Tag: Bible

Binding of Isaac by Lawrence OP image (mosaic)

The binding of Isaac: A sermon about discernment

Kyle 1 Comment

Image credit: “Binding of Isaac” by Lawrence OP via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost:

Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

During my first year of seminary, my classmates and I went on retreat to a remarkable intentional community in the heart of Virginia’s capital.

The founder of Richmond Hill is a guy named Ben. He’s an institution in Richmond politics as well as its faith community. He’s a prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures’ sense of that term: bold, truthful in the face of others’ discomfort, a beacon of righteous moral clarity for better and perhaps occasionally for worse.

The whole weekend experience had a profound effect on many of us. In particular, Ben said something about discernment that weekend that has always stuck with me.

Along with all the important caveats that go along with a statement like this, he said, “Sometimes, sometimes, it’s very important to make a different decision from what your priest is telling you, or what your therapist is telling you, or what your friends are telling you.”

His point was that for our faith to do its most vital counter-cultural work, we sometimes have to go against prevailing wisdom, the formal and informal structures of power and authority, convention and convenience, recognition and prestige.

In other words, Ben said: “You’re going to have to make some difficult and unpopular decisions.”

I probably remember the whole thing so vividly because I have a streak of overly stark moral seriousness, a kind of black-and-white thinking that basically assumes the worst about the hard choices we all inevitably face in life. From deep within me, my angels and demons responded to Ben’s challenge with a grave “Amen.”

Don’t get me wrong: if I thought God were asking me to do something as terrible as in this story of Abraham and Isaac, I’m quite certain my first response would not be to say, in a serious tone, “Well, this must be my cross to bear.”

But I think the binding of Isaac terrifies me so much because if the command were less a matter of life and death, I know I’m capable of making myself pretty miserable if I’m convinced that God wants me to do something or if that something simply seems like the right thing to do. Maybe you know someone like that. Maybe you are someone like that.

I wonder, then, if you’ll humor me in a little thought experiment for we-the-sometimes-overserious: What might have happened if Abraham refused the call of God?

After all, for the later Hebrew writers that put this story down in scripture, child sacrifice was most certainly forbidden. And just on the human level, who could blame any hero for refusing this particular demand?

So let’s pretend Abraham says “no.”

Perhaps he tries to negotiate with God, like he later does standing outside Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe he tries begging, like Moses on Mt. Sinai interceding for his people.

Perhaps, like Jonah, he runs away. Perhaps, like Job, he digs in for a long theological siege.

Perhaps, like Peter, he remains faithful to almost the very end, but before the climax learns that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

Notice that all of these characters, in the end, have to reckon with the path God has put before them. Sodom and Gomorrah still fall. The Hebrews who were at Sinai never make it to the Promised Land. Jonah sulks his way through saving Nineveh, and Job sulks and sulks and sulks. Peter receives the resurrected Christ’s gentle chiding about his threefold denial on Good Friday—and then he spends his remaining days faithfully feedings Jesus’s sheep.

If we want to try to understand the binding of Isaac on its own terms, we should set aside for now the debates about the righteousness of God. The Bible assumes that God is righteous. And more often than not, it assumes that God’s will will be done, despite our frequent human frailty. So in this case: even if Abraham says no.

What’s interesting about this story is that it flips that script. Here God puts a difficult demand before a servant, and the servant listens. And the thing God supposedly wants the servant to do ends up not happening, because of course God never actually desired it in the first place.

God doesn’t want Isaac to die or Abraham to be anguished. He does want to know if Abraham is all in on this plan to become the father of a great nation. There are serious stakes here, but not the stakes Abraham believes are before him.

For his part, Abraham keeps saying yes: he rises early, collects his companions, makes the journey, carries the tools, answers the anxious question, ties up the son, raises the knife … and encounters God’s deliverance.

**

We will face difficult decisions in life. Sometimes they will seem utterly impossible—or downright wrong. And sometimes, sometimes, we should go on the difficult journey. We should keep saying yes, keep taking leaps of faith small and large, and do our best to be attentive to where God is leading us.

I think I’ve faced two decisions in my life whose stakes rose to something like what the tellers of this story are trying to evoke. Remembering Richmond Hill’s remarkable founder, let’s call them “Ben decisions.”

In both cases, I thought God was telling me to choose the harder, counter-cultural path, and so I did. This was no real virtue. It just was what is was.

