Fast Food for a Long Journey (September 4, 2011, Proper 18A, Exodus 12:1-14)

Proper 18A
Exodus 12:1-14
September 4, 2011

Fast Food for a Long Journey

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

One of the greatest stories ever told continues in our Old Testament lesson for this morning. It is a story of great sorrow and of great joy. It is a story of slavery and freedom. It is the story of a long journey suddenly begun. It is one of the stories that grounds us in hope. It is a story that gives us a humane and liveable alternative to the inhuman and death-dealing stories that form the major narratives of our time.

It is a wonderful story. But it is also very strange. It’s strange for several reasons. It’s strange because it comes from a far away place and from a long time ago. It’s about a meal, a strange sort of barbeque. A yearling lamb or a goat is to be slaughtered. It is to be roasted whole over the fire: head, legs, “innards” and all. It’s strange to us, but maybe not to them. Maybe this is the sort of thing people did in that time and place.

It’s also strange because the way we have it it’s not just a story about what happened the night they were set free. It’s also a story that explains how Pesach or the Passover meal came to be. As such part of its purpose is not only to say why God’s people celebrate the Passover, but to tell them how they are to celebrate it. It’s a set of instructions as well as a story.

Some of the strangeness of this story we can dispel by a better understanding of the time in which it was told and written down and the purposes for which it was preserved. But only some.

Some of the strangeness is just there, no matter how well we understand. We have the story of a God who is often a stickler for detail, a God who knows and cares about whether a lamb or goat is a year old or a two year old, a God who can tell a first-born human being or animal from a second- or third-born. This same God, however, cannot seem to tell the difference between an Egyptian and a Hebrew household. This same God tells the Hebrews to splash blood on the doorposts and the beams above their doorways so that it will look like God has already been there so that God will pass over that house while engaged in this killing rampage.

And this may be the strangest thing of all: that the liberation of the Hebrews should require the deaths of countless other innocents. Our moral sensibilities are offended by the deaths of all the first-born sons, all the first-born cattle, all the first-born dogs and cats, very few of whom had anything directly to do with oppressing the Israelites. The story doesn’t say why. The violence is just there, scandalous perhaps, but unapologetic.

But this story is also strange because it is alien to our ways of seeing the world, of thinking about it and living in it. If offends because it contradicts us and makes us uncomfortable.

God promises not only to kill the first-born, but also to “impose judgments” on the gods of Egypt. The contests between Moses and the Egyptian magicians and the confrontation at the Sea of Reeds between the escaped Hebrews and Pharaoh’s cavalry are more than they seem to be. Behind the scenes it is Yahweh who is engaged in the most important contest of all: a contest with the gods of Egypt.

Yahweh would take on Atum, Isis, Nut, Osiris, Seth, Tefnut and dozens of others. It would be one against a hundred or more, an unknown storm God from the desert against the gods of empire. It wouldn’t simply be a contest of strength against strength in which Yahweh would show that these gods who pretended to be strong were in fact weak, too weak to keep a few slaves from escaping from their masters. Instead it would be a judgment. Yahweh would show that the gods of Egypt had failed in their legal responsibility; they had failed to uphold justice. Yahweh would show that they didn’t deserve to rule.

While God would be “imposing judgments” the people of Israel would be eating! They would eat lamb, but wouldn’t take the time to dress it out; they would simply roast it whole. They would eat bread, but they wouldn’t take the time let the yeast in the dough do its work; they would bake matzoh, wafer-thin bread that wouldn’t need to rise. They would eat dressed for travel. They would eat it with their shoes on. They would eat it with their walking sticks in hand. They would eat it in a hurry. History’s first fast food!

While they ate, they became God’s covenant people. We tend to think that we belong to God because of what we believe, but it was not so for them (and maybe it isn’t so for us, either). They became God’s people by eating. The meal marked them. It was a meal that sacramental theologians call a “sign act” and it was something they would do ever after.

They began their shared life as God’s people with fast food, but the pace slowed a lot after that. The business beside the Sea of Reeds was pretty exciting, but after that, their life was pretty dull. They would walk to an oasis and set up camp. They would stay there for a time and then they would move on. They gathered the manna that God gave to them. Same stuff every day.

—What’s for breakfast?
—Manna.
—Manna again?
—Yeah, but I rolled it into little balls and boiled it.
—Well, okay, then—something different. No, wait! It still tastes just the same. Manna again!

(Later that day)
—What’s for supper?
—Fried manna.

Children were born and grew and had children of their own and grew old and died and still they seemed no closer to their goal. After a while the only life they knew was walking from one oasis to another. That and eating manna.

The sheer dailiness of their lives must have been overwhelming. They couldn’t even look forward to getting a new Android. One day, one year, one decade, was like another. Fast food for a long journey.

And this is where it comes a little too close for comfort, because this pattern of life as God’s people runs against the grain. One of the gods of our regime, it seems, is Novelty, the god of new things. Novelty is an active god, doing all sorts of important things that keep our way of life going. Novelty makes sure that we are never happy with what we have, unless it’s brand new, and then only until something newer comes along. Novelty offers itself as the cure for what we have come to believe is a fatal condition: boredom. Serving the god Novelty we will spend our money, risk our health and our bodies. We’ll do anything to escape boredom.

In our churches we look for ways to repackage and re-present what is essentially the same stuff as if it were different stuff. We expect constant creativity in our worship. We demand the glossy and new in our educational curriculum. We expect new pleasures in our fellowship. We don’t like doing the same thing twice. We especially don’t want to do the same thing enough times that it gets under our skin and soaks into our bones and becomes a part of us.

But the long journey is the pattern of our life with God, the long journey that is often, well, boring. The word journey in fact comes from the French for “day.” A journey is a succession of days, days that are mostly like each other. Our life with God and our life with each other is mostly made of dailiness. Sometimes something happens, but mostly it doesn’t. And even when something happens it often turns out to be not as important as it looked at the time. The work—God’s work—of shaping and fashioning us as individuals and as a congregation is a work that takes a long time. We are in a hurry. But God is not.

So it often happens that we come to some decision point in our faith journey. We commit ourselves to being Jesus followers. Or we decide to attend to our own life with God more carefully. The decision is made in a moment. And we expect, somehow, that we’ll see results right away. We’d like to be saints by the end of the year. But it will take a lifetime and more. It will take a lifetime of mostly doing it wrong and only occasionally getting it right, a lifetime of beginning again, a lifetime of shaping our lives while—unseen—God is shaping us. The journey of God’s people may begin with fast food eaten in a hurry, but it is made of days, many days, one after another, mostly alike.

