People didn’t know what to think about Jesus or John the Baptist. How do we recognize those who tell us the truth?
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30).
As Jesus himself observed, people didn’t know what to do or what to think about him and about his predecessor, John the Baptist. Jesus compared it to children in a village square singing, “We played the pipes for you and you would not dance. We wailed for you and you would not mourn.” Because John the Baptist, well, he was an ascetic and they said he had a demon. Jesus came along and he met with people. He ate and drank with them. And they said that he was a glutton and a drunkard and the friend of sinners.
What is one to do? How is one to meet expectations which are never quite defined, but mostly seem to come down to if you’re not behaving just like me, then you can’t possibly be somebody with a legitimate message from God. Isn’t that the case today? For this person and for that person, if the message doesn’t sound like something that they might say, well then it probably isn’t from God, now, is it?
I’m pretty sure that’s the case from me. I suspect it’s probably the case for you as well.
In a prayer, just a little further down the chapter, Jesus actually thanked God for the revelation coming to those not who were powerful or educated, those that you would expect to recognize the incarnation of God. Instead, the truth had been revealed to people like Simon Peter or James and John, day workers, fishermen, people who had not spent a lot of time learning and studying people who probably could not read at all.
The message of the good news in the end comes not to those who have prepared for it necessarily, but to those who are willing to embrace it. The message of the gospel comes to those who are willing to listen for truth and to accept it into their spirits when they do. The blessings of the gospel come not to those who have set themselves out as the arbiters of truth, but to those who can recognize it when it comes.
May that be said of you and of me.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Ah, Jeremiah. My favorite prophet. No, really. He is. Despite the fact that, as a college student, I had to take a break after reading the book of Jeremiah because it was so depressing (I told you that story last week), I took a course on this book during seminary that has stayed with me for over thirty-five years now.
In that course I learned about the prophet who might have been called “Magor missabib” in Hebrew, something like “terror on every side” in English. It was a pretty good description of Jeremiah’s message. The nation had failed to meet God’s expectations, Jeremiah said. They had erected shrines to other deities and worshiped them, and they had failed to protect the widows and the orphans, the most vulnerable of the population. Jeremiah had warned that this risked the end of God’s protection for the nation, which was a very small one between the two great empires of Egypt to the south and the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, to the north.
Jeremiah’s warning had come true. Judah’s King Jehoiakim had submitted to the Babylonians as a vassal, but he attempted to break that yoke when the Egyptians won a battle against them in 601. Jehoiakim’s rebellion resulted in a siege of the city and their surrender, during which Jehoiakim died. His son Jeconiah ascended to the throne, but the Babylonians replaced him with his uncle Zedekiah.
The nation had surrendered to the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar II. The king, many civic leaders, and many religious leaders had been removed to Babylon (Ezekiel was one of them). The new King Zedekiah was the choice of the Babylonians.
Into that, Jeremiah appeared wearing a yoke, symbolizing and saying in so many words that Babylon would continue to control Judah for some time as a result of their unfaithfulness. Other prophets, notably one named Hananiah son of Azur, disagreed. In contrast to Jeremiah, Hananiah promised that God would restore King Jeconiah and the other exiles and even return the sacred objects looted from the Temple.
I have to say that this would be entirely consistent with a dominant theology of the day. They fully believed that God’s promise that David’s line would continue forever meant that the nation would always be preserved as well. That theology had been confirmed one hundred and fifty years before, when the northern kingdom of Israel, which was not ruled by descendants of David, had fallen to the Assyrian Empire. Judah, in contrast, ruled by a king from the house of David, had endured.
Why shouldn’t that happen again? Why shouldn’t a nation blessed by God be preserved again?
As Tyler Mayfield writes at Working Preacher, “Prophecy is deeply contextual. The content of a particular prophecy is not eternal truth for all situations. What is an authentic, appropriate, and helpful prophecy in one moment and place can be false, inappropriate, and obstructive in another setting.”
Hananiah spoke a word that promised the nation’s restoration. It was a vision that Jeremiah wanted to see. “May the LORD do so,” he said, “may the LORD fulfill the words that you have prophesied.” Who wouldn’t want their nation freed from foreign domination? Who wouldn’t want to see exiled people returned? Who wouldn’t want to see their friends restored to their homes? Who wouldn’t want to see the Temple once more filled with the objects they called sacred?
But Jeremiah didn’t hear the word of God saying that. He invoked the voices of previous prophets who had warned about disasters and conflicts arising from the nation’s unfaithfulness. Those were the prophets people remembered: prophets like Elijah and Elisha, like Hosea and Isaiah, like Micah and Nahum. They weren’t much more cheerful than Jeremiah, and some of them a lot less so.
As Charles L. Aaron, Jr., writes at Working Preacher, “One prophet, Jeremiah, tells the people the truth. The other prophet, Hananiah, tells the people what they want to hear. One appears to us as the brave preacher who endures scorn for speaking the word the Lord gave him. The other appears to us as the soothing charlatan over whom everybody fawns because he offers near-term hope.”
