Part 1
November 14, 2010
Texts: Luke 15:1-7, II Cor. 3:1-6
Today and the next two Sundays I would like to speak to you about the strange God of the Bible. Another way to put it is to think of God as other. By other I mean someone or something as big as an ocean or as small as a still, small voice – some reality other than me with which I can be in relationship. I refer to this other as strange because every time I think I have God figured out something presents itself that jars or even shatters my certainty.
Intellectually as a Christian I agree with my Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters that there is one God and only one God. I can’t prove this. I believe it because it is the only way of thinking and living that makes any sense to me. Theoretically I suppose there could be several gods or zillions of gods or no god, but none of these beliefs make sense to me. I believe in one God whom I understand as other meaning more, different, as most of all as surprise. I am never certain about God. I believe in God in spite of my uncertainty.
So as you can see, I am starting off with a note of caution. Years ago, a friend of mine while a seminary student was called on by the professor to open the class with prayer. As he got to his feet, one sentence prayer came to mind, “Lord, forgive us for becoming familiar with the divine.” J. B. Phillips spoke against such familiarity a long time ago in his little book, “Your God is too small.”
There are two places where I can be confident about avoiding superficial familiarity. One is Christian community and the other is the study of the Bible. By Christian community I do not mean a warm fuzzy group where everybody agrees with everybody else. By Christian community I mean a group of people who covenant to love God and each other and to get as close to the front lines of the Gospel as they can see and support each other in working and living there. At this point in my life Christian community for me is 8th Day Church.
I was raised, like most Americans, to think that God works primarily from the individual to the community or society. According to conventional wisdom God speaks to individuals and the echo circulates outward from the individual to the community and perhaps society. I do not deny that it works this way, but I see in the Bible and in my own experience a reverse process – convincing signs of God at work – healing, repentance, deep understanding flow from community to the individual or from this view if the community does not allow God to work, then nothing flows. We will get to this later but in a strange way the Bible also works this way - primarily from public to private. Jesus’ actions and teachings were largely public and their intent and meaning were grasped to a large extent first by a community and through that community by individuals in their private selves.
This is a very different way of thinking – that is from public to private, community to individual, and objective to subjective. I think is consistent with Walter Brueggemann’s contrast between the “dominant consciousness” and the “alternative consciousness,” terms which we at the Church of the Saviour have enthusiastically embraced. This reversal is a needed first for two reasons, one as a break on our individual religiosity and the other that self love can go only so far.
By religiosity I mean the confusion I often get into, and perhaps you also, between what comes from God and what really is coming from me, my opinions, my needs, my prejudices. Community reminds me that I am not the Gospel nor its source. There is a wisdom and a creativity in community that challenges me in which I think I am encountering the word of the Lord.
Secondly, self love can only go so far. My first experience of community was gifted me in my junior year in college. Three seminary students from Princeton Theological Seminary spent a week at our campus with the blessing of the Presbyterian chaplain initiating small discussion groups with students about total commitment. I was ripe for making that leap of faith. At the end of their time on the campus the seminary students invited the 20 or so students who had responded to their call to form two spiritual support groups. The one I got into had a dozen guys. We met every Sunday night from 10pm to midnight with the Presbyterian chaplain as an advisor. Spending that time learning to share, study and pray together was transformative for me. I left those meetings week after week feeling free as a bird, deeply refreshed.
Mid way through the year, a former roommate of mine stopped me to say he wanted to talk to me. When we got together he said, “Fred, I have been noticing something different about you, and I want what you have.” I had never had anyone speak to me like that. I was blown away. Community overflows like that. Notice he did not say to me “I want to be like you” like the saying among basketball lovers “I want to be like Mike.” He said that he wanted what he noticed bubbling in me. What was bubbling in me at that point was not some larger me but the power resulting from being in and really in community.
This is what drew me to the Church of the Saviour. It was like finding that treasure in the field that Jesus talked about and selling all you have to buy it. I virtually did that and I have never regretted it. A number of others here today made the same choice.
It is important to understand that Christian community in the sense that I am using it is, like my understanding of God, other than me, although I am part of it. Therefore Christian community takes on a certain strangeness, that is, otherness at the same time it is very familiar. I feel at home in community.
The Bible is that second place to which I turn with confidence that if I stick with it, my study of the Bible will ground me and challenge my illusions, both positive and negative, and give me a sane view of reality. This is not a plug for another “march for sanity” but we might consider it.
