The Burden is Lite: Year A: Proper 9

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 45:10-17; Psalm 145:8-14; Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

After all the heavy-duty theological argument of the past three weeks, we are rewarded with romance. Abraham’s servant finds Rebecca as a bride for Isaac, and the two of them become one of the love stories of the ages. Psalm 45 is an Ode to a Royal Wedding; Psalm 145 is a Psalm of David, praising God; while the Song of Solomon celebrates Spring, fertility, and the pagan rite of Sacred Marriage. The only sour note is old Paul, grousing on about how his “member” is at war with his mind, “making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” What a curmudgeonly post-script to love, sex, and destiny! Those pious Elves probably think the Song of Solomon is an allegory of God’s Love for Israel, or Christ’s Love for the Church!

Meanwhile, Matthew’s Jesus complains that “this generation” reminds him of “children sitting in the marketplaces who call out to others: ‘We played the flute for you but you wouldn’t dance; we sang a dirge, but you wouldn’t mourn.’” He whines on: “Just remember, John appeared on the scene neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He is demented.’ The son of Adam came both eating and drinking, and they say, ‘There’s a glutton and a drunk, a crony of toll collectors and sinners!’” Too bad we’re studying Matthew’s Gospel instead of John. If it were John’s Jesus, he’d be attending the Wedding at Cana, and turning the water into wine instead of complaining about not making a difference.

Including a portion of Zechariah in Proper 9 seems another non-sequitur. Here we are, three months after Easter, revisiting the aria from Handel’s Easter portion of The Messiah: “Rejoice, daughter of Zion; behold your king comes triumphant and victorious, . . . humble and riding on a donkey.” However, a clue is found in the Revised Common Lectionary edition of 1992. There is an asterisk beside this reading in the second Index, indicating that the alternative readings refer to a pair of readings in which the Old Testament reading and the Gospel reading are related.

Looking at the cherry-picked portion of Matthew’s Gospel, verses 25-30, Jesus is saying, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me . . . for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Singers will find their minds going on in Handel’s Messiah to the Mezzo Aria, and the accompanying chorus. Going back to last week’s reading in Jeremiah, clearly the reference is to the yoke Jeremiah put on his own neck, and the false prophet Hananiah, who destroyed it. However, the traditional view tells us that Jesus redeems and actualizes the metaphor by declaring that unlike the yoke that Jeremiah took upon himself, the yoke that Jesus offers is easy.

Is this a stretch or what? Especially given the fact that the Elves cherry-picked last week’s Jeremiah to such an extent that the yoke is never mentioned in the prescribed reading. Nevertheless, look at Paul’s lament in Romans 7:24b-25: “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Piety is easy, and the burden is indeed lite. Surely the point of the recommended readings is not that sex outside of marriage (defined strictly as between a man and a woman of course) is a sin. Wedding parties rule! Have a church picnic in the park instead of a service in the sanctuary! Read love poetry, including ee cummings and the entire Song of Songs! Thank God/dess for The Supreme Court of California!

For the purposes of liberal commentary, however, I owe it to Paul to reclaim Romans 7.

John Shelby Spong has theorized that the Apostle Paul was gay. In Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (Harper SanFrancisco 1991, pp. 116-120), Spong lays out an argument that Paul’s homosexuality drove him to seek salvation in Jewish law. Seeing that the new Christianity was beginning to overthrow that law, Paul became a zealous prosecutor, trying to stamp out a movement that threatened to overturn the very law (Torah) that “only by the most herculean efforts was holding Paul just above the abyss . . . .” But then like a bolt from the sky, he realized God’s free gift of justice-compassion – grace – given to all those who participate with the risen Christ in establishing God’s realm in this life and this time. This grace brought forgiveness of even the sin of murdering Jesus himself. Spong writes, “The being of Paul, a being he did not understand, a being he could not control, a being that all of the wisdom of his world and all of his sacred tradition condemned as worthy only of death, that being of Paul met the grace of God in the person of Jesus the Christ” p. 122. If Paul could experience this liberation, then everyone could.

Did Paul stop being who he was – whether a homosexual person or not? I would suggest that he became even more truly who he really was. If participation with the risen Christ means the radical abandonment of one’s self-interest, the Grace that is the free gift of God then is radical acceptance of one’s own condition, and the conditions of others – or, as the Unitarian Universalists put it in their First Principle: “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Reading from the beginning of Romans 7, instead of cherry-picking the most scandalous portion, Paul says, “But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit” Romans 7:6. Further, to take a sneak peak at next week’s theme, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” Romans 8:1.

