A Day for Liberation (Luke 13:10-17; Proper 16C; August 25, 2013)

A Day for Liberation

Luke 13:10-17
Proper 16C
August 25, 2013

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

She looked like she bore the weight of the world on her shoulders.  And who knows?  Maybe she did.  She was “bent over and couldn’t stand up straight,” the story tells us.  She had been that way for eighteen years.  We can safely conclude that she wasn’t born that way.  If she had, the story would have mentioned that because it would have made her healing all the more remarkable.  Life somehow had done this to her. 

We might have said that she had osteoporosis, but the story says that she had been disabled by a spirit.  We smile at such a naïve, superstitious detail, but maybe there was more than the merely physical going on.  At least we should recognize that a condition like this, if it didn’t begin in the spirit, certainly had an impact on the spirit.  Can anyone bear such a burden for eighteen years and not be profoundly changed by it?

She was in synagogue on the Sabbath, hoping for some good news.  There was lots of news, but mostly it was the same old news, none of it the kind that would change her world for the better.  The Romans were particularly testy lately and everyone was on edge after some Galileans had been murdered by Pilate while they were offering sacrifices.  What did it mean?  What had they been doing to deserve such a thing?  What more can we do to stay out of trouble and avoid the notice of the Romans than we are already doing?

Some of the news was closer to home.  Sarah’s husband Judas had been robbed while coming home from the market town after selling some sheep.  The thieves took the money, of course, but they also left Judas badly wounded.  He would live but healing would be a long time in coming.  What were Sarah and her family going to do in the meantime?  They already owed the money lender.  Would he demand their land?  And then what would become of them?

Another neighbor, Isabel, had just given birth.  The baby boy was doing well, but Isabel was in bed with a fever.  This was the third day and the crisis would come soon.

This bent woman, this dispirited woman, this woman who bore the weight of the world on her shoulders was in synagogue on Shabbat, hoping for some good news.  Shabbat should have been a good day for good news.

That it was not was not the fault of the day itself.  In fact the Sabbath was remarkable.  It was a part of the oldest Jewish traditions.  The Sabbath is the fourth of the Ten Commandments that were given to lay out for Israel a way of life that stood in contrast to their life as slaves in Egypt.  There they served the gods of Empire and had little in the way of genuinely human community.  And especially they had no rest.  Exodus describes it this way: “[T]he Egyptians put foremen of forced work gangs over the Israelites to harass them with hard work.  They had to build storage cities named Pithom and Rameses for Pharaoh…They made their lives miserable with hard labor, making mortar and bricks, doing field work, and by forcing them to do all kinds of other cruel work.” 

The Empire du jour, Egypt, demanded unending work from the Israelites, work without end, work without rest.  When the Israelites tried some collective bargaining, the Egyptians responded by making their work even harder.  Day after day, week after week, year after year, the Israelites toiled to build the warehouses to store the loot from Egypt’s wars, the tribute of empire.  There was no end to the accumulated loot and no end to the Israelites’ labor in service to the gods of Egypt.

For the Israelites, led by Moses out of slavery in Egypt, it was no burden to be told to rest one day each week.  It was sweet freedom.  It was a gift.

It was a gift that made the Jewish people special.  Their pagan neighbors couldn’t understand why or how, on one day of every seven, Jews would do no work.  They would neither buy nor sell.  They wouldn’t work in the fields.  They wouldn’t even cook any food.

Instead, they rested.  They gathered with their friends and families.  They ate cold leftovers.  They drank a little wine.  Not too much, but some!  They took walks.  Not too long and only at a leisurely pace.  The grownups talked and sometimes argued about the Torah, having decided that studying the Torah is never labor, but always a delight.  The kids played games.  They all sang and danced and laughed a lot.  The Sabbath was a gift.

Of course, there is no gift so good that it can’t be spoiled.  The rule-makers, no doubt anxious to protect the Sabbath and keep it holy, made a lot of rules.  How far could you walk on the Sabbath?  Two thousand cubits beyond the city limits.  Could you tend a fire that had already been lit before the Sabbath started?  No.  Can you act to save a human life?  Yes.  Eventually there were thirty-nine different categories of prohibited activities, each with their own rules.  If you add enough rules, even the gift of Sabbath becomes a burden.

