Read With Me

Loving the One Who Has Come

2011-01-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

"While the Christian is the one who exists between two incomings, looking back to one in love and looking forward to the other with longing, the current moment is claimed to be awash with the Spirit."
Peter Rollins How (Not) to Speak of God

All our Advent readings were full of this duality: the coming of Christ, both the one that happened some two thousand years ago and the one we hope for that hasn't happened yet. Here we are right in the midst of Christmas (remember, in the Church, Christmas is a season of twelve days), and this is what I want to be doing: basking in love for and of and by God. I want to revel in the reality that God so loves us that God took human form and was pleased, yes, pleased to dwell with us. I want to love this God, adore this God, enjoy this God. I want to take time simply to be delighted and to brim over with love from my deepest places. I want it to be like that first night with my first child. I couldn't stop looking. Sleep wasn't even interesting; gazing at my beloved, this baby, was all I longed for and the very reason for being.
Some time later, soon perhaps, I will wonder about this second coming of Jesus, but now this first coming is enough. God is so beautiful, so utterly amazing. How could such a One be? How is it that such a One is present to me, lovable by me, held in some real sense by me? I don't understand this God I am loving. No, I still don't understand this daughter i've been loving for some sixteen years. But full understanding isn't required. I adore; I long for; I behold; I hold. And I know myself forever changed.
This is, I suppose, what it means to be "awash with the Spirt" -- to be so overwhelmed with love for the One who loves us that we are forever changed, that all is forever changed.

Who is this God and How do you Know?

2010-12-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

“This full, radiant, glorious experience of God in Jesus Christ eventually revolutionized the whole concept of God, so that the word God itself was reimagined through the experience of encountering Jesus, seeing him act, hearing him speak, watching him relate, and reflecting on his whole career.” (Brian McLaren A Generous Orthodoxy 82)

I’m reading this book by Brian McLaren, a book about some of the changes that seem to be happening in American Christianity. Actually, it’s about McLaren’s own theology, which as he describes it, is evolving in reaction to changes in contemporary theology, new ways of thinking, and new experiences. Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence and an important thinker who believes (along with a lot of other people) that we are in the midst of a new Reformation, says “I am sure that the generous orthodoxy defined in the following pages [of McLaren’s book] is our 95 theses.” She sees the ideas McLaren presents as key to our new, emerging articulation and practice of our faith.
So, one of the issues in McLaren’s book is, simply, what is God like? During the last Reformation, Martin Luther and others proclaimed that Jesus is the best representation of God we have. Jesus is the version of God we can begin to get our minds and hearts around. If we want to know what God is like, look to Jesus.
I am intrigued by this idea of reimagining. The word reminds me that theology is our trying to describe One who is ineffable, utterly beyond our capacity to fully express, even perhaps to fully know. Yet, we are in relationship with this mind-popping God, and part of being in relationship is trying to understand, to know the other. So, we imagine. We propose. We attempt to put words to our experience, and we wrestle with the words left behind by others who have experienced God.
Think about it. How do you know who God is?

Time To Begin Anew

2010-12-05T04:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I became overwhelmed and distracted by other things. Life got away from me. I wish I could report that this is a novel experience for me, but "life gluttony" appears to be my favorite sin.
One option would be, of course, to simply give up on the blogging idea. But words call to me, and I find myself honing my sense of my own vocation, being clearer about what my abilities and joys actually are. Sure, the dishes still need to be done, and classrooms still need to be kept cleaned, but there needs to be room for what is truly important.
So, today, on this second Sunday of Advent, I begin again. I read, and I write. I'm going to write every day, for actually I have found that I am most faithful to daily disciplines. I'm going to share some of what I'm reading: engagements with all kinds of texts.
For today, here is a poem Tracy Keenan, our minister at Covenant and my friend, shared with me last week. I find it reverberates still:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Christ Climbed Down"

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit / and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
for everybody's imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I did a really terrible thing last week. I wheeled around, going out the back door to my car, to a daughter at least as stressed as I was, and I raged something like the following: "Do you know what Christmas and your birthday are becoming for me? The season when I can't possibly buy enough to give you what you want! The season when I worry about money every minute."
Oh, my. Well, it's true that the season of Advent is a akin to Lent: a season of preparation that involves confession and repentance. Apparently, I decided to sin boldly in order to give myself more opportunity to repent. My poor daughter. It's enough for her to be responsible for her own life, but to make her responsible for the mess inside me is a bit much.
I'm good at railing against consumerism, but I let it get its hooks in me. I become entangled in some absurd religion in which shiny things assure emotional connection and mother-daughter intimacy. How foolish can I be?
So, I read this poem and this scene from my life, and I repent. I "turn" to another way of being. I choose life. I remember the words of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: "We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born."

Genesis 23: Sarah dies

2010-08-22T04:30:00.000-07:00

Reading of Sarah's death right after the last story in which Abraham seemed willing to offer up their son always reminds me that we didn't hear from her during that chapter. If this were a novel rather than a biblical account, can you imagine the scene? Jewish writers have composed midrash (commentaries on scripture) about this -- particularly more recently when consciousness of the absence of women's voices led many into writing midrash again. Midrash ask questions of the text that the text itself sometimes may or may not be interested in -- they aren't theology exactly, though they can be. Midrash remind me that the stories of the bible are to be lived with, pondered, chewed on, explored. Asking anything is fair game; bringing the story into your own life and concerns is vitally important. I'm not saying that we can make the Bible say whatever we want -- when we read well and read scripture in light of scripture we find ourselves engaged with and sometimes wrestling an Other that is far from containable and definable. But we are always looking for, listening for the Word of the Lord in and through these words, the words God would speak to us.
Scholars will tell you that this chatper is part of the Priestly tradition, reminding us that many hearts and minds worked to compose what we call Genesis. These writers were concerned with the proper way to do things and the consequences of doing things the right and the worng way. In many ancient cultures, burying your dead in a plot of land gave their heirs a holy claim to it. This is a foreshadowing of how a faithful people will dwell in the "Promised Land."

