Dead Turkeys and whatnot.

(ya'll knew I had to work in a dead animal reference somehow, right?)

So it's almost Thanksgiving, that wonderful prelude to Christmas mania.  A time to be thankful.  Else how would we know when it was tasteful to start displaying all our Christmas paraphernalia?  

I am going to my grandmother's house.  I expect a rousing good time along the lines of a classic play, written by the love-child of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.  (My great-grandfather was called Big Daddy.  How I wish I was kidding.)   So, I leave to you my senior sermon, which I delivered last week.  It went well.  Really well.  Pretty much all sermons I give, I immediately want to rewrite so as to make them not suck quite so bad.  This one, on the other hand, I enjoyed giving, and don't despise.  See what you think.  I believe I actually pounded on the pulpit at one point.  

Isaiah 49:4-13,  Matthew 28 (it will become obvious)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.

 

This passage from Isaiah is one of my all-time favorites. [ In fact, I have a huge, Religious-Studies-geek crush on whoever wrote 2^nd Isaiah, right up there with Cyrus the Persian, and Josephus the historian.  I’m not proud. ] 

2^nd Isaiah contains some amazing stuff, and he really earns his prophetic stripes.  He’s right up there with Jeremiah, at times, in his willingness to say things that upset people—that over-turned everything they knew.  In our time, today, I have a hunch we tend to forget how earth-shattering and shocking this passage would have been for the Israelites of the Exile.  Isaiah to us has been mellowed out a fair amount by Handel and the overproductive Christmas card industry. 

         We have to remember that Isaiah is talking to a group of people who know themselves as the Chosen People.   That is who they are!  Never more so than when the going gets tough, and the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and send them all into exile. 

         Did not God save them from the land of Egypt, when they were enslaved?  Did YHWH not bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey, and aid their ancestors to defeat the current inhabitants of that land?  Did not God give Moses the law at Sinai, to show his people how to live in holiness, as God himself is holy?  This is a special people!  A set-apart people!  Inheritors of a unique relationship with the one true God.   Everyone else can do their own thing—this is who we are. 

         Yet, here comes Isaiah, and says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the survivors of Israel.  But I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

         Surprise!!!!

         In one fell swoop, the assumption that being the Chosen people, having a special relationship with God is a two way street gets blown apart.  We belong to God—God does not belong only to us, and God can, and does! pay attention to whoever God wants.  God is bigger—much bigger!-- than the claims of a small band of Near Eastern monotheists in the sixth century BCE, and God is bigger than our claims, and we forget that at our detriment. 

         When I worked with Sabeel—the Palestinian Christian Center for Liberation Theology in East Jerusalem, I was surprised to discover that many of the Palestinian Christian communities in the region had stopped using the Old Testament in their liturgies since 1948.  Almost all of these were liturgical churches, so this was an immense and deeply- felt loss for them, but it was explained to me time and again that the familiar readings had become too viscerally painful.  For, if you belong a group of people who trace your lineage back to the earliest Canaanites, through Jesus’ first disciples, how do you read, how do you hear, the story of the Exodus? 

It becomes not a story of liberation, and God’s saving action, but the story of the Canaanites,--your people-- being once again driven from their ancestral lands in the name of a God they aren’t allowed to claim.  The fall of Jericho becomes a tragedy, not a victory.  And you know what that feels like.

All made worse, and more poignant, by the rhetoric, which flies from some of the religious extremists in modern Israel, who cite biblical precedent for plans to transfer Palestinian populations to other countries, or to expel further populations from the West Bank.  Saul lost the kingdom because of his mercy toward the Amekalites, they say—we won’t meet the same fate.

One of Sabeel’s great missions, then, was to reclaim the scripture for the indigenous Christians.  This was a living and Spirit-filled document, they believed, and the God they know was not like that, so how to explain this?  And so, they turned to Isaiah. 

They turned to Isaiah who sends the Chosen people out to all nations, as a universal symbol of God’s care,  and calls a Persian king the Messiah of God, and they turned to Jonah, who was sent by God to the Assyrians, right after they pillaged the Northern Kingdom!, and they turned to Ruth, a foreigner—a Midianite!-- who became the mother of King David.

          And of course, they turned to God, who so refused to be confined in heaven by human expectations, that he came to dwell among us in human form, and consecrated all human existence as holy and worth honoring. 

         And what was so humbling to me was that it is working.  In ways few people could have predicted, the scripture, all of it!, is once again becoming a source of strength to these people as they struggle, as well as a place of common ground with Israeli Jews.  It is the spirit of God at work—the Spirit that cannot be confined despite all of our ill-founded human attempts to the contrary.  That can’t be confined to the claims of the Palestinians alone, or the Israelis alone—the God that works outside of context, and who ultimately unites us. 

         And that, is our saving grace.  The God who refuses to be confined by our contexts and our narrow vision is the God who constantly acts to save us from them.  Acting in ways we couldn’t have predicted, with people we are unfamiliar with, pushing us outside of our boxes and our boundaries. 