In one case, I said yes to this “call” for quite a while. I even asked for God’s help resisting the easier path. And then something finally happened that gave me confidence to believe that I had been thinking about this decision all wrong, that what I thought was a call from God was actually my own inner voice calling from a place of pain that needed to be healed.

I still remember the utterly overwhelming moment when I started believing that the good thing I wanted might be something God wanted for me. Like Abraham standing over Isaac, I got to experience the relief of the angel’s message: “don’t do this crazy thing—God has something so much better in store for you.”

In the other case, I think I probably made the right choice by staying the course I believed God had put before me. It was painful and difficult. I believe I learned lessons that I needed.

I would not, maybe could not, choose to do the same thing in the future. But I wouldn’t go back and change my original decision either.

As it did for Abraham, my willingness to stick with a costly choice has given me some small measure of confidence that I will have the trust and courage to follow God into difficult and unknown territory again someday.

**

What remains utterly unclear to me is how to tell the difference between the two kinds of “Ben decisions” we see reflected in different ways in the binding of Isaac. One is the kind where we assume the worst about what God wants from us but it’s really our own brokenness that brought us there. The other is the kind for which there is no way out but through to the other side, where God is genuinely waiting and drawing us onward.

In the first, the “flipped script,” we share in Abraham’s joy when we realize God’s will is more wonderful than we had feared. In the second, we share by grace in Abraham’s faithfulness. We partake in the sobering but also intimate experience of walking through the valley of the shadow of death and fearing no evil.

There’s no “answer” to the many thorny questions this text forces upon us, and maybe that’s the point. Because whether we make it through the valley, attempt the journey but falter along the way, or end up realizing God never sent us there in the first place, we can trust that there in the valley God will be with us.

Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Job, Peter and all the rest—the Lord was with them all the way.

Yes, God does sometimes ask very difficult things of us—though the journey may not be as it first appears.

What changes everything, for them and for us, is that we don’t have to walk alone. Indeed, we never are.

Imagination photo

Praying with scripture—and our imaginations

Kyle

Fourth Sunday in Lent:

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

I wasn’t at the morning liturgies last week, but I have it on the sound authority that is the parish website that Mother Kate had a challenge for us: “You NEED to be praying and reading the Bible,” she said. “It is what sustains you through the dark times and the stressful times and the confusing times.”

I heartily agree, and I second another point she made: many of the rough patches in my own spiritual and emotional life have also come during periods when I’ve convinced myself that this need didn’t apply to me, not right now.

As years have gone by, I’ve noticed the change that happens when I return to my morning Bible reading after I’ve been lax for a while: the sense of relief, of familiarity, of the sure presence of Christ there within me. Having some daily or near-daily practice, however brief and however simple, is the way we invite God into our lives, and learn to see God already there.

The good news is, there are as many ways to pray as there are people who do it. Part of my job at Virginia Seminary was training others to think about a certain kind of social media use as prayer, or a certain kind of sitting with art or music. In fact, one of my favorites ways is with a podcast called Pray As You Go, which is produced by the British Jesuits and meant to be used while commuting. You can read a bit about it in today’s issue of The Messenger.

The genius of this particular prayer resource is that it makes digitally accessible a very old and very intimate form of prayer. Here’s how Jesuit Kevin O’Brien explains it in his book The Ignatian Adventure:

Ignatius was convinced that God can speak to us as surely through our imagination as through our thoughts and memories. In the Ignatian tradition, praying with the imagination is called contemplation … a very active way of praying that engages the mind and heart and stirs up thoughts and emotions.

Ignatian contemplation is suited especially for the Gospels, [O’Brien continues. W]e accompany Jesus through his life by imagining scenes from the Gospel stories … Visualize the event as if you were making a movie. Pay attention to the details: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings of the event. Lose yourself in the story; don’t worry if your imagination is running too wild. At some point, place yourself in the scene.

Now, I’m no skilled facilitator or even practitioner of Ignatian Contemplation. But in response to Mother Kate’s challenge, this week I tried “contemplating” today’s marathon gospel passage from John.

I’ll be honest, I have a lot of feelings about John’s gospel, some of which participants in our weekday morning Eucharists are probably getting tired of hearing about. But I think Fr. O’Brien would tell me, tell all of us, that our feelings—positive and negative—are a rich point of entry for the Holy Spirit to teach us something when we contemplate a biblical story.

