A Good-Enough Myth

First Sunday after Christmas, Year B
Scripture: John 1:1-15
Contemporary: Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot
December 31, 2023

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, NJ

A myth is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. This runs counter to the usual way we define “myth.” We usually define myth as a story that is false (and involves the gods in some way). It’s myth versus science. Myth versus history. Myth versus fact. But the way I’m using myth here has little to do with whether it is true or false or fact or fiction and more to do with why we tell stories, as we certainly do. The way I’m using the word also means that myth is not a particular kind of story, but rather an aspect of every story we tell.

Approaching the Bible as a collection of myths is helpful for giving us a way into the text without having to be professionally trained experts in the original languages, ancient history, or the many theories of how the text came to be the way it is. Then, the central question about interpretation becomes, what is the puzzle about themselves that the writer(s) of the text confront and how do they answer it? We also want to see how all that bumps up against our own myths, both as individuals and as a community. That is almost always what I am about whenever I stand here.

So, John 1:1-18, what scholars call the Prologue to John. After starting with a cosmic view John brings us readers down to earth so that by the end of the chapter we’re dealing with the baptism of Jesus, the calling of the first disciples, and then, in the next chapter, the wedding at Cana. I say down to earth, but, really, John hardly ever really gets there. The stories are hardly more than pretexts for Jesus’ sermons. A hard line emerges in those sermons between “the world” and the “spirit” and it is clear where Jesus is and where we are supposed to be. John finds “down to earth”an uncomfortable place to be.

The abstract statements of John’s Prologue have yielded thousands of pages of more abstract theology. But rather than move from John’s abstract text to even more abstract theology, I’m committed this morning to moving in the other direction: from the abstract text to a story.

On that score John 1 doesn’t fare very well. It’s not much of a story. There is a story arc of sorts: it’s a creation story that moves from God to creation through this mysterious Word and ends with the same Word entering into the creation: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” This does fit into Aristotle’s definition of a story as requiring a beginning, a middle where something gets changed, and an end. But it’s not much of a story is it? It entirely lacks the sort of details that make a story come alive. It is devoid of emotion. We don’t really even have much of an idea of who the characters are and certainly we don’t have enough to develop any sympathy for them. It’s not much of a story.

That’s especially obvious to us because of where the story has been placed in the lectionary. On Christmas Eve we heard Luke’s birth story with its shepherds and angels, its holy family at the mercy of the powerful but pitifully ignorant Caesar Augustus. On Epiphany we will hear Matthew’s story of the toddler Jesus, the ruthless Herod, and the mysterious magi. Today we have, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Okay. So there is not much of a story in the text. When this happens, one of the things we can do is to turn to the story behind the text. John’s gospel was written somewhere, at some time, by someone, even if we can’t say precisely where, when, or by whom with confidence. It was written for a reason and intended for an audience. This audience faced particular circumstances, had their own struggles, and suffered in their own way. John was written for them in those circumstances and intended to have an effect. This is the stuff that makes for story-telling.

I have long thought that a key understanding John’s gospel is realizing that John’s community has suffered a deep trauma. I realize that this reading of mine has little corroborating evidence that would anchor my claim in history. But I’m willing to make the claim anyway, because it provides a plausible background story for the Gospel and its introduction. Almost everything we know about John’s community other than its general time period we have to infer from the gospel itself. I think it’s especially useful to start with the story in John 9 which contains the story of the healing of a man who had been born blind and what happened to him afterwards.

Blindness and other traits that are perceived as limitations are fraught topics. We have begun to realize that our understanding and our habits of expression about so-called handicapping conditions can be harmful and impose greater limitations on people than the conditions themselves. John has had no such realization (although we will have to credit him at least with recognizing that congenital blindness is not punishment for the sins either of the man born blind nor his parents).

The story is simple: Jesus and his followers encounter a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus makes a muddy paste of spit and dirt. (This is John’s earthiest moment.) Jesus applies the mud to the man’s eyes, and orders him to wash it off in the pool of Siloam. The man does and can see for the first time.

One would imagine that this healing would be received with joyful amazement. One would imagine wrongly. The religious leaders grill the man for details about the healing, but all he knows is that the man who healed him was named Jesus and that he can now see. The scholars summon the man’s parents who testify that, yes, this is indeed their son; and yes, he was born blind; but, no, they don’t know anything about how he has come to have sight;and; would they please refer all questions to their son because they don’t really want to get involved in his disputes, thank you very much. When the leaders go back to the man, he gives them a theology lesson which do not receive graciously. They expel him from the religious assembly, so that he can no longer associate with his faith community.

This is a real story. The little details bring the story to life for us. It resonates with the pain of betrayal and exclusion. This is a story of the trauma suffered no doubt by many Christians. Even in the absence of official persecution, being a follower of Jesus often meant scorn and rejection by friends and family and a loss of the connections to a wider community that give life a sense of meaning. What I believe is that this story is a version of what happened to the whole of John’s community. They had lived as a part of the Jewish community. Their embrace of Jesus as God’s anointed led to tension with their community. Argument led to polemic. Differences of opinion became mutual rejection. The synagogue finally tired of the conflict and resolved it by tossing these followers of Jesus from their midst. Many families may have done the same. We might have done the same. Everyone knows how annoying converts can be.

