Well, last week in our reading, the Israelites were on the cusp of the promised land, and they were looking back and reflecting on all the things that had happened and all of the people who had worked so hard to get them where they are.

But what happens when you get everything that you ever wanted? Well, usually we want more, right?

And the people wanted more. They wanted to be like their neighbors around them who all had kings. And God tried to dissuade them from this notion, saying, “No, no. You can all live together happily with me as your king.” And they said, “That’s nice, but we want one of us as king.” And so God reluctantly went along with their plan, and we find out today, in today’s reading, why that might not have been the best idea.

2 Samuel 11:1–5, 26–27; 12:1–9

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.

But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare and drink from his cup and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”

Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your bosom and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah, and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

These days, it’s generally meant as a compliment, but in today’s passage, it’s more of an accusation. Nathan says to David, “You are the man.” But he’s not laying flowers at David’s feet. He’s calling him to account for his egregious abuse of power.

David, we know, is a biblical hero, one of the most important figures in Israel’s history. The Gospel writers make sure they can trace Jesus’ lineage back to David. That’s how important and well-regarded he is: king of Israel, player of the harp, writer of Psalms, and so much more.

David’s story begins humbly. The youngest and smallest of his brothers, forgotten and dismissed by everyone, including his own father, David is the ultimate underdog. And the story of David and Goliath still stands today as the ultimate underdog story, right?

But the scene that we just read happens much later in David’s life and career. He’s been in power now for a long time. People love him. Enemies fear him. His servants will do anything for him. Even he is beginning to believe the hype. The power and endless praise have gone to his head. He has started to think that he deserves all of it, that he is superior, that they are lucky to have him as their king.

And his relationship with God shifts as well. Where he was once grateful and humble and eager to serve, now he speaks to God as if they’re on the same plane, the same status.

Then Allie Rosner Bass writes, “It happens one evening when David’s troops are out to war. Kings were supposed to lead their armies into battle. David, however, stays home and is taking a stroll on the rooftop of his palace. Perhaps a clue that something is already wrong.”

And from his vantage point on the roof, David sees a beautiful woman bathing and is determined to have her. The whole affair is reported matter-of-factly in a terse sequence of verbs: David sends for her, she comes, he lies with her, she returns.

And as if this is not bad enough on its own, David knows that the woman, Bathsheba, is married to one of his generals, Uriah. But that doesn’t stop him. Quite to the contrary, when Bathsheba confronts him with the consequences of what he has done, saying to him, “I’m pregnant,” David doubles down.

Instead of confessing his fault and seeking to make amends, he sends Uriah to the front of the battle lines with instructions for his troops to pull back and leave him stranded, essentially getting the enemy troops to do his dirty work for him.

When word returns that Uriah has been killed, David then brings Bathsheba into his house. To those looking in from the outside, this may seem incredibly generous and magnanimous on David’s part—to take this poor widow and her family and give them a home after what has happened to her husband, the war hero Uriah. But those who know what truly happened, including us, know David’s shame and guilt. He is a rapist, an abuser, a murderer, and a despot.

But here’s the real question we’re likely to miss if we’re too distracted by the bawdy and scandalous tale: Why does the Bible include this at all? It certainly doesn’t reflect well on David, one of Israel’s greatest figures and heroes.

“You are the man,” Nathan says to David, but he’s not offering a compliment. He has just told David a story about someone seeing something that didn’t belong to him, but he took it nonetheless. And upon hearing this in the abstract, David’s sense of justice is offended. How dare he do such a thing? Bring him to me so that I can set things right.

But Nathan says to him, “No, you are the man. It’s you, the wrongdoer. You have violated God’s justice. You assaulted Bathsheba. You killed Uriah. And you lied to the people, and you lied to yourself.”

It took Nathan telling David a story, supposedly about someone else, for him to see the truth. But do you get what that means about David? David still knows right from wrong. When he hears it in the abstract, he knows what justice requires. He just has become distant from it because of his power and his privilege.

Bass writes, “The story presents a cautionary tale about the dangers of power. David, securely ensconced in his palace and confident of his absolute authority, sees something he wants and makes it his.”

And the prophet Samuel had warned of this when the Israelite elders first came asking for a king. A king, he said, will take your sons for his army and your daughters as his servants. He will take your fields and your vineyards and your cattle and your sheep. That’s from 1 Samuel, chapter 8. Now Samuel’s warnings appear to be coming true.

In other words, this is actually less about David and his character and more about the fact that the people wanted to have a king like the other nations. God’s warning about how power can corrupt even the purest of people is at odds with the people’s desire to cede their agency to someone else. They don’t want the responsibility of governing. They want someone else to tell them what to do.

While attractive for the short term, over time things erode and temptation becomes too great. You start to believe the hype. People want to do things for you. You see an opportunity, and you look around and you ask, “Who’s going to stop me?” And not just that: “Who will even call me out on what I’m doing?”

No, they’ll praise me and tell me that I deserve it and that exceptions are made for the great ones.

And for the rest of us, we start off innocent as well. But then comfort starts to kick in, and we say things like, “Well, you know, too many cooks in the kitchen doesn’t really work,” or, “Someone has to take charge. Leaders lead, and the rest of us follow and obey.”

But soon disobedience starts to get called disloyalty, and we become afraid to speak truth to power. What will it cost us if we do? I don’t need a target on my back, thank you very much.

And soon it becomes easier to believe that those in power just operate from a different set of rules from the rest of us. “It’s not fair,” we might say, “but it is the way that it is.”

Now, unless you think that I’m starting to talk about current events from a purely partisan perspective, I do admit that I see this playing out in today’s politics. But—and I mean this sincerely—if your takeaway from today’s sermon is, “Mark was right, and those people really need to shape up and do better,” then I dare say you missed my point.

My point is that I think this is precisely why Scripture tells us this story about our beloved David—heroic David, humble and faithful David—because even he, even the very best among us, is not immune to this warning.

We are all David. We are not all Bathsheba and Nathan.

Let me put this another way. One of John Calvin’s most misunderstood teachings, perhaps even more than predestination, is that of total depravity. I know—Calvin sounds like such a fun guy, right?

When Calvin writes about total depravity, he doesn’t mean that each one of us is completely unredeemable or that some are wholly despicable, but that all of us—each and every one of us—are capable of depravity.

We’ll talk about this more next week, but we can’t simply divide humanity into sinners and saints. Rather, each of us is both at once. We are sinners capable of sainthood, and we are saints who sometimes sin.

So, what difference can all this make for us here and now?

Well, if you didn’t know, early voting started here in Maryland. If you don’t already have a plan to vote on or before November 3, please go home this afternoon and make one.

While it’s definitely not my job to tell you how to vote, I can and do urge you to use your voice. Like Bathsheba, like Nathan, use your voice. It can and does make a difference.

Engage politically. Research issues. Vote your values. Vote for people, not parties. And remember, you are voting for people, not demigods. No one is perfect. Everyone can and may be corrupted by power.

Regular people are rarely our enemies, and we should be much more suspicious of those who want to convince us that they are than of those regular people.

“Voting isn’t marriage; it’s public transport,” writes Paul Tambyah. “You’re not waiting for the one who’s absolutely perfect; you’re getting on a bus. And if there isn’t one going exactly to your destination, you don’t just stay home. You take the one going closest to where you want to be.”

And to this I would only add: Don’t just vote at the polls. Don’t just vote every couple of years. Vote consistently and intentionally with your time, your talent, and your treasure as well. Vote every day for the kind of world that you want.

But perhaps more important and fundamental than that, make sure that the world that you want at least in some way resembles what Jesus called the kingdom of God, which will stand when all other kingdoms have fallen: a kingdom where justice and mercy work in harmony; where all sin is held to account; where power is told the truth in love; and where every voice not only makes a difference, but it makes the difference.

To God be the power and glory and honor, now and always.

Amen.

The post Your Small Voice appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Well, I’m not going to give too much of a recap of where we have been because our passage actually does that for us today. But I’ll just briefly remind us that over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been in the book of Exodus, and we heard about God using Moses to rescue the people from slavery in Egypt, their narrow escape through the sea, and their time in the wilderness, where they experienced this newfound freedom. But then God gave them the commandments as a shape of that freedom—ways that they can live together in peace and harmony with one another and with their neighbors.

In today’s passage, we’ve moved on from the book of Exodus and into the book of Joshua—and actually all the way to the end of Joshua—when the people are on the cusp of entering the promised land.

Joshua 24:1–15

Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel, and they presented themselves before God. And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac, and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt with what I did in its midst, and afterward I brought you out. When I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, you came to the sea, and the Egyptians pursued your ancestors with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. When they cried out to the Lord, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them, and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt. Afterward you lived in the wilderness a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I handed them over to you, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you. Then King Balak son of Zippor of Moab set out to fight against Israel. He sent and invited Balaam son of Beor to curse you, but I would not listen to Balaam; therefore he blessed you, so I rescued you out of his hand. When you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, the citizens of Jericho fought against you, as well as the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I handed them over to you. I sent swarms of hornets ahead of you that drove out before you the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant. 

“Now, therefore, revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” 

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Well, there are times in life when it’s just vitally important to look back and reflect. And these occasions become more and more precious the older that we get: births, baptisms, birthdays, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, reunions. They give us an opportunity to reflect not only on where we are going, but on where we have been.

Why is it so important to look back?