If you want to discern God’s voice, said Jeremiah, take a look at who tends to get things right.
What he didn’t say – what he didn’t have to say, because I’m pretty sure that he left a pretty big echoing silence – was that he, Jeremiah, had declared God’s judgment against Judah and look: they’d been invaded and surrendered to the Babylonians. He, not Hananiah, had been right.
Who should they trust for understanding God’s will in the present?
To be honest, it didn’t require the voice of God to predict Judah’s likely future in 596. They were under the thumb of the Babylonians and they were going to stay there. It didn’t need divine intervention to keep them vassals of that empire. If God did nothing at all, they would stay just as they were.
Hananiah misread the signs of the times just as much as he misread the signs of the Divine. Oh, by the way, he ended this conversation by breaking the symbolic yoke Jeremiah had been wearing, and the story ends with this sad line: “At this, the prophet Jeremiah went his way.”
I think it’s fair to say that we, in the twenty-first century after Jesus, are surrounded by people who are happy to tell us what God’s will is for us, for our church, for our communities, for our nation, and for all the nations of the earth. I also think it’s far to say that I’m one of those voices. If you’d like to know my opinion about God’s will for us, I’m right here to tell you.
So how will you know whether I’m the one who’s right, or among those who are right, or how right I or any of those preaching similar messages might be?
I’d like to say something similar to what Jeremiah did: Go look at the words of the prophets of the past. In theory, that’s a good comparison. Go look for the ones who are Mister or Ms. Bad News. The judgmental ones are right.
In our day, though, we’ve got plenty of judgmental people (and I’d have to include myself among them), but we don’t agree on what to be judgmental about.
Jeremiah found the presence of shrines to other gods in the nation of Judah profoundly troubling. Me, I don’t. It’s trite to say that some of my best friends are Buddhists, but it’s also true that some of my best friends are Buddhists. I’m quite content to let them remain Buddhists as they continue to be kind and compassionate people.
Jeremiah found the abuse of the poor by the powerful to be profoundly troubling. As do I. The gap between rich and poor was probably greater in the sixth century before Jesus than it is now, but it’s much too big now and it’s getting bigger. I am not content to see this nation and this world torn apart by systems that reward a few and impoverish many.
There are plenty of modern-day religious leaders who berate us for living in a religiously pluralistic society. They tell us we should all be Christian. They tell us to remove the Buddhists, the Jews, the Muslims (especially the Muslims), the animists, the Wiccans, the Taoists, the anybody else. Jeremiah might have been there with them. I’m not.
Plenty of these same modern-day religious leaders praise the accomplishments of wealthy individuals. They’ll tell you that wealth is the inevitable result of virtue, and therefore wealthy people are, by definition, virtuous. I think I’ve mentioned before that I think this is really poor theology. I’ll actually call it heresy. Jeremiah would have agreed.
So who’s right? How will we know?
For Christians, there’s a complicating factor. We can’t say that good prophecy comes exclusively from Mr. or Ms. Bad News because… Jesus. Jesus insisted on speaking Good News. I grant you that his good news could be hard on the wealthy, and it could be challenging for the powerful, but there it was: Good News.
I’m not doing well at telling you how to distinguish between the prophets and the charlatans, am I?
Debie Thomas has some wisdom at JourneyWithJesus.net: “As God’s messengers in the world, we are not at liberty to soften the Gospel for the sake of our own likeability. Jesus has not commissioned us to say whatever is trendy or comfortable or easy or popular. He has commissioned us to say what is true. False hope is not God’s hope. Easy peace is not God’s peace. And convenient justice is not God’s justice.”
I think I can authoritatively say that if the message benefits a few and burdens many, it’s not God’s justice. If the message promises peace without the hard work of rebuilding broken relationships, it’s not God’s peace. If the hope is entirely disconnected from the reality of today, it’s not God’s hope. If the promise is built on lie after lie after lie, it’s not God’s truth.
Hananiah broke Jeremiah’s symbolic yoke and the prophet went away. The leaders and the people of the nation had made their choice, and they continued to make their poor choices until King Zedekiah’s rebelled about ten years later, resulting in the destruction of the nation and the burning of Solomon’s Temple. Zedekiah’s rule was built on injustice. It was built on violence. It was built on fantasy. It was built on lies. It resulted in disaster, as Jeremiah had foreseen.
May we choose better. May we choose truth.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches – intentionally and otherwise – so the sermon as he wrote it is not precisely the sermon as he spoke it.
What happens when people claim to speak for God and have radically different views? Ask if they can read the signs of the times as well as the signs of God.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of the Prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 28:5-9).
Things were not good in Judah. The Babylonians had sent an army which had conquered its capital city Jerusalem. They had taken away the king, a number of the king’s advisers, senior leaders in the city, the nation, the Temple. They had looted the city, including removing at least some of the sacred appointments of the Temple itself.
Now, some prophets in the city had declared that God would keep the Babylonians away. They had been wrong. Among them was one named Hananiah who declared that within two years, God would reverse the judgment, restore the nation and even return the sacred objects to the temple.
