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It's not entirely clear that Karl Barth advised ministers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Still, it's not a bad homiletical strategy. Applied this week, it seems to cry out for some reflection on a creation God deems "very good," and the bodies of children floating in the storm surge of the Burmese cyclone and crushed in the Chinese earthquake.
I'm not sure where my sermon is going yet. But in addition to the Bible and the newspaper I'm relying on David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea, a short volume about theodicy in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.
In response to the book's subtitle, "Where was God in the tsunami?" Hart is surprisingly sympathetic toward atheistic complaints that such disasters must needs overthrow faith in a loving, omnipotent God:
After all at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world would want to disparage. For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they never would have occurred to such consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.
And he is surprisingly harsh in dismissing Christian apologists who (apologizing for what? Their faith in God? God's ways in a world of tsunamis?) would justify the calamity by appealing to God's inscrutable plan, or simply chalking it up to rough, divine justice. I found myself remembering this post from my Ivy Bush days which cites the Calvinist Jesuit John Piper as an example of all Hart finds wanting in Christian discourse in those shocking, waning days of 2004. Hart uses Ivan Karamazov as a blunt object to smash such apologies to smithereens.
Hart's argument is that we need to reclaim the biblical worldview that the world, though created good by God, is nevertheless in servitude to evil forces. The world that is is not the world that God intended it to be. And examining the fossil record or feasting one's eyes on the fauna that rings the Indian Ocean cannot teach us this. Only when history is seen in light of Revelation do we see it as fallen, yet hoping for redemption.
God's sovereignty, as Hart sees it, cannot be understood in terms of God being the author of all that happens, for even if God's willed it for a greater good, that would still make God the author of evil, and any morally serious person ought to revolt against such a God, as indeed Ivan does. God is the prime cause of everything, but things can and do run amok in the chain of secondary causes that God's sovereignty permits.
For Hart, God's sovereignty must be understood as God's ultimate victory over all that has besmirched this world, including the corpses of children buried in rubble and floating in the flood waters.
Hart's argument wraps up with a bracing defense of God's impassibility and a passionate complaint against Calvinist determinism. You can see the latter quietly developing through this short volume, but when the wave finally breaks, it's rather powerful. What's interesting is that both God's impassibility and Calvinist determinism are in great disfavor in mainline Presbyterian seminaries these days!
At that old Ivy Bush post, I remarked that Calvin's high doctrine of providence was a pastoral argument. It was meant to reassure suffering people that their lives weren't in the hands of a capricious fate but of a loving and sovereign Father. Hart decries how that same argument, in the hands of Piper and his ilk, is used to reassure not the survivors of natural disasters, but those of us who watch from the comfort of our living room Lay-Z-Boys:
(W)ords we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety...
Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe (a survivor's) anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world. Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words...
And this should tell us something. For if we would think it shamelessly foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real... then we ought never to say them.
It is often remarked that Job's friends did well when they sat in silence with him for seven days. Where they went wrong was when they began to open their mouths, for rather than comforting Job, they went about justifying God's ways in the world. This earned them a sharp rebuke from Job and in the end, an equally sharp rebuke from the very God whose ways they sought to justify.
Hart admits that in the face of such massive suffering, silence might be the best option. But he ventures to speak nonetheless. So I have to speak on Sunday. I still don't know what I'm going to say, but I think that I'd better not say anything unless I can imagine that between the Bible in my right hand and the newspaper in my left, an earthquake survivor stands in my presence waiting to hear what I have to say.
And now, let us bow our heads in a moment of silent prayer for the young, eager beaver, liturgically correct seminary graduate determined to celebrate Pentecost on this, of all Sundays. For eager beaver seminary graduate has been called to a congregation of decidedly low church sensibilities, where there is no day higher or holier than Mother's Day.
Glenn W. Most has written a most interesting book on Doubting Thomas. It combines a close reading of the story in John 20 with an examination of how the synoptic gospels handle issues of doubt and faith after the resurrection, as well as interpretations of Thomas by the Church Fathers, Gnostics and medieval and renaissance artists.
Most shrewdly observes that no where does it state that Thomas actually touched the wounds in the body of the resurrected Jesus, yet we tend to mis-remember the story as if he did. This is due in some part to a long history of interpretation that insisted he did probe the wounds in order to refute the Gnostic denial of a resurrected body.
But there's also the problem of visually representing a modal verb. Simply put, it's easier to paint a finger entering the hole in Jesus' side than painting an invitation to put said finger there. We remember the story as we've seen it on the canvas and in stained glass.