Because it’s vitally important that we understand we did not get here on our own. One of the most dangerous things is when we think that all of this—that we’ve earned it, or that we somehow have deserved it, or that we’ve come about it because of our own goodness or sacrifice or hard work. That may be part of the truth, but that’s only ever part of the truth.

We owe a debt of gratitude to so many who went before us, some of whom we had the pleasure to meet, but many of whom we only know their name, if even that. There have been those who have worked and sacrificed so that those who come after them may have opportunities that they never dreamed of. Parents and grandparents, sure, of course, but countless others as well. And not to mention the strokes of good fortune and all of the needful things that have happened so that we can be here today.

And we see this in our passage today when Joshua gathers the people at Shechem as they prepare to enter the promised land. But before they do, they have to stop. They have to pause. Joshua wants to make sure that they acknowledge those who helped them get there while they are still at this crucial juncture.

Arthur Wright points out, “Joshua gathers the entire people of Israel to Shechem. He then begins to recount God’s activity and faithfulness on their behalf, from the call of Abraham to God’s partnership with Moses and Aaron to save the Hebrew people from the Egyptians.”

And did you notice the emphasis that is put on: Not by your sword, not by your bow. You didn’t plant those fields. You didn’t plant those vineyards. I have done this.

“God is viewed as the primary agent of these events,” writes Arthur Wright, “and the passage emphasizes God’s agency on behalf of the people.”

He then continues, “This passage offers us an opportunity to remember the histories of our own faith communities and reflect on the ways in which we’ve seen God’s faithfulness to us along the way.”

As many of you know, I just had a birthday. Birthdays are a great time to look back and reflect and give thanks. As a congregation, we have just been celebrating 125 years. And to do that, we’ve revisited and celebrated our history. And as a nation, we have marked 250 years as well.

And we give thanks and we celebrate. But these occasions are not just times for celebration. They are also times for truth-telling. As we look back, of course, not everything is worthy of our praise. Sometimes we need to repent and make sure that we learn from our mistakes in the past.

As Joshua and the people stood triumphantly at Shechem, the truth is that their victory came at a cost for others. People were displaced and dispatched in order for them to take hold of this promised land. And that’s part of the story, too. It’s a hard part. It’s a part we would rather look past or look over, but it’s part of the story as well.

“At this moment in time, where nationalism—and especially in the United States, where Christian nationalism—continues to be ascendant,” writes Arthur Wright, “it is important to draw attention to these features without simply minimizing or explaining away the violence.”

Do we really believe that it affirms something true about God’s heart and God’s activity in the world? We have to choose, just as the ancient Israelites had to choose which gods they will serve.

You and I—this text demands that we choose between a God of conquest and violence and a God who intends to bring divine blessing to the entire world.

In recent years, our knowledge of what we mean by the entire world has expanded exponentially. While we had long suspected it, it was only in 1992 that we confirmed that there are planets outside of our solar system. That’s a huge shift in our cosmic perspective of who we are.

Furthermore, with the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we’ve been able to look out further and further into the universe, which also means that we get to look back further and further in time as well. The data that we have available to us now is overwhelming, to say the least. It can make us feel small and insignificant—just a small, tiny speck in the universe.

Physicist and professor of humanities at MIT Alan Lightman writes, “Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension. We’ve learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is itself inconceivable.”

But there are other galaxies—many, many, many other galaxies beyond that as well. “The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse,” Lightman writes. And I think sometimes that’s why it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, right?

But seen from a different perspective, it’s a miracle that we exist at all.

Lightman continues, “Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck that we will ever experience, yet it’s the easiest to overlook and to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, we have our coffee, we make breakfast, we send the kids to school, we go to our jobs, we move through our routines, we worry about the deadlines, we check off all the items on our to-do list, and we forget that beneath it all lies something profoundly rare: existence itself.”

The point Joshua is trying to make is that we are blessed beyond measure just with the mere fact that we’re here at all. And no, it hasn’t been perfect. It hasn’t always been pretty. And we’ve not always been on our best behavior, to say the least. But nonetheless, we are extraordinarily blessed just to be alive here and now, in this moment, in this place.

And the least that we can do is give thanks and pledge to honor that blessing and pass it on. We can also look back, knowing that we are loved, and admit where we were wrong. We can learn from our past and our mistakes and promise to do better when we know better.

Gratitude does not require that we gloss over the past. It helps us to honestly acknowledge the good and the bad.

Look, I know as well as you do that there are times in our lives when gratitude is not an easy choice. It may be the very hardest choice of them all. When health fails, or money is tight, or work is overwhelming, it’s not easy to be thankful.

But the more we practice gratitude—like any skill, the more that we practice it when we can and when it’s easy—it will help us to find a little bit of gratitude when it’s more difficult.

We can think of gratitude like a deep well that we dig. And the deeper we go, the more it can hold. And the more it will have for us when we need it.

And we may even find our way to gratitude for some, but not all, of the tough times.

In a really profound and touching interview—and Google it and watch the whole thing later if you haven’t seen it—with Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert reflects to him, “It’s a gift.” Stephen Colbert from The Late Show—you all know, the comedian. Okay? So this is really—that just helps with the perspective.

He says this: “It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. But if you’re grateful for your life, then you have to be grateful for all of it.”

And Colbert goes on to explain further, saying that it doesn’t mean that you’re glad for everything that’s happened to you, but in time you may find it useful to relate to others these things that we have gone through. We can turn our pain into compassion. “You’re a different person on the other side of it,” is how Colbert puts it. And largely, it is up to us how we respond and what we choose in terms of what kind of person we will be.

“If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day,” writes Anthon St. Maarten. “Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully,” he writes, “it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom and find the hidden blessing in it.”

“Choose this day,” Joshua says to the assembly at Shechem. Choose. Every day we make choices, and every day we wake to the miracle of existence.

Sure, some days the weight of it all feels too much, and all we can do is hold on until sunset. But other days, the sun peeks out from behind the clouds, and we’re hit with an overwhelming sense of thankfulness for all of it. Most days, of course, fall somewhere in between.

But choosing gratitude does not mean that we gloss over the hard parts of our lives or those things in our past we would rather not think about again. Gratitude actually helps us to face up to the hard stuff because it puts it in the larger context of existence—and what a miracle it is that we are here at all to celebrate and to suffer, to give and to receive, to learn and to grow.

Existence is a gift. We are extraordinarily fortunate just to be here. But this does not mean that life will be easy or free of pain. Rather, even in the midst of the darkest and hardest times, we can still choose gratitude.

“If the only prayer we ever say is thank you,” writes Meister Eckhart, “it will be enough.” Amen.

The post Choose This Day appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Exodus 19:3–7; 20:1–17

Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.” So Moses went, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him.

Then God spoke all these words,

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

“You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

“You shall not murder.

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Well, I grew up in the time before there was such a thing as truth in advertising. I remember getting a pair of sneakers and being disappointed that I couldn’t run as fast as Carl Lewis or jump as high as Michael Jordan. For those of you who are younger, Carl Lewis is like Usain Bolt, and Michael Jordan is like LeBron James, okay? Or that eating spinach didn’t immediately give me huge biceps like Popeye.

But perhaps the most disappointing of them all were these dinosaur capsules. Does anybody remember those? They’re these little capsules that, when you put them in water, would suddenly grow into, like, a brontosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus rex. And I distinctly remember the commercial for these. It showed a boy with a garden hose waiting around the corner, ready to surprise his friends. And so he puts the little capsules there, and then, when they come, he comes around the corner and sprays them with the hose, and they grow into these real, life-size dinosaurs that are roaring and everything. I was sold immediately. I began imagining playing this prank on my buddies in the neighborhood. It was going to be legendary.

But, of course, when I actually got the capsules and tried them in the sink, the results were underwhelming, to say the least. Sure enough, the capsules dissolved, but what grew out of them was nothing like those lifelike dinosaurs in the commercial. Instead, it was this tiny little dinosaur-shaped sponge that could fit in my hand.

Now, what if I told you that those who argue that we should hang the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom or every courtroom are guilty of the same thing as those ads from my childhood: false advertising? They reduce them to a list of rules to be obeyed or else. They take all of the life out of them, and they oversimplify them to the point of squeezing all of the meaning out of them. They dehydrate them, if you will. They flatten them.

Bobby Williamson and Amy Robertson write, “We insist that these commandments cannot be flattened onto a piece of paper, but must be understood with the smoke and fire erupting from Sinai and the liberating power of God in Egypt.”

To bring them back to life, what we need to do is not douse them with a hose, but recomplicate them. We have to put them back in their context and read them not as individual rules to curb bad behavior, but as life-giving guidelines for people to live together in community and freedom. We must understand them as a gift, not a burden.

Tom Long writes—and this is on your bulletin cover—“We think of the Ten Commandments as ten things we’d really like to do, but God doesn’t want us to, so to please God, let’s don’t.” But we miss the way that the commandments begin, he says. “I am the Lord your God” is the first thing that God says to the people. “I brought you out of slavery into the land of freedom.”

And this, God says to them, is the shape of freedom. You are so free that you don’t have to have any other gods. And you certainly don’t have to serve them. You’ve been given so much, you’re free not to covet what is your neighbor’s. You are free to have the Sabbath day and to keep it holy. “It’s not a list of rules,” Tom Long writes. “It’s the shape of freedom.”