Fortunately, there is food for the journey and like manna it comes from God’s hand and like manna there is nothing much remarkable about it, especially after we’ve had it week in and week out for a lifetime. And yet, like manna, it will nourish us, strengthen us and get us there. We have set a table and spread out a meager meal that we call, ironically, a feast. It isn’t much, but everyone is welcome. If you’ve decided to come on the journey, you’d probably better join us at the table. You’ll be hungry if you don’t.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Crossings (August 28, 2011, Proper 17A, Matthew 16:21-28)

Proper 17A
Matthew 16:21-28
August 28, 2011

Crossings

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

Here we are, in the middle of that long stretch of Sundays that the tradition of the church calls “ordinary time.” It’s not called that because the Sundays get a “ho hum” reaction, although it’s certainly not as exciting—if that’s the right word for it—as Advent and Christmas, say. It’s called ordinary time because it’s not a time with lots of high holy days, so we simply number the Sundays and count them with “ordinal” numbers. Do your remember? Numbers come in two kinds, cardinals and ordinals. “One, two, three” are cardinal numbers. Ordinal numbers are “first, second, third.” Today is the 11^th Sunday after Pentecost. Ordinary time.

Having said that, there is something rather nice about “ordinary” time in the other sense. It is rather nice to have nothing much going on. Our friends and relatives on the east coast are wishing that nothing much was going on. Last week it was an earthquake. This weekend it’s a hurricane. What next—a plague of locusts? Ordinary is good.

We’re home from vacations. Sure, it was good to get away, to see something new, or to see family and old friends. But it’s called “away” for a reason. Away is somewhere else, not here, not home. Now we’re home.

Kids are back to school. They are settling into routines and so are we. The routines may be demanding, but there is more predictability from week to week and month to month. Unless, of course, the school authorities decide to send everyone home because the weather is unbearably nice. They said it was because it was too hot, but come on! And how civilized. “The weather is too nice. Let’s send everyone home.” I wish I had had school authorities like that when I was in school. Instead, we suffered through boring classes yearning to be outside.

In ordinary time, news is not a good thing. It means something has changed, and it’s hardly ever because something better is coming along. People say change is good. I think we keep saying that hoping to convince ourselves that it’s true when we know in our hearts that change is at best a mixed bag.

So, anyway, hooray for ordinary time. Hooray for life going on. Hooray for ho hum. It’s something to celebrate.

And then, in the middle of ordinary time, just when we thought everything was going along nicely, we are thrown this lesson from Matthew and we are plunged without warning into Lent.

This talk of crosses and dying and denying ourselves and losing our lives is not exactly what we had in mind. They are not what we want. We want the chance to work hard and make our way in the world. We don’t necessarily want to be famous or rich or powerful. But we want to make a comfortable living for ourselves and our families. We want to be able to retire and enjoy doing things we’ve put off while we still have the health and energy to do them. We want to spend time with our families. We want to see our children grow up. We want to see them happy. We’d like to see them with families of their own, although we promise not to nag them about it. Well, at least we promise to try not to nag them about it. We want to spend time with our grandchildren and, who knows, maybe even with our great grandchildren. We want to avoid painful medical conditions and we hope to die in our sleep without having been a burden to our families.

We don’t like trouble. Well, I don’t, anyway. Actually, let me clarify that just a little. I don’t like making trouble. I’d rather study trouble, think about trouble, theorize trouble, preferably trouble that is either a long time ago or far away. When I make trouble—and I have been known to do that—it’s come at the end of a hard internal struggle against my own preferences.

Bill Cosby is known as a comedian, but I think he’s really more of a sage. Talking about his children who complain that something is “unfair,” he says, “What children do not understand is that parents are not interested in justice; what they want is quiet.”

And here comes Jesus, history’s best-known disturber of the peace, to announce an end to quiet, an end to peace, an end to the blessings of ordinariness: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

These are hard words. And so, naturally, we want to soften them a little, but it’s like trying to fluff up a rock so we can use it as a pillow. It’s not that we haven’t tried, God knows. We try to chisel the words down into a smaller size. We say that self-denial is something like giving up chocolate for Lent or going out eat or to the movies less often. We turn self-denial into a mild asceticism undertaken for the sake of, well, for the sake of ourselves, substituting immediate gratification for meeting long-term goals. But our version of self-denial benefits the self, so that’s not so hard.

Or we say that the cross that we have to take up is some uncomfortable or even painful thing that life has thrown at us, a thing there is no way to avoid. If our parents are too strict, our children too unruly, if we hate our job, if our house is too small and we can’t afford to move, if any of a hundred things are not the way we’d like them and we don’t see how to change them, then we say, It’s my cross to bear.

But these strategies are doomed to failure. In our hearts we know that they are bad-faith efforts to get out from under Jesus’ words. We know that Jesus’ words mean something far more serious, far darker, far more threatening to our peace and quiet than we’ve made them out to be.

Jesus is going to Jerusalem. He “had to go” to Jerusalem. Why is that? Because Jesus cares less for quiet than he does for justice. He has declared God’s passionate commitment to justice in Galilee. He has preached and demonstrated a gospel of justice for the poor, for the sick, for the outcast, for the discarded lives that barely subsist at the margins of society. He has done it in Galilee, but he must also do it at the center of power. Jerusalem is where the elites are, who collaborate with the Empire in oppressing their fellow compatriots and co-religionists. From Jerusalem they govern the province. In Jerusalem they control the Temple, the center of symbolic power. They use it to make it appear that anyone who is against the Empire is against God.

Jesus goes to Jerusalem to lay bare the schemes of the elite. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s not the elites and God against the boat rockers. Jesus goes to make it clear that it’s the poor and God against the elites and the Empire. Jesus goes to pick a fight.

The elites won’t love him for rocking the boat. The nobles and chief priests won’t be grateful that he’s exposed their tidy arrangements. The bureaucrats that administer the apparatus of imperial and religious law won’t appreciate what Jesus will try to do. They will do what the Empire always does when it is confronted with the truth it tries to hide, when it is confronted with the demand for justice. Casually, without much thought and with no misgivings, the Empire will kill him. The elites imagine that that will be end of the matter.

Of course, says Jesus, the elites imagine wrong. That will not be the end of the matter. The elites imagine that God will stay out it, that God is on their side, even that they are doing God’s work, but they are wrong. The Empire does not have the last word. God has the last word. Death is not the end of the matter. Life is the end of the matter: Jesus will be raised from the dead.

Jesus goes to Jerusalem with his eyes open. He knows what sort of opposition his message will provoke. He knows what happens to people who tell the truth to Rome and to Rome’s minions. He knows how the elites will react when he demands justice for the poor in God’s name. And in spite of this he goes to pick a fight.

And this, Jesus says, is the pattern of discipleship. Anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus will live in the same way, in the same way they will have to renounce themselves so that they will be able to demand the same justice, they will stir up the same rage, and they will call forth the same reaction.

There really isn’t any way to soften these words. We can’t blunt the demand that they make. So we do the sensible thing: we ignore Jesus. Can you imagine if we didn’t? Can you imagine a church that didn’t? Can you imagine what their mission statement would be? Wouldn’t it sound something like this:

“We will follow Jesus in laying bare the lies of injustice and oppression and in demanding justice and freedom. We will know that we have been successful when the Empire strikes back.”

