“Serving Others by Opening Doors”

Moses stands staring across the Promised Land, seeing the homes, villages, cities and territories the tribes of Israel will inhabit and live within, seeing, perhaps, the vision of the future God intends for the people Israel and the whole world. This vision from the top of Mt. Nebo is a gift of God’s grace to Moses because he will not step across the Jordan River with the Israelites. This is as close as he comes before he dies and is buried in, as scripture tells us, an unknown place.

          Oh, the people will mourn his death for thirty days before they are led through the waters of the Jordan River by their new leader Joshua to begin the next part of their life’s journey, even as they begin receiving the land promised to them by God through their ancestors Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, and their children who are the twelve tribes of Israel.

Yet will they comprehend everything Moses has taught them? Will they for example, remember the lessons taught them as they wandered with their parents and grandparents for forty years in the wilderness? Will they remember their wandering was because of the choice their grandparents made to reject the land of promise and reject God by refusing to enter the promised land the first time? Will they comprehend how God’s Torah, God’s teachings that Moses taught them in Sinai and repeated as they stood outside the promised land, opens up the promises of God, explains God’s intentions, lays out the way for God’s people to live together, saying what is necessary to realize the promise of blessed abundance and a sustainable life lived on the land on which they will dwell? Will they comprehend that Torah does not guarantee land and security and blessing, it just invites and offers it by describing the path toward it? Also, will they comprehend the kind of leadership Moses embodied as he led a rag tag people-some of whom were Hebrews and some of whom were not Hebrews, but all of whom were also slaves In Egypt and who decided to get out of Dodge when the getting’ was good, walking through the waters of the Red Sea which becomes the dividing line separating their past from their future? Did they grasp the significance of this leadership that had to deal with complaints, whining, threats, and rejection while at the same time Moses was leading these people as God called and taught him to do?

From my perspective I doubt they did and I say this because none of the commentators and scholars I have studied and some of the textbooks on organizational behavior I have read and used as well all the other books on leadership I have studied ever discuss Moses’ leadership, except those who wrongly credit Moses for creating the pyramid organizational scheme for modern corporate and church leadership that has been largely found ineffective and useless in this our time of shifting from modernity to post-modernity, which has been opening our eyes to the reality that the world is pluralistic and not monolithic, and that the church’s crisis of a lost identity and a loss of purposefulness is the result of our not knowing who we are or why God created the church.

Yet, Moses’ leadership was quite extraordinary because at a time of absolute power and control invested in one person, who could wield that power and control in service to their own selfish agenda, Moses did not do that. Rather, Moses was faithful to God’s agenda. He listened to the needs of the people and he encouraged and developed new leaders to help in that mission, mentoring the leader who would take over after he was gone. He listened as the people  vented their disagreement with the direction they were going and he listened to their alternatives, while still seeking ways to bring the people to the place of well being and health and wholeness by teaching them God’s way to live, so everyone in the community would have enough. He also did not allow the community’s failures to keep the community paralyzed and stuck because he reminded them of their history and God’s vision for their future and their children’s future and their children’s children’s future, inviting them into the epic quest of teaching the rest of humanity scattered throughout the world how abundant, tranquil and complete life is when communities live according to God’s teaching. Also, he showed the people with his life the persistent faithfulness of never giving up on trusting and following God, who never gives up on them.

While Moses is celebrated and revered as the prophet par excellence, that is until Jesus shows up, and is remembered as Israel’s first great leader, I believe he is really an example of the servant-leader, one who isn’t concerned about having power over people, but one seeking to do good for people and opening doors for people to walk through into the future God intends for them.

This is clear when we look at the 11 characteristics servant leaders possess, compiled by Dan Wheeler and John Barbato based on the work of Robert Greenleaf and Larry Spears. The first characteristic servant leaders have is a calling, the place where one’s passion and the needs of the community or world meet, compelling that person to act for the benefit of other people. For Presbyterians, call is what happens when a person with abilities gifted to her or him hears God calling them to use those abilities to serve God’s agenda in the world by engaging God’s mission of peace, of health, well being and wholeness for every person through the vocation God has equipped them to do. Certainly, Moses was called by God to use his strength for doing right and challenging the authority of the oppressor and to keep following God’s agenda, while letting go of his own self-interest for the sake of others.

Second, servant leaders actively listen, seeking first to understand and letting the other person know they are valued and heard, then encouraging the people to share their ideas.

Third, servant leaders express empathy by walking with other people amid life situations which may be mundane or challenging, but always understanding what is happening in the lives of others and how it affects them. Fourth, servant leaders seek ways for healing to occur, have an awareness of self, other folks and the world around them, by creating an environment encouraging emotional mending that is part of the community they serve’s healing to wholeness.

Fifth, servant leaders have a keen awareness of what is happening around them and this awareness informs their opinions and decisions. Sixth, servant leaders are persuasive. They persuade people to act, rather than using the power of authority to force people to do what the leader wants them to do. Just as God is persuades people to go in the direction God wants them to go, so do servant leaders. God does coerce and neither do servant leaders. Rather, the servant leader offers compelling reasons for people to follow their direction. Seventh, servant leaders conceptualize the world, events, and  imagines the possibilities for the future then encourages people to dream great dreams, opening up the creative process to everyone in the community and teaching the people to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of day-to-day- realities and operations.

Eighth, the servant leader has the foresight to recognize the consequences of choices and to envision the future by seeing the patterns in the environment and anticipating what the future will bring.

Ninth, the servant leader is a good steward of the community’s resources by preparing the community to reach out into the larger community to serve the health, the well-being and sustainability of the whole community, knowing that the health and well-being of community of faith is directly affected by the health and well-being of the entire community. Tenth, the servant leader is committed to guiding people to develop their abilities as fully as possible and see them grow because the servant leader values each person and believes each person is essential to the growth of the community. This is especially important as they seek to mentor the future leaders of the community, particularly those who will take leadership positions like Joshua did or like Jesus’ disciples will do following his ascension.

Finally, servant leaders build community by fostering the unity of the community into a cohesive oneness that lives with integrity, so that who they say they are is reflected in what they do and how they live. In other words, they walk the talk.

However, as much as Moses is a great example of servant leadership, it is Jesus who is the ultimate example and, indeed teaches the twelve disciples that if they want to be great, they need to be the servant of all because he did not believe equality with God and all the power such equality might be his to use was something to be grasped, but was, instead, something to let go, so he could come to serve God by serving humanity, which is the reality of the two great commandments. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and being and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Jesus is the ultimate servant leader, who, as William Blake wrote, opens the doors of perception, so everything will appear to women and men as it really is, that is the infinite, the full reality of God’s presence and grace permeating all life.

If the church, the universal Christian church, is to emerge from its current crisis of lost identity and purposefulness and if the Presbyterian Church specifically desires to really live into the Reformed tradition’s watch words of ‘being reformed and always willing to be re-formed, re-shaped, by the Holy Spirit” then we might want to pay close attention to Moses and Jesus’ servant leadership practices because in doing so, our lights will shine, revealing more clearly that we are the image and likeness of God dwelling within a creation God called good and complete. And then, we too shall dwell in the peace we are seeking.

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Everybody is a Critic

Everybody is a critic. Think about it for a minute. How many armchair quarterbacks could have thrown a pass better than the professional, college, high school player they are watching? How many umpires are called blind or told to call it both ways? How often have you critiqued the driving skills of other drivers on freeways, especially on cross country trips? Or criticized a town official, any elected official local, state, national, or hymns picked for worship, or the police officer who gave a ticket-any ticket to someone you knew?

          Everyone really is a critic. So, why are we surprised when we read Exodus and hear all the mumbling, grumbling, moaning, whining, complaining that the Hebrews and others are doing in the middle of the wilderness? Where is the food? Where is the water? Did you just bring us out here to die? We had been better off in Egypt-at least we would have had food before they worked us to death. Yeah, and where is God? Is God with us or not, Moses? Yeah, Moses, where is the Creator of the Universe? Yeah dude!