Jeremiah, who had opposed Hananiah, said that no, no, the sins of the leaders were still working themselves out. And indeed, they would live under Babylonian domination for some time to come. “But Hananiah, may it be as you have said, may it be that this different proclamation, unlike the prophets of before, who had observed the conditions of the day and said that there were consequences for them, the consequences sometimes from God and sometimes consequences of the behavior in itself. If peace comes, then we will know that you are a prophet. And if Babylon maintains its dominion, we will know who the prophet is.”
Jeremiah, in addition to hearing from God, could read the signs of the times. Babylon was not going away. And indeed, it would be more than seventy years before the people who had been taken into exile were able to return home. And if you think about it, that’s not the people taken into exile. That’s their grandchildren and their great grandchildren.
Jeremiah could read the signs of the times and would not be swayed by words that promised what he wanted. He wanted the restoration of the nation. He wanted the Temple’s sacredness to be restored. But that was not going to happen. The nation’s leaders had taken them down terrible paths, and the nation as a whole had suffered the consequences.
Not all that many years later, the king that the Babylonians had installed tried a little rebellion of his own, resulting in the destruction of the city walls and the burning of Solomon’s Temple.
Jeremiah could read the signs of the times. May we read the signs of the times and make the changes that are necessary to restore the fortunes of the most vulnerable and the most needy in our society, and to hold accountable those who oppress and impoverish them.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
What could be better than the Bible? Yes, that title is deliberately provocative. If we’re honest with ourselves and others, however, it’s true that the Bible is an uneven work of literature. The first time I read through the Bible, I didn’t read it exactly through. Jeremiah ends with the relentlessly depressing accounts of the fall of Jerusalem and the tragic early days of Babylonian occupation, and then I read the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is even more depressing.
I had to take a break. I had to read something with a happy ending. So I read the Gospel of Matthew. Then I went back to resume my progress through the Bible with Ezekiel.
It’s also true that your tastes may favor some parts of the Bible over others. Those who like poetry may gravitate to the Psalms or the Song of Songs. History fans might prefer First and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings, or in the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles. If you want to hear about Jesus’ work as a healer, read Mark. If you want to hear some of your favorite parables, read Luke. If you want to hear Jesus say, “I am…,” head over to John.
I suppose if you’re a fan of genealogy, you’d enjoy those long family lists in Numbers, but you’d be a rare person.
A lot of people read the Bible for wisdom, guidance, and models for their own decisions and actions. The Bible is full of advice, even more advice than I’m happy to give you. Some books are dedicated to giving advice. The writers of Proverbs (it’s a collection, so there were a lot of them) and Ecclesiastes have plenty of guidance for you. And then there’s the Apostle Paul, whose willingness to tell other people what to do has informed many generations of Christians.
One of the models of faith for generations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is Abraham. He trusted God enough to move to a new place, and he believed God’s promise of descendants. We also revere his wife Sarah. She laughed at the promise, it’s true, but she also lived and fulfilled it.
Which makes this story even harder to take. Because Abraham and Sarah act horribly here.
Ishmael, Hagar’s son by Abraham, existed because Sarah insisted upon it. Believing that she would not have a child of her own, she forced her slave to have her husband’s child. As Vanessa Lovelace writes at Working Preacher, “Ishmael’s birth would also have brought Sarah esteem, since ancient Near Eastern surrogacy laws granted her the right to raise the child as her own. With the birth of Isaac, however, Ishmael’s status changed—from Sarah’s legal son and Abraham’s firstborn heir to the son of a slave woman.”
Sarah was not willing for her son to share Abraham’s inheritance with any other child, and especially not to be second in line to Hagar’s son. Commentators have tried to soften her position for centuries, but the text is clear: “the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” It was about the transmission of wealth and the family name. My son, not her son.
An understandable feeling, I suppose. But acting upon the feeling to condemn Hagar and Ishmael to death?
I don’t care whether it was legal by the standards of the time. I don’t care whether the social mores of the time embraced it. I don’t care.
It was wrong. Dead wrong. Horribly wrong. Sinfully wrong.
And that is what I mean by “better than the Bible.” Abraham and Sarah are heroic figures in many ways. They are archetypes for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
But at this moment, we have to be better than the Bible.
This story gets me angry because Abraham and Sarah decided to dispose of Hagar and Ishmael. Before Isaac’s birth, Abraham had pleaded with God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” But now the boy was disposable. The mother was disposable. Once members of the family, now they were disposable.
Disposable people. Disposable people.
That’s why I get angry.
The problem with Abraham and Sarah’s treatment of Hagar and Ishmael isn’t that it’s exceptional. It’s that it’s been echoed so many times by so many people in so many cultures over so many centuries. On this weekend following Juneteenth, I have to raise the world-wide practice of slavery. For millennia, some people have insisted that some other people have had to follow their instructions, do their work, bear children to those they insisted on, and live where they said. Under some codes, enslaved people lived or died at the will of those who held them in bondage.
These were literally disposable people.