I say study of the Bible because it involves more than simply reading the Bible as I read the newspapers or an interesting novel. The Bible requires study. One of the tasks of Bible study is to notice the way we water down scripture by hearing it as a prescription for conventional American morality. For example, think of the way most of us were taught to read the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We learned to read it with the Samaritan as a moral example. If you call yourself a Christian, this is what you need to do. In Jesus’ time, the name Samaritan stirred an emotional reaction among mainstream Jews equivalent to our reaction to the vile racial epithet n i g g e r. Today this epithet n i g g e r is so offensive only black people can use it. If a white person uses it, he is crossing a line that evokes outrage by African Americans and sensitive whites. Why would Jesus craft a story by intentionally selecting as the protagonist, the one who moves the action, an outsider whose identity evoked outrage? This is worth pondering, but today I simply leave you with the question. By the time Luke incorporates this story into his writing, the term Samaritan simply represented an outsider and his action as example for discipleship.
Let’s see if we can probe a bit deeper than conventional morality and begin to understand what Karl Barth meant when he coined the phrase the strange God of the Bible. But first let me tell you where I am going in these three sermons.
Last week Ray McGovern was sharing his distress about the state of the country with Gordon Cosby. He asked Gordon, “Do you see any signs of hope?” Gordon replied, “Ray, I think your question is really do you believe in a faithful God?”
This is what I want to talk about for these three Sundays – a strange God who is a faithful God and a faithful God who comes across as strange in this world. This is a paradox and it is the only way I know to think honestly and reverently toward God. I chose the infinitive “toward” intentionally. This is the capacity we are given – that is to think toward God, in the direction of God. Unless God speaks to us, as I believe he does through community and the Bible, the best we can do it to look and think toward God, and that is enough. God speaks and God hears, although God doesn’t necessarily respond according to our time table or proposed solutions.
I have chosen a brief text to suggest an arc for all three sermons. It is II Cor. 3:4 “Such is the confidence we have through Christ toward God.” What I hope to accomplish over these three weeks is to offer a thoughtful witness to the strange God of the Bible being amongst us and offering us the possibility of confidence toward God. In brief, my aim is to deepen my own understanding and hopefully yours of the strange God of the Bible as a faithful God.
If you should be interested in working alongside me in this effort, I will be working primarily with Luke 15 and II Corinthians chapters three through five. One scholar suggests that there are two peaks in the New Testament: the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and II Corinthians chapters 3-5. In the latter, Paul gets into some really dense stuff – about one man dying for all and in his dying all men and women die so as to cease living for themselves in order to live for him who died for them. This is some of the dense stuff about the strange God of the Bible, but before we tackle it, I need to lay a foundation of language and human connection to make sense of the dense stuff. What I have in mind is to take my full time today to laying a foundation. Then next week and the following I intend to shorten the sermon and allow time for reflections by those of you who wish to do so as we have done from time to time in the past.
Now I would like to take you through Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15 and point out the difference between reading the text in a conventional way and reading the text with the help of some devout and serious Christian scholarship. The conventional way of reading this story is to think in terms of dichotomy, that is between the lost and the safe, sinners and righteous, good people and bad people. Read conventionally the parable suggests on the one hand that there are lost people in the world and God challenges those who are safe to go and find them and bring them into the fold, meaning the church. When that is done there is joy all the way up to heaven.
Another way the story is read is that we are the lost and Jesus is the shepherd, and Jesus searches for us until he finds us and when he does there is rejoicing all the way up to heaven. If we were having an altar call in a revival service, the preacher might be calling on church members to come down the aisle to rededicate their lives to Christ.
Biblical scholar Kenneth Bailey who spent his career living and teaching in the Middle East and in particular spending lots of time in small villages learning the clues to Bible stories that Jesus’ original audience would pick up that we miss. In his wonderful book about the parables entitled Poet and Peasant, Bailey says that in a poor village in Jesus’ time the average sheep herd would be about 15 sheep. This means that the people listening to Jesus would have pictured the 100 sheep in the parable as actually 6 to 7 herds with 2, 3 or more shepherds. Also shepherds in village culture led the sheep home every night to a corral in the village where they would be safe and then led them out to pasture again the next day.
The villagers understand that when a sheep gets separated from the flock and realizes it, it lays down as if paralyzed. In this immobile state it bleats until the shepherd finds it. When the shepherd does he literally has to pick the sheep off the ground put it on his shoulder and carry it the whole distance to the flock. In the case of this parable, the Middle Eastern villager would understand that at the end of the day before leading the sheep back to the village, the head shepherd would count to see if all were there. If one was missing, he would then send the rest – the ninety-nine back - back to the village with the other shepherds while he searched for the lost sheep. He knew that if he looked long enough he would find the sheep if he listened for the sound of the sheep’s bleating.