In the chapter on Thomas in art, Caravaggio's portrait is the hub around which the discussion spins. Most doesn't shy away from pointing out the contrast between Jesus' delicate, wounded body and Thomas' crude violation of it, represented by the vulva-like slit in Jesus' side, and the stiffly erect shape of Thomas' probing finger. Are we meant to feel revulsion at Thomas' impertinent request? Or, noticing Jesus' hand on Thomas' wrist, which may be restraining Thomas' hand or pulling it toward the wound, are we meant to see something different, a discovery that leads to the miracle of faith?
Most observes that Thomas' forehead is furrowed in a way that seems to indicate astonishment, even wonder, while the other two disciples' brows are wrinkled in a manner than connotes extreme concentration. One thinks of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, which is also pictured in Most's book.
Perhaps for this reason, Most argues, the Italian Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino wrote of Caravaggio that he had painted "some paintings which were in that middle between piety and profanity, such that I would not have wished to see them (even) from afar," for in his Doubting Thomas, the artist has represented "the irrevocable conflict and the indispensable interdependence between" faith and doubt, scientific belief and religious skepticism, and the knowledge that arises from a leap of faith and that which is the result of "scrupulously punctilious inquiry."
Most concludes by observing that we live in a relentlessly skeptical age, and yet our relationships demand that we suspend for a time the very skepticism that has generated such advances in knowledge in favor of a trust that cannot be justified on rational grounds alone. Thomas thus represents both the doubters and believers among us and within us.
Many have labored mightily to reconcile the differences in the gospel accounts of holy week. How many times did the cock crow? How many women went to the tomb? How many angels appeared? Such reconciliation is unnecessary, for as N.T. Wright argues, four accounts that differ in the details but agree on the big picture give proof that the witnesses didn't collude on "getting their stories straight."
Nor is it necessary for proclamation. We come to Easter each year with the burden of telling the old, old story in a new way. The distinctiveness of each gospel account is the wellspring from which fresh Easter preaching bubbles up.
So this is what I've noticed is distinctive about Matthew's account of the resurrection, appointed for reading this year by the Revised Common Lectionary:
Do You Have a Permit for This Parade?
March 16, 2008/Year A, Palm Sunday
Psalm 118, Matthew 21: 1-11
On the ninth day of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land we finally arrived in the Holy City. Our bus took us through Jerusalem up to an overlook on the Mount of Olives. From there we walked down a narrow street to the Dominus Flevit, a Roman Catholic church built on the site where it is believed that Jesus paused and wept over the city as he approached it on Palm Sunday.
The courtyard of the church has a nice view of the Old City. From there we looked across the Kidron Valley, through which today runs a four lane highway, to behold the Dome of the Rock glowing in the afternoon sun. The third most holy site in all Islam, built on the site of the ancient Jewish temple. Beyond it, and the rest of the Old City that sits astride Mount Zion, on a higher ridge, tower cranes in modern West Jerusalem brushed the sky.
It was here that our tour guide called our attention to the wall that surrounds the Old City, and some of its gates. One, called the Golden Gate, is no longer open. When the Ottoman Emperor Sulieman the Magnificent conquered the Holy Land in the 16th century, he learned that the Jews of Jerusalem were praying for the coming of the Messiah. They looked for his arrival at the Golden Gate, which opens east to the Mount of Olives. He also learned that the Christians of the city, who were also praying for the Messiah to come, believed that he had come once before, descending the Mount of Olives and entering the Holy City through the Golden Gate.
Sulieman, a Muslim, said, “Well. This is my city now. Ain’t no stinking Messiah gonna come take this city away from me.” So he bricked in the Golden Gate. And as a second line of defense, he established a Muslim cemetery outside the Gate in the erroneous belief that a Jewish Messiah couldn’t be contaminated by passing among the dead. A Messianic minefield, this Muslim graveyard. With that, his city was secure.
Now we laugh at Sulieman’s ignorance of what a Messiah really is, but this long dead Turkish ruler is symbolic of us. There’s something within us that doesn’t excitedly wave palm branches when the Messiah approaches. There’s something within us that wants to ask the revelers if they’ve got a permit for this ragtag parade. Ride on, ride on in majesty? There’s something within us that wishes Jesus had never rode into our lives.
Astride that colt, Jesus enacts an old, obscure prophecy, and signals his claim to the throne. Now it is kings who are seated on thrones, and kings are authority figures. To King Jesus we owe our obedience and our loyalty. Yet, like Sulieman of old who jealously guarded his city, we jealously guard our lives and our possessions. We are slow to hand them over to a higher authority. To paraphrase the crowd on Good Friday, we have no king but ourselves. Henley’s poem Invictus speaks for us more than the shouts of “Hosanna” from the crowd. “I am the master of my fate/the captain of my soul.” Something within us says, Stay out, Jesus. I’m doing just fine, Thank you very much.