The Law of the Hebrew Bible, I regret to say, mitigated the evils of slavery without eliminating them. Slavery of Hebrews had to be time limited, and enslaved people could not be abused or their possessions stripped from them. But still: disposable people. Though slavery is illegal in every country in the world today, the International Labour Organization found in 2022 that 28 million people endure forced labor and another 22 million are forced into marriages – just like Hagar.
That’s why we’ve got to be better than the Bible.
The Bible both warns against national leaders who abuse their authority and praises them. God warned the Israelites through Samuel against the appointment of a monarch. Saul proceeded to demonstrate the accuracy of the warning. At God’s direction, Samuel anointed David to displace and succeed Saul, and everybody celebrated. Well, not everybody.
I can’t help noting that David spent more time in power than Saul, and had more time to demonstrate the abuses of kings. Ask David’s wives and concubines. Ask his sons, two of whom rebelled against him. Ask Bathsheba. Ask Uriah.
When national leaders abuse their power, they create disposable people. Sometimes they’re the women they want to abuse. Sometimes they’re the foreigners they want to eject. Sometimes they’re the political opponents they want to subdue. Sometimes they’re people with a different skin color. Sometimes they’re people who are attracted to people of the same gender. Sometimes they’re people who are women.
If you want to justify any of these abuses — anti-immigrant, political imprisonment, racism, heterosexism, sexism — you can do it from the Bible. Sexism and heterosexism are easy. Racism? Yes, you can justify that. The Bible is rife with anti-foreign sentiment. It’s harder to make the case for imprisoning your political opponents, because a number of the prophets turn out to have been the political opponents of the monarchs, but if you work hard enough, you can do it.
You can justify disposable people.
That’s why we’ve got to be better than the Bible.
Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “This is an astonishing story to find amongst the accounts of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis. It follows not the perspective of the householders, but the perspective of the slave. Not the ones who are awaiting their destiny to be fulfilled by God, but the one who is collateral damage along the way. Hagar is the archetypal mother of every person who has ever been exiled, who has fled violence, both domestic and governmental, every person who has found themselves shunned, discarded, trafficked, forgotten.”
In Hagar, we hear from the disposable people.
It turns out they’re not disposable.
Amanda Benckhuysen writes at Working Preacher, “Our chosenness as people of faith does not mean that we have a corner on God. It does not mean that God’s love and care is limited to us. What is striking about Isaac and Ishmael is that God makes the same promise to them both. They would each become a great nation. They would both experience God’s presence and blessing.”
Hagar and Ishmael were not disposable.
We are not disposable. It’s the foundational assertion of Christianity, that God has no desire to discard any of the souls that God has placed upon the Earth.
The people who aren’t us are not disposable. Whether they’re male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free (to borrow from the Apostle Paul), they are not disposable. Whether they agree with us or with someone else, whether they’re gay or straight or bi or trans, whether they’ve committed a crime or been accused of one, whether they’re demonstrating against abortion or against ICE raids, no people are disposable.
No people are disposable.
That’s why we’ve got to be better than Abraham and Sarah. Better than the Bible.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally – so the recorded sermon does not precisely match the sermon as written.
The image is Hagar and Ishmael by Robert Loftin Newman – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57365865.
It is true that many figures in the Scriptures give fine examples for how we should behave – but that is not true of this story.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the twenty-first chapter of Genesis (Genesis 21:8-21). It is a troubling story.
It begins well enough. The family of Abraham celebrated the weaning of Isaac, who had been born to Sarah long after anyone thought that that was possible. Then Sarah saw Isaac playing with his older half-brother Ishmael. Now Ishmael existed because Sarah had insisted that Hagar, his mother, conceive a child with Sarah’s husband Abraham. Hagar, as a slave, had no choice in the matter. And so Ishmael was born.
Seeing them playing together, Sarah decided that it was not proper for the son of the slave to be playing with the son of the wife. She insisted that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. And Abraham, reassured by God that God would take care of them, did precisely that.
The second half of the story is familiar to us. Hagar left her son under a bush and went away so that she would not have to watch him die. God spoke to her and guided her to a spring, and so the two survived. It is a rescue from a situation that should not have happened.
The story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac is one of those that I hope we look at and say, “We will not emulate the people into this story. We will not take advantage of the neediness or the social place of people in order to provide children or just relief to powerful men. And we will not send helpless people out into the desert with minimal resources and a vague hope that they survive.”
This is one of the places where I read the story and I say: We have to be better than this. We have to be better than our ancestors have shown us.
May it be true for us, for our children and our children’s children.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Jesus’ travels through Galilee disturbed him. D. Mark Davis, writing at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, translates verse 36 as, “Yet having seen the crowd he was wrenched with compassion about them that they were having been harassed and tossed aside like sheep not having a shepherd.” Then he writes: “This verse is chock full of strong language. Jesus’ reaction is not just a sweet feeling of kindness, as if he just saw a flock of cute baby lambs. It is a visceral reaction, as the definition of σπλαγχνίζομαι suggests. I think it reads best as a gut reaction, something like ‘furious compassion.’”