          Now, we all know that God was with the Hebrews and the other slaves who left Egypt with the Hebrews largely because Exodus includes this fact as does Psalm 19. God was before them and behind them in great pillars of fire and smoke, leading them to the land promised to them through their ancestors and protecting them and feeding them manna everyday and providing them water everyday. Indeed, God was transforming the wilderness from being a place where lifelessness appears to be the only order a person or a people might depend upon. God is transforming the wilderness from being the place where escaping from one kind of death only leads you to different kind of death. Indeed, the wilderness is often described as a place of disorientation, disorder and chaos and where promises of life seem to rise like mirages and where hope keeps disappearing in sandstorms between towering rock-strewn mountains, however God is transforming the wilderness into a place where God is met, is found to be responsive to the needs of the people, so the people will learn to trust God. This is reason God provides what the wilderness cannot provide not by airlifting the people out of the wilderness, but by leading them to find the resources for life within the place of seeming desolation and hopelessness.

“The place where a table is spread in the presence of seeming disaster,” writes theologian Terence Fretheim, “and where the gift of water bubbles out of a rock struck by a wooden staff calling a people to see life abounding around them. Where the gift of food comes from the place where the resources for life appear imaginary. Where there is a gift of healing in a place where pain seems never to end.”

So, if God is doing all these wonderful things why are the people grumbling? Why will they very shortly melt their gold and create a golden calf to worship as their God, which is most certainly a loud and clear rejection of God?

I think it is because of what Fretheim writes at the end of that last sentence I quoted, which is the wilderness is being transformed into a place “where the movement from death to new life comes from within the very experience of godforsakeness because death is transformed into a new life yielding a new identity and a new way for living as a sustainable community beyond the deathly journey through the wilderness.”

Having a new identity and a new way of living means they have to give up their old identity as the people oppressed by Pharaoh and held in slavery and made to work without rest, without complaint because that meant the work would get harder, the beatings would increase and their lot in life wouldn’t change for the better. It also means they must give up their old way of living. They would have to give up a familiar existence and routine they had learned and used to navigate the world around them for a new way of living their lives, which was not yet in this part of their Exodus journey noticeably clear to them.  

You see, they do not know where they are going. They do not have maps to tell where it is or Google earth to give them a view of it and they do not know how to get there or what it will be like when they do arrive. They are living in the middle of uncertainty with little that is familiar or comforting and they are not learning the lessons God is trying to teach them. And their anxiety is about as high as an elephant’s eye to borrow a lyric. Indeed, their anxiousness is so high, they are failing the one overriding lesson God is trying to teach them, which is very simply “Trust God with your life.”

Trust God has created a reliable world where what is needed for life-food, water, air to breathe, earth that is fertile and is able to bring forth abundant harvests. Trust God has created a new structure for the community that will allow each person to have all they need without  resorting to greed, without desiring what your neighbor has, without resorting to killing to solve problems, without lies and gossip that destroys relationships within the community and beyond the community, without creating a hierarchy of those at the top and those at the bottom of the community and valuing those at the top more than those at the bottom, without those in power using that power for their own agendas or to oppress the people in the community, and without disregarding those ties that bind family’s together in healthy relationships. In short, trust God has created a community where healthy relationships abound and wholeness is for available for everyone just as the psalmists sings about in those psalms of orientation and praise.

All the Hebrews and those other people journeying with them will have to do is fully embrace, intentionally and mindfully live, and commit themselves to a relationship of mutuality and fidelity with God and with neighbor, becoming the people God is teaching them, molding them, and shaping them to be.

Then, when they do embrace and commit themselves to this new identity and are becoming this people the moaning, complaining, criticizing, groaning and conflicts will cease because they will know God is with them and they will become pilgrims on their way to a destination, rather than being wanderers walking hither and yon lost in the wilderness, yearning for the good old days of Egypt.

Truthfully, this is one of the overarching lessons all of scripture is teaching because once the Hebrews cross into the land, they will be challenged continually to embrace and commit themselves fully, intentionally, and mindfully to becoming the people God continues to teach them to be. It is a lesson the Israelites will have to learn repeatedly, and it is the lesson every Christian congregation we meet in all the epistles whether written by Paul or by others will have to learn. Indeed, that is what all the epistles are about because all of those folks from Corinth to Thessalonica and everywhere else are being challenged to leave behind their past and former identity and to fully embrace and commit their lives to living their new identity in God and in Christ, trusting God is with them to lead them, protect them and care for them along the way of their life-long pilgrimage down the long road of faithfulness to God and neighbor.

It has not changed. This, too, is our challenge in this time and this place. Are we willing to risk trusting God by living fully, intentionally and mindfully our identity as followers of Jesus who strive to share the gospel of God’s love and forgiveness that is a gift for all people, reaching out to God through worship, reaching out to one another by sharing fellowship and sharing times of challenge and joy, reaching out to the community locally and globally in ministries aimed at feeding the hungry and providing comfort to the distressed and despairing people, so we will be a blessing to other people?

 Are we willing to commit our lives to becoming this people God is teaching us, molding, and shaping us to become, so we too might be pilgrims journeying to God’s destination, rather than being wanderers traveling hither and yon lost in the wilderness? Are we willing to risk trusting God with our lives?

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All Land Is Sacred

Where, O God, can I flee from you?

          Where, O God, can I go and hide from you?

          These are the psalmist’s questions reflecting a radical monotheism that is relational. This is a song of a relationship between psalmist and God that covers the entire breadth of human existence in terms of God’s presence, knowledge and power, the giving and nurturing of an awareness of the Lord as the total environment of life as well as the teaching and confessing that “my times, O God, are in your hands,” according to James Mays’ commentary. This intensely personal devotional song portrays the human self in the light of the work of God as well as God’s work and person as the foundation for the human person’s life. This is not an abstract or systematic writing about who God is and what God does, rather it is the intimate relationship where the psalmist is completely known by God. The Hebrew word translated as “know” indicates this knowledge of God is intimate and deep from the moment of being formed in the womb through birth and into the long daily routines of awakening and sleeping, going out from home, and coming back home, working, and resting and eating. Nothing is hidden from God and there is nowhere to go to get away from God. The psalmist is never free of God; however, neither is he a prisoner of God. Rather he is free to live for and with God, as Mays describes this relationship.

          Reading this personal psalm of God being the totality of a person’s life and the encompassing environment for all life contrasts and highlights the foolishness of Jonah, who goes to great lengths to hide from God because he refuses to be the prophet to Nineveh that God has called him to be. Instead, he runs in the opposite direction, tries to hide from God aboard a boat, then in the middle of storm convinces the crew that they can calm the storm by throwing him overboard into the sea, which they do. Then, in the sea he is swallowed by a great fish, as described in Hebrew. It is while he is in the great fish that Jonah prayers a prayer of thanksgiving to God for saving his life, which is humorous because he has been trying to hide from God, trying to hide from the Creator of the Universe. Of course, Jonah’s prayer is answered, and the great fish vomits him up onto shore where he begins walking to Nineveh to be the prophet God has called him to be, although he complains to God throughout his time of ministry in Nineveh.

          So, when Jesus couples Jonah’s story with Jesus’ death and resurrection it is a sign that God’s transformative love is a call to remember how near we are to God’s love and remember the power of God to transform life as well as remembering the unconditional nature of God’s love to forgive and embrace those who change the direction of their life even if it means God seeking us in the depth of our sorrows and our desire to hide ourselves away from everything and everyone, including God, to lift us up out of our miry bog and to place us on a dry, level plain, so we might continue to live for and with God in a greater awareness of God’s encompassing presence and trusting God to sustain life now and for eternity.

          What the psalmist is also calling us to realize with the focus on geography, the focus on God being the total environment of life and the focus on God’s participation in our own personal creation is that all life is sacred and connected to each other in relationships of interdependence where what happens to one member of creation impacts and influences other members of creation.

This is profoundly true in our relationship with the land that we are tasked by God to till, tend, and protect and to care for, so it remains able to nurture life and sustain life and which various passages of scripture point out is often a mirror of our relationships within families and within whole communities.

          Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel is but one example of this mirroring effect. Cain and Abel are the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain is the oldest and is a farmer while his younger brother Abel is a keeper of sheep. They both bring to God offerings from their respective vocations. Abel’s is accepted by God while Cain’s is rejected by God. Cain is angry, dejected and is warned by God that “sin is prowling like a wild animal waiting to overcome you, but you must master it.” Thus, Cain has a choice either to master sin or be mastered by sin. Still feeling the rage of his anger, Cain invites his brother into a field and kills him, then walks away. However, the voice of the dirt that absorbed Abel’s blood cries out to God with its own sorrow and grief for the blood spilled in violence because anger, resentment, and rejection had all grown to such overwhelming proportions that Cain could not master sin, but instead sin mastered him. It mastered even his response to God’s question, “where is your brother?” and his retort, “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Keeper, the word has more meanings than one who keeps. It means “to exercise loving care for, to watch over, to guard, to preserve, to protect, to tend to the needs of another, to save a life, to sustain life.”

          This was the same word “shamar,” in the Hebrew, used in Genesis earlier to describe God’s expectations for the man and woman and their descendants to keep the garden, keeping it able to be fruitful by their serving the land and all creation as they tend to the land’s needs and protecting the land from those elements that might destroy it, making the land unable to be productive and unable to sustain life.

Now, as the land that absorbed Abel’s blood cries out in sorrow and grief, the fractured and broken relationship of the brothers was, also, given voice as the land’s pollution from violence mirrored the pollution of sin Cain experienced. In the same way that the mark on Cain signified his identity as one who ended life, the infertility of the sacred land, scarred by the blood seeping into it, identifies it as land unable to nurture life or sustain life.

          Similarly, Walter Bruggemann, Old Testament scholar and theologian, makes this same point about land mirroring the broken and fractured relationships within families and within the community in his work “The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith” using the themes of contamination of the land, of excluding people from the land and possessing land to fulfill selfish economic actions without regard for the community, and of the defilement of the land. He begins, of course, with Moses’ farewell speech about faithfully living God’s teachings and God’s way of life as the foundation for staying long in the land promised and given to the Hebrews while being unfaithful to God’s way is the basis for the Israelites being exiled from the land and losing the land. Thus, the way the community lives its daily life in all their various relationships impacts what happens with the land.

          I doubt that we are strangers to this conversation if we consider how brown field industrial sites have physically divided communities and economically divided communities into those who have more than they need for life and those who do not even have the necessities needed to sustain life. Not to mention making the contaminated land unable to be used for the nurturing of life and the sustaining of life. We might also hear in this conversation the call to reflect about how brown field industrial sites also violates the command to love your neighbor as yourself and violates God’s call to keep the land. Or, perhaps we might consider the way “mountaintop removal strip mining and the accompanying filling up of valleys with the debris from mountain top  is the most destructive way to mine coal, creating unhealthy living conditions for people in nearby communities, eliminating not only  forests and streams but altering a whole ecosystem that can never be restored as well as forever changing the communities where people live,” according to Kentuckians for Commonwealth. How does this action comport with loving our neighbors or keeping, tending, or lovingly caring for creation as God has called humankind to do?

          How does any of the environmental disasters we have witnessed whether from the BP oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, the Chernobyl or the Three Mile Island disasters, or the pollution of rivers by coal mining companies, to name just a few, square with an understanding of our responsibility for the keeping and caring and protecting of the land given to us by God, not to mention the psalmist’s declaration that God is the total environment for life?

          As the Seasons of the Spirit commentary reminds us, our choices have consequences for the land. Sacred ground can become scarred ground, whether by shedding blood or by poisoning the soil. So the question for Christians today in light of climate change, Arctic permafrost melting and rising ocean levels is, will we hear the voice of the land crying out to us for restorative justice and peace or will we keep pouring the blood of human violence, contamination, defilement and greed into its mouth, so that we do not have to hear the land’s voice crying out to us or to listen to God teaching us the way for life to be nurtured and sustained?

          How we answer that question will have consequences for how much longer the land will nurture and sustain life for us, our children, and all future generations.

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“Freed to Be”

“Thirty-five years earlier, before the relapse of my dystrophy, I couldn’t have done what I’ve done. I was a businesswoman, I had a shop, I was in a marriage, and I was a conformist. I probably had to go through all this to come out at the other end, to be sort of hit on the head and to realize that my former life wasn’t all that good and that it was time to try something else, said Hanni Sager, Toronto’s Toy Lady. Sager was renowned for her toys and all the displays and play time events she put together in Toronto, especially Toronto’s Harborfront cultural center, but today she is working with disabled and street children in Mexico’s Oaxaca state near the Pina Palmera Center for disabled children by helping them to become toy makers of the simple folk toys they enjoy despite the muscular dystrophy that wastes away her muscles.

Sanger has discovered the truth of Proverbs 14:12, “Before every person there lies a wide and pleasant road that seems right but ends in death.”  For Sanger, like many people, started down a road that seemed pleasant at first, a wide road that promised freedom, that promised joy, but which turns out to be the wrong road headed in the wrong direction and by the time she discovered this she couldn’t turn around on her own.

  Then, she heard the words inviting her to a life of true freedom and a rest that brings real lasting joy, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Now, freedom has been spoken about and celebrated much these last few days. Politicians have talked about freedom. We’ve had fireworks celebrating freedom that are designed to make us feel joyful. We’ve heard the songs declaring freedom in the symbols of freedom like a flag, which should spark some feeling of being joyfully free. We’ve even heard famous quotes about freedom such as these:

“Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man,” by John Locke (1632–1704), British philosopher. Second Treatise on Civil Government (written 1681, pub. 1690).

“Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation,” from Thomas Jefferson ‘s March 4, 1801, First Inaugural Address.

“Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set,” by Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965), U.S. Democratic politician. “Putting First Things First,” Foreign Affairs (New York, Jan. 1960).

            Yet, do any of these quotes or any of the words spoken or the songs sung lead us to authentic freedom? Have we been freed to be? How many people are still caught up in carrying the burdens they’ve been seemingly chained to like the Greek mythological king Sysiphus, who was condemned to roll a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down when he comes near the top for all eternity? Maybe, some are carrying the burden of fear about the next terrorist attack, the next casualty report from Ukraine, the next financial meltdown, the next round of inflation statistics that tell us we need to have 4% or more of our neighbors chronically unemployed to get inflation down to 2%, the next gas hike, the next food hike or shortage, the next report about how many foreclosures there have been and will be in the coming months and the next essay about what the future might or might not hold?

  Maybe, the burdens we carry have to do with feeling like we do not belong because those who said they loved us abandoned us or turned away from us. Or, perhaps we are carrying the burden of busy ness that is depicted in the Chinese pictograph by two words “heart” and “killing” and so being busy means killing our hearts physically and poetically Or, perhaps it is the burden of our anxieties, the burden of our temptations and our responsibilities, the burden of our loneliness, maybe after bereavement, and the burden people have when they sense that life has no meaning, and above all, there is the burden of our failures and of our guilt. What a burden they can be!

            In the weariness of carrying any of these burdens is it possible for others and for us to hear the words of Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” as an invitation to the only true and real freedom we will ever have?

            These are words that have been immortalized in Handel’s “Messiah” and by that famous religious artist, Harold Copping, who in one of his pictures, depicted Jesus standing on a hillside with the crowds milling beneath him and his arms are outstretched as if to welcome the crowds with the caption underneath, “Come unto Him.”

Come unto him because Jesus is the supreme burden bearer. He is the one the Gospel of John speaks about early on, “Behold, the Lamb of God who bears away the sin of the world.”  This is the essence of the Good News, that God, through His Son Jesus, because of His great love for us, came to be one with us, took our humanity to himself when He was born, and took our sin and guilt to himself when He died, setting us free.

Perhaps one of the best expressions of this comes from John Bunyan in his allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress: “Up this way then did a burdened Christian run, and not without some difficulty because of the load on his back. He ran thus until he came to a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place, stood a cross and below a sepulcher. So, I saw in my dream, the justice Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from his back and began to tumble and continued to do until it reached the sepulcher where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome and said with a merry heart, `He has given me rest by His sorrow and life by His death.'”           