Another entry point when it comes to this prayer practice is characters, and there’s no shortage of them in this passage. So I wonder if, as a sort of Ignatian thought experiment, we might try putting ourselves in the shoes of some of these characters. I wonder what we might learn. (You may find that  closing your eyes helps.) 

Picture yourself as one of Jesus’s disciples, walking along a busy stone-paved street near the Temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps one of your sandals has worn thin and you’re favoring that foot. Perhaps you’re the one who asks Jesus if it was the blind man or his parents who sinned. Do you feel rebuked when he tells you “neither”? How do you feel when he mentions that night is coming, that his light might soon depart from the world? Do you get excited or inspired when you realize Jesus is winding up for another healing? How do make sense of the bizarre ritual that follows—saliva turned to mud, a healing touch, a dispatch to the spring fed pool outside the city walls?

Picture yourself in the crowd as word starts to spread of what’s happened. Perhaps you yourself are arriving for a more commonplace ritual cleansing, and the commotion catches your eye. Do you believe the man’s claims that he is the beggar who was born blind? If so, are you perhaps envious of his good fortune? Do you run to tell others, or jostle for a better view as the tense conversations begin, or leave to find a quiet place to ponder what you’ve seen?

Perhaps placing yourself in the narrative helps you see something about the passage that you’ve never noticed before. I’ve always sympathized with the man’s parents, assuming they simply hid their elation for their son out of fear of the authorities’ angry suspicion. I realized this time they might also feel some resentment … for bringing this unwanted attention upon their family, perhaps even for disrupting their family dynamic and forever changing their long-time roles.

Perhaps placing yourself in the narrative lets God teach you something about you. In my case, I found it a little disconcerting how I resonated with what I imagined were the Pharisees feelings of frustration, of their sense of “losing control of the narrative” in this incident. So where in my life today is that kind of desire for control at work? How can I learn from the open-mindedness of the man born blind? How can I learn from Jesus’ patience, from his apparent comfort with offending when necessary, from his utter lack of fear of being misunderstood.

Perhaps placing yourself in the narrative help you have an intimate encounter with Christ. Our imaginations are a powerful place to meet Jesus—to feel his healing touch, to study his non-judgmental gaze, to be caught up in his loving embrace. It can be a little overwhelming. And some days it will be underwhelming.

I find this advice from Father O’Brien helpful, regarding Ignatian Contemplation or any kind of prayer: “[P]ray as you are able; don’t try to force it. Rest assured that God will speak to you, whether through your memory, understanding, intellect, emotions, or imagination.”

If we trust that God will speak to us as we spend time with scripture day by day, we begin to develop what one of my mentors calls a biblical imagination, “encourag[ing] honest religious conversation rather than stopping it cold.”

Instead of thinking of Bible stories in isolation, we juxtapose them against the backdrop of our lives. We see ourselves and our situations reflected in part within the great canvas that is the mythos of our faith. Or it goes the other way, and modern-day Biblical characters or situations start to jump to our attention as we survey the world around us. A biblical imagination doesn’t try to force analogies or equivalencies, but it does take note of resonances, parallels, and departures.

I prepared most of this sermon on Thursday, against the backdrop of the impending healthcare vote that never happened. In that context, this passage about Jesus’s conflict with the authorities and a man who got stuck in the middle has increased my appreciation for the messiness of social change, of consensus building, of perhaps following or perhaps changing the rules, of doing our best to care for each other with the tools and resources we have.

Living together, to say nothing of leadership, is hard—whatever side we find ourself on in the conflicts of our day. It takes creativity and inner stillness to begin to dream a new reality into being. I think Jesus navigated his conflicts so powerfully, and started such an important movement, precisely because he had a powerful imagination.

No coincidence, then, that we can meet him in ours.

Photo: “Imagination” by Thomas Hawk via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Michael Curry video screenshot

Conversations with/in Scripture

Kyle 3 Comments

A sermon for Proper 20

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

First of all, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.

If you’re like me, you heard or read these words and thought some version of “here we go again.” Here we go with Paul or his imitators encoding the social values of their time into scripture, and our having to deal with it.

We can’t escape that this passage from 1 Timothy just kind of exudes empire, and a particular approach to living in one as a religious minority.

