Have you not known? Have you not heard?
   Has it not been told you from the beginning?
   Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
   and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
   and spreads them like a tent to live in;
23who brings princes to naught,
   and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
24Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
   scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
   and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
25To whom then will you compare me,
   or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
26Lift up your eyes on high and see:
   Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
   calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
   mighty in power,
   not one is missing.
27Why do you say, O Jacob,
   and speak, O Israel,
‘My way is hidden from the Lord,
   and my right is disregarded by my God’?
28Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
   the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
   his understanding is unsearchable.
29He gives power to the faint,
   and strengthens the powerless.
30Even youths will faint and be weary,
   and the young will fall exhausted;
31but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
   they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
   they shall walk and not faint.

On Thursday of this week I was spending some time visiting with Ginny Mattox, whom many of you know well, of course. She is, in many ways, a remarkable woman, smart as a whip, and has made quite a life for herself despite being born legally blind. She met her husband at a school for the blind in Iowa, and he became a successful piano tuner. She had children, worked various jobs over the years, and experienced a lot more heartache in this life than is perhaps fair, but she is, as they say, a persistent woman, and fiercely independent. Ginny joined the church a few years before I arrived, perhaps 8 years ago, after her former United Church of Christ congregation closed its doors, and she quickly found a place here amongst the Women’s Guild, and in the hearts of many of us. She is now 96 and can’t make it to church very often because of her health, but her heart is here, having found a new church home in this place. I asked her permission to share with you part of our conversation from this past Thursday, when she sharing a bit of her frustration at the fact that what little sight she always had has grown worse after a small stroke she experienced some months ago. It’s simply harder now to read things anymore, though thankfully she has an electronic enlarger that gives her some help. Nonetheless, it remains a real frustration, and, like many of us, she had grown upset and perhaps a bit depressed that she simply cannot do what she once did. And that certainly makes sense – we will all experience the frustrations that come with age, if we’re not already experiencing them right now in our lives. Together, we shared our mutual frustrations about the state of our bodies, and the state of the world, and then I began thinking of our text today, the one I knew I was preaching on, about Isaiah’s call to the people to remember, to remember who God is, the creator of all, and to remember all the times God has been indeed faithful, those times when God was there for the people of Israel, and was there for me and for her. “Have you not seen? Have you not heard” the prophet says as he points to God as creator, and to the mysterious ways God actually does move in this world, of how we cannot know the fullness of things. And from then on, Ginny and I found our conversation punctuated with each of us saying to each other “have you not heard? Have you not seen?” with laughter filling the room with the way the phrase could be worked into any topic of conversation. But we also laughed with the satisfaction that came with sharing moments when we once saw the hand of God being present in our lives, even as we sometimes have a hard seeing that very same hand in our current circumstances.

Now, I don’t know who ministered to who on Thursday, but it was a good moment, and a deep reminder of how important it is in the life of faith that we remind each other of what the prophet Isaiah puts before us, that when things become dark, when life becomes stripped of hope, we need to remind ourselves, and to remind each other of who God is and how God done wondrous things not so long ago. The words we just heard are from what scholars call Second Isaiah, that is, a section of Isaiah believed to have been written after the disaster of the Babylon invasion of Jerusalem in 589 (BCE), and the eventual carting off of the best and brightest to the city of Babylon itself, something commonly known as the Babylonian Captivity. First Isaiah warns them about the invasion and then another writer who claimed Isaiah’s name, the aforementioned Second Isaiah he is often called, wrote and spoke to console and to give Israel comfort during that time of collective captivity in Babylon, and then a third person claiming Isaiah/ mantle, wrote after the people have returned from the Babylonian exile in 539. Most scholars think that three different writers took on the name of Isaiah, in order to speak to the people during these three distinct times. What we have before us in this text just now is reflective of a time when Israel had lost hope, when they are still in captive in Babylon, yearning to come back home again, and this Second Isaiah wants to remind them of who their God is, and what this God has done for them in the past, and he does this so beautifully by asking them to remember, to dig deep within their collective memory and remember how God has always been faithful to them.

And Second Isaiah does this asking them this pivotal question, said in a different ways: “have you not heard, have you not seen”—do you not remember the creator, the one who has created all of these things, the heavens that have been stretched out, the rulers of this world that have been scattered by the hand of God? They come and go, these cruel and despotic rulers, and God simply blows them away like grass in the palm of God’s hands. Isaiah says that this is a God who is both near and far, both other and beautifully intimate, so much so that God calls us—each of us, and all of creation—by name. God remembers our names, that is how intimate God is with us, even as Isaiah says that this God is one who metaphorically sits above it all, and sees the inhabitants of this world as grasshoppers—both far and near, is Israel’s God. Have you not known this, Isaiah asks, have you not heard, and always known, that God is here and that God remains present in this world? This is a God who is with Israel in their times of deep trouble, deep despair, as they were in Babylon, and this is the same God who is with us, when all seems lost, and there is no way out, no hope left, and no point to going on.

What those in captivity in Babylon forgot and we seem to so often forget, is that faith, that trust, comes with memory, with remembering who God is, and remembering those moments in our lives when we have seen and experienced God’s faithfulness, God’s movements in our lives. We so often forget our own stories, our memories of those times when God arrived “right on time,” as some of the old African-American preachers used to say, and we forget those ways that God spoke to us through family and friends, strangers, and sometimes, sometimes even through enemies of ours. I know that when I get scared, when I get fearful about the future, about my personal future, or the future of something or someone I care about, or even fearful about the future of this country that I love so much, I know that I am experiencing fear because I’ve forgotten to remember the ways that God has always taken care of me, has always taken care of those that I love and even struggle to love, though not in ways that I always expected, or even wanted. I forget about those moments when I thought there was no way out, there was no hope, no nothing for the future, and yet, here came the future, and it was often more than I could have ever wished for. God arrived “right on time.”

But why do we forget about the past when we are in the midst of our present despair, why do we not ask ourselves and others that key question “have you heard, have you not seen” during our difficult times? Why did the people of Israel forget about God’s eternal faithfulness to them, as they were languishing in Babylon? Was it because they chose not to remember or they simply forgot to remember the God of whom this text speaks, the one who reminds them of who this Divine One is, the one who stretches out the heavens above them, and yet who knows them—and us—each by name? Maybe it’s because we get so wrapped up in the moment, the present, that latest flurry of crazy tweets by our President, or whatever, that we somehow forget that the present moment has not been the ONLY moment in our lives, or in the life of this country or of this world—we forget that we have a history, a memory of the ways God has loved us and held us, and done great and wonderful things in our lives. We become so stressed out about the future—our financial futures, the future of our marriages and our relationships, the future of our children, the future of this country—we are so stressed about the future because we have forgotten to remember, to remember our true stories of the past, and thus it is causes us so much unnecessary pain. Don’t get me wrong – these are troubled times, and some of us are in troubled space in our lives, really troubled spaces, and its important never to pretend or push people past the truth that some of us are actually being held captive in Babylon, are suffering real and profound heartache, if not trauma. But the perhaps the key to life is to balance out that reality with another truth, with another reality, the one where we remember who God is, and has been, and will be, and we remember those other moments in our lives when we were back in Babylon, in despair – and somehow, and some way, God found a way out for us when there was no way out.

So, I invite you to ask yourself this week, this Advent season, this season of waiting, to ask yourself this question, when despair settles in, when hopelessness seems to be your constant companion, to ask yourself these two questions – have you not heard? Have you not seen?

Have you not heard that this past Friday was World AIDS Day, a day some of us remember those we have lost to the other side of the veil, and we remember those dark times when the funerals of young, beautiful men and women came upon us so quickly, and how the world seemed as if it would be wiped by this virus, and the gay male community itself would be wiped out as well, by both the virus and hatred, bigotry and fear hurled at it? And yet, have you seen those who at the edge of death be resurrected to life, of how a demonized and hated community would one day be able to witness what seemed impossible to have happened, marriage equality, only years after some spoke of rounding up gay men and putting them into internment camps? Babylon has fallen and will always fall, will always disintegrate before the mighty power of our God. Friends, have you not heard, have you not seen?

And have you not heard how the Christian church is about to collapse under the weight of its abandonment of justice, because of its acceptance and embrace, in some parts of church, of a predator of children, all for the sake of political power, as the church has so often done in the past? And yet have you not seen the Christian ministers this past week in our nation’s capital speaking aloud the 2000 verses in the Bible that give witness to God’s preference for the weak, the lowly, the powerless, God’s preference for those in captivity in Babylon, and have you not seen these brave ministers being carted off to jail for this act of civil disobedience? The Babylonian captivity of the church will one-day end, soon and very soon, because God will not abandon her children to the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar forever. Friends, have you not heard and have you not seen?

And friends, have you not heard the struggle of parents seeking children of their own, who endured pain and suffering for the sake of those whom they do not yet know, those they have longed for? And yet have you not seen God doing the miraculous, of God promising what cannot be, and that promise being made true, and have you not heard of Love being born in a manger, to parents of no seeming worth, in a poor nation held captive to the Babylon of its time, to Rome? Babylon will hold sway, Babylon will murder Love itself on a cross, but Love cannot be killed, Love cannot be vanquished, Love cannot be buried and forgotten – it will rise, it always rise again. Friends, have you not heard, and have you not seen?

Friends I have seen and I have heard. Have you? And when the waiting for the birth of our Lord seems to be too long, too painful, when the waiting for the end of Babylon seems like it will never come, let us gather together in places like this, and ask ourselves, “friends have you not heard, have you not seen?” And let us respond with the truth, with truth we’ve buried away while we were in despair in the dungeons of Babylon, and that truth is this: we have seen, we have heard, and because of that we shall do as the prophets Isaiah says we shall do. We shall wait for the Lord and she shall renew our strength, and we shall shall mount up with wings like eagles, and we shall run and not be weary, and we shall walk and not be faint. Blessed be our God, forever and ever. Friends, have you not heard, and have you not seen?

Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.