Can you imagine what their charge conference would be like? Can you hear the district superintendent asking, “Well, now, tell me what this church is about.” And the members reply, “We pick fights.”

“Say what?”

“We pick fights. Oh, we try to pick them carefully. We try to make sure they are the right fights. But, yeah, that’s what we do. We pick fights.”

It would be hard to say that they weren’t “making disciples for the transformation of the world,” but I’m not sure that this is what the General Conference had in mind when it adopted this as our purpose. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have to chase away prospective members with a stick, either. “We pick fights.” Sheesh!

It’s not that there haven’t been Christians willing to be Jesus’ followers. Oscar Romero, the bishop of San Salvador during the late 1970s, comes to mind. Like me, he was a bookish sort of fellow who preferred to avoid conflict. But by a strange and difficult path he became someone who laid bare the lies of his government (and of his church). He demanded justice. He was shot for his troubles. The death squads took care of him. While he was celebrating a mass. How’s that for irony. They thought that would be the end of the matter.

It’s a funny thing. In an interview two weeks before his death, Romero said these words:

“I have frequently been threatened with death. I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.”¹

As skeptical as I am about the sort of divine intervention in history that Jesus talks about, I have to say, I’ve seen the truth of Romero’s words. He is very much alive in the people of El Salvador. I would even say that from a strictly pragmatic point of view, killing Romero was about the stupidest thing the death squads ever did. He is more powerful now and his voice is more widely heard than it ever was during his lifetime. The Empire did not have the last word, nor did death.

So this peaceful, scholarly man, conservative by temperament as well by conviction, came to see that following Jesus meant picking a fight for the sake of justice.

I hate picking fights. I’d rather go along and get along. I’d rather compromise. I’d rather avoid conflict. I hate picking fights. But I love Jesus. And I know that he’s right. So, really, what choice do I have?

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Interview in March, 1980, given to Excelsior, a Mexican newspaper.

August 21, 2011, Proper 16A, Romans 12:1-8, Confessions of a Reformed Non-Conformist

Proper 16A
Romans 12:1-8
August 21, 2011

Confessions of a Reformed Non-Conformist

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

When I was eighth grade, or perhaps ninth, I was rummaging through the boxes in our basement, boxes still not unpacked from our move four or five years before, when I discovered my father's stash of science fiction books. Among them was Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury began the book with this epigraph from the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."¹

Henry David Thoreau couldn't have agreed more: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

This was the middle of the 1960's. It would have been hard to find a more fitting description of my generation's relationship to the status quo, the authority of our elders or the traditions that we had received from previous generations. We were the members of that generation of children born after World War II in the giddy years of a rising economic tide which, thanks to strong unions and a progressive income tax, did indeed lift all boats.We set out to chart our own course, to step to the music which we heard, keeping time to the beat of a different drummer.

We set out to change the world. The first thing to do was to get rid of war. For only the second time in the history of our nation, large numbers of young people refused to fight the war that their elders had decided they should fight.

My generation is a generation of idealists, raised in a time of economic expansion and increasing freedoms. In our bones we believed that things should get better and better, world without end, Amen. Idealists make lousy soldiers.

The story of my generation is littered with ironies. We rejected the wars of our elders and then, when it came our turn to lead, we cheerfully sent our nation's sons and daughters to fight our wars. We wore tie-dyed t-shirts with slogans that proclaimed our rejection of "the system," while "the system" geared up to supply us with those t-shirts and the other necessary equipment of non-conformity. We rejected tradition and cited as the authority for our rebellion writers like Thoreau and poets like Jiménez who were very much a part of the very tradition we were rejecting.

It's not that we didn't have a good idea or two. It's not that we did not cherish values that were and are deserving of our full devotion. As ideals go, seeking a world that is free of war is pretty good. Seeking a society that is open to all its members, regardless of race, is pretty good one, too. Seeking a world in which the wealth that we enjoy is more fairly shared among all its people isn't bad either.

Seeking that world is a good thing. Getting there is something else.It is easy enough to say, if I may paraphrase Paul, that we should not be "conformed to 'the system'". But rejecting "the system" was not particularly helpful in moving toward an inclusive, peaceful and just world. Jiménez failed to notice that writing "the other way" when given lined paper makes non-conformity pretty safe for the status quo. Thoreau did not grasp that the beat of a different drummer could be copyrighted and mass-marketed. This particular system, the one that we live in and with, has some special problems for us to work through.

We live in a consumer society. We value freedom and choice. As consumers we expect that, if we have the money, we should be able to have what we want. When we go to the grocery store we expect to find an array of choices in the frozen foods, another array of choices in the beverage aisle, yet another array in the cereal aisle and so on. I'm not sure that I find this terribly freeing. Many times I have confronted a shelf with hundreds of breakfast cereals and been paralyzed. And I know what I want. It's there. Somewhere. I just can't find it.

The food industry—to stick to the food aisle—has discovered that there isn't much money to be made in supplying me with what I need. The real money is in processing, turning corn into corn syrup and adding it to processed wheat that has been shaped into miniature superheroes of different colors. Ever more combinations of ever more processed stuff.

Now as a consumer I might, as I do, go for something simple: shredded wheat. It is processed, but it's made of wheat. No corn syrup. No sugar. No food coloring. No salt. No ingredients that can't be pronounced. Nothing my grandparents wouldn't have recognized as food. Yes, it has some preservative added to the packaging. But other than that, it's wheat. Not much money in that. I'm a food industry nightmare.

Enter advertizing. Food manufacturers discovered a long time ago that, if they waited for us to want what they have to sell, they wouldn't make much money. So, after World War I, they hired out-of-work war propagandists to figure out how to make us want stuff we don't need and to think we want stuff we don't really want, so we'll buy something more profitable for them than shredded wheat. Consumer society was born.

Of course, a consumer society needs consumers. It needs, not just people who buy the stuff they need, but people who are defined as consumers. It needs people who believe that all these different kinds of cereal are about their choices and their freedom, rather than about profits for the food industry. In our culture that's what it means to be "conformed to the system."

I have come to believe that this system presents some real problems for us and the world that we call home. It presents special problems when we approach our relationships with each other and with God as consumers.

For lots of folks a church is a retailer of religious goods and services. When people find themselves in need of religious goods or services, they go looking for a retailer who can supply them. They go "church shopping." They are looking for "a good fit." I understand. It is possible to find yourself in a church that just feels all wrong, one that would never work. I've been there. I've even been the pastor of one like that. But I tell people that while they are exercising their freedom to choose—a cherished right in this country—to be careful how they choose. If "a good fit" means a church that's comfortable, then "a good fit" is a bad thing. We're not here for our comfort. If finding a church that "meets our needs" means a church that's gives me what I want, then meeting our needs is a bad thing. We're not here to get what we want.