Whatever one might surmise about Paul’s sexuality, and the liberating interpretation Spong presents, it is important to return to the guiding principles of context, and the integrity of the story (getting it straight). Paul is continuing his impassioned debate regarding works, faith, grace, and the law. He uses every trick of the trade, including hyperbole, and finally in chapter 7 resorts to the time-honored use of sex as a way to get his readers to listen to the radicality of his proposition. He starts with an anology of marriage, reminding people that according to the law, a woman is only married to her husband so long as he is alive. “If her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.” If that doesn’t get their attention, nothing will. He is saying that participation in the kingdom as begun by the life and teachings of Jesus makes everyone who signs onto the program “dead to the law” that results in sin; or, in John Dominic Crossan’s words, the law that inevitably leads to injustice – the normalcy of civilization. Is the law itself sin? No, rants Paul. But if not for the law, we would not know sin. This argument gets very close to the idea that we as humans cannot know good unless we have evil to compare it with – a subject for a much wider debate. For now, suffice to say that these commentaries take the view that the nature of the known universe is good at best, neutral at worst. Humanity is the species that brought “evil” into the world because of our consciousness of consequences. Perhaps– for post-modern people – that is as close as we can come to Paul’s point.

Paul then in desperation confesses his own personal weakness. The law is spiritual, he says, but I am trapped in a physical body. Even thought the law mandates a particular behavior, and even though I may greatly desire to comply with that mandate, I cannot. This is the inner conflict – the personal jihad – the personal struggle to not only accept Jesus’s invitation to participate in God’s Kingdom of justice-compassion, but to commit to that program, and stick to it.

We shall see if Paul does discover in the end that the yoke is easy, and the burden is light.

Get with the Program: Year A Proper 8

Genesis 22:1-14; Jeremiah 28:5-9; Psalm 13; Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

“Paul, having mentioned sacrificial atonement by Christ, does not develop it further in any way, but speaks instead of participation in Christ, which . . . is the heart of his theology. And where sacrificial atonement got only one verse (3:5), participation gets a whole chapter (6:1-23).” John Dominic Crossan, In Search of Paul (Harper SanFrancisco 2004) p. 384.

The Elves, of course, divided the chapter into two parts, thereby robbing Paul of the integrity of his argument. In the first half, Paul says that if we have indeed died to sin, by committing to living the same way of life as taught by Jesus, we shall then live not according to our own self interest, nor according to the interests of empire (foreign or domestic), but according to the kenotic (self-abandoning) rule of God. The “end” or result is“eternal life.” The result of living according to the normal rules of civilization is death, says Paul: Not physical death, but spiritual death – the death of injustice, which also brings with it the death of god. But the free gift of eternal life (grace) here and now is extended to all who choose to participate with the risen Christ in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion.

The horrific story about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God has nothing to do with the “Christian God” sacrificing “his son” in order to “save us” from “eternal hellfire and damnation” (atonement – substitutionary or otherwise). It does, however, have to do with that same “free gift” in Paul’s argument. The name “Isaac” means “God will provide.” In the bare bones of the story, God provides the proper sacrifice and spares Abraham the barbarism of murdering his son. The story is so obscured with Christian gloss that it is nearly impossible to avoid the Christian metaphor. But in its own context, the story does two things: It illustrates an awakening spiritual awareness on the part of humanity that human blood sacrifice is not necessary to become reconciled with one’s gods; and the legend provides a graphic, pre-Christian demonstration of the level of commitment required to keep the Covenant. The old ways of literal blood-sacrifice of the first-born child were overthrown by the Covenant established for the people between God and Abraham. The Covenant continues, says the Apostle Paul, whenever anyone signs on to the program begun by Jesus.

Cherry-picking Jeremiah robs Jeremiah’s witness to the will and wisdom of God of nearly all its power. All we hear from the Elves is that God’s prophets always foretell gloom and doom, and the false prophets claim peace. Jeremiah tells Hananiah that when the prophesied peace comes, “then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” The doctrinal assumption is that the Creation is “fallen” permanently into sin; therefore, any prophet has to be false who claims God’s peace instead of God’s “wrath” (“judgment”). A second assumption is that the reading simply reflects an ongoing rhetorical debate between false and true prophets, and we already know that Jeremiah is the good guy. Neither assumption honors the integrity of the story. Both lend themselves to pious self-righteousness.

In the encounter with Hananiah, Jeremiah has put an ox yoke on his own neck, demonstrating submission to the Yoke of Babylon “until the time of his own land comes.” Jeremiah tells the people, “if any nation will not serve this king, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, then I will punish that nation with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, says the Lord . . . . You therefore must not listen to your prophets . . . who are saying [the opposite] to you. . . . But any nation that will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will leave on its own land . . . to till it and live there.” Jeremiah 27:8-11.

When we know the context (see last week’s blog) we find that Jeremiah has had to resort to drama in order to get anyone to listen to him regarding the political fact that the Babylonians have won. But wait – doesn’t that make Jeremiah a collaborator with the very Empire these commentaries have been railing against for two cycles of the Revised Common Lectionary? Again, the answer lies in the context of the entire story of Jeremiah – who stayed with the remnant of Israelites in Jerusalem while the rest were exiled to Babylon. “[T]he 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.” Year C Commentary on Proper 21, The Field At Anatoth.