Genesis 22: The Akedah

2010-07-11T04:42:00.000-07:00

Here we go: the binding of Isaac, that wretched story where God asks a man to offer up his own child. I know more than one person who would happily rip this page of scripture out of our Bibles. This, this is the sort of story, some would say, that gives God a bad name. It’s that cranky, unpredictable, jealous, wholly unreasonable God of the Old Testament again. We really do want to share our faith you know, to learn the Bible and share it with others, but these stories from the Hebrew scriptures seem to be obstacles to that. They are so hard and they speak of scary, awful, deeply painful and challenging things that we don’t want to think of, let alone share with people we are trying to get to like God. So, this, this is the God who adores us? You can just hear the reactions: who would want to believe in a God who would ask such a thing? Abraham was either delusional or your God is cruel. You could use this sort of thing to justify all sorts of horrors. We know; we’ve seen the sort of things you people do in the name of religion.
So, here we are with our Bibles open to Genesis chapter 22. What are we supposed to do with this?
I’ve heard it argued that this story is actually in here as a sort of explanation as to why the Israelites as opposed to other peoples in the region did not sacrifice children to their God. Some read this as an analogy, a foreshadowing perhaps of God giving up God’s own son, God’s only son, Jesus, as a sacrifice. That explanation seems to make some people feel better. You can imagine how much ink has been spilled trying to digest this story, to make it palatable. But maybe we should forget the fancy theologizing and all the mechanizations and gyrations we might do to fit this story into however it is we understand God and how God works. Maybe we should just read the story.
Of course, what does that mean? What is it to read? Some of you may know that I have a draft of a dissertation hidden away somewhere. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure where it all is. I sometimes stumble across a chapter when I’m looking for something else. The work I did was about reading novels and how readers make meaning. I argue that reading is an intense, intimate, complex interaction between the words on the page, the experiences and the reality created by the consciousness behind those artful phrases, and the world of the reader, the collection of experiences and feelings and ideas held by the person reading. Reading a book then is entering into a living relationship, negotiating meaning by relating to what we encounter. Reading is relational. We relate to the story, take the stuff of our lives and let it engage with, talk to, struggle against, imbibe this other’s experience and way of telling it.
Reading scripture together, hearing the word of God proclaimed is even more relational and intricate and mysterious, for we believe that the Holy Spirit, even yet, even now, is at work in us, embodying language and doing God’s work within us. So, let us read and let us pray and let us hear the voice of the Lord.
“After these things. . . .” These three words should stop us in our tracks you know. It means, there is a context here; there are things that have happened before now that make “now” possible and meaningful and the rich reality that it is. This isn’t some stranger that woke up one day and claimed a voice in his head told him to do something crazy. We are about to read about a drama that takes place between two parties (yes definitely it involves others Isaac who certainly has an interest here and the vividly absent Sarah even), but the story here is what happens between Abraham and his God. Do you remember Abraham? Do you know his story? We’ve got the whole great 66 books of the Bible to tell us something of God, not to mention all the stuff of our lives with God, and we have the preceeding ten chapters that tell us a great deal about Abraham.
The story begins in chapter 12. Abram, son of Terah, had already followed his father away from Ur in Mesopotamia, that land between the rivers Tigris and Eurphrates. He and his wife, Sarai, were settled in Haran, and Yahweh says to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” What happens next is amazing. We read, “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.” This is impressive stuff.

But not everything Abram does is impressive. Abram was way below the Sea of Galilee, past Bethel, past Jerusalem even, when a famine broke out in the land, so Abram went to Egypt. He was almost there when he leaned over and said to Sarai, “You know you are really beautiful, and I’m afraid these people will kill me and take you for a wife, so let’s tell everyone you are my sister and they’ll let me live.” But someone from Pharaoh’s household hears about how beautiful this woman is and Sarai is taken in as a concubine. Her “brother” Abram makes out well with this; he’s paid with sheep, oxen, slaves, donkeys, camels, but Yahweh is not pleased and the Pharaoh and his house suffer great plagues. Pharaoh has a fit, “Why did you not tell me she was your sister. Take her and get out of here.” Personally, this story has never won Abraham any points with me. Abram is not perfect. It’s clear here that God has God’s eye on Abram and Sarai, and Abram doesn’t seem to know that yet. He knows Yahweh told him to go and he went, but Abram hasn’t yet learned exactly who he’s dealing with in this LORD.

After Abram and his nephew Lot part company because the extended family has simply gotten too big, life is prosperous, but it isn’t peaceful for long. Another war has broken out and his nephew is taken captive. Abram leads his men into battle and rescues Lot. The King of Salem (or Jerusalem) Melchizedek brings out bread and wine, for he was priest of El, the God Most High, and he blessed Abram, in the name of the maker of heaven and earth.” Yahweh speaks again, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram laments, “I have no son.” And Yahweh reassures, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.”
“And Abram believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Centuries later Paul will write, “Abraham grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised to him as righteousness.” It’s not a creed, a set of theories, posing the right tenets that will save us. We don’t remember Abraham as a great theologian. We are saved in relationship with the Holy One, as we act in faith to be in right relationship with our God. This relationship is marked with a ritual and after sundown in the darkness, a smiling fire pot and a flaming torch pass between pieces of Abram’s offering, and Yahweh makes a covenant with Abram.
Time keeps passing, as is its wont, and still, no child, and Sarai is clearly well past child bearing years. The couple is in their 60s now. What could God be thinking? How will God possibly keep this promise? Maybe, maybe she thinks, we’re supposed to help. Maybe God means for us to take the initiative her. She gives Abram her slave-girl, her handmaiden, and tells her husband to conceive a child with this woman, for, legally, that child will belong to Sarai, as well as to Abram. Abram consents; Hagar conceives, and you’ve all watched enough television to know what happens next. Neither Sarai nor Hagar feel whole or safe or beloved or properly honored now. Sarai is mean, and Hagar runs. The angel of the LORD finds Hagar by a spring of water in the wilderness, and assures her that her son, Ishamel, will be the son of many. It is Hagar, a slave girl, one used to be cast aside that now speaks with the Holy One. She names the LORD who spoke to her, “You are El-roi.” She says, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”

God calls us and offers us each to be an opportunity for God to bless the world. If we truly take seriously our roles as living temples of the Holy Spirit, of the living, healing, loving, forgiving and resurrecting God, the world will be blessed by God’s work through us. As people of faith we know that God may well tell us to go somewhere without telling us what will happen when we get there. We know we may not always be full of trust and our acts may sometimes belie our faith, but we also know that God will teach us and not give up on us. It is possible for us to grow in faith and in love and to love the Lord our God with our whole hearts.