As most of you already know, today is last Sunday of the church calendar, with Advent beginning the new church year next Sunday. And every last Sunday of the liturgical year most churches shift their gaze towards celebrating the point of church itself, the reason we gather together, the reason being the Christ, and the reign of God that Jesus promised was both not here, not yet, and yet was actually here, even now. Today is called Christ the King Sunday or sometimes the Reign of Christ Sunday, drawing as it does to the monarchial images of antiquity, monarchies being the governmental norm during most of the world’s history. On this Sunday, we often get images of Christ or God being lifted up and acting quite kingly, and today’s text is no difference, in many ways, and I’ll get to that in a second. What I want to do before we get to the Ezekiel text itself is to explore the images, the impressions, the ways we might try to describe Jesus to someone who simply asked us who this Jesus was and is. Who is Jesus for you? How would you describe him? What did he do, and what does he mean to you? If you were describing Jesus to someone who had never heard of him, never heard of Christianity, how would you explain this Jesus, this Christ to them? Now, that question alone might require a few minutes to sort out our thoughts, on where to begin, and how to begin, and where to end up, even, as we formulate our understanding or understandings of who Jesus is to us.

And then, on top of trying to describe Jesus who might be to us, to explain this Jesus, we might then have to go into trying to explain who God is, and what relationship God and Jesus are to each other, and that might get us into all sorts of mysteries like the Trinity and what and who the Spirit is in relationship to who Jesus is, and it all gets pretty messy from then on out. I do think, though, that if we were to try to describe the personalities – and yes, I realize the inadequacy of language when speaking of divinity, especially using a word like “personalities” to describe the divine –if we were trying to describe the personalities of God, of Spirit, of Jesus, many of us might likely land on the idea that Jesus was, in a way, the heart of God put on full display some two thousand years ago. Despite all Jesus’ difficult teachings, and sometimes harsh rhetoric towards his enemies – and he did have enemies – most of us imagine him as a gentle soul, perhaps the gentlest of souls, imagining him almost as our friend, the Christ of songs like “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and in another favorite, “Softly and Tenderly.” As noted by others, Jesus often functions in our imagination as God’s soft side, as God’s heart, whereas God, the Lord, God the Parent, plays the role of a strict, sometimes harsh, but still loving father or mother. Of course, that is a not necessarily how God the Creator and Parent is always presented in our Bible, but it is there enough in our Bibles that people often mistakenly relegate the mean God to the Old Testament and the nice God to the New Testament. And we do the same with Jesus, as if Jesus was showing us a new, kinder, loving side of God in New Testament that we didn’t easily see in the Old Testament – for some, this false dichotomy found in the idea that the God of the Old Testament is the God you fear and the God of the New Testament is the God you love.

But just as that assumption about God and our Bile are too simplistic, our images of Jesus should be more complicated than that of the gentle Jesus, especially if you read the actual Gospels – I mean, there are times when Jesus is angry, violently so, as you see him turning over money changers tables in the Temple in a fit of rage. And you find in places like the latter part of Matthew and parts of Mark where Jesus is seen as the Messiah who will come in the last day to judge the quick and the dead, who will hold us accountable on whether or not we have practiced his teachings of love and justice. The echoes of that image have their roots in texts like the one we have before us today, in this beautiful text from the book of Ezekiel, where once again God is seen as the Shepherd and we the sheep, a common metaphor both in the New and Old Testaments. The prophet Ezekiel, the same man who will ask whether or not dry bones can still live a few chapters later, puts before us in chapter 34 a vision of God that mirrors one of Jesus’ own stories about sifting between the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. In that parable, Jesus asks the sheep and the goats about whether or not they have visited him in jail, etc. and he divides up the world by those did and did not do these acts of compassion and justice. Ezekiel is writing and speaking hundreds of years earlier to a people captured by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, and though the vision he was given by God was harsher than his counterpart the prophet Isaiah, he had still hope, he still believed that God would remake Israel from the inside out, and create a more just nation. Unlike Jesus’ story in Matthew 25 of separating the sheep and the goats based on their deeds, here there are no goats, and only sheep, and the first divine act is bringing all the sheep, the lean ones, the fat ones, back into the sheepfold, back under the care of the Divine Shepherd. The Promised Land the sheep will find is idyllic when they come back home, especially as they have come from an altogether different pasture, out of a place of clouds and thick darkness, Babylon itself, as the text here says.

But it’s interesting that a shift quickly happens that moves the people from coming out of Babylon to a newly reconstituted Israel, with all sort of utterances about who this new Israel will be. And this important, because in the prophetic narrative, the reason why ancient Empire after ancient Empire has simply rolled over the nation of Israel is because the people have been unfaithful, and thus God has allowed Israel’s enemies to defeat them, or, according to some prophets, God has actually sent these empires to punish the people of Israel. What concerns so much of Ezekiel’s attention is what kind of people Israel will be – and how will it treat the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, the somebodies and the nobodies. All this talk of lean and fat sheep, culminates in this verse, where the prophet, in speaking for God, says the following to the fat sheep, the powerful sheep, the sheep who were somebodies: Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I have to admit that when I read this verse, I thought of one of our dogs, Chloe, who is bigger than our other dog Zuki, and whenever there is something to be had, some treat to be dispensed, Chloe will use her weight and size to push herself in front of a two dog line, and poor Zuki just has to step back a bit, being smaller and thinner than Chloe. That is what the poor, the powerless, the nobodies often experience in this world, pushed and pulled, butted around until they are scattered far and wide, which makes them even more vulnerable than they were before.

But our God in this text says that this sad and unjust arrangement will not be forever, that God will save her flock, that she will not allow this to happen forever, and that God will be their God and a King David will reemerge, will arise somehow from the past, and be their prince. For us Christians, we’ve typically understood this sentence as foretelling the coming of Jesus, this new David, and perhaps it does so, but I want us to pay attention to how different this particular image of Christ is from the one we think about when we sing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and “Softly and Tenderly,” the sweet and gentle Jesus that many of treasure, including myself. In our text today, God and Christ are imagined as bringers of justice, as ones who free the people from outside forces like that of Babylon, but also frees us from the bondage and prisons found within Israel itself, from the ones that keep the lean sheep lean, and the fat sheep fat. And what is so interesting here in this text is this image of God feeding justice, feeding the food of justice to the sheep, but actually, not to all the sheep, but to the fat sheep alone, which is so unexpected, at least it is to me. In my mind, it would seem logical to feed the lean sheep the food of justice, they who have been deprived of food, they who haven’t had much justice, but in fact the text says that it was fat sheep, the powerful, the somebodies, that were fed justice. Now, you could think of it is hate feeding, of cramming justice down the throats of the unjust, but I don’t think that is the case – God doesn’t judge us, doesn’t hold us responsible simply to punish us, but to correct us and invite us into a new way of being, into a way of justice. God doesn’t forget the lean sheep, neither does God forget the fat sheep – they too are a part of the family, and they will not be given up on, which is a piece of good news for all of us, really, especially for those of us who don’t realize how fat we may have become compared to the rest of the world, or even the people around us.

And so that image of a God who sends a figure like David, like Christ, into the world to mete out justice is one of those pictures I want us to add to the myriad we have in our heads, to set the image of Christ being the one who judges both between the sheep and the goats, as found in Matthew 25, and the sheep and the sheep, as found in our text today. This Christ, this God, really does throw his lot in with marginalized, the meek, the poor, the nobodies in this world, and that should be not forgotten – and it continues a long and strong thread found throughout the Bible, of God and the prophets speaking out against the injustice of those who oppress Israel from the outside, the various Empires and their rulers, but who also speak out against those oppress others from within the tribe of Israel, the fat sheep, the ones who need justice fed to them. Jesus is not only the one who holds us when we are need of hope, and he is not not only the one who heals when our bodies and spirits are broken – he is also the one who stands within and beside those lean sheep, those despised by the world, the losers, the freaks, the nobodies, and brings justice to them, who makes the world right again, now and in the great Last Day.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, who used to teach up at Northwestern University in the United Methodist seminary on campus, reminds us in our Modern Lesson of how the church has so often failed to put that particular image beside all the other good and true images we have of our Christ. In doing so, she references an old Jewish legend about the coming of the Messiah, which tells of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi (who lived in the first half of the third century) who was meditating near the tomb of another great rabbi, and who was then mystically visited by the Prophet Elijah. "When will the Messiah 

come?" asked Joshua. "Ask him," replied the Prophet. "The Messiah is at the gates of Rome, sitting among the poor, the sick and wretched, the lepers, begging for alms. Like them, he changes the bindings of his wounds, but does so one wound at the time, in order to be ready at a moment's notice." That image of the Messiah, for us Christians this Jesus of Nazareth, sitting at the gates of Rome, the gates of unparalleled power and wealth even in the 3rd century, sitting with his fellow lepers, his fellow nobodies, his fellow wounded, I mean, its stunning image, at least to me. The earlier image I invited us to embrace, the one of Jesus being our judge, the one of him handing out justice for the nobodies, and redemption for the somebodies, stands beside this image of Jesus, this one of a man, a leper, outside the gates of Rome, the gates that seemed to embody all that mattered, begging alongside his sisters and brothers. And yet, he will only untie, clean, and retie his bandages one at time, so that if he called upon, he will be ready at a moment’s notice.

Christ as judge, and Christ as the one riddled with leprosy, the Messiah as an instrument of divine justice, and Messiah as an instrument of solidarity with all those who have been wounded by life and injustice itself – those two images, among many others, needed to be added to our understanding of Christ the King, and what the reign of Christ might actually look like in the real world, the one that might come at a moment’s notice. The challenge for all of us is to make sure that we see the fullness of our Savior, and the fullness of what God is doing in this world. What gets us and our fellow Christians in trouble is when we think of Jesus being only our personal Savior, and thus uninterested in the salvation of the world, uninterested in making the world whole again, a Christ uninterested in justice, but somehow obsessed with us in particular, and our particular needs, Kevin’s particular needs, your particular needs. But, of course, we can also get ourselves into trouble when we think of Jesus as being only about justice, as one only interested in making only the world whole again, in making only the world a just place, but not also passionate in making us, in particular, whole again, in bringing salvation to us, wholeness to me, to you, in particular. Jesus is the prince who brings justice to those most in need of justice, the lean sheep, the thrown away people of this world, and Jesus also is the leper, the beggar at the gates of Rome, wounded, in need of healing, but ready, oh so ready, to be the instrument of God’s healing when time comes for us, and to us. Both images of Christ are true, and we’re asked to embrace both true pictures of him, and certainly many others as well. We just mustn’t make the mistake, as we and others often do, of not recognizing the fullness of our Christ, the many faces of our Christ, the one found in the image of Jesus as King found in our stain glass, to my left, right over there, the bringer of love and justice, but also the face of Jesus deformed by leprosy, hidden as it is by a hood, in the sculpture found on the front of your bulletin, the one who stands beside all the wounded and lean sheep of this world. May the Christ, in all of his fullness, in his complex beauty be praised, and welcomed and celebrated, forever and ever. Amen.

