He Wasn't Talking about Jesus (24th Sunday after Pentecost; Isaiah 9:1-7; November 19, 2017)

He Wasn't Talking about Jesus

24th Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 9:1-7
November 19, 2017

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

The Bible is a difficult book. Many of the books embody multiple traditions that have been stitched together with varying degrees of success. Each of the texts has an agenda through which it views the traditions it has inherited. Each text contains multiple voices, some of them partly suppressed. Reading the Bible well is a complex practice that involves a knowledge of history, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism, not to mention a stubborn persistence in the face of a sometimes very difficult and occasionally an even repulsive text.

Defying this reality Protestants have a traditional insistence that is nearly impossible to pronounce. It’s called the "Perspicuity of Scripture." That teaching simply means that we have held that any ordinary, reasonably intelligent, literate person can read the Bible to their own spiritual health. I wonder sometimes.

Misreadings abound. Most of them fall into the fundamentalist fallacy, that the Bible is a collection of absolute truths in written form that are divinely-given and protected from error. Many Christians believe this and many atheists believe that this is what all Christians believe. I can hardly recognize this as a description of the Bible that I find that is a spirited conversation about important things involving many voices each with its own and sometimes multiple perspectives and ideas, a conversation that is sometimes tranquil, but is more often carried out with raised voices and vehement gestures.

Fundamentalists of whatever stripe aren't interested in conversations, of course. As far as they are concerned there has been far too much conversation already and everyone should recognize the truth--their truth--and just shut up and behave. Fundamentalists aren't interested in uncertainty. Especially they cannot abide the notion that there might be ideas that are mutually contradictory and yet are true at the same time. They cannot handle the universe in shades of gray, let alone one in dazzling color. Oddly the people who say they are ones who value the Bible and who use the phrase "the Bible clearly teaches" and clearly failing to understand what the word "clearly" means, are those who least appreciate its complexity, beauty, and liveliness.

And saying all that, and I've said more than a mouthful, doesn't even begin to address the problem of the filters that we all bring to reading any text, let alone one as important and central as the Bible. We'd like to read the Bible without filters, but I don't think that can be done. To begin with, the Bible is a filtered text. It contains the writings that it contains and not some others. Some books were chosen; others were not. It's a translated text for almost all of us. Translation is never a one-for-one operation. Two languages never line up perfectly. Choices are always made in the act of translating. Knowing the original languages helps but that's not a perfect answer either. I can read Greek fairly well and I can puzzle through Hebrew in a way that I don’t really call reading, but the fact is that my first language is English and I read the world differently for that reason alone. I read Greek like a contemporary, English-speaking American, not even like a contemporary Greek, let alone a Greek-speaking Jew of ancient Roman Palestine.

But we also bring the filters fashioned from our experiences and our biases. No one can free themselves from those, no matter how hard they try. And how could we? The very notion that we should read in a bias-free way is itself one of the biases of our culture that values objectivity. (Or at least it values the rhetorical forms that claim to be bias-free.)

One of the places where we pick up biases is tradition. In fact, I'm wondering if a reasonable definition of tradition wouldn't be a set of biases that is transmitted along with a body of texts, stories, and attitudes from one generation to the next.

I've said all that because I am frustrated. I'm frustrated because every time I try to read today's lesson I hear in my head the chorus from Part I, scene 3 of Handel's The Messiah, "For unto Us a Child Is Born." To some extent every line of the Bible is a text that has already been read, an already-read text. It has already been read. It has already been interpreted. It has already become meaningful. And all before we even open the covers. We are--whether we like it or not--always and already part of a history of reading. And this time I don't like it.

To me one of the worst things that you can do to the Hebrew Bible is to assume that it only means something when it is made to be about Jesus. None of the writers of Old Testament were writing about Jesus. There was no foretelling going on. Later, after we had experienced Jesus and saw the pattern of his life, then early Christian writers saw similarities and parallels between that pattern and parts of the pattern of Israel's covenant life with God. Then, emboldened by this discovery they claimed that Jesus had "fulfilled" the Scriptures, sometimes in ways that strike me as odd and even a little ridiculous. But that wasn't and isn't how the prophetic tradition worked.

The Prophet Isaiah wasn't talking or thinking about Jesus when these words were written. I know that this is true even if later Christians seized on these powerful and lovely words as the text for part of a beautiful and splendid oratorio composed some twenty-four centuries later. And yet I still hear it, "For unto us a child is born..." It's what we call an earworm, that unshakable melody that keeps playing in our heads. As earworms go, it's not so bad, better by far than, say, "Feliz Navidad."

Still, I want to wade into the conversation in and around this text and say to Handel, "George! Be quiet. The music is lovely, but stop. I want to hear Isaiah of Jerusalem speak for himself. George! Uist!"

Isaiah, when he has a chance to speak for himself, is a rare voice among prophets. Most prophets say that while things may be good now, they are about to get really bad. But Isaiah, in second half of the eighth century BCE Jerusalem was just the opposite. There appeared to be great threats, but the reality, Isaiah insisted, was that these threats were empty. That background was that Assyria in the northern part of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley had made the little kingdoms around Judah into vassal states, paying for their very limited freedom with massive amounts of tribute money.

Some of the little kingdoms--Israel, Tyre, and Syria--decided that, if they worked together, and especially if Judah would join them, they could all regain their freedom from Assyria. King Ahaz of Judah was reluctant to join them and eventually refused. So the rest of the alliance laid siege to Jerusalem.