What we need in a church is a community that will help us to grow and change, that will help us to be "transformed by the renewing of our minds" in Paul's phrase. To be that a congregation needs to provide two things. The first is safety. If we are not safe we cannot risk change. The second thing is a challenge. If we are not challenged we will not change. A good fit is a congregation that doesn't quite fit.

To choose a church well we have to chose for reasons other than what a consumer culture values. And for a congregation to do its work on us, we have to move even further away from consumer values. A congregation is a spiritual rock tumbler. We start out as dull stones with sharp edges and rough all over. We get tossed into the church with a bunch of other rocks and we bump up against each other. We rub each other the wrong way sometimes. But if we hang in there long enough, some of our sharp edges get blunted. In a few places here and there we lose some of our surface roughness and we start to shine. A good congregation will do this if we resist the consumerist temptation to bail when we become uncomfortable or bored or dissatisfied.

To avoid being conformed to the system, we have to be transformed. God has a number of strategies for doing this. We call them "means of grace." There is the sacrament of our shared meal. There is baptism, which we will celebrate in a few minutes. There is the collection of sometimes awesome, sometimes awful writings we call the Bible. There are the many practices of prayer. There is that least-used discipline in our consumer culture: fasting. But the most vital of God's strategies for our transformation is the flesh and blood reality of our congregation. We are just ordinary people, prone to all sorts of faults. I don't really have to number them. We know. We're just ordinary people and yet we are bigger than the sum of our parts. Our congregation, quite aside from our very real failings, can also be good and wise and holy. If we hang in there for the long haul, there is a very real possibility that we will become good and wise and holy as well. Or, as Paul puts it, we will prove what is good and pleasing and mature.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Bradbury attributed the saying to Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Yale Book of Quotations, p396, agrees, citing the Spanish original, "Si te dan papel rayado, escribe de través" (from España, November 20, 1920).

August 13, 2011, Proper 15A, Matthew 15:21-28, Wider Yet

Proper 15A
Matthew 15:21-28
August 13, 2011

Wider Yet: The Limits of Human Imagination

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

It's going to be a long fifteen months until the elections of 2012. For some time I have found our national political conversation wearisome. Perhaps because it has ceased to be conversation in any real sense of the word. We no longer actually listen to those with whom we disagree. Instead we make up some distorted version of their position and tear that apart. The give and take that used to happen in spite of ideological differences so that things could get done is now so rare as to become a heroic achievement. There are, I guess, a lot of reasons for this.

What concerns me this morning is that the way that public debate takes place fails to check a very natural human tendency, that, left unchecked, destroys our sense of community and a shared life. Like everyone else I tend to view the world from where I stand. I see and understand the world and the people, places and things in it from a particular place.

I know that each of you does the same. Mostly this works okay without disturbing me too much because, after all, we are mostly more alike than different. The proof of that is that you get most of my jokes, or at least you are very politely pretending to and laughing at the right places and that's nearly as good.

When we disturb each other it's because of a tendency that I have (and perhaps you have it, too): I tend to normalize my perspective. That is, because I stand in a certain place and see the world in a certain way and because from where I stand that way looks natural and right, I assume that my way of looking at things is normal. It's not just a geographical place I'm talking about. I take my place in the world as a white, middle-aged, middle-class, over-educated, ordained and appointed, straight man who occupies a place of power and privilege. My view of the world seems normal and right. When I bump into others who don't share that view, I tend to see their view as abnormal, unnatural and wrong.

In short I am the product of my experiences, the product of my times and of the culture that nurtured me. I can, of course, choose some of other experiences, but those choices themselves are shaped and limited by my experiences, my times and my culture. This doesn't sound very hopeful, does it?

Before we give up on our chances for real change, though, let's take a look at the story from Matthew and see if it has anything to add.

It's not an easy story, mostly because in it Jesus is not very nice. He says some rather nasty things to a woman who—from our point of view at least—doesn't seem to deserve it. Many readers of the Bible have been scandalized by this story and have tried in various ways to make it sound nicer than it is. Unlike these readers who try to get around a problem text, I'm just stubborn enough to plot a course through it and inconsiderate enough of your feelings to drag you with me. So let's see.

As Matthew's gospel has laid it out, Jesus has been working without any time off for some time. This isn't good. There is a rhythm to human life of work and rest. We are supposed to work hard. We are also supposed to rest not just when we get our daily sleep. We are supposed to take a day off now and then. For some reason—though I can't quite put my finger on where I might have heard this—a ratio of six days of work to one day of rest comes to mind.

Jesus had not been getting his days of rest. Every time we tried to slip away someone would see him and the word would spread and the first thing you know a quiet retreat had turned into a mob scene with multitudes asking him to fix their problems. We aren't told, but I'm imagining that Jesus realized that a preacher cannot take a vacation and stay at home. He needed to get out of town and turn off his cell phone.

So he left his parish—Galilee and Judea—and went to their version of the Jersey Shore, the neighborhood of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. There he would be away from the Jewish population centers and hoped, if he wore sunglasses, to avoid having to meet any needs other than his need for rest.

It didn't work out that way. Perhaps Jesus hadn't reckoned with his spreading fame. Perhaps Jesus hadn't realized that the Jewish hope for a messiah was known and even shared outside of his people. In any event, even at the Jersey Shore and even when he was wearing sunglasses, there was at least one Canaanite woman who not only recognized him on sight but was able to address him by title: Son of David. "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David," she cried.

She was desperate in the way that only a parent with a sick child can be. She was desperate in a way that drove her to a Jewish messiah to ask for help for her daughter, even if he was on vacation.

Now we come to the difficult part. Like us, Jesus grew up in a particular place and time and within a particular culture. His way of looking at the world was shaped by time and place and culture. There were things that he knew because of this shaping. He knew, for example, that the earth was flat and that the sun journeyed across the sky during the day and returned under the earth to the east at night. He knew that disease was caused by the actions of evil spirits. He knew that his people, the Jewish people, had been chosen by God to live in covenant with God. They had obligations under this covenant. Jesus understood that his mission was to help his people to see these obligations clearly, to take up these obligations and make the fulfilling of them a part of their ordinary lives, and to enjoy as a result the power of God to heal and make whole. Jesus' work was to be done among Jews. This woman had no claim on him. He ignored her.

But the woman did not take the hint. Instead she kept on crying for him to help her daughter. Jesus kept ignoring her. The disciples started pestering him to send her away. The woman kept crying out. Some vacation.

So Jesus stopped and faced her. He had acknowledged her existence. He would have to deal with her. So he began by sharing his mission statement: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Mission statements are good. They give clarity about what we're supposed to do. More importantly they give clarity about what we're not supposed to do. Jesus' attempt to clarify things, however, failed to impress the desperate mother of a disturbed and troubled child. "Have mercy on me," she continued to cry.