The band of Jesus followers found themselves bereft of family and community, stripped of their connection with their identity as Jews, and deprived of the protections that come with having a social place in the world. Trauma indeed.

Read as myth, the story of the man born blind might be summarized as “we are a people who have lost our place in the world, who live in exile in our own town, cast out by the spiritually ignorant because we have seen God’s light in Jesus.” I think that this is the myth that lies behind all of John’s gospel, John 1:1-18 included. This is a deeply traumatized community. And it’s responding as people often do to trauma. They have a polarized view of their world. Their fellow Jews have become evil enemies. They take refuge from their traumatic history by taking flight into abstraction. We can see all three of these moves in this short reading.

Now, in our day, when we suffer deep trauma that gets in the way of living we try all sorts of things to stop our suffering. We wall off our feelings behind psychological barriers; sometimes we drink too much; we pass on their trauma to others; we engage in high-risk behaviors; we may even take our own lives. Sometimes, though, we will seek help in therapy. The purpose of the therapy, whether said in so many words or not, is to help us write a different story, a different myth. The object isn’t to erase the old myth by ignoring the trauma. The goal is rather to complicate the old myth with more complex stories, so that our story of trauma becomes just one story among many that together build a world in which other outcomes than misery and suffering are possible and leave us able to make meaningful choices that move us toward better ends. The antidote to bad myths is better myths, more nuanced myths that correspond more closely to the real world of hard objects we can bump into. The goal is a good-enough myth.

What I believe about John’s gospel is that it is an attempt at better myth-making to help John’s community move toward healing from their trauma and toward new life lived right here in this world. One of the strategies that the gospel uses is to complicate the old myth. The Prologue is a case in point. It’s stamped by the old myth. The story of their trauma has been abstracted almost out of existence. The world is polarized between light and darkness and the two halves cannot be reconciled. Emotions have been banished.

But, there is a complicating element and it comes at verse 14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The very abstract Word reverses abstraction and enters creation by becoming flesh. God has suddenly started taking an interest in bodies. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to imagine that God might take an interest in trauma, too, in which case John’s community might eventually be able to turn its attention back toward the memory of trauma it has been trying to avoid. If I’m right, we’re still in the early days of therapy for John’s folk. This is by no means a perfect myth. But, for where they are and what they are facing, it is perhaps, a good-enough myth. Wisely, John has not demanded that his community bite off the whole trauma in one bite. But he is insisting that they start to nibble around its edges. Trauma cannot be allowed have the last word. For this to happen, trauma must at some time be allowed to speak and to be taken seriously. In the Gospel of John that process has begun with a good-enough myth.

Now. I hope you’ve made a few connections to your own experience. But there is a connection that I am unwilling to leave to chance and that is the connection to our own recent experience. I think I understand some reasons why a short lame-duck period might be beneficial and why it might be diocesan policy. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are freshly wounded by Cynthia’s retirement and departure. This is true whether we consider ourselves to have been her supporters or her opposition. Relations have been severed at a stroke. We have suffered individual traumas and a collective trauma. There are various responses possible. I even find myself wondering whether I could stay in touch with her, make myself an exception to the general rule since, you know, I am a colleague. No, I recognize that for what it is: an attempt to minimize or evade the trauma. Or we can try to throw a switch and focus entirely on the very real need to meet the future head-on. I think we will be ill-served if we fail to honor our loss and allow the space for healing (which need not prevent us from making plans).

As part of our planning we will be asked to gather a lot of information about ourselves and our community. The point of that will be to come up with a clear view of who we are and who we are ready to become. And, that, my friends, sounds suspiciously like an invitation to rewrite our shared myth. We will then share that information with the diocese and through it with any prospective new clergy leader. But let’s not do this because that’s what the diocese tells us we have to do in order to find new clergy leadership.

No, we tell myths for our own sake, and I hope we will seize this as an opportunity to do consciously and deliberately what we usually do unawares: to tell ourselves a story about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. It doesn’t have to be a perfect myth. If there were a perfect myth, the prologue of John certainly would not be one.

I am asking that we commit to telling not a perfect myth, but a good-enough myth. Let’s reject myths that are too simple. Let’s make it as complex and as honest as we can bear. Such a good-enough myth will serve us well on this next stage of our journey.

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.

How About a Little Reverie? (1 Advent B, Mark 13:33-27)

How About a Little Reverie? 

1st Sunday of Advent
Mark 13:33-37
November 29, 2020 

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, New Jersey 

Ten months ago tomorrow the Centers for Disease Control announced the first person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. The CDC Director Robert Redfield assured us that “based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.” Seldom has such tragic ignorance been offered in the service of such fleeting bliss.  

Our lives and our shared life have taken a terrible hit. We are grieving our many losses. We are approaching 1.5 million known dead across the globe, with the daily death toll now above 10,000 per day, a fifth of those in what we used to think was the most advanced nation on earth.  

We are grieving. Too many have lost those whom we love. All of us are grieving the life we used to call normal. Our daughter Beth teaches eight-graders in a district using a hybrid model of remote and in-person instruction. To protect her daughter (our granddaughter) Diana, Beth is living alone for now. I hope you will forgive me if I express my admiration for her: this is a heroism I can barely fathom. It is a measure of how much things have changed that we are grateful that we could Zoom in her simulacrum to join us for Thanksgiving Dinner.  