The Cry of Ishmael

2010-05-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

Genesis 21: 11-21
This is not the first time Hagar has found herself weeping in the wilderness. The first time she had run away after being treated harshly by Sarai. The angel of the LORD comes and sends her home; she says of herself that she had seen God and lived – an astonishing event for anyone, but for a woman and a slave? Almost too incredible to fathom. Here in chapter 21, Hagar’s grief is even greater, for the child has been born, and her son has drunk the last of the water, and she has left him to die, trying to move away from the sound of her cries until she simply seems to drown them out with her heart-rendering wailing. This time she has been sent away by the father of her child. This time God has approved of the banishment. This time she must be utterly lost. Any parent reading this text and allowing it into our hearts, must ache, must try to pull away from the horror of the image of our dying child.
But in this text, this time, the action seems motivated more by Ishamael and his cries than by Hagar. God hears the voice of the boy (a familiar motif in the Hebrew Scriptures: people cry out, people wail, and God hears and God responds). God shows her a well, water to sustain her and her son, and God assures her that they will live, that Ishmael will father a people.
And so it happens. The descendents of Ishmael, relatives of the Hebrew people, flourish. Many, many centuries later, some four hundred years after Christ has come, these people will turn to God in a way that seems strange perhaps to their Jewish and Christian neighbors. The descendents of Ishmael cry out that there is indeed One God, the One to whom we are called to submit. Islam is born.
What are we to make of our family tree? The promise, God says, comes through Isaac. The covenant that God had in mind when calling Abraham, that covenant is through Isaac and his descendants. But now we see that God is God of all peoples, revealed through relationship particularly with Jews, but God of all. Paul says that Gentiles are grafted onto the family tree through Christ, that they, we, become adopted children.
Wouldn’t we do well to remember that the people born of Ishmael are on the tree too? God heard his cry. God answered.

Genesis 21: 1-10

2010-03-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

Genesis 21: Part One, verses 1-10
When I was little and we were late leaving for someplace, five children and my mom already in the car and waiting for Dad, I remember my mom muttering not quite under her breath, “That man is slower than God.”
Sometimes waiting for God to reveal something, or answer something, or keep some promise can seem like a lifetime. For Abraham and Sarah, the first real fruit of God’s promises did almost take a lifetime. Finally though, Isaac is born, and just as the psalmist will later write, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30) Finally Sarah is laughing not with skepticism but with joy, deep and grateful and powerful joy.
I imagine that she must have fed off of that joy for quite some time. I bet that she was kind to the neighbors, forgiving to her husband, that she hummed while she worked on most days. I wonder if she wasn’t even friendly with Hagar, that other woman who had given birth to her husband’s other son. When we are feeling blessed and our joy overflows, we can be lavish with life, with our attention and forbearance and acceptance. We can afford to be generous, for we are ever so aware of all we have been given and absolutely every good thing seems possible.
But this doesn’t last forever. No, in my experience it never does. I have never been able to hold onto this joy, this abundant love and lavish grace for long enough. God does something marvelous, and I know myself to be beloved of the Holy One, and something opens up in me so that I am able to be free and whole and generous. And then, the luster of it all wears off, I guess. The everyday reasserts itself, and I fail to notice the blessings inherent in the everyday. There is no longer enough love in me to go around, it seems. I close up and hoard again, need to guard what “little” I have.
This seems to me to be what happens to Sarah. Isaac is weaned. Her baby, the only baby she will ever have, is grown into a child. Life must seem to be rushing by so fast. “Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac.” Suddenly there is not enough to go around, and she says to her husband, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” There are not enough goats or sheep or tents or valuables to trade. There is not, I suspect, in her eyes, enough love. What was lavish is now not good enough. Someone must be hurt.
We all know this drama. We’ve lived it. Sometimes we’ve been Sarah, and sometimes we’ve been Hagar. What do you think it will take for us to spend more time in the lavish places, to be more aware in every moment of the abundant and steadfast love of the One who made us and who made that other, of the One who adores us and also adores that other? Why won’t we believe that there is enough of the good stuff, enough of the love, to go around?

Genesis 20: Abimelech

2010-02-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

Genesis 20
Here we go again. Lest we believe that the patriarchs always learned from their mistakes, we see Abraham again letting Sarah be taken as some kind of concubine. As I said in writing about chapter 12, when this happened last time, we need never think that God can works wonders only through especially holy and noble people. God works through very fallible people who are at least aware enough to know they need God, and at least in love with God enough to trust God, and at least obedient enough to attempt to follow God. Abraham allows Abimelech to take Sarah to save his own skin. I am less than thrilled with the man. In verse 16 it seems that Abimelech is far more concerned with Sarah’s welfare and reputation than her husband is.
But as I read chapter 20 this time, I am struck not by anything Abraham does, but by God’s care for Abimelech, a foreigner, one outside the promise. The Hebrew Scriptures proclaim boldly and often that the Jews are the chosen people of God, in special covenant with the Holy One. I believe this. Again and again in scriptures, God shows care for people who are not of the Jews. God works through people who are not within this covenant. God is God of all and is perfectly capable of loving and caring for everyone. I believe this, too. It is very dangerous to think of ourselves as the favored ones, the ones most loved. Such arrogance leads us into belittling and betraying the vocation of loving others to which God calls us. God comes to Abimelech in a dream and has intervened in events to protect him. In this story Abimelech is the noble one, and Abraham . . . not so much.
Just as in the story before when Yahweh speaks with Abraham about his plans for Sodom and Gomorrah, God invites Abraham into participating in the care for others. Verses 7 and 17 indicate that God wants Abraham to pray for Abimelech and his people. Abraham’s prayers for others matter. Despite his failings, Abraham is called prophet. Abraham is one who speaks with God.
This all should teach us something, shouldn’t it? Do we ever make the mistake of thinking that because God cares for us, God cannot care so much for some other group or sort of people? For whom should we be praying? If we believe that we have been given the privilege of speaking with God, doesn’t it matter very much what we say? On whose behalf should you be praying?

Genesis 19

2010-02-19T07:25:00.000-08:00

Somehow the thought of reading this chapter again depresses me. Instead of eagerly encountering the words on the page, I imagine all the arguments the text engenders, all the ways in which the story has been put to use.
The mere mention of the city’s name, “Sodom,” sends blood pressures soaring. It makes me tired. This is not a story about the evil of homosexuality. It is a cultural assumption that homosexuality is outside the norm, and that fact has its effect in the story, but the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are not coming under judgment because too many gay people live there. The one glimpse we have of them speaks of violence and brutality far more than of sexuality.
And even when I understand the cultural thrust of the events of the story -- the deep-seated, essential-for-survival ethic of hospitality is not only stepped on here but ground into the dust and vomited upon – emotionally and “soulfully”, I cannot move past Lot offering his daughters up for rape. I understand, I think, how we are supposed to understand the act as one of sacrifice for another, but I have three daughters, and you have got to be kidding me. And I have a hard time reading this as Lot offering up what matters most to him (even though he does put his own person in danger) because of how little standing women often have in the world.
Leave it to say that this text unsettles me in a thousand ways. And, actually, I suppose therein lies much of its value. When we make judgments it is often within the messy, roiling, complexities of passions and conflicting ethics and pushed buttons. This sort of situation, with more emotion and twists and horror than I want to allow into my consciousness, is what all our crime dramas and exposes on tv thrive upon. I just don’t want to go here today. I’d love to be able to go to verse 26, decide this is a story made up to describe some awesome land formations in the region (check out the DVD of Bruce Feidler’s Walking the Bible to see these; they’re cool), and move on.
The judgment of the LORD is a theme that will recur though. I’m not going to be able to skip it every time. In chapter 18 the will-be-great patriarch Abraham is invited into contemplating the judgment of a group’s behavior. When we look back on history and think about mass horrors like the Holocaust and Rwanda and US slavery and the extermination of Native Americans and the stealing of Aboriginie children and of a college student being beaten to death for being gay – don’t all these beg for God’s judgment, and don’t “we” try to get in on that. What’s enough goodness within a culture or group of people to make it worth saving? Think for a moment about the way that question is threaded throughout the entire collection of scripture: God floods the world and then regrets it; the nations of Israel and Judah fall; God incarnate takes death on the cross. What do we deserve? How good to we have to be not to get what we deserve? Who will suffer for what? What is God going to do about all the evil in the world? Do we – me and the people I love – have to be punished too?
What I have come to believe is that I dare not read this story and identify only with Lot. If I am going to read it I think I also have to be willing to see myself as a citizen of Sodom. What then?
Then, I need God. Then, only the seemingly untenable love and transforming power of God can do anything at all.
What do you do with this story?