Finally, his patience gone, he addressed her in a way that, if it was brutal, should have been effective in getting rid of her: "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." He called her a dog. There is to this day no worse insult in the Middle East than to call someone a dog. Jesus called her a dog. Some readers have tried to soften the insult by pointing out, correctly, that the word that is translated "dogs" is the diminutive form of the word for dog. It could mean puppy or it could mean household dog, so that's not so bad.... No, he called her a dog.

This is perfectly in line with how his culture regarded outsiders. It's perfectly in line with how any culture regards outsiders: beneath notice, not quite human, Other.

Now, if this Canaanite woman had been a little less courageous, if she'd been a little less desperate, if she had had a little less of that quintessentially Jewish character trait known in Yiddish as chutzpah, the story would have ended there.

But it didn't. She had finally gotten Jesus' attention. That was a victory in itself. He had put her down verbally, but could only do that by talking to her. All she had to do then was to win the verbal exchange. Verbal jousting was very popular in those days. Thrusting and parrying with words or watching others do it was what people did in place of watching ESPN. Those who were really good at it were taken as wise, even as God-favored. It was expected of philosophers and messiahs. But anyone could play. Even this Canaanite woman.

But she would only get one chance. So she took her best shot. "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table." Taking and accepting for the moment the terms that Jesus had used to define her and their relationship, she turned them inside out. She showed that even within those abusive terms, she had a claim that Jesus could not deny. All she was asking for was crumbs. He had to grant them to her.

She had won and Jesus knew it. In his encounter with this woman, Jesus heard clearly the inhumanity of his culture's view of things, a view that had seemed natural until that moment. It was awkward. Jesus wasn't used to losing these verbal jousts. I can count on the fingers of one finger the total number of times that Jesus lost. So he must have been uncomfortable. And how embarrassing to have it happen in front of his disciples! But there it was. The text doesn't say so, but I imagine that Jesus laughed. Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself and surely this was one of those times. "Okay, you win! Go in peace, your daughter is made whole." And so she was.

Jesus' encounter with the Canaanite woman was surely a revelation to him. It didn't change his mission. He was right about that, at least as far as Matthew is concerned. He didn't suddenly revise his itinerary to tour the Roman Empire. He sought the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But he learned something about the heart of God that he had not known before: it encompasses everyone. Yes, Jesus learned a tough lesson that day. He who already knew God's heart so deeply and so well learned that he still more to learn. He received this lesson from a woman he had been taught to despise.

And this gives me hope. If Jesus needs this lesson, then how much more do I? And if Jesus can learn this lesson at this stage of his career and life, it's still possible for you and me. And that's about all the good news I can handle for today.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

5th Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 8:12-25
July 17, 2011

Green Theology

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

In the year that I’ve been hanging around Decorah you may have noticed that I don’t often preach from Paul. There is a reason for that. The Apostle Paul and I have our differences. He comes across as a pompous know-it-all and, really, there is only space for one of those in a room at a time and I would rather it were me. His prose is awful. His sentences run on and on, dangling participial phrases like charms on a charm bracelet. He starts out to make a simple point and then takes every available detour until he and we have forgotten what he set out to say. To put it succinctly, the Apostle annoys me.

I feel badly about it, of course. I don’t like it when my own preferences get in the way of loving someone, even someone dead for nearly two thousand years. One year I took it as a lenten discipline to preach from Paul every time he came up in the lectionary. And, wouldn’t you know it?—it was every Sunday during Lent! So every week I sat down with this person that I don’t really like very much. We had our arguments, our points of profound disagreement and some surprising agreements as well. In the seven weeks that we met for conversation I found what many people of have found when they’ve really made an effort to get to know someone whom they do not like: I came to respect him.

I discovered that it was not Paul himself I had rejected—it was the report I’ve had about him from others. His writings have been captured and, I believe, distorted by an agenda that I can only describe as narrow and abusive. He is taken out of context and made to seem to be saying things that he simply does not say. I have found him to be innocent of many of the charges made against him.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re not quite friends. I’ve never invited him to a baseball game or out for a pint. But I respect him. I think I understand him a little. I appreciate his perspective. I sometimes preach from his writings when it isn’t even Lent. I was intrigued by something I think I see in this week’s lesson, so this is one of those weeks. I’ll need two weeks of vacation to recover from the effort and maybe you’ll be glad of two weeks with someone else in the pulpit as well!

Romans is unique among Paul’s letters because it was written to a congregation whom he had never met. It is a letter of self-introduction to them because he is planning a missionary journey to the far west of the known world, to the Roman province of Hispania, and he hopes to gain their support for this effort. Rome is on the way and he would like to break the journey into two stages.

The letter is Paul’s fullest statement of what he has been preaching. He doesn’t deal with the particular problems of a particular congregation. Instead, Paul’s concerns are more general. He deals with the issue that has every Christian congregation struggling. In broad strokes the problem was this: How is the community of Jesus-followers going to deal with the presence of both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians? Is the gospel about Jesus for Jews only or is it for non-Jews as well? Do non-Jews have to become Jews in order to become Christians? Must non-Jewish Christians keep the Jewish law? If not, what law are they supposed to follow?

Paul said what God had done in Jesus the Christ was so new, so powerful, so radical, that the categories of Jew and non-Jew no longer made any sense. The Jewish law no longer counted, nor did any other law. The only thing that mattered was confidence in Jesus’ faithfulness and living a life that grew out of that confidence. This new thing rendered the old ways obsolete.

God’s plan includes both Jews and non-Jews. In fact—and here’s where our reading comes in—it doesn’t just include people. God’s plan is a plan for the whole of creation. We are not the only ones who long for redemption. With eager anticipation all of creation longs for it with us, longs for what Paul calls “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

Paul’s train of thought has left its rails. The course of Paul’s argument won’t be picked up again until the next chapter. In the meantime Paul’s train of thought continues careening along through —to change metaphors—a poetic crescendo that will end at chapter’s end with Paul’s jubilant shout that nothing seen or unseen in all of creation will separate us from God’s love found in the Jesus Christ! Hooray!

Now, where were we? Oh, yes: Paul was sketching out how things are with us. There are two choices, Paul says, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. On the one side there is flesh, death, the deeds of the body, slavery and fear. On the other side there is life, spirit, adoption, freedom, and glory. We who are Christians, says Paul, still live at least in some sense on the side of flesh, death, slavery and fear. But we hope for the side of spirit, life, freedom and glory. We aren’t there yet, but we hope for it, we yearn for it, we live toward it, we groan for it. We are in labor, giving birth to a new creation. This scares me, because although I’ve never been in labor myself, I have seen it and it looks like hard, painful and frightening work.

But we’re not the only ones who are in labor for this new thing: the whole of creation does, too. Now this is something odd, a thought that neither the ancients nor we have taken seriously.