The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, after Ehud died. So the Lord sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor; the commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-ha-goiim. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help; for he had nine hundred chariots of iron, and had oppressed the Israelites cruelly twenty years. At that time Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the Israelites came up to her for judgment. She sent and summoned Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, “The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you, ‘Go, take position at Mount Tabor, bringing ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his troops; and I will give him into your hand.’”

This Sunday before Thanksgiving we have this most unusual text, one I’ve never preached on, but I’m glad I’m able to, especially now, with its unexpected challenge, its unexpected gift. There is an obviousness to this text at this time in our collective history as a country – a strong, powerful woman being put before us here in this text, and yet also have the issue of sexual harassment and dangers that men have often poised to woman, now and perhaps forever. The “Me Too” movement, where woman and some men have been speaking up about the ways men have often assaulted them through their words, their hands, their threats of ruination, it has all been incredibly satisfying to some to see women’s voices finally being taken seriously, at least in some cases, but notably not in Alabama, of course. And yet, it’s been difficult to see some of our personal heroes fail to live up to our expectations of what is right and what is wrong, something I spoke with our confirmation class about this past week, in relation to Martin Luther, who was a deeply flawed hero. But perhaps some of us shouldn’t be surprised by the extent of this problem – I have no doubt that women are not surprised by the recent public revelations of this kind of behavior, having experienced it many times in their own lives. Even a few men that I know, including myself, have experienced being touched inappropriately by people who had some sort of power of them, wondering if saying “no” too forcefully would hurt their career, hurt their chances of a good recommendation. The good news is that more and more women and men are being believed, are being heard, are being supported, despite an array of forces that want to destroy them and their credibility, all in attempt to protect people from the consequences of their actions. We should expect certain kinds of just and good behavior from people, even if we know we and they can’t always live up to those standards.

But expectations are a funny thing, of course, because so often the unexpected is what we get in this world, from others, and even from a text like this one from the book of Judges. The expectation is that the people of Israel have always been ruled by men, being the patriarchal culture that it was, but here comes the unexpected – Deborah, the one who sits underneath the palm tree, and who hands out judgment for those in need of someone who can decide between two conflicting claims. But first, some background. The book of Judges comes after the book of Joshua, which tells the story of how Joshua and Israelites conquered the Promised Land, after spending 40 years wandering in the desert. After Judges, you find the book of Ruth, and then there are the stories of the kings of Israel, starting with Saul, continuing with David, and then come the stories of good and bad kings that ruled Israel over hundreds of years. The book of Judges tells the story of a time before there were these kings, when the 12 tribes of Israel essentially formed a loose confederation, but were almost independent of each other. But disputes arose, differences between the tribes that needed to be settled in other ways than through war – and it would eventually be war between the tribes that gave rise to a clamor for a king, a final authority. But before the king there were the judges, men and women who functioned as the ones who settled disputes between the tribes and often led the people into war – you’ve probably heard of Gideon and Samson, but there were others you’ve probably not heard of, people like Othniel, Ehud, Tola, Elon and others. Some scholars have said that these stories in Judges, whether history or not, have functioned as an ancient argument for the need for a strong king, both to bring peace between the tribes, and to lead the people in times of war against its often hostile neighbors. Though the book of Judges is replete with victories and times of peace, it also laid bare how the lack of cohesion caused trouble. God’s hope was that there would be no need for a king, since God would be their king, directly ruling them through people like Ehud, Gideon and Deborah. But the people clamored for a king, a strongman, a ruler who could somehow unite the country, and eventually, in the book of First Samuel, God reluctantly gives them what they want – and what they wanted, a kingdom ruled by a king, would eventually fall apart hundreds of years later.

But today we are still in the age of the Judges, the ones before the time of the kings, and Deborah is the one who sits under a palm tree, is the one who makes decisions, and who leads the people into war, though perhaps not into the battle itself. She is so unexpected in so many ways in such a male dominated world, a leader of men when women were not seen as leaders, of either men or women. She delivers justice to the tribes of Israel, and when the time comes for war, for the people to be released from the bondage they had brought upon themselves because of their disobedience, it is her that sends word to Barak to gather up armies from two tribes of Israel, and to wage war against the Canaanites. If you read the book of Judges as a whole, the narrative is replete with moments when women are horrifically violated, harmed, harassed, and victims of violence. But here is Deborah, in contrast, somehow breaking through the deep misogyny you find in these texts, even this one found in our beloved Bible. Deborah is unexpected, in her war planning, and in her later prediction that it will be woman who will slay the King of Canaan, and not Barak. The assumption by Barak is that it will be Deborah who does the deed, but no, it will not be her, but instead, it will be a woman who is not even an Israelite who will drive a stake through the head of the Canaanite king – again, all so unexpected both within the context of this particular story, and the even larger, patriarchal narrative of Judges.

And that sense of unexpectedness is what I want to explore today, especially as it connects to gratitude, to this season and to the challenges of today. Deborah is such an unexpected gift to the people of Israel from God, the person needed in that moment, in that time, despite all the expectations of what leaders should look like, the greatest of which is that they should always be male. The spiritual challenge for many of us is to expect the unexpected from God, to have faith, have trust, that God is going to show up in this world in some surprising way that we did not anticipate, that we did not imagine. We have ideas about what miracles look like, about what heroes and leaders look like, and then God shows us up, and shows us another way that heroes manifest themselves in this world, another way holiness is embodied in another person, in another moment that simply surprises us in its oddness, in its peculiarity. So much of the spiritual life is looking for traces of God, in unexpected moments, in the ordinariness of life and not just in those moments we hope and pray for God to appear, those moments when we want God to do a thing, and do that thing in a certain way. I’ve been in prayer for the last few weeks about a particular challenge, and no answer seemed to be forthcoming, not obvious one, anyway, and then a few days ago when I was at the Roscoe Village Speedway, a woman smiled at me, out of the blue, for no other reason than we caught each other’s eye, and I smiled back and it simply made my day, this trace of God in her, this woman who seemed to bring God into the room by her simple gesture of shared humanity. I wasn’t the answer I was looking for, nor am I sure it was even an answer from the divine about what I was praying for in particular – but it was so kind, so needed, so unexpected that I think it was God smiling back at me, reminding me that despite the lack of a clear answer, God was here, and God is here, and that God had heard my plea, even if God had not answered it in the way I had hoped for or expected.

For me, a moment like that is a reminder that God does show up so unexpectedly in this life, in ways we had not anticipated, as it was the case with Deborah, in the patriarchal context of her time, a woman rising to power so unexpectedly. But today I also want us to think about not just the unexpected, but its twin as well, that is the expected, about those moments when what was expected from each of us, from God, was actually done by us, and done by God. At least a couple of times a year on the news program 60 Minutes there is some child prodigy in violin or piano, some incredibly gifted person who took to piano at 3 years old and who is now writing concertos at 8, and for whom it all seemed to come so easily, because of this good gift from God they’re manifesting in their lives, in their fingers. I love those stories, but I wonder about the rest of us, who have spent countless hours trying to master an instrument, and whose best is pulling off a simple song with a bit of competence after years and years of diligent practice. Now, I know the argument you and I hear about our participation trophy culture, about how we in America tend to hand trophies off to kids who simply show up to play the sport, do the work, etc. People complain that we are rewarding young people and even ourselves for simple ordinariness, for what is just simply expected of people, expected of good decent people. You join a baseball team, you go to practices, you participate in the games, in whatever forms, and some are held up for their great batting averages, or great pitching, and they receive a special trophy, but everyone else gets at trophy as well, because they too contributed to the team as well, they did what was expected of them, they showed up and did their jobs, however imperfectly. Again, the backlash is by those who say that we are celebrating the expected, the lowest common denominator, and that we instead should celebrate those who achieve the remarkable, the extraordinary, so that we can push kids to do and be better than just ordinary, to do and be more than what we simply just expect of them.

Now, look I do get that idea, that simply celebrating the ordinary and the expected might somehow diminish the extraordinary and the special – but there are times lately when I’ve come to appreciate the expected, and the ordinary, and all those who just simply meet our expectations, who show up in this world, and simply do their jobs, who practice the piano and don’t get anywhere of significance with it, those who chose to be on the team despite being on the 2nd or 3rd string, knowing they won’t get much playing time. On my alma mater football teams, there a group of running backs who will probably have long careers in the NFL, but then there is a Ronnie Clark, from some small town in Alabama who is now a senior and has had numerous injuries, and is so far down the depth chart people haven’t even heard of him – I certainly hadn’t. But he stayed, he remained, he showed up and didn’t quit, and a few weeks ago, in what was already a blow-out win over Ole Miss, late in the fourth quarter he came into the game, and scored a touchdown, the first one of his career. Half of the Alabama football team ran out to the end zone to greet him, as if he had just scored the game winning touchdown in the last minute of the game. The world is composed of those who do the unexpected, who are just extraordinary, and thank God for them, and then there are those who just show up, who do the work, who just do the right thing, to no accolades to no extraordinary applause or even effect. The recent and needed exposure of the ways men have sexually harassed women, something we men have known happens, but whose recent revelation through stories of women telling their truth, has made us aware that even some of our heroes will fail our expectations of them, of what we had hoped and believed about who they were as human beings. I guess I’ve grown more thankful for the people who do meet our expectations, who don’t sexually harass women or men, who do the right thing, day in and day out, who just simply show up and do the right thing. I get that you could argue that my expectations of others are too low, but my cynicism about human nature has sadly been confirmed of late. And no, I don’t buy into the idea of the soft bigotry of low expectations – what contributes to low expectations is not low expectations, but our actual low behavior, behavior that has recently been exposed in this country over the last few years.