Yet, how are we to understand this invitation to lay down our burdens and put on Christ’s yoke as freedom, not to mention offering us rest? Well, a yoke was used to put oxen into teams, usually teaming an older ox and a younger ox together. Now, yokes could either be ill fitting or right fitting. Those that were ill fitting did not rest easy on the oxen, rather they chafed the oxen and the oxen struggled against them making the work harder and their burdens heavier. The same could be said for the way the Pharisees had become by the First Century. Indeed, several rabbis of the time said Torah hung like a sword held up by a single hair over the head of the people and they often spoke about the “yoke of the commandments” meaning the faithful obedience of Torah. For some folks in the first century, their faith had become less about trust and more about religious minutia that burdened them down with the realization they just could never measure up and if they couldn’t measure up to being faithful to God then they were truly lost. In many ways, they felt the way Bono describes the way many of our contemporaries feel, “‘I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God.  It is almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building. The Spirit is described in the Holy Scriptures as much more anarchic than any established religion credits.’

  Jesus’ metaphor of the yoke calls people to rethink about what was truly important in being faithful to God. As a bridge between the inability of some people to see God’s saving work revealed in Jesus’ healing and so miss seeing the coming fruition of God’s kingdom and the Sabbath controversies of the next chapter when the Pharisee’s concern is about working on the Sabbath and the proper observance of hand washing rituals, Jesus calls attention to what the kingdom of God is truly about and what it means to be faithful and obedient followers of God’s way. His metaphor comes after the Sermon on the Mount’s long teaching about the costly life of discipleship, so clearly Jesus is not offering us a vacation from being faithful to God, nor is the rest he offers a period of inactivity, rather he invites us to put on a yoke that is right fitting. That fits us so well; it will not chaff us, but is as the underlying Greek word means, “kind” and easy for us to wear. This is the carefully designed yoke which is made for us because God has not only given each of us a task to do that is made to measure, but God gives us the ability to do it. Also, Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden is light because fulfilling the Torah, according to his way is simplified by his emphasis on the weightier matters of God’s commands; justice, mercy, and faithfulness wrapped in the embrace of God loving us and our loving God with every fiber of our being and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us. While the old Shaker hymn is correct that it is a gift to be simple, Jesus does not diminish the weight of our accountability to God, but he will also help us to bear this responsibility.

Jesus does not invite us to be a solitary ox pulling the load alone but invites us to be Jesus’ yokemate and so learn from him how to live faithful obedient lives. The reason for yoking a younger ox to an older ox, was so that the older oxen could teach the younger one how to move under the yoke and how to work together to make the work easier and lighter and not so tiring that the oxen became worn, weary and exhausted. In the same way Jesus invites us to wear the same yoke he is wearing and to learn from him. Learning not only to think, but also to do and to live. Almost saying to us, “Become my yoke mate and learn how to pull the load by working beside me and watching how I do it. The heavy labor will seem lighter when you allow me to help you with it.” Like in the over quoted poem “Footprints” we often discover that when we see only one set of footprints in the path behind us, those are moments in our lives when Jesus carried us and all our burdens. Carried us in the gentleness of God’s grace and humility of God coming to serve us, so we might learn to serve God and each other in sharp contrast to some of the current crop of Christians set on the rule keeping of religious minutia, but at a deeper level we learn that serving God and all our fellow human beings demands a spirit of gentleness and humility. Demands watching Jesus closely to see how he crafts his obedience to God, so we may do likewise and find ourselves in the place just right, find ourselves in the valley of love and delight.”

  The place that is right for us and where we discover we are free to be, who God created us to be. The true freedom God intends for all people, the freedom, to not be oppressed, to not be dominated and controlled or held in slavery to all the internal and external, the emotional and the social powers that enslave us, that dehumanize us, that wear us down and exhaust us by their taunts, but to be the authentic human beings we are created to be and discovering the profound joy that permeates everything we do and wells up within us the gushing release of rejoicing for the blessing of being in the liberating, healing and invigorating reality that is God’s kingdom as the wisdom of Jeremiah tells us, “Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask where the good way lies, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”

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Trinity: The Way of Celtic Prayer

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New Shoots of Perspective

                        When I was about seven, I was busily writing the “Further Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” stories, which my younger sister illustrated with crayon drawings. We’d sell our books on the sidewalk to whomever passed by us. Most children had a lemonade stand; I had a small publishing enterprise. Often grown-ups would stop to look at the books and they would ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I said, “I want to write stories and I want to tell stories.” They would say, “That’s nice.”

When I was twelve they began saying to me, “That’s a nice dream, but it’s too hard making a living writing stories” then off they’d go with a barrage of facts, making writing stories sound like an utterly ridiculous goal.

           Invariably, they finished up by saying, “It’s nice to have big dreams, but you need to face the facts of life. You need to get a real job with a real income like everybody else. This is, after all, the 20th Century.”

          The way they said it made it sound as if the mere fact of living in that century settled the issue for all time.  It was as though they agreed with Clifton Fadiman’s statement, “All of life is an earnest search for the right manila folder in which we get filed away.”  As if they lived in the grip of fatalism that believes everything is as it has always been and forever will be. As though life proceeds like clockwork. As if something need to have happened only a couple of times in the past three years for our minds to declare it “inevitable” and “irrevocable.” As if a leaf is green because it could be nothing else. The poor are poor because they are poor. Everything is as it is due to routine, predictability, and given enough time and government research grants, everything shall be explained and demystified.

          “The world is as it is. It can’t be changed,” they seemed to be saying. 

          Yet, when I hear God speaking through the prophet Isaiah, “And a child shall lead them” I wonder why will it be that a child shall lead humanity into the incredible beauty of God’s vision for our lives that is poetically described by Isaiah? After all, children in the ancient near east and even today are among the most vulnerable and least powerful persons in a community. On their own, children do not create legislation, pass laws, or even have their voices taken seriously by those who do make laws. Greta Thune is a great example. Children depend upon others to keep them safe and provide for them. I mean, just look at the news reports and magazine articles about child labor in India, Pakistan and throughout Southeast Asia, not to mention the plight of children in refugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon, or the young girls sold as brides to men old enough to be their grandfathers.

 Also, children depend upon adult leaders to mentor them into lives of creativity and vitality.

  So, why does God tell us through the prophet Isaiah that in God’s peaceable kingdom a child will be the leader?  What is it about a child that will make them the best choice for leadership?

          Well, take a look at the painting of the peaceable kingdom.. What is it that you adults see? Do you see all the animals just hanging out together, predators and prey standing next to each other? Do you see their faces and do you detect the smiles on their faces as if the painter Edward Hicks said, “Now, everyone say cheese?”  Do you wonder why it is that they are smiling? Is it because the prey is no longer fearful? Or maybe they are calm because they are in a forest with such an abundance of water and plants to eat, that hunger isn’t an issue for any of the animals, so the predators have decided it’s good to be a vegan. Do you see the children in the painting? Why they are the age the painter has depicted? And, did you notice that one is a male and one is a female? Do you see the angel? Can you see far into the background and see William Penn, the Quaker, affirming a peace treaty with Delaware peoples? Yet, what does this have to do with the peaceable kingdom and Isaiah 11?

          Well, let’s think about it through the eyes of a child. What does a child see in this painting? Does the child see the peaceable kingdom as perhaps really the Garden of Eden? I wonder if children would see the picture divided between the animals’ peaceable kingdom and the humans’ peaceable kingdom. I wonder if children might see more than we see. 

Several years ago, Tina and I and two of our children went to see the movie “August Rush.” It is a marvelous movie not only for the music that runs like a thread throughout the story connecting each of the people together and drawing them together, but also for the story of a young not quite twelve year old boy who hears music in all the sounds of the world around him whether he is standing in the middle of a corn field as the wind blows the stalks in amazing swirling and flowing patterns or he is standing in the middle of New York City listening to music being created by the interplay of car engines, horns, shoes scrapping across pavement, water bubbling in a fountain, and people’s voices echoing in the air of the city. Each of these is its own symphony playing notes of music that is his life, which is creating the music of his long lost mother and father’s lives, so mother, father and son might be reunited and made whole.