Genesis 18: Part Two

2010-02-11T04:45:00.000-08:00

It's that question we are still asking: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked, so that righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (v. 24-25) People of faith have been plagued with questions of theodicy (the defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil)forever, it seems.
What does God's judgment look like? How can God be merciful and just? Is God's version of justice like ours? When something bad happens is it God's judgment? Why do bad things happen to good people? You know the questions. We've all wrestled with them in one way or another. The scriptures wrestle with the same questions, and there isn't one simple explanation that wins the day. Deuteronomy insists that a righteous life will bring blessings. The story of Job puts this into question. People of faith keep asking questions. It's important to me that we are allowed to ask, and it's fascinating to me that in this text God may still be figuring out what God is going to do.
We want God to be in charge. We want God to pull strings and protect the people we love (who may or not be the righteous; truthfully we want them protected simply because we love them). We want the world to be fair, even when it so clearly isn't. And the truth is that if it were fair, our lives might be a bit less privileged. What is fate; what is the hand of God; what is coinicidence; what is the result of decisions we have made. . . ?
In this story, God is in the questions with us. I do believe that God judges. I do not believe that God punishes. I do believe that we bear the consequences of our sins. I do see that this doesn't necessarily happen in a fair or equitable way. I hold on to all the promises of grace. I know I don't know, really, what's going on. I hope with faith that in the end all shall be well.
These questions of life and death and the nature of God are not questions we can afford to simply put on a shelf. Perhaps for ourselves we can reach some stalemate or some plausible resolution for a time, but in a world where our neighbors suffer and the church proclaims a loving and just and powerful God, we need to be willing to talk with those who would question God. We need to assure them that God is big enough to be with them in the questions. And we have to stop pretending that we have all the answers.

Talking with God: Part One

2010-02-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

Genesis 18: Part One
This has been one of my favorite stories since I was about eleven or twelve years old, and I hardly know where to begin to talk about it. It’s fascinating and complicated and mysterious from the very first lines. “The LORD appeared to Abraham” and when he looked up he “saw three men standing near him.” The grammar of the text won’t line up properly. Perhaps because the experience won’t be pinned down. To the three men Abraham said, “My lord. . . .” He uses the singular to address the three, but then offers the plural “yourselves” water with which to wash and bread to eat. We are clearly to understand that Abraham is encountering God here. What’s hard to fathom is exactly what that experience was like. Of course, I understand that. It truly is hard to convey to someone else what an experience of God is like. Just as when God wrestles with Jacob several chapters from now, God does not seem willing to be pinned down. And our language, even our minds, can’t contain the immensity of the Holy One.
Franz Rosenzweig wrote this: “The story opens by saying that God appeared to Abraham, but when Abraham applies the vision to his own world he suddenly sees three men standing before him. Abraham is the religious man par excellence for he sees God in the human situation.” Is this how we are to understand the story, that in a particular human interaction, Abraham perceives God? Later, in chapter 19, two of the three men are referred to as angels. Angels means “messengers,” and tradition has understood them as beings of special powers who worship God, do God’s bidding and bear God’s messages. So, are two of them angels and one of them God? God appeared in human form? Wouldn’t that be rather amazing? How did Abraham recognize Yahweh? Did he know immediately? If Jesus walked into my office now, would I know it? My mind is spinning with ideas of the incarnation and all that is implied in the very notion that the Spirit of God can dwell in human beings.
The mere fact that humans can communicate with the Holy One, that the Holy One wishes, chooses, to communicate with humankind – that’s astonishing. In verse 16 Abraham walks with the two men as they begin the rest of their journey, and Yahweh seems to stay behind and think. Will God decide to reveal something of the mind of God to Abraham? Yes. And it also seems, from verse 20, that God will be both with Abraham by the oaks of Mamre and in Sodom and Gomorrah judging the outcry there.
As we read verse 22 it does seems like we are more in a vision than in every day reality. (Which is not to imply that it is not “real.”) Abraham draws near to God and seems already to know what is on God’s mind, even though we never see him being told. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” It’s a question we are still asking, isn’t it?

Genesis 17 Circumcision. . .

2010-01-26T05:24:00.001-08:00

Genesis 17
Again, the covenant, the promises made by God. You wonder if all this repetition is perhaps the result of the way Genesis was woven and edited together over the years, taking oral histories and stories and shaping them into a book about people and God for the people of God. But then, it also seems right to me that God would repeat God’s self and that Abram (know Abraham) would hear it a little differently each time. God has to tell me the same thing again and again, and my understanding transforms over time.
You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. (v. 11) . . . Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. (v. 14)
It is hard for us to comprehend how meaningful this outward sign of an inner commitment became to the Hebrew people. Contemporary American Protestant Christians are not so big on outward signs. We wonder how something like this could matter so much. We hypothesize that perhaps the real reason God commanded this to them was for hygiene, not so much faith.
But I wonder if maybe we aren’t missing the point, and I also wonder if we haven’t lost something by so adamantly shunning outward signs. When God calls these people “holy,” that doesn’t mean that they are self-righteous or better than other people. (God is always ranting about how “stiff-necked”, stubborn they are.) God means that they are separate, marked as God’s, for God: “an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” (v. 7b) They circumcised themselves; they ate differently; they kept the Sabbath. Over time, many practices developed which marked them as distinctly different. All those people traveling between the kingdoms of Egypt and those of Mesopotamia could see that there was something different about these people. And getting dressed, making a meal, living out their week, they lived differently, with a different focus and purpose. Sure, outward signs can be just that, but this outward sign was always intended to be more. We read in Deuteronomy 10:16: “Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer. For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome. . . .” This is supposed to be about remembering God, that they are bound to God in covenant, in permanent relationship.
What do we do to remember, again and again and continuously, our connection to the Holy One?
By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already suffered persecution because of being marked as Yahweh’s people. During the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV Jews who kept the Sabbath, for example, were put to death. It was no easy path to keep the ways of the LORD.
Deciding that circumcision was no longer required, as Paul insists, could not have been an easy manner. We need to keep this in mind when we’re reading Acts and Galatians about the battle within the Jewish community. Yes, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, all are equal and free. But it is not easy to give up practices that have defined who we are.