Some of us are coping, doing what needs to be done, our supports holding for now. Others are struggling to maintain any sense of control or well-being. Some have been pressed into a panic mode. And many of us sort of slide along the scale as circumstances and energy vary. I don’t know anyone who is thriving. We are drinking more¹, eating more², and exercising less³. I have yet to hear anyone say, “Well, at least we’re getting enough high-quality sleep!” In fact two-thirds of us report that our sleep quality has worsened in the last ten months.⁴  

So, imagine how thrilled I was to discover that the gospel reading for the First Sunday of Advent is a parable that tells us—four times, no less—to “Stay awake!” And, lest we think that translation issues might have made this harsher than it should be, the word that is used doesn’t simply mean to avoid sleeping. No, it means vigilant wakefulness, the kind that lets us stay on guard, attentive to the risks and unknown dangers around us. A less helpful or welcome lesson I cannot imagine.  

This idea of wakefulness, of vigilance, as a virtue isn’t original with Jesus. It’s a common theme in the literature of Jesus’ time in which God’s faithful people must go through great hardship. There may seem to be no end in sight for them, but they must not lose hope. Their rescue is on the way; something new is coming; creation is about to be remade. God’s people must stay alert to the signs of its coming, just as sentries in a besieged city watch eagerly for the arrival of a rescuing army.  

Vigils—periods of the night spent in prayer—were a feature of the devotional life of early Christians and from there passed into the practice of monastics. Even a casual reader of early monastic writings can see that sleep deprivation was an integral part of the lives of the holy women and men who lived in the deserted spaces of Egypt and Syria.  

 Nowadays going without sleep has become a late capitalist virtue. Sleeping people neither produce nor consume anything. Sleeping people are economically meaningless. Accordingly, as capitalism has developed, we spend less and less time asleep. In the last century the average night’s sleep has fallen from ten hours to six and a half.⁵ In place of the praying monastic the sleepless entrepreneur is offered as an ideal. 

For the Pentagon, 24/7 hyper-vigilance is a desired trait in its fighters. Some veterans have become such perfect embodiments of that injunction to keep watch that they cannot sit down in a room unless they are facing the door. This is just one feature of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many PTSD sufferers drink too much, eat too much, and don’t get enough exercise. They also have trouble sleeping.  

I wonder if we aren’t all suffering from some attenuated form of PTSD. The trauma that we are going through is certainly not as intense as combat, but merely knowing that a quarter of a million of our friends, family members, colleagues, and neighbors have died—so far—while our President refuses even to acknowledge that we have been harmed is injury enough.  

Is Jesus suggesting that we give up one of our last restorative strategies in order to spend our nights stoking our anxieties (and weakening our immune systems while we are at it)? If so, then I suggest we ignore this parable. I cannot see how voluntary sleeplessness can be anything other than a way of underscoring just how apocalyptically God-awful it is to live during a pandemic.  

It was hard enough for me getting to this point. I’m a little tempted to leave it there and walk away. “Listen for the what the Spirit is saying.” “Thanks be to God!” indeed. 

But it’s the First Sunday of Advent. Jody reminds me that Advent is her favorite liturgical season. She expects something Advent-y (her word). 

Hoping to avoid the ugliness that may ensue I therefore turn back to the text. My attention focused by fear, I notice a couple of things. The first is that one little word is caring a lot of freight. “It is like” is how my version translated it. “It is like a man going on a journey...” It is like. But “like” is not the same as “is.” The parable is offered to us as like, as a simile of, as a figure of speech about a man going on a journey. “It is like a man” in some ways; but that means it is unlike a man in others. The trick is in untangling like from unlike. So, in what ways could a doorkeeper who never stops keeping watch be like us? Are there other possibilities than hyper-vigilant insomnia? If so, what are they? 

The figure of the watching doorkeeper waiting for the absent master is a part of that apocalyptic literature in which history gets worse and worse until, with a bang, it ends and is replaced by God’s dream. God’s dream erupts into our world bringing a new creation. 

God’s dream is like this, but also unlike this. More often God’s dream hovers at the edge of our awareness, doing its work but mostly unnoticed. It lingers at the limits of sight. It percolates below our consciousness. It teases at us, just out of reach. 

This parable, then, could be read as an urgent plea for us to pay attention to what is happening mostly beyond our awareness and completely beyond our control. It comes to me in the moments between wakefulness and sleep when suddenly and unbidden there is what I can only describe as an almost-revelation of rightness, of sanity, of restoration. And then it is gone and I cannot remember why or how it was sane or even what it was that was restored and there remains only a longing for what almost is but isn’t…not yet, anyway. 

This state is akin to reverie, when our guard is down, when our minds wander off and the task at hand (if there is one) is happily forgotten. It is the very opposite of productivity. It is useless to the system and there are whole shelves in bookstores dedicated to advice about how to stop “procrastinating” in favor of engaged thinking.  