          While no one believes him or understands him, the boy refuses to give up on this vision and he finds imaginative ways to make the music of his life spread far out into New York City knowing that his mother and father will hear it and will be drawn to him and to each other.

Perhaps, that is the reason God chooses a child to lead humanity to the peaceable kingdom. Maybe, it is because children see life as amazing. A child makes no rigid distinction between the tales of wizards and fairies and the tales of historians as G. K. Chesterton notes, there was a reason why Cinderella was younger than her ugly sisters. “A child, “he writes,”of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon.”

          I think this is the reason children picked up Harry Potter books and couldn’t put them down.  I think they became enmeshed and awed to wonder by a world that is beyond our predictable, everyday routine. Where there are brooms to ride in games played high above our heads, invisibility cloaks and maps that show people moving about a castle school where the pictures talk to you. At least, I know this is why I couldn’t put them down. The Harry Potter books and books about knights of the round tables, princes and princesses and others like them invite us to open our minds and imagine there is more to life than what we see.

          In imaginative literature, music, plays and art, we are invited to look beyond the surface of life and see that a leaf is green for a reason that has nothing to do with rational science.

In many ways, Isaiah is, also, reminding us to look beyond the surface of this life to see that a leaf is green because God meant it to be. Every leaf that is green or red or yellow and not beige is so because of God’s choice to color it that specific color. The world is something, which has been meant, designed, brought into being by God’s choice. And, it is here for our wonder, our surprise and our enjoyment. Even the repetition of cycles and routines is meant for us to wonder about than to see them as dull, pointless, or seasons to dread. Maybe, we are supposed to be looking at the grass as a signal to us. Maybe the stars are trying to get us to understand some message they have for us, maybe the rising of the sun each day is making a point we will discover only if we pay close attention to it.

 Perhaps, the point it is making is that God has chosen the order of the world and the repetition within creation as a way to speak to us about its vitality and health. Like the child who laughs at a joke and says, “Daddy tell it again and again and again, laughing each time as though it was the first time. Or, like the child who falls in love with swinging on a swing and says, “Mommy, do it again. Do it again!” I wonder if God says to the irises each spring and apples and oranges in summer and fall “do it again. Do it again.” So, we might wonder at the continual renewal of life and be surprised at the first blooms of flowers popping up from the wintry ground, reminding us how God creates life anew each day.

          Maybe, the shoot that springs forth from the tree stump is God’s way of reminding us that God is the God of green life. That God is the one who brings forth greenness when we have felt as if we were dry as summer dust as Hildegard of Bingen wrote in the 12^th Century about the veriditas or the healing, greening power of God, “God through Christ is bringing the lush greenness of God’s kingdom to a shriveled and wilted humanity.”

Even, Paul’s word to the Roman church in chapter 15:13 of his epistle might be translated as Eugene Peterson has, “Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!”

          Maybe we need a child to lead us in becoming God’s children, so we might see the new heaven and the new earth coming into being as God intends it to come into being with a shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse and a wolf living with a lamb, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a child leading us to hear God’s music of life creating the symphony which draws all people and creation together into God’s peaceable kingdom.

          I pray this may be your vision and your hope for this Advent and Christmas, as surely as it is mine.

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“Opportunities in Unexpected Places”

The elites of Israelite society, the chief priests, the scribes, the military commanders, the advisors to the king, the learned, and the skilled artisans stumble along the stony road to exile. The road is hot, rocky, and dusty. At the resting places on the side of the road, Babylonian soldiers laugh and mock them. Their feet trod the stony path to a land they do not know; to live among a people they cannot understand; for a length of time beyond their reckoning even as they mourn the death of families, friends, and neighbors amidst the rubble of the burned-out Temple, which had been the central visible symbol of their faith but is now gone along with homes and families. All of it is gone and they will all struggle to find a way to define the purpose for their lives as an Israelite exile community. Yet, how will it be possible for them to be the people Israel without land, without Temple, without priest, without cities, without homes, without family, and without friends? Everything that defined them as a people was gone. Nearly, every element of their identity has been taken away from them, as if they were stripped naked of their personhood. 

Into this complex matrix of grief, disorientation, culture change, shock and despair come the prophet Jeremiah’s letter God told him to write. In the letter, Jeremiah delivers this word from the Lord: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:5-7).  The meaning is clear.

“Your old life is dead,” says the Lord; “your new life is to be found where you are and in the new circumstances of your life. And it’s going to be this way for an exceptionally long time, but at the ripe time, Kairos time, I will gather you and bring you back home. So, do not be seduced by despair and disorientation and false prophets who do not speak my word, because they will only lead you to death. Instead, center your life in me for I am your God, and you are my people, and it is in my way and by my word that you will find new life springing up in unexpected places and in unexpected ways.”

Here in this letter hand carried from Jerusalem’s rubble is God’s promise of life. A promise resonant with the promises God made to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and kept through Moses and the wilderness experience where Israel was taught to trust God enough to choose life by centering their lives in God and God’s way of being. A promise betrayed during the monarchal period of Israel’s life story when exceptionalism, pride, prosperity, and power seduced Israel, as Walter Brueggemann points out, to believe that God’s primary purpose and function was to guarantee Israel’s special privileges and entitlements in the world. They were self-deluded into thinking God served them and their agenda for the world, until the prophets spoke clearly that God was reasserting the reality that the Lord of the universe will order creation and humanity according to God’s restorative justice, righteousness, and equity. When the Israelites did what their ancestors did in the wilderness, that is when they failed to listen and trust God, they were sent out into this new wilderness called exile, so that once again God might teach them to trust and center their life in God and God’s way of being with this new promise of hope-this new promise of life.

  What I find remarkable and significant for North American Christian congregations in this promise is what comes in the last sentence, “seek the welfare of city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare is where you will find your welfare” because the word translated as welfare is “shalom” which in this context can mean soundness, wholeness, completeness, health, or well-being. These are all words defining the totality of God’s peace. Switching out welfare for one of these other words makes the sentence’s meaning different, “pray for the health of the city for in its health is your health,” or “pray for the well-being of city for in its well-being is your own well-being,” or maybe a combination “pray for the wholeness of the city for in its health and well-being is your own health and completeness.”

In whatever way we seek to translate shalom, the reality comes back so hard to us that it is impossible for us to miss the point that God is teaching, which is very simply that we are inseparably connected to everyone within the community in which we live or as Martin Luther King Jr. would say “we are all caught in an intricate web of mutuality where I can never be all I am to be unless and until you are everything you ought to be.” We are not created to be isolated little random moving beings within creation happy to be thinking solely of ourselves. Creation wasn’t created that way in the beginning and it doesn’t work that way now. Every part of creation is connected to every other part of creation, just like the cells and organs of our bodies are connected in interdependent relationships where what effects and influences one cell or organ effects and influences every other cell and organ. We all know that right? If I eat spoiled food and get food poisoning, it’s not just my stomach that expereinces it, is it? Or, if I have cancer or diabetes not just one small portion of the body is affected by it. The same is true of the hand surgery I had a few years ago. The same is true for communities.

Indeed, God’s lesson for these former elites of Israel is that there can be no viable future of well-being for the wealthy and powerful Jerusalem establishment, unless the entire community has well-being.  A lesson the wealthy and powerful failed to learn throughout the history of Israel and a lesson the wealthy and powerful have always failed to learn throughout the history of the world both ancient and contemporary, particularly as we see them time and time again routinely neglect the health and well-being of the most vulnerable and powerless among them, the widow, the orphan, and the resident alien and allow the community to be disparately divided between the rich and the poor. This is the same lesson the 1% in this nation, their politicians and even the libertarian tea party folks, the MAGA folks, and other self-centered folks have, also, failed to learn. 

Yet, God is teaching this lesson to the Israelites in a strange land among people who do not share their faith, nor their worldview, but who are in control of governmental power, land, and wealth because they are the majority, and the Israelite exiles are the minority. So as the powerless and vulnerable minority, the Israelites are challenged to act in ways that will create health and well-being for the entire community.

