The Great Conversation
As I wrote this week, I found myself weeping for the aches of the world. Specifically, I had just received word of an uncle’s passing – an uncle against whom it seemed the societal deck had always been stacked.
I’ve become accustomed to loss in this season. I’ve become accustomed to learning of a colleague or acquaintance, friend or family member who has been diagnosed with COVID. Or who has perhaps lost their job or their home or their car. Or perhaps is struggling with mental illness and feeling hopelessly disconnected from the world. Or whose healthcare access is compromised and complicated because of pandemic. I’ve become accustomed to hearing about legislative gridlock and about global climate change and about centuries of layers of racism.
Perhaps you have become accustomed to these things, too.
And so this is where I am today. Feeling like everything is broken and hard. THIS is what I bring with me when I read these texts.
Last week, we talked about what it means for us to bring our various lived experiences together to read scripture. We talked about the work of being the interpretive community. We talked about who might be missing from our community. Our lives are shaped by our unique experiences, and we bring all that uniqueness together into the body of Christ where we read scripture and seek to be shaped by worship and service, prayer and study, relationship and fellowship in light of that reading.
Right now, much of our experience is rooted in a backdrop of loss and tough things. I have to think that there is something that changes us when we are all sharing a profound experience across society like we are right now. Things come into focus differently, quickly, for more people – a wider range of people. Such seasons foster something of an awakening. The bubonic plague is attributed with giving rise to the renaissance, for example.
We’re certainly not the first people to live in a season of hardship. And as I wrote that sentence, I felt myself having to make all sorts of exceptions because I have incredible privilege and resources– white skin, a couple of degrees, a car to drive, a roof over my head, heating oil, a fridge where I worry more about having too much than too little.
But still…with all that privilege it is still a season where I feel loss and hardship. Maybe it is for you too.
How is that shared season of loss a part of who we are as an interpretive community?
We as Christians place at the center of our beliefs a holy collection of stories and prophecies, histories and poetry that was assembled over centuries and generations. It is a collection of insights that reflect an evolving human experience, seasons of shared and individual hardship and joy. It is a collection of words, inspired by God, that express the ways our limited human minds and hearts have - over time and progress - come to understand God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the church and the call to discipleship.
We make the road by walking. Walking in our real, lived experience. Alongside others in their experience. The road is shaped by our individual experience and by our communal experience as we read these holy texts together.
Our texts for today are a trail of breadcrumbs that point out where others have walked before, how their paths shifted and changed in light of their experiences, and how we might need to walk in light of our experience today.
We begin with a short excerpt from the first chapter of the prophet Isaiah. Just prior to what you heard this morning, God has outlined something of a legal suit against God’s people for their failure to keep the Sinai covenant. He is laying down the charges – which include all of God’s people being children who have rebelled against their parent, a crime punishable by death in the Levitical laws.
We pick up the text today with a message from God about what really matters – your incense, your sacrifice, your pomp and circumstance do not matter so long as you are not loyal to me, God essentially says. Stop with the frippery and the showy ceremony – instead “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plea for the widow.”
So …there is a way, other than the specifically outlined complex system of temple sacrifice it seems, for God’s people to show their loyalty. That way is to behave differently in their day-to-day lives out in the world. That way is to stop doing harm, do good, seek justice and repair…
In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he is pleading with the community – asking them to find harmony by following Christ’s lived example rather than fussing about the rules for circumcision, or food, or fussing about individual peace and comfort over the comfort and peace of the whole community.
And then in the gospel of Matthew, we see the example that Jesus actually set time and again by his actions – the kind of example Paul points to – to live in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus.
And of course, Jesus sets a high bar. When confronted by the keepers of the Jewish temple tradition, asked why he who claims to be a great teacher and the Son of God would be sitting with sinners and the dregs of society, Jesus calls them back to the text of the prophet Hosea – I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
The actual Hebrew in Hosea is more nuanced and complex – the word mercy in the gospel text is actually a translation from the Hebrew word hesed found in Hosea (translated “steadfast love” there).