Advent takes place in the not-here/not-there spaces of our lives as in the imperial advents of Roman days in the not-here/not-there space between the urban centers of politics, business, and administration and the open spaces of the countryside. The advent of God’s dream comes in the cracks, the fissures, and the half-dreaming reverie of our lives. In this sense, nothing has really changed. For it is not in Rome or Washington or other center of imperial power that God’s dream creeps in to dwell with us, but in the college student facing down imperial storm-troopers, in the listening voice at the other end of the telephone line, in midst of the poverty of a peasant family finding respite in a stable from the whims of a far-away ruler, If we must be attentive as Jesus instructs us, let us be attentive to those places for they are where we will glimpse 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.

1Michael S. Pollard, Joan S. Tucker, and Harold D. Green, “Changes in Adult Alcohol Use and Consequences During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” JAMA Network Open 3, no. 9 (September 29, 2020): e2022942, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22942.

2AJ Owen et al., “Poor Appetite and Overeating Reported by Adults in Australia during the Coronavirus-19 Disease Pandemic: A Population-Based Study,” Public Health Nutrition, n.d., 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020003833.

3Jaime Ducharme, “COVID-19 Is Making Americans More Sedentary,” Time, May 12, 2020, https://time.com/5831678/covid-19-americans-exercise/.

4Matthew Gavidia, “How Have Sleep Habits Changed Amid COVID-19?,” AJMC, June 2, 2020, https://www.ajmc.com/view/how-have-sleep-habits-changed-amid-covid-19.

5Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London & New York: Verso, 2013), 11.

No One Left Out

 

Proper 27A

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

November 8, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

Church of the Redeemer

Morristown, NJ

No One Left Out

To read the New Testament, or any of the Bible for that matter, is to enter a world that is strange to our own. It’s not just that we have smartphones and regular garbage collection and they did not. It’s that we and they see the world in very different ways. They thought differently about how things work physically; they thought differently about the size and shape of the universe; they thought differently about history. They thought differently about everything.

And it’s hard for us to grasp. Learning to read the Greek in which they wrote is often easy compared to the work of learning to read what it was they were writing about. What seems easy to understand either because we’ve read it so many times it has become familiar or because we imagine that the writers lived in our imaginative world is, for both of those reasons, easy to misread and misunderstand. We have to read until the familiar becomes strange.

All the same, for all their strangeness, for all of the differences made by two thousand years of time and a continent and an ocean worth of distance, these human beings were not so unlike us. They preferred being alive to being dead. They lived together in communities. They married and raised children. They maintained households and community relations. They had a notion of what a good life would be and they struggled in that direction. They chafed under injustice and oppression and they resented unfairness.

Once we’ve read until a familiar text has become strange to us, then we turn around and read a strange text until the people become recognizably human.

This letter of Paul’s is his first surviving epistle, in fact, the oldest of any of the New Testament books, older by a generation than any of the gospels. Say whatever we will about Paul (and I’ve said plenty) he was the first known Jesus-follower to attempt any sort of written account of the Jesus movement. Like all of the New Testament books, 1 Thessalonians was written for a particular community of Christians to speak to the particular concerns that they had. We read over the shoulders of the first century readers for whom this book was written and to whom it was sent.

We surmise from reading even this short passage that there were worried and troubled followers of Jesus in Thessalonika. It was perhaps fifteen or twenty years since Jesus had died and been raised from the dead. It was a bedrock article of faith among the Christian assemblies that Jesus would return. He would return to “restore” Israel, as the Gospel of Luke puts it, to bring the definitive reign of God, to transform history so that humans, or at very least the humans who had followed the Way of Jesus, would be able to live the lives that God had always intended that they should lead. There are various images in the Bible of what this might look like, but the one from Micah that we would have heard last week had we read a little further will do nicely:

…they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid.¹

They believed that Jesus was the one through whom God would (finally) bring this to pass and that all this would happen soon. The folks at Thessalonika were not modern people. There were no anthropologists there, no sociologists, and no political scientists. They didn’t think scientifically in terms of systems that could be created, dismantled, or nudged in the direction of a just and peaceful society.

But they had nonetheless been at the work of living out an alternative vision of what human community could be. They were about the task of living into values that were at odds with the broader culture of Rome and its empire. They struggled to live non-violently, justly, lovingly, compassionately, and peacefully.

They weren’t environmentalists or ecologists, either. They certainly saw their lives as a struggle between culture and nature, a struggle that was often a matter of life and death, one that they had no assurance of winning. But they also understood that, just as human life as lived in the Empire of Rome was less than what God dreamed for them, so, too, was nature not as it should be. They believed that when Jesus returned to set things to rights, part of what would happen would be the restoration of creation to its intended splendor.

They understood themselves to be a part of God’s plan from which the natural world was not excluded and that their ultimate salvation and the creation’s salvation were wrapped up in each other. So their living out of and into God’s good news would be good news for the entire world.

Now they had been at this work for some time. But as the years drew on, members of their community died from one cause or another. This was not unusual, but it raised a problem. What would happen to those who died as Jesus’ return was delayed? Were they simply out of luck? Would they miss seeing in its completion the work that they had invested their lives in?