This is what makes this verse significant for North American Christian congregations, who have been told Christendom, the imperial and power aligned church, is dead! Who come to the reality that the church no longer has the influence on culture and society it once did, even the big church evangelicals are losing influence according to Christian Century magazine. We are becoming a minority within many of our communities because our membership has been declining for decades and the church is being disestablished from its institutional moorings.

But I must say that is great! Here is an opportunity for Christians to re-orient our lives, our thinking, our discussions away from the obsession of church growth, the whining about decline of membership, the snake oil of finding the silver bullet for congregational transformation, dispensing with the focus on congregational life cycles and all the other nonsense that keeps us trapped in the self-absorbed delusion of despair and disorientation, so we might focus instead on the health and well-being, the wholeness and peace of the communities we live within and in doing so find our own health, wholeness and peace. After all, God‘s lesson for the exiled Israelite elites is a powerful challenge to Christian congregations who feel they are living in exile to look beyond ourselves and to comprehend that the health of the communities where our congregations are located has a direct impact on the health of the congregation. If a community is declining in population, chances are the congregations within it will also be declining. Nor can you expect stewardship to rise when everyone in town is laid off as some churches I suspect discovered during the last economic downturn.

What is, also, exciting is that the Israelites rose to the challenge in Babylon by creating community centers within the exile community whose focus was education, language instruction in Hebrew and Aramaic, social events, active engagement in the larger community, and prayer. These community centers eventually evolved into the synagogues that were brought back to Israel when God restored them to the Promised Land, and which flourish everywhere in the world where Jewish communities exist. The exiles found a way to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land through creativity, through the courage to do something brand new, something no one had thought to do before and did this in the face of despair.

This is what Christian congregations, also, need to do. We all need to be courageous and creative enough to enter this time of transition thoughtfully and intentionally because when we do, we will discover a new way of being church that is so new, it will redefine what it means to be the ‘people of the Way.” 

This is the challenge for congregations in a time of transition as they consider how they will re-define their identity then live that identity, how they will care for each other, so everyone thrives, how they will create a deeper spirituality through a creative and imaginative worship, and how they will engage their neighborhood, so the congregation becomes stronger, more visible, and more highly valued as a catalyst for health and a thriving well-being that will ripple throughout this neighborhood and into the entire city, so the presence of this faith community will make a difference and will matter to the entire community.

This challenge is not beyond any congregation to engage. Right now, there are congregations doing creative ministries through collaborative relationships with community agencies on mission projects that seek to make systemic changes in the health and well-being of their communities. I am one of the passionate proponents of this approach because in my own research and ministry with congregations attempting change I discovered that when a congregation goes outside of its walls to do mission that is focused on improving the health of the community, the community response to the congregation is positive and the congregation is awakened to the hope and possibilities for life that seemed impossible to imagine as new people come to worship and participate in the life of the congregation. Now, lest you think I am as one colleague described me “dangerously naïve” about the long-term possibilities of this, it has been working in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood since the late 1980’s when Rev. Eugene Rivers and other pastors involved their congregations to end gang violence and influence in their neighborhoods. By 1991 gang violence in those neighborhoods was reduced by about 25% and those same faith communities are acting today to make systemic changes in that neighborhood through the Ten Point Coalition, it happened in Worcester, Mass when the Pleasant Street Baptist Church sought the health of the community, and it is continuing through the neo-monastic community “the Simple Way” in Philadelphia.

Every time Christians walk out into the mission field right outside their doors with an assured hope and an unshakeable faith in God, seeking the health of the community by creating meaningful community and by encouraging seekers to seek the transcendence and mystery leading to the exciting discovery of the meaning and purposefulness for each person’s life that is when the entire community experiences the completeness of God’s peace embracing them, which is exactly what God desires for all humanity and for all creation.

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“God’s Wisdom in Flora and Fauna”

“The sky is full of blue and full of the mind of God,” exclaimed an elementary age girl, who moved from Louisiana to North Dakota wrote Kathleen Norris in her book “Dakota.”

        A truth spoken by a young girl confirms the truth sung by the psalmist who sings aloud, “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”

          In this song, the psalmist cannot contain or control the effusive, joyful, evocative flow of images any more than a person seeing a bright blue sky or a stunning sunrise coloring the horizon in hues of orange, red, and yellow against the backdrop of green trees and white and purple flowers carpeting a meadow can contain or control their joy and the awareness that something deeper, something profound is happening.

Psalm 104 is the continuing witness begun in Psalm 103. In Psalm 104, the poet is extolling God’s blessings pouring over all creation’s great biodiversity in a hymn of praise to God as the creator of life that is remarkably comprehensive in its expansive vision of space and earth, flora and fauna, topography, and geology.

This vision is sung with words of praise aiming to describe God and describe God’s creative act in bringing a non-hierarchical and classless eco-system into being with power and control.

This is not scientific analysis reducing creation and life to its smallest size, its lowest common denominator, or its sparse causality, as one commentator has said. Nor, is it a dry reciting of the names of plants, animals, fish, or birds. Instead like a painter trying to capture the vision of a landscape, the poet uses the bold colors of visual imagery and powerful metaphors such as God’s hand reaching out to touch mountains; God watering the mountains like a gardener feeding the flowers and grasses just planted in fertile soil, rich with nutrients; God’s open hand holding out the food for the lions and the birds of the air and the dismay all creation experiences when God hides God’s face from it.

One could almost see, as one commentator has noted, the poet standing with God on a beach like two old friends with the poet waving his arm across the horizon, drawing attention to the vastness of the life above the surface of the oceans and the life below the surface of the oceans. The ships bobbing on the waves and the whales diving deep below the waves. The poet exclaiming amazement at all the creatures, flora and fauna, oceans, rivers, and mountains dependent upon God for everything necessary for life and the uniqueness of every life captured in the uniqueness of every snowflake, the unique configuration of each sea coral plant, or the iris of every mammal’s eye. God makes no two things exactly alike. Creation is filled with great diversity even among creatures possessing surprising similarities.

How does God provide for all life? How did God conceive of all life from giant sequoias to Greenland sharks to pelicans and bluebirds to pansies and periwinkle to granite and volcanic rock?

In this wonderment, we recall the stories of Genesis 2 when God took dirt and shaped and molded human beings, reminding us how intricately connected to creation we really are. The way God breathed life into the first human to animate him and how God knew that a human alone was not fully alive, but needed the community of other humans, who are similar, yet quite different. The evening strolls God took in the Garden in search of the man and the woman, calling us to recognize God’s desire for community with us, wanting conversations with us at the end of the day in a moment of Sabbath-a moment of rest and reflection.  

Yet, the psalmist also calls us to remember God taming the chaos with the verses about the leviathan-the sea monster depicted as chaos and evil in other portions of the biblical story, but here depicted as playing with God in a frolic of joy and carefree enjoyment of life. Then, as we recall the Genesis 1 story of God taking a mass of unformed, lifeless gunk, we discover the order, limits, boundaries, and the separation of light and dark; water below and water above-oceans and sky; wild animals and domestic animals; waters from the dry land; and the cosmic order of stars, sun, and moon, each with a purpose in the sustaining of life.

However, each verse the psalmist sings tells us not only about creation they also describe something about God. God, like creation, is not to be described in simple or superficial words. God, like creation, is not to be exploited for human gain or agendas. Nor can God be known from a parochial or narrow perspective, or a set of propositions laid out in an easy digestible menu of characteristics that fit neatly into human devised categories like those of Christian nationalists.

God is not to be fully known without first seeking to know fully the bio-diverse creation God created because God, like creation, is complex. God’s complexity is apparent when we realize some aspects of God’s nature are fully visible like the Andes or the Rockies while others are hidden from us like the mountain ranges at the bottom of the ocean or the light emitting ocean creatures dwelling in the deep darkness of the ocean. Creatures we have only just begun to comprehend.