2010-01-22T09:10:00.000-08:00

Genesis 16
Okay, so you believe you know what God would have you do, and you plot out that course in your mind and heart. But nothing seems to happen. God doesn’t seem to be doing God’s part, so you decide that God must have meant something else. Or you think that maybe God meant you to help out in some way, that you need to do whatever God actually meant.
This is where Sarai and Abram find themselves. They get tired of waiting. They begin to doubt. They start with the “God must have meant. . . .” And then everything falls apart.
It can be so very hard to figure out how to live our lives. Even we are striving to be faithful, anxiety and doubt and impatience can lead us away from who we actually are and what we are called to do in the world. God can be so very slow. And we can be so very certain.
And, besides, sometimes God does want us to do something. Sometimes we are not supposed to simply wait. But, truthfully, waiting is never simple. It always takes effort, effort to keep listening, effort to keep trusting, effort to keep on with the every day with some measure of joy and peace. Waiting is really hard.
When Sarai gets her bright idea about editing God’s promise and taking a path that seems much more plausible, everyone is hurt. Sarai is ripped apart with jealousy. Abram is stuck and seems to withdraw from the situation. And Hagar. . . it’s unbearably awful for her. No one had considered the effect of all this on her.
She is the one to whom Yahweh now turns. Again, we read of an angel, a messenger of God, but Hagar insists that she actually saw God directly somehow, saw God and lived. God goes looking for her. God goes looking for the one who seems to be outside the promise. What God has her do seems terribly hard, but, of course, what options did Hagar really have? God assures her that God is with her, hears her, that she matters to him, and that her child will have a future. Hagar names this God who speaks to her. She calls him “God sees.” It must have been lovely to her not to have been invisible anymore, to be more than a container for someone else’s will.
Oh, God, help us to hear and to listen again and to hear some more. May we walk in your ways so that we do not cause pain to others. May we walk in your ways so that we can become the people we are created and called to be.
And, thank you. Thank you for always seeing the people we cast aside in our blindness. Help us to see, too.

2010-01-14T09:03:00.000-08:00

Genesis 15
I find myself pausing with the opening line: “the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision.” How do we describe in mere words what it is like to encounter or engage with God. I think about this all the time as I read the scriptures. I think of how these words are an approximation of an experience that was so intimate and real and unquantifiable. When God speaks to us, how do we prove it? We are so unpracticed at God talk. Who did Abram tell about his encounter? How did he put it into words? What is the gap between what happened and what the first listener heard?
I do trust we have enough here, that the Word of God can be heard in and through these words which have been passed down these thousands of years. But I wonder, too, what it must have actually been like, this vision. People still have visions of God. Here we have one of Abraham’s; some two thousand years later Paul will refer to visions he has. They don’t say, “Something happened to me that wasn’t real, but let me share it any way.” This Godspeak, this vision was so real to Abram that he lived his life with it in mind.
What words does God speak to us that are that powerful? How do we hear them or sense them or envision them? Do we go around supposing that there was a time when Yahweh communicated with very special human beings, but that God would no longer do such a thing?
The covenant ceremony here is fascinating to me: it’s a sort of ritual meal. Abram asks God for reassurance, for some indication that what God has promised will really come true. The first step in the assurance is for Abram to do something just because God has said it: go get some meat. Abram actually appears to go do some hunting and get some meat, enough for quite a feast. He waits. He sits there for hours, shooing away the predator birds, and waiting. At twilight, Abram falls asleep and falls into a deep and terrifying darkness. In the Jewish Publication Society translation of the Torah, it reads “a great dark dread descended upon him.” Abram is dreaming now, and the dream is real. The assurance of the promise is a strange one: besides the fact that your descendants will be as numerous as the stars, you should also know that life won’t be easy for them. There will be a time of slavery and oppression. Is the bad news supposed to prove the truth of the promise? Or is the assurance meant to be that God will share something of what God knows with Abram? Is the assurance that despite whatever horrible things may happen, God is still with them?
The dream continues and the covenant is made. God has sealed the deal with a meal and some fire.
From the very beginning, being the chosen people never meant being the people who have it easy. God chooses to work through these people, to save the world through these people. But it won’t be easy. It won’t be all that long before one of these chosen people will say, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

2009-12-27T04:59:00.000-08:00

Genesis 14: Part Two
King Melchizedek of Salem – only a real bible geek or the graduate of a rigorous Sunday School class would know who this is, yet the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews comes back to him some two thousand years later to draw a comparison between this king /priest and Jesus the Christ. (Hebrews 6:19ff)
Salem is Jerusalem, Jerusalem long before King David made it the capital of a nation and long before King Solomon built Yahweh’s temple there. This is the only mention of Jerusalem in the torah (the first five books of the bible), and El Elyon, the ancient high god of the Canaanite gods, was worshiped there. King Melchizedek of Salem was a priest of this “God Most High.” He brings out bread and wine for a sacrificial meal – how else does one share communion with a god? – and blesses Abram in the name of this “maker of heaven and earth.” Here is a meal with god and humans done in the name of peace.
How are we to understand this event? Is El Yahweh? Why would Abraham respond with a tithe – ten per cent – to such a prayer to a Canaanite god when he has made covenant with Yahweh? Did Abraham consider El to be another name for Yahweh? Or was this god “close enough”? How are we to understand “other” gods?
Melchizedek became an image of the ideal king who is also the priest of a people. We see this in psalm 110:4: “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’” His name means “king of righteousness,” and we see him here as the King of Salem, and salem means peace. The covenant is with Abraham and his descendants, yet God appears to be worshiped by these others, too. Can it be that God is allowed to operate outside the lines we understand to be drawn? Has God, perhaps, always loved the whole world?