Let me give you a few examples of recomplicating the commandments. Let’s take that word in the last commandment, “covet.” It’s not an everyday word, right? It’s a churchy word: covet. And we think we know what it means. “Don’t be jealous” is basically what we usually interpret that as, right? Don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. Don’t be jealous of what your neighbor has. It’s like an ancient version of, you know, “The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.” That’s the simple version, the dehydrated version of the command.

But when we take that commandment and we put it back in context, remembering that this is being spoken to people who, not that long ago, were completely under Pharaoh’s control, where they had few, if any, possessions, and what they did have could be taken away from them at any moment by those in power over them, we can ask: What does it mean for those people, in those circumstances, to be told not to covet? What depth does that add?

Well, Bobby Williamson points out that the only other place in Scripture where this word is used, “covet,” is in Micah. And there it is to describe, in a very negative way, the way that the wealthy people in the city were devising ways to scheme and take the land away from rural farmers for their own profit. And God was angry at them for coveting what their neighbors had—for using their power to not just be jealous of it, but to forcibly take it from them.

So it’s not really when your neighbor gets a new car, and they pull into the driveway, and you say, “Oh man, that’s—I wanted that car.” No, no. It’s about not using our power and privilege to get our way at the expense of others. Which, you know, thank goodness that never happens anymore, right? Yeah, right.

So we can see that, by putting this commandment back into context, it recomplicates it. It makes it not so simple, but it also makes it much more relevant. We can apply that to our daily living and lives in community with one another. Don’t take advantage of others just because you can. An important part of living in community is respecting each other’s autonomy and not using our power over others to our advantage and their disadvantage.

That’s how we all live together in freedom and harmony, is what God is saying. Not just, “Don’t look over at what your neighbor has and wish you had it,” but live in such a way that you are glad for them, that you are with them, that they can live in peace and harmony, and so can you.

The other example I can easily point to is the commandment about the Sabbath. We still play around with this one. We like to, you know, say, “Well, Sunday’s my Sabbath. I went to church, and then I went home and had brunch, and then I went and watched the football game and fell asleep.” Probably what I’m going to do this afternoon, to be completely honest.

But is that what God meant by observing the Sabbath? Is that all God wants us to do? Again, that’s a flattened—it’s not that it’s wrong, necessarily. It’s just flattened. It’s dehydrated. It’s a simple version of the commandment. But if we put it back into context, we can see that there’s so much more. There’s so much more depth and richness there.

“Sabbath, in the first instance,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “is not about worship. It’s about work stoppage. It’s about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.” Again, thank goodness that never happens in our culture anymore.

He also writes, “The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgement that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production.” So it’s not just about your work stoppage. It’s about your neighbors as well, and those that may be in your employ. Let them rest once in a while. Let them be, so that they know that they’re valued not just for what they do or what they produce or what they own, but for who they are and who God created them to be.

Can you sense the difference when we recomplicate these commandments? Can you sense how much more is going on in each of these? Freedom, of course, is a gift, but without limits or a sense of responsibility to our fellow human beings, it’s just competitive chaos. It’s enslavement all over again, just in a much more subtle form. It’s every person for themselves rather than the reminder that we are each other’s keeper, that your well-being and my well-being are part of the same whole.

Hanging the commandments on the wall, putting them on display, makes them seem like a museum piece, an interesting historical artifact, but has very little relevance. But when we take them down, when we put them in context, when we ask questions, when we actually try to live them—not just the letter of the law, but the generous spirit of it—suddenly they come to life for us. They become worthy of our time, worthy of our examination.

They remind us that we are not what we own or produce. We are God’s beloved. And that’s not just true of us, but our neighbors as well. And if we truly believe that our neighbor is a child of God, just as we are, all of these things just become no-brainers. Of course we will not cause them harm or treat them unjustly. That’s not the way we want to be treated. And so we will be sure to treat them the way that we want to be treated.

Because, friends, faith is not about forcing others to live the way we think they should live. It’s about trusting in the grace and mercy of God and trying our best to live the way that God intends for us to live: in community, in shalom, in wholeness, in forgiveness.

We do not honor God or the Ten Commandments by hanging them on a wall in a school or a courthouse, but by taking them seriously, understanding them in the larger context of our faith, and allowing them to become a part of our being, a part of who we are.

Pointing to some words on the wall isn’t all that impressive, is it? But showing somebody, through our living and the way that we treat them and the way that we treat others—and especially the way that we treat the most vulnerable—what it means to belong to God and what it means to trust in God’s love above all else: that, my friends, is the kind of advertising that we Christians need a whole lot more of. Don’t you agree? Truth in advertising.

Because the true test of faith is not making others follow our values and principles. It’s how well we follow them ourselves. Amen.

The post The Shape of Freedom appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

So often when we read the Bible, familiarity is actually not our friend. It provides a challenge. That’s especially true with stories like Noah and the ark, which many of us have heard since we were little. It may be one of the first Bible stories that was ever read to us, maybe in a nice children’s book with wonderful pictures. But that familiarity can turn us deaf to new insights and to being willing and open to being surprised by the text.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve spread this reading over the past two Sundays. Last week we read about the flood and the building of the ark. Today we’ll read about the conclusion and the sign that is put in the sky.

After all these years of reading and studying this text, I was surprised this week. A commentator suggested that when God says in this passage—and we’ll hear this in today’s reading—“I have put my bow in the sky,” the reference is to a bow and arrow. I tested this with the adult ed group because I didn’t want to expose my ignorance if I was the only one. I had never thought of that before. Maybe you have. Good for you. But that was a new insight to me.

So the sign is not only there to remind us when we see a rainbow in the sky. It was also a symbolic act on God’s part in the story: to hang up the weapon. “I will no longer use this weapon. I will no longer use any weapons against you. We will resolve our differences peacefully and in other ways,” God is saying.

With that, I’ll turn us to the text and ask us to try, as best we’re able, to put on new ears and new eyes and new thinking, and be open to the new insights this text may have for us today.

Genesis 9:8-17

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

For the word of God in Scripture,
for the word of God among us,
for the word of God within us.
Thanks be to God.

***

Why is the sky blue and the grass green? Where does the sun go each night, and where do the stars go during the day? And what about those stars? Are they like lanterns hanging in the sky? Or are they holes in the fabric of the sky that let light through from whatever is on the other side?

Why do rainbows come out after rainstorms? Why are there floods and earthquakes? In the ancient world, it was common to tell stories explaining the way things are. If you want to impress somebody at a dinner party, these are called teleological stories. Telos is the Greek word meaning “ending.” The idea is that they are stories told with an ending already in mind. They explain the way things came into being.

Before science, this is how people explained the world around them: through stories. This is the way wisdom and learning were passed from generation to generation. Now, as modern people, we too often dismiss these stories as fairy tales or myths, by which we mean they’re cute, sometimes fun and insightful, but aren’t really meant to be taken seriously. They’re not true vessels of truth.

But as John Dominic Crossan once pointed out, it’s not that those ancient people told literal stories and you and I are now smart enough to take them symbolically. They told them symbolically, and sometimes you and I are dumb enough to take them literally.

Noah and the ark is no different. Many of us learned the story of the flood as children. I honestly don’t know what about God destroying the earth with a flood says, “This is a good child’s nighttime story.” But I guess the picture of animals going two by two is too cute to ignore. Some illustrator somewhere said, “I can draw that.”

The reality—we don’t need to imagine too hard—would have been anything but cute: smelly, hot, dangerous, noisy. Not fluffy, adorable, or fun. And the meaning has a lot more to do with us than the origin of rainbows and floods. It speaks to us of the relationship between the Creator and creation.

Walter Brueggemann explains: We do not have before us in the story of Noah and the ark a history. This story is not concerned with historical data. And with equal firmness, we must deny that this story is merely a myth. What meets us here, he writes, is proclamation: the announcement of what God has done and is doing about a fractured world.

Scholars point out that there were a lot of flood stories already floating around—excuse the pun—in ancient times. Biblical authors were no doubt aware of these other flood stories, which usually featured people doing something wrong to displease the gods and the gods sending a flood to punish the people. Sounds familiar, right? But instead of just telling that story, the biblical authors make it a proclamation about how the God of Israel is different from the gods of the nations.

Those gods carry their bows and arrows and swords around with them. The God of Israel doesn’t just punish people when they do wrong. God does care about justice, but God balances God’s justice, punishment, and judgment with love and mercy and forgiveness. The two are never apart. We never meet one without the other.

This is how the God of Israel is set apart. The Lord, the God of hosts, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, no longer carries a weapon of violence. God has hung the bow in the sky, put it aside. “I don’t need it anymore.”

And yet God cannot allow wickedness just to pass by unnoticed or unchecked. God has to do something about it. Yet God does not leave humanity without recourse. God selects Noah and his family to build an ark and save just enough of creation to begin again.

Here we learn that God is the God of second chances. That’s where we left off last week. We’re reminding ourselves that despite what we first might think, or what we might have been taught, or how we learned the story originally, this is a story of grace and gratitude after all.

But the familiarity of this story is so strong. We’ve been carrying it with us for so long, along with a version of God that is harsh. We’ve been carrying these with us for far too long. It feels odd; it feels hard to read a story like this and find the God of second chances, and to know where we are in it.

Today I want to offer us another way into this passage that might help us find new relevance in this ancient story. This week I learned another thing. I learned two things this week, not just about the bow. I learned something else I want to share with you: in many Jewish communities, they have a different way of reading this story that makes it relevant for people of faith.