Hesed was a term that referred to the fulfillment of covenant obligations – in love. Not just because there is a legal obligation but because two parties love and honor one another with loyalty and solidarity. We forget in our litigious society that these covenant relationships were more than just contracts, they represented relationships bound by love…like the love between a parent and a child, or the time-tested love between two who have been married and weathered a lot together.
So…what obligations is Jesus calling the Pharisees back to when he reminds them that God desires mercy and not sacrifice?
Hmm… well…
The Sinai covenant included instruction about how “others” were to be included in the wider community – Leviticus 19:34 says this: the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
OK. This is one of those places where we need to look at our experience, our context today.
In the Hebrew scriptures, the Israelites were often reminded that they were “aliens” once, away from their homeland and subject to underemployment and underprivilege.
In light of my lived experience…I can also take “alien” can mean any person who is not like me. Broadly speaking, We could read this as an alien being anyone that “the rest of society” makes an outsider.
Jesus is pointing to the exclusivity and judgement practiced by the Pharisees as a failure to keep the full intent of their covenant with God. He is pointing to their failure to practice more mercy or loving kindness or hesed.
I’m pretty sure the Pharisees thought they were keeping the rules pretty well – noting who was a sinner and calling that out. Keeping the riffraff out of the temple.
It is complicated, isn’t it…figuring out what matters most and how to live into it all at once. I mean, there were reasons for the Pharisees to name sinners and call them out. But Jesus is looking at the situation a little differently – and choosing to be with those who others reject.
In the book We Make the Road by Walking, author Brian McLaren is seeking to help us understand that the human interpretation of covenant obligations to God evolves as human experience evolves. Sacrifices DID serve a purpose in the context of the ancient near east. Jesus is calling a more sophisticated society back to the rest of the story – that love for neighbor – love for those that God also loves - is ALSO a part of the covenant, perhaps one that has been forgotten.
There is something developmental about being the interpretive community. As we share life, as we begin to know and trust one another, we begin to see that there are very few absolutes. No one leader is ALL GOOD or ALL BAD. No one policy helps everyone and hurts no one. We become aware as we make the road by walking that there may actually be more than one road that leads to the same place. Or there might be more than one way to travel the road.
As I studied these texts this week, I have prayed a lot about the journey our denomination and our church have been on as we consider how we will respond to issues of racism and homophobia around us. And here’s what I prayed – dear God, please help us to not be contributing to the suffering of the world.
In our church history – it was once ok to include slaveholders in membership. In our church history – it was once ok to deny communion to black and brown people. In our church history – it is still ok to deny marriage and ordination to gay people. In our church history – it is still ok for congregations to say that they prefer a pastor that looks and sounds like them.
I wonder…
I wonder – dear God please help us to not be contributing to suffering in the world.
I wonder if it is possible that we are being called to see a new way as we share this common experience of pandemic.
Not that God has changed God’s mind but rather that we are somehow better able to see how God’s love is for everyone.
We are able to see how many neighbors we are called to love.
That we are able to see with greater clarity the range of sins that we all bear.
And thereby understand the grace that we all depend upon.
That we are able to see how we are ALL precious in God’s sight.
We are better able to see the ways we create or cause or fail to end suffering in the world.
Or put another way, perhaps we can be better able to see how we might be part of ending that suffering.
I want to give thanks today for the journey many of you have been on…I give thanks for the great conversation launched by Bill Maas and Gary Clark and the reconciling task group and the missions/outreach team and then by the anti-racism small group. I give thanks for the ways we are bringing our lived experience into great conversation with the bible and with our call to discipleship – the call to love God and one another.
I also recognize that we are not all of one mind on the issues of race, sexuality and gender.
And I pray, like down on my knees pray, that we will do the work of the interpretive community to find out how God is speaking through our scriptures and into our experience SO THAT we are able to be the beloved community, rooted in being loving - anti-racist and anti-homophobic.
That doesn’t just mean we are not going to be racist or homophobic…it means we are going to seek a path that rights the injustices of racism and homophobia. I pray that we are able to become a community that is not contributing to suffering.
I think that in some ways, the suffering and hardship and loss of the past 9 months has made me more sensitive to how pain feels. How exclusion feels. How suffering feels.
I have great privilege. But these months have offered a glimpse of something different.
God, help me to not be part of more suffering in the world.
May it be so.
Amen.
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