And so I want to invite you to celebrate the Deborah’s of this world, the unexpected gifts we are given by God, and I want to invite you to celebrate the anonymous soldier from the tribe of Zebulan who answered the call to help set free his people, as everyone expected him to. And this Thanksgiving I invite you to say thank you to all those people that tend to just get participation trophies in our lives, the ones who clean up our messes, the ones who cook our dinners, and the ones who clean us up afterwards, literally and emotionally, and who fold your laundry, and the person at work who does his work quietly, and the ones who can just be counted on to be there. And I invite you to show gratitude in some unexpected way to those whom you expect to do the right thing, and who actually do it, day in and day out – your friends, your spouse, your children, your co-worker, the guy at Speedway, the woman who lets you into traffic, the ones who don’t cut into the line, the ones who holds the door for us, the ones who do the right thing, day in and day out, so often unnoticed by us, we who admire extraordinary miracles and long for them so much, when, in fact, it is the ordinary miracles that happen to us all the time. Thank you, dear God, for being the God who meets us in the unexpected, who sends us unexpected people, unexpected gifts, but also thank you for meeting us in the expected, in the people, places and spaces where we expect to find you, and you are actually there, in the ones who show up and do the right thing, the kind thing, the good thing, day after day, year after year.

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

THE ANCIENT LESSON Matthew 5:1-12 Liz Duffrin

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.  Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended. Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses. Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.

I am sure many of us remember the horrific incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia a few months ago, when racists and skinheads converged onto the small city to voice their racism, and to protest the taking down the statutes of Confederate leaders. A counter protestor was killed when a racist plowed his car into the crowd and shots were fired, and fists and kicks were thrown, and it was an awful, awful moment in the life of our country. The Sunday after the events I joined a few thousand at the Daley Plaza downtown to express our stance against racism, and our support of those who were feeling under attack by the latest wave of vitriol hurled at black and brown people. After listening to a series of speakers a young man stood up and made a stark challenge to us: cut out of our lives our friends and family who continued to practice racism with their words and/or their lives. At first, oddly enough, I thought, well, of course, we shouldn’t tolerate messengers and practitioners of hate and discrimination in our lives – I mean, there is something to be said about the fact that who we hang out with, who we share our lives with, is ultimately a reflection on us and what we value as well – even the New Testament offers this idea to its readers. But almost immediately, I was struck by the impossibility of putting that challenge into action in my own life – I am a Southerner, despite my lack of an accent, and almost every relative and every white friend of mine has said or done something that is racist – and I am certainly not immune from that charge either. I am a recovering racist, still working on aspects of my thought and life that perpetuate racism in my own heart and in my surroundings. I think I’ve spent most of my adult trying to get “woke” as the young people say nowadays, to wake up from the parts of me that had been infected by the white privilege I bear within me that is all around me, and around most of my family and friends. But if I were to do what the speaker at that rally asked me to do, I would probably have no blood family left in my life, people that I do very much love and care about. My parents were good people, they were heroes of mine, loving and kind people for the most part, and still they harbored ideas and thoughts about African-Americans that sadden me, that are shameful to me and that besmirched the goodness they generally practiced in their lives. And what about me – how do I cut myself out of my own life, me who is still working on that places in my heart and soul that haven’t quite woken up yet, haven’t yet reached the Promise Land, so to speak, the land where we can greet each other in all of our racial, sexual, and political complexity and discriminate against each other, explicitly or implicitly? Most of us in this room are probably dealing with some part of this problem, this imperfection, this sin we see in ourselves and in the ones we love, and how to navigate our relationships with those who have no desire to wake up and think that we are foolish for questioning the assumptions they imparted to us years and years earlier, consciously or not.

Of course, all of this has to do with the problem of how profoundly imperfect we all are, how despite our best hopes and wishes for ourselves and others, we rarely can live up to the goodness we desire to practice and hold within our hearts. There has been much criticism of original sin, perhaps rightfully so, that we are somehow born bad, or at least part of us is. Of course, the greater message of the Bible is that we are also born good – God said so at the beginning of creation, that God looked over the world, and us, and said it was good. But whether or not you buy the doctrine of original sin, what it does try to get at is something we all know is there, in each of us, in all of us, if we are honest with each other, and that is that there is shadow in us that doesn’t want to welcome the light, that doesn’t want to resist racism, that doesn’t want to wake up, that doesn’t want to give a damn about people I don’t know and don’t understand, a part of us that doesn’t want to do the right thing by the earth, that doesn’t want to give a damn about anything except ourselves and the people closest to us – and sometimes not even them. There is shadow even in a heart created within the light of God’s goodness, and it shouldn’t and doesn’t surprise many of us that despite the goodness and sometimes even greatness of our family or personal and public heroes, within them, as within us, there is shadow, some prejudice that surprises us, some bigotry that shows up unexpectedly, some unwillingness to do the right thing, at least in this part of our lives. I know this is true because it is true for me and everyone I know, and that desire for the perfect hero, the perfect politician, the perfect spouse, the perfect friend, the perfect parent, it all eventually crashes down, as we see them for who they are, and we see ourselves for who we are – people striving to do the right thing, but often failing to do so, sometimes even unaware that we have missed the mark, “missing the mark” being a common way we Christians speak of sin.

All of this desire for the perfect hero came too fore this week when I was thinking of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, or at least the anniversary of Martin Luther’ posting of the 95 these against the practice of indulgences in the city of Wittenberg, Germany. In a recent issue of The Christian Century magazine (Oct 25, 2017), Rabbi Noam Marans reminded us Christians of the awful anti-Semitic legacy of Brother Martin Luther and how we Protestants were no better, in practice, than the Catholics we sought to correct during the Reformation. He points that early in his career, Martin Luther took a positive stance towards Judaism, writing an essay in 1523 called “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” in which he noted that our Lord Jesus was himself Jewish, and that we Christians and Jews are sisters and brothers because of that connection. And yet by 1543 Luther had changed his mind about the Jewish people because he felt they were not readily converting to Christianity as he had hoped, and he wrote a screed called “On the Jews and Their Lies,” which is just patently anti-Semitic, in which he says ”…thus when you see a real Jew you may with good conscience cross yourself, and boldly say, ‘There goes the Devil incarnate.’” Later the Nazis would use this essay and other of Luther’s writing as part of their justification for their campaign of genocide against the Jewish people. But of course those vile words weren’t the only words Luther wrote, and so much of what else he wrote was beautiful and joyful and true – listen to brother Luther, yes BROTHER Luther:

The whole being of any Christian is faith and love. Faith brings the person to God, love brings the person to people.

God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does.

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess.

There are some of us who think to ourselves, 'If I had only been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby. I would have washed His linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!' Why don't we do it now? We have Christ in our neighbor.

Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!

What we have with Luther is what we have with all those that we love, and with our very own selves – people of often great light and love who carry within them some deep shadows, some places within them, within us, that God has not broken into, because we will not Her into those spaces, those corners of our hearts, our minds, that we would rather keep free of love and grace and understanding, whether or not we are aware of it.

But the ambiguity of people, especially the ambiguity of our heroes, shouldn’t surprise us, though of course, it still does, we who live in hope that people can actually live up to all their words, all their values, or that we can always live up to all of our own values. Look at brother Moses in our text today, he who stands high upon Mount Nebo, at the very cusp of his life’s work, which was leading his people into the Promised Land, and yet looking out onto a land he will never enter himself. God gives him only a glimpse of what must have seemed like Eden to him, after so many years of wandering in the desert because the people were stubborn and ungrateful and continued to try the patience of God. What brings Moses to this moment is the fact that he too was imperfect, that he too was sometimes often quick to anger and arrogance, and it showed up in an incident which is recounted in the book of Numbers, chapter 20. The people are thirsty, and they complain to Moses and Aaron, and they pray for water on the people’s behalf, and God grants this prayer, and Moses does as he is told – he strikes the rock and water pours forth. But what seemed to condemn Moses to die on Mount Nebo, and never be able to enter the Promise Land, are the words he said to the people – Listen, rebels, shall WE bring water for you out of this rock! We honestly don’t know for sure what angered God so deeply about Moses’ words, but most think that it was because he had deigned to take credit for the miracle – shall WE bring water for you, we Moses and Aaron. He had made it about him and not God, it became about the Messenger and not the Message, it became about Moses and not the Promised Land or about Moses and not God. Whether or not you or I think it fair, that is what seemed to prompt God to close the door to the Promised Land to both Moses and his brother in law Aaron, both who would die out with the first generation of Israelites because of their stubbornness. Joshua will lead the people into the Promised Land, not Moses, not Aaron, and so Moses dies on that high and holy mountain, buried by God’s own hands, and praised by the writer or writers of Deuteronomy as the greatest of the prophets of Israel. God seems to choose flawed human beings to do great things in this world, a truth you see being replicated over and over again in the Bible.

Now, to be sure, not everyone is Moses, or Luther, or Calvin, or Martin Luther King Jr, people whose light was so great that we often ignore the darkness they carried within them. I want us to be clear that knowing that all of us are flawed, imperfect human beings capable of great wrong doesn’t mean that we simply dismiss the imperfections of our leaders, excusing them from the task of becoming better leaders, to become better human beings. I often say about brilliant and gifted people that with great light comes great shadow, but that doesn’t mean the shadow should be ignored or un-confronted. I’ll share with you a couple of ways how I think we can distinquish the great leaders, maybe even the prophets of our age, from those who simply took power or were given power by an electorate: first, good leaders rarely make the mistake of confusing the mission and the messenger, the mistake of confusing the word they’ve been given with the proclaimer of that word, the messenger. Moses made that mistake at that rock, striking in anger and frustration, taking credit for what he did not do, but he did such a thing very rarely – he was Israel’s greatest prophet because he almost never wavered from his mission, which was to lead God’s people into the Promised Land. You can tell a good leader by her unwillingness to make it about her, that the point is not Moses but the Promise Land, that the point is not Martin Luther but the hopeful transformation of the church for his time, that the point is not Martin Luther King, Jr. but the racial equality that must happen in this world. All of these flawed, imperfect souls, kept the point the point, even as they stumbled personally, writing vile words, not living up to their best values, or whatever. It was never about them, but the goal, the calling they had to be prophets of their age, and the tellers of great truth.