Paul crafted his answer to meet this pastoral need and to do that he drew from things that were a part of their lives. No, he said, those Christians who have died have not missed out, because when Jesus comes it will be like when the Emperor comes to pay an official visit, what was called a parousia. The Greek word means “presence” or “arrival.” (Its Latin translation is “adventus,” so that might help us.) The Emperor would draw near a city and heralds would be sent forward to announce the emperor’s approach. Horns would be sounded. The people of the city already knew that the emperor was coming so they would process out of the city to meet him on the road. They would wear white garments and, bowing down, they would present gifts.Now, a feature of ancient Greco-Roman cities is that there were no cemeteries inside the city walls. Instead, the roads into a city were lined on both sides with tombs. People wanted to be buried there so that travelers would see their tombs, perhaps read the epitaphs, and in this way they would be remembered, memorialized. Of course this meant that the emperor (or any other traveler) would meet the dead of the city before he met the living.

Paul re-imagines the parousia of Jesus as taking place from above. As he approached, the trumpet would sound, the heralds would announce his arrival, and the faithful would go up in this case to meet him. The dead would meet him first. The anxious Thessalonians didn’t need to worry about the dead of their community. When the time came, the dead would have a front row view.

I don’t doubt that the community at Thessalonika was able to find some comfort in the poetic image that Paul sketched in his letter to them.

The question I have is this: does it work for us who do not anticipate visits from the Emperor and who, for that matter, may or may not believe that history is laid out in the way that the Thessalonians believed it to be? I mean, do we really expect that our history will go along, fulfill certain disconnected prophecies, and then suddenly come to an end to be replaced by this supernatural interruption? We can and do imagine several scenarios for the end of human history, but none of mine at least look anything like this.

 

I see God’s dream for us differently, not as something outside or above history, and not as something really in history, either, but as something that bubbles up through it, erupting sometimes into a glimpse of what God wants for us.

It happened that way about four years ago in Baton Rouge during a Black Lives Matter protest. Protesters blocked a roadway without a permit and a line of heavily armored Louisiana State troopers prepared to shove the protesters off the street. A young black woman named Ieshia Evans stepped onto the street and stood facing them. Looking at the picture of her in a summer dress, I suspect that she hadn’t planned this. Still, she was there, this slender young woman, facing down a phalanx of police who looked like they were ready for combat. She described it this way:

When the police pushed everyone off the street, I felt like they were pushing us to the side to silence our voices and diminish our presence. They were once again leveraging their strength to leave us powerless. As Africans in America we’re tired of protesting that our lives matter, it’s time we stop begging for justice and take a stance for our people. It’s time for us to be fearless and take our power back.²

God’s dream lives just below the surfaces that we walk on unthinking. Sometimes it erupts. Sometimes it springs up and thrills our hearts, making us believe that the impossible dream of a peaceful justice is not only possible but inevitable.

The Thessalonians were worried about whether the dead of their community would be allowed to be a part of Jesus’ coming. And this after just a few years of delay in their expectations. What nearly two thousand years of delay have taught us is that Jesus’ coming is always already happening right now. Through Ieshia Evans, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and through everyday acts of millions of others who never make the news,Jesus approaches, blows a trumpet, and announces the transformation of the world, not as a future event, but right now and here among us. No one alive, or dead, or yet to be born will miss out.

Therefore, as Paul said, let us encourage one another.

 

--------------------------------------------------

 

1^ Micah 4.3b-4b.

2^ Yoni Appelbaum, “A Single Photo from Baton Rouge That’s Hard to Forget,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/a-single-photo-that-captures-race-and-policing-in-america/490664/

The Roaring Twenties

 

Proper 26A
Micah 3:5-12
November 1, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopalian
Morristown, NJ

The Roaring Twenties

Our Scripture reading is set in the little kingdom of Judah during in the Roaring Twenties, not the 1920s but the 720s BCE. The Assyrian Empire had been the regional superpower for about three hundred years (with about another one hundred to go). They had just recently overrun the Kingdom of Israel to Judah’s north, capturing its capital Samaria in 722. A flood of refugees washed up on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The people of Judah were anxious both because of the refugees themselves who came in large numbers and because of the Assyrian armies who could easily menace Judah next, as in fact they did just a few years later.

Ordinary people were anxious, but the rich and powerful saw an opportunity: They stole ancestral land from the people to sell to the newcomers. They made sure that the court system was sufficiently corrupt not to have to answer for their crimes. They bought the silence of the Jerusalem prophets.

With the financial and real estate sectors, the judiciary, and the official religion under their control, they could act without fear.

The one percent and their enablers had a lock on the system and there was nothing that could be done about it. They committed one outrage after another. They broke laws with impunity. They had purchased God’s silence, convinced God to look the other way, and persuaded themselves that God’s silence meant God’s approval. With Samaria and Israel destroyed, but with Judah safe and Jerusalem bigger, richer, and more glorious than ever, they concluded, “Surely God is on our side!”

Self-congratulations led to contempt for anyone else. As far as they were concerned the peasants who kept the city in wine, mutton, and barley, and even the men who drafted to keep watch on the walls of Jerusalem were “losers and suckers.” The elite had created an all-encompassing narrative in which they themselves were the only legitimate holders of power. There was no way to break into that narrative.

Those who had been dispossessed, contrary to Judah’s covenant with the land and with their God, needed to be restored to what belonged to them. Those whose labor had been stolen to defend the city where the stolen wealth of the land had been moved needed God’s justice to be done. They needed God’s judgment. Their very lives depended on it.