To the ancients nature was not a good thing. As the opposite of culture it threatened everything they did. Wolves threatened their sheep. The forest threatened their cultivated fields. The sea threatened sailors. Nature could overthrow culture all too easily. Nature could turn an assembly of rational citizens into a blindly furious mob. People wanted to get as far away from nature as possible.

They admired the scenery of a cultivated countryside. They would have liked this part of Iowa, but not for its pockets of woodlands or its limestone cliffs. Nature on its own terms was dangerous and uncanny, hostile to humans. It wasn’t beautiful.

We didn’t start seeing nature as beautiful until the late seventeen hundreds, less than three centuries ago. That only happened after we began to imagine that we could control nature. Then we began to think of nature as beautiful. People began to travel to see the wilderness, not so they could plow it up or cut it down, but so they could appreciate its newly discovered beauty. When Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett cries, “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is saying something quite modern, something her great grandparents would neither have said nor even understood. We have come so far from the ancient point of view that we now see nature as flawless. We see a “natural” ingredient in an otherwise highly processed food as a selling point. We set aside plots of wilderness for protection. We have turned the ancient world upside down.

But notice that both of these views agree that nature is one thing and we are another. We have changed our minds about the relative value of culture and nature, but we are agreed that human beings and their culture stand outside of and apart from nature.

Paul disagrees. Paul says that we are creatures. We are deeply flawed creatures. And here is the huge point: because we, the capstone of creation, are flawed, so is the entire edifice. The condition of our species is not a problem just for us. It is a problem for the whole world.

But we knew that already, didn’t we? If we misuse fertilizers in Iowa, a patch of the Gulf of Mexico dies. If we build a nuclear power plant on a seismic fault-line, the soil and the sea life suffer. The careless agricultural use of marginal land leaves a gully where there could have been a pasture or woodland. A consensus of climatologists has come to the conclusion that the greenhouse gases that our species is producing are changing the climate of the whole planet. None of this is new news.

What is new is what comes next. Paul tells us that just as our flaws have become a deep wound in creation, our healing will be nothing less than the liberation of the rest of nature from its slavery. So what God plans to do is to rebuild creation from the ground up, to lay a new foundation for the natural enterprise.

God has a dream for us. This is true. What is also true is that this dream isn’t just about us; it’s about the world we live in, it’s about Elizabeth Bennett’s “rocks and mountains,” it’s about salamanders and tree frogs, slime molds and saguaro cactus, fireflies and falcons, blue whales and bluebells.

So far, our efforts to protect the environment we live in have been based either on self-interest or nature worship. When Paul’s train of thought left the rails, he showed us, whether by accident or on purpose, that there is another possibility. It is a happy derailment, I think.

It offers us a different way of thinking about ourselves and our world and a different reason for our caring. We can care for ourselves and for the rest of our world, neither because it serves us to do it, nor out of guilt, but because loving the world towards the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” is part of our calling as God’s children. Our fellow creatures can do more than groan with us because of our deep woundedness. They can celebrate our healing with us. They can rejoice that God is not saving us out of the world, but into it. Then will what we and our fellow creatures hoped for be in plain sight. Then will God’s dream for us be realized.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

"A Sower Went Out to Sow" - July 10, 2011; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23; Proper 10A

Proper 10A
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
July 10, 2011

A Sower Went Out to Sow

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

A crowd gathered around Jesus. That wasn’t unusual. That Jesus used a gathered crowd as a chance to teach is no surprise either. Nor is it a surprise that he taught them in parables. If Jesus is known for anything special in his method of teaching, it is that he taught in parables.

“A sower went out to sow.” And still there is no surprise, no startling new thing. We know this parable. In fact, we’re pretty sure we know them all. At least we’re pretty sure we’d recognize any of them. We may not understand them all, but we know how we’re supposed to go about understanding them. The parables are little stories. They are set in scenes that his hearers recognized, scenes drawn from ordinary life.

And, if we’re sure of one thing, we’re sure that they don’t mean what they say. They are what our English teachers called “allegory.” They aren’t meant to be taken literally. The elements in the story, like the sower, the seed and the different soils, are all metaphors, figures that refer to something else.

In our reading for this morning, we are even told what these particular elements in the story really mean: The seed that the sower sows is “the word of the kingdom.” The different soils are the different kinds of audiences. The hard-packed soil of the path is the hearer from whom the devil snatches the word away like a bird picking seeds off the ground. There are shallow people in whom the word of the kingdom can’t take root, so when hard times come the word dies. There are people who let their anxiety or greed crowd out the good news; they are the thorn-infested soil. And finally there are people who will take the word of the kingdom to heart. They will give it space to grow. They will guard it from the enemy. They will keep it from being crowded out by other commitments or concerns. So be careful about what kind of reception you give to the word of the kingdom: Be like the good soil in which the seed of the good news can take root and grow and bear a rich harvest.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Of course, in this particular case we have the teacher’s edition of the textbook, the one with the answers in the back. For other parables we’ll be on our own. We’ll have to figure these out for ourselves. And it doesn’t look too good.

In fact, if we look at the stuff that lies between the parable itself and its interpretation, the part of this passage that the lectionary committee didn’t think we should read this morning, we’ll find some discouraging news. When Jesus’ disciples ask Jesus why he teaches in parables he answers by telling them that he speaks in parables so that the crowd will not understand what he is saying. They aren’t supposed to understand. Only the disciples are supposed to understand. They are only ones who get the answer key. It’s too bad that they didn’t pass it along to us! Instead we have an interpretation for this parable and a very few others and we’re thrown on our own too-meager resources to figure out the rest.

Now what? Where do we go from here? It looks like we’re stuck.

Let me suggest a way forward. As it often happens, the way forward begins by going back. Matthew’s gospel was written in the last three decades of the first century, anywhere from forty to seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Like every writer of every book of the Bible, Matthew was much less concerned with putting the tradition that he had received into writing while remaining a neutral observer than he was with helping his community deal with its own problems by making use of the tradition that he received.

Matthew’s community was puzzled as to why the good news that had meant so much to them didn’t seem to get much traction with many of their neighbors. Why was it that they just didn’t “get” it? Well, the interpretation that Matthew provided helped them to understand. Some people, maybe even most people, didn’t get it because they were the wrong kind of soil for that kind of seed. Matthew’s community could see their experiences mirrored in the results of the sower’s sowing: some people never seemed to hear the message at all, others seemed glad to hear it but wandered away soon after, still others were so distracted by other things that the message couldn’t really take hold. They, meanwhile, should concentrate on being fertile soil. And, behind those choices, there was another will at work: some people were not meant to understand while they, thankfully, were.

Matthew has recast the tradition to speak to his own day. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s the only thing that we can do. We live in Decorah, not Antioch, in the early part of the twenty-first century, not the latter part of the first.

I believe that Matthew’s reinterpretation of Jesus’ parable does not bind us to follow his reading. Instead, I believe that it frees us to recast the tradition so that it speaks to our world and our life in it, just as Matthew recast it to speak to his world. So the way forward lies back, behind Matthew’s reading.

