For understanding the holocaust, we have the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. For the great depression, we have The Grapes of Wrath. For American racism we have To Kill A Mockingbird. For labor in America we have The Jungle. Nothing in these stories is real. All of them are as true as any textbook. The stories are outrageous, but not exaggerated. The half has never been told, either in terms of atrocity and suffering, or courage and sacrifice.
Many scholars treat the book of Esther similarly – as a fictional, but no less true, account of Jewish history everywhere and always: exile, pogrom, genocide and survival; scapegoat and doormat in every country and culture where Judaism ever landed. Outrageous, but not exaggerated. This morning I want to consider Esther, both the story and the character, in light of Advent. Specifically, as we wait for Jesus to come do for us what we cannot for ourselves, what is Jesus waiting for us to do for one another? Let's pray: These little lives of ours are not our own, O God; we know it and yet forget it all the time. With Esther as our teacher, help us to remember: these little lives of ours are yours, to spend as needed for the loving care of your precious creation. Amen. The story is set in a place called Susa, a palace complex in Babylon around 600 BCE. There are four main characters. King Xerxes and King Ahasuerus are two names for the same person. He was the king of Babylon, from Ethiopia to India, as the story goes – 127 provinces. (Very little of this telling matches other history books, by the way.) King Xerxes has no idea how to govern. His twin goals in life are to be admired by important people and have beautiful women fawn over him. He stays drunk a lot of the time. He has a ring of power that he hands over to anyone with a bad idea. Haman was the right hand of King Xerxes. He is as gross as the king, but with slightly less power. Mordecai is a Jew who had come to Babylon from Jerusalem in one of the Jewish deportations. He lives near and is constantly present in the palace complex. Hadassah was his cousin, an orphan whom he had raised. Hadassah's other name is Esther. As the story goes, at one of King Xerxes’ drinking parties – this one lasting for 180 days – he had the idea that his wife, Queen Vashti, should put on her crown and parade around in front of all the men, so they could see how beautiful she was. While not every commentary agrees, not a few read the Hebrew to say wearing ONLY her crown. Naked or clothed, Vashti refuses. Xerxes is enraged. It's a national emergency. He calls together his advisors. Knowing upon what side their bread is buttered, they tell him to banish her immediately and forever, lest wives everywhere hear of it. They say, then there will be no end of contempt and wrath. And issue a written proclamation too, they say, something like, “from now on all women everywhere will give honor to their husbands, high and low.” The king loved their plan and said, “Make it so.” Then he wrote personal letters to all the provinces that said, “Every man is master of his own house.” (And the simultaneous eye-rolling of women everywhere no doubt caused the earth to tip on its axis.) So then Xerxes had to find a new queen, so he sent eunuchs throughout the kingdom to raid villages and kidnap the most beautiful girls from each one. It's sort of like Hunger Games, only instead of training, the girls endure a year of beauty treatments in preparation for their one night with the king! One by one, they go to his chamber. His favorite is Esther. Mordecai has kept an eye on her the whole time and made her swear to tell no one she's a Jew. In a year, Hadassah has catapulted from orphan refugee to Queen of Babylon, a position of consummate privilege based entirely on her looks – and a secret. Time goes by. Mordecai keeps his eyes on Esther the best he can. He gets word to her of an assassination plot against the king. She tells the king, credits Mordecai, and the assassins are caught and hanged. Haman continues to be the worst. It's decided that everyone must bow down to him. Mordecai refuses, day after day. Seeing upon which side their bread is buttered, other officials in the court tell Haman, the reason he won't bow to you is that he's a Jew. Haman is enraged. As Eugene Peterson translates it, Haman hated to waste his fury on just one Jew. He goes to Xerxes with an idea: Let me exterminate each and every Jew in the kingdom, and I'll pay for it myself. Xerxes, who five minutes before hadn't thought about it one way or the other, loves this plan. He gives Haman his ring of power and says, Keep your money and make it so. A date is set. The edict is published in every language and posted in every province, “On this particular day, all Jews shall be killed, massacred and eliminated.” Published and posted, the story says, so the people can get ready. Which people? The Jews or their neighbors? The Jews are devastated, naturally. None more than Mordecai. He puts on the garment of death – sackcloth and ashes – and goes to the palace gate. Because, in spite of the public service announcement, not every Jew has heard. Esther sees Mordecai and thinks he has a wardrobe problem. That's privilege, don't you know? She’s protected from what threatens her family. Her secret is now secret from herself. She identifies more with the banished queen than with her own people. A good house, good food, and servants make assimilation to privilege easy-peasy. Mordecai wants Esther to go to the king and beg for their lives. It's too dangerous, she replies. She's now fluent in privilege, its language and its math. The crisis is about her. Her life is suddenly worth more than all other Jews. But she didn’t grow up in a palace. Mordecai raised her. Now he reminds her, this is who we are: Jews. We will survive. We always do. The question is, how shall you live? What will be your part in it? Will you be found faithful or not? What will you do with this one little life you have been given? Here’s the thing about privilege: it’s useful when one has it, but it can be tenuous. Esther's privilege is perishing with each new wrinkle or gray hair, and she knows it. The king hasn't asked for me in a month, she tells Mordecai. No doubt he had a younger harem at beauty camp right then and talent scouts in the provinces too. Who knows, Mordecai says, perhaps all that's happened to you was to bring you to this exact moment? Is that a question? And if it is, doesn't the answer have to be “yes”? However any of us got to this moment, this is the only moment in which to spend this one life we have. Esther knows what she must do. And I would offer, her obedience happens in four movements. I call them movements, because they are acts of faith. 1. She accepted the reality of privilege. However passing her power might have been, however slim her chances for success, however dangerous for herself personally, she had access and resources other people didn't. She had a hundred reasons to stay quiet and only one to speak up: because it was right. She didn't do it because she knew she'd win. She did it because it was right. And being righteous matters. Following Jesus matters, most especially through terror and chaos. But every day, our assignment is to act justly and love mercy, spending whatever privilege we have to maximum efficiency. 2. First Esther accepted the reality of her privilege. Then she applied that privilege to the problem at hand. Obviously, Esther was arm candy. She was responsible for being beautiful and available – until SHE decided to re-write the job description of queen. I have the lovely idea that she called Vashti for advice. However she came upon her plan, she used her position as queen to beat the system at its own game. She saved her people and took down Haman too. His demise is soooo satisfying. You should read it. This privilege of ours spends like money – on what, we decide. Ourselves? Our comfort? Justice? Kindness? Righteousness? Queen Esther did beat the system and save her people. But in real life that almost never happens. Even now, 2500 years later, women going up against the system more often end up like Vashti than Esther. In the long history of human oppression, people like Esther lose and lose and lose, until enough bodies get stacked up that things finally begin to move. But nothing starts to move until someone goes first. Esther went first. St. Stephen, St. Paul, the disciples, so many through the persecutions, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romeo, Reverend King, and all the people whose names are gone – people going first to do right to break up the hard, hard ground of injustice. 3. Esther accepted the reality of her privilege. She applied that privilege to the problem at hand. And third, she asked for help. She prayed. She prayed and she fasted and she told every Jew in the kingdom to pray and fast with her. In his book on Habakkuk, Howard Thurman points out that folks who do evil work hard at it and that somewhere, people who want to do right got the idea that our job should be easier just by virtue of it being right. Esther has good reason to expect to be killed for walking into the room. She can only go in alone. But knowing that everyone is with her in heart and spirit, that is powerful stuff. Stuff that will keep her legs under her. To people facing genocide, three days of prayer and fasting may not have a been a big ask. But would you do it? Would you do it for others? It's a hard question – isn't it? – since people the world over are facing genocide by starvation and war and abuse right now. We're tempted to say, “Who's asking?” as if that would make a difference. What if the one asking was the arm candy wife of the worst king ever? In the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, Esther is described this way, just before confronting the king: “She was radiant with perfect beauty, and she looked happy, as if beloved, but her heart was frozen with fear.” Most anyone can be brave once. Or twice. But only in the deep waters of God's peace and grace will the strongest of us keep our legs. We are too afraid of pain. Not even pain – just discomfort, inconvenience. How shall we face death if we haven't learned to pray? 4. Esther accepted her privilege. She applied that privilege to the problem at hand. She asked God for the courage she needed. And then, she acted in faith. She acted out the most genius plan. All the stars fell into line; the good guys lived happily ever after; and the bad guy died a gruesome, yet satisfying, death. You want me to tell it or do you want to read at home? Nah, I'll talk about Jesus and you can read at home. This Advent ritual is just pretend. All Jesus came to do for us is done. He lived. He died. He rose. We are set free from death. We wait only to be set free from fear of death, fear that binds the courage that would have us spending our privilege, our very lives, on behalf of people who live in the real terror of hate and meanness dealt by the principalities and powers of this world, being salt and light as Jesus said in Matthew 5. Salt: living unspoiled in the spoiled and ruined world. Light: helping other people see what they can't see in the shadows of the spoil. Taking off eighteen years for childhood, five years for really old age and a third for sleep in those middle years, a 90-year-old is left with a little less than 47 years to decide what she'll do with. Drs. Bonhoeffer and King both died before they were 40. We have today. We have the world we have. It may not be the one we wish we had. We may know exactly what we would have done in 1942 Europe. Or 1968 Birmingham. But those were not our times and places. We have here. We have now. Jesus has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. Here and now, he calls us to do what we can for the people around us who are waiting for hope, who are waiting for peace. Would you pray with me?