Certainly the people of Jerusalem were ambivalent, at best, about his arrival. At the cries of “Son of David” at the Golden Gate, the city was thrown into an uproar. The noun form of the Greek word for “uproar” is “seismos.” The heart of the city quaked when they heard those cries at the gate.
Perhaps they were remembering another scare years before. Strangers, Wise Men from the east, perhaps entering the city through the Golden Gate, inquired at King Herod’s palace, “Where is he who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him.” The question troubled King Herod and all Jerusalem with him, for though the crib room in Herod’s palace was empty, the stars foretold the birth of a King.
The temple priests and royal advisors feared and quaked at the coming of Jesus like bureaucrats fear an election year, like employees of a company fear its sale. There’s nothing they hate more than regime change. Instability at the top. The devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t know. A new King, a new administration, a new owner means new procedures, new goals and objectives, and maybe demotions, layoffs, reassignments. Who needs the hassle?
And that’s what Jesus brings when he rides into our lives. A new set of priorities. And with that, instability. Uncertainty. Pain. Suffering. He’s bought us. Not with cash or stock options, but with his own precious blood. And things must be different now. And we hate it.
Or maybe we’d welcome a change at the top, if it were the right kind of change. But it wasn’t clear to the residents of Jerusalem, or to we who make pilgrimage to today’s sanctuaries if Jesus represents the kind of change we want to see. He fancies himself a King, but look at him, riding that donkey. He can’t even afford a real saddle. Any self-respecting King would have thundered into town on a warhorse. Power, we respect. Ruthlessness, we grudgingly admire, certainly in our leaders and even in our foes, once they’re vanquished. But humility? Shall we bend the knee to that, like those ridiculous-looking guys in turbans prostrating themselves before a baby in a manger? It’s a paradox, but there’s something about defenseless love that arouses our greatest fear and loathing.
“Hosanna! Save us, lord! Give us success!” we pray. Ah, success. Some translations read "prosperity." That’s what we want for ourselves, because that’s what our parents wanted us to be. We'll vote in November for a leader who we think can guarantee us the most success. But this Messiah invites us to take up a cross and follow him, hoping that somehow at the end of that long and winding road, we might obtain the resurrection from the dead. Is resurrection a suitable substitute for success? Is that a journey we want to set out on? Does that set us to saddling our donkeys and following Christ in hot pursuit?
Maybe it’s not the Messiah himself, but the company he keeps. His storms the city with an army of the immoral, the disabled and the outcast. The blind beggars he healed in Jericho are right at his heels. The women, some demon-possessed, others of ill repute, who funded his ministry in Galilee, are in and amongst the crowd surging through the Golden Gate. Kids, snotty nosed, whining, jumping in every mud puddle they can find along the way, at his feet. Do we really want to live in a world where Jesus reigns, for in that world the meek might finally receive their promised inheritance. What will become of us who, in the present age, proudly possess the earth’s choicest real estate? The very thought is cause for indigestion, both in Jerusalem of old and Salisbury of today.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” says the psalmist. I imagine that, where those tower cranes pierced the sky in West Jerusalem, underneath sat rusted and beat up dumpsters into which was thrown splintered wood, chunks of concrete, leftover gravel, strips of wiring and God knows what else that didn’t make it into the building, all of it destined for the landfill, just like construction sites here in the U.S.
That’s what we did with the Messiah. We came out to the parade, sized him up, and by the end of the week we’d decided he just wouldn’t do. Like a stone with a fissure running through it, or like the bad soil the contractor discovered out here that had to be hauled away and replaced with gravel before the new fellowship hall could go up, we, for the reasons we’ve mentioned earlier, and for our own reasons, decided that we wouldn’t build a life on this foundation. Golgotha, the little hill on the far side of the Old City from our vantage point on the Mount of Olives, was the landfill for Jerusalem, where rotten food, splintered wood, crushed stone, and worn out Messianic pretenders were heaped together into a pile.