God’s plan is that the people make the best of a bad situation and live in safety in their own land. All they need to do is trust in God’s promise to preserve that land for its own great destiny. But Hananiah has aligned himself with the politicians who want to overthrow the Babylonian empire and establish their own – despite the reality of overwhelming imperial military forces. Worse, Hananiah has the audacity to physically break the ox yoke that Jeremiah has attached to his own neck, thereby symbolically defying God’s will. As Matthew’s Jesus says, “The one who accepts you accepts me, and the one who accepts me accepts the one who sent me.” The obverse – that the one who does not accept you does not accept me – means that if God’s prophet is defied, God [himself] is also defied. In the part we are not supposed to read this week, Jeremiah goes back to Hananiah and warns him that because he broke the wooden yoke, an even stronger yoke of iron is now attached to the necks of all the nations conquered by the Babylonians, and furthermore, Hananiah will be dead within the year. Sure enough, “In that same year, in the seventh month, the [false] prophet Hananiah died” (Jeremiah 28:10-17).

The editorial in the Christian Science Monitor of June 18, 2008, discusses the U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding Guantanamo detainees and habeas corpus. The Court divided 5 to 4 between the majority who held that “Liberty and security can be reconciled,” and the dissenting view that “lower courts will almost certainly release dangerous detainees and cause more Americans to be killed.” The Monitor concludes that “America’s identity rests on its ideals, such as due process. They help preserve a quality of life that may require a sacrifice of life” (emphasis mine). The editorial point concerns secular politics (and arguably imperial theology) not Covenant. Nevertheless, as Jeremiah demonstrated with his ox-yoke (and perhaps underlying and informing The Monitor’s view), the fact that Empire holds sway does not rule out distributive justice-compassion, which not only may require sacrifice. The readings for this Proper 8 assert that it does. Abraham was willing to give up any hope of realizing God’s heady promise that he would be the father of a great nation in order to remain obedient to that same God of justice-compassion. Jesus gave up his life because of that same obedience to the rule of distributive justice in God’s realm. The only time the prophet gets derailed is when she makes false promises of easy piety, war, victory, and peace. The trick is to distinguish between Covenant (non-violent, distributive justice-compassion), and the easy piety of empire. Anyone who thinks that participation with the risen Christ in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion is easy, is listening to false prophets. The defining factor is justice – so long as justice is distributive and grounded in compassion, all is well. As soon as justice becomes retributive, and rooted in violence, the difference between the false and true prophets becomes clear.

BLOG ARCHIVE

The King’s Business: Year A Proper 7

Genesis 21:8-21; Jeremiah 20:7-13; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Psalm 69:7-18; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

A friend of mine quotes his Oberlin seminary Old Testament professor, Herbert Gordon May, regarding the meaning and interpretation of scripture: “context, context, context.” The readings for Proper 7 are all lifted wholesale out of context, and cobbled together like medieval motley. Even conventional dogmatic themes fail to form recognizable patterns in this “incongruous mixture” (as the Oxford Dictionary of American Language defines “motley”). Not to pursue this metaphor too far, but “playing the fool” by wearing motley implies astute criticism of the King’s business. The Elves have not only missed the point of the King’s business; they have failed to present any point at all. All bets are off this week. Pick a reading and preach on it.

Taken out of context, the reading from Genesis picks up at the end of the feud between Abraham’s wife Sarah and Abraham’s mistress, or second wife, or slave, or concubine – choose your epithet – Hagar. Ishmael was not really a bastard, but definitely not the fruit of the first womb. In order not to derail God’s plan for Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael are thrown out into the desert. What a rich soup of themes for the 21st Century: Patriarchy; women’s liberation; selfishness; stupidity; exploitation; breach of trust. But the story leaves us with too many questions: Did Ishmael really become the ancestor of Islam? Why did God intervene to save Hagar in the desert, but not in time to preserve family relationships in Abraham’s camp? What is the connection with the Egyptians? Why are we reading this text of terror?

In the alternative Old Testament reading, Jeremiah is caught between what God demands that he say, and the social and personal consequences of saying it. He blames God for enticing him into the prophetic life, then abandoning him to the persecution of his enemies. Nevertheless, by the end of the reading, Jeremiah has to rely on God’s promise of deliverance.

The portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans is plucked out of the midst of Paul’s argument about grace – the free gift from God that renders everyone just. The unwary may find themselves floundering in the waters that equate baptism with death and burial, and resurrection with a heavenly afterlife.

Finally, Matthew, the liturgist, strings together sayings of Jesus like a litany, designed to bolster the courage of believers under the constant barrage of criticism and persecution – much like Jeremiah. But Matthew ups the ante: “Whoever loves father or mother . . . son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” Judgment of unbelieving sinners is the name of Matthew’s cherry-picking game.

For my purposes here, Professor May’s “context, context, context” has two parts. The first is the political, social, and spiritual conditions that gave rise to the original writings.