So the President of the synagogue, doubtless one of the rule-maker types, had harsh things to say.  But I notice that he didn’t say them to Jesus.  Maybe he was from Iowa where nice people who have a beef with someone are not permitted to say anything.  To them.  They may and do tell other people.  So, the President of synagogue, as a way of rebuking Jesus, told the people that if they wanted to be healed, they should come on other days, but not on the Sabbath.

Jesus replied that anyone who set their ox or donkey free to lead them to fodder and objected to setting a woman free from her sickness was a hypocrite, that is, was “under judgment.”  The Sabbath is all about being set free.  Of course it is lawful to set someone free on the Sabbath.  The rule-makers weren’t pleased, but the crowd was glad to hear what Jesus had to say.  It was good news for them.  It was especially good news for the woman who had been bent over for eighteen years.  Whatever the burdens of her life at least she no longer looked as if she were bearing the weight of the world.

So her story ended well.  Our story?  Well, it’s not done yet, but when it comes to the question of rest, of Sabbath, it’s not looking too good.

Some of you can remember when a Sunday Sabbath was the law.  Stores were closed.  Gas stations were closed.  The pharmacy in our neighborhood was open but the soda fountain in the same store was closed on account of what were called “blue laws.”

We got rid of those laws.  It’s probably just as well.  Sunday may be the day that passes for a Sabbath among Christians, but Christians aren’t the only folks in our country.  It’s inhospitable—as well as illegal—to impose one religion’s practices even on other members of one’s own religion, let alone the members of other religious traditions.  So, I’m not in favor of bringing back blue laws.

But it’s clear that we have a problem with the notion of rest.  Our “days off” are a blur of frenetic activity.  The United States is the only developed country that does not require employers to provide paid vacation.  Even at that over half of American workers don’t use all the vacation days they are allowed, some because they have too much work to do and don’t want it to pile up while they’re gone, others because they don’t have any money to travel and a few because they are afraid it will reflect badly on them.[1]  We aren’t sleeping enough.  Adults need between seven and eight hours of sleep each night.  Half of us are getting less than seven hours a night.[2]  That’s for adults.  School aged kids need between ten and eleven hours, teens between eight and a half and nine and a quarter hours.  So how are you doing?  I’m guessing you’re not getting enough. 

The reasons for our shortage of sleep are numerous, but I believe that many of them come down to this: We aren’t getting enough rest for the same reason that the ancient Israelites weren’t getting enough rest.  The Empire du jour in those days commanded them to work without ceasing.  It set task masters over them. 

Things are different now.  We now deprive ourselves of rest and give it to the tasks we are convinced we need to do.  Collectively, we have been deprived of our ability to say, “Enough!”  We have become our own taskmasters.  We live in Egypt and think that we’re free.  The Empire today has learned to be subtle. 

But the Empire is still with us as it was for the Israelites.  We are bent over like the woman in our story, bent over as if we were carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, bent over and waiting for deliverance.  The Sabbath was a barrier to healing that kept a tortured woman from being set free.  Jesus broke the Sabbath in the name of the Sabbath for her sake, loosened her bonds and set her free.  In the name of the Sabbath Jesus comes to us and offers to set us free from our own bonds, offers to deliver us from the grip of the Empire.  Jesus comes to give us rest.  It will be good to be able to stand up straight.

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.

 

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[1] “Vacation? No Thanks, Boss.” CNNMoney. Accessed August 23, 2013. http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/18/news/economy/unused_vacation_days/index.htm.

 

[2] National Sleep Foundation. “Bedroom Poll: Summary of Findings,” November 1, 2010. http://www.sleepfoundation.org/sites/default/files/bedroompoll/NSF_Bedroom_Poll_Report.pdf.

"Love Song, Interrupted" (Isaiah 5:1-7; Proper 15C; August 18, 2013)

Love Song, Interrupted

Isaiah 5:1-7
Proper 15C
August 18, 2013

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

Every profession has its special vocabulary, its words or ways of using words that communicate perfectly to the people inside the profession and completely mystify everyone else.  Some of the words are a kind of shorthand.  People inside the profession—whether they are hair stylists or astrophysicists—use this shorthand to save time and prevent misunderstandings.  Members of the health care professions can refer to what the rest of us call “the little thingy that hangs down from the soft part of the roof of the mouth at the back of the mouth” by calling it the “uvula.”