Bailey says that the climax, the central message of the parable is in the middle and radiates out from there to the end. What do we find in the middle? We find the joy of the shepherd in finding the sheep.This joy is repeated at the end of the parable when both the late returning shepherd and the villagers who have invested their money in the sheep rejoice together both that the shepherd is back safe and sound and that their business investment in the sheep is still en tact.
According to Bailey we also find in the middle of this parable a reference to repentance. The object of the search is a lost sheep. In the parable the sheep does nothing but get lost and bleat. Instead of beating the sheep for causing him all this trouble, the shepherd rejoices and continues to rejoice all the way back to the village. This means that he also rejoices in the burden of restoration. Think about that switch - from anger to rejoicing in taking on the burden of restoring that sheep to the flock.
Then think about what this parable says about repentance which was a major issue between Jesus and some in his audience in Luke 15. Jesus is trying to pull toward him a mixed audience of outcast street people and tax collectors and very serious religious people such as the Pharisees and scribes. For the Pharisees and scribes a big issue they have with Jesus is where does he stand on repentance. For the outcasts, the tax collectors and street people and women surviving in the sex trade, they are immobilized where they are. They see no way to be accepted into community by repenting their way into it. They have to think of their next meal. Repentance as the Pharisees see it is out of the question for them or so they think.
Where is repentance in this story? It is in the middle, alongside the joy of the shepherd. For the bleating sheep, repentance is being found. What a switch. It is not wonder that the God of the Bible is a strange God, a God who is other to all our assumptions and understandings. Repentance is being found – by God, by community, by the Bible, by whatever.
As Bailey listened to Middle Eastern villagers he shifted his view of what this parable is about – not bad converted to good, but the eruption of joy and the rethinking of repentance. The Kingdom of God is not about transformation of the past, but about a brand new present to which all are welcome. For people who get this, it is like being found and lifted after being immobilized. For other people who have joined the movement the joy is in lifting their immobilized new brother or sister and carrying them to join the flock.
This parable brings to mind a recent conversation. My oldest daughter, Sarah, is a chaplain at state men’s prison in Hillsborough, N.C. which is near Chapel Hill. I was down there a few weeks ago having lunch with Sarah and one of her mentors, a retired prison chaplain named Bill Crittendon. Bill shared the comment of a doctor friend who said, “Bill, as a doctor I am clear as to what I am about and that is to make sick people well. I’m not clear about what you do, but I suppose it is to make bad people good.”
In that story we hear the dilemma of this country. Making bad people good as a mission makes no sense. Things don’t happen that way. Prisons aren’t set up to transform the past or to make bad people good. They are set up to carry out vengeance. But “vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” That doesn’t mean we march to the capitol and demand that all prisons be closed and all prisoners released. There is value in being law abiding. I want the people living on my street to be law abiders. Every time I hear of a neighbor having a gun pulled on them or an elderly woman having her purse snatched or worse, I don’t like it. But you and I know that there is much more to it. The current system is bankrupt. A parable like this invites us to think in new ways, to think o the Kingdom of God and God among us in new ways.
Let me conclude by trying to pull the pieces of this sermon together. Let me go back to my initial point about God as other and as the strange God of the Bible. To think of God as joyful is a stretch for me. I am not by nature a joyful person. I am conditioned to be serious and to think that somehow there’s got to be a solution for every problem and my role in life is to solve problems, including my own. But I know something about joy. I know joy when I see it. Thinking of joy for me is like thinking of God as other. Joy is other to me, but when I hear it, when it comes near, I have the capacity to go toward it. I can choose it. I can embrace it.
In my youth I learned the hymn, “There is joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart, there is joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart to stay.” We think of God as love and we are going to do more of that next week. The God of the Bible is also joy, unceasing joy. As such God is a free spirit. God doesn’t get immobilized like the sheep or you or me. God is free and one way that freedom flows is through joy. Where joy is God is nearby.
As I said at the beginning there are two places where I feel I can go in confidence and trust that God, while remaining hidden, will be nearby. One is community and the other is the study of the Bible. Just think of what can happen when Bible and community converge and the community begins to hear the Bible in a liberating way and the Bible is read in a way that pulls us into its story and shapes our story. This is my vision. What is your vision?