It’s obvious, right? We don’t need to build an ark. We have a much better understanding of meteorological events. We know floods aren’t sent by the gods. We can’t always predict flooding, but we know why it happens. We know why the sky is blue and the grass is green. We might not be able to explain it immediately to our children when they ask, but in general we know. We know why the sun sets, what the stars are—all these things.

So this isn’t just another teleological story. It isn’t history, it isn’t myth, it isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a proclamation. And the proclamation is this:

God knows that sometimes we need a vessel to get us to the other side of the storm. That’s why God had Noah build the ark: to protect him and his family, to help them weather the storm, to get through the flood. Perhaps not coincidentally, the word for “ark” in Hebrew is the same word for “word.”

And words are the vessels that we have to understand and reach out to God: the words of our lips, the words of our minds, the words of our hearts and spirits. In other words, our prayers. And in the Jewish community, that’s how they read this story. It’s about prayer. Prayer is the vessel.

According to Amy Robertson of the BibleWorm podcast, the Jewish tradition really digs into this. She says, “What does it mean to construct a word, a prayer life, a vessel that carries us through really difficult situations and helps us to keep somewhat apart from the wickedness that is all around us? How do we build a prayer that has an active life?”

Remember back to the instructions: God said not only all the cubits and all of that, but it has to have a window. How does our prayer life have a window in it so it’s not cut off from the realities of the real world, the outside world? How do we invite all of nature in, like Noah did—all of creation—so that we don’t imagine it’s just us and God sitting there, but we imagine ourselves sitting there in the midst of creation, surrounded by all of God’s creatures, knowing ourselves a part, not apart?

I love this interpretation. I’ve never heard that one before. I am grateful to our Jewish brothers and sisters and for their tradition for presenting that to us. It’s helped me move beyond all those little parts of my head—no matter how much I tell myself that this is proclamation—that try to reconcile this story to history or dismiss it as a fairy tale. It reminds us that God will not leave us without a vessel in a stormy world, a space for shelter and safety, a space to reflect.

So what I want to suggest is that this fall, as we begin this new program year together, we think of ourselves as an ark: this place, this community, the people gathered here to worship week after week. This is our ark. But God has some requirements. We don’t just get to build it to our own comfort and specifications. God has taught us how to build it, right?

It has to have a window in it. Our worship needs to be about more than us and the people here. It needs to have a window; it needs to be checked against the realities of the world. We need to always have one eye on the outside world. We cannot come here and turn our eyes from the suffering of others while we count our blessings.

Also, like Noah, we too must provide shelter and protection for all of God’s creatures, indeed all of creation. “Everyone is welcome here,” we say. Do we really mean it? Who is just outside of our doors looking for a vessel? Who has not been invited into our ark? And who needs to come with them?

I encourage us to think of this place as our ark, our vessel—not just the building, but our whole community. Because the truth is, our world is underwater: floods of violence and war, floods of animosity, floods of greed and injustice, storms of racism and sexism and religious bigotry. So many of us are drowning as well. We’re drowning in family entanglements, we’re drowning in our own issues, we’re drowning financially, we’re drowning in our jobs. We need shelter. We need an ark. We need a vessel to carry us through the storm to the other side.

We all know what it is to need an ark. I guess that’s why most of us are here. Because it’s all too much, and we need a break, a place to come, people to know us and help us keep our heads just above water. But this ark isn’t just for us, friends. It’s for others as well.

As we think about the image and the road ahead, as individuals and as a congregation, I want us to close today with a prayer inspired by the story of Noah and the ark. It was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner. You might recognize the name; he’s the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Part of the prayer is on your bulletin cover. If you search for it, you can find the whole thing later. I would suggest that this prayer is kind of an ark for us, a vessel to guide us in the days and weeks and months, and maybe even years, ahead.

Prayer for the World
by Rabbi Harold Kushner

Let the rain come and wash away the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds held and nurtured over generations.

Let the rain wash away the memory of the hurt, the neglect.

Then let the sun come out and fill the sky with rainbows.

Let the warmth of the sun heal us wherever we are broken.

Let it burn away the fog so that we can see each other clearly.

So that we can see beyond labels, beyond accents, gender or skin color.

Let the warmth and brightness of the sun melt our selfishness.

So that we can share the joys and feel the sorrows of our neighbors.

And let the light of the sun be so strong that we will see all people as our neighbors.

Let the earth, nourished by rain, bring forth flowers to surround us with beauty.

And let the mountains teach our hearts to reach upward to heaven.

Amen.

The post Begin Again: Flood and Promise, Part II appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Genesis 6:5–22; 8:6–12

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven, and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent out the dove from him to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground, but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark, and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days and sent out the dove, and it did not return to him any more.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,

Thanks be to God.

***

If you are fortunate or blessed enough to get one, here is my advice: Take it. Make the most of it. Second chances are a gift. They are one of the purest forms of grace.

Now let me be clear: True second chances are not necessarily earned. They are not due and should not be expected. It is the same with forgiveness, which may or may not be a part of the second chance. We have spent a good chunk of this past summer looking at repentance and repair. In the process, we learned that forgiveness, too, is pure grace. It cannot be forced. It can only be freely given.

If you have caused harm to another, you can apologize. You can seek to make amends. You can offer to be a part of repair. The one thing you cannot do is demand or expect forgiveness. Even if you have apologized again and again, done what you can for amends and repair, forgiveness is up to the victim and the victim alone. It is tied to their own process of healing and repair. It is theirs to give if they see fit to do so. And if they don’t, that is just something that we have to accept.

Now, that applies to interpersonal situations, but what about between us and God? Things get even more complicated. You will hear some preachers say all you have to do is pray a certain prayer, or just genuinely repent in your heart, and God will wipe your slate clean. But is it really just that easy? I mean, if we can just say a few words and get forgiveness from God, then can’t we just ignore the victims?

The older I get, the more I am suspicious of those who want to privatize faith—those who say, “My faith is about my relationship to God and is no one else’s business.” When we speak or think like this, we mix up the definitions of personal and private. Faith is always personal. It cuts straight to the heart of the matter, straight to the human heart in a way that is deeply intimate, but in no way unique. Faith is always personal, but never private. It is never about me and me alone. It is always about how we relate to others. Jesus made this plain when asked the greatest commandment and quickly recited the Shema: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind.” But Jesus doesn’t stop there. “The second is like it,” he said. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Reflecting on what this means for us today, Brian McLaren writes, “It’s not about the church meeting your needs; it’s about joining the mission of God’s people to meet the world’s needs… Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle—a planet ravaged by unsustainable human behavior and an out-of-control consumptive economy, the growing gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, and the proliferation of weapons of all kinds—including weapons of mass destruction.”

That may sound like a mighty lofty plan, but God has had mighty lofty plans for us from the beginning, according to Genesis. Professor Dennis Olson writes, “God began directing a symphony of light, order, boundaries, flourishing life, creatures of all kinds, vocations, relationships, co-creative responsibilities, and blessing—a veritable garden of life teeming with possibility, hope, and promise. God’s gracious generosity and hospitality welcomed into existence a whole new creaturely world, a world different from God but a creation in relationship with God.”

Dr. Olson continues, “True relationship requires a degree of freedom and agency on both sides, both human and divine. While God assessed God’s creation at the beginning as ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31) but not perfect, possibilities existed for wrong choices and negative consequences. Tragically, humans were tempted to become ‘like God’ (3:5). They experienced temptation, fear, distrust, shame, and a tendency to transfer blame to others rather than oneself.”

We are used to reading the story of Noah and the ark as a story of destruction and punishment—God’s wrath and judgment flooding down over the people, drowning the wicked. But what if, instead of a story about destruction, we read it as a story of re-creation; not a story of punishment, but a second chance, a chance to begin all over again? Because in the biblical narrative, that is exactly what it is.

Olson writes, “Other cultures surrounding ancient Israel had their own flood stories in which a hero builds an ark and survives a flood sent by angry gods. The biblical account adapts some elements of this flood story tradition but also reshapes the tradition to conform to an enduring biblical pattern… The flood was a whole-earth attempt by God to deal with the corruption and violence of God’s good creation by destroying nearly all of it and starting over again… God promises ultimately to work for creation’s flourishing and not its destruction, even though God knows that ‘the inclination of the human heart’ will continue to remain ‘evil from youth’ (8:21). Yes, judgment and consequences will follow from such human corruption and violence. But God will also be mercifully restrained and will work to ensure that the story of humans and creation continues in spite of human wickedness.”

The story of Noah and the ark is the story of second chances, of new beginnings and re-creation. It is “what the Gospels teach us,” according to Jonathan Walton. He writes, “Consider the ways Jesus often forms his disciples while they are in motion. Jesus walks alongside them, asks questions, and listens. In the process, the disciples misunderstand his teachings, debate with one another, encounter those with different views, and witness miracles that they cannot readily explain. Yet, along the way, they are transformed.”

The Gospel is the story of transformation, and transformation happens when we embrace the grace, the forgiveness and the second chances we have been given.

When we come to this table, we accept the divine invitation to begin again, to try once more to live as God intended. Here at this table, we are all recipients of God’s amazing grace. Here we are nourished to live in love, hope, and forgiveness. Because we all need second chances, where we can learn from our past without being bound by it.