Professionals also use these words to mark and guard the boundaries of the profession.  A nurse knows right away that someone who says “I have a little sore on the little thingy that hangs down from the soft part of the roof of the mouth at the back of the mouth,” is not a health care professional.  If you call it the uvula, instead, and use medical language—and use it correctly—when you’re visiting a nurse or physician, they will say something like, “You seem to know a lot about medicine…”  The unspoken question is, “Are you one of us?”

A good deal of a professional education is learning the special language of the profession.  It’s a sort of credential in and of itself.  If you have graduated from an auto mechanics program but still refer to a clutch throwout bearing as “the little spinney thingamabob that presses up against the big flat round plate thingy when you push the clutch pedal in,” you are unlikely to land your first job as an auto mechanic no matter how well you can do the actual work.

As a profession, ordained ministry is no different.  We get a professional education in seminary.  They call it the “formation of ministerial character,” but what they mean is shaping habits and that includes habits of thought.  They do this by teaching the technical language of theology. 

Like any technical language, theology serves two different purposes.  The first is to allow the members of the profession—theologians—to talk to each other easily and clearly.  This purpose has to do with competence.  The second purpose is to mark anyone who does not know the language as “not one of us.”   It has to do with insiders and outsiders.  It has to do with power.

Now, those of us who played the game of being a seminary student and learning the things that our seminary wanted us to learn and who played the game as if it were not a game—and I’m one of them—have a bit of a problem.  At some level I came to believe that the theological language that I learned in seminary is the “right” language to use to describe God. 

I suppose that’s common among professionals of all sorts.  But it doesn’t really matter much that I don’t know the technical language of hair stylists, auto mechanics or physicians.  I just want a haircut that looks okay and is easy to care for.  I just want to know if the new noise in my car is a problem that needs to be fixed or if it’s just something I should get used to.  I just want to know a new ache or pain can be treated or at least that it is not the first sign of something serious.  Largely, I can leave the language and even the things themselves to the professionals. 

But theology is different for two reasons.  First, everyone has some notion about God, some image, some understanding.  Everyone has their own experience of God.  Everyone has their own relationship with God.  These are not things that we can let professionals take care of for us.

Theology is a handy system for theologians to use to talk among themselves and theology can certainly make the untrained feel like outsiders.  The bottom line, though, is that there is no such thing as a human language that is good enough, big enough, precise enough to be able to describe God.  At its very best our language can only hint at God’s reality by using words the same way a poet uses them.  “My love is like a red, red rose,” Robbie Burns wrote.  What does he mean to say?  That love is red? or doubly red (whatever that might mean)?  Does he mean to say that love has thorns? or that it will wilt quickly unless it’s put in water and will wilt eventually in any event?  Or does he mean that love is both sweet and painful?  Burns must use something we know about—roses—to say something about love.  But we know something about love, too—well, at least the lucky ones know, or maybe it’s the unlucky ones. 

But what do we know about God?  The only way we can speak about God at all is in the same poetic way that Burns speaks about love.  All language about God is poetic.  Even the technical language of theology is poetry.  It’s just not very good poetry, because it is poetry pretending to be something else.  All those years I spent learning theology did not give me an inside track when it comes to describing God.  Imagine my disappointment!

The Bible with its stories in which God seems almost human, with its poetry that purrs one moment and rages the next, with its biases and its archaic worldview and above all with its unacceptable violence, is also human language.  Its tries at telling about God are no better than the learned discourse of theology, but they are no worse, either.  In some ways a like Isaiah 5 is better than theology because it embraces poetic language.

Isaiah 5 is a love song.  Or it tries to be.  It begins as one.  God has commissioned the prophet to write and sing a love song to a vineyard.  God picked out a fertile hillside, dug out and hauled away the rocks, planted good grape vines, built a tower at its edge from which it could be guarded and dug a wine vat where the grapes could be crushed. 

A horticulturalist expects a harvest and, given all that God has done for the vineyard, it should be a good harvest, but it is not.  Even before they are ripe, the grapes rot on the vine.

No sooner has Isaiah begun his song than he must change roles.  Isaiah the singer-songwriter has to serve legal papers.  God has filed a lawsuit against the beloved vineyard and Isaiah is God’s attorney.  The people of Jerusalem and Judah are to serve as the jury.