Sometimes some pretty good stuff winds up in the landfill. Dan Gobble is the pastor of Providence United Methodist Church on Bringle Ferry Road. He was telling me on Wednesday how his grandfather, John Henry Gobble, built an entire house out of what he recovered from the dumpster at a TVA site he worked on in Tennessee. Those were the days in the construction industry when speed was at a premium and there was no market for recycled products, so if it didn’t get nailed down or welded into the building it got promptly bulldozed and hauled to the dump. But John Henry went dumpster diving after work every day, rescuing forlorn 2x4s, salvaging rebar, scavenging copper pipe, and out of that rejected material constructed his own, personal castle.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” says the psalmist. God the Father, like John Henry Gobble, goes sifting through our cast-offs, finds Jesus and says, Yes. You’ll more than do. The time to rebuild has come, and I will lay you as the foundation.
“This is the day that the Lord has made,” says the Psalmist. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Centuries of Christian interpreters have heard in these words a prophecy of Easter. Indeed, this Palm Sunday is a kind of Easter Sunday because on a Sunday long ago God raised Jesus from the dead. He has ascended on high, higher in the sky than tower cranes or space shuttles can penetrate, and He is Lord over all, from you and me to Sulieman the Magnificant, even over those who handed him over and denied him clemency.
Only let us remember that, in the words of one scholar, the Risen Christ is not the acceptable Christ. The one whom God chose is the one we kicked to the curb, the one whose coming still generates an uproar in our hearts and in our communities. Let us take care, lest we stumble over the cornerstone God laid. Let us build on him, and not wall him out.
When I went to Israel in May, 2006 we spent a day in Nazareth, the boyhood home of Jesus. Over the grotto, that is, the cave like dwelling where it is believed that the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, stands the Church of the Annunciation. It is a behemoth. To say that it’s two stories is technically true, but it’s more accurate to describe it as one cathedral on top of another. In the upper sanctuary, wall-sized portraits of the Virgin Mary stare down at you. One, a mixed media work of art from Japan, depicts Mary with Asian features. We were told that the white portion of her dress is made out of real pearls. When money is no object, you can build quite a church!
Next to the Church of the Annunciation is the Church of Saint Joseph’s Carpentry, built on the site where it is thought that Jesus’s earthly father plied his woodworking trade. The Church of Saint Joseph, by contrast, is old, small, dark, dank and musty. And as I took a look around its wholly unimpressive interior I thought, “So typical! Joseph never gets any credit!”
Indeed, the man, like the church that bears his name, stands in the long shadows cast by other members of his family. In Roman Catholic tradition, Mary is acclaimed The Queen of Heaven, and her likeness is reproduced in stone and in stained glass in countless houses of worship. Even we Protestants invoke her name on a more or less weekly basis when we recite the Apostles’ Creed. “Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,” we say. But Joseph? That name hardly ever parts our lips. There’s just no glory in being a step-father.
And yet, in this era of “baby daddys,” an era in which 300,000 families in North Carolina have a hard time making ends meet because of delinquent child-support payments, we need a few more Josephs, a few more unsung heroes who do their duty to both God and neighbor.
Just what sort of fellow was he? In the Roman Catholic tradition, Joseph the carpenter is the patron saint of workers. Matthew the Evangelist describes Joseph as a righteous man, for when he discovers that his fiancé is pregnant with someone else’s child, he foregoes vengeance and decides to end the engagement discreetly. Yet Joseph discovers an even higher righteousness when in a dream he is reassured about the child, and obeying the Word of the Lord, raises him up as his own.
Indeed we need a few more Josephs. We need a few good men who work hard and don’t blow their paycheck on booze, meth or crack. We need a few good men who do as the Lord commands them. We need a few good men who, in the words of the psalmist, stand by their oaths even when it hurts, men who discover a higher righteousness in answering God’s call to be their brother’s keeper. The power to procreate is not the same as the power to be a Father. It’s hearing and obeying the Father of us all that makes men out of boys. Joseph gets that. And we need a few more Josephs in our society.
And indeed they’re there. Step-fathers and foster fathers and adoptive fathers who don’t show partiality, but who bestow their love and wisdom indiscriminately. Teachers, scout masters, coaches and volunteers in schools who take an interest in the moral and educational development of someone else’s children. They go overlooked in a culture that revels in fame, infamy, and fortune, but like Joseph of old, they are there, in the shadows, doing good work. As the Christmas carol puts it, “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given/So God imparts through human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven.”