“Furious compassion.” You’ve had that feeling, haven’t you? That’s the feeling when you see that somebody has been misled or abused and you’re not only concerned for them you’re angry on their behalf.
People feeling furious compassion tend to tell others about the feeling. They tend to gather people to witness and understand what’s happening. They tend to organize them to do something about it.
That’s what Jesus did. From a larger group of followers, he selected twelve to take on roles not just as learners, but as leaders. He selected twelve to take on the same work that he had been doing. It was no small commission. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”
Every bit of that charge is laden with challenge. The easiest part seems to be first part: proclaim good news. Good news. Who could object to people proclaiming good news?
Well, the first people who object to good news are usually the people who are benefiting from the bad news. They’re the ones setting the rules that protect their wealth and power from the ones without wealth and power. They’re the ones who accused Jesus of healing people’s demons with the power of demons. They’re the ones who eventually got him executed as a rebel – since when you tell people the good news that God is in charge, not the people who say they’re in charge, it is a rebellious act.
Jesus wasn’t done. “Cure the sick” – I’m afraid that’s not one of my skills. “Raise the dead” – I can’t do that. “Cleanse those with a skin disease” – I can put a bandage on it. “Cast out demons” – maybe I can; I’ve never tried. “You received without payment; give without payment” – how ironic is it that tomorrow is payday?
Matthew only gave us Jesus’ side of the assignment here, but my goodness. The disciples must have been saying something along the lines of, “Who me? No way.”
If they said it aloud (Matthew didn’t tell us), I’m pretty sure Jesus said something like, “Yeah, way.”
Christian discipleship – the Way of Jesus – is Assignment: Mercy.
As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Go and proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Go and cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. Go and touch. Go and heal. Go and resurrect. Go and make peace. Go and render believable the compassion of God.”
Assignment: Mercy.
As our myna hopefully learned this morning, mercy doesn’t have to be grand and glowing. Mercy begins with basic consideration. Mercy welcomes others to join in the feast. Mercy steps in to decrease the temperature of a dispute. Mercy. Is attentive to everyone’s safety.
During this weekend’s ‘Aha Pae’aina, called together with the theme of building bridges, there were more than a few exhibits of basic mercy. We greeted one another warmly, with hugs and smiles and aloha spoken and unspoken. We feasted together – my, how we feasted. I’m not sure when I’ll have room to eat anything else again. There were items of disagreement on the agenda, and we addressed them with respect and consideration for the people on either side of the question. And if I can summon up a personal example, while delivering my workshop I froze my feet in their places for a minute or two, because a nine-month old baby was crawling around next to me and I was not going to step on her fingers.
Mercy is also bigger than that. I kept my feet still to avoid hurting a baby. Why can’t the nations of the earth keep our militaries still lest they harm the infants of another nation? Why are we told that it is a virtue to use force ruthlessly and mercilessly? Why are we told that we don’t have the courage to take territory from another nation, instead of being told that our sense of morality prevents us from taking territory from another nation?
Jesus had the opportunity to start a war. When he was arrested, somebody swung a sword. Jesus could have screamed, “Attack!” Instead, Jesus said, “Enough of this,” and healed the injured man.
Assignment: Mercy.
During this ‘Aha, Conference Minister the Rev. Dr. David Popham told me something I hadn’t known – he knows plenty of things that I don’t, of course. He mentioned that Hawai’i has been closely followed by the disaster response people in the UCC and the Disciples of Christ. We’ve been through a lot, for sure: the 2018 Puna eruption here, the fires on Maui in 2023, this year’s series of Kona low storms. He joked, in fact, that sometimes they would call him and tell him things that he didn’t know, which was probably because the local people who would call the Conference were still busy dealing with the situation in front them, while those whose professions it is to assess disasters were communicating with our national church staff.
The point is that we have friends. We have neighbors who meet the definition Jesus provided to “Who is my neighbor?” Do you remember? “Who is my neighbor” was the question that launched the story of the Good Samaritan – and the neighbor was the one who showed mercy.
Assignment: Mercy.
All right. Have I made that point enough? How are you going to fulfill your assignment?
You do it with everything you’ve got. Yes, that’s a big ask. Yes, it’s a lot to give. And in some instances, yes, it’s not going to be enough.
Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the small mercies, to the politenesses, the sharings, the protections. None of us can possibly be aware of everything going on around us, but if we can we can look right and left before crossing the street, we can look right and left to see what’s going on with our neighbors. It’s a call to ask about needs and not assume them. A person in a wheelchair may appreciate some assistance from you on a streetcorner, but they also may not. Be vigilant, and let your vigilance include the simple politeness of asking, “How are you doing?” followed, perhaps, by, “What do you need?”
Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the big mercies, to the relief from systemic oppression and suffering, from the prejudices of social pressure and the discrimination of unjust law. Assignment: Mercy is a call to remind the world that war simply isn’t the Way of Jesus, no matter what awful things the Church has said to the contrary in the past. Assignment: Mercy insists that people be held accountable for the harms they bring to others, that they be held accountable through an open and transparent process of law, and that those in power shall have no special influence in the adjudication of the crimes of which they’re accused. Assignment: Mercy further calls us to bring people into society as well as we can, to make sure that neither habit nor desperation are major forces to drive people to criminal behavior.