But, you know, you could argue that even thieves and serial murders and narcissists have the same sort of focus, that they too keep the point the point, they too can dismiss themselves in favor of a laser focus on their vile mission. And that is why the mission itself matters, the calling matters, because it matters whether or not a person too points to a Promised Land of sorts, to a land of milk and honey. What I mean by this is that it isn’t good enough to just have a goal, a focus – I mean, one can have bad goals, a bad mission, a skewed conception of the Promised Land, that oddly includes only you and your own. But the Promised Land in the Biblical tradition is not just about me, it was never about Moses, but the Promised Land was always about us, about a world where there is plenty of milk and honey for the both of us, for all of us. From the laws that given to Moses were supposedly given by God to govern this land, you have important principles like the 50th year Jubilee, where all land bought and sold was returned to its original owner, so that there would never be a simple accumulation of land and money to a small few. And the courts of justice could not and would not be bought by the richest, and thus justice could be meted out fairly, and the widows and their children, the most vulnerable, would always be taken care of, and the very land itself would rest every 7 years, and the stranger who stumbled into land of Israel would be no stranger, for those in the Promised Land would remember that they too were once strangers in the land of Egypt, and all strangers would be treated with justice and compassion. A good leader doesn’t just have a clear mission – Pol Pot of Cambodia had a clear mission, as well – but the Mission itself must be a just and good one, a Promised Land not for the few but for all of us. Luther cast a vision for the renewal of the church, and though there were grave mistakes made on the way, including by Luther himself, the Promised Land for him was a church where freedom resided, where we understood that we were loved by God through our faith, and not because of what we do or don’t do, that the Scriptures were for the people, as dangerous as such an idea that might have sounded like 500 years ago. So much of that vision, that mission has come true, in every part of the church universal, and that is because it was a Promised Land that included all of us, each and every one of us.

Before I end today’s sermon, I just want to remind us of something, or maybe I am simply reminding myself, in these less than heroic times, where the real prophets among us seemed to have been drowned out by the false prophets of this age, the false prophets who do not have a vision of the Promised Land that includes all of us, which means that what they offer is no Promised Land at all. But, in fact, there is a Promised Land, there is a world to come, a world that can be actualized, and for us Christians it is the Kingdom of God of which Jesus speaks, the realm of God, which mirrors the Promised Land of Jesus’ ancestors, a land of milk and honey for both friend and stranger alike, a place for all of us who have left the Egypts of this world and who seek freedom in a new land. Our work is surely to keep praying and working for this new world, to do works of justice, and to be present and aware of our own imperfections as we struggle the imperfections of others. We need new prophets, new leaders in this day and this age, ones who focus on the realm of God alone and not on themselves, at least not too much on themselves, and ones that can cast a vision that looks like the one that Moses cast, that Jesus cast over two thousand years ago. Now, whether or not those prophets will arise in this age, in all of their imperfections, I don’t know, but I do believe this – in the end, this Promised Land, this new world to come, the one where all are welcomed, where there is justice for everyone, all of it will come to pass one day, because it is simply what God wants, and what God wants, God eventually gets. We can hasten our collective entry into Promised Land by working with God and working beside each other, or we can delay our entry and entry of others into the Promised Land by doing nothing. But know this: in the end, the Promised Land will come with or without our help. For your sake and my sake, and the world’s sake, I’d rather be on the side of making the Kingdom of God a reality sooner rather than later – but make no mistake, it will come, it will surely come, this new world and it will include you and me, in all of our imperfections, alongside other flawed and beautiful human beings, friends and strangers, because, you see, it is a Land that has been promised to us, and God will keep that promise, the one that was made to all of us. Amen.

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

THE MODERN LESSON Rita Nakishima Brock

Context: Brock is a well-known feminist theologian, and these words come from a sermon in a book entitled And Blessed is She: Sermons by Women.

An ordinary woman [once] lived in a small town near Modesto, California. She was not famous, powerful or influential…I was told this true story about her. She was the kind of person we’d call a good neighbor. She was friendly, liked by her neighbors, and was good to her family. When the United States entered the Second World War, she supported our government – until California Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren signed an order requiring all US citizens of Japanese ancestry to be interned in relocation camps.

Many of this woman’s neighbors were Japanese Americans. She knew them and loved as her friends. She went to Sacramento and lobbied the legislators. She wrote the president to try and stop the camps and the government confiscation of Japanese property. She could not move the powerful and famous. She was a lone nobody….The (denomination) Disciples of Christ was the only official church body to protest the order to intern Japanese American citizens. So this lone woman…bought all the Japanese farms and homes in her town for a dollar each and watched her friends be taken away. When the camps were closed, when the Japanese who survived had no homes left, when their lands were stolen by our government, this woman’s neighbors were lucky. She gave her friends back their homes and land so they might live.

This past month or so we’ve seen a contentious debate about the nature of patriotism and how it should be manifested, how we should show loyalty to our country, and whether one should kneel or not kneel during the national anthem. I do think that the President has effectively distracted us from the reason why some NFL players have chosen to kneel during the national anthem, which was to protest racial injustice, to bring attention to the police disparity that often happens when some police officers interact with people of color. As I’ve shared with some of you, I had an early experience of that reality in the small town I lived in Texas for my first three years of high school, where an African-American man was stopped, jail for drinking while driving, and hours later he was found dead in prison cell, beaten to death by the police officers who had arrested him. They tried to cover their crime by washing his clothes to get the blood off, and then putting those wet clothes back on him, before they called the only doctor in town. Dr. Winslow clearly saw through this ruse, and contacted people above the local police office, probably the Texas Rangers, and the two officers were eventually arrested. Their punishment for killing a human being: 5 years in jail, and I think they got to keep their pensions. Of course, of course, this kind of behavior is not done by all police officers, it is not even the majority of them that do this kind of thing, but it is a reality for many people of color, and other minorities, including the one I am a part of: amongst my gay college friends in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we would have thought twice about calling the cops for anything, since they would be just as likely to harass us and make trouble for us as the homophobe who was harassing us, and who we were trying to escape from. Now, of course, this is not all officers, and not even the majority, but it is a problem, something we’ve seen more clearly now because of cell phone camera videos, and police body cameras. There a lot of good cops and a lot of good pastors and a lot of good teachers, but there are always some that will sully their profession by their actions, and because police officers have the power of life and death over people, this issue has become of incredible importance to our country and especially to people of color. Some have even argued that to question what our government does, or what the police do, or what the military does, or what our current President does, is an act of disloyalty, an almost treasonous act, on our part.

But underneath that issue of the NFL protests is how sometimes the people who protect us can in fact harm us, is the issue of what kind of respect, what kind of loyalty to do we owe the government of whom they are an instrument, a powerful instrument. I think the story we heard about from Rita Nakismima Brock, the feminist theologian, about the woman who was loyal to her government, until that government began to do the wrong thing, in this case, rounding up loyal Japanese citizens, confiscating their property, and putting them into camps. We did not do that to the many people of German descendants, or Italian descendants in the US, whose countries we were at war with, but only the Japanese. The woman in her story saw the injustice of such a thing, and did everything possible to stop it – and when she couldn’t stop this madness, she bought the property from her Japanese neighbors for $1 and sold it right back to them for the same price after the war. She loved her country, but sometimes countries, nations, they can do the wrong thing, and God knows we Americans are not immune to that reality. In the end, her ultimate loyalty was not to her nation, but to justice, to doing the right thing, when her own nation was doing the wrong thing. As Christians, as people who follow after the way of the Christ, what do we ultimately owe to our country, and to the instruments of that country, like the military, the police, the apparatus of the state, and what do we owe to God? That question has vexed and troubled Christians for 2000 years, almost from the beginning, as Rome began to persecute Christians in some places for acts that were seen as disloyal to the state, acts as such not worshipping the Emperor alongside God.

I don’t know if we ever quite worked out the balance that is needed, the balance between being a Christian and being an American, between being citizens of the kingdom of God, and being citizens of Rome or America, or wherever. The point is that there are times when these dual loyalties stretch us, when our citizenships in both worlds clash with each other, despite our loyalties to both kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the country which claims our heart-felt loyalty. But the tension between being Christian and being American, or whatever citizenship we claim, that too has been often unquestioned and unexplored, except in rare circumstances in this country. There were Christians who were pacifists for faith reasons, whose faith in Christ led them to eschew participation in the first and second world wars, and whose patriotism was questioned by others in this country—but that pacifism was a fairly rare phenomenon, and thus it was never the kind of issue that pushed us to test the limits of this dual citizenship. Most of the time we never thought twice about it, about where the distinction between being a Christian and being American lies—and some have so conflated the two that to be an American is to be Christian, and sometimes vice versa. To love America is to become Christian, maybe Jewish, but nothing else, no other religion is truly an American religion, other than those two faiths, in the eyes of some misguided American Christians. Yet, the reality is that there is a distinction, that we are both of these things, American and Christian, Christian and American, and we ought to think about what that means, and we ought to think about where our ultimate loyalties lay, even as we embraced that dual citizenship, that citizenship in two different kingdoms.