It's at this point that Isaiah came on the scene. He was convinced that, as usual, the king of Judah was afraid of the wrong things. He was afraid of the three kings outside his wall. He was afraid of the Assyrians. He didn't know what to do or which way to turn. Isaiah confronted him with an insistence that he trust Yahweh to deliver them from both sets of threats. He even suggested that Ahaz should ask for a sign that this was Yahweh's promise. Ahaz piously claimed that he couldn't put Yahweh to the test by asking for a sign, so Isaiah told him that he would have a sign anyway: A young woman would give birth to a child whose name would be "God is with us." Before that child was two or three years old, the threat against Jerusalem would vanish. No need either to join the other kings in rebellion or to plead for Assyria's help.

Our reading today holds out the hope that a prince already born would show all the qualities of an ideal king. Therefore, Ahaz should proceed with confidence, neither rebelling against Assyria nor bowing before Assyria's power. If Ahaz wants to fear something, he should fear putting his trust in armies—is own or anyone else’s instead of in Yahweh.

We have some beautiful and powerful poetry in the service of a rather simple message: Ahaz was afraid of the wrong things and should, instead of acting out that fear, trust Yahweh to uphold the covenant.

It's not an unimportant message. It's one that we could hear to our own benefit. What are we afraid of? Too many of us are afraid of others: Muslims, or immigrants from Latin America, or black folks demanding that their right to life and dignity be recognized. Some of us imagine that justice is a zero-sum game, that anyone else's gain is our loss. Some of us imagine that people hate us because of our way of life or our freedoms. Some of us fear those who we imagine are going to take away our guns.

In our fear of these imagined threats we miss the threats that are really there. When the real danger is the loss of a sense of community without which human beings cannot survive, instead of reaching out we are building walls. Instead of being afraid of a system that siphons off the product of our work for the profit of a very few, we let ourselves be bought off with a few temporary tax breaks and a pocket full of mumbles. Instead of being a afraid for those who can't get a good education without incurring staggering loads of debt, or being afraid for those whose access to decent health care is precarious at best, we are afraid of "enemies" around the world and will not rest until we have bankrupted ourselves to protect ourselves from them. Instead of being afraid that changes in the world's climate will make human life on earth more difficult or even impossible, we are afraid that we will be asked to make changes in the way we live our lives.

We are mostly afraid of the wrong things and in the midst of our fear we are easy targets for demagogues and con-artists. Our greatest strength, says Isaiah of Jerusalem, lies in a shared life of covenant justice and anything that stands in the way of that is the real threat. God, and nothing else, is the ground and source of that shared life. If we listen to Isaiah, we can avert the real threats that approach our gates. There will be good governance again and everything will be all right. It will be okay.

"For unto us a child is born..."

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Let Justice Roll Down (23rd Sunday after Pentecost; Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24; November 12, 2017)

Let Justice Roll Down

23rd Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 1:1-2; 5:14-15, 21-24
November 12, 2017

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

I've been thinking a lot during the last week about the massacre that took place in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Once again, we have witnessed horrors. Once again, we hear the cries of the wounded and bereaved. Once again, we listen to the empty words of our leaders. “Now is not the time. Thoughts and prayers.”

I'm sick of the violent deaths in our news. I'm sick of having to remember all the places where the people that I love go where they're supposed to be safe but have nonetheless been the sites of mass shootings: movie theaters, schools, clubs, country music concerts, and now even church, just to name a few. And these, really, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The numbers from 2014 tell a story: 92 people died each day from gunshot injuries. Of those 30 per day were victims of homicide, 59 were victims of suicide. Far too many, more than we can bear, if we try to bear them, which is why we don't. We only bear a few, the more egregious examples, and only for a few days or weeks.

I was also reeling like some of you from the news accusations of abuse of power committed by Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Ben Affleck, President Bush (the elder),
Michael Oreskes of NPR, Louis C.K., and others. This behavior doesn't seem to be limited to any particular industry and certainly not to one side of the political spectrum.

On Friday Carol, Beth, Diana, and I went shopping for some party favors for Diana's seventh birthday party being held this afternoon. Fourteen girls are coming; we picked a great time to get out of town. Anyway, while three generations of Caldwell women deliberated over which favors to get, my attention wandered. Well, to be perfectly honest, I wandered right along with my attention. I found myself looking at t-shirts. There were lots of designs, most of them I understood not at all. One of them caught my eye, though. It was silhouette of Beauty and the Beast from this year's release starring Emma Watson (as Beauty) and Dan Stevens (as the Beast). I like Emma Watson. I've watched her grow from Hermione Granger, the bright and somewhat gawky first-form student at Hogwarts Wizarding Academy, through her years at Brown University, her work as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She has some pretty strong feminist credentials.

But something bothered me about the t-shirt. The Belle that she portrays in Beauty and the Beast is no shrinking violet, by no means a victim. She is smart and brave and she makes her own choices. But. But at the same time the story of Beauty and the Beast can only be made to stretch so far. It's a myth that resists being subverted. Remember that, according to me, a myth is a story that we tell to explain ourselves to ourselves. Beauty and the Beast is a myth about men and women and the nature of their relationships. At bottom it asserts that men are victims of their own animal natures and can find (or recover) their humanity only through the intervention of women. For the Beast to become human he must recover the human nature only Belle can see. Only her love can see his true (and hidden) nature and bring it to the surface. She--not he--is finally responsible for his becoming human. If she succeeds he will be freed from the tyranny of his beastliness; if she fails his humanity will disappear.

So my question of the t-shirt is: Why do we imagine that men are powerless to find their own humanity? Why do we imagine that women are responsible for making a man out of a beast?

It seemed to me that I had found a clue that not only connected mass murderers and powerful sexual abusers of less powerful women (and sometimes of men). A great deal of effort and far too many words have been spent trying to understand harassers and mass shooters. We diagnose them at a distance and prescribe treatment plans, but we miss the obvious: They are men almost exclusively. They imagine themselves to be powerful expressions of masculinity, men who get what they want or strike out at those who deny them what they believe they should have, but these men are in fact examples of something that has gone terribly wrong.