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Here we are again on the first Sunday of the Christian year, when preachers turn to the prophets to make the case all over again, in a world already full of religion, Why Jesus? Small-town and as unknown as he may be, Habakkuk puts words to it as well as anybody ever did.
This is from the Pastor-Annette,-slightly-snarky-and-very-free translation: This is a sorry world full of faithless people, God. And I don’t know why you make me look at it. Further- more, I don’t know why you let it be this way? As Howard Thurman puts it, Why does the God of right permit the rule of wrong? It is the most universal of religious questions. In Habakkuk, chapters 1 and 2 God answers, but not to the prophet’s satisfaction, Look and See! Look and see is God’s second favorite thing to say, after do not be afraid. Look and see something you would not believe. I am rousing the Chaldeans as they march the face of the earth. Chaldeans is another word for Babylonians, the way Hoosiers is another word for Americans. Hear that? God answers the prophet’s question about why God lets evil rule by saying, I’m the one stirring up that trouble! Turns out, God is absolutely right in verse 5: nobody wants to believe that. So the prophet does what people always do. He keeps asking, pretending he hasn’t heard a thing God said, just waited his turn to talk again. Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, And you cannot look on wrongdoing. Did God say that? No. God did not say how he could not bear to look at the Chaldeans. But that’s what Habakkuk heard, apparently. Before asking the perennial religious question again, Why do you look on the treacherous and keep silent as wicked people consume good people? The prophet goes on a bit about those nasty Chaldeans and decides, Fine, I am going to stay right here until God answers me, his rampart and watchpost. I’ll just stay right here and watch to see what God will say regarding my complaint. Write this down, God says next; write it so plain that people can read it while on the run, so anyone asking later can read the answer I am giving now. Which Habakkuk did, obviously, since, here we are. But have we read the answer? Are we any more satisfied with God’s response than Habakkuk and the Judeans were back then, than religious people have been since? Let’s pray. Give us hearts and minds, O God, brave enough to see and hear what you would have us see and hear. Amen. My sermon title has evolved over the last few days, from “Things That Really Get God’s Goat” to “What Gets God’s Goat,” to “Five Goats.” Many commentaries refer to chapter 2 as “the five woes,” but I like the alliteration of get God’s goat. And everyone knows that awesome alliteration is two-thirds of good preaching. If we asked, why doesn’t 2+2=yellow? and God said, “Because yellow isn’t a number,” we’d be satisfied. But when we ask, why does God allow suffering? and God answers, You bring this suffering upon yourselves and I hate it as much as you do, all we know to do is to repeat the question. By the time God tries to explain God’s self, we’ve stopped listening again. But if we could keep watching and listening, we’d see something of God’s answer in the five goats of Habakkuk, chapter 2. Care to guess the origin of get one’s goat? Or maybe you already know it? It comes from a tradition in horse racing. Thought to have a calming effect on high-strung thoroughbreds, a goat was placed in the horse’s stall on the night before the race. Unscrupulous opponents would then steal the goat – get his goat! – in an effort to upset the horse so he will run poorly and lose the race. Things that get God’s goat are the things that make God jumpy, angry, out of sorts, make God be other than God most wants to be, for us and with us. Five of the things that get God’s goat are: Plundering Theft; Pervasive Exploitation; Perpetual Conquest; Perennial Oppression; and Perilous Idolatry, all perpetrated by the Haves against the Have-Nots, by those who have political/ economic/social power against those who don’t. Not only does the prophet name them, but he also describes their effect on everyone involved: the Haves and the Have-Nots. Plundering theft. Google images of looting are mostly of brown and black people smashing storefronts to steal TV’s. That’s wrong, but not even close to all that’s wrong. I could talk more or show you a cartoon which says it better than I ever can: Rang-Tan in My Bedroom. And it’s not just monkeys, but people. People in Indonesia, whose land got taken away and sold by the state to palm-oil companies. From forest to storefront, the two are not unrelated, friends, as much as we would like to believe otherwise. The Haves cannot pillage endlessly and expect the pillaged to put up with it forever. The Bible says they won’t, on this very page. 7 Will not your creditors suddenly arise? Will they not wake up and make you tremble? Then you will become their prey. 8 Because you have plundered many nations, the peoples who are left will plunder you. For you have shed human blood; you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them. Goat-getter #2: Pervasive exploitation (verses 9-11). 9 “Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain, setting his nest on high to escape the clutches of ruin! 10 You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life. 11 The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it.” We who have built our houses in safe neighborhoods, where we can’t see the effects of this economy on those it robs, how it takes advantage of the desperation of people with few options for education and work – it is all one economy, all one system. And it’s built on sand, to borrow from Jesus’s parable in Matthew 7. The same way all the stones hold up the wall and all the framing holds up the house, in a system built on sand – corrupt from top to bottom – being closer to the top will not keep us safe. Goat # 3, Perpetual Conquest. “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed, and found a city on iniquity!” 13 Is it not from the Lord of hosts that people labor only to feed the flames, and nations weary themselves for nothing? 14 But the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. Nations built on blood and cities built on crime. In his commentary on these verses, Howard Thurman wrote that every place called civilized is born of conquest. And that every one will fail, until humans know God the way water knows the sea. We cannot act against the ways of God and please God at the same time. We can pretend, of course, which was one source of Judah’s agony. The prophet gives voice to their frustration, demanding to know why God treats them so. But the sound of their own terror drowns out what they most need to hear. Maybe greed is just another shape fear takes. The more we have of what humans need, the safer we feel. And the safer we feel, the less able we are to discern the difference between safety and opulence, bringing us to the fourth goat. Perennial oppression. What makes something perennial? It can reseed itself. Mint and lemon balm are the most persistent perennials in my yard, and they are less perennial than the oppression of humans upon humans. 15 “Woe to him who gives drink to his neighbors, pouring it from the wineskin till they are drunk, so that he can gaze on their naked bodies! Now it is your turn! Drink and let your nakedness be exposed! The cup from the Lord’s right hand is coming around to you, and disgrace will cover your glory. 17 The violence you have done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, and your destruction of animals will terrify you. For you have shed human blood; you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them.” Again, the tyrannized will tolerate it so long as they have something left to lose, but hardly longer. Why do you think people risk their children drowning in the sea or being tear-gassed by our soldiers? Because they’ve so little left to lose otherwise. Had we eyes to see, we would see this prophecy playing out before us now: the violence you have done will overwhelm you. In reference to Judah’s violence, the text speaks of Lebanon. For these times, we can write in most anywhere brown people live: Central America, the Middle East, Alabama, American inner cities, and so many other places. We cannot trap people militarily or economically or socially and expect them to tolerate it endlessly. Our ancestors didn’t. People are meant to be free and treated as beings made by God in God’s image. How you know God wants us to treat our loved ones is how God wants us to treat everyone. Finally, the fifth goat, Perilous Idolatry. 19 “Woe to him who says to wood, ‘Come to life!’ Or to lifeless stone, ‘Wake up!’ Can it give guidance? It is covered with gold and silver; there is no breath in it.” Call dead things live. Call live things dead. Call good things bad and bad things good for long enough, eventually you won’t be able to tell the difference – nor need to, maybe, once no moral bar exists, save the one that serves oneself. What is valuable to Empire? What is valuable to God? What is valuable to us, and what has that to do with life? Again, friends, again, again, again, Judah thought she was the victim of Assyria and Babylon. The prophet’s task was to show herself to herself, that she herself had plundered, exploited, and oppressed, and all the while lived by a story, a theology even, of God’s goodness to her that took no account of the abuse she inflicted on others. That was violation of the Mosaic covenant, plain and simple, the consequences for which they had always known and the prophets had continually reminded them of. They could refuse to know what they knew by pretending not to understand. They could refuse to listen. They could refuse to see. They could refuse to change. But finally, what they could not do was save themselves – save themselves from a faithless world full of sorry people who had created a mess that the best of them were not smart or good or strong enough to redeem. Therefore, Jesus, the one in our other text today, asking those who would follow him the same question, giving the same invitation God issues to Habakkuk and Judah: Watch with me. Watch and see this thing that I am about to do. Shall we? Shall we be the ones who see and hear God’s answer to this world’s troubles? Welcome, dear ones, to another season of watching and following. Would you pray with me? Jeremiah was a prophet. And he never had a good friend his whole life. No one understood a single word he said and, in the end, he drank the same bitter wine drunk by everyone else in Judah: the bitter wine of exile. Wine fermented by the deep conviction that hearing the truth was the same as doing the truth, the conviction that our covenant promises can be faithfully ignored while God keeps God's, regardless – because that's who God is.