Jesus himself had to deal with this question in the text we just heard a few minutes ago, when forces around him were trying to trap him into declaring where his ultimate loyalties lay. Will Jesus declare, with the Herodians, followers of the puppet king of the Romans, Herod, that the right thing to do is to pay the 1 denarii tax to a pagan emperor, whose face is on the coin, as you can see on the cover of your bulletin today, an act which will condemn Jesus to the super patriot Jews around him who would say that such an act was treasonous, including a few of which were likely his disciples? Or will he side with the Pharisees, whose loyalty to God above all else was well known, will he tell his questioners not to pay the one denarii tax required of all Roman subjects, getting him in trouble with the Romans, who would have understand such a position as tantamount to treason? It’s a really clever little trap that his enemies have laid for him—and it’s even cleverer if one keeps in mind some of the back story around this particular question. You see, in the year 6-7 of the Common Era, a few years after Jesus’ birth, there was another man who many Jews believed to be the Messiah, a man by the name of Judas (Acts 5:37) who pushed for the worship of God alone, and who argued that it was wrong for Jews to pay the 1 denarii tax to the Romans. Unsurprisingly, he was eliminated, taken out, and so you can now understand the dilemma here for Jesus—will he align himself with those who admired the Judas of 25 years earlier? Or will he take the safer road by telling them to pay the tax, and thus keep the Romans happy and off his neck, but then in doing so alienating even some of his own disciples, who likely numbered themselves among those religious and national zealots of first century Palestine?

In fact, what Jesus gives them in his response is, frankly, not much, actually, despite the cleverness of the answer. We know what he says: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” and it is brilliant answer to a beguiling dilemma, but the issue is never really quite settled, because we’re never told what part of our actual lived lives belong to the emperor and what part of our life belongs to God. Sure, it threads the needle, and keeps him out of hot water, at least for a while, but it also confounds us, we who hear these words thousands of years later, and we don’t quite know what he wants from those who follow him. Clearly, Jesus is not trying to divide up our lives between the sacred and profane, the religious and political, the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world, because he most certainly took stands that would have embroiled him trouble in both arenas, in both kingdoms. We aren’t given an easy and clear answer about what parts of our lives belong to those dual citizenships that we inhabit—and that is where actual discernment process comes in, where we have to figure out for ourselves what actually belongs to Caesar, and what ultimately, always belongs to God.

But there may be a clue to Jesus’ intentions in his use of that particular coin, one that was meant to trap him, the one with Caesar’s face on it, which is the on the front of your bulletin. When Jesus puts forth his mysterious solution to the issue, he’s simply saying that they can pay the emperor with this coin, because his name and his face appear on it and thus the state, the Empire and Emperor has a just claim on the coin. But what about giving to God the things that are God’s? What is God’s, what bears God’s imprint, and thus is claimed by God? Think about this for a second, think about the story of God’s creation of humankind, of God saying that we are created in God’s own image, that we bear the image, the very likeness of God in our very being, much like this denarii bears the image of Caesar, of the emperor. And, if following Jesus’ logic here, that the imprint on something denotes the ownership of it, if we bear the image of God, then we belong to God, all of us, every fiber of our being belongs to God, and we are what is owed to God, our whole lives, our whole selves. The Emperor can have his denarii, his coins, his money, and there is wisdom there, there is room for loyalty to our country, whatever country it is, but Jesus here is making a larger point that ultimately we ourselves, we who bear the image of the living God, the creator of the universe, we belong to something even greater than our country, our nation, even one we love deeply. In that vein, I’m reminded that we often forget how young our country is, how truly new to this planet it really is—two hundred and something years, but the church, in all of his many forms, has been around for 2000 years, and the people of Israel, for even longer than that. That doesn’t dismiss America, my country, for many of us, our country, or any patriotic loyalty, but it just puts things into perspective—that all countries begin and end, but the realm of God, what God was and is still doing in this world, the kingdom of God, it was here before the founding of this country, and it will be here after this country becomes a memory and discussed in history books by people and nations that do not yet exist. We are simply asked by God, and Jesus, I think, in this passage, to keep things in perspective, and to remember to whom we ultimately belong.

A few weeks ago, a saint in my former congregation in Michigan passed away, a lovely and kind woman by the name of Joyce. Her family asked me to share some remembrances to be read at the funeral, and so I wrote the following:

I don’t know if it is a good thing but often we pastors locate members of our congregation by where they sit every Sunday. We humans are creatures of habit, and Joyce was like most of us, and so while I was in Coloma, she sat to my left, a few pews from the front, underneath one of those beautiful clear windows that lets the light pour into that sanctuary on Sunday mornings. Of course, I had plenty of interactions with her elsewhere, including at her home, but in my mind, there she is even now, worshipping God with the rest of the good pilgrims of that place. She always looked her best for Sunday morning worship, ready to take in the music and the sermon and the prayers and immerse herself in wonder of worship.

Bryan shared with me that she appreciated my time in Coloma because she learned so much from me, which is humbling and surprising for me and other pastors, who often wonder if we’ve made any sort of impact in the world. But I have to say that I learned as much from Joyce as she perhaps she learned from me, and it was in that pew she homesteaded every Sunday that I learned one of the great lessons she taught me. We all know of Joyce’s deep patriotism, her love of this country and its best values, but what moved her the most was the sacrifice that so many young men and women paid for the sake of our freedom. She once told me a story from her childhood, when she would listen to the radio for news of the war, and it would cause her such grief, thinking of those young men dying in some far flung place without their families and loved ones. When we honored veterans and those died in defense of our country at the church, she would begin to softly cry in the pews, showing us that deep compassion she found for boys she never knew and we would never know, boys dying half way across the world alone and afraid, that compassion having never left her even then, decades and decades later.

Now, alongside the image of her in the pew every Sunday, I have another one of Joyce as well, listening to the radio as a child, imagining our American boys lost to the ravages and inhumanity of war, and the compassion that she practiced for veterans, and that compassion she had for all of us who knew her. Those tears she gently shed in that pew will never leave me, and she taught me so much about what real compassion can be, of how the heart can still break over and over again, even for strangers, and how we all still need that compassion for each other now, that capacity to care for each other, especially in these difficult days. She showed us God’s breaking heart on those Sunday mornings when the tears came from her for those she did not even know, but who she loved nonetheless. Thank you, Joyce, for teaching me more about compassion, and know you will be missed by Douglas and I, and you will be missed by all who know you, but we shall see you soon enough and that will surely be glad day for us.

Joyce taught me compassion, especially for the stranger, for those lost to war, and that is one of things I loved about her deep patriotism – her tears were not ones shed in blind allegiance to a country or a flag, but shed for those who died in war after war after war, in defense of this country and its ideals. It was not the easy and uncomplicated “blood and soil” kind of patriotism, but one born of understanding that doing the right thing, in defense of freedom, might cause you to lose something, it might cost us something. Granted, we Americans have not always been on the right side of history in all of our wars – think of the slaughter of Native Americans in this country - nor have police officers always done the right thing, nor have pastors always done the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing is speaking up, and breaking the infamous blue wall found in police departments, or going against our country’s unjust treatment of its own citizens, as did that California woman did during World War 2, and trying to create justice for our neighbors. It’s moments like that remind us that in end our ultimate loyalty is to the One whose image we bear, that image, that likeness that bear so imperfectly, but whose presence in us remains nonetheless. Love of country is a good thing, but the love of God is an even better thing.

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.  Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

THE MODERN LESSON Richard R. Blumenthal

In the context of religious life after the shoah [Holocaust], I wrote a terrifying book called Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. I began with a theological prolegomenon on how to think about God. I, then, moved to textual study and, then, to dialogue with a survivor and a theologian. Then came the time to draw conclusions: Is God, or is God not, abusive? I admit to having fallen physically ill before writing that section; I just didn’t want to say what the evidence told me to say. But I wrote it anyway (“Being honest entails holding God accountable”). Then came the question, Now what? How does one pray after saying that God can be abusive? I called up the tradition of protest, beginning with Abraham and Job, and continuing through the Jewish poetry of the Crusades and coming right up to Elie Wiesel. And I decided that it was okay to accuse God…

Everyone missed the chapter entitled, “Seriatim, or Sailing Into the Wind.” In that chapter I pointed out that that one cannot sail into the wind. Thus, if one wants to get from point A to point B and the latter is the place from which the wind is coming, one must “tack”; that is, one sails to the right and then to the left, repeating the process as often as necessary, until one gets to one’s goal. Furthermore, if one stays on one “tack” too long, it gets harder and harder to return to one’s course and get to one’s goal. I, then, suggested that many processes in life are like that. All human negotiations proceed by repeatedly moving right and then left until one reaches an agreement and, if one remains too long on one issue, one can never resolve the matter at hand. So it is with prayer, I argued: One must be angry with God and express one’s anger, honestly as Frank says, but one cannot be angry with God for too long or one will get lost in the anger. Rather, one must consciously “tack” in the direction of loving God, but, again, one cannot be loving with God for too long or one will lose the power and honesty of justice.

When I wrote the book, I overstepped some of the traditional boundaries. Still, I think survivors of all kinds of abuse would do well to follow this advice: Be genuinely angry even if it makes you nervous; then, be loving even if it makes you feel compromised; and keep alternating; it is the only way to sail into the wind of that true relatedness to God that we call prayer.

This past week is the last for a little known but important organization call the Sunshine Activities Center, down on Montrose Ave. The Center worked with mentally challenged adults by providing them a space to learn and interact with others, and perhaps, also provide a chance for their caregiving families to have a break during the day. Linda Williamson, along with others, began this wonderful organization some decades ago, but because of the state of Illinois not paying them during the recent budget standoff, and new rules that made it impossible for them to continue, they had to shut down the Center. Linda invited the church to see if there was anything we wanted to purchase at rock-bottom prices, and we did so last week, acquiring some much needed almost new chairs for the Fellowship Hall. I was back at Center this week after Linda offered some free learning materials that might be useful to our children’s Sunday School, and while I was there I met some of her current and former staff members. After finding out I was a pastor, one of her former employees, who has also had a child who went to the Center years earlier, she said to me, in a gracious way, “If I get to heaven, I’m going to have a lot of questions for him!” I replied that all of us will be full of questions, but I think she was referring to the injustice of this moment, of what was happening to the Sunshine Center and the people who created it, of having spent a lifetime in service to others, and yet coming out of it poorer than when you began. And she was right – the rich seem to get richer, the poorer get poorer and goodness and compassion so often do not get rewarded. It reminded of a time a few years ago when I was encouraging my sister Allison to find a new job, perhaps in Mississippi state government, and I was looking over their job opportunities, and there was listing after listing for social workers to work with abused children, jobs that required a master’s degree, for which the starting pay was $24,000 a year. Frankly, that said to me that we Mississippians don’t give a damn about protecting our children. And that gentle but frank questioning of God by that lovely woman I met this past week, it’s something most of us would do, if given the chance, to ask God why someone like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, is a multi-millionaire, while those who change people’s lives for the better end up with no financial security, nothing but the good work they once did, which is, of course, not nothing, and valuable – but which doesn’t quite pay the rent in retirement.