Genesis 14: Part One

2009-12-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

I confess that I very nearly skipped this chapter. I thought maybe no one would notice or no one would care. Then I remembered something I read in a book by Philip Yancey – at least, I think that’s where it was. The claim was that people of Afghanistan ate up the Old Testament, that it made sense to them in ways perhaps the newer testament didn’t. They could relate to it. So, I reread chapter 14 and then I stopped and I prayed for the people of Afghanistan, all of them. And I prayed for our soldiers there, and for soldiers from other nations, and for the aid workers from various places. Then, I prayed especially hard for the terrorists hiding out in the hillsides.
You see, I don’t know what else to do besides pray. Some four thousand years ago, tribes of people were fighting each other in what we have come to think of as the Holy Lands. The notes in my study bible tell me that this section is important because it proves true the curse Noah put on his grandson Canaan in chapter nine. Ham (Canaan’s father) had seen Noah’s drunken nakedness, while Shem and Japheth showed more respect. So, Noah cursed Canaan and his descendants, willing that they would be an enslaved people.
It all makes my heart tired, achy and so very tired. There is a line of thought, a trail of theology in the Hebrew Scriptures in which God blesses those who do right and curses those who do wrong, and in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. I accept some measured truth in that: when we do the right thing, life has things in it that are easier. But bad things still happen to good people. The mistakes and wrongs I commit do in fact affect my children, and so it goes through the generations. But their ailments and dilemmas are not punishment from God for something I have done; they are consequences sometimes, and sometimes they are unrelated. There is a line of thought in the scriptures in which we are to understand that God takes side in battles and God sends troops into war and God even orders the wholesale slaughter of entire cities. But we are also told that God loves all people and that God craves peace.
In the midst of all this, I look to Jesus. It’s what I do when I cannot understand God, for while I have no hope of actually fully comprehending God, I also, in my paradoxical way, believe that God wishes to be known to us. God, in some measured way, reveals God’s self to us. The best, most complete, example of this is the incarnation of God in Jesus. God took flesh and dwelt amongst us. So, I look to Jesus.
I think if Jesus were in the midst of this battle, he would be praying. I have a hard time even imagining what else he would be doing, but I think when he taught us to love our enemies he meant it.
Now, don’t jump to conclusions too quickly. I am not without anxiety in these questions. Did Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that pastor who longed to study peace with Gandhi, do the right thing in taking part in the plot to assassinate Hiltler? If I’d had a gun to defend the Rwandans against the machetes, would I have used it? Do I want the peacekeepers in Darfur (more were killed this past week) to fire back when the refugee camps are raided? What should we do about Afghanistan?
I don’t know.
Sometimes I begin to read the bible, this record of people’s lived experience of God, and I swirl off into questions about how to live now. I wonder what the Word of God in and through these words really is. What are we to do? Today, the best I can do is to pray and to do my best to pray with great love. For I believe that God so loves the whole world and that Jesus is the Prince of Peace and that Isaiah’s vision of swords being turned into ploughshares is a real hope. So, I pray for God’s grace and God's lavish, reality-shattering love to be in and through us all. I pray for us all, friends and foe. And, oh, how I wish we could give that baby Jesus the gift of peace this Christmas.

Genesis 12

2009-11-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

Genesis 11: 31 – 13: 1
This is where we first meet Abraham and Sarah, though at this point their names are still Abram and Sarai. Yahweh tells Abram to go, to move, and the wondrous thing is that Abram does. Some two thousand years later, Paul is till marveling at Abraham’s faith in believing God. Some four thousand years later, we are still marveling.
How did Abram hear God? How did he know for sure that it was God who was speaking? Why did he trust in the promises? How can we live that kind of relationship with God, that kind of faithfulness? What does this mean for us?
The LORD tells Abram that God will make a great nation of him and that God will bless him and that, indeed, all the world will be blessed through him. What a marvelous promise: you matter and you always will. You matter to me. Isn’t that what we all want to hear?
Sometimes we are tempted to think that the patriarchs, those great figures of the bible that have become models of faith, are different than we are. Sure, they were heroes, and God spoke to them, and told them what to do. But that’s them, not us. They are in a different category.
It isn’t true. Read the whole chapter. Abram is not some infallible, godlike human. He profits over giving his wife over to be part of the Pharaoh’s harem. Imagine what Sarai goes through. And Abram profits over it. The faithful father Abraham, the one whose praises are sung, does such a thing? How can it be?
The people God chooses are not exemplary portraits of humanity. They are human. What is remarkable is that they listen to God, and even in this they are not perfect. If Abram had fully trusted God at this point in his life, would he have been afraid of the Pharaoh. Oh, yes, he had faith. Enough to pick up his family and move along a great journey toward the unknown, but he did not have perfect faith. He was still afraid of things.
This story should fill us with hope because God can use us even when we are so very unfinished and imperfect. This story also might leave us with a bit of trepidation, too, however, and even for the same reason. God can use us. Right now, today -- not simply when we become more perfect.
What might God call us to next? Will we go?

The Tower of Babel

2009-11-22T04:45:00.001-08:00

The Tower of Babel. It's a fun Sunday School lesson. We get to play with blocks and knock things over. But grown ups often wonder why this story is here. The Wikipedia entry (it does have some cool pictures) refers to a "vengeful God" shutting down the building project. Why thwart humanity so?
After the flood and the new beginning for humanity, the people had one language and seemed to be able to unite long enough to get something done: "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." Humankind wanted to glorify humankind, reaching up to the heavens with their power. The venture makes Yahweh nervous: "this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them." Now, God could have sent some fire and brimstone and destroyed the whole thing, I suppose. Instead, God confused their language so that they could not understand one another's speech, and God moved them around the face of the earth. The people stopped building and called the city Babel, meaning "to confuse."
Is God's action here some autocrat's petulance, or is it a gift of some kind? Maybe what we already "know" and have decided about God influences the spin we put on God's motive here. I believe God loves humankind and has great dreams for us. It seems to me that the building of the Tower of Babel was a lot of unified effort into the wrong cause: "let us make a name for ourselves." A common motive for human behavior, but what does it really get you?
Thousands and thousands of years later, there will be another time of babbling, a time when it seems like tongues are confused. On the day of Pentecost, Jews who had been scattered all over the Mediterranean and around the vast Roman Empire each hear the good news of God's kingdom and the power of the love of God in Jesus Christ in their own language. (see the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles) It is a huge sound of "babel" and yet there is meaning in it. Meaning because each can understand, and meaning because what is said is not about human glory, but about life lived in the power and freedom and joy of the Holy Spirit. This confusion causes Jews from all over to gather together to listen to the Word of God. When the Spirit of the Living God enters the people, they become an amazing building, a Temple of the Holy Spirit. They are united in Christ and knit together in God's love. They will come to see that there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free, no divisions that can block the freedom and power of life in God.