God’s lawsuit specifies all that God has done, God’s expectation of good grapes, God’s disappointment, and God’s demand to recover damages.  God will undo all that God has done, so that the vineyard will become a place of thorns and thistles, a dry and barren place, a place of ruins and dust.

Isaiah’s audience, the people of Jerusalem, might have been wondering what this talk of vineyards was about.  Perhaps Isaiah, a priest of the Jerusalem temple, a minor functionary in the bureaucracy of the little kingdom with the extra large ego, was speaking about Israel, the kingdom just to the north of Judah.  Yes, that was probably it.  Those northerners never did understand what it meant to live in covenant.  They were always chasing after foreign gods.  Not like the people of Judah, with the Temple of Yahweh, the holy place of God, the place where God’s name dwelled—and would dwell—forever. 

Isaiah finally let the hammer fall:  “The vineyard of the Lord of heavenly forces is the house of Israel…”  (Didn’t we guess?  Those northerners!!  You give ‘em what for, Isaiah!)  But Isaiah was not finished: “and the people of Judah are the plantings in which God delighted.  God expected justice, but there was bloodshed; righteousness, but there was a cry of distress!”

Judah itself is named in this lawsuit.  Judah will be the jury in the trial in which it is also the defendant.  This is how confidant God is in the suit God has filed.

In the next few verses we learn more about this lawsuit and the nature of the charges God is bringing against Judah.  We learn about the vineyard’s rotten grapes.  These things are not easy for us to hear, because it is all too easy to see their pattern reproduced in the world around us.  Doom is pronounced against real estate moguls, “those who acquire house after house, who annex field to field, until there is no more space left.”  Doom is pronounced against the passive audiences who give themselves over to be amused by the media.  Doom is pronounced against the spin-masters who portray evil as good and good as evil.  Doom is pronounced against the national security complex that can’t win a war but can and does harass the people instead.

While Isaiah is by turns a singer-songwriter, process server, and attorney, the God of the text moves from proud landscaper in love with his vineyard, to aggrieved covenant partner, to plaintiff in a lawsuit.  In the meantime the people of Judah and Jerusalem are an audience at the debut of a new love song, the jury in a lawsuit and finally the defendants in the same lawsuit.

This is not the way that theological language works.  Theological language wraps eternal truths in five syllable words.  It avoids passion and aims for clear-headedness and precision.  Not so the poetry of the prophet Isaiah.  Isaiah’s God is a complex character who is not always predictable.  Isaiah’s God is passionate about justice and is inclined to take injustice as a personal insult.  But above all, Isaiah’s God is alive. 

Those of us who have decided to be a part of this story, to make this story our story, are not so much posed with a theological puzzle as we are caught up in a drama with Isaiah’s living God.  Our careful attempts to fashion a language that can contain God, hold God still, and pin God down like a butterfly tacked to a display board, are so many exercises in futility.  It is only when we hear or tell these stories and others like them that we can get a quick glimpse of the God of Isaiah, of Deborah, of Jesus, of Rosa Parks, of Monseñor Romero.  And then, just like that, God has moved on and we are left to pull up our tent stakes and follow.  That is what it means to be caught up in a story with a living God.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

The Last Word (Proper 13C; Hosea 11:1-11; August 4, 2013)

The Last Word

Proper 13C

Hosea 11:1-11

August 4, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

It’s a familiar enough scene to anyone who has been a parent (or had one).  You can picture it: It's late on Saturday night, say about 12:30.  The kid (who has an 11:00 curfew) is still out—no phone call, no special permission asked, nothin’.  The kid—who can text at sixty words per minute with her left hand, find her favorite song on her iPod with her right, and chatter with her friends all while driving down Water Street—is not answering her cell phone. 

The parents are beside themselves. Where could she be?  Why hasn't she called?  Their minds are working overtime.  They are seeing all kinds of images of their child, none of them good.  They're imagining her in an accident.  They're imagining her in jail.  They're imagining her lying in a ditch somewhere, the victim of a crime.  They're imagining her kidnapped.  Those terrible stories you read in the paper and see on the evening news—they all start this way, you know, with a missed curfew.

If the phone does ring, their hearts pound, their minds race.  Is it her?  No.  Is it the police? the hospital?  No.  Then get off the phone!!!

And then, a quarter to one, she comes waltzing through the door without a care in the world.  All of that tender concern vanishes in a nanosecond.  Where have you been?  We've been worried sick about you, just sick.  Go to your room; you can come out when you leave for college!!