But there was nothing in the narrative offered by their rulers, their judges, their priests, or their royal prophets to suggest that God was anything other than indifferent, that God cared about the outrages they were experiencing,or that God would or even could bring justice and judgment for them.

Enter Micah. Micah was a wild card. He was a prophet who was not on the Temple payroll. He took no money from the king. He was a prophet in private practice. He could say anything, do anything, and what he did was to speak on God’s behalf. Not on behalf of the domesticated God who lived boxed-in in the Temple. Not on behalf of the God whose reputation was tied to Judah’s geo-political success.

No, Micah spoke on behalf of Yahweh who was still free and wild, a God of barren open spaces and windblown mountaintops. Yahweh was loving-kindness itself toward the people who longed to live in the community of peace that was possible within Yahweh’s covenant with the people and with their land. But Yahweh when roused in defense of her cubs was a mama bear toward those who threatened to undo Judah’s covenantal justice.

Micah spoke: Yahweh had had more than enough of prophets who sold their gift to the highest bidder. Yahweh was tired of the rich buying and selling the poor. Yahweh was done with priests who used the commandments to keep the poor in line. Justice was coming. Judgment was coming.

And it was about the land. It’s always about the land. Since Judah’s corruption was centered in Jerusalem, judgment would take this form: Jerusalem would be ruined. The trees would take over the land where the Temple once stood. The land would still be there, but Jerusalem would not.

Now, the word of the prophet is one thing. Audience response is another. Seldom are the judgments of a prophet unavoidable. More often than not there is a way out, if–and it’s a big if–their words are heeded. Micah spoke hyperbolic words against Jerusalem on God’s behalf. He wasn’t the only one. Isaiah of Jerusalem was also active. A group of priests were re-imagining life in God’s covenant. It came together under one of the kings, Hezekiah, who reformed Judah’s life. Assyria did not overrun Jerusalem. Judah enjoyed a period of peace that lasted more than a century.

Things being what they are, the crisis of the Roaring Twenties tends to be repeated. We are in the midst of one of those repetitions now. The rich and powerful control the regulatory process and the tax codes so that they become even richer and even more powerful, while the rest of us watch with anger and dismay as every norm is shattered. High offices are occupied by the self-serving. Self-serving religious leaders declare that all of this is the will of God and that anyone who disagrees will be judged by God. And it seems that there is no one to stop them, no one to offer a different narrative, no one to announce the coming justice of a God who is not bought, who is not captive, but who remains wild and free and every bit as passionately committed to justice as ever.

Micah doesn’t live among us, but his spirit does. And we are perfectly capable of being Micah in his place. We are perfectly able to say to the rich and the powerful:

This is what God says
to those who lead my people astray:
the pundits shall be disgraced,
and the press secretaries put to shame;
they shall all cover their lips,
for they have no insight into God’s reality.

This is what God says
to the Senators and Representatives
who say whatever the lobbyists demand
in exchange for money in their campaign war-chests,
This is what God says to the preachers who lie,
who say that God does not care about justice,
that God is not committed to peace,
but only to the freedom of the strong to be strong
at the expense of the weak:
Therefore because of you
the District of Columbia will be plowed as a field;
Washington shall become a heap of ruins,
and Capital Hill a wooded height.

Micah is not here, but we can say that to the rich and powerful. Many of us have already said it. More of us will say it on Tuesday. And if need be we will say it in the streets. Micah does not live among us, but his spirit does.

An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

 

An Eager and Reluctant Pilgrimage

Men's Journeys
Jeremiah 20:7-13
June 21, 2020

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, NJ

Just why I can't really say, but unlike many of my progressive peers, I lean toward the Hebrew Bible. Maybe because it was Jesus' Bible and, as the old Sunday School song says, "If it's good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me."

Maybe because, when I took Hebrew, I was assigned a study of the uses of the Hebrew word gô'êl, a word that is usually translated as "redeemer" or "avenger," but which is best understood as "the one who does what a next-of-kin should do." Often it refers to a human next-of-kin who should make sure that their relative lives in peaceful sufficiency. Sometimes it refers to the requirement to exact vengeance in the case of a wrongful death. This was ancient Israel's rough and ready criminal justice system and, before we comment on its barbarity, may I just remind us all that our own criminal justice system can hardly claim any moral high ground.

When I realized that one of God's consistent claims in the Hebrew Bible is that God acts as gô’êl, as next-of-kin, to anyone who does not have a next-of-kin to act for them. In particular this is true for the widows, the orphans, and the undocumented workers. Mess with these classes of people and you will find yourself facing, not an angry parent, spouse, or sibling, but Yahweh, the covenant God of the Israelites. Something in me thrilled to discover this. Social justice is not some add-on to the biblical message. It is part and parcel of who God has decided to be toward this world and its people. This is comes as both comfort and warning.

So I am a Hebrew Bible fan. More than that, I am a fan of the prophets. To them falls the task of speaking for the God-who-is-next-of-kin. When a society fails to protect those who have no other protector, when a nation fails to safeguard those with no safety net, when a people decide that the rich and the powerful are the God-blessed, then prophets announce the bad news: by setting themselves against the moral arc of the universe they will bring, not prosperity and security, but anxiety and scarcity on themselves.