2009-10-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

As we saw last time I wrote, I have a hard time staying inside the Noah story. I cannot imagine a God drowning children – not even when God’s heart was broken. But that doesn’t mean that I can simply reject this story or edit out the parts I don’t like. Why is this here? How do I make sense of it? How do I read this scripture in light of the entire Scripture? There are many places in the bible that give me pause. You’ll see – many places. I have to allow myself and my understanding of God and the world to be challenged by them, and I have to read them in relationship to all I have read and lived.
When I read this story in Genesis, I think mostly of the passion and commitment God has for humankind.
I know it’s skipping ahead, but read Hosea. Even in the first chapter, poor God is so torn. How can the LORD lay claim to the people who do such things, to children who have sworn covenant love and then turned their backs, to priests who neglect the poor, and to teachers who know so very little of what it is to love. You can hear God screaming “You are not my people” and still in God’s heart of hearts longing to call them “Children of the living God.”
How do we express the passion of God? This is not some clockmaker deity who sets things running and then moves on to tinker with the next project. This is the God who created and called it good. This is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. This is the God who promises and wrestles and speaks even in utter silence. This is the One who gets One’s hands dirty in our clay.
Hosea offers these images. Think of this God as the husband who keeps loving through a wife’s utter unfaithfulness. Think of this God as father to a child that is not his, a loving father who teaches his child to walk. Think of this God as an attacking lion who has nothing left to do but ravage. Think of this God as the mother bear after you’ve stolen her cubs. Imagine if God really did simply go away until we had our act together. This God wants steadfast love more than anything, but our love is like a morning cloud, like dew that evaporates with the rising of the sun. This God rages with love and hope and desire that can find no satisfaction in humankind – yet can only, somehow and incredibly, find satisfaction in human kind. What is God to do?
God, O thankfully, God remembers God’s self : “For I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:9) “I am like an evergreen cypress; your faithfulness comes from me.” (Hosea 14:8)
And here, in this space of wonder and of passion, come the cross and the resurrection. Jesus loves. God incarnate loves. No matter what we do to him, the incarnate God loves. Sin and death will not reign, for the kingdom of God is at hand. God will live no matter we do. And this God will pull us into life, into resurrected possibility. It is almost too much for the heart to conceive.
First, as it is in the story, we recognize the evil that we do, that we allow, that we neglect to fight, this evil is so vast and so horrendous that our hearts and minds cannot take it in. We might sometimes join God in wishing all this ugliness away. There’s that flood. The flood cannot be the end of the story though. For we remember the good. We remember the two being as one. We remember walking in the garden with God. We remember caring for creation as God’s partner. We remember that we are created in the image of the Holy One. We remember what we might be, and we look to the rainbows, those fleeting rainbows with all the hope and faith we can muster. We need those glimmers of God in our lives to remember all that the kingdom of God might be.
Next week: we babel.

Genesis 6:5 -Genesis 9:17

2009-09-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” Genesis 6: 5-7
Sometimes I “deal with” this story by juxtaposing Genesis with the flood stories of Mesopotamia, like the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Abraham came from Mesopotamia and would have brought this flood story with him, the one in which Enlil the storm god floods the world because there are too many noisy humans in it. When the Hebrew people tell this story, they tell of a different God. Yahweh would not act so petulantly; Yahweh would only destroy the world if Yahweh’s heart were broken because humankind proved to be only evil and violent. And note that it’s a broken heart, not righteous rage.
Something deep within me is moved each time I read of God’s grief and regret. We affect God. God is so invested in us that what we do touches God so profoundly that God reacts. This is not some self-sufficient, unchangeable perfection. This is One who craves relationship, who opens up within God’s own self a space of vulnerability, a possibility for intimacy and for pain. This All Powerful God forfeits some measure of power to the people God creates. The Bible is always a story of relationship; can God and humankind find a way to be in true relationship? God wants this. God has given God’s heart to it. God will give Christ to it. God incarnate will suffer and die rather than betray the bond between God and humanity.
The flood story seems so very different to me from the story of the cross. Here in Genesis, God seems to act out of pain with immense violence; in the cross God bears immense violence and pain for the sake of love.
How do we understand this change? Do you see a change? I’ve been reading the conversation recorded in Bill Moyers Genesis. The chapter on the flood is called “Apocalypse” and seven men and women debate the meaning of the flood story. I know there are lots of animals we can paint onto the walls and that rainbows are pretty, but why in the world do we put this story into nurseries? Has anybody read the story? Do we ever think about what it means?
I don’t want to sum this up in one blog. I want to live with this story for a while and see where it takes me. So, here it is, Genesis 6:5 through Genesis 9:17. Will you read it and ponder it with me?
And for extra credit in the kingdom of God (smile): I keep thinking of the way God is portrayed in the book of Hosea, a minor prophet near the end of the Old Testament. Take this flood story, Hosea, and the cross. How do you understand God? Maybe that’s what I’ll write about next week.
Grace and peace to you. May the Spirit be at work in you as you live with these words of Scripture, and may we all rest in God.

Genesis 4: Cain and Abel

2009-09-16T10:24:00.001-07:00

“The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.’”
I wish I didn’t understand this passage. So much has gone so wrong so quickly. With passion and delight, God made this beautiful Creation. God entered into partnership with humanity, and now look. So much possibility, and this is what we do.
I cannot help but read this tale as a sort of parable for who we are. I watch my two oldest daughters at each other’s throats, behaving as if there isn’t enough love to go around. How could they think there isn’t enough love to go around? One moment they are devoted to each other, sharing clothes, laughing at the dinner table, being family. Suddenly, everything shifts, and venom flies. Distrust, blame, bitter resentment, envy in all its glory – they’re all there, these dark streams of the human heart.
The streams are in my heart, too – and they turn into oceans when you consider all the wars and battles of various sorts going on right now, as I write and as you read.
This seems to be the crux of the story to me: Cain feels rejected, feels not good enough. He could acknowledge that pain, the empty feeling. He could ask if there is some lack within him. Or, he could trust that he is loved despite how he feels in the moment. God warns Cain that he is in a dangerous place. But anger and blaming seem to be the easiest path for him. Let it be Abel’s fault.
In Grace (Eventually), Annie Lamott writes, “I seems to hang on to my hates because they help take my mind off the cracked reflection in the mirror.” Richard Rohr, in Jesus’ Plan for a New World, writes, “The ‘evil’ one must always be killed so that ‘I’ can be worthy, loved and moral. Another group, nationality, class or religion has to be named wrong so that ‘I’ can feel right.” It’s what we do. We assign blame somewhere outside ourselves, and we turn our hate there, and somehow we think that makes us safer. We worry about the speck in someone else’s eye rather than the log in our own. We judge others so that we do not have to judge ourselves.
Oh, Lord, give me the strength to recognize what is within me. Let me lay it out before you and trust that you will love me anyway. Don’t let me be pulled apart by how I feel today, but keep me held together in your abundant and steadfast love. If I can know myself beloved by you, I will have what I need to keep myself from the sin lurking at the door. Help me not turn my anger outward. Let me be free to love others as you love them. This is my prayer and my hope.
Forgive me when I am Cain, and heal me when I am Abel. Make me new in Christ, so I can be free in your love, free to love boldly and love well.