“Keep your head down. Stay out of trouble. Trust that the lords of the realm were put there by God and that your conditions are under God’s determining control.”

Of course, we know that many Christians of this time took a more active and sometimes antagonistic approach to the powers that be. Christian martyrs defied convention and authority with deadly consequences. The early church embraced patterns of relationship and community that flew in the face of social convention—and the people around them noticed.

Some of this we know actually know from scripture, and I think that points us to a disconcerting but ultimately empowering reality: Scripture does not speak with one voice. The authors of scripture are always in conversation with each other and even themselves, sometimes copying what came before and sometimes arguing with it, but always engaged. [Big shout-out here to Judy Fentress-Williams of Virginia Theolocial Seminary.]

Amid all this witness bound together, not every school of thought is so blase about the notion of kingship. There’s a stream of thinking in the Hebrew Scriptures that’s ambivalent and sometimes even hostile to the notion of monarchs. [Technical term: E-Stream. More here.] Also priests, usually, and generally any source of centralized or hierarchical authority.

One representative of this school is the book of Deuteronomy, the second law, the law for living together in the land of promise. Here mutuality rather than hierarchical authority is the primary mechanism for keeping the peace—so you better not move your neighbors’ property marker.

The prophet Jeremiah also belongs to this tradition. The King mentioned in the passage we heard this morning, sought after but unfound, isn’t one of the kings in the line of David, nor a conquering foreigner. The King here is God Almighty, and indeed this school’s very point is that when you put someone besides God at the very center of a community’s life together, bad things happen.

For Jeremiah and his ilk, “pray for the king” is strange advice, even if it’s true that the king too is subject to God. Jeremiah would say, “Pray for repentance. Pray for the deliverance and restoration of our people, for a balm in Gilead. Pray that God would write the law upon our very hearts so that we each may keep it, and find favor in God’s sight.”

Now, it’s not like the Book of Jeremiah and the First Letter to Timothy are polar opposites or describe a relationship with a different God. They just have different perspectives on the life of faith in community.

This, I think, is a very good thing. It means scripture speaks in different ways to different people, or to the same people at different points in their lives. It gives the scriptures resonance no matter the social or political season.

That these ancient writings can still speak to us so powerfully is a testament to the working of the Holy Spirit and to the surprising unity that can be found among the diverse chorus of biblical voices.

**

If you’ve been reading your Looking Ahead these last two weeks, you may be getting an inkling that all this talk of conversation is leading toward a preview for next week’s Social Media Sunday. Well, you’re not wrong.

If scripture is a conversation, then it’s also an invitation. The church may have decided long ago to stop adding books to the canon, but that doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to contribute to the ongoing dialogue.

God writes the covenant on our hearts as we gather to reflect on what it means in our lives. Jesus is made present to us and others not just by the media of bread and wine but by our stories of how his grace and mercy have made a difference for us. Our collective participation is key.

I think Jeremiah would dig the whole social media phenomenon. Of course, his assorted public relations stunts (like burying his underwear) would get tons of shares and retweets, and we have to assume that the guy liked the attention. But I think he would also love how these media connect us. If we let them, they can put us in deeper conversation with a broad community of believers for support and companionship amid our own daily cycles of captivity and restoration.

As a sort of warm up for next week, let me share a couple examples.

For starters, I recommend that after church you google “Michael Curry video.” High in the results should be a teaching clip our Presiding Bishop released this week.

Not only does Bishop Curry present a very concrete vision of how what he calls “The Jesus Movement” should look in the Episcopal Church, he also gives us a helpful mnemonic device by which we might identify the common message of this movement:

Loving, liberating, life-giving.

If you wanted a concise way of summarizing for others what the Episcopal Church is all about, you could do a lot worse than to share this video. Or remix it. Or post some other response. I guarantee you Bishop Currie would love to have your voice in the choir.

Even more germane to this notion of scripture as conversation is a fascinating app known as Parallel Bible. The idea of Parallel is that anyone with a camera can illuminate the words of scripture in an app, just like the medieval monks did on the printed page.

Members of the Parallel Bible community post photos to accompany particular verses, often reflecting on how the verse is meaningful in their lives. Browsing the app, or Parallel’s printed edition of the Sermon on the Mount, is a great way to peek into the lives of fellow disciples.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from illuminating a verse of scripture on whatever social media platform you prefer. If you’re connected to me on social media (and yes, that’s an invitation), you’ll see that I took a stab at a verse from today’s rather challenging gospel passage, which I’ve otherwise managed to avoid this morning.