This is what God is trying to get Job to understand with all the different speeches-mythic, powerfully dominating, playful, royal- as well as the conversation that moves first from how life was created and formed and molded in the beginning before moving on to the wild and fearful creatures like the leviathan. God is trying to transform Job’s narrow perspective about who God is and who Job is and what this life we are gifted is to be about. God wants to bring Job face to face with his fear, so he might confront the reality of a chaotic existence of joy and suffering and discover that his limited belief and his limited trust in God is a trap ensnaring him in isolation and moral bitterness, preventing him from the transformation God intends for him. That is, also, what Paul is trying to teach the Corinthians as they struggle with conflicting teachers who declare they are the authoritative ones, the ones with right teaching and the other teachers are just charlatans as the Corinthians struggle with their own spiritual arrogance and the inability to discern God’s wisdom amidst the swirl of human thought masquerading as wisdom.

The expansive, bio-diverse, no one thing exactly alike, cosmic-earth creation carries within itself God’s wisdom, which we will discover if we just stop our drive for certainty long enough to realize that great diversity is what sustains all life, not mono-culture, homogenous community, uniformity, and conformity. that is why God calls the church to reach out to all nations, not just a few that look like us. That is why the church reached out from its Jewish roots to the Gentiles. That is why the people of God cannot be pictured as one particular people, but must include the great diversity of all people

We, the church now, must recognize that every creature, flora and fauna, geography, topology, star and planets, oceans and sea monsters-have their birth, death and very existence as the result of God’s personal, wise, and sovereign action. We, the church now, must affirm that we are called as Christ’s body to be good stewards of creation by protecting habitats of biodiversity in all its life forms, so all may thrive together as expressions of the glory of God’s kingdom here and now.

Witnessing that God is the source of all life, physical life, spiritual life, eternal life, and the life of the church and that all these spheres of life are inseparable from one another.

Witnessing that all creation, including the church, lives by the power of God’s renewing Spirit, not by its own ability, merit, or ingenuity. Witnessing that all creation, including the church, exists to praise and serve God.”

So, yes let us sing, “Bless the Lord, all our souls.” Amen.

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Ocean Sunday

Did you know that we have learned more about the oceans in the last 50 years than we have learned in all the previous centuries? One of the most recent discoveries is that the Greenland Shark is the vertebrae creature that lives the longest. It lives to be about four hundred years old. Did you know that the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which is simply each number after O is the sum of the two preceding numbers such as 0 + 1= 1, 1+2=3, 2+3= 5, 3+5=8 and so on, occurs repeatedly in nature from the petals on a daisy to the seeds of a sunflower to pinecones and pineapples? That the golden ratio of 1.618 occurs in the bones of our fingers, the measurements of our forearms and hands and is used in architecture like the Parthenon? Did you know that no matter how large or small a circle you make that diameter divided by the circumference will always approximately equal pi or 3.14? Do you know that we don’t know how many prime numbers there really are?

            All of this is to say that God’s questions to Job just might be more relevant to us than we might have thought. The question – where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements? Or, who shuts in the sea with doors when it bursts from its womb? Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place? All of these questions speak about knowledge God’s and our own, the identity of God and human beings and the relationship of God and human beings and all creation. Yet, they also speak about the totality and complexity of life and how it is to be comprehended and sustained.

           These questions begin God’s conversation with Job starting at chapter 38 and continuing to the end of the book of Job. In this conversation God’s speeches to Job move from wisdom language, mythic discourses of creation and the divine warrior, to honor and shame language and royal language of king to subject.

The broad range of these speeches ought to tell us there is not one way of simply interpreting what God is saying to Job and to all of God’s people, including us. Too often interpreters have tried to boil down Job to find the one, single point God is making to reorient Job away from his complaints about how he has been treated toward a new understanding of God. The speeches could be interpreted as dominating power, playful mockery, or exasperated teaching. The rich visual language contributes to the variety of meanings, since visual imagery is evocative and leads us to discover many meanings, the complexity of life, and resists the temptation to reduce the meanings to a set of propositions. Also, these speeches do fit smoothly together, they do not seem to be compatible with each other, which drives some interpreters and readers to latch onto one phrase or a couple of phrases and make that phrase or phrases the key to opening the meaning of the God’s speeches as a whole, while discounting, repressing or silencing the significance of all the other speeches.

But this is what we humans do. We boil everything down to its simplest, smallest component or part then think we can discern the whole of life from it. Isn’t that why politicians defined the whole of immigration policy to be about building a wall? Isn’t that what we do with gun control, economic inequality, welfare reform, poverty, lock ‘em up and throw away the key justice system, and race relations? Isn’t that why we learned history as all about great men and great events back in the day? Isn’t that what happened to the people of Flint, Michigan when the leaders simply traded one water supply for another to save money? Isn’t that why we have miles and miles of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean because one plastic bottle thrown overboard won’t matter much? Isn’t that why we have polluted the oceans with raw sewage because we think well, one little bit can’t harm anything, after all the oceans are so vast?

This is also what Job does throughout the entire book of Job leading up to Chapter 38. Job is focused on his suffering, which isn’t surprising, and the reason he is suffering based upon his narrow perspective about how life is supposed to work. His friends who come to join him in his suffering do the same thing. They have a narrow, simplistic understanding of life and they want to use that as the sole basis for telling Job why he is suffering and how he can end his suffering. All of them claim to know how life works and why Job is suffering and how he ought to end his suffering, which rests on actions that Job can take. Job is angry with God because he feels he has been faithful to God and should never have had to suffer because he was faithful to God. His friends blame Job for being sinful, even if he didn’t know he was sinful-like a double secret sinfulness- leading them to tell him he must confess his sin, if he wants to be forgiven and if he doesn’t confess his sin then he cannot be forgiven. Except that Job doesn’t believe he sinned, so Job won’t confess to doing something he didn’t do.

Within this context neither Job nor his friends are correct. Their perspective is limited by a knowledge and understanding of God and life that is narrow, limited and only focused on using their own understanding, wisdom and self-defined wise actions for coping and controlling life as they live it.

This is, of course, not so far away from what we do as Wendell Berry suggests in his essay “Paragraphs from a Notebook” included in his essay collection “Our Only World.” Berry states, “We need to acknowledge the formlessness inherent in the analytic science that divides creatures into organs, cells, and ever smaller parts or particles according to their technological capacities.”

Now, Berry isn’t anti-science or technology, rather he is suggesting that our drive toward specialization and a focus on increasingly narrow parts leads us away from truth complexity, and the knowledge needed to adequately sustain human life or the health of the ecosphere because we no longer see the whole, complexity of the integral connections between one part and another part of creation that can be disrupted and destroyed when we are only looking at a single portion of creation. Indeed, the phrase unintended consequences may be an apt description for the blindness of seeing only the parts and not the whole, not the relationships within creation. It isn’t because we intended for destructive consequences to happen, but because we didn’t even bother to consider that destructive consequences could occur, even when we are trying to help others.

This is, as Berry writes, what has happened when we look at creation as only being valuable as market commodities to be exploited in the progression of an industrial revolution aimed at constantly selling new products in order for corporations to survive instead of seeing the sanctity and intrinsic value of the world and all creatures created to be interdependent in a vast and deep community of compassion, forgiveness and self-giving love.

It is the problem of seeing only the parts and not the whole, which is part of what God is trying to do through the variety of divine speeches that begins with words describing a secure and well-ordered creation, such as boundary, path, way, and place, but that will give way in the next speech to images of wildness, chaos and fear that are also present in creation.

Over the next few weeks of September, I will be exploring Creation and why God’s speeches are so varied and how they speak about God’s wisdom versus human wisdom, God’s perspective and our limited perspective, God’s intention for life and our intention for life more deeply. For now, I leave you with this prayer from Benedict,

“O gracious and holy Creator, give us wisdom to perceive you, intelligence to understand you, diligence to seek you, patience to wait for you, eyes to see you, a heart to meditate on you, and a life to proclaim you, through power of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

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Praise the Lord, Creator of Life

Halleu Adonai! Halleu Adonai!

          Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

           All creation from the highest heaven to the deepest seas raises a chorus of praise for God. Brothers sun, wind and air, Sisters moon, stars, and water, rocks and the hills lift up a strong united voice singing praise to the Lord.  All you great diversity of people over the earth from the rich to the poor, the presidents and prime ministers to citizens who vote, farmers and factory workers to doctors and lawyers, men and women, adults and children raise your voices in songs of God’s praise.