If we look at the circumstances within which each of these readings was created, we find that they were all written within a context of alienation and exile. The Abrahamic saga is part of the foundational myth of the Jewish nation and religion. Defining who is legitimately part of the authentic Hebrew people was vitally important to both the remnant exiled to 6th Century B.C.E. Babylon, and those left behind in an alienated Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah was a living witness and interpreter of that time and place. Several hundred years later, the fledgling community of Christians in sacked Jerusalem faced the same kinds of issues: Who are we? Who was our spiritual leader and guide? What is our purpose? Who is part of our community, and who is not, and how do we decide?

The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans is a bit different. Written perhaps 10-15 years before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, Paul thoroughly debates the definition of who is a Christian and what it means to follow Jesus. But even though Paul has chosen his mission to the Pagan/non-Jewish Roman world, he too is a political and religious exile. What can be more inflammatory to the Empire and to established religious tradition than to claim that “no human being will be acquitted in God’s sight by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin”? What greater threat to an economic and political system based on patronage than a community where everything is shared in common, and no one possesses more than anyone else?

The second aspect of “context” is the internal integrity of the story or argument. John Dominic Crossan makes it clear that the first order of business in scriptural interpretation is to “know the story and get it right.” God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (HarperSanFrancisco 2007), pp. 128-131. I have pointed out before that it is vastly unfair – if not unconscionable – to cherry-pick Paul’s words from Romans (or anywhere else) in order to perpetuate an institutional theological misinterpretation. (See Repent for the Kingdom 5) It is equally unconscionable to mis-use portions of foundational myths to the same end. When those myths are further bastardized to perpetuate present-day global political empire, Paul’s assertion that “the strength of sin is the law” takes on particular and tragic importance.

The Abrahamic story winds its way through the first five books of the Christian Old Testament. To get the entire story straight, and explore its meaning for 21st Century political realities, is beyond the scope of this Commentary. Perhaps this is the best argument for not following the Revised Common Lectionary, and instead concentrating on entire threads over a series of Sunday mornings. An alternative is certainly extended Bible study for all levels of church members, from pre-school to senior adults. The problem of course is curriculum. The straight story needs to be told from the cradle onwards, and without the dogmatic gloss that the New Testament supersedes the Old.

The prophets are no less prone to misinterpretation out of context, but their truncated stories are more easily dealt with in one sermon. Jeremiah wants the people to return to the old ways of the Covenant, and he is apparently willing to compromise with the Babylonians in order to avoid national destruction. This gets him in trouble with those who want to establish Judah as a kingdom in its own right. Jeremiah’s dilemma is familiar to everyone confronted with the conundrums that accompany living in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. He is compelled to speak truth to power, and we catch him at a weak moment – or would if the Elves allowed us to read on past the momentary relief Jeremiah finds in reminding himself that “[the Lord] has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.” But in the very next verse, “Cursed be the day on which I was born!” Jeremiah sobs. “Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, saying ‘A child is born to you, a son,’ . . . Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?”

What Jeremiah prays for is deliverance. What the Apostle Paul promises in Romans 6:1-11 is transformation. For Proper 7, that transformation happens in the act of baptism: We are then dead and buried to the old life, which was defined by adherence to the law, and we are raised just as the Christ was raised to “walk in newness of life.” The key words here are “death” and “life,” not “crucifixion” and “resurrection.” “Crucifixion” and “resurrection” are political terms, which Paul does not hesitate to use elsewhere. Jesus’s death is not just a death. It happened in the context of Roman injustice. Jesus’ resurrection is God’s action in the world, continuing to counter imperial injustice. But using the words “death” and “life” confronts Christians with the day-to-day reality of participation with God in that same continuing action.

Returning to the opening metaphor, this day-to-day participation is indeed the King’s business, which the Elves and the writer of Matthew miss. Once we know the political and spiritual context that Matthew was addressing, we cannot fault him for this; nevertheless, the aphorisms recorded by Matthew cannot be taken literally and applied uncritically to 21st Century issues. Two of the aphorisms were agreed by the Jesus Seminar scholars as authentically going back to the historical Jesus. These are: “After all, there is nothing veiled that won’t be unveiled, or hidden that won’t be made known”; and “What do sparrows cost? A penny apiece? Yet not one of them will fall to the earth without the consent of your Father. As for you, even the hairs on your head have all been counted. So don’t be so timid; you’re worth more than a flock of sparrows.” However, the original context for either of them has been long lost, and their position in Matthew’s litany seems arbitrary – whatever Jesus meant when he said them, they have been reduced to non-sequiturs, and their intent compromised.

Continuing the metaphor, and seriously playing the fool, the rest of the aphorisms listed by Matthew are clearly out of character with a Jesus who taught distributive justice-compassion. They are full of retributive judgment, and hints of violence against non-believers, and it is highly likely that Jesus never said any of them. They were essential to the survival of the early Christian community. But are they essential to a 21st Century Christianity?