Assignment: Mercy is a call to show that a loving God has had a powerful and positive influence on our lives. It is a call to testify to the grace that God has demonstrated in the world: in Creation, in guidance, in wisdom, in the poetry of the Psalms, in the restoration of distressed people, in the birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the activity of the Holy Spirit from the first century to the twenty-first.
At this point, I am sorely tempted to parody the opening of an episode of Mission: Impossible. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to show God’s mercy to a hurting world. If you are caught or captured in this mission, God will not disavow, but will celebrate your actions.
Actually, you want to be caught at this. Let everybody see. Let everybody know. You have accepted: Assignment: Mercy.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes as he preaches, so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
Jesus set his closest associates on the challenging assignment of bringing compassion to those who needed it so. We have the same assignment.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth chapters of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 9:35-10:8).
This section begins with Jesus’ observation that the people of the villages that he had met were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. There was more work to be done than he could do himself. He summoned twelve from amongst his followers, and he gave them power and authority.
He appointed them to be ambassadors of the movement, to go out and visit these other villages. There, he directed them, proclaim the good news that the realm of God is drawing near. Cast out the demons, heal the sick, and by the way, make no preparation as you go. Don’t save any money, don’t bring even any extra clothing.
It was, and it is, a tough assignment. I would argue that we as disciples today: we are the heirs of those twelve. We are still asked to do something about bringing the reign of God closer to being in the world. To do what we can for the sick, to comfort those who are pressed by evil spirits, and to assist those who are pressed by evil people. We continue in this long tradition of seeing what is wrong in the world, and bringing good news and good action to those who suffer to those in need.
Proclaim the good news that the realm of God is near. Bring healing and comfort and assurance, and you will be doing the work of Jesus.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Do you remember the Pushmi-Pullyu from Doctor Dolittle? The fictional animal (I repeat, fictional) had a body like an antelope or a llama, with a head at both ends and with two pairs of legs and feet that pointed in the same direction as the head and neck above them. According to author Hugh Lofting, the two heads allowed one to eat and the other to carry on a conversation without being rude.
Nevertheless, I can imagine that the two heads didn’t always agree, and I can imagine that that would have been remarkably awkward.
Religion and spirituality have a pushme-pullyou dimension – all religions, as far as I can tell. On the one side, we’ve got the impulse toward a direct relationship with God. People do a lot of things to build that and maintain it. We pray by ourselves. We worship with others. We place art with religious themes around us. We perform certain rituals that we believe God has asked us to do, which includes our practice of Holy Communion, by the way. We dedicate ourselves to furthering that primary relationship.
The other dimension is to do things that we believe God has asked us to do in relation to other human beings. It’s been widely claimed, with pretty good justification, that the “golden rule” of treating people as you’d like to be treated is part of every religious tradition. That’s hard to prove, but check out the Wikipedia article on the Golden Rule sometime. Researchers have found it in a lot of faiths and cultures.
When asked about the Greatest Commandment, Jesus first quoted Deuteronomy 6, which says “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” Jesus then followed up with a reference to Leviticus 19: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
There’s the pushme-pullyou again – Jesus didn’t say doing both at once was easy. But he did seem to think there were priorities.
Jesus appeared to have an odd reputation among his fellow rabbis. They paid attention to him. They respected him enough to invite him as a special guest when he visited their villages. He also puzzled them, sometimes quite a lot. Why would a respectable religious leader and teacher summon a tax collector to follow him? I suppose it’s nice that the man abandoned the disgraceful, collaborationist work, but make him an associate? I mean, eat with him?
Quite aside from ritual uncleanness, that’s gross.
How many people have never been invited to your table because something they’ve done or said or represented is, to you, gross?
For myself, I don’t know. I’ve lost count.
It made a huge difference for Matthew. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “He is sitting, literally, at the table of his unhealthy and degraded identity as tax collector. Toward him walks the ‘source of life’s fullness.’ The English writer, Jeannette Winterson, says that many great stories begin this way. Once upon a time, there was a person in circumstances that weren’t all that they hoped for. And then there was an encounter. In a moment, the bare facts of what is changed to what if, the expansion of possibility.”
It made all the difference in the world.
Jesus’ rabbinic colleagues were right to be leery. Let’s get that straight. They were following guidance from Law and Prophets that emphasized personal piety and practice to maintain faithfulness to God. They were praying, fasting, worshiping, and resting on the Sabbath. They were doing, frankly, things that we should be doing.
But that’s just one side of the pushme-pullyou.
Remember the other side? Love your neighbor as yourself.
