Refractions

After a brief interlude, we turn from the traumatized Isaac, unable to contribute anything to the story except for the next generation, we meet Jacob, ready to tangle, on the make, a trader with a keen eye for the main chance.   We will follow his story now for several weeks – a hinge on which the whole narrative shuts on Esau and opens on Jacob, on Joseph and his descendants, on bondage and then freedom, on Moses, Aaron and Miriam, then Joshua and the Judges, the Kings and the Prophets. Jacob comes out of the womb ready to rumble.   At birth, he fights to be first, holding Esau by the heel and, presumably trying to pull in front of him.   What fails at birth he eventually wins by exploitation and deception.   Every classroom, every workplace, every soccer team, every extended family has one of these characters, ready to knock anybody off the ladder in order to get ahead. It will take Jacob years to learn what “ahead” looks like.   On July 31, he will come ...

Abraham’s temporary willingness to participate in the blood sacrifice of his son casts a long shadow – confusion and mayhem for the next three generations. In light of the divine promise, that the descendents of Abraham would be a blessing to all nations, the enterprise is off to a rocky start. For the next several weeks, we will hear the stories of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob and Esau, of Laban, Leah, and Rachel, of Joseph and his brothers. These are not impressive people. They’re either weak or on the make, dreamily enjoying favoured status or busily plotting to sell a brother into slavery. It surely isn’t anything about the character and morality of these descendents of Sarah and Abraham that has us still telling their stories.   Indeed, these stories are not really about what these three generations accomplish. Much of that is, in fact, sordid. No, what these stories proclaim is what God is able to make of these three generations. There is a story greater than their stor...

The story our ancestors offer us from Hebrew scripture is called the Akeda, the binding and unbinding of Isaac. At the same time, though, it is also the story of the binding and unbinding of Abraham his father. As he trudges up the slope of Mount Moriah with his son, “your only son, the son whom you love”, he believes with all his heart that what is necessary – what must happen – is that he tie his son up, cut his throat, and burn his body. Repugnant as this clearly must be to him, he cannot avoid it. It is inevitable. God demands it, and saying “No” to what God demands is not possible. There are in this story two names for God. The first, “God” is a translation of the Hebrew “Elohim”. The second, “the LORD”, is how “Yahweh” is rendered in English translations. The God who binds Abraham to this sacrifice is Elohim ; the God who unbinds him from it is Yahweh . Stick with me here for a minute.  Elohim (God) is also used to speak of the gods of other peoples –  for...

Parable of the Old Man and the Young So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, and builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; ...

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…”  (Matthew 28.19) It’s pretty clear – baptism and discipleship belong together, in the same sentence, in the same breath. Baptism is how the church makes disciples. I wonder what would happen if we decided that the relationship between baptism and discipleship should be as clear and direct in our practice as it is in our scripture. For the most part, our churches have leaned toward an apparently more Pauline understanding of baptism – as membership. In baptism, we graft new members into the Body of Christ. A hand, a foot, an eye – distinctive working parts of a purposeful body. Unfortunately, “member” has come to mean something quite different than it once did. Membership has come to mean “belonging”, as in club membership – the Oakville Club, the YMCA. Moreover, as American Express reminds us, “membership has its privileges”.  It’s easy for us all to fall into the trap of imagining ourselves as privileged me...

You could imagine them if nothing changed, getting together once in a while to “remember when”. At first, the absence of Jesus might have occasioned some sense of loss, or sadness, or even grief. At first, they would talk about how he disappeared – like Bilbo Baggins on his eleventy-first birthday – and wonder where he’d gone, what heaven was like, and whether they’d go there when their time came. They would have little bits of this and that to remind them of places they’d been with him, things he’d said to them, events they had gone through together. Over time, the hard edge would come off the grief and loss, the memories a bit hazy and warmed by hindsight. They would laugh more, cry less, and say they should get together more often, when in fact, the gatherings would be rarer as time passed. They would talk about their children and grandchildren, and the passing of so much time so swiftly would amaze them every time. It wouldn’t have been a bad life, really. But something did happe...

The Ministry of the Church in the Mission of God: The kingdom of God, here and now So, what is God’s mission, God’s action in the world for the sake of the world, and how might the church encourage and prepare its members to participate in that action?   To begin, we turn to Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God as both a present reality and a future hope.   In both Matthew and Mark, the first act of Jesus public ministry is a call to repent (turn around) and enter the Kingdom of God, which has “come near”.   In both cases, Jesus first hears this call to repent and inhabit the Kingdom of God from his cousin John, before John baptizes him.   For Jesus, baptism was baptism into the service of God’s mission. In his baptism by John, he embraces the purpose to which God calls him, as in our baptism we embrace the purpose to which God calls us, expressed in the Baptismal Covenant. Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is driven ‘by the Spirit’ into the wildern...