I close with another quote from Crossan’s In Search of Paul, from the chapter in which he thoroughly discusses Paul’s theology, and specifically the letter to the Romans: “Christ’s ‘death’ always meant for Paul the terrible death of an unjust execution, the horrible death of a shameful crucifixion. It did not mean death as the normal end of life. His theology was not actually built on Christ’s death and resurrection as if Christ had died at home in Nazareth and rose there on the third day. That death meant injustice and violence. Here then, after two thousand years and especially as the twenty-first century’s terrorism replaces the twentieth century’s totalitarianism, we ask this question: Is it death or is it violence that is the last enemy of God? Or better, is it unjust and violent death that is the last enemy of God?” p. 389.

Here is the astute criticism the King’s Business demands.

BLOG ARCHIVE

A Priestly Kingdom: Year A, Proper 6

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7; Exodus 19:2-8a; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; Psalm 100; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:23

Most ministers are skipping Romans and concentrating on the readings from Matthew’s Gospel. The Gospel is much easier to expound upon, and little intellect is required to understand Church dogma. But if Christianity is to have any viable relevance to life in the 3rd millennium, hard work is called for in comprehending, updating where possible, and reclaiming both the Apostle Paul’s and the gospel writers’ interpretations of who Jesus was, and what his life and death means – to the 1st Century as well as the 21st.

The Elves have paired the stories of Sarah’s pregnancy with Isaac, and the charge by God to the people in exodus from Egypt, with Matthew’s barely veiled hostility toward the Jewish tradition. Even though Sarah treated the promise of a son as a joke, the readings skip to assure us that Isaac was indeed born, and Abraham’s covenant with God was confirmed by circumcision of the infant after eight days. In Exodus, God tells Moses to promise the people that, “if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured people. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” But it is Matthew’s opinion (a millennium or two later) that the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” are in desperate need of a shepherd. Matthew’s Jesus sends out the disciples, telling them to rely on the hospitality of the people for their sustenance rather than demanding payment for healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, even raising the dead. But there is a catch. Those who do not welcome the disciples or do not listen to them are to be abandoned to a final judgment. Worse, Matthew’s Jesus expects that the [Jewish] councils and synagogues, governors and kings will universally hate both the messengers and the message.

The anti-Jewish message is clear, and it must be countered with scholarship. Matthew was a Jew, and he was likely the liturgical leader of a synagogue that had chosen to follow Jesus’s Way. Matthew was writing – as all the gospel writers were – well after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. That he constructed his gospel as a liturgical replacement for Torah may be an indication of the bitterness of the disagreement between Jews facing the loss of their religion in diaspora, and fledgling Christians who wished nevertheless to be part of a synagogue. As Funk, et al. remind us, “The sayings in [these readings] reflect a knowledge of events that took place long after Jesus’s death: Matthew is really depicting the situation as he knew it in his own time. . . . Persecution will cause the emissaries to flee from one city to another. But they will not have gone through all the cities of ‘Israel’ before the end comes with the appearance of the son of Adam (. . . an apocalyptic figure). All this is far removed from [the historical] Jesus’s perspective.” The Five Gospels, p. 170.

My late father used to joke that the one thing Christians love more than Jesus himself is persecution. As soon as anyone objects to public prayer in schools or city/county council meetings, or whenever Christmas displays or representations of the 10 Commandments are barred from court house lawns and walls, the pious tie themselves to the stake, and beg for gasoline and matches. There is nothing more satisfying than to be hauled off to jail for disturbing the peace or disrupting a meeting, shouting the Lord’s Prayer in defiance of godless liberalism. But Paul was not talking about easy piety when he wrote that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The reading is the continuation of Paul’s argument that Jesus died for the benefit of all people on the Planet, not just those who believe that Jesus rose bodily and magically from the grave. Jesus died in the attempt to reconcile humanity with God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. When we live in Covenant with that realm, we participate with an incarnate Christ in making distributive justice possible in our personal, political, and social lives.

In that context, the charge from God to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai becomes the source for transforming the theology of Empire (piety, war, victory, peace) to Covenant, non-violence, and distributive justice-compassion. The instructions for how to do that can be reclaimed from Matthew’s Jesus.

“Go and announce: ‘Heaven’s imperial rule is closing in.’ . . . Don’t get gold or silver or copper coins for spending money, don’t take a knapsack for the road, or two shirts, or sandals, or a staff. . . .” Trust in God’s “imperial rule” sounds naive to sophisticated, third millennium, post-modern realists. But trust in the process of distributive justice-compassion to the radical extent demanded by the Covenant is just as dangerous in the 21st Century as it was in the 1st. In the 1st Century, outlaws, rough roads, Roman legions, wild animals, and extreme weather conditions would have added a high premium to the courage already required to tell the story of Jesus in a hostile world. 21st Century exiles face hostility ranging from professional media to political and religious fundamentalists, and ordinary folk, caught up in normal, conventional attitudes toward “justice,” “peace,” and integrity. Normal civil society seems intent upon deliberate misinterpretation of the motives of anyone insisting on eliminating the death penalty; providing universal, single-payer, government-subsidized health care; developing and promoting renewable sources of energy; controlling the availability of weapons of mass destruction; and negotiating with “terrorists” and other “enemies.”