**

Speaking of avoidance, you’ve perhaps noticed that in this conversation with scripture, I’ve been a little short with the author of 1 Timothy. I’ve not exactly bent over backwards to appreciate the broader point of this passage. Let me briefly do so now.

We keep our heads down and pray for the king because we have work to do. The reading goes on to remind us that Paul was “appointed a herald and an apostle,” a direct messenger and brand ambassador for the “loving, liberating, life-giving” message of Jesus Christ.

This tiny piece of the conversation is important because we have received the same charge. Smartphones and broadband Internet aren’t responsible for giving us this mantel. We put it on at our baptism.

But smartphones and broadband Internet have added to the countless means by which we can practice this vocation. If you haven’t considered that possibility before, in the weeks to come you’ll get a chance to practice if you so choose.

But whichever means we choose, I hope this week each of us will rise to the challenge of sharing the message of love, life, and liberation. Join the conversation in ways appropriate to our own voice and our own context. That’s what it means to go forth in the name of Christ. So here we go again.

Digital humanities word cloud

Potential for biblical digital humanities with high school, college coders?

Kyle

When I left a graduate program in applied computation and went away to seminary, I remember having this vision of a custom LaTeX template for sermons. It would format my sermon for pulpit manuscripts, printing, the Web, etc. And it would include a tagging system that would help me better understand my preaching ticks, habits, biases, patterns, etc.

It sounds kind of laughable now. But I remembered this project, and a couple others like it that I’ve imagined over the years, when I read this New Yorker piece on the growing prevalence and accessibility of digital humanities research (hat tip to the Hack Manhattan listserv):

During the previous months, I’d been learning a coding language while trying to develop a project about the aesthetics of classical Arabic poetry. My interests were similar to Henry’s: What could we learn about an author’s oeuvre by studying his or her tics and favorite clichés? What made a certain poem identifiably the product of a person, place, or time, from the perspective of syntax and vocabulary? After class one day, I asked Henry whether he would be interested in collaborating, though I felt sure that he had more interesting things to do with his time. Amazingly, he agreed.

 

We spent the rest of the semester developing an algorithm that could detect different types of rhetorical figures in a large corpus of poetry. It flew through thousands of lines of verse like a drone over a wildlife habitat, snapping pictures of similes, allusions, and metatheses. The program, like the Pliny text generator, produced both epiphanies and duds.

I’m thinking it would be fun to sic some of the simpler natural language processing tools on the text of the Bible in an informal session with some high school or college students who knew enough Python (and enough Bible) to make that fun.

I didn’t take me too long this morning to get the Natural Language Toolkit set up to do some basic concordance work on the Book of Genesis (and the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). And that only scratches the surface.

If you know some disciples who might enjoy an activity like this, let me know! I think I can help point you in some fruitful directions.

Image credit: “Digital Humanities Blog Carnival, Presidents Day edition” by Phillipp Barron via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

March for Justice in Washington DC

Psalm 126 and National Lament: Black Lives Matter

Kyle 2 Comments

Advent 3, Year B

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

With profound respect and gratitude to the many people whose writing and witness helped me prepare, including Remington Gregg, Osheta Moore, Mike Kinman, Broderick Greer, the Theology of Ferguson/StayWokeAdvent/DearWhitePastor crew (especially Micky Jones and Jake Dockter), Mike Angell, and Emily Scott.

PDF | Audio (soon, or via Dropbox) | Text:

Our psalm today is the perfect prayer for the season of Advent. It’s a song of in-betweenness, then as now. Of hope, yes, perhaps, but not a cheap hope. Maybe a hope in the midst of lament. Let’s hear the translation from our prayer book:

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, *

then were we like those who dream.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *

and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Then they said among the nations, *

“The LORD has done great things for them.”

The LORD has done great things for us, *

and we are glad indeed.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD, *

like the watercourses of the Negev.

Those who sowed with tears *

will reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, *

will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves. (Psalm 126, BCP)

Of course, the poetry of the original Hebrew and this artful translation is much of the initial appeal here. Both the music and the message of those final verses are simply stunning. When the Lord restores the fortune of Zion, it is a bountiful harvest for those who have been in waiting.