Centuries before, the people of Israel, the northern of the two nations which had split after the death of David’s son Solomon, heard an earnest and, let’s face it, rather troubled prophet named Hosea try to remind them that their national practice of worship and ritual was not enough to maintain the covenant with God. Whatever they did during the week to treat others badly, they firmly believed that their piety won them forgiveness. “Let us press on to know the LORD;” Hosea quotes them as saying, “his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
But what about the other side of the pushme-pullyou?
“I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,” Hosea wrote, quoting God this time, “the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
Centuries later, Jesus quoted Hosea quoting God to those who asked about hanging out with all these sinners. “Go and learn what this means,” he said: “’I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”
If you’ve been listening really carefully, you may have noticed that those quotes don’t match. “I desire steadfast love,” it says in Hosea; “I desire mercy,” it says in Matthew. The reason is that the Hebrew word Hosea used, “hesed,” doesn’t have a one-to-one translation in English or in first century Greek. It means steadfast love, and it means mercy, and it means loyalty, and it means grace.
Commit to steadfast love, mercy, loyalty, and grace to those around you, said Jesus. That’s more important than prayer and fasting and worship and resting at the right time.
God desires mercy from us for them.
It’s also true that God desires mercy from them to us. Personally, I don’t have as much control over the way other people treat me as I’d like. Like you, I’m relying on that foundational teaching of the Golden Rule in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, Yoruba, and a host of faiths whose names I’ve never heard to guide their adherents into care, compassion, and mercy for their fellow travelers on the road of life.
Look hard enough at any religion, look hard enough at Christianity, and you’ll find justification to treat other people badly. In Christianity it isn’t that hard, to tell you the truth (I suspect that’s true in plenty of other faiths as well).
Before you pull out that excuse, however, remember Hosea and Jesus and a lot of other Biblical writers, all of whom insisted that God desires mercy from us and for us.
Mercy. It’s more powerful than all the pious actions we might do.
Mercy.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text as he preaches – sometimes he means to do it, and sometimes he doesn’t.
The prophets said it. Jesus said it. God desires mercy.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the ninth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 9:9-13, 8-26). This follows the conclusion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I read it as Jesus providing examples, demonstration, embodying, if you will, the very teachings that the Sermon on the Mount is filled with.
There are a lot of healings here, and Jesus healed some people that you might not expect. This section begins with Jesus calling somebody that people would not have expected. He summoned Matthew, a tax collector, to join him amongst his followers. Some of the other religious leaders had questions, and they went to Jesus’ disciples and asked why it was that the Teacher welcomed tax collectors and sinners and even ate with them.
Religious leaders didn’t do that. It was important in those days that religious leaders maintained themselves as clean in order to perform their functions.
Jesus responded by reminding them of something that the prophets had said over and over again. Quoting them, quoting God, Jesus said, “Go and learn what it means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
The cleanliness was all about being prepared to properly offer the devotional sacrifices of the Temple or of the Tabernacle. The prophets had rightly pointed out, and Jesus rightly reinforced it, that God’s preoccupation with human behavior is not exclusively or even primarily with the sacrificial practices. God’s concern with human behavior is the way we treat one another.
And how are we to treat one another? With mercy and not with some kind of self-righteous piety.
People in the ancient world: they got that wrong over and over again, which is why the prophets had to keep saying it. People in Jesus’ day got that wrong over and over again, and that is why Jesus had to say it. In our day, people get it wrong over and over again, and that’s why I have to repeat it.
God desires mercy, not some kind of pietistic religious practice, that may or may not do something about our own relationship with God, but does nothing for the other people for whom God cares.
God desires mercy for everybody around us, and God desires mercy for us as well.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
The first chapter of Genesis is not the Bible’s only account of Creation. There’s another one in Proverbs 8, in which the figure of Wisdom works alongside God in the building of the world. Probably the most famous additional text is the first chapter of John’s Gospel, which echoes both Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8. You’ll likely recall as well the second chapter of Genesis, which looks very much like another account of creation.
When I think about different ideas about Creation, I’m thinking theologically, not scientifically – Genesis was not written as a book to explain how the world works, it was written as a book to explain God’s interactions with the world. That’s one of the reasons Genesis’ editors, and those who assembled the collection of Bible books later, felt perfectly fine about including more than one account of Creation. It doesn’t worry me that Genesis doesn’t match the geological record, or that cosmological theories don’t line up precisely with the first chapter of John. I also don’t get excited that evolutionary theory sort of follows the order of sea life, plants, and then land animals in Genesis.
To me, it’s the theology that matters. As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “The contrast with other creation accounts of the ancient world is significant and begins the biblical corpus. The Holy One creates not out of pettiness, spite, avarice, or violence. Creation brings order, diversity, and relationship. It flows out of the identity of the Creator. It is progressive from the beginning, and the stage of rest is yet another progressive step. Creation continues. Rest, by nature, is a pause from activity. Because the Holy One is Creator, creation never stops, it rests.”
What matters to me is that all of the Bible’s Creation accounts emphasize both God’s deliberate choice to make a world of living things, and God’s love for that created world. What’s the refrain of this first chapter of Genesis? “And God saw that it was good,” finally stated as “very good.”