And being given another chance, we begin where all great epic stories begin: in gratitude. Gratitude for the gift of life, gratitude for companions on the journey, gratitude to be able to grow and change, and learn, and be transformed. A whole new chance in life, just like that. You can’t earn it. You may never deserve it. But it is yours. It is a gift. It is always a gift.

Amen.

The post Begin Again: Flood and Promise, Part I appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Mathew 15:21–28

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

All right, I know I’m just back from vacation, but pop quiz time. Let’s see how well you all know your Bible. How many Gospels are there? Four. Easy one, right?

Sometimes the most obvious things are staring at us right in the face, and we’re so used to them that we take them for granted. How many Gospels do we have? Four. Not one—four.

I think this says something really important and significant about our faith. Presumably, those who put the Bible together, deciding which books were in and which were out, could have chosen just one of those Gospels. But they didn’t. Or they could have combined those four Gospels and made one super-Gospel. But they didn’t. They let the four Gospels be and put them side by side.

Now, to be clear, we know that other Gospels were out there that didn’t make the cut. Perhaps those who were putting the Bible together didn’t know about those other Gospels at the time, or maybe they did know about them and thought they were more fringe. But what we know is that the four that are there are there at least partly because they were already widely read among communities of faith.

Still—and this is important—they do not always agree on important details. Where was Jesus born? Where did he start his ministry? Who were his first disciples? What are the names of the women who accompanied him on his journeys?

Sometimes those differences are telling. For example, in Mark’s Gospel, we are told that the woman who asked Jesus to have mercy on her and heal her daughter is a Syrophoenician woman. Syrophoenician is a mixture of Syrian and Phoenician. They were both neighboring countries to Israel—not really allies, but not really enemies. Just neighbors. So it’s kind of a neutral term.

In the context of the story, it means that Jesus doesn’t have to care about this woman because she’s not from the house of Israel. He doesn’t have to care about her, right? Which is kind of what comes into question.

But we didn’t read Mark’s version, did we? We read Matthew’s version. In Matthew’s version, the woman is not Syrophoenician. She is Canaanite.

Now, Canaanites were also from a neighboring region to Israel, but not so neutral. They were the historical and sworn enemies of Israel. When Matthew tells us that the woman is Canaanite, not Syrophoenician, he’s kicking Mark’s version up a bit. It’s not just your neighbor whom you don’t have to care about. This is your enemy whom you’re not supposed to care about.

So, what does this all mean?

It’s widely believed that Mark’s Gospel was the first one written. It’s the earliest. When Matthew sat down to write his Gospel, he was reading Mark. He knew Mark. He knew the stories that were in Mark.

That means the Gospel writer Matthew made an intentional decision to change this woman from being just a neighbor whom Jesus doesn’t have to care about into an enemy—someone who would make everybody reading the story think, “Yeah, Jesus, she’s a dog.”

If you’re like me—even if you’re not—you may be wondering when you read or hear this story: What is going on with Jesus?

We are conditioned to expect him to respond with kindness and compassion to all people. Never be mean. We don’t expect Jesus to be mean. Never short-tempered. Never biased, certainly.

So it’s shocking to read about him not only ignoring this woman who so badly needs him, but also calling her a derogatory name. This is not the Jesus whom we know or expect. So what’s wrong? Is he hangry? Does Jesus need a Snickers? Does he need a nap?

I think more is going on here than that.

We need to remember that when we read the Gospels, we’re not reading an unedited, unbiased account. That’s the brilliance of having four Gospels. That’s the wisdom of our forefathers and foremothers, who thankfully kept four Gospels and did not leave us with just one.

It tells us that we have to engage our brains. We have to engage our intellect. We have to engage our hearts. It’s a two-way street with the text. We have to engage it and wrestle with it.

We are acknowledging that these authors are biased, too. They’re all telling us their version of Jesus—which is something we all do, right? We all have our own version of Jesus.

What we have here with Matthew is that he’s taking a story about not ignoring a neighbor, which is significant in and of itself, and making it into one that threatens to stretch our ideas about who is in and who is out. It forces us to admit that God really does love everyone.

That means not only those whom we love, or even just those we don’t care about very much and are fine ignoring, but also the people we despise.

Now, I’m going to admit something here. This is not the sermon I originally thought I was going to preach today when I was planning this at the beginning of the summer.

I thought I would be preaching to you about this remarkable woman and her persistent faith: how she stood up to Jesus, but did so kindly and respectfully; how she called him out on his bias; and how such a give-and-take is part of our ongoing relationship and dialogue with God.

We need to be persistent in our faith. We shouldn’t be afraid of the questions, the doubt or the struggles. That’s a good sermon. I would have been happy to preach that sermon today.

But something happened this week, and the sermon I thought I was going to preach changed. Maybe it’s because of the summer I’ve had.

In many ways, it’s been a really good summer. I’ve had a good bit of vacation. I’ve gone to some of my favorite places. I’ve spent time with loved ones. I’ve been able to relax—all the wonderful things we want in summer.

But in other ways, it’s been a challenging summer for me. I’m reaching middle age, so these are all normal things, okay? I don’t want anybody to worry. I’m fine, I promise you. I’m fine, okay? Everybody got that? I’m fine. I’m good.

But it’s been challenging. There have been family health challenges. I’m at that stage in life where I’m ushering my children into adulthood, and it’s not easy. Last week, as many of you know—and you’ve been very kind to follow up with me and be compassionate toward me—I dropped my son off at school almost a thousand miles away.

These are all normal things at this stage of life. But as many of you know, they make you think. They make you ponder. They give you a new perspective. You reflect sometimes a little more deeply on things, and maybe your perspective begins to shift a little bit.

I will admit that in this process—and again, I think this is normal; this is nothing to worry about; we all go through it—I’ve had a few dark nights of the soul this summer when I’ve really wrestled with my faith. I’ve really wondered about my place.

Everybody needs a break and a vacation now and again. What I’ve found is that I have truly missed being with you all this summer. I’ve missed worshiping God in community.

That’s a weird thing pastors do. We don’t always go to worship when we’re on vacation. Some do. Some of the really pious pastors, maybe. I occasionally do, but mainly I take a break.

But as I’ve been wrestling with all of these life things, I’ve been struggling because I haven’t been here with you all, discussing these things that matter.

It has all led me to wonder about my image of God and all the things I put on God that are mine and not God’s.

Anne Lamott famously said, “When it turns out your version of God hates all of the same people you do, it’s safe to assume that you have created God in your own image.”

We all create God in our own image, and a big part of faith is deconstructing the God we have created and encountering the true, free, triune God.

I think that’s why Matthew tells the story the way he does—why he changes the woman from Syrophoenician to Canaanite. Matthew knows that we all do it. He knows that, when reading or hearing the story, his audience will be drawn into Jesus’ contempt for this woman. Their own contempt for her will bleed out as well.

They will be pleased that Jesus seemingly has the same enemies they do. Isn’t that nice? He doesn’t like the Canaanites either.

Except it turns out that Jesus was wrong. And so are we when we do the same.

So instead of a sermon about this woman’s persistent faith—and again, there’s nothing wrong with that sermon; it’s a good one—if that’s what you need today, go out and be persistent.

But it turns out that this sermon, which I need to hear today, and maybe you do too, is really about God’s persistent love for us.

Simply put, God never stops loving us. Ever. Not even at our worst.

God not only refuses to be boxed in by our projections and biases; God refuses to let us be confined by those barriers we make for ourselves. And we do it all the time.

Some of you may remember me saying: Every time we draw a line in the sand, the one thing we can be sure of is that Jesus is on the other side of it.

Every time we draw a line, every time we put up a wall or a barrier, every time we exclude somebody, Jesus isn’t with us. He’s with them. He’s on the other side of the line, the other side of the wall, the other side of the barrier, the other side of our prejudice.

That’s how persistently God loves us. God will not leave us to our own devices. God will continually challenge us in love, through love, and for love.

As we near the end of this series about disputing with God, there are many legitimate reasons we’ve come across to have disputes with God—to question God, to wrestle. That’s okay. That permission is important.

But today’s sermon in this series is kind of a caveat to that. It’s a warning that the God we might be arguing with is not the true God, but the God we have made up for ourselves. The God we may be arguing with is one of our own creation.

I have a pastor friend who, when he tells somebody he’s a pastor and they say, “Oh, I don’t believe in God,” responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.”

When they start saying, “Well, I don’t believe that God would do this or do that,” he says, “I don’t believe that either.” He finally tries to get to the point where he says, “Well, let me tell you about the God I do believe in.”

We all have to sort that out. Who’s the God we believe in? Who’s the God we don’t believe in? Who’s the God we’ve made up for ourselves? And who’s the God who challenges us—the God who doesn’t always say yes, the God who doesn’t allow us simply to wallow in the mess we have made for ourselves?

Thomas Merton uses this analogy. He says many of us will spend our whole lives climbing the ladder, only to find at the end, when we get to the top, that the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall the whole time.

Thanks be to God that we don’t have to have it all figured out—that part of our journey is the struggle and the wrestling and, yes, even the dark nights of the soul. And the truth of the matter is that when we feel most alone, when we feel most afraid, the God who awaits us is the God who never, ever stops persistently pursuing us in love.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The post Disputing with God: Persistence appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

We continue today with our sermon series on disputing with God. The past two sermons in this series have been on the book of Exodus, and in particular with Moses and the people, as they struggled in the wilderness and tried to remain faithful through that time of unknowing and uncertainty. In some ways, we’re kind of moving backward to Genesis 18, but one of the things I wanted to point out that maybe we don’t often think about is that we open the Bible and there’s Genesis at the beginning.