God’s mission, the church’s ministry God has a mission.   A church exists to encourage and equip people to participate in that mission.   The work of participating in that mission is called ministry (or “service”).   Ministry is conferred in baptism.   There was a time when the church had “missions” in distant places – Africa, the Arctic.   The purpose of such missions was, more or less, to bring people up to the cultural and religious mark – to make them civilized (western) and Christian.   The relationship between the local church and these missions was clear – local churches raised the resources to support distant missions. As a child, I remember Jehovah’s Witnesses (often) and Mormons (once) coming to the door.   I shared the general impression that they were outlandish and intrusive.   Along with the Salvation Army, these were the only instances of local mission that I met in my early formation. In 1991, South African missiologist Davi...

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1 These words, from the only narrative appearance of Jesus outside the gospels, offer the contemporary church two lenses through which we can assess the choices of the past and the crisis of the present. “What power?”   “Whose witnesses?” In this last week of the Easter season, we might recall that these were the questions that Jesus entertained in his own last week in Jerusalem, the week leading to his execution. What power would he choose? Whose witness would he be? Throughout that last week, Jesus made his choice clear, and maintained a steadfast witness. While the religious authorities of Jerusalem adapted to Caesar’s power, rooted in the mastery of death, Jesus trusted the power of the one he called “Papa”, whose Spirit animates the life of the world. And while the authorities’ bending before Caesar’s...

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. If “the world” in this text means the collection of creatures and habitats – critters, rocks, waters, trees and soils – that constitute our earth, then what we have here is in one sense quite familiar – Christian denial of the goodness of the material world.  Its roots are more Greek than Hebrew, more Plato than Jesus of Nazareth, but its grip on Christian imagination over the centuries has been fierce and relentless. But what if “the world” means something else?  What if it means a collection of habits that condition how we understand the world and ourselves in the world?  Is there a collection of habits so pervasive and convincing that they shape, even determine, what world we see and inhabit?  Like the default settings on computers, which are in play behind the scenes unless and until we choose to...

He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness, You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures. He is he Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety, You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years. He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh, And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.   These three stanzas from W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio have been a prominent landmark in my soulscape for almost exactly thirty years. I read them first in the late spring of 1981. Deborah’s wedding gift to me in 1983 was to cross-stitch these nine lines of poetry and put them in a frame. And over the years, the words have themselves become a frame – a way of reading part of John 14, one of the series of “I am” illuminations that characterize the Fourth Gospel. The places through and in which we follow, seek and love Jesus are, I think, just the ones that Auden identifies. In the Land of Unlikeness, through ...

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”   John 10.10 It’s important to know who’s at the gate. Everything depends on it. Abundant life or no life at all. Of course, it also all depends on who gets to define what life is, or as Michael Ignatieff recently put it, on who controls the narrative. In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer with a hacker alter ego named Neo, awakens to discover that the life he thinks he has been living has been generated by a computer program called “the Matrix”. He has spent his entire life so far as one of millions of bodies whose sole purpose is to generate heat to energize the machines who have taken over the world. The machines control the narrative and make people believe they are actually living the life the Matrix projects into their minds. When Neo is rescued from the body farm and awakened to reality, he discovers what many of us discover at on...

Why are Cleopas and his companion heading for Emmaus?   Are they beckoned by the promise of home, or driven by the fear of violence and death in Jerusalem? They are clearly disciples of the Galilean rabbi whose teaching and practice led to his execution. It would not be unreasonable for them to imagine that some part of the violence that landed on him might land on them as well.   And if it is fear that drives them, the astounding witness of the women that they repeat to the stranger on the road has not yet sunk in. Because the resurrection is, among other things, a compelling invitation to repent of the authority of fear in our lives, authority that we have granted.   The resurrection unmasks that of which we have been so afraid – the power of death – as, in the end, empty, an empty tomb, a broken bondage.   The resurrection does not obliterate the cost of our living as soft bodies in a hard world. It does, however, disclose the limit of death’s power.   It ...

We can easily become so focused on Thomas that we miss everything else in the story. I’m thinking in particular about the very early part of this week’s gospel – “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”   The continuing ministry of Jesus will include these apostles (the word means “sent ones”). And they are sent “as the Father sent me”; that is to say, the terms of their engagement with the world on behalf of the Father are the same as they were for Jesus. Teach and heal, cast out demons, confront the illusion of inevitability that holds hope hostage, unmask the privilege and power that sustain an elite, and attend with compassion to those who are left out and lost. The cost of this engagement will also follow the trajectory of Jesus’ life. Like him, they will spend their lives . So it makes perfect sense that before Jesus tells them about this engagement in God’s mission, he reminds them that he has the necessary authority to invite them into this hard and holy way. He sho...

Palm Sunday lays a question before us, maybe the most important question of all. As John Crossan and Marcus Borg describe it in The Last Week, it’s a question about two parades on the same day, one coming through the east gate of the city, the other through the west.   The important question is, “Which gate?”   Through the west gate, coming from Caesarea Maritima, comes the infantry and the cavalry, with the Governor, Pontius Pilate.   It is a national festival, and the army is arriving to stifle any unrest, any thought of rising up against Rome. Through the east gate comes an odd and ominous parade.   Jesus of Nazareth enters on a donkey, laying claim to the city as anticipated by the prophet, Zechariah:                                              ...

