. It's all around us. We are expected to look out for ourselves. Our culture honors those who use their power to make money and their money to gather power. They don't even have to pretend to be doing something else. And we don't even require that they follow the rules, at least not if they are rich enough. If you are rich enough, then you can work the bankruptcy laws to your advantage. If you are rich enough, you can wiggle around tax laws. If you are rich enough and break enough rules people will admire you as someone who, instead of being taken advantage of, takes advantage of others.

Most of us aren't all that rich. But that doesn't mean we aren't privileged. Now that is a word that is misunderstood. But it's a pretty simple idea, really. We can think of privilege in the context of a race. If life is a race then privilege means that others wear ankle weights. Privilege comes from our position in society. Being white gives us a little privilege. So does being a man. So does being straight. It's not that these things guarantee success. It's not that straight white men don't work hard. It's just that others are running the same course with a little extra weight and it makes a difference.

Privilege isn't something we can do anything about, one way or the other. I didn't make myself white and I can't make myself un-white. I can't even step out of privilege, even for a moment. I might be able to refuse a result of privilege. But my ability to refuse is itself the result of privilege; I have a choice where others do not because I have privilege.

But there are things that I can do to call the whole privilege system into question. I can name it, for one thing. Like I'm doing now. I can keep my mouth shut and let others speak, others who are overlooked because of my privilege. (Well, I can try, anyway. It certainly isn't easy.) I can give myself to the struggles that others are engaged in to make justice a reality and let them tell me what to do. As a straight man I can ask the LGBT community what they want me to do. As a white man I can ask people of color how I might contribute to their efforts without trying to school them about what they should be doing.

In other words I can cultivate humility in the face of the struggles and wisdom of others.

Clearly this matter of privilege is at the heart of this hymn. What did Jesus do with his privilege? For what did he use it? For whom did he use it? How did he use it?

Well, he sure didn't use it like Caesar. He walked a cross-shaped path. He gave up his status. He provoked the violent response of Caesar's empire and refused to claim any privilege when it put him to death. He did it all for the sake of the vision of God's dream for the folks at the margins of society, for the beggars and the prostitutes, for the day-laborers and the sick, and even for the outcast and the outsider. He acted from love, from his for God and from God’s love for all of us and all of creation.

Notice that in the hymn Jesus isn't humble toward the religious authorities; he isn't humble toward Caesar or Herod or Pontius Pilate; he isn't humble toward the rich. He is humble only toward God. Humility toward God means that he did set God's dream above his own wants and needs. But God's dream is a nightmare to the rich who cling to their wealth, the powerful who hoard their power, and the comfortable who bask in their privilege.

If we sing this hymn often enough in church, we won't be able to hear it as an insistence that we respect things as they are and just go along with them. Sing this hymn often enough and we will begin to follow Jesus in calling out the injustice and inhumanity in things as they are. The more we sing it the less respect we will have for the way that Caesar used his power. And for the way that Caesar uses it today. The more we sing it, the less likely it is that we will be submissive and humble toward the so-called authorities and powers of our day.

The wrong people have been using this hymn. The rich and powerful and privileged have been using it to keep the poor and weak and disadvantage in their supposed place. But that is an abuse of the hymn. The hymn is asking the rich, "What are doing with your wealth to do justice for the poor?" The hymn is asking the powerful, "What are you doing with your power to make sure that the weak come into their own power?" The hymn is asking the privileged, "How are you using your privilege to take down systems of privilege?"

These are hard questions, not because the answers are difficult, but because it's hard to bring ourselves to ask them. Once the questions have been asked, the answers are pretty obvious. And even though the grownups in the congregation haven't finished asking or answering these questions, I still dare to pose them to young people.

All of our Confirmation sessions have turned on the question of what it means to be follower of Jesus. We have compared that to being a member of an athletic team in terms of gaining knowledge and skills, growing in commitment to the team, and giving it our full devotion. We've looked at a few followers of Jesus from the past. The young woman Perpetua gave up her life rather than deny being a Jesus-follower. Benedict and his sister Scholastica longed for a deeper and more committed path as Jesus-followers. Francis and Claire gave up comfortable lives as part of the emerging middle class in order to depend directly on God's mercy for everything they needed. John Wesley exchanged the easy-going life of an Oxford tutor for the exertions of constant travel in difficult conditions so that he could share God's dream with the poor and laboring classes of early industrial England.

And now it's your turn. I don't expect you to commit today to doing what they did. You've a way to go before you will be ready for that. But make no mistake: you are a relatively privileged group of young folks. You don't live in a country or neighborhood where you have to worry about getting shot while getting to school and back home. You won't go to bed tonight knowing that there is no food for tomorrow. You aren't going to be arrested and maybe put in danger for the crime of walking while black. You aren't at threat of being deported because you parents decided to bring you here when you were two. If you get hurt, you will have good medical care available. When you travel abroad, you will do it on an American passport. All of these things about your lives are privileges.

So my question, and the hymn's question, and--I think--God's question is this: "What are you going to do with your privilege?" Will you use it to make a comfortable and secure life for yourself? Or will you spend it for the sake of God's dream of justice and peace?

God will love you either way, you know. So this isn't like a test about whether God accepts you or not. It's a different question, this question: How much you are willing to let God's dream become your dream?

That's the question we are all living with. We are glad that you have decided to live that question with us. We are glad to have you as companions on our journey. We are glad to have you as our partners in living toward God's dream.

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.