I find it helpful and useful when reading parables to take the parable at face value. I assume that it means what it says. This parable begins, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” I am going to assume that this parable, then, is about “a sower who went out to sow.” Jesus’ listeners would have recognized this scene.

The figure of the sower with a bag full of seed walking through a field and casting the seed by hand was familiar. The sower sowed the seed. Then he would go back over the field with an ox and a scratch plow. The scratch plow wouldn’t turn the soil over as our plows used to do. It would—as its name implies—merely scratch the surface inch or so to cover the seed so that it could germinate and grow. Then, much the same as our farmers do now, they would hope for rain. Only they waited and hoped with a higher degree of anxiety. Agriculture was a close thing in that part of the world. Jesus’ hearers knew that farming was a gamble and that there were lots of things that could go wrong. Even if everything went right, it was not a way for a peasant to get rich. Even in good years the yield was meager. The ancients used to say that a harvest was divided into thirds: one-third for seed, one-third for the rats and one-third to eat.

Farming as done by peasants was no get-rich quick scheme, but it would provide a living, especially if the peasant was fortunate enough to have good land, land on a well-drained slope for example. Jesus’ hearers knew this, too.

This brings us to the first surprise in the parable: this sower’s land stunk. It was hardly worth the bother, as the story tells us by detailing the ways in which the land was unsuitable. In the first place, there was a road that ran through the field. The birds would eat any seed that fell on the road. And what they didn’t eat would be trampled.

Part of the field was too rocky and the soil was too thin. No seed that fell there would produce a harvest. Part of the field was thorn-infested. Farmers could and would burn the weeds off before planting but the roots were too deep to be destroyed by fire. The roots of the weeds would send up new shoots and thorns would be well-established before the grain had even thought about germinating.

How did it come about that the sower was casting seed in such a field? Why wasn’t he casting his seed in a more promising field? Why was he trying to farm an upland plot? Jesus’ hearers knew the answer to that question: our peasant friend was farming in the rocky, thorn-infested hills because the good soil further down the slopes was taken.

When the Romans took over Palestine, they began to shove peasants off their land. They consolidated the small holdings of the displaced peasant families into large plantations growing luxury cash crops. The land was being converted from subsistence to commercial use. The economy was changing from barter- to currency-based. Goods and money were moving more freely—not to mention the peasant families thrown off their ancestral holdings. The International Monetary Fund would have been proud.

So it was either farm the poor land in the hill country or give it up altogether. But why would he keep farming? Why would he do something so futile, when all these factors that he could not control were conspiring to frustrate his hopes? Why not just give up?

Why not take up banditry? If he couldn’t live long he could at least live well. Plus, banditry offered the poetic justice of repaying the rich for their theft of his good land. So why not?

Or maybe take up a trade. The life of tradesman didn’t offer the same dignity as being a peasant and he would have to make nice with the people who had stolen his land, but it was a living and those were not easy to come by in those tight times. So why not? Why keep doing what he was doing?

As different as our sower’s situation was from ours, there is still something in his story that sounds familiar. In our lives, if we are ever to accomplish anything worth accomplishing, if we are ever to matter, we will sooner or later face something like our sower’s dilemma. When we have a hope, a good dream, that we are pursuing and we’re working hard to move toward it, and we’ve controlled everything we can control and then things we can’t control come along and threaten everything, why not just pack it in and do something else, something easy?

A woman is raising two children on her own in a bad neighborhood. She works two jobs to keep a roof over their heads and food (of a sort) on their table. Her kids have to walk through gang territory to get to school and they’re facing pressure to join a gang or face reprisals. And, meanwhile, politicians are scoring points with their suburban constituents by calling her lazy and attacking the utility assistance program that makes it all just barely work. Why not just give it up? Why not just take the path of least resistance? Why not just live like the welfare queen she is accused of being?

I can’t speak for others, but I can say for myself that there are times when “the preaching life”—as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it—gets tiresome. We live in a world that, while it is beautiful and even wondrous, is also and at the same time ugly with injustice and pain. I hear Jesus calling us all to live lives that are peaceful and just and I know that this means more than being nice to each other, but I haven’t figured out just what it looks like, much less how to live that kind of life. I’m a preacher, so in the meantime all I have are words to oppose that injustice, to celebrate that beauty, and to ease that pain. Words are in abundant supply and the demand for them has not kept pace, so words have become cheaper and cheaper. We are overwhelmed with words. What we need is silence. What I have are words. So how do I speak so that it doesn’t just dump more words into the verbal floodwaters? Why not just give it up and find some other line of work?

Why does the sower go out to sow?

The sower goes out to sow because, in spite of the injustice he has suffered at the hands of the Romans and their rich friends, in spite of the plant-choking thorns, in spite of the hard-packed road running right through his field, in spite of the seed-gulping birds and the too-thin soil, in spite of all that, there is good soil in that miserable field and some of the seed falls into it. And then something wonderful happens. We’d call it a miracle although it’s not a miracle at all—it’s entirely natural. But it is a marvel: the seed germinates; the plant grows and grows and matures; it blooms; and, despite the long odds and unfavorable circumstances, it bears fruit. Some of the plants bear thirty seeds, some sixty, some even a scarcely believable one hundred seeds. It is those few plants, a gift from a generous God, that justify the absurd venture of planting in such an unlikely place. That’s why the sower goes out to sow. That marvel is what the sower is looking for.

And that’s what we’re looking for. It’s what that woman trying to shepherd her kids from fragile childhood to responsible maturity is looking for. It’s what the preacher who is trying to be faithful to his calling is looking for. It’s what anyone who sets out to do something that matters is looking for.

And there it is: some of the seed falls into good soil. And what happens next is marvelous. So, when you set out to do a good thing, much of what you do will be wasted effort. Much of what you do will come to nothing. Much of what you do will be frustrated. All of what you do may seem futile and foolish. But there is more at work than what you can see. The odds are long, but it only has to happen once. And then what you do will become a marvel, a wonder. It will grow and multiply and bear fruit, some one hundred times, some sixty times, some thirty times. And that will make everything worth the price you have paid. “Let anyone with ears listen!” Amen.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Proper 9A
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
July 3, 2011

Rest

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

How are you? Are you feeling well? Are you feeling rested? There are at least two kinds of “rested,” you know. The first kind is the rested that means “no more tired than usual.” We’re that kind of rested when last night’s sleep was reasonably good and reasonably long. I’m feeling rested this morning but I know that it’s only the first kind of rested. The second kind of rested is fully rested. And I’m usually pretty far from that.

Most of us a running pretty significant sleep deficits. A century ago Americans reported getting an average of nine hours of sleep a night. Today it’s closer to seven. That’s enough sleep at night to function during the day, more or less. But it’s not enough to really satisfy our need for rest.