It starts with the creation story, and we think that’s a very natural beginning narratively. But in terms of the way that the Bible was constructed, Exodus, and the Exodus experience of the people being released from slavery in Egypt and God liberating them, is actually kind of the beginning point of the story of the people of God, the Hebrew and Israel. But the book of Genesis then is kind of the prequel.

So it’s kind of like around Christmas time I’ll remind us that, you know, it wasn’t that the story of Jesus’ birth was written down at the time of Jesus’ birth. It was written years and years later, hundreds of years later, really, once people had kind of understood the importance of Jesus’ life and they said, “Gee, I wonder how he was born. We should figure that out and tell that story.” In the same way, also, the people who are liberated from Egypt say, “Well, gee, how did this all come about?”

And so they go back and they tell the stories that we have in Genesis. Most of the stories in Genesis, of course, revolve around a man named Abraham and his wife Sarah. Just preceding the passage that we are about to read, God has come to them, and this is just to help us kind of orient overall into the big picture. This is after Noah and the Ark and the flood, and then the rainbow, and God has promised never to again destroy the earth.

Then God seeks to begin again with this project that God is trying to carry out through humanity and says, Abraham and his wife, that’s where I’m going to start. I’m going to build a nation through them. And even in their old age, then God comes and visits them with two strangers. Abraham and Sarah open up their home to them, welcome them, feed them, and come to find out that they are messengers from God and that they are God’s chosen people to begin again and that through them, even though they are old, they will have many descendants, as many as the stars in the sky.

And then from there, the two visitors go out and we pick up the story from there in Genesis 18. This translation just calls them the men. Other translations might have visitors or even angels.

Genesis 18: 16-33                                                                                                                                 

Then the men set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.”

So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

Genesis 18, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, is perhaps one of the most misunderstood passages of the entire Bible. The two towns or cities become the focus of God’s anger because of their wickedness. Yet the exact nature of the wickedness is never specifically mentioned.

There’s mention of the way they treat outsiders, how they abuse them and mistreat them. There are certainly accounts of assault and violence. And of course, we all know that this passage has been used over the centuries to shame and exclude and other people of same-sex attraction. People who want to oppose homosexuality from a religious viewpoint point to this passage as their source to affirm homosexuality is a sin.

Now, given the sensitive nature of this topic, I don’t want to feel the need to move down this path, but let me just say this: To equate the actions of any two people in love with that of a violent assault of someone on a stranger does not hold water. It just doesn’t.

So let me relate this to more current events. The New York Knickerbockers—I like to say the whole name, the Knickerbockers—won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years this past week.

And Knicks fans have lined the city streets in celebration. And as there is any time people drink and celebrate in public, fights have broken out. These fights have nothing to do with being a Knicks fan or a basketball fan and everything to do with being drunk and probably way overstimulated.

We would never say that God is angry with all Knicks fans because of these incidents. The only people who would say that are people who are already not Knicks fans. They will see these incidents as backing their bias. But the bias already existed.

Likewise, nobody reading Genesis 18 would come to the conclusion that God disapproves of same-sex relationships except for those who are already biased against gays and lesbians. It is the violence and assault that deserves God’s anger. Period. That is it.

Those who would use this passage to defend their bigotry or worse, their own physical violence or verbal violence against those with whom they disagree are actually guilty of the very thing that put Sodom and Gomorrah in God’s crosshairs in the first place.

When we widen out and read this story in context, we realize that the real issue at the heart of the passage is hospitality to strangers.

Hospitality to strangers, you see, is a biblical mandate. It could not be more clear. The Bible drives home this point time and time again. You take care of the stranger in your midst, the foreigner or the alien in your country. Why? Again, it goes back to that origin point for the Hebrew people because you were once strangers yourself. You were once foreigners in a foreign land, and you know what it’s like to be mistreated.

Right before the passage we read for today, as I explained in the setup, Abraham and Sarah offer hospitality to strangers. Strangers, who it turns out, were messengers or angels sent from God. And because Abraham and Sarah showed kindness to strangers and welcomed the foreigners into their home and fed and cared for them, God chooses them to begin again after the flood.

And in this passage, God makes a covenant with Abraham. God says, I will be your God, and you will be my people. He tells Abraham that through him he will build a great nation as numerous as the stars.

But this is the second covenant that God makes. The first one is after Noah and the flood, where God says, I will never again wipe out all the people because of their sin.

Now, as soon as the covenant is made, who do we expect to break it?

Abraham, right?

And don’t worry, Abraham makes his own mistakes. But biblically speaking, God is the first to be tempted to violate the terms of the covenant. Did you catch it? When God hears about the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah and the way they treat strangers, God decides to wipe them out. Well, that would break both covenants, wouldn’t it?

So God wonders, seemingly out loud, should I just go ahead and do it, but not tell Abraham?

Wow. That’s really interesting, isn’t it?

We think we’re the ones who should be afraid of God’s judgment. But according to Genesis, God seems to be a little bit afraid of Abraham’s judgments, not the other way around.

This is a turning point in Scripture and the basis for our faith and trust in God. To paraphrase the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, we may choose to live without God. Humanity may prefer a godless existence. But God never chooses to live without us.

Perhaps the central characteristic and identity of the triune God is the refusal to ever be without humanity.

So one way to read this story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a good way I think, is to understand that this is actually a test for God. Prior to Abraham, God was free to do whatever God wanted to do. But now, now God is bound by the covenant that God has made.

God knows that if he lets Abraham in on his plan, Abraham will disapprove. And indeed he does. Abraham says, what if there are 50 righteous who live in these towns? Will you spare them then? God says yes, if there are 50. What about 45? 30, 20, 10.

Just, by the way, footnote, this is where the notion of a minyan comes from. A minyan is that ten people are required for certain prayers in the Jewish tradition. You have to have a minyan. And so, you know, there are some times where there’s a group that might be joining at a synagogue and there’s eight of them and they have to go out and flag down two other Jews to come in and have a minyan so that they can have prayers. That’s where this comes from: If there are ten, I will not destroy the city.

Like Moses, Abraham convinces God to show mercy. But let’s be clear, it’s not the case that God is vengeful and has to be convinced to show mercy. Rather, it is that God is merciful. But sometimes in the midst of anger, God forgets God’s self. It has to be reminded of God’s true nature.

Now it has been said to those who believe, no explanation is necessary, those who do not believe, no explanation will satisfy. I’m not sure if I buy that 100%, but I think it makes a good point. If we are inclined to faith, if we have a sense that we are a part of something bigger, if we believe that there is a benevolent presence that infuses the universe with life and meaning, we don’t need the Bible to convince us.

Rather, the Bible helps us work out what kind of God we believe in. And rather than just telling us what kind of God is, the Bible tells us stories about God that were shared throughout human history of people working out what kind of God is, considering what we know about God and what we know about the world. And if we approach the Bible this way, what we actually find is a treasure chest of the world’s biggest ideas and questions.

I mean, how limited and unhelpful is the interpretation that Genesis 18 is about how two people choose to share their love and affection. How mean-spirited and harmful is that interpretation? And what does it say about God?

Nothing good.

But it was the early Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo who wrote, “whoever then thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” In other words, if your interpretation of Scripture doesn’t lead you to love God and neighbor more, you have not yet understood Scripture correctly.

If your understanding of Scripture does not lead you to love God and neighbor more, you have not yet understood it correctly. Conversely, as the quote on our bulletin cover today states, “Hate, it appears, is the heresy.”

Friends, what I’m trying to get at here is that faith is not some static statement of beliefs to which we choose to ascribe or not. Not. Faith is a living, evolving relationship with God and one another. Faith, to put it in the language of the book of Genesis, is the living out of the covenant between God and humanity. “Faith,” writes Madeleine Lengel, “is what makes life bearable with all of its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

And one of the many ambiguities we encounter in life is the very issue of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not human sexuality, but how justice and mercy relate to one another. Because God has a point here. As much as we don’t want to admit it, I mean in the abstract, it’s easy to agree with Abraham. It’s not right to punish the innocent along with the guilty. That’s not fair. That’s not justice.

But neither is it fair to the innocent to leave the wicked go unpunished or unchecked, right? Bobby Williamson points out “there’s no discussion here about simply stopping the wickedness in one way or another. Or even just eliminating the people perpetuating wickedness while leaving the righteous alone.” That’s never even on the table. The assumption here is that they are all in it together. “But if mercy in this case basically means ignoring the land’s outcry and letting the wickedness stand, what does that say? And what does it mean for the innocent who continue to live there?” And he concludes with this: “In a modern society that so values individual autonomy, how do we think about the ways in which our fates are inextricably tied?”

Now that is a question worth wrestling with, don’t you agree? That will get us a lot further down the road than judging what we think about the way that two people love one another. How do justice and mercy relate? And how are our fates intertwined? With one another.

I don’t have answers to that. But I think that’s what we’re supposed to be wrestling with as people of faith.

It’s an odd notion to me that our image of God that we receive as children would not continue to grow and change with us as we get older and experience more of life in the world. We need an adult image of God to carry with us, to walk with us in this complicated and confusing world. But so many of us were never given permission, or whatever, to allow our notion of God to evolve, to wrestle with it in meaningful ways. And so we look like people who are trying to engage this complicated world with this very rudimentary image of God.