There in the valley of dry bones stands our ancestor, carried there by the hand of God. Just as with Jesus in the wilderness, led there by the Spirit immediately after his baptism, we learn that Ezekiel’s journey is the work of the Spirit. This is no tame Spirit, then. And these are no green pastures, no still waters. In fact, this valley’s principle feature is its utter lifelessness. Not so much as a drop of water or a breath.  God leads our ancestor around the valley, and it’s nothing but bones, nothing but dry. This lifeless valley and its bonescape are what has become of the people of God. God asks Ezekiel if these bones can live. “You tell me.” But he knows they can’t. Dead is dead. Over is over.  “You tell me,” says Ezekiel, to the Holy One, who replies – “I’ll tell you . YOU tell the bones.” Prophesy to them, tell them that things are about to be quite different for them. Tell them to be alive again. Walking through the bones, our dreaming ancestor does tell them. ...

When Samuel anoints David as king of Israel, he becomes part of a long pattern of contested sovereignty – “regime change”. Saul is still living, and for several more years will act out the role of king. But as of this moment in Jesse’s yard, he is no longer the real king; that authority God has taken from Saul and bestowed on David, because, we are told, Saul has turned his back on the Lord and set up a monument for himself. Regime change is what Eve and Adam attempted in Eden when they seized the fruit of God’s tree. And it’s what’s going on in Libya right now. Who will be king? Who will have power? The question of power – where it comes from, its legitimate uses, who has it – provides a constant rumble rising out of history’s cellar – a tectonic force that reshapes life on the surface, sometimes gradually, often violently.   And there is violence here. Saul will seek David's death. Absalom's violent death will break his Father's heart. Not much of scripture has to do ...

None of us remembers our birth. But most of us can imagine what a trauma it was to leave the warm, humid comfort of the dark and quiet womb and be thrust into the dry, cold, noisy brightness of whatever room.  So when Jesus speaks to Nicodemus of a spiritual birth, I’m inclined to believe that what Jesus asks of Nicodemus is not going to be easy. The gospel account of the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus is complicated by the writer’s habit of characterizing Jews (in general) and Pharisees (in particular) as obsessed with narrow legalism and driven by judgmental self-righteousness. Evidence suggests that the sect of Pharisees was more complex than the portrait this evangelist paints. Nevertheless, what emerges in Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus is an exploration of the contested ground between structure (law, judgment) and freedom (Spirit, novelty). That contested ground is not an exclusively Pharisaical or Jewish reality. It is at the heart of a contemporary tension in the f...

“ The first crisis of human stewardship came with our first ancestors’ decision to test the sovereignty of God by consuming the only fruit in the garden reserved exclusively to the Creator. Rejecting stewardship and embracing the illusory promise of sovereign possession of the garden, they initiate a continuing pattern of exploitation, entitlement, violence and destruction that plagues human participation in the life of the earth.”                                           Anglican Church of Canada – Resources for Mission Several weeks ago, Jesus informed us that we have to choose the master we will serve – God or wealth. On Ash Wednesday, we heard his words, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Today we read about the “first crisis in human stewardship” in the garden, and ...

My friend Jon Sams says it’s hard to believe in God in a flat place. I don’t know about that – prairie horizons utter powerful and eloquent testimony to the holy. But I do know that biblical mountains (remember Moses at Sinai) are places apart and above – places in which our usual patterns of encounter with the world are suspended. On the mountain we do not take the initiative. We are not in control, or even responsible to see that this or that happens or does not happen. Biblical mountains are a topographical sabbath on which we lay aside the notion that any of us is the author of life’s story. On the mountain, God is the author, the Storyteller who moves the plot forward. So as Jesus leads Peter, James and John up the mountain, we have at least a sneaking suspicion that something is going to happen, that the Storyteller is about to introduce a new direction. Another new direction. We’re all still recovering from the last new direction – in all three synoptic gospels, what preced...

There’s a radical edge to Jesus that familiarity can obscure. We love to hear him say, “Consider the lilies”.  It’s good advice against fretting and worrying – a comforting insight.  We might easily miss what comes before and after it. What comes before is the kind of stern clarity that Jesus expresses from time to time. You can’t he says, have it both ways. What follows is his insistence the his followers distinguish ourselves from the worried Gentile preoccupation with food and clothing and entrust ourselves to the care of God.  So we can’t just treat this “lilies” passage simply as advice for coping in lives that are otherwise committed to business as usual. What is at stake, Jesus insists, is the fundamental orientation of our lives. Will we live our lives and direct our energy towards God, or towards wealth? That is, will we seek first the kingdom of God, or will we serve the other kingdom – the kingdom governed by greed, governed by fear? It’s not a choice that chu...