Hold that thought.

Our lesson this morning came from the prophet Amos. Amos is different from the other prophets we have met this year. He has a day job. He is a shepherd and tender of fig orchards. He is neither a royal prophet nor the head of a school of prophets. Instead he finds himself overwhelmed with his sense that the life of Israel has become deeply contrary to the covenant with Yahweh. He left his work in the south of Judah and made his way north to the Kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria. There he denounced the injustices that he saw: the steeply unequal distribution of wealth and the exploitation of the vulnerable and of the land. He especially denounced the pretense that they kept up by maintaining their high-quality worship, their praise bands, their candlelight services, and their professional-quality choirs. Instead, he demanded in God's name:

But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Let justice flood the land like a flash flood that comes rushing down a wadi, sweeping away everything in its path. Let righteous flow like a stream that is filled with water the year round.

For Amos this justice would care for the widow, the orphan, and the migrant worker. This justice would level the staggering inequalities of wealth and power that had arisen among the people of God.

We could certainly use a double dose of Amos' medicine. But I want to offer another possibility, a broader application of his vision than even he could see.

If our children and our friends and our neighbors are ever to enjoy the safety that we believe they should, they and we must be free from the fear of some man who has nursed a grudge and plans to act out his revenge. Sure we need a great more common sense about guns. But one of the roots of our problem with guns is our problem with masculinity.

It is time and past time that every person who bears the image of God be able to live in freedom from fear of a man who feels entitled to touch them without their consent. If men can be clear that we are not entitled to any special privilege or status, if we can be clear that when our feelings are hurt we not entitled to take it out in anger against our neighbors, it would be like justice rolling down. If we men can be clear that we are never, not ever, entitled to the bodies of women, if we can be clear that controlling women is not how boys become men, if we can be clear that men are responsible for their own feelings instead of blaming them on what women do or how they dress, life in our world can be sustained with a stream that flows all year.

Until then we live in a drought-stricken world, as dry as central Texas. My family lived for six months in central Texas when I was five in a place called Big Springs. When a place name in central Texas has the word “spring” in it, that’s not because there is water there. “Spring” in a central Texas name is a wish, a prayer. My mother fought a long and losing battle against dust the whole time we were there. She broke down and wept one morning when she opened her refrigerator to find a thin layer of dust coating everything.

When I say that our world has a deep thirst for life, I mean it is central Texas dry and central Texas thirsty. It is central Texas dry for lack of the justice Amos demanded. It suffers a Sutherland Springs drought that can be quenched only by the righteousness that Amos preached.

So let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

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.

God’s Discouraged Saints (All Saints' Sunday; 1 Kings 19:1-18; November 5, 2017)

God’s Discouraged Saints

1 Kings 19:1-18

November 5, 2017

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

It was a classic case of burnout. Oddly enough, it came at the moment of his greatest triumph.

Elijah’s mission had been to call the people of Israel to renounce their allegiance to the gods Ba‘al and Asherah. and back to their allegiance to Yahweh, the God of the covenant. Ba‘al and Asherah were fertility gods. They claimed to control the growth of crops and the birthing of lambs, calves, and even children.

Ahab and Jezebel, the king and the queen, liked the technology of production and control offered by Ba‘al and Asherah. So they sponsored them and put their prophets on the royal payroll.

Elijah’s mission was to confront Ahab and Jezebel and to win back the Israelite people for Yahweh. So Elijah challenged Ahab to a contest: summon all the Israelites and bring four hundred fifty of Ba‘al’s prophets to Carmel. Carmel means “garden-land.” It should give a home-field advantage to fertility gods. Each side would have a bull and wood for a burnt offering. They would each cut up the bull and arrange it on the wood. The prophets would call on Ba‘al and Asherah and Elijah would call on Yahweh. Whichever god sent fire would clearly be God.

The prophets of Ba‘al went first. They killed the bull; they cut it into pieces; they arranged it on firewood on an altar. And they called on Ba‘al. But Ba‘al was strangely unresponsive. Elijah made fun of them: “Yell louder! Maybe your god can’t hear you. Maybe he is meditating. Or maybe he’s in the bathroom. Or maybe he’s asleep.”

Give the prophets of Ba‘al points for persistence. They kept it up all morning long. They cried; they danced; they even cut themselves to show just how serious they were. Nothing. This should have been easy. After all, Ba‘al was a fire god. But, nothing.

Then it was Elijah’s turn and he gathered twelve stones, built an altar, put the firewood on it, killed the bull, cut it into pieces, and arranged the pieces on the firewood on the altar. Then he had water poured over the altar until everything was soaked.

Then Elijah stepped back and prayed, “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.”

And fire came down on the altar and consumed the bull, the firewood, even the water lying in puddles around the altar. The people of Israel got the point, reaffirmed their covenant with Yahweh, and killed the prophets of Ba‘al. It was a triumph for Elijah.

Queen Jezebel was furious. She sent a death threat to Elijah. He feared for his life and ran south. He was “heels and elbows” into Judah and right through Judah out into the southern wilderness.

That’s where burnout caught up with him. He was overwhelmed with a sense of failure and despondency. So he asked to die. “I am no better than the prophets who came before me. They tried to call Israel back and failed. So did I. The conversion I saw happened only because they were razzle-dazzled. As soon as that wears off, they’ll be back to their old tricks. I am a failure. I’m finished. It’s time to die.” How’s that for a bedtime prayer?

Physical exhaustion had caught up with him and he fell asleep. It’s just as well. Being awake wasn’t doing him any good.

He slept until an angel tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wake up; it’s breakfast time.” Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked around and saw a cinnamon roll from Ruby’s and a venti-sized cup of coffee from Java John’s. So he ate and drank and promptly fell asleep again.

