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Proper 21: The Field at Anathoth: Piety v. Covenant 3
1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31; Amos 6:1a, 4-7; Psalm 146; Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16
The readings from Timothy and Luke are so full of traditional piety that any meaning other than hypocritical virtuousness is difficult to discern. After condemning the rich, who fall away from the faith and get into trouble, the writer of the letter to Timothy backs off and advises that if you’re already rich, then your task is to be “rich in good works” so that you can store up points for the future, when Jesus returns, and you can “take hold of the life that really is life.”
In the first quarter of the 14th Century, Meister Eckhart said in a sermon, “Behold how all those people are merchants who shun great sins and would like to be good and do good deeds in God’s honor . . . They do these things so that our Lord may give them something, or so that God may do something dear to them. All these people are merchants. This is more or less to be understood since they wish to give one thing in return for another . . .” Sermon 32, in Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation, Matthew Fox (Doubleday, 1980).
Eckhart was preaching on the story in Matthew 21 about the time Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple. Eckhart is saying that the temple is the soul of a person. He says, “Who were the people, who were buying and selling in the temple, and who are they still? Now listen to me closely! I shall preach now without exception only about good people.” The “good people” he is preaching to are likely to be thinking in terms of tit for tat with God, perhaps on the order of what the writer of Timothy is suggesting. Somehow, some way, “God” rewards the good and punishes the bad in the next life. Luke’s reversal of fortune story about the rich man and Lazarus is satisfying because Luke is very clear that the poor man goes directly to heaven, while the rich man gets the karma he earned with his indifference to the plight of the poor. Such moralism might have made the story salvageable, but then Luke gets side-tracked into a diatribe against those who refuse to believe the story about Jesus’s resurrection, which could easily turn into support for anti-Semitism. This is the easy piety of Empire, not the distributive justice-compassion of Covenant.
The cherry-picking Elves manage to put Amos into the same context – which is outrageous. Amos is probably the most militant of all the prophets. (“Let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!”) Yet they contrive to have Amos support the merchant’s convention: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory . . and eat lambs from the flock . . . who sing idle songs . . . who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile.”
The normalcy of 21st Century civilization – world-wide – is that same merchant mentality that Meister Eckhart preached about in the 14th Century, but with a particularly post-modern twist. Justice-compassion is bad for business and a detriment to political power. Blog.2.18.07 The only way to get any respect is to make money. “Working” means making money, not fulfilling vocation or actualizing art or natural talent. One would think that the work that should be most valuable to society would be child care and health care (that’s CARE, not INSURANCE). Instead, the most money is made by commercial corporations, male sports stars, and the military-industrial complex, which includes Big Oil, conventional energy, and all the businesses that support them. To make matters worse, taxes – which should go to assure social well-being – are levied most heavily on those most vulnerable: the working poor, small business, and the middle class; and they are used to support the Empire model of piety, war, victory. This week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is asking Congress for another $120 billion or so to continue to finance the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This will mean more borrowing from an already deeply mortgaged future, putting global social and economic security at increased risk.
Contrary to Luke and the writer of 1st Timothy, Jesus was teaching about this life, and participating in God’s Kingdom here and now (Covenant). The trick is to discover trust in that covenant regardless of the circumstances. As a demonstration of his trust in the covenant with God, the prophet Jeremiah buys a field at Anathoth on the eve of the Babylonian conquest, when the people of Israel are facing certain exile and slavery. This is a defiant – even a subversive – act in the face of Empire. He honors the Mosaic law spelled out in Leviticus 25:25-28, that allows – perhaps obliges – a family member to “redeem” land that is in danger of being lost to debt. With the Babylonians at the gates of Jerusalem, Jeremiah agrees to buy the field. It is an act of trust that the people will return by the Jubilee Year, 50 years after the sale is arranged, and the land will then be restored to them.
What is the field at Anathoth today?
What is the post-modern radical act of trust in covenant with the rhythm of the Universe? Leviticus 25 also speaks of the Sabbatical Year. Every seven years, there is to be complete rest for the land. How ironic that in the 21st Century, Israeli farmers scramble to hire non-Jewish Palestinians to work their land during the Sabbath years – of which 2007 is one. Leviticus 25:6 does allow that the people “may eat what the land yields during its sabbath,” but that is not meant to be a loophole for the merchant mentality to wriggle through. Here is plenty of opportunity for a radical return to Covenant.
And what of Christians, who believe that the Christ is the New Covenant? What is our field of Anathoth? Perhaps this: As individuals, to deliberately abandon self-interest as Jesus did; to extend distributive justice-compassion, not pay-back, in every situation. Collectively, establish non-violent solutions to the trouble spots exacerbated by the theology of Empire by replacing military might with medical personnel, teachers, food suppliers, and experts in sustainable living.
Under such a covenant, “You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. . . .”