“Look,” Matthew’s Jesus says, “I’m sending you out like sheep to a pack of wolves.”

Indeed, we respond.

“Therefore, you must be as sly as a snake and as simple as a dove.”

Countering the normalcy of civilization means knowing the facts, framing the question, and presenting the argument so that the opposition is empowered to join the program. Tricky, but do-able.

“And you will be hauled up before governors and even kings . . . so you can make your case to them and to the nations. And when they lock you up, don’t worry about how you should speak or what you should say. It will occur to you at that moment what to say. . . .”

This is sailing a bit too close to the wind. Suppose I just vote, or buy organic, or – I’ll march, but I really can’t volunteer to get arrested in front of the White House. My [husband, wife, boss, children] won’t let me.

“ . . . You will be universally hated because of me. But those who hold out to the end will be saved.”

Jesus never says it’s going to be easy. He just gives us the choice: What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion? What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice? When we choose liberation, we sign on to God’s original Covenant as full partners in the struggle. We become a holy people, a priesthood, guides into the kingdom, and mediators of the sacred.

BLOG ARCHIVE

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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Faith, Works, Law, Who Cares? Proper 4

Genesis 6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19; Deuteronomy 11:18-21, 26-28; Psalm 46; Romans 1:16-17; 3:22b-28, (29-31); Matthew 7:21-29

Now at last we launch the Year A Bible study of Paul’s letter to the Romans, and the Gospel of Matthew. The Church’s one foundation having been established, and the mission defined, the eternal jihad between faith and works, grace and the law, justice and judgment is joined. The time has come to once again review the four questions for the apocalypse, which frame these discussions:

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

As these essays have developed beginning with Year C, a slight modification to the third question has emerged: What is faith? Literal belief, or trust and commitment to the great work of justice-compassion? The post-modern meaning of faith is usually belief, regardless of the circumstances. The more basic meaning is trust – either in a person’s (or God’s) word, or actions, or in a process set in motion by a god, a prophet, or a leader. The Apostle Paul’s letters make little or no sense to post-modern minds unless the distinction between faith as literal belief and faith as trust is clear. Further, as literal belief becomes less viable in the third millennium of the Common Era, Christian “faith” is increasingly confronted with John Shelby Spong’s challenge to change or die. The continuing series of these essays will take the position that to the extent that Christian “faith” continues to mean “literal belief,” the 21st Century is a “post-Christian” era.

A second theme that continues to determine these interpretations of the lectionary readings is the meaning of justice. Civilization defines justice as retribution – payback; an eye for an eye. But the deeper meaning of justice is distribution: the rain falls on the good, the bad, and the ugly without partiality. Civilization does not use that definition except in cases where there is clearly injustice if partiality enters the picture. The classic example is that in the United States, if you are rich, white, and male your chances of serving jail time for possessing cocaine is an order of magnitude less than if you are poor, black, and female, charged with possessing marijuana. Occasionally there is a reversal of this pattern, as when an over-zealous North Carolina prosecutor trumped up a case of gang rape of a black stripper against a championship team of white LaCrosse players. In either case, distributive justice is at work – although in a negative sense. The positive understanding of distributive justice is contained in the term justice-compassion. To be 100 percent clear, these essays use the compound, distributive justice-compassion, which holds sway in the Covenant relationship of the Realm or Kingdom of God. Justice as retribution/pay-back holds sway in the normal march of civilization into Empire. See especially the work of Jesus Seminar scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg for a thorough discussion of these concepts.

So, into the fray:

We begin with Paul’s argument about justification by faith, not by works. Since Martin Luther, this has meant that our actions are rationalized (we are right to do them) because of unquestioning belief in the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. “Works” that the law requires do not count. Only actions that derive from belief will save us. The alternative reading from Deuteronomy could not be more blunt in its agreement: “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God . . . . and the curse, if you do not obey . . . .” Matthew’s Jesus presents the distinct possibility that acting in his name does not necessarily mean automatic acceptance into heaven. Indeed, Matthew’s Jesus insists that to use Jesus’s name without paying attention to Jesus’s words subverts the law, just like a corrupt or foolish builder who builds his house on the sand. The cautionary tale of Noah and the flood leaves no room for misunderstanding. The “wicked” will be finally judged and destroyed.

Throw in a sentence or two about how “the Law” means “Jewish law,” which has been replaced by the love of Jesus, reflected in the compassion God showed humanity after the flood, and this sermon should take about 6 minutes. Plenty of time to deal with First Sunday Communion, without going past the noon hour.

Problems:(1) Perhaps most important is the antisemitism that can creep in whenever the gospel writers or the apostle Paul engage in polemics about “the law.” (2) Do Paul’s obfuscations about whether faith (as belief) overthrows or upholds “the law” have any relevance to Christians today? (3) If God’s justice is distributive, and the world belongs to God, what’s with the collective punishment meted out to the entire creation who were not among the chosen few allowed into Noah’s Ark? (4) Is this yet another instance where the Old Testament is supplanted by the New Testament?