It’s amazing when we’ve come to the end of our rope and we are emotionally exhausted and spiritually spent. We feel the pain in our spirits and think we need some remedy for the heart and for the soul, but the first thing is to take care of our bodies: we need to get enough rest, to eat enough, make sure we’re properly hydrated, and get a little exercise. The cure of the soul begins in the body, it seems. It was certainly true for Elijah.

So an angel poked him awake a second time and had him eat some more—food for the journey this time.

Where is Elijah going? Before, he was simply wandering off into the wilderness to die. Now he has a destination: the mountain called Horeb. Horeb is another name for Sinai. It’s a holy place, the place of Israel’s beginnings. For Elijah the way forward lies back, back to where the covenant journey began.

It took him a month or more to get there, on foot and traveling through the wilderness. When he got to Horeb it was deserted. He passed the night in a cave and when morning came he heard the familiar voice saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

I think Elijah expected some such question. I think he’d worked out a little speech: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

It was a nice speech, full of self-reproach and self-pity, but it didn’t seem to impress Yahweh much, because Elijah got no reply at all, only a summons to stand on the mountain as Yahweh passed by. There was a great wind, but God wasn’t in the wind. There was an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake. There was fire, but God wasn’t in the fire.

Why God wasn’t in any of those things, I don’t know. I do know that wind and earthquake and fire are all pretty noisy and I do know that I can’t hear God in the noise. There’s a lot of noise in our lives: televisions, traffic, dogs barking, lawn mowers. For those who are afraid to leave their noise behind, there are car radios, iPods, and mp3 players. There are cell phones ringing and people carrying out cell phone conversations in restaurants as if they had to shout to wherever they are calling.

There is the noise of information, too: televisions (again), radios—even my beloved NPR, newspapers, billboards, Facebook feeds so that we know instantly that some celebrity has violated their probation in California and that three-quarters of our fellow citizens on Puerto Rico still have no electricity. But it’s all noise without any guide as to what is important and what is not.

The worst noise of all is in our own heads. Todo lists; bits of conversations and the brilliant things we wish we would have said; anxieties about a sick parent hundreds of miles away and no one, really, to make sure that they are safe and well; melodies that get stuck in our heads and won’t go away; the scripted tapes from our childhoods that tell us what we’re doing wrong and why it is that we’ll never, ever measure up; half-forgotten dreams; abandoned hopes and plans; unfinished projects. All that is ready to play as soon as we turn off the electronics.

And the voice of God? Is it anywhere in that noise? Who can tell?

“Listen to your heart,” a friend of mine told me once before I went on retreat. It was good advice, but there was a problem. “I can’t hear my heart,” I answered. Too much noise. It took the better part of a week for the noise to die down and for me to begin hear the faintest whisper. Maybe it took that long for Elijah, too. The text doesn’t tell us how long before he heard the “sound of sheer silence” that he knew was God’s voice.

He wrapped his face to protect himself from seeing God face-to-face and went out of his cave to meet God. Oddly, they have—word for word—the very same conversation they’d had just four verses before. Maybe the tone of voice changed. And maybe some of the force of Elijah’s rehearsed speech began to dissipate. Maybe when Elijah heard himself say it all a second time, it started to sound foolish. Maybe the words just sort of died on his lips. I don’t know.

Anyway, Yahweh didn’t answer him the second time, either. Instead, God gave him a fresh todo list, saying, in effect, “You’re a prophet. So get out there and do some prophet stuff. Stir things up a bit. Anoint a couple of kings (over countries that already have kings and aren’t looking for new ones); prepare your successor. Go. Do what you are called to do. Oh, and, by the way, you’re not the only faithful person left in Israel. There are seven thousand of them. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

And just like that Elijah’s renewal leave was over.

Now, opportunities for a three month pilgrimage to Horeb, or even a retreat at a monastery, are pretty rare. For almost all of us, almost all of the time, if we are going to hear God’s voice at all, it’s because we have managed to find a little silence in the midst of the daily-ness of our lives. Silence is hard to come by. A minute of silence on television or the radio would get someone fired. “Dead air” they call it. But silence here, well, that’s a different matter. Here the silence can be alive.

So here are two minutes of silence—a gift for you, an appetizer, if you will—a minute with no agenda except to be available to God.

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.

I Have Indeed Built You a Temple (Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13; October 29, 2017)

I Have Indeed Built You a Temple

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13
October 29, 2017

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

In the last week I've had two chances to tell the story of our church building. You know, I hope, how this building was built in stages: first the sanctuary, then the Fellowship Hall underneath us, then the office wing, and, finally, the Christian Education wing. This space itself has undergone significant changes over the years: the nave ceiling was lowered once and the ceiling over the choir twice. The balcony was added. Over time we have had at least three different treatments of the bell tower. There are rooms that have been sealed off and no longer used. There are spaces that have been made usable. And, of course, we have retrofitted the building to make it more accessible.

All of these--the original building and the changes to it since--tell stories. I don't just mean the stories of how they happened, of how it took about three days to raise the money for the last version of the steeple, or about seventeen minutes to fund the pew cushions. Sometimes the time is just right.

A church building is an announcement of the church's mission in architectural form. We began as a worshiping community. The education of children and adults did not, for the most part, take place here, certainly not in age-level divided classroom space. We felt the need to develop more of a sense of community that centered in shared meals, hence the fellowship hall and what we now call the kitchenette, later relocated to the east end of the hall with expanded meal-preparing and service abilities. Did we see the need for opening our meals to larger community? After WWII, churches all across the country discovered "church administration." Offices were built, secretaries hired, records kept, files retained, and committee structures beefed-up. We organized for ministry. Efficient office space was a new need for organized ministry. Then, as the baby boom generation became school-aged, we realized that we had a huge generation of children that needed to be educated. For some reason school systems were caught flat-footed and short of space. Churches began to see the Christian education of the children of its members as one of its central missions. They imagined that this would happen in those age-segregated classrooms modeled on the public school systems of the day. In fact, so similar were the theories about public and religious education that the same space could be used for both and, as you know, one of the ways that we paid for the Christian education wing was by leasing it to the public schools system until they could build adequate space of their own. That's why, for example, there are five restrooms in that wing, one of them inside the kindergarten room.