It’s not hard to imagine this psalm being a favorite of the young Jewish man who went on to preach over and over about the upside-down kingdom of God. There is an unmistakable pattern to Jesus’s teaching, to Jesus’s promises, to Jesus’s prophetic actions, to Jesus’s presence with us still by the power of the Spirit. The message is that God cares about the suffering of God’s people, especially the most vulnerable. And God will deliver them. God longs to grant release, recovery, redemption, restoration.

It’s all those “re”s that make this psalm powerful, and hard. In the opening verses, the people remember a time of great promise:

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, *

then were we like those who dream.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *

and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Then they said among the nations, *

“The LORD has done great things for them.”

The LORD has done great things for us, *

and we are glad indeed.

But here’s where it all comes crashing down; here’s where we realize where we are and what’s at stake. Here the Psalmist speaks to God in the imperative voice: the command form, you may have heard it called in language classes. But here it is a plea:

Restore our fortunes, O LORD, *

like the watercourses of the Negev.

That one shift in perspective changes everything. Now we realize we’re in the midst of what one scholar calls a National Lament: O Lord, we remember the bounty, the optimism, the reputation in the sight of our neighbors. They are lost to us. Restore our fortunes. Burst forth in the desert like a river when the rains came.

Those of you who have studied the narrative arch of the Hebrew Scriptures, perhaps in Pilgrims class, perhaps while studying The Story last year, will recognize here one of the “troughs” in the cyclical ups and downs of the life of the people of God.

God reaches out. The people respond in faith. The people get complacent. Complacency turns to disobedience. Disobedience turns to hostility at the bearers of God’s message of repentance. Finally, God chooses a messenger that the people cannot ignore. The people repent. God forgives. And the cycle begins again.

Of course, it wasn’t only so for the Jews of the Ancient Near East. Advent 2014 has coincided with the deepening of our own sort of national lament.

We’re not pleading for a bountiful harvest, or the restoration of our homeland, not literally. Our songs today are punctuated with different refrains: Hands up, don’t shoot. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter.

The killing of African Americans Mike Brown and Eric Garner, and the subsequent grand jury acquittals in recent weeks of the white officers who took their lives, have brought an urgency to the conversations about the racial injustices that still plague our nation, and still grieve the heart of God.

On Thursday, black staffers on Capitol Hill staged a walk-out in solidarity with those who are suffering. Senate Chaplain Dr. Barry Black led the prayer: “Forgive us when we have failed to lift our voices for those who could not speak or breathe themselves.”

Among those who have helped bring these conversations home for me is our parishioner Remington Gregg, who shared these reflections a week or so ago on Facebook and gave me permission to share them here:

This is not a question of pro- versus anti-law enforcement. Nor is it a question of absolving those who died. One of the reasons why so many people are enraged is because there seems to be a complete lack of comprehension by some to admit that there is even a problem. That there is suspicion among some—I stress some—members of society when they see a black man … People cross the street. Security guards follow us whilst shopping in Brooks Brothers. And executives disregard our resume because a name sounds too ‘urban.’ Many just want an honest conversation about how, in 2014, the United States still propagates individuals who see pillaging in Seattle and call it ‘shenanigans,’ but see the same thing in Ferguson and call folks ‘savages.’

Somewhere in the cycle of sin and repentance comes the point where the people have that honest conversation. I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’re making progress. This psalm is an excellent spiritual song to sing on our way together. And this season, with it’s call to keep awake, is the perfect time to continue making steps forward as a nation.

For those of us who don’t have first-person experience of violent discrimination, waking up means tuning in to the voices crying out. Osheta Moore of the Shalom in the City blog recently wrote, “I wonder if the love that is spun in the words, “I’m listening and I’m sorry” can change the very fabric of this world? I think so. I think this is who our God is …” She goes on to name the various ways she is listening, including this one:

I’m listening to Christians who don’t want to acknowledge racism. I’m sorry it’s unsettling to look this darkness in the face, but Jesus looked darkness in the face for you. In his very body he suffered pain and abuse to express your great value to God. In light of this, can you look darkness in the face by listening to me and millions of black women when we cry out unsettled by the devaluation of the bodies of our black boys, men, fathers, and brothers? Will you ask God what you should do with such a precious gift?

No matter what our race or color, let’s make sure we’re not squandering God’s gift of life. Let’s make sure we’re not avoiding uncomfortable conversations or assenting to the status quo with silence.