         This is what redeems us--because  in the history of the Church, we have, to put it mildly, messed up quite a few times.  We’ve given into our contextual blinders, and it’s led us into disaster after disaster.  Translation problems led to schism, missionary zeal disguised imperialist intentions, and then, there were the Crusades.  Not to mention that our track record with minorities is mournful.  It has been so much easier to claim that we know what God looks like, acts like, believes, and we’ll form our church in that image. 

         But somehow, SOMEHOW, we’re still here.  Despite our humanness, despite our human proclivity to do exactly, precisely what we know, somewhere, deep within us we probably shouldn’t be doing, the Spirit still moves.  God is not confined those times we manage to get it right, or a scarier thought still--, to our mistakes.  We belong to God—God doesn’t belong only to us.  God is beyond our contexts, however blinded we might get.  God works through even our mistakes to up-end history. 

As Bp. Mark McDonald once said, “The Bible was given to the slaves to civilize them, and produced Harriet Tubman.  It was distributed in Africa to create calm and it created Desmond Tutu.”  Our misguided attempts to confine God, to recreate others and God in our image were eventually broken by the Spirit, and in ways that can be unsettling.  After all, there are reasons we like to keep God in our small confinements—it’s comfortable for us!  It makes life easier.  Each time we face the Spirit of God, it’s a challenge.  It’s a stretch.  It’s a leap.   We’re changed forever in sometimes-not-so comforting ways.  God becomes bigger, less manageable.  Less like us.  More like God. 

          And this is ultimately why we’re sent to preach the gospel to all nations.  Not to make them like us—that would fail miserably, and we’ve already tried that a couple of times.  But we go in order to break free from our own confining ideas about God, and how God works, and who God cares about.  We go and preach to learn more about God—how God works with other people.  To learn more about each other, and to learn more about ourselves.  To lose our blinders. 

[]

          There is a story from the Passover Haggadah  that is read when the traditional ten drops of wine are spilled out of the wine glass, about halfway through the meal.  The story goes,  When God closed the Red Sea over the heads of the pursuing Egyptians, and the Israelites were saved, there was great rejoicing among all the angels in heaven.  One of the angels noticed that God was not participating in the jubilation, and so he approached the divine throne.  “Why are you singing?,” YHWH asked him, “My children are drowning.”   

         It is when we learn to spill the wine from our cups, when we learn that God stands above our partisan celebrations, When we learn that God is god of Israel and Palestine, and white and black South Africa, and everyone on this earth—then and only then, will we have fulfilled the great commission.    Amen.  

It's like, you know?

(ya'll remember that TV show? The girl from Dirty Dancing was in it, only she had a nose job, and no one recognized her any more. So her career suffered. Ironic!)
So I'm still alive, and have finally survived most of this insane semester. This is no mean feat. This semester has featured, for me, the following:
-numerous interruptions of my class schedule, to the point where I show up for the wrong class, at the wrong time, on the wrong days.
-Dying relatives, accompanied by predicable familial meltdowns, in the style of Tennessee Williams. (Hey, we are a traditional and a highly literate people, even in our dysfunction. Respect!)
-the annoying return of Headaches from Hell, which have been persistent since roughly August.
-These, in turn, result in the equally annoying return of Prophetic Visions! And while it has a cool title, it's not that fun. Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen may have enjoyed seeing multiple copies of things, and zooming lights, but I am not a fan. Neither are the people that I am talking to when my world splits double. Evidently, it is unnerving to have me start tilting my head from side to side in an ill-fated attempt to have your image revert to its solitary self again, while jabbering on about atonement theory. Or something.
But! On the happier side of things! The semester is almost over, which means I get a nice long break.
Also, I've spent the last week hanging out with extremely cool conference people, as part of my official part time job. (This should not be confused with my Work-study Coordinator job, or my Field placement job. Or my taking-over-the-world job.) The conference was on the intersection between catholicity and globalization. Which sounds odd, but turned out to be very interesting. I was the liaison between the Conference center at the seminary (still not done, but one day! Inshallah.) and the conference participants. We had present the IFI (Philippine Independent Church), Church of Sweden, old Catholic churches, and Episcopalians.
And it is times like these when I remember how closely life outside of high school mirrors high school. And yet doesn't at all.
Much of the ecumenical work of the church is political backstage work--who's talking to whom and why, what might upset that relationship, how can we avoid that, should we send a gift? What kind of gift? How should we phrase this bit of text so as not to offend anyone, and if we stop talking to this person, how will that affect all our other relationships, because if person A is in close communion with person B and we stop talking to person A, then person B will cut ties with us. (Like most parties I went to in middle school, someone inevitably ends up in a corner, alone and in tears.)
But! At this conference, it turns out that all that stuff (which, don't get me wrong, is important in its place) is prelude so you can actually talk to people! And the people are doing incredible things! Which, I think, is actually why we were talking to them in the first place. Not so much because we wanted to line up theologies to march in pretty rows. That's never going to happen. But the actual basis of these things is that you honestly like the churches you work with--you respect what they do, where they do it, and you want to help out as you can, in your own unique way.
Next up: two sermons. Promise!