We’re working more, too. In the last fifty years we’ve made enormous gains in productivity. Rather than cashing our gains out in extra leisure time, we’ve bought more stuff that we have less time to enjoy.

Families with children still at home are particularly burdened. There are long working hours. In most two-parent families both parents are employed. Evenings and weekends are a blur of organized activities for children.

Even in Decorah there is not enough time. Even in Decorah I hear people express the wish for an extra hour in the day or an extra day in the week. I know better than to think that would help us. If we had that extra hour or day, we’d just fill them to overflowing. We have the kind of shortage of time that more time won’t solve.

I’m always suspicious when I hear the wish for “more.” It’s not that there aren’t genuine shortages for some people. But for most of us the shortages are more apparent than real, more the result of a way of thinking than of the nature of the world.

There have always been places where people were convinced that they didn’t have enough, despite all evidence to the contrary. In ancient Egypt Pharaoh had his Hebrew slaves build whole cities of warehouses to hold the stuff that his armies had stolen from the surrounding lands. And yet the Pharaohs continually sought more: more gold, more tribute, more slaves, more plunder, and more warehouses to store the stuff. When the Hebrew slaves complained that the daily quotas for making bricks were too high, Pharaoh responded by shifting the burden of gathering materials onto the slaves—without reducing the quotas.

Every empire has behaved in the same way. There is never enough: never enough land, never enough gold, never enough slaves, never enough of anything! However wealth has been defined, empires are never satisfied.

In the Bible, which surprisingly often looks at the world through the eyes of ordinary people, the experience of perpetual shortage that characterizes life in an empire is contained in an image: the yoke.

This kind of yoke is not the yellow part of an egg. When the word is used literally, it’s the device put around the neck of one or more oxen so the owner can get some work out of them, make them pull a plow, a cart or some other burden. Of the sixty or so times that the image occurs in the Bible, eleven refer to a literal yoke, the collar for an ox or to a team of oxen who are joined by a yoke.

Only twice does it have a positive sense of referring to the covenant that binds God and God’s covenant people. It also occurs a few times in those books called “the Apocrypha” that are sometimes found in Bibles. In one of them, Ecclesiasticus, it refers to accepting the instruction of a female figure called Wisdom who personifies God’s, um, wisdom.

The rest of the times in our Bible the image of the yoke is used in a negative sense. Twenty uses refer to the oppression that results when an empire—a foreign invader—comes and takes over, abusing the people for its own profit. Another dozen times refer to the same thing when done by one’s own king. Once the image refers to literal slavery, as when a master owns a slave and may therefore make the slave do whatever the master wants. Twice it refers to a burdensome religious obligation.

The remaining two times it is used by Jesus in this reading in front of us: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

As I sorted through this reading to try to puzzle out just what Jesus might mean by “my yoke,” I noticed a few things. For one, the image of the yoke almost always involves work. The oxen work; the peoples oppressed by empires or their own rulers work; even the student bound to a teacher works. And it’s hard work, too. It’s plodding along, dragging a burden behind you. It’s toil. It’s labor. It’s not fun.

So what does it mean that Jesus uses the image of the yoke as if it were an alternative to work? “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” How does the yoke—which clearly involves unpleasant work—become something that gives rest?

An just what does Jesus mean by a yoke, anyway? As we have seen, there are basically three alternatives. But Jesus probably wasn’t handing out ox yokes for his disciples to wear, so I think that rules out the first alternative. That leaves two.

One possibility is that his invitation to “take [his] yoke upon [ourselves]” is an invitation to discipleship. We come to him as students to a master, willing to trust what he teaches, willing to listen, and finally—and this is the hardest part for us Americans, maybe especially on a Fourth of July weekend—willing to obey. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, does it? It doesn’t sound like rest, either.

And the other possibility is this. As the Bible’s PowerPoint presentation of yoke images plays out, I notice a succession of empires, one oppressor after another: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and the Seleucid Kingdom, one of the kingdoms into which Alexander the Great’s empire split after his death. There’s even Israel when it gets acting all imperial and starts oppressing its own citizens. One empire or imperial wanna be after another, each with its own yoke.

Of course, in every book of the New Testament, in every scene of every gospel, sometimes named but usually not, as background, as the imperial elephant in the room, is the Roman Empire. The people of Roman Palestine resented Rome, longed for deliverance from its power, and—as they might have put it—chafed under the it yoke.

They worked hard, but the wealth always seemed end up in Roman hands. Every time they turned around, any time they did anything, there was a Roman hand expecting to be greased with a tax, or a fee, or an out-right bribe. The land would have produced enough to support them, but the best land wasn’t theirs. The best land was producing cash crops, but the crops left on boats and the cash never ended up in their hands. They were stuck with the up-country land with thin rocky soils and inadequate rainfall. So, no matter how hard they worked, there was never enough. Never enough food, never enough land, never enough money, never enough rest.

Which was ironic, because the Jewish people were the only people in the world who observed a sabbath. The sabbath wasn’t for working. The sabbath wasn’t for trade or commerce or deal-making. The sabbath wasn’t for long journeys. It wasn’t for cooking or for washing clothes or mowing the lawn. The sabbath was for rest. It was for leisurely meals with your family, meals where you all sat down around the same table and you ate real food slowly and talked a lot. The sabbath was for long laughter-filled visits with friends. The sabbath was for singing. And best of all, it was for the sumptuous feast of the Torah, when the words of the Bible could be savored at an easy pace, and their meaning puzzled over and debated and argued to your heart’s content. That was the sabbath.

But the rest wasn’t giving any rest. Sabbath isn’t restful if we spent it anxiously looking at our neighbors to see if we’ve lost ground on them while they were working and we weren’t. Sabbath isn’t restful if we are convinced that fundamentally we don’t have enough. Sabbath under the yoke of empire can easily become an anxiety-filled space that is transformed from “don’t have to work” to “aren’t allowed to work.” Even the sabbath can become a burden under the yoke of empire.

Which maybe is why more time wouldn’t help us any. And maybe it’s why we don’t sleep enough. Because we, too, live under the yoke of empire. It isn’t an empire in form. There isn’t an emperor putting out imperial decrees. There aren’t any colonies or conquered territories. Mostly it’s an empire in our heads and in our hearts.

We live under the yoke of the conviction that our restlessness is an itch we can scratch by getting more stuff. We serve under the yoke of the notion that our want, our desire, and (dare I call it) our greed will be satisfied if only we can possess the object of our want, our desire, yes, our greed.

We can throw off the yoke of the British crown. We can detail our freedoms and project our power to defend them. We can jealously guard our rights. What Jesus sees and we do not is that we are going to serve something and someone. The question is what and whom, not whether. We are yoked. The question is to whom and to what.

That’s why Jesus says to us, “You are yoked with the wrong yoke. Put off the yoke of the empire (in whatever form it presents itself to you in your day) and take my yoke upon you and learn from me...and you will find rest in the depth of your being.”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.