Of course all lives matter, as some have started shouting in misguided reaction to our growing cultural refrain. That’s not the point for the time being, in the wake of so clear a message that our systems of law and justice continue to be broken for some. At this time, in this season, black Americans feel understandably exhausted and betrayed. It is the responsibility of all Americans and especially all Christians to claim for themselves the message that black lives matter, and to stay awake for opportunities to make that proclamation more than just a slogan or a hashtag online. But slogans and hashtags are a start.

In this nation, in this city, in this neighborhood, it should be impossible to hear “then were we like those who dream” without remembering or at least being reminded about a time when people of goodwill throughout our nation were inspired by one man’s dream, claimed it for themselves, and responded with integrity and courageous action.

It will take no less commitment from all people of goodwill today to tackle a problem that too may still believe has already been dealt with. May we remember that our walk with God and neighbor will always be of a more cyclical character, our progress always hard-won and fragile.

And may Advent 2014 continue to be a time when we keep awake in hopeful expectation for the time when we can all proclaim—not only with our lips but in our lives—that black lives matter. Restore our fortunes, O Lord. Your people need you.

Source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr: http://bit.ly/stonePhoto

Jesus Is Our (Metaphorical) Rock

Kyle

Thursday in 1 Advent, Year 1 (Isaiah 26:1-6, Ps 118:19-24, Matt 7:21-27)

PDF | Audio (or via Dropbox) | Text:

Image source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

In college, I worked as a writing tutor. As word of this avocation got out to my friends, they started asking me to help with resumes and with statements for various applications. Probably the most useful idea I shared with them was something I’d been told, and tried to follow, when I was writing my own statements. “To get the readers to remember you,” the advice went, “you have to get them to imagine you doing the things you mention.” In other words: show, don’t tell.

And so I might recommend adding a paragraph that, to take a particular example, drew a picture of my friend’s experience building concrete canoes for a civil engineering competition. Yes, it was great that in so doing he had learned to be mindful of the intricacies of mixing ratios, but that message was more likely to stick if his readers actually pictured him out on the river for that first precarious test-paddle. We both hoped that the image helped the idea become better integrated in the mind of the reader: “Oh, Mike So-and-so, yeah, he was the concrete canoe guy, right?”

Of course, the great power of pictures and symbols, of metaphor and imagination, is not news to the inheritors of a tradition shaped by the likes of John the Evangelist, Augustine of Hippo, and Ignatius Loyola. They each knew that forming and nourishing disciples is about much more than presenting ideas to us. It’s about helping those ideas gain some purchase within, in our minds, yes, but even more so in our hearts. They knew, and we know, that biblical and theological imagery can, if we let it, get inside us, becoming, in one author’s words “part of ourselves … absorbed into our very life” [Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988): 77.].

If we believe the words of scripture can act upon us in this way, then liturgies like today’s present an embarrassment of riches for our spiritual nourishment. At the center are Jesus’s words from Matthew’s gospel: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). Jesus and his teachings are our bedrock, our sure foundation—vast, dependable, and in an important sense unbreakable.

You probably noticed these images of rock and stone throughout our lections today, and each appearance offers its own richness, its own power to reach our inner nooks and crannies. My moment of intimate encounter came with the recapitulation of the image in our Communion Hymn: “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” When we drop the conceit of the house and put our own two feet squarely on that rock, or in that sand, it seems to change things.

“Sinking sand” reminded me immediately of my inbox, and my relationship with it, of how quickly the dream of tidiness and control slips through my fingers as requests, reports, and referrals pile up. My strategies are sinking sand, my plans for getting through the day on my own efforts rather than by trusting that I am supported and saved by a rock and redeemer who doesn’t care what my inbox, or even my resume, looks like. All other ground is sinking sand.

An image can do its full formative work on our hearts and souls only if we invite it in and bid it stay a while. That’s what these contemplative seasons are all about. What will your image be? Advent, of course, has plenty of worthy pictures for us to choose from and sit with: light in the darkness, a highway in the desert, hills toppled and valleys raised, strange messengers from earth and heaven. But I think, in what for us is a season of papers, exams, grading, shopping, and last-minute travel, we could do worse than to spend our time with the image of our “everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:4). Our houses, and our hopes, can be built on nothing less.