The story of Noah and the Flood, Matthew’s Gospel, and Paul’s Letters all have in common the purpose of defining for a people the nature of their God, and how to live in harmony with God’s insistence on justice. For Matthew (and the historical Jesus), this meant keeping the movement within the boundaries of Mosaic law. For Matthew (not the historical Jesus) justice took the form of apocalyptic judgment. The story of Noah certainly lends itself to apocalyptic interpretation. But actually, it contains a thread of redemptive hope that runs throughout the Old Testament. In story after story a “righteous remnant” reconstructs, regenerates, and reestablishes the world of distributive justice-compassion after God has acted to root out (or drown out or burn out) the inevitable consequences of human civilization – i.e., injustice. Noah and his family are the remnant in Genesis. In Exodus, the righteous remnant of the original tribes of Israel who have remained faithful to God’s distributive justice-compassion are delivered from Egyptian captivity and returned to the promised land. In the Babylonian exile stories, the prophet Jeremiah encourages the remnant left behind in Jerusalem to trust in the promise that the remnant carried off by the enemy will return to rebuild the temple within 50 years. The Servant Songs of Isaiah encourage those exiles.

In the New Testament, 30 years before the fall of Jerusalem and the great diaspora of the Jews from the Holy Land, the Apostle Paul began to define a Christian movement within Judaism that included non-Jewish people, who were beginning to separate from the tradition. The gospel writers’ purpose was to encourage the remnants of those who followed Jesus’s way to remain faithful to his teachings, and to build faith communities, some within Judaism, and some without.

In the 21st Century, Christians are debating the relevance of a belief system that depends on a premodern cosmology that clearly holds no scientific truth, and barely works as metaphor. Paul’s 1st Century arguments about who was a legitimate Jew (circumcised) and who was not, and whether one needed to be a circumcised Jew in order to join the Christians is meaningless except in the context of Judeo-Christian history. But who or what is a Christian today is the heart of the question, and Paul’s argument about faith versus works (which is the whole point of his letter to the Romans) is worth looking at seriously.

If Paul’s use of the word “faith” means “trust” in the basic truth of Jesus’s life and teachings (which may be called simply “trust in Jesus”) then perhaps what Paul was saying in the 1st Century might be understood as follows: But now, in addition to God’s law about living with distributive justice-compassion, and the prophets who preached about God’s insistence on distributive justice-compassion, we recognize the distributive justice-compassion of God for all people, because of our trust in the basic truth of Jesus’s life and teachings.

Paul is absolutely not saying that Jesus replaces God or the law or the prophets. Jesus instead fulfills, or actualizes, or brings into focus the law and the prophets, and if we follow his way, we also participate in the fulfillment of the same law. And what is that law? It is the law of distributive justice-compassion, which applies to everyone, Jew or Gentile, whether one “believes” the resurrection story literally or not.

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Bringing the Exiles Home: Sunday after Trinity (Proper 3)

Isaiah 49:8-16a; Psalm 131; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5; Matthew 6:24-34

“If the Sunday between May 24 and 28 inclusive follows Trinity Sunday, the Proper for the 8th Sunday after the Epiphany is used.” The Revised Common Lectionary, 1992, p. 33. In 2008, there were only three Sundays in Epiphany, then Transfiguration, then Ash Wednesday and Lent. All this because the Roman church won the fight at the Council of Whitby in 664, making the Easter celebration dependent on Sunday and the Moon, rather than the Eastern Orthodox custom of associating Easter with the Jewish Passover. That same council eliminated the Celtic version of the Christian church, and Celtic priests were forbidden to use the Druid tonsure (shaving the head back to the ears).

When we left the study of the Gospel of Matthew in January, it was the last chance for justice before plunging into Lent and the Easter Season. Picking up with the reading from the 8th Sunday after Epiphany puts us back on the “proper” track – or it could. In actuality, from the point of view of traditional church teaching, the Elves continue to solidify the belief system of those who won the arguments that raged from the 1st through the 4th centuries of the Common Era.

The Second Servant’s Song from Isaiah spells out the Servant’s mission. Adopted wholesale into the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year, the Servant is easily interpreted to be the Christ, who replaced Israel as the manifestation of God’s glory, and the bringer of salvation to the whole world. Cherry-picked Paul reminds the Corinthians that even though the apostles are “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries,” and even though “I am not aware of anything against myself, . . . I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.” Matthew’s Jesus says don’t worry about food, clothing, or shelter. “Can any of you add one hour to life by fretting about it?” The Psalmist assures us that we have no need for greater or higher understanding because we can trust in God like the weaned child trusts in its mother.