With Jeremiah, we've come close to the end of the Old Testament narrative. Babylon is crushing Assyria everywhere. Egypt wants Judah in place as a buffer on her northern border between herself and Babylon. Both Egypt and Babylon offer alliance with Judah, and the successive kings of Judah tease them each in turn, until Babylon has had enough. They invade. They occupy. The deportations begin in 598 BCE. Jeremiah escapes into Egypt, which is exile all the same. Eleven years later, there's nothing left of Judah politically. The Temple is destroyed and the last deportations occur. All the while, Jeremiah is preaching repentance. Because no matter how late the hour, the truth is still the truth, even when conducted by kings and presidents. Repentance is theological work. Foreign alliance may or may not have been bad politics. It was terrible theology. Judah made her alliance centuries before, in the wilderness promises of covenant. Promises summed up by the prophet Micah as “Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly.” But as Israel grew in power and in wealth – became an empire in her own right – that theology morphed into another, one that said “we can do what we want, since God can't help loving us most,” despite all prophetic preaching to the contrary. Then other empires grew ever bigger, ever stronger, and these biblical people found a way to align themselves with empire values and still keep their theology – at least the part about being God's favorite people, about God's dedication to their personal well-being and safety. They kept this theology, even as Israel collapsed to Assyria, even as Babylon breathed down her neck in pursuit of Egypt. Along came the next prophet Jeremiah, preaching into the wind, because no matter how late the hour, the truth is still the truth. Your presence in the Lord's house does not qualify as obedience to covenant, he said. Don't oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow; don't shed innocent blood in this place; don't go after other gods. Who is he describing? He's describing every worldly empire everywhere. And Judah too, if they choose to make alliance. Their values will be yours, Jeremiah says. You don't get their protection without their reputation too. The blood they shed is on your hands as well. The prophet continues, You stand here, trusting in deceptive words, to no good end. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, pledge allegiance to idols? Is there any line you won’t cross? seems to be his question. Then come back in here, stand before me, in my house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’ – only go leave again and keep doing the very same things? Has this house become a den of robbers? (That should sound familiar to you!) You do know I can see everything you're doing, right? says the Lord, in the voice of Jeremiah. The tricky part, of course, is that no one thought they themselves were doing anything wrong. Such is the nature of systemic injustice, systemic evil. Everybody feels personally innocent. Or, at least, nobody feels personally responsible. And great is the temptation, of course, to compare the times, to note how so-called biblical people in our own day bow down to empires, after kings and presidents who promise to keep us safe, no matter the price in terms of justice, kindness and humility, the things we know God requires of us. And yet, I'm more and more convinced that faithfulness to the gospel is not concerned with how others ought to live, but how I choose to live. And how I live begins and persists with how I pray. And by pray, I merely mean, live inside my own heart, and soul, and head. Which is no small thing. And I keep wishing it came down to something other than this, other than each of us getting our own hearts/heads/souls right with God. But if I skip that, I am ever-so-slowly coming to understand, nothing works. The longer I listen to myself pray those lists of things I'm always praying – the list of things I'm grateful for; the list of things I think I need, for myself, for others, for the world; and the list of things that grieve me and give me cause for fear – the longer I hear myself praying these three prayers, the more clear it becomes to me how innocent I believe I am when I’m not praying. The sense that this is MY life. That MY life is in some way removed from the flow of all life and every other life. The more it’s clear to me that the great pretense of my life is that all our destinies are not wrapped up together when, in truth, they are. The world does not go to hell in a handbasket and the church NOT go with it, simply because we think we are safe. Jeremiah knew what was true and right. He knew what was wrong with Israel and Judah. But knowing did not save him from their same fate, any more than knowing will save us, if we are wise enough to know. Which I am certainly not. Real prayer isn't political. It isn't knowing who is right and what the right course of action is. Real prayer is remembering where our alliance lies, so that our faith and hope can be rightly placed and our lives directed, not by the values of empire, but by the values of covenant: justice, kindness, humility. In prayer I put myself – heart, soul and head – before God alone, and stay there unafraid of whatever is at the gate or border of my country or my heart, unswayed by the empires or the personal promise-makers who beg for my allegiance as if they can protect me from the destiny of forgetful people or my own failing faith. Those first Bible people used the word chosen-ness to describe God’s favor upon them. We Jesus people use the word grace. God's grace is what gathers us together; grace is that to which we sing and speak and testify. Grace is not most visible in here, but out there where we walk and talk, where we spend our money and take our stand. Grace is first of all theological. It says the allegiances offered by the empires of this world are too little too late for humanity now. That what's needed, most of all and all the time, is justice, kindness, and humility. Covenant-keeping in quotidian scale. Daily justice. Daily kindness. Humility through and through. Discovered first and always in the quietness of prayer. Continuing here and now. Pray with me. When it seems like my sermons are long, I want you to remember that we have covered nearly the entire Old Testament narrative Genesis‒Chronicles in 8 weeks.
