Put Your Own On First: Year A, Proper 13

Genesis 32:22-31; Isaiah 55:1-5; Psalm 17:1-7, 15; Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

The Elves may have cherry-picked Romans 9 in order to avoid anti-Jewish preaching. The portions not included certainly could be read by the literal or unwary as a diatribe against Judaism. Paul’s point of course is not anti-Jewish. He spells it out very clearly in those first five verses we are supposed to read: “They are Israelites,” he writes, “and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; . . . from them . . . comes the Messiah.” But he is disappointed that many Jews rejected the idea that Jesus is the Messiah. He argues that they relied on works mandated by law instead of faith in the ancient Covenant with God, which in Paul’s mind was renewed and manifested in the life and teachings of Jesus. Therefore, God has extended to Gentiles the opportunity to sign on to the Covenant. Jews, of course, then and now, would disagree that they failed to measure up to the promise of distributive justice-compassion.

Whether Paul’s polemics deserve attention or not, the whole series of readings for Proper 13 is about Covenant, starting with Isaiah 55. Just as God extended his Covenant with David to include the entire nation of Israel, so God now extends to all the world the opportunity to participate in the ongoing restoration of God’s Kingdom of distributive justice-compassion. The Feeding of the 5,000 is an illustration of the God that Jesus preaches in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:25-30), and it is an illustration of the invitation to abundant life extended by the prophet Isaiah. “Listen carefully to me and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant . . . .”

The story of Jacob wrestling with God (or the angel of God) is also used in Proper 24, Year C – but there it is an alternative to Jeremiah, and is purported to be related to the gospel and epistle readings. In Year A, we skip the rest of the Jacob story, his reconciliation with Esau, and his establishment of settlement at Bethel (Jerusalem), so that we can go directly to the story of Joseph, and continue the lineage to the birth of Jesus. But the story of Jacob’s fight with God is set in the middle of Jacob’s dilemma about how to deal with the coming meeting between himself and his estranged brother Esau. After the fight Jacob is reborn-renamed as Israel (the one who strives with God) because he has striven with God (the angel) and humans (Laban) and prevailed. The next thing that happens is reconciliation with Esau – distributive justice.

The point is that Covenant – living in partnership with God in distributive justice-compassion – means life here now, not there then. In other words, reconcile with your brother and you will participate in the available abundance. When we fight with God about it, we always get hurt. In other words, if we resist dealing with the injustices in life – such as robbing our brother/sister of their birth right – we may well end up mentally and/or physically impaired. This is not “judgment.” These are the consequences of not acting from radical abandonment of self-interest.

To return to Paul’s argument, only the radical abandonment of self-interest counts. The law does not require such action. Only faith in God’s realm produces salvation, which is life lived in partnership with God in justice-compassion. Works prescribed by law support the systems of injustice because we are not personally invested in them. We have a personal investment in reconciliation with friends, family, enemies.

Radical abandonment of self-interest (i.e., “love”) is easiest to understand at the corporate level. Commercial, political, social “self-interests” are targets that attract money, media, and throngs of dedicated workers, whether for church mission fields, political action committees, marches, rallies, enthusiasm, and results. Political and social liberalism in the United States would be closer to death than it is without the willingness of people to abandon immediate gratification for the greater good.

But where the rubber hits the road, or perhaps where the Apostle Paul got it at the gut level (see Romans 7:21-25), is in the mundane realities of day-to-day intimate living with self, family, friends. Traditional teaching and understanding have it backwards. Sacrificial love is not about throwing yourself under the bus. Sacrificial love means letting go of guilt and ego involvement. It means taking a break, nourishing yourself, saying goodbye. The first instruction the flight attendant gives us when the oxygen mask comes down is to put your own mask on first, then help the one next to you.

In a crisis, when Death is sitting on the chair beside your Mother, we want God to intervene, to save, to prevent the inevitable course – whether it is dictated by the medical profession, the legal profession, or the Church itself. But look at what Paul says in the rest of his polemic in Romans 9:14-18: “[God] has mercy on whomever he chooses, and [God] hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.” In other words, in God’s realm, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

Remember that the opposite to the Covenant – nonviolence, distributive justice-compassion, peace – is the theology of Empire: Piety, War (violence), Victory, and conditional peace. The theology of Empire requires victims: victims of war, and of domestic or public violence. Victims are the result of a justice system that is based on judgmental retribution and payback, not neutral fairness. Under Covenant, there can be neither victims nor enemies, because those who live by distributive justice-compassion know that true power lies in trusting God’s realm. Life under Covenant means the radical abandonment of self-interest. Those who love their enemies have no enemies.

When we are in alignment with that Covenant, intervention can be seen to be interference on the part of Empire, not the fulfillment of God’s distributive justice-compassion. Paul says later in Chapter 9:30-33: “Gentiles who did not strive for righteousness have attained it, that is righteousness through faith; but Israel, who did strive for the righteousness that is based on the law, did not succeed in fulfilling that law. Why not? Because they did not strive for it on the basis of faith, but as if it were based on works.”

When we let go and trust in the Covenant, everything falls into place. Does that mean that justice is served, or that suffering ends, or that miracles overturn the physical realities of the Universe as we know it? Of course not. Death is part of life, and life is whatever happens to us. What “works” is the marvelous course that opens out before us as soon as we let go of any thought of making something happen that is not already in the offing.

On the evening of July 3, a hospital dumped my Mother into a “skilled nursing/rehab” facility, which I was unable at the 11th hour to avoid. On Friday July 4th, the biggest political patriotic holiday in the United States, I had to say goodbye to her and fly 1,000 miles back to my home. All I could tell her was, I had done my best, and would have to trust the people in the system to do their job, and the creative forces of distributive justice to hold sway. Like a kayack in rapids, she and I had to just ride the river. Any attempt to intervene with a paddle or by shifting our weight would have wrecked us on the rocks. That is part of what it means to radically abandon self-interest.

Am I going to sue the hospital and take on the whole catastrophe of the U.S. medical system? Call Fox News and start an investigation into nursing home malpractice? Not directly. Those kinds of actions are usually self-gratifying, ego-justifying, Empire-supporting manifestations of works based on law, without faith, and outside the Covenant. Does that mean we just turn our faces to the wall and die? Absolutely not. We are not victims. There is work to be done in the “right to die” movement, which the United Church of Christ has begun to seriously explore. There are hospital and nursing home chaplaincies in need of personnel grounded in Covenant; and in the interim, there are blogs to write.

Did – will – my Mother magically recover full strength and vibrant life? No. Not on this Planet. But, as Isaiah promises, according to God’s Covenant, she shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace. . . . Those who live in Covenant with distributive justice-compassion are not victims, but victors. “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law,” sings Paul in 1st Corinthians. “But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

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