Now, this may sound like an odd way to begin a sermon on the sovereignty of God, which is the last of the Reformation principles touted by reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, though, in this case, it was John Calvin who emphasized this particular doctrine. What he and others said was simply this: God is in control, and God is all powerful, all-knowing, and nothing, absolutely nothing can stop God from doing what God wants to do, can stop God’s will from becoming reality, if God so chooses. Often those who argue for this doctrine will point to the book of Isaiah, the 46th chapter, where God is believed to have said “My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.” Now, for many of us this may not sound like an all - that - radical of a doctrine, but set against the time that Luther and Calvin lived in, the reformers felt it was necessary to assert that God was, indeed, in charge of God. Perhaps the main reason for this need to say this idea aloud, and to say it loudly was that there was a sense that we Christians had gotten ourselves into a pickle with some of the ways we thought we could manage God – say these kinds of prayers, give this much money, obey these commandments, and God will forgive you or bless you or reward you. If you do this, God will do that – again, the idea of the transactional God I mentioned in an earlier sermon, that God who makes a deal with us human beings, as if we could control God’s responses by our actions – pray this prayer 10 times, do these acts of devotion, and God will surely forgive you. It was as if we humans could manage God by our actions, our doings, our prayers – and the Reformers found this repugnant, this idea that this relationship between God and humans was simply another deal we human were making, another transaction like the ones made in those medieval food and mercantile markets found throughout Europe.

And so, in order to challenge this idea of the transactional God, the God we can control by our actions, Calvin wanted to make sure that we humans did not think that God’s goodness, God’s salvation, God’s wholeness, was something we deserved, or was something we were rewarded for because of our good behavior, or even, frankly, was something we were given because we chose God, we chose Christ. No, they said, it was God who chose us. And thus there was no divine/human transactions for brother Calvin, no pretensions that we can control God by what we do, what we say, for everything was always in God’s hands, and always God’s choice. The good news for some is that it made us aware that, in fact, it was always an “amazing grace,” undeserved by us, but nonetheless given to us, as a free gift from God. God does this work of salvation and not us – and nothing we can do or not do will compel God to give it to us – we can do nothing or say something that will make us deserving of grace. God will decide who is saved and who is not, an idea that is rooted in the idea that God is ultimately in control and not us. But the shadow side of that doctrine, the doctrine of God’s sovereignty was the idea that God also destined some to hell or annihilation, however we understand the absence of salvation, that God destined some to the opposite of salvation, abandoned some to hell, so to speak. Not many people nowadays endorse this idea, what was once called Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, for obvious reasons, since the cruelty of God would be enormous in such a case. In an attempt to wrestle the burden of our salvation from our own hands, some have said Calvin boxed himself into a corner, since logic necessitates that if God chooses some, God must necessarily choose against others. Most of us are not interested in this shadow version of Calvin’s God, the one who chooses some to exclude, for no reason as well.

Now, for Christians like myself, we’ve taken the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in a different direction, believing as we do that if God wishes all to be made whole, God can make it so, whatever our choices on this side of the veil. We can’t get in the way of God doing what God wants, and there is every indication that God wants wholeness for all the world God created, and thus, in my mind, that will happen, to world and humans alike, despite all our best human efforts to get in God’s way. God wins, and not because God convinced us to do better, be better, chose better, or even accept the ways of this Jesus of Nazareth – but because God can and will complete the love and work began by the Christ. For some, this violates human freedom, the right and ability for us humans to damn ourselves through the exercising of our freedom, but I must say that I don’t deny human freedom – I simply deny that it can, in the end, thwart what God ultimately wants in this world, which is wholeness, which is love, which is salvation. As much as Calvin got it partially wrong in his doctrine of God’s sovereignty, the part where he focused on God choosing some, but not others, Calvin got one part of it really right, in my humble opinion – the need for us to realize that grace, grace being often defined as unmerited favor, is something we do not deserve, that grace is really the heart of the Christian Gospel, and that we are loved by God not because we are good enough, kind enough, righteous enough, but simply because God has chosen to love us, for no reason at all.

Now, in our Scripture today, we have the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes sharing some thoughtful, if not fatalistic and cynical words with his ancient listeners, but with us as well. The writer seems to wholeheartedly endorse the idea of the sovereignty of God, though in a roundabout way, when he says that whatever we do, we all end up with the same fate, death in this case, a place in Sheol, the place of the dead, echoes of the Egyptian place of the dead, of which the Israelites knew of because of their time in Egypt. This was before late Judaism and early Christianity embraced the idea of a heaven, and a place of eternal punishment, but the point for the writer of Ecclesiastes is that, in the end, we all receive the same fate, and that God controls that fate, whatever we may do on this side of the veil. Obviously, Jewish thought and belief extolled the need for being a good person and a follower of the Jewish Law, but for this early Jewish thinker, God will do what God does, whatever our actions, good or bad. There is a fatalism here that makes some of us uncomfortable, as did Calvin’s idea that some were predestined for heaven, no matter their worthiness, no matter what they did or did not do. Still, there is wonderful advice here to work hard, enjoy good wine, and a good marriage, to simply enjoy life, despite not having much control over what will ultimately happen to us in our lives. And in this final set of lines you can see this ancient writer acknowledging that God will do what God will do, and sometimes it is seemingly not very fair what God does: Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them. You can do everything right, and do if for the sake of the least of these, and yet still end up with nothing – it is almost as if this text is echoing that woman at the Sunshine Activity Center, and that hard truth is echoed in this text, in the words we just heard.

And that is the rub, isn’t it, for those of us believe that God can do what God wants to do, that God is in control, or at least has the power to be in control, if God so chooses to do so. The shadow side of believing that God is sovereign, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, is that we are forced with trying to make peace with the moments when God doesn’t step in and do the right thing, or at least what seems the right thing. In the Modern Lesson you heard today, Richard Blumenthal, a professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University, one of my alma maters, wrote a book that changed my life and my understanding of God, especially when it comes to the sovereignty of God. In this book entitled Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, Blumenthal argues that the Jewish people have been abused by God, and that within the Hebrew Bible, which is our Old Testament, there are multitude of passages that accuse God of not being fair to the Israelites, texts that protest against God’s lack of action, or even God’s absence during times of personal and community disaster. Probably a third of the Psalms found in our Bible are written in anger and disappointment at God’s actions or lack of action in the life of the psalmist – and the wonder if it all is that no one at that time seemed to think that accusing God of not doing the right thing was something that shouldn’t ever be expressed. If God is in control, if God is sovereign, the logic seemed to be, well, then they could protest God’s decisions, and hold God accountable for not being faithful to the people of Israel. And no one seemed to want to edit those psalms of protest and disappointment out of the Bible, because just because God was God, and we were not, that doesn’t mean we humans don’t have right to protest God’s actions, or lack of action, at certain moments in time and history. And never was it understood that by protesting, by holding God accountable, a person was somehow severing their relationship with the Divine, or walking away from the relationship. Sometimes God in the Bible would reply defensively, as God does in the book of Job, and other times, God was simply silent, as if by the silence somehow acknowledging the injustice allowed by God’s lack of action. Like Jacob, one must sometimes wrestle with God deep into the night, and often still receive no answer, no satisfaction at dawn, limping away wounded, but faithful, wounded but present for the relationship with God. Anger expressed in prayer at the injustice in our lives and in the world is still a faithful and good prayer.

In Blumenthal’s Modern Lesson, he shares his thoughts about prayer and our relationship with God, even as we sometimes must protest God’s absence, or lack of action. The way to find ourselves back to God, after moments when our lives are upturned by some injustice, some hurt not of our own devising, was to be a spiritual sailor when we are sailing into a strong head wind, zigzagging our way to God, angry one moment, loving the next, and repeating the cycle until we find ourselves back home, to the God who is, the God not of our making, but the God who will do what God will do, no matter how much I plead, no matter how much I try to manage God with prayer or good deeds or even protest. We don’t owe faithfulness to God without the truth, and sometimes truth is found in moments when we’ve and others have done the right thing, and what we’ve received in return is tears and ashes, and we simply need to say that such a reality is just not right. I think of the Sunshine Activity Center, I think of Mississippi children, I think of a 12-year old child I pastored who died too soon, I think of a million different moments when I hoped and wanted God to step in and God chose not to do anything. I don’t think God intentionally causes pain, cancer, death, hurt – but I do think that God could intervene in the natural processes that govern this world, and most of the times God simply does not. But our holding God accountable is an act of faithfulness to God, an act of saying “this ain’t right,” because we remain in relationship with the God who is God, who is the One who can do what God chooses to do. This God is much like the God who can choose to welcome all, despite all the grossness and meanness we humans have wrought upon each other and the earth. God is God and I am not, but that doesn’t mean being in relationship with God doesn’t have its challenging moments, moments when we have tack our way back to God, zigzagging between love and rage, acknowledging the sovereignty of God, but making sure that the Divine hears our pleas of protest and anger at the injustices of this world, injustices that God could have done something about and did not. Of course, before we get too self-righteous about God’s lack of action, we need to acknowledge how we too have stood on the sideline as acts of injustice have simply passed us by, even in simple ways, such as letting places like the Sunshine Center close, while the stock market explodes with growth, and the rich just get richer, and the poor become poorer. God is God and we are not, and we have to make our peace with that reality, if we can, knowing that loving someone doesn’t mean you don’t hold them any less responsible and accountable. It’s complicated, isn’t it, this relationship with the living God, this sovereign, all powerful God, but like all relationships, human and otherwise, that doesn’t mean they are any less worthy of our time, our attention, our care. So, I say this: choose a relationship with this beguiling and mysterious and loving and sometimes maddening God, and I say choose whatever way gets you home, tacking left, tacking right, saying yes, saying no, being angry, being loving, but, in the end, choose a path home towards a God who, among the many choices She has made, has still chosen you, and me, and the rest of this beautiful world. Amen.

Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, and my suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

THE MODERN LESSON Howard Thurman

Two or three times a week I read the Bible aloud to her. I was deeply impressed by the fact that she was most particular about the choice of Scripture. For instance, I might read many of the more devotional Psalms, some of Isaiah, the Gospels again, and again; but the Pauline epistles, never—except, at long intervals, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians…With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters. What she told me I shall never forget. “During the days of slavery,” she said, “the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to them that are your master….as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible”
Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation 62

We continue today on this World Communion Sunday with an unlikely look at another great Reformation principle, Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone, this profound re-centering that happened 500 years ago back onto the ancient texts that had been church’s bedrock, almost from the beginning. That re-centering was away from church tradition or those tasked with interpreting church tradition, away from those who decided for the rest of the church what the will of God was for the people of God. Scripture was not available to the masses for three reasons: first, generally members of the church were quite literally forbidden to read the text itself without the guidance of a priest or direction from the hierarchy about what the text meant. Secondly, the text itself was only in the Latin Vulgate, a language that few lay people could understand apart from the priests and the doctors of the church. And third, until around the time of Luther’s life, Scripture was hand copied, so there were few actual Bibles to read anyway since it took great time and manpower to produce a copy. But a few years after Luther posted his 95 theses against the practice of indulgences, he published a German translation of the Bible for the masses, which opened a new world to many German Christians, a world in which they had a chance to read for themselves the stories that some had rarely heard, or had just seen depicted in the stain glass of churches, which were themselves a way of sharing the biblical story visually to the largely illiterate masses.

Now, we Protestants, it was thought, now we can go back to the source material, go back to the stories and the teachings of Jesus himself, rather than having someone tell us what those teachings were, and how they should be understood. This was no minor shift, no minor re-centering, and it allowed the people of the church access to the texts that had formed them, formed them unaware, perhaps, but formed them nonetheless. But with more access to the Scriptures comes something else, something else that shouldn’t surprise any of us, and that was the emergence of different interpretations of the same text. Just because people could read the text for themselves, just because they could read Jesus’ words for themselves, or the stories of the Jewish Bible for themselves, it didn’t mean that people could AGREE on what those texts mean. Unlike the Jewish tradition, in which multiple and varied and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the texts were welcomed and embraced, we in the Christian churches had been told for hundreds and hundreds of years that there was only correct interpretation of the text, the one promulgated by the official church. We Christians had no tradition of being able to handle differences when it came to interpretations, no way of being to be comfortable with a multitude of contradictory voices argueing that their understanding of this or that Scriptural text was the right and correct one. And hence, not surprisingly, Protestantism begins to do its own splitting apart internally, and today we have so many different kinds of Protestants that its actually, quite literally, hard to count them all.

But something else also happened, something perhaps deeply unexpected. Some have noted that we Protestants ended up switching from one Pope to another, one central authority to another central authority, re-centering ourselves away back from Rome to the Christian and Jewish Scriptures, as the decider of what was it meant to be a Christian, a follower of this Jesus of Nazareth. Instead of the Pope or representatives of the Western Church deciding for us what correct doctrine or ideas were, we simply substituted another authority to decide for us what were the right and wrong ways of being a Christian, the new authority being the Scriptures themselves. And that instinct seems to make sense, except, of course, for the fact people of good will can simply disagree with each other on what Jesus meant when he is said to have uttered some particular words, or what an Apostle meant by his wording on this or that matter. Despite our Protestant desire to finalize authority in the Scriptures, we ended up diffusing authority, spreading it around, and causing, at least for some, a confusing cacophony of voices claiming to have the right interpretation of a particular text or doctrine. Is that a good thing? Well, for those of us who are comfortable with differences, of all sorts, it is, because it honors a reality that we’ve all experienced – you get five people interpreting a text or an event, and you’ll get 7 different opinions about what those words, or what that event means. But for those who desire just one final reading, one final interpretation of a text, or a story, its deeply uncomfortable, and often from them you see an eventual embrace of some sort of fundamentalism, some sort of absolutism that attempts to dictate to others the correct interpretation of ideas, doctrines, and stories.

Still, I think that turn towards Scripture in the Protestant Reformation was a good thing, despite the tendency of those who simply switched from the Pope in Rome to the Pope of Scripture. For those of us in the liberal Protestant tradition, we continue to embrace this idea of “Scripture alone,” but I would argue that we’ve done it in a way that avoids the absolutism that infects those enamored by a final and absolute reading of a text. We took the Reformation challenge of re-centering the church back towards its ancient voices, especially back to the testimony of who Jesus was and is, and we practiced it in a way that brought integrity to the process. Unlike some who think that Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone means that Scripture is the final arbiter of how we live our lives as disciples of Christ, we liberal Christians generally understand Scripture as the beginning point of that journey, of that attempt to figure out what it might mean to actual live out Christ’s words about love and grace and forgiveness. But just because we begin our journey in Scripture it does not mean we always end with the Scriptures, which in practice is the way the Scriptures have always been practically understood for two thousand years. For example, you heard that story a few minutes ago by the great Howard Thurman about how his mother, who was once a slave, refused to listen to the texts in the Bible that support chattel slavery, the buying and selling of other human beings, texts found in both the Old and New Testaments. When the Christians in this country argued with each other about the rightness and the wrongness of human slavery before the Civil War, the side with the more biblical argument, the one that could seemingly claim clarity on the issue in Scripture was the pro-slavery South. The evangelical historian Mark Knoll explains it this way in his book – The Civil War as Theological Crisis: The power of the proslavery scriptural position…lay in its simplicity. [Thomas] Thompson defense could not have been more direct. In effect: open the Bible, read it, believe it. After conceding that in ancient times God had set strict limits to Hebrew enslavement of other Hebrews, he then quoted Leviticus 25:45-46a: “Moreover the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall you buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance…” Then after acknowledging New Testament injunctions to piety, charity and respect for others, Thompson turned to the book of Philemon, the brief letter of St. Paul in which the apostle instructed an escaped slave, Onesimus, to return to his master. Thompson’s message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in “strangers,” how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil. (33)

Now, clearly the church has ended up believing that human slavery was never actually God’s will, despite what is written in our Scriptures – instead, most of us, if we are honest with the text, realize that human beings, in an effort to justify their enslavement of other human beings, tried to have God justify it for them by putting approval of this evil practice into our sacred texts. This is one of those cases where we liberal Protestants, along with other Christians, begin with Scripture, we look at what the text itself says about something, but thankfully we don’t end there, we don’t just stay there, we simply can’t stay there, because slavery is simply not God’s will. In fact, there are other Scriptural texts that clearly show us a God who is interested in freedom, a God who frees the people of Israel from their slavery, their bondage in Egypt. And common human decency, which is another way God still speaks to us in this world, shows us that the practice of chattel slavery is not God’s will. We begin with Scriptures, we remain faithful to the Reformation principle of “Scripture alone,” but beginnings are not endings, and so we don’t always end up there, at the beginning – and if we always did, we would find ourselves justifying all sorts of behaviosr that are simply wrong.

Despite the great harm that sometimes comes when we Protestants do what some have accused us of doing, of simply substituting one pope for another pope, of substituting one final authority, the Pope or church, for another final authority, the Holy Scriptures, despite the harm that comes from that sleight of hand, eventually, eventually we the church come around to our senses, we come to see that God is not done with humanity yet, that God has not finished speaking, despite the unwillingness of some believers to hear God through sources other than the Scriptures or the Church itself. That’s why it’s so important to keep an open mind to the change that God is still fomenting in the world, that God might be doing a new thing even now, both within the church, but also in the larger world. I’ve often said that sometimes God has to go around the church in order to reach the church, that God has to use whatever means necessarily in the larger world to get the church to see what God sees, and to do what God wants the church to do.

Paul, in his letter to his young disciple Timothy, writes this: All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. And you know what, I think he’s right, though, to be clear, the Scripture he speaks of here is not his own writings, which would later be understood as sacred themselves, but the Tanak, the Jewish Scriptures that molded and shaped him, the ones he hopes will do the same for his disciple Timothy and the nascent church. But Paul is also right in an unexpected way, unexpected, of course, being the way that God often works in this world. When we readers go to our holy texts, we go to seek what our ancient forbearers wrote and said about some topic, some idea, or we go to see what Jesus said and did about such matters. Often we are uplifted, challenged, moved, convicted, but there are also times when we Christians have had to set ourselves against those ancient voices, those ancient words, and so we in the church have come to reject Paul’s understanding of human slavery, a view he held that was common and unremarkable for its time, we have had to reject his words just as Howard Thurman’s mother did in the story we heard earlier today. That rejection of certain parts of Scripture, the parts that seem to endorse human genocide in God’s name, the parts that seem to denigrate and dismiss women, even that act of saying “no” to these texts is a result of that very same Scripture continuing to inspire, continuing to reprove us, correction us, and continuing to train in righteousness – even in our saying “no” to certain parts Scripture, even then that very same scripture continues to shape us- it helps us clarify what God really does want of us and of justice. Positive change can happen when we Christians do as the Reformers ask us to do, which is to go to those ancient voices and listen for the voice of God in them. Sometimes, though, the voice of God isn’t found in the words themselves, in the text themselves, but is discovered in us wrestling with particular texts that may not be God’s words, or God’s will in the first place. Even in moments when we stand against Scripture, it too teaches, trains us, reproves, shapes us, so that we can be followers of the Way that Jesus calls us into, the way of love and justice. Begin at the beginning, the Reformers says, and so we shall, but where we end up, well, that may be an altogether surprising thing, and a reminder that God is still doing a thing in this world, even now, changing the world even now, and maybe, if we allow ourselves to be, maybe changing us as well. Amen.