Israel is now split into two kingdoms: the northern, whose capital was Samaria; and the southern, also called Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem. One hundred more years have passed since the time of Elisha, the prophet in our story last week. Elisha was a preacher in the northern kingdom, still called Israel. Micah was a prophet in the south, as was Isaiah; only, Isaiah was a headliner prophet, working out of Jerusalem. Isaiah had the ear of the king, as well as religious authorities. Micah was a small-town preacher from Bethlehem. He and Isaiah agreed on a few things: that Jerusalem was wildly corrupt, for one thing, in danger of being destroyed by the Assyrians. The northern kingdom has collapsed, been razed, and swept into Assyrian territory. Judah is merely occupied, functioning at the benevolence of the Assyrian king. However, Micah is less optimistic than Isaiah. More likely, he's an independent-contractor-kind-of preacher, less beholden to king or congregation, so he speaks more freely. He's of the mind that Jerusalem is as doomed as Samaria, Judah as doomed as Israel. Not hard to see why he didn't have a job. Micah's pitch was that Judah's hope lay not in avoiding defeat, but rather in persisting in faith when defeat inevitably comes. Someday a new king will rise, he says. From the little town of Bethlehem. And his kingdom shall be different, not like any king or kingdom ever seen before. Christians like us attach Jesus to that prophecy and mostly ignore the rest – at least the parts about disobedience and defeat and suffering. Maybe we do that because the defeat of Judah didn’t happen for almost 200 more years, and to us that's a really long time. But 200 years is only about two inches on a Bible page, a speck in the history of time. Nevertheless, we each only have this one life in which to do our part. One life with which to listen to Micah and to choose to hear or to ignore him, to admit that we do know what God requires – justice, kindness, humility – and that we are capable of all three, or to keep pretending that the principalities and powers of this world are somehow magically going to transform a dumpster fire into something other than a holocaust. Let's pray: We wish you wanted something more exciting, O God, than our daily trust in you. We wish to do great works for you,to change the world for you, to be a great church for you. We pray for wisdom to listen to what you have already said, to do what we already know to do. Amen. "National theology" is a term I first found in John Bright's book on the history of Israel. Others use it as well. National theology, in ancient Israel's case, was a geopolitical- religious identity of chosen-ness – a belief that God was on Israel’s side in every situation – that was thought to be natural to the very order of creation itself. Inasmuch as God made the heavens and the earth, God favored Israel. By God's own nature, God would preserve Israel in all circumstances. It was who God was. National theology, rooted in David instead of Moses, in monarchy instead of relationship, had no element of covenant. People could behave as they pleased, and God would replace bad kings as God saw fit. The prophets pointed out the problems in this perversion of faith, faith in a government that impoverished and oppressed its people in order to expand territory, enrich the monarchy, then fund the troops needed to defend those lands and riches. Making alliances with enemies, while provoking division within. A clergy that sucked up to that government to their own benefit, leaving worship polluted and the truth untold. All these things the prophets were warning Israel and Judah about, long before Micah. Reminding the kings and clergy and people of the conditions of covenant, in sermons nobody much listened to. Then, what was supposed to be impossible, happened. Assyria annihilated the northern kingdom, Israel. It jerked a knot in the tail of that national theology. You might think Judah would take a new listen to the prophets. You'd be wrong. Remember what Jesus said about that: “A prophet gets no hearing in his hometown.” John Bright says there are two choices for die-hard nationalists (by the way, Bright wrote this in the 1950's). The first choice is fanatical confidence in a failing theology. There is no challenge too difficult, no mountain too high, no battle too fierce; just like when David struck down Goliath, God will forever be on our side too. King Hezekiah fits this to a T. He was king during Micah's preaching career. He was determined to reform Judah, to restore the two kingdoms, even. He staged rebellions against Assyria, even rebuilding parts of Jerusalem's waterways in the event of a siege. All his rebellions failed, and Jerusalem was besieged, of course, with Hezekiah trapped there like a bird in a cage, the Bible says. What in the world made him think he'd win that? A detailed story shaped over long history – of God's providence, no matter what. The second choice Bright calls, simply, cowardly faith: faith led, guided, and directed by fear. Hezekiah's son, Manasseh, is a study in the cowardly faith approach. When his father died, Manasseh couldn't kiss Assyria's foot fast enough. He undid every Hezekiah reform, and Judah survived as vassals until Assyria fell to Babylon. And in the midst of governments and religion, boomeranging from one form of nationalism to another, there are the prophets. There is Micah. We might hear him. But his people then could not. Because they would not. From chapter 6, Oh my people, what I have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! You remember this, right? We read it every year. It's the liturgy of reproach which we read on Good Friday. For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, And redeemed you from the house of slavery. A litany of God's saving acts in the time of covenant. Micah speaks for God, begging to know why the people have forgotten, why they have chosen to treat God this way. Then he turns, Micah does, praying on behalf of people who have not asked him to, “With what shall I come before the Lord?” Micah mocks their cynicism: Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? If Micah mocks them, it is because they have mocked God. And why might they do that? – because people are terrible? Yes. But also, people are generally the most terrible when they are the most afraid. And I can see why rank and file Judeans might have been afraid. There was no good news from the north, from Israel. None from Jerusalem. Leaders who were supposed to know what to do, clearly did not. Every day was a new dumpster fire, if you will. In that space, Micah delivers the sermon for which he's remembered: God has already told you, O People, what is good and what the Lord requires. To do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God. It does make a lovely cross-stitch, a nice painted plaque or bulletin cover. But really, as an alternative way of life to Empire? As a way of life in times like these? Anyone else feel like things are just a little extra crazy lately? I read the news and think, “Is this The Onion? No. This is really happening.” With the Bible open on my lap, I find this text and wonder, Am I supposed to believe that justice, kindness, and humility are the alternative to. . . democracy? And friends, here’s the thing. If we’re going to compare the times, we have to admit that our empire is NOT Israel. We are Assyria, running roughshod over the little places of the world, taking what we want because we want it and we can, then needing bigger armies to defend it all. Justice, kindness, and humility? Really? To which I hear Micah responding, Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to? Is it because you don't like the answer and are hoping for another? That's usually why we keep praying, don't you know? God hardly ever strays out of these three lanes: justice, kindness, humility. But these three don’t much suit our ego, do they? Imagining that the things God really wants are those ten thousand rivers of oil? How famous would we be if we gave that? And since we can't, well then, we're off the hook. It's easier to pretend God wants what we can't give than to accept that God wants what we have: our breath, our will, our privilege, along with whatever influence and energy and resources are therein. God wants those things willingly given to God's purposes. Because God made us and keeps us, because God knows what's best for us. And when we let ourselves know the truth that we know, friends, we know that trusting in empires is a fool's game. You know that, right? Every empire from Egypt until now has the same things in common: they are self-indulgent, abusive, and arrogant; and none of them has ever lasted. We are citizens of an empire, an empire no less self-indulgent, abusive or arrogant than any which came before. An empire that will not last forever. Does it scare you to think that? Or make you angry to be asked to think that? In empire years, ours is a baby. So maybe it will be around a long time. But back to the question. Am I seriously suggesting that justice, kindness, and humility are the alternative to Empire? I think Micah is. I think the whole Bible does. I think Jesus does, when disciples shake him awake in terror on that boat in the storm, and he says, what are you so afraid of? As if there's nothing in this world we can't lose and be okay without. Chosen-ness, biblical chosen-ness, always exists as an alternative to Empire. (Walter Brueggemann said that.) What it means to me, is that we can either consider ourselves God's chosen people, or we can consider ourselves an empire. But we cannot, biblically, faithfully, be both. One must trump the other, because the rules are simply too different. Empire demands selfishness, cynicism, and pride. Armies, money, leadership, alliances. Aggression, coercion, and power. Unyielding power. And faith in the power of men and women to save humanity. And friends, the best of us are not interested in saving all of us. Only God cares for such a project as that. God’s project operates on justice, kindness, and humility. They are so little and undramatic. So quotidian, if you will. Do you know that word? It means daily and never done. And, most of all, ordinary. Like laundry and dirty dishes. No one anywhere imagines laundry done once and for all. My laundry will be done when I'm dead, and probably there will still be a load waiting to go into the dryer. We can do justice, kindness, and humility all day today and have just as much to do tomorrow and the day after. Because tomorrow will have its own set of human beings in need of all three. Micah was a small-town preacher from Bethlehem. Like King David. And Jesus. Between them, actually. A lovely preacher, though virtually ignored in his own time and place. The essence of his preaching was hope. Quotidian hope. Hope re-centered in little-ness. In the ordinary, in the everyday lives of people who know God made us and saved and sustains us. Hope re-centered away from Empire, away from government and religion. Both are corrupt beyond redemption, Micah was not afraid to say. He said that the only hope his country had left lay in whether or not ordinary, god-fearing people would choose to do what they already knew God wanted them to do. Would you pray with me? Naaman was a foreigner – and Syrian at that. Syrian, mind you. He was general of the army of Syria, called Aram in the story. Naaman's Aramean army had recently crushed Israel and carried young girls away as slaves, one of whom lived in Naaman's own house. Today we call such men – what? Syrian militants who attack other countries and enslave their citizens? Terrorists, right? We call them terrorists.