If this is the well from which Jesus drinks, then one of those who dug must deeply would have to be the prophet Jeremiah. I'm a Jeremiah fan. Jeremiah's people claim to be the people of God and were convinced that it gave them unqualified immunity and unlimited protection. Jeremiah is clearest among the prophets about the fate of a people who forget who God is and what it is that God seeks for this world.

Jeremiah is my favorite, too, because he never hides how he feels about his job. Unlike Isaiah who was all "Ooh, ooh, pick me!" Jeremiah's response was in essence, "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number." When God would not be dissuaded, Jeremiah discovered quickly that the job of prophet has absolutely no perks. He is God's "essential worker:" abused, endangered, and woefully underpaid.

In our text today he does not hold back. “You fooled me, YHWH, and I let myself be fooled. You were too strong for me, and you triumphed.” The Hebrew root, repeated in the words, "fooled" and "let myself be fooled," has the basic meaning of being open, but not in a good way. It means being open to deception or enticement, being simple, foolish, or silly, in other words. So as Jeremiah is using the word, it accuses God of having deceived, or enticed, or even seduced Jeremiah into becoming a prophet. Add to that notion the mention of God's being too strong or having overpowered Jeremiah in that act and Jeremiah is close to invoking a dark metaphor. "Enticement by force" could be a way of avoiding a very ugly accusation, but it amounts to the same thing. Jeremiah is saying, in typical prophetic overstatement, that he is experiencing his calling as at very least some sort of bait-and-switch scam or even an assault with sexual overtones. The fact that either could be meant lets Jeremiah leave the accusation hanging in the air.

God should know better and Jeremiah is not shy about telling his own story. If being a prophet means speaking truth to power, telling God his own truth is as prophetic as you can get. Jeremiah demands God's promised justice, even when it is God of whom he demands it.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about men's journeys, but you've probably already guessed. I see features of my own story in Jeremiah's. Of course no disciple is greater than their master, so I'm claiming no equivalence. I'm not even claiming to be a particularly apt disciple. If Marx was right that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, in the place of Jeremiah's gutsy bleat, mine is more like the men's prayer from The Red Green Show.

This Canadian comic series features the misadventures of a group of men who are trying without a great deal of success to figure how to be happy. They have gotten no further than to figure out that their happiness must somehow involve the happiness of the women in their lives but they can never seem to shake loose the allure of guyness. At least once per episode they gather for a meeting of the Possum Lodge and open the meeting with the Men's Prayer that goes like this: "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

My upraising yielded a version of manhood that was deeply conflicted. I was supposed to be a "man," someone who was not only in charge,but deserved to be. And, as a man who was also straight, white, middle class, and college-educated, I was at or near the top of every hierarchy I could see.

In part I felt uneasy with that privileged height. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I saw just a little of what it cost my mother to live in a world that valued men more than women. Maybe it's because I experienced some of what it cost me and my sisters to be born into a world that valued adults more than children. Maybe it's because manhood defined that way remained a precarious achievement.

Mostly I was okay with privilege, okay with the power I had. My wishes, my hopes, my wants were important just because of who I was.

But there were times when that unease would ooze out. Carol had aspirations to become a nurse and then, a psychiatric nurse. I could hardly claim that that was less important than my goals. And, in the event, she has had, I suspect, a greater impact on the world than I have, for all my plans. Even she does not know how many lives she has saved and how many more are better because of her work. How could I have stood in the way of that? I didn't find it easy, and I was much less easily successful at it than I could have wished, but I was glad to be able to aid this remarkable woman in ways that my father would never have done. He once told me that I would make someone a wonderful wife some day. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

In seminary during the theological development of second-wave feminism, even at a backwater institution like the University of Dubuque, my notions of the role of men in the Christian movement were challenged on a weekly basis. One good friend especially, Karen Dearsch, took me on as a special project. I'm not sure why. Maybe I showed promise. More likely she just couldn't refuse a challenge. And I certainly was that. We would come out of a class in which I had made some foolish statement or other and she would turn to me and say, "Now, John..." She made the implications of my positions clear and with that clarity I came recognize how benighted they were. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Jody kept working on me, too, as you might imagine. She has reminded me of how little air there is in the rarified heights I often inhabit. She will meet a long abstract rant of mine with the giant-slayer question: "What about the sheep?" This is a shorthand reference to the work of Fernand Braudel who persuasively demonstrated that you cannot understand the history of the Mediterranean world until you are very clear about the fact that sheep change their grazing grounds with the seasons. "What about the sheep?" demands that I be grounded, and not to some abstract ground, either, but to the ground that yields the grasses that sheep eat in their summer and winter grazing lands.