You don’t have to believe in God’s creative action to believe that the universe has value. Some atheists do. Some believers in religions that don’t believe in a divine creation do. Christianity itself begins with the assertion that the world is good, that substance is good, that existence is good. The poet and hymn lyricist Brian Wren writes,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
Good is the body for knowing the world, sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground, feeling, perceiving, within and around, good is the body, from cradle to grave…
There are human belief systems that simply don’t accept this. A number of ancient religions did not value the world because they believed it was a divine accident, a by-product of conflict between gods. Some strands of Christianity, I’m sorry to say, have overemphasized soul over body, and as a result have permitted abuses of human bodies and cultures as well as permitting destruction of natural resources and beauty. Some contemporary philosophies, both Christian and non-Christian, stress the primacy of human beings in the universe, and not only tolerate but encourage deforestation, mountaintop removal, and habitat elimination. Just last month an Environmental Protection Agency committee ended review of gas and oil drilling for impact on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico. Have we already forgotten the Deepwater Horizon accident sixteen years ago? A deepwater well blowout spewed oil for four months.
I don’t think we’ve forgotten. I think there’s a different belief system at work, that says that if certain people benefit, other life on the plant can be disregarded and, if necessary, destroyed.
Whatever some people may think, that view simply isn’t consistent with Scriptural thinking and assertions. Many have stressed that people, in verse 28, receive dominion. OK. Does that imply that human beings can do anything they want? Are human beings who have dominion over other human beings allowed to do anything they want? Is that true of parents? Of community leaders? Of national leaders?
Is it true of pastors? Do you really want me to have unquestioned authority to do anything I want?
If you weren’t sure about that, I’ll help: the answer is no, you don’t. There are provisions in our church bylaws that set limits on the things I can do. There are provisions in the United Church of Christ that set limits on the things I can do.
When we look at dominion in Genesis, the one who exerts power over things is God, and what does God do with that power? God brings order to chaos. God brings light and shape and form. God brings life, and not just life: God brings a system in which life can sustain itself, and other forms of life.
If we assert that we have an unquestioned, unlimited dominion, then exert it in ways that destroy the living systems of God, we are not living out a divine commission. We are tearing at the environment that sustains our lives as well as those of other living things.
God values this world. If we follow God’s ways, we value this world. As much as the honu in the sea or the ‘io in the air, as much as the ohi’a on the mountainside or the paho’eho’e as it flows, we are God’s Creation, a manifestation of holy will and love. We are created.
As the twelfth century theologian Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “God says, ‘I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows. I gleam in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything, I awaken everything to life.’”
It’s the sixth day in which God declares all that has been made “very good,” and that is the day of the creation of the animal life of Earth, ranging from the creeping things – I think that’s probably the insects that we don’t like very much – to humanity itself, made in the image of God, “Male and female he created them.”
Male and female are… very good.
There are, again, different ideas floating around as to the relative value of male and female. History is dominated by the idea that men are worth more, that they are more reliable, that they are better trusted with power than women. It’s a curious idea. According to the FBI, people arrested for violent crimes in 2019 were 72.5% men and 27.5% women. Men in government have started nearly every war ever fought on this planet. Would women do better? I don’t know. I do think we’ve run the experiment long enough to say that it’s time to try something else to see how that works.
More to the point, this basic assertion demands that we accord full value and respect for the dignity of women. The claims of “complementarianism,” the idea that women are of equal value to men but that the two sexes are designed for different kinds of social roles, is simply sexism with a slightly softer texture. “Women, you have equal value to myself” is a meaningless expression when it’s followed by, “and because I’m a man, I’m in charge.”
The image of God does not depend on gender. It just doesn’t.
Humanity in God’s image also means that all people have value. Period. End of sentence. Someone of another religion has the same value as you or me. Someone of another nation has the same value as you or me. Someone of a different political party has the same value as you or me. Someone with power has the same value as you or me. Someone without power has the same value as you or me.
That means we can’t use distinctions within humanity to discount, devalue, or disenfranchise other human beings. Legal immigrants? Full value. Illegal immigrants? Full value. Dark skinned people? Full value. Light skinned people? Full value. Gay people? Full value. Straight people? Full value. Republicans? Full value. Democrats? Full value. Politicians? Full value. Teachers? Full value. Road repair workers? Full value. Incarcerated prisoners? Full value.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” I’d argue that he was right, but the basis is not just in the action of Christ, but in the creative work of God.
Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “We are all, Hildegard teaches, carriers of the divine light. We have interior gardens in which we cultivate these qualities of love, wisdom, and greening inside ourselves. And as love and wisdom flow through us, we participate in the greening of the world. We are, she writes, ‘so entangled with the strengths of the rest of creation that we can never be separated from them.’”
We come into Creation because of the love and grace of God. We come into a Creation already loved and graced by God. We come into a Creation in which we participate in the greening of the world. We come into Creation to celebrate, enjoy, and nurture other people, other creatures, the trees and shrubs, the very flowing fiery rock itself, because all of it, including ourselves, is very good.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text he prepared does not precisely match what he said while preaching.