Not the Bible, though. The Bible's adjective for Naaman the foreigner is “highly favored of the Lord.” The Bible says it was the Lord who gave him the victory in battle, battle against Israel whose children were captured and enslaved. Friends, I cannot say the Bible has an answer for every question of our lives. But one thing I know for sure: there are more lessons here than we can learn in one lifetime. Would you pray with me? How you, O God, manage to teach redemption out of violence and war is a mystery to us. And yet, our own hearts are neither free nor clean. We covet. We wish harm upon our enemies. We need much faith if we are to let ourselves know the truth of our own fear and weakness. Let us read and hear your word with faith, we pray. Amen. How rarely I open my commentary on 2nd Kings became clear from a note I found there, dated July 14th, 1998. “Annette, congrats on being officially voted in. That made me very happy. I'm leaving for a 5-day vacation so I won't be there Wednesday or Sunday. Rob D. already knows I won't be there Sunday. Also, here are the ushers for Sunday: Andy C., Michael U., Alisa T. Andy and Michael will find a 4th person, perhaps Mitchell, and Andy has the notes I made about what needs to happen. I think they'll do a great job. See you next week. Greg.” The church knows something of the healing of Naaman – more from Luke, chapter 4, than from 2nd Kings, chapter 5. Jesus' mention of it made his hometown congregation so angry they tried to throw him off a cliff – on the same day they praised his parents for what a good son they'd raised. They tried to kill him, simply for pointing out that God chose to heal a Syrian leper rather than a Jewish one. How afraid does a people have to be, to get so worked up over the idea of God being kind to foreigners? There's the story-you-know; today is the story-we-don't-know, the story of Gehazi. Gehazi isn't a foreigner. He's Jewish – and religious. A prophet in training. An assistant pastor, we might call him in church. In the service of Elisha, 2nd Kings says, as Samuel had been to Eli once upon a time. Naaman is headed home from Israel now, healed both of leprosy and his arrogance. He professes faith in the God of Israel, and he promises henceforth to worship Yahweh only. Furthermore, as a symbol of his gratitude, Naaman offers Elisha a fortune: ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. Two to three million dollars to us. Every penny of which Elisha refused, as was – and is – entirely proper. The healing of God is not for sale. The grace of God is not for sale. Instead, Naaman asks for two things. He asks for some dirt – two mule loads are enough, apparently – to take home and spread around so he can worship Yahweh on the ground where he'd first met Yahweh. Secondly, he asks for some pliancy around the interpre- tation of the first commandment. “Yes, I'm only really going to worship the God of Elisha,” he says, “but I still have to work for Aram, which means I'm going to have to pretend to worship those other gods. So, just know, really, I don't mean it.” Naaman is gone from Elisha just long enough for Gehazi to drum up his angle on the offering Naaman mentioned. Gehazi catches up to him with an adjusted explanation. Turns out there's need for a small gift, after all – just one talent of silver and two sets of clothes. $15,000 and the clothes. Some other prophets just arrived and need to be outfitted. Can Naaman help? Classic, I am telling ya. I've been in ministry a long time. It’s a classic, minister, sideways way of pretending their malfeasance is for the benefit of others. Naaman couldn’t be happier. He gives Gehazi double what he asked for, plus servants to carry it back – 150 pounds of silver, plus the clothes. Gehazi has his hidey hole picked out, and he's back at work before Elisha could miss him. Of course Elisha missed him. Elisha is a prophet. We know Elisha always knows what’s going on around him. Furthermore, Elisha is Gehazi’s teacher, his mentor, his spiritual director. Elisha gives Gehazi the chance to turn this mess around. Gehazi declines. Then, Elisha sounds just like Bill C.'s grandma, when he and his brother were acting up: “I seen what you done and I know what you're up to.” Elisha goes on: the leprosy that once afflicted Naaman would now cling to Gehazi and his descendants. The question that clings to me as the story closes is: did Naaman also know? Did Naaman also know that Gehazi was lying? Did Gehazi really fool him or did Naaman give away the treasure knowing full well he was being swindled? It's always the question, isn't it, when we're asked to help? Whether or not we help depends upon who's asking – and if we believe they're being true. Because, unlike Naaman – who felt privileged to be able to give – our own sense of privilege too often has us feeling like stakeholders, complicit in the outcome of the investment we're being asked to make. What if Naaman knew? What if he knew and gave Gehazi twice what he asked for anyway? Does that make him crazy or faithful? And is that question “either/or”? Everyone knows, don't be like Gehazi. “Don't be like Gehazi” is a perfectly good sermon. It’s also a really good theme for a mid-career pastors' conference. But what about “be like Naaman”? The Bible says he was God's highly favored. We first hear of him from Jesus, but it's almost as if Naaman's heard of Jesus too: the things Jesus says about giving everything you have to follow him; stories of Zacchaeus,and Jesus’s friend Mary and her perfume. “Be like Naaman,” who was healed not only of his gross skin disease but his arrogance – the arrogance with which he insulted Elisha in the beginning, that turned to gratitude that had him on his knees ready to give Elisha all he had at the end, because of what God had done for him at his baptism in the Jordan river. “Be like Naaman,” who couldn't wait to give away his fortune to anyone who asked, apparently, regardless of their motive or their reason – as if he didn't even want it, as if it didn't much matter if he was rich or poor, or what other people did or didn't do. As if what mattered is what God had done for him. Of the dozen sermons in this story, one runs below them all: God does as God chooses. And if we can get quiet enough to listen, the same true things stay true. Hear two of those true things: ONE: God loves whom God loves, whether we like it or not. And however articulately we state or how deeply we believe in this world's most sacred standards of who is right or wrong or good or bad or who belongs or doesn't, we'll never pre-determine God’s preference. And if the Bible is any indicator at all, God’s preference leans to the poor, the outcast, the foreigner. TWO: Knowing God changes people's values. Before he knew the Lord, Naaman cared deeply about his own reputation. How he was greeted mattered to him. Afterward, he bowed in gratitude to the same man. Jesus said, Give to anyone who asks. Naaman did. Was he a fool? was he a victim? or was he, simply, a very grateful, faithful man with his priorities finally in order? And if he was, what does that mean to you, a person of faith today? Has your experience of God left you more grateful than arrogant, more generous than suspicious, and more sure than ever that God chooses and God favors whomever God chooses and favors, for God's purposes in the world today? – just like God has always done. Would you pray with me? Having promised certain of his enemies their blood feud would die with him, King David finally does die. But he dies a liar, because with his last breath he instructs his son Solomon to kill all those enemies. Thus, murder is King Solomon's first use of kingly power.