So if you’ve never received permission to wrestle with the image of God that you carry with you, please, please consider this sermon series your sign. Permission is granted. God welcomes your questions, your doubts, and your challenges because God has decided not to be God without you. So take it on good authority. Not mine, two guys named Moses and Abraham.

Amen.

The post Disputing with God: Advocating for Others appeared first on Roland Park Presbyterian Church.

Our reading this morning comes from Exodus chapters 33 and 34. This is the follow-up to what we read two weeks ago, where Moses was up on the mountain talking with God. The people were down waiting for Moses to return with a word from God. And it was taking longer than they expected. So they turned to Aaron, Moses’ brother, and said, “Moses and God seem to have abandoned us. Please fashion for us another God that we can worship.”

Aaron said, “Give me all your jewelry” and melted it down, made a golden calf, and the people worshiped. God looked down and saw what the people were doing and said to Moses… This really upsets me. And I think I’m just done with these people, and I’m going to just wipe them out like we did with the flood. And Moses reminds God of God’s promises and faithfulness to God’s people. At the end of the passage, we find out that Moses has changed God’s mind. God decides not to visit destruction upon the people again. But this is what happens next:

Exodus 33:1–23; 34:4–9                                                                                                                  

The Lord said to Moses, “Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘To your descendants I will give it.’ I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

When the people heard these harsh words, they mourned, and no one put on ornaments. For the Lord had said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you. So now take off your ornaments, and I will decide what to do to you.’ ” Therefore the Israelites stripped themselves of their ornaments, from Mount Horeb onward.

Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp; he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise and stand, each of them, at the entrance of their tents and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. When all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise and bow down, all of them, at the entrance of their tent. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then he would return to the camp, but his young assistant, Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the tent.

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.”

The Lord said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tablets of stone. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name, “The Lord.” The Lord passed before him and proclaimed,

“The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children
to the third and the fourth generation.” 

And Moses quickly bowed down to the ground and worshiped. He said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, my Lord, I pray, let my Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

The older I get, and the longer I have been in this gig of talking about God for a living, the more and more I am convinced that those that speak of God the loudest, those that speak with the most certainty and authority of eternal matters, those that claim the mantle of faithful and true, are actually most likely to be worshiping an idol of their own creation.

The god they proclaim is so often small and unworthy of the title. This god only cares for some people, not everyone. The god they proclaim is bound by formulas that make little sense and force God into making decisions that are cruel and capricious. The god they proclaim offers salvation by syllables: if you say the right words in the right order, forgiveness and mercy and salvation are yours, no matter what you have done or said previously. That magic incantation is like an eternal get-out-of-jail-free card.

This god is available to those who are willing to turn off their ability to think critically and freely, and just believe certain things to be true. If you call on the name of this god or pray in a certain way, this god will always answer.

Just listen to them and ask, “How big is this God, really?” And does this sound like the God we encounter in scripture? Barbara Brown Taylor makes it plain that it is not. She writes, “Only an idol always answers.”

The God that we encounter in the Bible is no idol. And let me be very clear, I am not talking about idols like the Hebrews built with Aaron, a statue made of their gold jewelry. I am talking about the kind of idol that we make with our minds, false gods of our own making.

Now, to be sure, we all make God in our own image to one degree or another. Recognizing the human proclivity to idolatry is, perhaps, the first step to a more authentic and robust faith. That is why the Bible talks about it early and often. There is little that makes God angrier than idolatry. But again, not for the reasons we may have been led to believe. It is not because God has such a fragile ego that God must be worshiped alone and given credit for everything. Again, what a small god that is. Rather, it is because making God in our own image is the first step into us believing that God is in our corner and on our side, which can be used to justify all sorts of atrocities. Anne Lamott reminds us, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Passages like the one we just read remind us of the dangers of such idolatry, not only because they explicitly tell us so, but because they present us with a God which does not fit neatly into any of our boxes or preconceived notions. The God of Exodus is not a divine therapist sent to make everything in our lives better. The God Moses encounters is wild, free, and not subject to any limits we might set on the divine.

In today’s passage, Moses continues to argue with God over what should be done with the Hebrew people in the wilderness. Let me offer a quick recap up to this point. The people found themselves captive in Egypt, slaves to Pharaoh. Sent by God who heard their cry, Moses frees the people and leads them into the wilderness, where they wander for generations, guided by their hope in the promise of a better life.

But when things take longer than they expect, when they are hungry and tired, when they start to lose faith in Moses and question what kind of God would bring them out into the wilderness just to let them starve to death, they begin to hedge their bets. They start to crave a god who will do what they want them to do.

The biblical witness tells us that when people start to take matters into their own hands, when they start to remake God in their image, God gets angry with them. And not just angry, but furious. So much so that in the passage we read two weeks ago, Moses has to convince God not to wipe the people out. You may remember that Moses won the argument, and the text tells us that God changes God’s mind about the fate of the people. But the story goes on.

In today’s passage, God is still mad, and so while God has decided not to destroy the people, neither does God want anything more to do with them. God tells Moses, “Fine, they can find their own way to the promised land. I am done with them.” Again, Moses intervenes—this time listening to both sides, like a mediator.

Here is how one commentator summarizes what happens: “By the end, God and Israel seem to accept one another as they are. The people confess they are stiff-necked, but God commits to being with them in spite of their shortcomings. Likewise, God reveals a divine Self that is anger as well as compassion. This relationship is messier than we might like, but God and the people remain together in the messiness, committed to a future together.”

That’s all well and good, but what are we to do with this mess? How does it help us in our faith today?

Rabbi, professor, and leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Abraham Joseph Heschel, distinguishes between the God of wrath and the wrath of God. He writes, “When I consider the violence my own country, my elected officials, and my tax dollars now inflict on the world, I think of divine wrath. Divine wrath is the cry of the mother whose child has gone to war, to prison, to poverty, to hatred. It is the ache in the heart of the universe—when love is mocked, when power crushes the weak, when truth is twisted into a weapon, when life is thrown away like trash.

“I am told that wrath is not the final story, that God does not give up on us. That beneath the fury, there remains love—fierce and aching. A love that grieves what could have been and should have been, and works toward what still can be, even amid the tragedy. But we must taste the wrath in order to know the hope. We must feel the burn of divine pain before we can feel the balm of promise.”

Passages like those we are reading in our Disputing with God series, like the one we have read today with Moses and God, show us that our relationship with God is not a one-way street, but God invites our whole selves, including our brains and our experiences, into the relationship. Look again at our passage. God is displeased with the people who think of God as a far-off dictator. God is pleased with Moses, who feels free to disagree with God. As Richard Rohr reminds us, “The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people—always meet a lover, not a dictator.”

Friends, this summer I invite you to shed the image of God as a taskmaster in the sky, the god who cares more for formulas of sin and righteousness, the god who needs you to change before you can be loved and accepted.

Moses shows us that the God we find in the Bible is a God of relationship. It is the God who loves us. All of us. Period. No qualifications and explanations. That is the beginning and end of everything. In between, there is a whole lot that matters too. God does not want us causing harm to one another. God does not want us taking creation for granted or damaging the world we inhabit and on which we depend. God cares about these things not because God cares about some arbitrary rules, but because God cares about us, about how we live together and treat one another.

This type of faith may be messier than we would like. It does not offer the comfort of certainty. True faith humbles itself before a mystery. To paraphrase Paul, “It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way.”

What I think we will notice as we continue this series of Disputing with God is that it is the image of God that we carry with us that needs to change. It is not God, but our version of God, that is the problem. The move, counterintuitively, may be toward more doubt and less certainty. After all, which takes more faith?

As Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “Only an idol always answers.” The God of Moses, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of you and me, is not an idol, but a partner. This God invites us into a relationship that is messy, yes, but is full of love and truth. Amen.

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Discussion Questions:

1. Recognizing Our Images of God:

• Pastor Mark says, “The god they proclaim is so often small and unworthy of the title.” What are some ways people, including ourselves, can make God too small?
• How can we tell the difference between the living God we encounter in scripture and an idol we have created in our own image?

2. Idolatry and Certainty:

• The sermon reflects on Barbara Brown Taylor’s line, “Only an idol always answers.” How does this challenge the desire for certainty in faith?
• Have you ever experienced a season when God felt silent, mysterious, or hard to understand? What did that season teach you?

3. Moses and Honest Relationship with God:

• In Exodus 33:1–23; 34:4–9, Moses argues with God and acts as a mediator for the people. What does this suggest about the kind of relationship God invites us into?
• Pastor Mark says, “God is pleased with Moses, who feels free to disagree with God.” How might disagreement, questioning, or wrestling become part of a faithful life?

4. Wrath, Compassion, and Repair:

• The sermon describes God’s anger not as fragile ego, but as grief over harm, injustice, and broken relationship. How does this change the way you understand divine wrath?
• What does it mean to say that God remains committed to relationship, even in the messiness?

5. Faith Beyond Formulas:

• Pastor Mark invites us to shed “the image of God as a taskmaster in the sky.” What images of God do you need to release in order to trust more deeply in God’s love?
• How does the idea that God loves us “period” — with no qualifications or explanations — shape the way we treat ourselves and others?

6. Applying the Sermon:

• This week, where might you practice a faith that is more honest, humble, and open to mystery?
• How can RPPC continue to be a community where people are free to ask questions, repair relationships, pursue justice, practice hospitality, and engage curious faith?