          The singer of this psalm invites, “All creation be partners in this song! Praise the Lord!” This invitation is an imperative cry. It is strong and exuberant and loud and demanding! It is a cry that cannot be ignored because there are more important things to do. It is a cry that demands not just a simple, “God is great. God is good.” singsong response or a whispering kind of “God is good.”

 It is a cry demanding a strong, exuberant, joy filled, shouting, glad, demanding, happy, celebrating, clap your hands, stomp your feet, “God is good! All the time! All the time! God is good!” response. It is a cry to join in an act that is equally poetic and audacious as it is self-abandoning and subversive.

          It is a cry that reminds creation that God took a deep, dark, formless void, a hajata tohu vohu, and brought order, light and shape to it. God took a place where life was not and was not possible, then created a place where life is and where life not only flourishes, but is sustainable. God created life by speaking life into being through God’s Word. Each day that God spoke life, order, shape came into being. First light for day and dark for night. Second, oceans and sky. Third, dry land called earth. At the same time seas and oceans were given boundaries. Then, fruit trees and all other trees and green plants were brought to life. Fourth, sun in the sky for day and the moon and stars for night were given their reason for being. Together, their movements in the sky would be signs for days, weeks, years. For the changing seasons. Fifth, fish and all the other creatures living in the waters were given life. Then birds flying in the air receive life. Sixth, wild and domestic animals and all the creeping things receive life. Then, human kind, men and women, are created in God’s image and likeness and given their purpose. They are to be stewards of God’s creation by relating and exercising dominion of creation in the way God does; as a servant. Seventh, God rests. Creation is whole and complete, so God rests and by resting, God set within creation’s time a life sustaining rhythm of work and rest.

          Where there had been only formlessness, God created a complex, highly textured, intricate woven tapestry of a dynamic, organic life containing within it the fingerprints of God’s creative touch from the largest mountains and deepest oceans to the minutest sub-atomic particles.

          What becomes clear when we remember how God creates life is that God is as close to us as sunlight and snowflakes, if we pause long enough to feel the grace enveloping us in peace and love. It is a reminder that humanity and creation are intertwined within each other so much that humanity and land, people and place, need each other to sustain life.

          As Jim Meisner writes, “God isn’t distant or judgmental, God is alive, immediate and accessible. Wading into the ocean, we step into the arteries of the earth. The heartbeat of God pulsating life. The ocean reminds us that the same elements coursing through our bodies, supplying us life, are the same elements surrounding, pulling, welcoming us into the ocean also welcomes us home into the heart of God. Salt on lips, wind in hair, and sea on skin reconnects us with life and makes us one with God who creates life.

          Wendell Berry, poet and farmer, makes this point clear in his essay “Local Economies to Save the Land and the People,” when he writes, “we must not speak or think of the land alone or the people alone, but always and only both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.” Berry continues to point out how the destructive driving people off the land or encouraging people to leave the land in favor of an industrialized life of being consumers instead of being producers, where one has a “Job,” but not a vocational calling or a vocational choice is destroying local communities and local economies. Because when a people move to find the “job” to earn the money to buy what one does not produce, the people fail to live in a community of mutual usefulness. That place where small store owners knew their patrons, skilled craftsman were known by the quality of their work and where farmers grew crops for subsistence and for sale locally because people lived in their home counties where they not only knew the people going back generations, but also knew the names of all the trees in the forests near them. People were rooted to the land and to the people. Industrialization in all of its forms creates “jobs,” but it also creates the destruction of mutually useful and mutually supportive communities by making people able to be exploited by corporations with wealth and power or to be discarded when the “job” economy falters or when a machine can perform their jobs.

          In our remembrance of how God creates life and how the industrialization of life prompts the call to save both people and the creation in order to save the fragile relationships of mutuality inherent in both, we also hear the psalmist’s imperative cry to “Praise the Lord!” as more than a call to exclaim and celebrate our wonderment and awe at God’s creative act. Rather, his loud and demanding cry calls us to speak about God. To describe how our ancestors and we have experienced God’s presence as the key to living or future.

          We speak about God by telling what God has done. We speak about creation because it tells us that God seeks relationships of mutuality defined best by Martin Luther King, Jr. as ”I can never fully be who I ought to be unless you are fully who you are to be.”

           We speak about God’s call to Abram, the giving of a child to Sarah and Abram in their old age, the deliverance of the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt, the Hebrews being brought to the land promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because they tell us that God keeps God’s promises and God’s promises are about life.

          We speak about the Hebrews being fed manna and quail and water in the desert, God sending prophet after prophet to the people Israel, the bringing of Israel out of exile and back to the promised land, the promise of a Messiah bringing justice and peace because they tell us that God is faithful to the relationship with us despite our unfaithfulness.

          We speak about God coming to be with us in the midst of creation as a child born in the humblest and unexpected of places, of the healing ministry of Jesus the Christ, of the self-giving love Jesus lived in his relationships with other persons and taught us this was God’s way, of Jesus’ willingness to die on a cross for our sakes, of Jesus’ resurrection and the hope it brings into our lives because they tell us God is merciful and forgiving, seeking to reconcile our broken relationship with God by doing for us what we could never do for ourselves-namely bearing the burden and the consequences of the guilt and shame of our sins that break apart all our relationships. And doing this because God loves us with a love that is the full expression of mutuality. A love we can never be separated from no matter the place, time, or circumstance because not even death can separate us from God’s love.

          We speak about how God spoke through an angel to Joseph telling him to get up and take his family to Egypt, so they will be safe and far away from Herod’s murder of thousands of innocent children, about how when we felt confused and lost the Holy Spirit led us out of our confusion to the place we belonged, about the time we were alone and weeping tears of grief and God sat beside us and rocked us in God’s loving embrace because in speaking about these times we witness that God is present to protect us, to lead us, to comfort us, to touch us, and to transform our lives by God’s grace and power.

          Our exuberant, shouting, celebrating, songs of praise speak of God’s presence, God’s reliability, God’s steadfast and self-giving love, God’s mercy and faithfulness. Yet, these songs of praise also tell us about ourselves.

          We use poetic words and metaphorical phrasings in these songs of praise that evoke for us images of God, that generate and suggest to us concrete ways of understanding who God is-the mother that rocks a crying child to sleep in her lap, a mighty fortress strong and able to keep us safe within protective walls, a confidante who walks and talks with us. Yet, these same poetic words and metaphorical phrasings always resist every closed meaning or attempt to put God in a box to be controlled or manipulated. These poetic words of praise are so open to many meanings and ambiguity they leave wide latitude for us, who sing these words to accept and affirm a different version of reality than the one popular culture affirms. For as Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and professor reminds us, “If we eventually become the way we talk, if reality sooner or later follows speech than our utterance of praise may eventually wean us from our memo-shaped mastery-our 30 second sound byte shaped world, so we may fully live in the world God created.

          Just as our poetic words and metaphorical phrasings open us to the full reality of God’s kingdom, our act of praise is an audacious act because we seek to show how great and significant God is. How prominent God is in our lives. We dare to do this act of praise as though we are giving something to God that God needs or desires until we are met in moment of our praise with the surprising gift of illumination; our relationship with God is refined and deepened. We realize our praise arises out of an intimate communion with the One who is wholly reliable, who is so fully present with us, who loves us so dearly that in this moment of praise singing we give ourselves completely and unreservedly to God as an act of joyful gratitude for all the goodness of life.

          We abandon ourselves to God in gratitude and gladly celebrate the Lord’s claim on our whole lives. Here our praise is subversive because we say there are no other gods, kings, or loyalties who can give us gifts, who have benefits to bestow, no summons to make, and no allegiance to claim. They are massively and forcefully dismissed. Every other loyalty that would put a hedge of vested interest between God and us is critiqued and dismissed in our song of praise.

          For we affirm that there is only one Lord of the universe, we sing. God alone is sovereign of our lives. And, this sovereignty is embodied in the birth of Jesus the Christ, the Word made flesh embodying the reign of God in the ministry of a suffering servant who creates and renews life for us and for the whole of creation just as God created life by God’s Word in the beginning.

          Halleu Adonai! Praise Christ the Lord!   

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