Underneath the Church of Saint Joseph’s Carpentry, archaeologists have been hard at work, unearthing remnants of Nazareth of old. We saw several Mikvehs from New Testament times or earlier. A Mikveh is a Jewish ceremonial bath used for rites of purification. I think that this is a metaphor: burrow down underneath the surface appearances of our greedy and violent society and you will find holiness and purity. You will find Josephs engaging in the work of sound parenting, of obeying God’s word, and of dreaming God’s dreams and not being afraid to act on them, no matter how improbable they might seem.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, Joseph is also the patron saint of the Church. Like the Holy Family, the Church is a family unit that is not held together by a common bond of blood, or DNA, but by water and Spirit, and a mutual willingness to obey the voice of the Lord. In an age of so much violence and mistrust between races, clans, tribes and ethnic groups the Church is called to be a community of peace, for the ties that bind us transcend the fault lines of national borders or language or skin color. In an age of individualism, Joseph is the model for all Christians to take responsibility for the younger ones in the faith, whether they are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, or not.
But who is this man Joseph deep down? Such an extraordinary roller-coaster ride he took when the Spirit intervened in his impending marriage! Yet the biblical text is strangely silent about his inner life. I suppose we leave off interpreting here and enter the realm of speculation, but Doug Gay speculates better than most in this excerpt from a poem about the step-father of Jesus:
I am the man God set aside, the man God did not need to light this light,
The man God could not use to fire this fuse,
(I didn’t even get to choose the name)
I lost all this, I lost my place in time and this instead,
This unsought gift which comes not through my loins,
But through my hands and heart and head…
Joseph is the man God set aside in order to accomplish God’s great work of redemption. If there were any hint of Presbyterianism in Joseph’s style of righteousness, this had to have smarted. Presbyterians are doers. We build Habitat Houses, staff the homeless shelter, raise money for medical missions in Africa, even go there to volunteer. To be set aside by God, to be the one tool in the box that the Almighty decided not to bring out—this had to have hurt.
One wonders why. Why did God have to get Joseph out of the way, so to speak, in order to save us from our sins in Jesus? The catechism has an answer for us, which we will recite tomorrow evening: Our Lord’s incarnation was a holy and mysterious event, brought about solely by free divine grace surpassing any human possibilities.
It’s beyond our capacity to save ourselves. There’s a chasm between heaven and earth that can’t be bridged from this side of the divide. Like the helpless lady on the TV commercial, we’ve fallen and we can’t get up. Sin, like an addiction, is a demonic power that enslaves us, and we haven’t the strength to break its chains. We come to the end of another year; we look back, back on those best laid plans, and best of intentions, and see, if we’re honest, that we’re even further in arrears than we were when we first started out. Our books are soaked in red ink.
So God in Christ did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. God came to us when we couldn’t get to God. Christ shed his blood for us that the red ink on our balance sheet might be washed away, and our debts canceled once and for all. Christ emerged victorious from the grave, and through faith in him, he gives us the key that lets us out of the prisons of fear, sin and death. And so perhaps it is fitting that he who did all this for us without our help came to us without our help. God set Joseph aside to set in motion our salvation, so that Joseph and each of us might find a place set for us at the eternal feast.
And so maybe the strange silence around the earthly father of Jesus is appropriate. The good works of earthly Josephs in homes and classrooms and out camping with our children and youth notwithstanding, God can do far more in and through and even without us than we can do under our own power. And so perhaps the quiet, nondescript Church in his honor in far of Nazareth, and the silence between the lines of scripture can teach us a thing or two about how we tell the story of our own lives. Just as the Christmas story is not a story about Joseph, but about his step-son, so the story of our lives is not the story of what we have accomplished, but the story of what happened when Jesus so unexpectedly intruded into our lives.
There’s a line from a prayer that we owe to the Methodists: Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee. Joseph coaxes within us a willingness to be set aside, that Christ might have room to take up residence in our homes and hearts and world.
Nine years ago I preached on Matthew 1: 18-25. I compared Joseph, step-father of God, to Ian Bedloe, protagonist of Anne Tyler's novel Saint Maybe:
Ian goes on to become a master carpenter and not a bad father. It wasn't the life he had envisioned, but because of the dramatic intervention of God, through the members of The Church of the Second Chance, and by making room in his life for these kids, he became something more than he ever thought he could be. What Joseph and Ian discover is that Jesus and his salvation and forgiveness don't come into our lives without a price. That price is paid when we set aside our best laid plans for the future, or our family's best laid plans for the future, and embrace God's irrational, inscrutable plans for our lives, and embrace those who are hard to embrace.
That's a pretty good paragraph there preacher man, but nine years ago you had no idea how right you were. No idea.
It comes a bit too late for lectionary preachers, but this little application of the Parable of the Shrewd Manager is, well, the shrewdest one I've seen in a while.
Lectionary preachers would do well to abide with Jeremiah this week and next, and with this old but strangely contemporary article by Walter Brueggemann that treats both this Sunday's OT lesson and next Sunday's.
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