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Our reading today is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians chapter 1. Just a reminder that outside of the Gospels and the book of Acts, most of the rest of the Christian scriptures, the New Testament is one side of a conversation. We’re essentially reading Paul’s outgoing mail, and we don’t have the other side of the conversation. Although we can kind of sometimes piece it together from other clues from Scripture.

We may remember a few weeks ago we read from the book of Acts when Paul and Silas visited the town of Philippi in northern Greece, how they kind of encountered some trouble there and were jailed, and how even in the midst of being jailed they sang hymns and prayed and were attracting people to the faith, even their jailer. Paul established a community there and last week we read the beginning of his letter to the Philippians as he’s writing to them some years down the road after that visit.

This is a community, and this is not always the case with Paul, where he has great fondness for them and he really just wants to kind of encourage them along. Some other times he’s kind of addressing problems or dissatisfaction within the community in Philippians, by and large, Paul is just trying to encourage them along. They’re doing well. He wants them to continue to grow in love for one another and grow in faith and in service of others. And so we encounter this reading then from Philippians:

Philippians 2: 1-13

If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.

***

So today on the National Mall in DC, the White House is sponsoring a nine-hour event called Rededicate 250. Thousands of Christians will gather to reclaim what they believe to be the Christian roots of our country and to rededicate our country as one nation under God.

Now, as a Christian pastor, you might think I would be in favor of such a thing.

But you would be wrong. And I will tell you why.

Now, to be completely transparent, many of my objections could be rightly categorized as political. I think you all know we certainly address politics here. I don’t know how to preach and not address politics, because politics is life, right? But the pulpit is not a place for partisan politics—except when they step into my territory. And I would say Rededicate 250 is firmly in my wheelhouse here.

So my objections are—even though I do have political ones—I’m going to try my best to put those aside and concentrate on the theological reasons, not of what it means to be an American, but what it means to be a Christian.

So to be clear, I think there are plenty of reasons to object to this as Americans, but I do want to claim something really important about what it means to be Presbyterian.

Because, see, as Presbyterians, we actually value a diversity of thought and opinion. We not only value it, we invite it, we expect it, okay? Just to give you a feeling for how important this is to who we are as Presbyterians: part of our Constitution as the Presbyterian Church (USA)—most of it can be amended, because we expect that rules and guidelines will change over time, that we can grow in wisdom, and that practices need to be relevant to the time.

There’s only a small part of our Constitution which cannot be amended. These are the things that we think are pretty timeless, are important, are kind of as close as we can get to universal truths, okay?

And one of them is captured in this phrase: that we fully expect people of good conscience to disagree. That’s an essential part of who we are as Presbyterians.

We expect people of good conscience to disagree.

So didn’t we just read from Paul about having the same mind? A full accord with one mind? What is that if not a like-minded community? And how can we then reconcile our Presbyterian value of diversity of thought with what Paul seemingly upholds here as like-mindedness?

Well, first of all, I would argue that what Paul calls us as Christians to be of one mind—what he really means might be better translated as like-hearted rather than like-minded.

I actually cut out a little piece there of what Paul said. He doesn’t just call us to be of the same mind, he calls us also to be what? Part of the same love.

And then he goes and reminds us of the example that Jesus gave us in his life.

The verses that follow are what scholars call the Christ hymn. And there are many who believe here—this is really interesting, perk up for a minute—there are those who believe that what Paul is quoting here is actually a very, very early Christian hymn.

In fact, this section that’s kind of formatted differently maybe in your pew Bibles is thought to be maybe one of the very earliest pieces of Christian writing: a piece of music. Makes sense, right? It makes sense to them that this hymn is something that would have been known and spread, and that Paul here is just quoting it because he knows the Philippians know it. And so he’s grounding them in what they already know.

But if that’s the case, that’s really interesting, because this little bit shows us a whole lot of what the earliest Christians thought about what it meant to follow Jesus.

Professor Catherine Shaner writes, “The Christ hymn is clear: domination, conquest, exploitation—exactly the patriotic images that the Roman Empire embraced—are antithetical to divine power. Jesus’ death and resurrection reject our human displays of power and violence precisely because we know the divine was present in the worst kinds of violence, fear, stigmatization, and brute force. Violence, fear, and death are not God’s plan.”

But wait a minute.

Isn’t part of this hymn that every knee should bend? On earth and under the earth, at the name that is above all names, Jesus Christ? That sounds a little bit forceful, doesn’t it?

Maybe. I would suggest that we read it that way because that’s our lens. We come out of this lens of thinking about power as domination. But what Paul is doing here is something different.

He’s not saying that every knee shall bend because they will be forced to against their will, but that the vision for all of creation—for all of creation, for all of humanity, for all of it—is that we will be so into the love of God that, in the end, we will all come to realize that that is the greatest power of them all, and not all of our other attempts to amass power and wealth for ourselves, to dominate others through violence and through force.

Now, it would seem to me—and actually not just seem to me, because the Christian nationalist leaders who are organizing and participating in today’s rededication have explicitly said this, and I have quoted them from this pulpit before—that it is their intention to force their brand of Christianity on everyone else.

Matthew Taylor, a religious scholar of the ICJS in Baltimore, has been studying the leaders of this movement for the past five years. You may remember he came here a couple years ago and gave a talk on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, which was his attempt to explain the Christian leaders who were involved in the January 6th insurrection.

About the event today, he writes, “Their goal is not merely Christian nationalism, the claim that the U.S. is especially Christian. It is Christian supremacy, privileging Christianity over other religious and nonreligious worldviews in policy, and offering premium citizenship to their kind of Christian.”

So while at first we may look at this passage and they can find their justification for “every knee shall bow,” look at the rest of the hymn. Look at the rest of the passage. Where is it saying that this will happen by force?

No. God does not work by force, but by attraction.

So what are we to do? How can we make a difference? Should we just moan and complain, wait patiently for the next vote, withdraw from what’s going on in the world and just tend to our own souls, our own like-minded communities? Or do Paul’s words here in Philippians have something more to offer us?

I’ll tell you what—it’s really amazing what happens when you just pay attention, when you just have that. So often, you know, we’re rushing from one thing to the next.

I always have this pause in my morning when I’m out in the car waiting for the kids to come out so I can take them to school. And this happened last week, actually, as I was thinking about this passage and this like-mindedness and this “every knee shall bow,” and I’m thinking, “How am I going to—what am I going to say?”

And two really interesting things happened.

So one was, for some reason—even though 99% of the time I pull into our driveway head first—for whatever reason, and I don’t even remember, it’s like a week ago, I don’t remember why, but I backed into the driveway. So I’m sitting there in the car waiting for a few minutes as the car kind of warms up, and I’m looking outward. Where I would normally be looking toward our backyard, I’m looking out toward the street.

Now, the other thing you need to know is that we live in a neighborhood that has a lot of walkers, a lot of dog walkers, people that walk for exercise, people that run and jog. And so they’re out all the time. And these people—I mean, you can set your watch to them. You know that if you leave at this time of day, I’m going to see this person walking, or I’m going to see this person walking their dog.

And I may know them by name, or I just may recognize them. I may see them every day of the week. That’s how much a part of my life they are. But I don’t really know them. So you get the idea, right?

So I’m there sitting in the driveway, facing out, and this couple walks by. Not unusual, except I don’t recognize them. Never seen them before in my life. So that strikes my curiosity. Who are they? What are these people doing in my neighborhood? No, not really. But, you know, that’s kind of why I paid attention. I’m like, huh.

A couple, I’m going to guess in their sixties. And the remarkable thing is they were walking so in sync. Now, they were walking at a pretty good clip, so I only had about twelve strides that I could see them as they were walking through my view. But this couple, who I assume had been together for a long time, they were walking exactly in sync.

And I’m not exaggerating to say it wasn’t just that the stride of their legs was in sync. I’m talking heel to toe, touching the ground precisely the same.

And I thought to myself—one, I thought, they’ve been together a long time.

And I thought of the long-term couples that I’ve known. I don’t know very many of them that are like-minded. Some that are more like-minded than others, but that’s not what gets them there.

And I realized from this couple that they were in sync in a different way. It wasn’t that they agree on everything, but they’re so used to walking together that, without even thinking about it, their strides just matched up.

And it just hit me. That’s what Paul means. That’s what he’s talking about. That as individuals and communities, our job is to walk with Jesus.

And when we start, we’re not going to be in sync. We’re going to be out of step. But together, the more we do it together, the more in sync we can be.

Not like-minded. Something closer to like-hearted.

As Christians, it is our job to walk in the way of Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, humbled himself.

And we walk this way not just as individuals, but as communities of faith. We support one another. We encourage one another. We do not force our way of living and our way of thinking on others.

How little faith in God does that take, to force our way on others? If we truly believe and have faith, force is not necessary.

I think what Paul is calling us to is submitting ourselves to love—God’s love for all people.

Together, we try to walk in sync with our Lord and Savior. As we Presbyterians say, as a sign to the world of what God intends for all humanity.

Friends, that’s what we can do. Not hold huge rallies and try to force other people into our way of thinking, but to be a sign here of what can be, to be a community where love and generosity and compassion rule, not power and force.

Walking step by step with Jesus, we can show the power of humility and the strength of love.

Like-hearted, not like-minded.

Amen.

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