Buildings are one of the loudest public statements that a congregation makes. They tell who we are and what we think we're doing here. They are non-verbal billboards. All buildings, really, from the humblest family home to the White House and the Capital Building, are public statements that send a message to everyone who enters or even passes by. Solomon's Temple was no exception.

The project of building a Temple in Jerusalem was not new with Solomon. His father a proposed the idea and Nathan had shot it down. David noted to Nathan the prophet that the covenant box was being kept in a tent. It was a nice tent and all, a cut above what we can buy at Cabela's. But David was living in a house made of cedar and felt a little embarrassed about it. "Sure," said Nathan, "do whatever you want. Yahweh is with you." But then, Nathan checked with God and had to come back to David and say, "Nope. Sorry. No can do. God says ‘I've never had a house to live in. I've never asked for one. Why do you think I need one?"

This was a clear rebuke to David's plan to consolidate his rule over the tribes of Israel. Remember that he had moved the capitol of Israel into a hilltop fortress that he had taken over and called "David's City." We call it Jerusalem. He then had the covenant box moved there along with its tent. |And that's as far as David got.

But Solomon was able to advance the project. Solomon built a Temple. It was intended to be and in fact was a stunningly beautiful piece of architectural propaganda. It expanded the plan of the tent and made it permanent, set in stone. According to the tradition, it was so well designed and so well built that each stone fit exactly as it should without any use of hammers or chisels on the site, so that even the construction of the building took place in reverent silence. When finished it announced to Israel, to the residents of Jerusalem, and to all visitors and would-be rivals or enemies of Israel, that the God who was worshiped here was powerful and bound with unbreakable ties to the kingdom and its king. Anyone who threatened Jerusalem would have to take on Yahweh. It proclaimed in Yahweh’s name, "This is my Temple. This is my city. Its king is my chosen. This is my people. Jerusalem is defended."

The Temple was intended to centralize and supervise the worship of Yahweh. Local sites of devotion to Yahweh and the worship of other gods were torn down from time to time, although they were often rebuilt. There was resistance to the royal program of funneling access to God through Jerusalem. The prophetic movement became a needed counter-balance to the temple and its apparatus. After the building of the Temple, social justice movements seldom came out of Jerusalem and hardly ever out of the royal house. Jerusalem became a place of privilege. It was what Solomon, the Temple priesthood, the nobility, and the royal prophets got in exchange for the great favor that Solomon had done for God: "The Lord said that he would live in a dark cloud, but I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever." Solomon's plans for God, you see, are so better than God's plans for God.

So we have here two streams in the tradition and--in my opinion--they are not reconcilable. One stream of the tradition is that God does indeed live in a dark cloud where no one can gain control so as to have God in their pocket or at their disposal. God is available anywhere but nowhere more than among the widows, the orphans, and the foreign workers, that is, among those with little wealth or power, those in need of justice, and those who live in the margins and the shadows. God acts from below and outside of the structures of power. God is disposed to overthrow the rich and the powerful and lift up the oppressed, liberate the captives, and give sight to the blind. That I would call the prophetic stream of the tradition.

The other stream of the tradition is the Temple stream. In this stream Yahweh is the one who guarantees the stability of the regime. A tribal God has become the universal God so that the tribes of Israel (and then of Judah) become the legitimate rulers of the world. God guarantees that Jerusalem will never fall, that Judah will stand for ever, and that David's dynasty will never end. God has chosen them and will always support and defend them.

There is not much overlap between these two ways of seeing Yahweh's covenant. I suspect that there are times when we simply have to choose between them, times when we cannot have it both ways. And I don't have to tell you which stream Jesus chose.

If we are to build a house for God, I think we will have to do it along far different lines than we have imagined in the past. For as long as we can remember, churches have been public institutions in our communities. This has been true ever since the days of the Emperor Constantine who saw the Church as a way to centralize and supervise religion to the advantage of the empire.

But that era of our tradition is coming to an end. There is a parting of the ways that is already underway and will accelerate in the coming decades. There is a stream in our Christian tradition that sees God as the guarantor of the nation and its privileges and of their particular privileges within that nation. They have made a theological box for God to live in--and it's a well-built box, a decorated box, a beautiful box--so that God will bless them with prosperity, health, and security from the people they fear.

There is another stream that can't imagine how it could build a structure that could contain God. It can't imagine drawing any circle that places people outside that wouldn't also place God outside. It sees God as free to go where God is needed most and it sees itself as free to follow God into those very places, without regard for respectability or place in the community. It sees its mission as far more important than any building.

As a changing world forces a choice on us, buildings will be at the center of our conversations. Buildings consume an enormous amount of our energy. They are expensive to build, to operate, and to maintain. They can be very important tools for our ministry--and I believe that, on the whole, we use ours pretty well--but they will never be cheap. They also--and this is even more dangerous--focus our attention inward, rather than outward. They disrupt the healthy rhythm between rest and work, between learning and using what we have learned, and between who we are and who we are called to become. They threaten to distract us from attentiveness toward God to attentiveness to a building.

There are some who argue that the time for church buildings has come to end and that congregations should never occupy any building permanently. I can see that as a possibility, although I'd like to see some examples. What I cannot help but see and say is that the time is long past when we could say to God, "I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever."