Solomon, you'll remember, was not natural heir to Israel's throne. Nathan the preacher and Bathsheba his mother colluded to coerce the dying David to skip over his oldest living son, Adonijah, in order to crown Solomon. So naturally, Solomon is also forced to kill Adonijah – along with others, including his father's fixer, Joab. It's ugly business, being king. Then King Solomon lies down and dreams that he's wise and he'll be rich to boot. God says so, in his dream at least, and the church of my childhood more or less believed the same: that, based on Solomon, wisdom is the thing to ask for. Pray like you don't want wealth and power in order for God to give it to you. Those same preachers always smiled a little sideways at all of Solomon's wives and ladies. One thousand of them, the Bible says; the marriages, at least, forged for political and economic alliances, Egypt being the first. Egypt! The Bible of my childhood was simpler. Solomon was wise and he built the temple. That's what we knew and loved about him, which only works so long as we skipped acres of scripture. Our Thursday Bible Study students never skip those chapters. One summed Solomon up this way: “the whole thing is just so smarmy” (think of The Godfather ). And therein is the problem – the problem of finding our way as God's people, using people as our guides; the problem of confusing God with people who put God’s name on their own dreams; the problem with being more interested in the ways of kings and presidents than we are interested in the ways of God. We are inevitably forced to shave the parts off his character that don’t feed the story we need, to have the life in God we dream of for ourselves. Then the scripture offers up a story of two mothers and their baby sons, a possible side door into the hall of justice, where God-blessed kings judge prostitutes. Let's pray. Some days and places, more than others, O God, bear no resemblance to grace. Where hurt and hate and constant pain thrive like weeds, choking every kindness trying to take root. “How to live in hope and faith, O God?” we come asking once again. Amen. If the story were thirty-one books later, we'd call it a parable. A parable of justice, maybe. Two women – working mothers; business partners, it appears; and housemates, along with their kids. We don't usually get this much detail about such lowly characters. Each has a newborn son. One baby died. Both claim the living son is her own. Their dispute lands before the king himself. Are these the moments for which he dreamed of being wise? Settling such small-time cases? Is his outrageous solution some indication of his small regard for everyone involved? “We'll slice the child in two,” he says, “and give each mother half.” My brain and belly hate this story, because I've read chapter 2. King Solomon's not playing here. He’ll do it! This is the kind of king he is. But if I try to think in parables, I can keep listening. Maybe wisdom's aim isn't fairness, but to cleave open the truth. In which case, it does. My childhood church said, essentially, all's well that ends well. Except, it isn't and it doesn't – does it? My brain feels better, but my gut still hurts. Is my gut less God-given than my brain? At least one mama is always without her baby, and all is not well in the world. Especially if the people of God have agreed to admire a king who proposes to cleave a child in two. Who is the one who taught us in parables? And how did he teach us to hear them? What does he teach us here? When we sit long enough with this story as parable, we will realize who the hero is . . . and he is not Solomon. She is the second mother. The one who will sacrifice her own motherhood before she'll agree to cleave a child. Solomon may dream that this is wisdom – and all of history with him. But she'll have no part of it. She doesn't change her story, but neither will she bend to evil. Life isn't “either/or” to her. So justice can't be either. And yet, amazingly, we give all the credit to the king. It's he who saved the day, according to his fans. Finally, for a parable to work, it can't be about the characters, but about the listeners. About us, about seeing the light it trips in us, seeing ourselves in that light . . . and how we need to change. I know the second mama is the teacher, the one showing Jesus to me, reminding me: ● that to follow Christ is never to be surprised at how broken this world is; ● how badly the best of humanity is prone to act, especially from places of great power; ● that the fact that kings and presidents know what is right is no guarantee they'll do it; ● that if we are surprised to see them protect themselves at the cost of human decency, we are the foolish ones; ● that this lowly woman before a king – she is how God is in parables. God never pushes front and center, never speaks in the loudest voice. God waits on the porch and watches for us to come around; ● that the fact that Solomon was “smarmy” did not make him of no use to God – thank God, or we are all useless too. And of his dream I will say this: he knew what a king was supposed to do. Give me, O God, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern so many people? (my paraphrase) But knowing right from wrong is not wisdom and neither is it justice, if there is a difference. This woman the Bible makes sure we know was a prostitute is the hero of the story. We can't unknow it once we do. We know we ought to be like her, should we ever face her choices. Justice consists of the choices we make in the midst of the terror and tragedy of this world. But justice in the daylight is hard. We're more like the other mother than we can readily admit. Fair matters to us. If we've been broken, taken from, or offended, we are as likely as her to deny others what we don't have, rather than let mercy and goodness thrive. The difference between the two women is what Richard Rohr calls moral conversion, the difference between fairness and God's justice. Fairness means no one gets more or better than Mama Number One. Justice allows the mother of the living child to act against her own self-interest for the good of all people. That is moral conversion. Moral conversion is critical to life in Christ. Nothing suggests it's easy. But neither does such faith ask us to pretend that evil isn't evil or that broken things aren't broken. We can hate how hard and hurtful this world is – and choose to live by love, trusting God is always there: above; below; behind; ahead – like we pray at the end of every Sunday. Let's pray now. Once upon a time there was a preacher named Nathan. He was the personal preacher to a king. It was the worst preacher job ever, because the preacher sourced his advice from God and it was never the advice the king wanted to hear. Which meant that every time the king called for the preacher, the preacher risked his cushy job and his neck. But he did it anyway, because that’s what brave preachers do.
The first time the king called for him, the king said, “I have no enemies left to fight, so I’m thinking I will build an enormous temple to show everyone how good God has been to me in all my wars.” “Yes,” said the preacher, before he checked with God. “No,” he said after. And the king seemed to take it pretty well. He prayed as if he thought God was right to tell him, “wait.” But then, instead of building a building – and in spite of having no enemies – the king went back to war. He killed a zillion people and took all their gold and bronze, and the people thought him wonderful, as people are prone to do when their king is winning all the time. In all that war and conquest, the preacher isn’t mentioned. But the king got tired of fighting wars himself, so he outsourced that dirty business to a man named Joab. Today we’d call him a fixer. The king stayed home and gazed upon the city he had built with that stolen gold and bronze and upon all the people he believed loved him for it. The king was so rich and powerful he no longer knew the difference between wealth and power, between what he wanted and deserved, between what could be stolen and devoured – and what God meant for him to have. He lost all sense of being king and he didn’t even know it. Until the preacher came back uninvited and told a simple story about a farmer and his lamb. Having forgotten altogether the point of being king, this pretend king was outraged. And ordered his own death. The preacher stood his ground while the fake king raged. Then in his bravest preacher voice told him, “God says, ‘It is you. I gave you everything and would have given more. And this is how you treated me? You raped and murdered the ones who trusted you. That you might die by your own hand is too small a sentence for the evil that you’ve done. The sword you have wielded without regard for justice shall dangle over your house forevermore. "Everything you have done in secret shall be done to you in public before the eyes of everyone who now thinks you great. Your contempt for me will be paid for by generations of your sons and begin this very night with the youngest one of all.’” Friends, everyone is someone’s son or daughter. There is no such thing as selfish, when we are choosing how to live. Every move moves every life around us for better and for worse. The richest and most powerful move more lives than we ever will admit, pretending to ourselves we didn’t mean it or that we didn’t know. God knows and calls the ones who claim him to tell each other what we know about ourselves and others. We are each other’s preachers. And there are sons and daughters dying just for being born in a world in love with whatever gold and bronze will buy, in love with winning wars against enemies invented because their gold would look better on our walls. The weeping king prayed again and did his best to say “I’m sorry.” But what was done was done was done. He rose from prayer having no idea how many tears he had left to cry. There was to be another baby. The Lord named him Jedidiah, a name almost no one remembers – that ancient love of money forever on our minds. The king’s fixer, meanwhile, was busy at the front. He called the king back to battle and, naturally, he went. Went and took yet another crown from yet another head and put it on his own. Enslaved another town to pick and ax and saw. For after all, he was the king. For his part, that preacher, Nathan, outlived the king and advised him to the end. And then Jedidiah after that, whose other name was Solomon. But Nathan always did his best, remembering he did not speak for kings, but for God. Would you pray with me? Weeks ago, speaking of Noah, I said covenant wasn’t the right word for the rainbow story, because in Genesis 6, God is the only one promising anything. Noah and his family agree to nothing. The only covenant made is by God, to God: “when I see a rainbow in the sky, I’ll remember that I promised not to kill you all no matter how much I want to.”
