Promises Promises: Year A, Proper 5

Genesis 12:1-9; Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm 33:1-12; Psalm 50:7-15; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

The Call of Abram to establish his legacy in the land of Canaan is a powerful tale. The Lord God speaks, and Abram responds with an epic movement of family and possessions. He stops at a spot sacred to the Canaanites – an oak tree, or perhaps a standing stone – and claims the land for himself and his descendants. In an act that at once desecrates and resacralizes, he builds an altar to his own god. Then he moves on to the hill country, to the higher elevations at Beth-el (“house of God”), pitches his tents, and builds another altar. It is an archetypal saga of yore, on the order of Malory, Shakespeare, and Tolkien. The Apostle Paul updates and extends the promise made to Abraham to “all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.” Further, he tells his 1st Century Roman community that the promise now rests on grace, extended to all those who trust that God is able to do what God promised.

This week’s portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans references the faith of Abraham – the trust that Abraham had in the promise received from God that Abraham and his descendants would inherit the earth. Just as actions that are required by the law convey no credit for one’s personal commitment to justice – such as wage/hour laws – Paul cautions that if the earth is inherited (appropriated?) by those who follow the law, God’s promises are null and void. The law, Paul says, brings “wrath” – the rightful (just) response of God to what humans have done. Human civilization inevitably leads to retributive justice and ultimately to the kind of empire that puts tariffs on food imports, or exports old-growth rainforests in defiance of God’s distributive justice-compassion.

Behind all of Paul’s circling language lies the conviction that the law – the normalcy of civilization – leads inevitably to injustice because the law requires retribution – payback. There is no grace (free gift) under the law. The law does not offer radical fairness. Under the law there must be winners and losers. But those are justified who trust in God’s direct action in the world to establish God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, both through the life and sacrificial death of Jesus and participation with Jesus in that same program. Their trust is credited back to them as justice itself. Throughout his letter, Paul makes it clear that the promise of God to establish that kingdom preempts human law.

The Elves skip Paul’s argument about how the purpose of circumcision was “to make [Abraham] the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them.” Instead they cut to the chase: “For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” Where there is no law [regarding circumcision], Paul says, there is no violation. By the same token, if there is no law regarding who owns what portion of the Planet, then the radically fair distribution of the resources of the land preempts any imperial claim.

What seems to be left out of today’s portion of the argument is the choice that we have to join or not to join the ongoing program of establishing God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion at all levels: individually, socially, politically, ecologically. Paul hints at the consequences of not joining the program when he speaks about how “the law brings wrath.” Tradition interprets Paul’s argument about the wrath of the law versus the righteousness of faith as meaning Old Testament retribution versus New Testament grace, earned by belief that Jesus died to pay for human sin. Certainly, cherry-picked Hosea warns of the consequences of abandoning the God of Abraham and following Ba’al. But Hosea is preaching about an 8th Century B.C.E. political dispute between Judah and Israel about how to defeat the Assyrians. The Elves only included this reading because Matthew’s Jesus quotes Hosea in a non-sequitur – “Go and learn what this means,” he says, and then quotes Hosea 6:6a: “It is mercy I desire instead of sacrifice.” The rest of the passage from Hosea 6:6 says, “[I desire] the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” This is a crucial redaction on Matthew’s part. Hosea’s point is that knowledge of the nature of God as distributive justice-compassion is more important to God than public ritual. Matthew’s point is for pious Christians who were not comfortable with the kind of social company Jesus kept. Matthew’s Jesus says “After all, I did not come to enlist religious folks but sinners!” The Five Gospels, p. 163.

The Elves dance through Matthew Chapter 9, cobbling together a breath-taking combination of images. First, Jesus chooses “Matthew” as the first disciple. Then he challenges the Pharisees who questioned his judgment about “dining with toll collectors and sinners.” Jesus says, “Since when do the able-bodied need a doctor? It is the sick who do,” thereby setting up the story of healing Jairus’ daughter, eight verses later, framing the story of the unfortunate woman – who, if she lived in 21st Century America would have had no health insurance, and would have been dead after 12 years of untreated vaginal bleeding. These stories seem to illustrate the “mercy” of God, as opposed to the retributive systems of the Pharisees. They are exaggerations, meant to convict members of Matthew’s community, who perhaps had some doubts about whether the poor and disenfranchised deserved justice. These stories illustrate that sinners, collaborators, outcasts of any kind only need to trust in the power of Jesus to do what he says he will do. They seem to reinforce Paul’s claim that God’s promise extends to everyone.

Abraham did not “distrust” – Paul’s word. Instead, he was fully convinced that God was able to do and would do what God promised. For 6th Century B.C.E. people in Babylonian exile, this promise kept hope alive that they would be restored to their own land. Abraham’s trust resulted in a reckoning – a distribution – of justice. Paul makes the intellectual leap that those who trust God’s ability to raise Jesus from the dead will also have given to them the ability to participate in that same distribution of justice-compassion.

What happens in the 21st Century to the promises of primordial gods and the updates to those promises by 1st Century mystics? The metaphors in all these readings can quickly descend to 21st Century irrelevance and dangerous Christian hegemony. The last time anyone did something similar to Abraham’s action was in August 2007, when the Russians planted a flag under the polar icecap and claimed nearly half the Arctic seabed for themselves. Needless to say, an American scientist is claiming that the technical procedures for the dive were his, and so the spoils are in dispute. Paul says that Jesus was “handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.” Watch out. Substitutionary atonement (invented 900 years after the death of Jesus) is out there, roaring around, looking to trap the unwary. “Justification” does not mean being “saved” or “paid for,” “vindicated,” or “acquitted,” but means being made just – i.e., chosen, even ordained, as participants in God’s justice-compassion. In addition, there is a subtle anti-Jewish note in the story of the healing of the woman with the 12-year issue of blood if the woman is described as “unclean,” and Jesus is credited with defying Jewish law by allowing her to touch the fringes of his robe. See Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew (HarperOne, 2006) pp. 24; 119-166.

For 21st Century Christians, these readings make three points.

First, in terms of 21st Century political realities, there is no difference between the Russians planting their flag on the sea floor and Abram appropriating the sacred places of the Canaanites for his own god. Western world history is chock full of land grabs on the part of empires in the name of God and his Christ.

Second, taking Paul’s point whole-heartedly into the present day, the laws that human societies create eventually evolve into the kind of empires that grab the natural resources for themselves and demand that everyone else pay, thereby rendering God’s promise of distributive justice-compassion null and void. There are consequences to such violations of God’s law by imperial injustice, which may not be apparent. The “wrath of God” – the consequences – may be long in coming, but as the psalmist warns at the end of Psalm 51 (left out by those discriminatory Elves), “What right have you to recite my statutes, or take my covenant on your lips? . . . you give your mouth free rein for evil . . . but now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. Mark this, then, you who forget God, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no one to deliver. Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me; to those who go the right way I will show the salvation of God.” Some of those consequences include global warming, sudden and catastrophic climate change, and mass extinctions of humanity and other (more essential?) life forms.

Third – and perhaps most startling – is Paul’s insistence that faith trumps law every time. Everyone who lives in trust of God’s realm instead of relying on law is guaranteed the promise of distributive justice-compassion. This is the grace of a kenotic god, whose presence is justice and life and whose absence is injustice and death. The struggle is to discern the difference.

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