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Surfaces (20th Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Samuel 16:1-3; October 22, 2017)

Surfaces

20th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 16:1-3
October 22, 2017

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

Saul was king over the tribes of Israel but it wasn't working out very well. He had become rather erratic, moody. And to make things worse he seriously messed up some instructions from Samuel. He had been told to attack an Amalekite city and destroy everything: the people, all livestock, and anything of value.

(I pause here to observe that this is, of course, morally reprehensible. This is neither the first nor the last time that Israel seems to been required by God to commit an atrocity. The story is ugly. It's there and there isn't really anything we can do about it. It's also not particularly relevant for today's reading, so I'm going to let it go.)

When it came down to it, though, Saul and his army attacked the Amalekite city, and overran its defenses. They captured Agag the king alive but put the people to death. They also kept the sheep, the cattle, the fattened calves, the lambs , and everything of value.

God sent Samuel to confront Saul about his failure to do as God had demanded. Samuel found Saul at Gilgal. Saul met Samuel and told him, "I've done what Yahweh demanded."

"Oh, yeah?" Samuel said, "Then why do I hear sheep bleating and cattle mooing?"

And Saul replied, "Well, um. See, we, um, decided to keep the best for, um, um, to sacrifice it to Yahweh. Yeah, that's it. Yeah."

Samuel then killed Agag the king and Samuel and Saul went their separate ways. They never saw each other again.

So God told Samuel to go to Bethlehem and overthrow the government. So Samuel went to Bethlehem. He went with fear and trembling. Anointing a new king is a really bad idea when the old king is still in power and that's exactly what Samuel was doing. So God gave Samuel a cover story: Samuel's public story was that he was in Bethlehem to perform a sacrifice for no particular reason. The town worthies were gathered as were the offerings. Jesse and his boys were invited. They purified themselves and came to the sacrifice.

As Jesse introduced his sons to the out of town celebrity, Samuel and God had a running conversation. Samuel saw the eldest son of Jesse, Eliab, and said to God, "He's good looking. That must be the new king. Right, God?"

"No," God said, "that's not the new king and what's more I don't look at things like you humans do. Humans see only what the eyes can see. I see right into the heart."

"Oh," said Samuel, "Then how about Abinadab?"

"Nope," said God.

"How about Shammah?"

"Nope."

And so on through seven of Jesse's sons. Samuel was puzzled. The new king was supposed to be one of Jesse's sons. "Do you have any other sons?" Samuel asked Jesse.

"Well, yeah. But he's the youngest and he's watching sheep."

"Send for him," Samuel said.

When the youngest son of Jesse arrived, God told Samuel, "That's the one!"

So Samuel took his horn and poured oil on David's head. God's Spirit fell on David. Samuel left Bethlehem and went to Ramah. End of story.

Well, really, it was the beginning of the story of David and the eventually founding of the only ruling dynasty of Judah. David and his descendants reigned over Israel until the division of the kingdom and then over Judah for the next four hundred years.

But there is something odd in this story. Did you notice it? When Samuel saw Eliab, Jesse's oldest son he thought, "That must be the one."

But Yahweh said, "Have no regard for his appearance or stature…God doesn't look at things like humans do. Humans see only what is visible to the eyes, but the Lord sees into the heart."

People see surfaces. God sees depths. Got it.

But notice what happens when David is brought in from watching the sheep. The narrator comments, "He was reddish brown [dark complected? well-tanned?], had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking." And God told Samuel that David was the one.

What are we to make of this? The most attention to appearance paid in the story is paid to David in spite of our having been warned not to pay attention to appearances.

It’s like we can’t help ourselves. We look at surfaces and pay attention to appearance. "Don't judge a book by its cover," we are told. But publishers spend a great deal of money on covers because they know that covers sell books.

Appearances don't matter, but orthodontists are doing pretty well as a profession, if the number of parents shelling out lots of money for braces for their kids is any indication. Is there any such thing as a child with teeth that are "good enough"?

I think we can agree that singers should be judged on their voices. But how much of a singer's success hangs on whether they conform to our notions of visual beauty?

Politicians sell themselves to us by carefully constructing images of themselves and their opponents, weaving them together into a story that appeals to their chosen demographics. They are "pro" this and "anti" that, but these, too, are images. When pressed for details about how, they disappear like startled squids in a cloud of ink. They are masks and façades.

The reality is that our attention is given to appearance in all sorts of ways that we hardly notice. Our eyes slide along surfaces; we regard appearances. We are even governed by them.

I check my Facebook feed every day. I always find an article or two that I think deserves to be read. But while reading them, my gaze happens to land on a link that reads "Presidents Ranked from Worst to Best." Sounds like it could be fun. I wonder if their ranking is anything like mine? This is what is known as "click bait," a link that is meant to entice me into following it.

But off I go. Of course, each President has their own page and I have to click to get to the next page. Forty-five clicks, forty-five presidents, forty-five pages of advertising to get to the last page and guess who?--Abraham Lincoln. No surprise there. Well, that was a lot of effort and I didn’t get much out of it.

But I wasn’t the one who was supposed to profit from the experience. The advertisers were the ones who were supposed to profit.

And the advertisers are sophisticated. On television, ads are placed according to a general picture of the audience watching that particular show. On the Internet the ads we see are chosen for us as individuals, selected to fit the choices we have made. If we buy something from Amazon.com we will see ads for similar or related items for weeks. Our ads are also based on the links we choose. Ads selected just for us.

We interact with this medium to create our own individualized experience of surfaces chosen and substituted one for another as fast as we can punch the screen with our fingers. Each participatory click is a vote to regard appearance.

The media are a succession of surfaces. Not only can't we see the heart, but we suspect that there is no heart to see, only the relentless effort to capture market share to boost the value of the medium for advertisers.