Today’s text, Joshua 24, is a true covenant story. God has kept a promise, and the people make a promise in return – a big promise. It’s the Bible, so naturally everyone repeats the promise three times. Joshua writes it all down and then moves a stone beside a tree – also a Bible thing – and then declares, “This stone shall be as a witness against you if you ever break your promise,” he says, also three times. But hardly anybody remembers Joshua said that. Today we remember. Let’s pray. If only we truly trusted, O God, that where you want to take us is where we most truly want to be, that how you choose to lead us is how we most truly want to go. For this wisdom and this courage we pray. Amen. Until this year, verse 15 was the only verse of Joshua I could quote from memory. And not because I’ve read it so often in the Bible, but because it was on a decoupage plaque in my in-laws’ bathroom for all the years I knew them: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” You only have to google the first three words, “As for me.” There are thousands. All of them for sale, of course, at sites with names like “hischild.com.” The problem – because you know I am always going to find a problem – is that verse 15 is not the end of the text; it’s not even a natural break in the text. It’s mid-conversation. The natural break in the text is verse 28, “Then Joshua dismissed the people, each to his own place of inheritance.” Which, to no one’s surprise, is not a big seller at hischild.com. Nor is his parting declaration: “This stone shall be a witness against us; a witness against you, if you deal falsely with your God.” Emphasizing the Hebrew insinuation of the marriage covenant throughout the text, The Message translation reads, “if you cheat on your God.” When I googled “this stone shall” I got a verse from Matthew 21 and lots of memes about kidney stones. “This too shall pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it shall pass.” But nothing from Joshua 24. Because, obviously, who wants to read that, stumbling into their in-laws’ bathroom first thing in the morning? Joshua isn’t decorating. He’s giving his own eulogy. When he dies, there will be none left who knew Egypt, only people who knew people who knew Egypt. So much is lost. In time. In translation. They’ve arrived – Canaan; Promised Land. Of course they are happy, but they have no idea what they are doing; and they have no idea that they have no idea what they are doing. His eulogy is Joshua’s last effort at reminding them: where they came from, how they got here, what their choices are now. Jewish history calls this text “the covenant is renewed.” And while Christians since that time prefer to quote Joshua, we aren’t him. I’m pretty sure the Jewish storytellers didn’t intend listeners to identify with him, the same way gospel writers didn’t intend us to identify with Jesus all the time – standing next to Jesus pointing our own fingers at those self-righteous Pharisees. WE are the self-righteous Pharisees. And we are the wandering descendants of Abraham, people headed into an unknown future, forever tempted to glorify a past that is, at best, sketchy. And so, for the sake of faithfulness to the text, and for the sake of faithfulness in our lives and life together here and now, I suggest we sit not with Joshua, but with them, to listen. To listen and consider the choice Joshua presents them and to which they commit. Choose this day whom you will serve. The two choices: God who brought you out of Egypt or Foreign God. Joshua has recited the history of their God, beginning with Abraham, and in the telling referred to some, but hardly all, of the available foreign gods from which they have to choose. “Oh we choose the same God as you” is their instant answer. Joshua argues back. “It’s no small thing you are promising,” he says; “this God is jealous. This God punishes the worship of foreign gods.” But they are unswayed. Why not, after all? God is finally on their side. After forty years of wandering they’re home. They just whipped the Amorites, and they now occupy their land. What is not to love about this God now? Three times, Joshua argues. Three times, the people insist, “We will serve the Lord only. God forbid that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods!” God forbid, indeed! Again, from The Message, “We’d never forsake God! Never! We’d never leave God to worship other gods!” Three times, they say “Never!” When, of course, they did. Everyone’s had that day of faith, the day we thought we’d never doubt God again. Days that sometimes didn’t even last a day. And the Hebrew people’s enthusiasm rings sad because we know they really meant it when they said it. And they truly believed they’d follow through. Because God had been so good that day or that week or that year, they let themselves believe that faith was something said and done. They had won a battle and thought the war against the Canaanites was over. In fact, it had hardly begun. Who led Israel in the very last battle to drive out the very last Canaanites, do you remember? I’ve preached it a time or two. King David – defeating the Jebusites to take the ground that became Jerusalem. It was a long time after Joshua. Faith based only on past small victories will not sustain us in an unknown future. Nor does it promise to. Faith comes as manna in the wilderness – daily and only enough for today. 14,600 days in the wilderness was meant to get them in the habit of trusting God one day at time. Turned out, that wasn’t enough days. And then, there were those other gods, the ones that Joshua mentions: Abraham’s originals, from back before, when he lived in Haran; and Egypt’s; and those belonging to the Amorites, so recently defeated. A foreign god is any other one, of course, any other one than the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the one we are reading about here, the god in no way confined to the tiny thoughts and words we have to think and say. Anyone who is not the God of Joshua in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New. (By the way, Joshua and Jesus are the same name in Hebrew.) Seems to me, Joshua’s three examples make good archetypes of foreign gods of every time and place, including ours. Abraham’s – back when he was Abram, son of Terah; Egypt’s – the land of slavery; and the Amorites – recently defeated. I’m renaming these three foreign gods: 1. Possessions; 2. The Past; and 3, simply, Power. Abram’s people back in Haran carried their gods in their pockets or on a donkey’s back. We know so from Jacob’s story, remember. When he fled his Uncle Laban’s farm, he stole Uncle Laban’s gods. And when Uncle Laban caught them on the road, Jacob made Rachel sit on them in the ladies’ tent, knowing her dad wouldn’t look for them there. (If you’d like this explained in detail, you can ask me later.) The things we carry in our pockets or somewhere else: money; toys; food in the fridge; the fridge itself; the roof over the fridge; the paid light bill that keeps the fridge cold; clothes, a car, a bank account. We may not bow down to them, but our very lives are bent to their getting and their keeping. At what point is it worship? Things are means, not ends – at least they’re supposed to be. Except we, or me anyway, care which things we have. (Freegans?) The awesome thing about things, of course, is that they are so “thingy”; so touchable, tastable, visible: my flannel pajamas when I’m cold; things that I can touch and hug and pet and feel, that I can look at over and over and over again. I can open my bank account online and know my rent and my lights and my gas tank are good for another month. OR I can open my bank account and know that they are NOT good at all. But I know exactly how not good they are. A student at Subway one day was counting all her pocket money to see if she could also have a drink with her lunch. Turned out, no – because the math was plain. Things make promises we know they can’t keep, but we settle for those broken promises more often than we admit, because things demand no trust from us. No patience and no faith. But they are dependable. There are there. I get why Jacob stole Laban’s gods. They were insurance. Because, like it or not, the new God of Abraham wasn’t always so predictable. Remember how the Israelites remembered their past in Egypt? Not as slavery. Every time things got scary in freedom (aka wilderness), they begged Moses to take them back to the fleshpots of Egypt. The perfect past – the “good, old days” when life was easier, simpler, slower; people were better; cities were safer; children more respectful; TV was better, movies were better. According to a story I read this week, the evening news was done right, back when Walter Cronkite reported it. When it was unbiased. “He just told the truth.” Why do we romanticize the past? Obviously, it’s easier to bear, with the pain shaved off. We don’t romanticize anything about the past more than we romanticize war. I saw in yesterday’s paper IU ROTC cadets wearing WWI uniforms for homecoming. Really? I’ve even had a little puppy fever lately. But luckily Rob and Erika got a puppy. and they have to walk him twenty times a day until he learns not to pee on the floor. So I don’t want a puppy now, because they reminded me what is true about puppies. Obviously, forgetting – or storing – past memory is a useful part of our brains’ design. We couldn’t function if a lifetime of pain, trauma, emotion was constantly replaying in our thoughts. But I mean to speak spiritually – glorifying, worshipping, serving the past where God already did what God wanted done, through the lives of other people, who were not us. We live here and now. This is where God can use us. Only here and now can we hear and know God calling us. Here and now is the only time and place in which we can serve God. Finally, there are the Amorites and the Hittites. (All week I’ve been saying the gigabytes instead of the Girgashites.) The occupants of Canaan. All those descendants of the son Noah cursed, the morning of his terrible hangover. I have no doubt why their gods would have been a temptation. They had towns and cities, protected by walls and armies. Power is what kept them safe. Economic power. Military power. What is not to love and want about that? Especially by a people who have never tasted it? No foreign god will be harder for Israel to resist than this. The Amorites and gigabytes are just the beginning. When Egypt and Assyria go to war, the prophets remind Israel of the covenant, insisting that faithfulness to it forbids alliances, forbids them to pick a side. We are to trust in God alone. Which sounds very churchy and wise from here. Not so much to people who could hear Assyrian horses pawing the ground and snorting. And that really is the whole thing, isn’t it? God says, “Worship me only; serve me only; depend on me only. No matter what or who is at the door. No matter what promises they are making.” The people do their best to promise. But then, God appears to go to sleep for 400 years of slavery in Egypt and then act surprised when we humans are the teensiest bit tempted to cast our lot with the offers we can see and hear and taste and sign onto – the job with the biggest salary, the team with the biggest army, the leader who makes us feel the least afraid of the unknown future. We know all those promises are likely to be broken. But we cast our lot all the same, simply because they are promises we can see and hear and touch, promises that more people than not around us are professing faith in too. And there’s a certain certainty in that. Three times Joshua asks them to choose whom they will serve. Three times they promise the same: The Lord our God, they say, and they mean every word – from the very bottom of their hearts – being people just like us, hoping against hope that life will never be so hard again. Joshua knows better, even if they don’t. Three times he reminds them. Each reminder is also a warning, foreshadowing the entire story to come. Then, finally, he blessed them. Having done all he was meant to do, Joshua died. And the people’s promise became their way of life, as much as it is ours. Let’s pray. Every week I feel like there are five to seven Bible texts you really need to hear to get the context for one. Just like me at the gym. My trainer feels like I need to do five to seven sets of my circuit, if I’m going to really benefit from being there. Like you, I prefer two. I’ll settle for three. But I’m not going to tolerate five or six or seven.