Someone responded to my first sermon here by saying, "I can see where [Jody] gets it." That is at least half backwards. But for Jody's apparently indefatigable patience (which I know to be more apparent than real) much of my thought would stagnate and start to smell, however much I would be willing stay settled where I am. "I'm a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say more. I would love to talk at great length about a community of folks in Potrerillos, a village in the mountainous northeast of El Salvador, and how they stood my notions of wealth and poverty on their heads. They tolerated my stupid questions. They didn't answer me with words; instead, they showed me. For them I have learned Spanish, or relearned it. For them I have learned more about political economy than I ever wanted to know. I'm still not sure how that story is going to go from here. None of it has been particularly easy, for in the process I discovered that hard and painful truth that my country had betrayed me. Maybe a different version of the Men's Prayer goes: "I'm an American. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

I could say something about how my most deeply held beliefs have been constantly challenged: beliefs about race and racism, about sexuality and gender, about capitalism and colonialism. Every axis against which I am measured and found privileged is also an axis about which my world is spinning. I have no idea how it will all come out except for this:

I know my journey isn't just about me, nor is it undertaken just for my benefit. One thing has emerged with greater and greater clarity (although that is no guarantee of its truth). There is something at work--fashioning or perhaps birthing but in any event--bringing into being a world that we have hardly begun to glimpse. Jesus called it the basileia tou theou, that I like to translate as "God's dream." King called it the Beloved Community. It is the possibility of human community within a broader global community of all living beings and the world that sustains them. The whole world is on a journey toward it.

My own pilgrimage, however reluctantly I undertake it, is intended--and not always by me--to inch the world toward God's dream. Perhaps I am being dragged toward God's dream. I'll accept that if the alternative is being left in self-satisfied stasis.

Yes, "I am a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess."

Amen.

Response to the Statement of the Appointive Cabinet of the Iowa Annual Conference

March 28, 2019

Dear Bishop Haller and the Appointive Cabinet of the Iowa Annual Conference,

Since my conscious decision to count myself a follower of Jesus some forty-five years ago, the United Methodist Church had nurtured me and challenged me to grow in the love I bear toward God and in the love that God bears toward all of creation through me. Always the prodding of the church had been for me to love more, to expand the circle of those whom I love, to love recklessly.

But now the United Methodist Church warns me insistently, stridently, and threateningly that some of those whom the Spirit has taught me to love are not acceptable in God’s eyes and must not be acceptable in my eyes either. To say that I judge myself to have been betrayed by my church is a painful understatement.

In the midst of this great disappointment I appreciate the opportunities that you have given the clergy and laity of the Annual Conference to gather to ask questions and speak what is on their mind and heart. “Holy conferencing” is always in short supply. Thank you for making it more available in this way.

Unfortunately, my retirement to New Jersey prevented me from attending these sessions and from gathering with my clergy and lay colleagues and friends. So I have chosen to participate in the on-going conversation by writing a response to your statement of March 14.

I found some things that you said to be valuable and useful. I appreciate your statement’s acknowledgment of the harm–past, present, and future–done to LGBTQIA persons. I appreciate your commitment to keep us informed as the shape of the General Conference’s actions becomes clearer and is evaluated by the Judicial Council for its constitutionality. I appreciate your statement’s recognition that we need each others prayers.

But your statement is a troubled text. Your intent to offer a powerfully unifying statement is undercut by its inner and unacknowledged contradictions.

Foremost among these are the evasions around the “great harm [that] has been done and continues to be done.” “We confess and grieve” is a strong beginning that promises the bold change of mind, heart, and life that our tradition calls repentance. But that change is not forthcoming. It disappears behind the passive voice: you grieve that harm that “has been done.” What is this harm? How has it been done? And, most importantly, who has done it? If we do not name the harm, if we do not identify how it happens, if we do not see clearly how we are implicated in the mechanisms that perpetuate it, how can we possibly address much less “eradicate” it? You could have led the clergy and laity of the Iowa Annual Conference in asking and addressing these questions. Instead, your statement retreated into the fog of the passive voice.

Having accepted no responsibility for past and present harm, it is not surprising that your statement moves on to open self-contradiction. You are “committed to observing the governance of the Book of Discipline” and at the same time you are “committed to eradicating any further harm.” Unless you deny that any provisions of the Book of Discipline are harmful to LGBTQIA folk, there is simply no way that these statements can both be true. How long can any of us “go limping with two different opinions”?

How long, for example, can you dangle charges over a colleague who has been under complaint for most of the last three years and who has suffered under an un-acted upon complaint for nearly a year? Here, if ever there were one, is a chance to “[eradicate] any further harm.” Bishop Haller, you might do that by dismissing the complaint and taking any consequences of that dismissal upon your own shoulders rather than allowing continuing harm to be borne exclusively by one who is both an elder of the conference and a beloved child of God.

I suspect that some at least of the faults and evasions of this statement reflect a specific process, a process that sought to craft a statement that all of the signatories could agree to. The cabinet, as you suggest, is diverse in some ways. In terms of gender it is, if I am not mistaken, the most balanced cabinet in our history. It evidences ethnic diversity. Doubtless it reflects a diversity of theological commitments.

Along the most critical axis, however, it is not at all diverse. It is monolithic. It is a group of powerful straight folks gathered to talk about LGBTQIA folk rather than with them. You could at least have acknowledged this limitation. As it is, your allusions to diversity only serve to distract from the harmful reality that some voices were silenced before you even began to speak.

I have been taught by the biblical tradition to expect that the voice of God speaks most clearly through those who have been silenced, those who have fallen into the gaps, those who are consigned to speak from the margins. Perhaps these voices were excluded or perhaps I am not as receptive as I should be. For whatever reason, I did not hear God’s voice in your statement. That saddens me. I had hoped for better and I hope for it still. In that hope I remain,

Yours in Christ, 

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD, Elder (retired)