Facebook perhaps epitomizes this shallowness. It is not that Facebook and other social media lack any value. We can get bits of news more frequently from our friends and family than we did under earlier regimes. But they are mostly Tagesreste, remains of the day, bits and pieces of our lives without much reflection or thought. There are exceptions, but no future biographers are going to publish books of the Facebook posts or Tweets of this or that famous person like they used to publish collections of letters.

Facebook at its heart offers us a place to construct a public self, a persona, a mask, a character, an avatar with which to inhabit without bodies this space that is not space. If we do it right, we will be rewarded with "friends" whom we have never met and about whom we no nothing except for the surface they have created for us. I would say that it is the perfect embodiment of capitalism, a fictitious space where we are both producers and consumers, where our work is to produce masks, icons, avatars of ourselves, where we volunteer to do all the work and Mark Zuckerberg gets rich.

This play and interplay of surfaces is the logic of late capitalism. In academic circles they call this "post-modernism." In the study of language post-modernism is the disorienting notion that the meanings of words are not stable, the discovery that words are all defined by other words in a network of definitions that is not necessarily tied to the real world of hard objects you can bump into. When we try to find meaning, post-modernists are convinced that we only slide from the one surface to another and never do and never can get to the bottom of anything. It is surfaces all the way down. Meaning for post-modernists is a bubble that must sooner or later burst.

"David was reddish brown, had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking." That's how David was sold to the tribes of Israel. They bought the image. They held up all their kings to that image to see whether they fit. Some even called Jesus the Son of David, an image of the image. Jesus rejected that title, you know. Although his followers failed to listen to him, he rejected the notion that he was descended from David.

"God sees into the heart." Perhaps that means that we can't. And we certainly don't do it very well. Or maybe, just maybe, it means that we are called to become like God in this way, to become conscious of more than shimmering surfaces, to become aware of a third dimension, to discover depth in the world around us. Perhaps we are called to see the way God sees, to see without stopping at the surfaces, to see into the hearts of our neighbors. Perhaps we are called to value the world as God values it, the one who looked into the heart of the world at every stage of its creation and said, "Oh, that's good!" Maybe we can learn to see into the hearts of the things around us, too, into the hearts of trees and even into the hearts of the rocks. Perhaps if we see well enough, listen well enough, they will tell us some of the secrets their depths hold. Maybe, maybe not.

One thing is for certain: They'll never post it on Facebook.

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.

Blind Seers and Silent Prophets (Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Samuel 3:1-21; October 15, 2017)

Blind Seers and Silent Prophets

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 3:1-21
October 15, 2017

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

The book of Judges ends with the words that serve as the caption for the whole time between Joshua the successor of Moses and King Saul: "In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right." This suggests that this was a time of anarchy, but that wasn't quite true. There was no rule of kings and lords, but people were accountable to each other, Each person was part of a family, and each family part of a tribe. Disputes were settled by village elders. The families in a tribe protected each other and, unless the dispute was between tribes, tribes looked out for each other, too.

When trouble threatened the tribes of Israel, leaders would emerge, people recognized as having a special gift of Yahweh's spirit. They were called judges, but for the duration of a crisis these judges not only did "judgy" stuff; they served as military leaders of Israel's army. When the crisis was over, the tribes went back to looking out for themselves until the next crisis.

This may not seem like much of a system, but it worked well enough as long as there were no large populations on the move or ambitious empires looking to grow.

But, as our story begins, that system was beginning to break down. Masses of new people were beginning to arrive in the coastal plains by the Mediterranean. They had tools and weapons made of iron and the bronze weapons of the Canaanites and Israelites were no match. People were being displaced up into the hills where the tribes of Israel made their homes. Cities were rising along the Mediterranean, ruled over by kings--or perhaps more accurately, by warlords--who were jealous to extend their power as far as they could.

The old way of responding to a threat was too slow. By the time a judge arose and called out the troops, the invasion would be over. Adding this to the problem of fighting iron with bronze and the tribes were losing. Plus, any tribe could always decide not to help. Why would the tribe of Benjamin on the east side of the Jordan send its young men to fight a threat far to the west ?

In theory, at least, their common covenant with Yahweh could have provided the unity that they needed. In practice it probably did to some extent. But even with that there was a problem. According to the tradition that has come down to us, there was a central shrine to Yahweh at Shiloh. The tent of meeting was there and so was the holy box of the covenant. There were priests who tended the shrine, offered the sacrifices that people brought, and gave advice.

Eli who was the priest during the time of our story had performed satisfactorily during his lifetime, but he was old and blind and his sons who were doing most of the work were "despicable men who didn't know the Lord." [1 Sam 2:12] They kept the best of the sacrifices that men brought for themselves and they abused the women. Harvey Weinstein did not invent this sort of misuse of power. Eli knew what his sons were up to but, like too many people who are aware of misconduct but are afraid to rock the boat, he did nothing about it.

It was to Eli in Shiloh that the woman Hannah had brought her son Samuel. He was her only son, born to her late in her life. The birth of Samuel had taken away the shame that she felt on account of her childlessness. She was so grateful to Yahweh that she gave Samuel into Yahweh's service. Samuel was about four years old at the time, the usual age for weaning.

And so our story begins, but not without noting that the story takes place during a drought. It wasn't the kind of drought caused by a lack of rain or melted snow. It was a drought of another sort. There was no word from Yahweh. There were no visions. Prophets had fallen silent. The seers of visions had gone blind. There was no shortage of opinions, no lack of voices to urge this or that course of action, but none of the voices were God's voice.

But one evening, while the lamps were still burning and Eli had nodded off, Samuel was keeping vigil in the sanctuary. Samuel heard a voice calling him by name, so he, assuming that it must be Eli calling, ran to the old priest and asked him what he wanted. Eli replied, "I didn't call, my son. Go and lie down." A second time the voice came. A second time Samuel rushed to Eli. And a second time, Eli said, "I didn't call, my son. Go and lie down." And a third time came the voice and third time Samuel hurried to Eli.