In Hosea's oracle, Yahweh is fed up.  Israel has not simply broken its curfew.  It’s been thoroughly delinquent.  Israel has not kept covenant with its God.  It has worshiped other gods: gods of production and progress and power.  It has ignored all that makes for a human and humane society.  A humane society needs to protect the poor with fair trade practices.  Instead Israel has decided that anything goes and “Devil take the hindmost!”  A humane society needs to put a brake on the greed of the rich.  Instead Israel has set no limit on the accumulation of wealth by the rich and the dispossession of the poor.  A humane society needs a plan to meet the need that everyone has for rest and renewal.  Israel has decided to pursue production, progress and power, twenty-four/seven.

It has broken the Torah, refused to walk in the way of Yahweh, and for what?  So that a few folk could indulge in conspicuous possession.  So that Israel could be a bit player in international politics.  All the while they have pretended that they were good followers of Yahweh.

Sure, the king led the people in keeping the festivals.  He did it studiously, since they made the king look good.  But the name of Yahweh had become cheap.  Yahweh could be represented to stand for anything.

The latter part of the eighth century bce was not a good time for the relationship between God and Israel, and God was fed up.

Our passage begins with Yahweh remembering all that Yahweh had done for Israel, all that Yahweh had given to Israel.  But the more God gave, the more Israel deserted Yahweh for other gods: the gods of production and progress and power.  The heart-breaking thing was that Israel did this in spite of the fact that God has acted as a tender mother to them:

…it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,

I took them up in my arms…

I led them with cords of human kindness,

with bands of love.

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.

I bent down to them and fed them.

Is there a tenderer picture of God’s loving kindness in all of the Bible?  The Hebrew word for this picture is חֶסֶד, but it’s a word that is nearly impossible to translate.  “Loving kindness” seems so inadequate for the depth and visceral quality of God’s love for Israel.

God remembers all that God has done for Israel.  But remembering all the things that we have done for someone who has disappointed us is not a way get past our anger.  It doesn't work for God, either. 

“So, Israel doesn't want to be my people?  Fine, they can have it their way!  The covenant can be revoked.  Israel can go back to Egypt where I found them or they can be conquered by Assyria.  It makes no difference to me which.

“They want gods of production and progress and power?  They can serve those gods as slaves in captivity or as slaves in exile.  Their country will be conquered, their cities ravaged.  Since they do not want to follow me, I will no longer attend to them, hear their prayers, or answer when they call.”

Here is anger's fantasy of revenge, revenge for all the hurt, all the pain, all the anguish a parent feels when the child they love is bent on destroying themselves.  Yahweh imagines the broken covenant dissolved—“It was a stupid idea, anyway,  being the covenant God of this wayward people.” 

When the covenant people is destroyed that will be an end to Yahweh's anguish.  The covenant people surely deserves it, all of it.  They deserve...  They...

God knows what Israel deserves.  And God is angry enough to destroy them, angry enough to let them destroy themselves.

But, somehow, God just can’t do it, can’t turn tempting fantasy into horrible reality.  Now that they’re out there, now that God has said those terrible words out loud, God just can't go through with it, can’t pull the trigger.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?

How can I hand you over, O Israel?

How can I make you like Admah?

How can I treat you like Zeboiim?

In the end, Israel is God's child.  Judgment and mercy went to war in God's heart and mercy won.  Mercy always wins.  Always.  Always.

This, friends, is the fundamental fact of our lives.  It is the truth at the heart of the universe.  It is the foundation of our shared life.  It lies at the center of our mission.  It is the motivation for all our ministries.  Whatever our call, whatever our vision, at the center of it, upholding it, moving through it, permeating it, is the mercy of God. 

This is the bedrock of our faith.  I don’t know of anyone who has put it better than Bishop Palmer who likes to say it this way:  “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

This is the news at the heart of the universe.  It’s news that’s so good we can’t possibly keep it to ourselves.  It’s news that’s so good we have to let it spill over into our lives and into everything we say and do and think and feel.  It’s news that’s so good we have to share it in our deeds and, yes—God help us!—even in our words:  “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

This is the experience of ancient Israel in the testimony of the prophet Hosea, it is our own experience in the heights and depths of our own lives and it’s our message to everyone who will listen, from Decorah to Postville to Potrerillos: “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

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.