This week I’d have added verses from Luke 8, Colossians 1, and all of Exodus 15. Exodus 15 is The Song of the Sea (see how I’m doing it anyway), the liturgy Israel composed to memorialize the Red Sea miracle. The people’s fussing and complaining is conveniently left out of the song – appropriately so, as it is a song about God’s faithfulness, not theirs. History becomes liturgy, the way events become stories. The liturgy is sung and sung and sung until it can be sung by heart. The singing becomes the act of faith, so that when trouble closes in again – because it surely will again – the words and tune of faith are limber, ready to be flexed again at a moment’s notice. Let’s pray together: God of heaven and earth, God of land and sea, God of Tranquility and Terror, we never leave your reach. We are never outside your sight. Would that we might walk and breathe and work and rest inside this truth we know for sure on days this light and full of peace. Amen. One of my neighbors has two young kids and sometimes we’ll visit on my driveway in the evening. She’ll procrastinate going home because she hates bath and bedtime. “It’s awful,” she says. “They act shocked and offended every single night, as if bedtime is something I invented that day.” Her kids are like the Hebrews on nearly every page of the Old Testament, positively shocked that God expects them to do anything they don’t want to do, something difficult or dangerous or simply unpleasant. It’s been 400 years since Joseph. His descendant, Moses, was raised in pharaoh's palace, until he ran away – for good reason. Moses is an old man when he meets his God in the wilderness. God talks from inside a burning bush. As they talk here, God and Moses will talk to one another for the next forty years, using bushes, rods, and shepherd’s hooks, snakes and rocks and quail and plagues. It’s the plagues that turn the story from Egypt towards promised land, from slavery towards freedom. Plagues of frogs and grasshoppers and oozy skin sores, water turned to blood, hail and darkness, and dead baby boys. It’s gross. But that’s the Bible. All of the plagues are sung about as battles between the gods – Pharaoh’s and Moses’ gods. Pharaoh finally concedes. When the Hebrew baby boys survive – Passover, remember – Pharaoh tells him they can go. They’re barely gone a month; Pharaoh reneges on the deal. He musters his entire army to go and fetch them back. Geographically the text gets a little tricky from here. Theologically, it does not. The Hebrews are between a rock and a hard place. “Hell if I do and hell if I don’t,” my mother called it. Like the choice between being eaten by a lion and being eaten by a bear. I’d rather the lion eat the bear and leave me out of it, thank you very much. The sea to the front, Pharaoh’s army to the rear. They can drown or be cut down by the sword. They do what people do. They panic. They cry. They blame their leadership. They fall out of formation. There’s noise. Chaos. “Were there no graves in Egypt?” they complain to Moses, which is to say, “Why didn’t you kill us before we walked all this way?” Moses does what leaders do – fathers, mothers, teachers, platoon sergeants. He yells at them to “SHUT UP!” But Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again.” And in saying so, Moses does what? He makes promises he has no way of keeping at the time he’s making them. He speaks for God before God has spoken to him, about this particular problem anyway. What’s Moses’ aim, do you think? I think he wants them to calm down. Nothing good is born of panic. We’re not our best selves during panic. Nonsense makes sense when we’re panicked. Back when my paramedic sister rode an ambulance, she’d tell me such nonsense. Like the gunshot victim who fought her as she tried to start an IV – because he was terrified of needles. “You have a bullet in your gut, sir,” she had to remind him. Is Moses panicked? Maybe. We aren’t given to know how he feels. We know only what he does. What he does is, he leads as best he can. Because how we feel need not determine what we do. I appreciate that about him. God, apparently, not so much. Moses offers this encouragement to the people, to which God responds, with kind of an exasperated tone (to my mind), “Why are you stopping? Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go!” A clown followed four-year-old Mariah into a room at a birthday party once. When she turned around and saw him, she literally ran up her daddy’s body like a squirrel up a tree. There’s no mystery why kids are scared of clowns. Clowns are terrifying. Being trapped between a sword and the sea is terrifying, as Syrian women and children on the beaches of Turkey today know better than us. And it seems awfully privileged of God to ask, “why are you stopping?” assuming God has the advantage, the privilege, of being able to see well beyond the border of that moment. A similar biblical moment comes to mind from Luke chapter 8. Jesus and his disciples are in a boat crossing the sea of Galilee. Jesus falls asleep and a storm comes up. The disciples are sure they’ll die. Just like the Hebrews, they blame their leader for not caring if they die. Jesus wakes up, looks around and responds much the same as in Exodus, “For God’s sake, what are you are so afraid of?” As if to say, it’s just a little storm. It’s just a little water; it’s just death by drowning. You act like dying is the worst that might happen to you. What are you so afraid of? Only that’s not what he says in Luke. He says, why are you so afraid? in Mark. In Luke he says, where is your faith? And it’s so, so easy to rush to verse 16, to the miracle, to consider too lightly that God is instructing Moses to instruct these people, tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to flex the faith (which they’ve just put on, remember), to step into the water and keep walking no matter what, knowing full well that as their feet sink in the sand, the sword is gaining on them. Again, how does this fit the broad biblical narrative? Old Testament miracle stories are the bread and butter of American evangelical Christian nationalism. From them I learned that God always rescues us and that our enemies will inevitably recognize ours as the one true God. Extrapolated from there was the understanding that we are the one true nation, the one true people called and blessed to lead the world. And being the one true and faithful people, we can depend on God in any given situation in which we are trapped between any given sword and sea, any particular crisis, to be miraculously evacuated to the safety reserved for God‘s chosen people. Long before that was the American narrative, it was Israel’s narrative until exile. It was Israel’s narrative in the days of David. But this story took its final shape in exile. And exile shadows every story that leads to it. Even the people telling the story know that God with us does not mean God delivers us from every earthly toil and trouble, that God with us does not mean we shall not taste death. You’ve read the story. How many of them died in the wilderness? Every single one of them. As will all of us. In this chapter, they believe themselves free of Egypt only to find out they weren’t free of Pharaoh. They got free of Pharaoh and his army to discover, just two chapters later, they are not free of starvation. Right after the Song of the Sea, they’re begging to go back to slavery. Slavery to the very people who just chased them with swords. Only they don’t call it slavery, do they? They call it sitting around the fleshpots of Egypt feasting on cucumbers and melons and fish. Friends, over and over and over again, we will take the slavery we know over the trouble we don’t. Forgetting the gospel we knew for sure yesterday, last week, last year. The event and person of Jesus has taken away every cause for fear. Death holds no threat over us. The exile may shadow the Old Testament. The cross shadows the whole story, from Genesis forward. We live ever in that shadow. Jesus appeared caught between capitulation to Empire and certain death. Momentarily, but only momentarily, he prays for a third option. It doesn’t come. He doesn’t panic. He rises. And we will too. So we need not panic either. Jesus rose and we will too. He rose from that prayer and moved, calmly, fearlessly, pur- posefully, intentionally, in the direction of death, so that we can too – seeing, believing and knowing that death at the hands of this world is hardly the worst thing, hardly some- thing worth panicking over. After all, we live these lives and our life together in the shadow of the cross, from whence we know that death is barely the beginning. Would you pray with me? |
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