By this time Eli was awake enough to recognize what was going on and he gave Samuel instructions on how to respond if Yahweh called again. Sure enough, the voice came a fourth time, and Samuel did as he was told, "Speak. Your servant is listening."

And Yahweh spoke.

If it had been me, I would have started Samuel off with something a little easier, perhaps something uplifting, something with lots of promises of good things. Why put such a burden on the boy?

But, apparently, God doesn't think like I do. Instead of some comfortable message, God gave Samuel a message that something so bad was going to happen in Israel that it would throw everyone who heard it into such a state of shock that the sound in their ears would seem so far away that it could only be heard as a buzzing noise. The priesthood of Eli and his two sons would come to a horrible end.

I can imagine how hard it would have been for little Samuel to pass this message along to Eli, his foster father, let alone to his older and thoroughly corrupt foster brothers. He tried pretending he had nothing to say. But Eli was insistent that Samuel tell all of what he had heard. This is what a prophet must do. A prophet must listen and a prophet must speak; either one without the other is a failure of the office of prophet. Even as young as he was, Samuel was not too young to learn this central reality that comes with burden of hearing God's voice.

So Samuel's long career began. He saw the end of the old tribal alliances and an end to Eli's priesthood, He chose Saul as king. He replaced Saul with David. Samuel was the hinge on which the history of Israel turned.

One last time before the old ways yielded to the new, God had brought forward a person upon whom the Spirit of Yahweh rested, a person who would lead the tribes through a time of crisis, a judge who brought the role of the judge to an end. One more time God was faithful to Israel in a time of deep danger, giving the tribes one more chance to live into the covenant that had and would set them apart for the privilege and burden of living out God's dream in the real world.

I observe that there are some resemblances between then and now, between the crisis into which Samuel was placed and the crisis in which we find ourselves: Our world, too, finds itself with choices to make. Our time, too, demands that we leave older, more comfortable ways of living and embrace new ways that we can hardly imagine.

One of the most important things happening in our world is the collapse of binary thinking. For example, for as long as anyone can remember, as far back as there are records, we humans have defined ourselves by identifying and rejecting who we are not. Greeks defined themselves against the barbarians, those who went "bar bar" like sheep instead of speaking a civilized language like Greek. Romans built walls around its empire to keep out those whom it deemed too savage, those who could not be turned into Romans. (Incidentally, their walls were expensive and they never worked.) Spaniards and Portuguese defined themselves as Christians against the heretics of the northern islands and the barely human inhabitants of the New World. White Americans defined themselves against the savage Red Indians who didn't deserve the land that they lived on and the Black Africans who for their own sake needed to be enslaved.

Men have defined themselves against women at least since the beginning of history. Greek men saw themselves as hot and dry and well-contained as over against women who were cold and wet and leaky. Roman men saw themselves as defined by virtue. Virility and virtue both come from the same Latin root, vir, that means simply, "man." Women were by definition not virtuous. Examples of virtuous women, rather than causing Romans to rethink their categories and definitions, instead caused them to grant honorary manhood to the exceptional women. In our own day we have the Harvey Weinsteins whose toxic masculinity leads them to define themselves as the predators and exploiters of women who are the prey and the exploited. If we believe the testimony of women—and I do—he’s not at all alone.

Straight folks defined themselves in North America and northern Europe by inventing a homosexual Other in the eighteen hundreds, a category that had never existed before. Republican and Democrats are "othering" each other, defining themselves as patriotic and good against others who are unpatriotic and wicked.

This is the binary thinking, this business of defining the world and ourselves with either/or’s. A new reality is emerging which is not either/or, not binary. Once we think we are done sorting everyone into male and female boxes, we find that there are remainders, people who are both or neither. Once we have sorted everyone into gay and straight, once again there are those who remain.

Sooner or later we will have to recognize that male and female; straight and gay; white, black, red, brown, and yellow; the blessed and cursed; and, the chosen and the unchosen are all boxes that are built by someone for our their own convenience and comfort at the cost of great suffering and oppression that have been laid on others. In our day the real world is hammering at the walls built to shield us from reality, demanding recognition that God's creation is composed of bewildering variety. Just because most of us have two hands, two feet, two eyes, ears and nostrils, does not mean that the world is binary.

Right now we live in a time when the newly visible fuzziness of our categories causes deep anxiety, and fear, that leads to hatred. (And hatred, as we all know by now, leads to the dark side of the Force.) A newly invigorated sexism, racism, and homophobia have been let loose and have spawned a new culture of cruelty that delights in violence and the figurative if not literal death of all Others.

In a way of course all these Others are really stand-ins for the really big binary division between humans and nature. Nature was invented by the Greeks in order to define culture. This nature/culture division has allowed us to so damage our own home that our very existence over the next century is up for grabs. But a binary division between culture and nature is only a line drawn to ease our anxiety. The reality is that humans beings are just another part of nature and everything that we have produced--from skyscrapers to GPS satellites to flu vaccines--is no less natural than a beaver dam or a beehive. Pretending otherwise we have pushed this planet as far as we can. It has begun to push back and will do so with a vengeance in the coming decades.

An old world of simple categories and clear alternatives is coming to an end. It never worked for the people that it oppressed and the things that it exploited. But we are beginning to see that, really, it doesn’t work for anyone.

A new reality is coming into being. In our story Samuel was there to nudge the new reality in the direction of God's dream instead of standing by as it slid into a new and more terrifying nightmare. In our day, who will do the nudging? Who will speak on behalf of God's dream? Who will say, "Speak. Lord, your servant is listening"? You and I will. You and I will bring an end to the long drought. You and will declare God's vision of wondrous variety and balance. You and I will speak forth God's dream of solidarity and hope.

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.