Issues raised by an uncritical reading of these passages include a latent anti-Jewishness. Christians are “weaned” from the old religion. Because “the Jews” failed in the original mission spelled out by the prophets, it is up to Christians to bring all the world into the Kingdom of God established by Jesus. Matthew’s Jesus underscores this with his famous admonition that we cannot serve both God and wealth (as “the Jews” have been accused of doing). A second pit-fall is the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” preached by Christian mega-churches, which turns Jesus into a latter-day self-help guru. If we trust God, all the things we need will be given to us. If we donate money to such ministries, we will get a pay-back in health, wealth, happiness, and fulfillment.

Jesus’s point in the series of pronouncements on anxieties and fretting was that, contrary to popular belief, being rich is not a sign of God’s favor. In fact, Jesus says, you cannot serve two masters – God and wealth. You love the one and hate the other. Further, it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into God’s domain (Mark 10:25). Jesus did not say that “all these things will come to you as a bonus” if you first seek God’s domain. That idea was added later by gospel writers who were a generation or more removed from those who actually knew Jesus or his original followers. By the time Matthew’s gospel was written towards the end of the 1st Century, the Temple was gone, and the Jewish community that had been centralized in Jerusalem was dispersed. Under those conditions, it seems humanly logical that those who survived and thrived would have felt themselves blessed by God.

The admonition to look for God’s domain and try for God’s justice is an afterthought. Putting such a condition on God’s grace reverses the teaching. Jesus was concerned with the common folk and their day-to-day struggle for existence. It was revolutionary for him to say that wealth is not the definition of living in God’s kingdom. Instead, Jesus says, the sign that one is living in God’s kingdom is the certainty that there is no need to worry about life’s necessities: food, clothing, shelter. The poor (the meek) live as the birds and the lilies do, and God provides for them.

The composer of Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus say that “You are to seek God’s domain and his justice first” (The Five Gospels, p. 152). The NRSV says “strive first for the kingdom of God, which is a stronger verb than merely “seeking.” “Striving” implies struggle, work, perhaps even participation in Jesus’s ongoing program of restoring God’s distributive justice-compassion to a world that has chosen retribution and pay-back instead. As last week’s essay suggested, “Paul taught that participation with Jesus’s program of restoring God’s Kingdom of distributive justice-compassion means living Kenotically. It means a radical abandonment of self-interest; a radical inclusiveness, in communities, business dealings, and political structures, that functions on a very different footing from the normalcy of civilization.” This week, we are reminded of what God’s realm looks like. “There is more to living than food and clothing,” Jesus says. He has us observe the natural world around us, where the birds and the flowers neither plant, nor harvest, nor toil nor spin. He compares the grasses in the field, tossed into the fire without thought, with disenfranchised humanity that takes nothing for granted. Isaiah’s servant acts as a covenant to the people, “to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages. . . .”

Paul’s letters to the Corinthians must not be taken out of the context in which they were written. Paul was responding to that community’s struggle to understand how to live outside the structures of 1st Century patronage. His arguments might well apply to 21st Century societies that have fallen into habits of civilization that are unsustainable for life on Planet earth as we have known it. Trinity Sunday’s readings were about reestablishing economic, social, and political justice. The readings for this Proper 3 introduce the concept of eco-justice.

Sustainable, distributive eco-justice means the radical abandonment of the kind of self-interest that results in faulty building codes, protectionist trade policies for food and natural resources; the whole-sale plundering of the Planet for economic profit, whether corporate or individual. Matthew’s Jesus may indeed be most relevant. If we do work for policies that will support and sustain life, then those things that support human life – food, clothing, shelter – may indeed be given to us.

But we have to trust the process. We must be willing to let go of traditional, unsustainable land-use management, farming practices, and the kind of market forces we are accustomed to creating and reacting to. Perhaps above all, we must trust whatever the forces are that created the entire Universe. A third issue that arises with an uncritical approach to these readings is the heresy of substitutionary atonement. The worst excess of this belief is that a relationship with God and God’s Realm is impossible. According to this heresy, Jesus died at God’s command in order to atone for (make-up for, pay for) our sin. But that sin still runs so deep in the human heart that no one can ever hope to be saved, whether we believe that Jesus died for us or not. Paul seems to be hinting at this in the phrases lifted from 1st Corinthians. “Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.” Our only hope is the capriciousness of God’s “mercy” once Jesus comes again to “judge the quick and the dead.” Substitutinary atonement is a heresy because it flies in the face of what 21st Century science tells us about the very nature of the Universe, where survival (salvation) depends on whether or not there is a niche that will sustain the life form, and where, on Planet Earth, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

21st Century humanity is largely exiled from relationship with the natural (non-human) world. Even in developing countries, where economies depend on natural resources such as forests, oil fields, agriculture, animal husbandry, or fish and seafoods, human life continues in blissful disregard of cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Humans seem to love living on the edge of destruction, and either blaming the gods, fate, or themselves for the consequences. Much of this edginess could be alleviated through changing the emphasis from retribution/pay-back to distribution and fairness: or in John Dominic Crossan’s words, from a “greed-world to a share-world”

Only Covenant – the non-violent, kenotic partnership with the creative forces that sustain the Universe – can bring the exiles home again.

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