2009-09-09T14:54:00.000-07:00

Read Genesis 2.4-3
It’s so hard to read this story without other voices telling us what it means. Centuries of readers before us, from Augustine to our Sunday School teacher to skit writers for tv, have put ideas in us of what the story says and what we should take away.
I mean, there is no apple in the story. The apple (a popular fruit in Europe, not Mesopotamia) becomes the forbidden fruit years later when the scriptures are translated into Latin. It makes a nice pun because in Latin apple and bad are the same word. Genesis 3 doesn’t say anywhere that the serpent is Satan; that’s John Milton’s version of Paradise Lost in which Satan chooses to inhabit the serpent. (Well, okay, we can’t blame it all on Milton; Paul make some allusions, and 2 Enoch causes trouble, but all that is long after Genesis was written.) We call the story the Fall, but it doesn’t say that anywhere, nor does it mention original sin. We read this text through lenses other people have made for us. Do they clarify or obscure the text?
This story has been far more of a foundation story for Christians than it has for the Jewish people. Jewish tradition reads these stories as a sort of primeval prologue to the patriarchs. We Christians want to build our theology upon it. I find myself wondering sometimes if that’s an unfortunate move.
Try opening the book and just reading. Clear your mind, say a prayer, and just read. What do you notice? What leaps out at you? How do you feel about what is happening?
I am struck that humankind is made of the common dust of a rainless earth and the very breath of God. In some ways that explains what happens in the rest of Genesis and in the other sixty five books. In this creation account, it doesn’t say that we are made in God’s image. This account was probably written about three or four hundred years before that in Genesis one. It doesn’t say that we are created in the image of God, but God’s Spirit is what enlivens us. So, in both accounts, we are made and we are very much not God. But in both accounts, there is something of God in us. How lovely. How true.
I read this rabbinic story in Bill Moyers book on Genesis: the rabbi says that if we want to keep balance in our lives, we should each have two pieces of paper. One says “I am but dust and ashes.” When you need that bit of wisdom, read that. The other says, “Bishvili Nivra haslam” which means “For my sake, the universe was created.” You might have one that says “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?” and another that says “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” If you are really brave, you could give copies of the verses to your spouse or a best friend and allow them to flash a card at the appropriate time. That would require a great deal of trust.
That also brings me to the creation of Eve in this account. Some people have read this as a story of subordination, but I think it says more about interdependence and essential sameness. “Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” What could mean more to us? While we are so often aware of the “otherness” of people, of how hard it is to know what they are thinking or feeling, of what a challenge it is to see the world through another’s eyes, this story calls forth the possibility that two could act as one. I find it rather astonishing. And hopeful. God calls to unity and relationship again and again and again and again. It seems to be what we are made for.
And unity and relationship seem to be what is broken when Eve and Adam eat the fruit that was forbidden to them. A voice of a creature God created, for God made the serpent( and in chapter one at least, declared it to be good), this voice suggests disobedience, makes a case for acting against what God has said. Why did God put the tree there in the first place? And isn’t knowledge good? Don’t we seem to be made for it? If we are created in the image of God, wouldn’t we want to know, to make choices, to be free to act, to learn, to try again. Yes, the terrible and fearful reality is that we so often act badly, even tragically, but not to be able to act. . . .?
And yet, we are not God. We are largely dust. God sets boundaries; that’s how creation comes into being in the first place in chapter one. God separates one thing from another. If God is God and we are not, God can tell us what to do. And we know that when one person in a relationship does something to break the trust, does something the other has forbidden, then there is pain and loss and sometimes exile. One of the writers in that Bill Moyers book on Genesis uses the metaphor of marriage and fidelity and infidelity (a common biblical image) to speak about what happens in the Garden. Walter Brueggemann (my very favorite Old Testament scholar!) writes, “You count on fidelity, but if it’s a real marriage, it’s not a closed book. With God, everything is always open for freedom and risk and healing and forgiveness and homecoming. The relationship always has to be renewed and rearticulated because a gamut of potential infidelities is always available.” I can break God’s heart in ten thousand different ways. And God has at least that many ways of forgiving and of making life between us possible again.

Reading Scripture

2009-09-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

The Things I Think I Know That Guide Me in Engaging with Scripture

God is beyond our ken, abundant in mystery, and the truth of God would pop my little mind.

The point of the whole reading endeavor is to know the Living God and to live forth in great love.

Jesus, God incarnate, is the best revelation of God. To try to understand what we can about God, we look to Jesus Christ.

God’s Spirit at work is what makes the words of scripture the Living Word. Prayer and reading go hand in hand.

The words in the Bible are words of humans who are inspired by, wrestling with, enamored of, adored by God. They refract the experience of God to us. They are lenses through which we read.

We are made to be in community, and we will find more truth together, listening and responding to one another, than we will alone.

Truth is not simple or one-dimensional or found only in fact.

If the word of God is truly living and active, “sharper than any two-edged sword” and if it is to be “able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” I must allow it to read me. I must subject myself, my assumptions, my fears to the word of God. I must not try to be in control of the text before me. I must let it surprise, confuse, delight, heal, rebuke, challenge, encourage, uphold me.

Scripture must be read in light of scripture. The whole story needs to be read in order to better understand the part. Everything must be read in light of what we know to be most true about God.

It’s okay not to know.

God’s love is the best and most unthwartable part of the story. Test everything else you think you know against this.

What It Means to Read

2009-09-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

Two people can use the same word and mean radically different things by it. Each meaning may fall into the parameters of the official dictionary definition, but the real content of the word, the life it lives, is not the same when spoken by one person or another. Reading is one of those words.
I learned to read with Sally, Dick, Jane, Puff and Spot in first grade. In Miss Wample’s room we had reading circles in the back of the classroom, and there were different levels of these circles. I didn’t go to kindergarten and apparently didn’t achieve some magic benchmark, so there were weeks and weeks and unending weeks when a circle of especially blessed children were called to congregate in the back of the room while the rest of us were consigned to worksheets. Eventually, I was allowed to learn to read, too. And I read for all I was worth. In the center of my heart I can still find that six year old Katie on the day I was told that I could move up a reading level. About time . . . .
I have three daughters now, and I have watched the schools teach and evaluate reading. They worry over the mechanics: can you sound the words out, can you repeat the facts after you are done reading, can you answer some comprehension questions on a multiple choice test. If you do these things well, you are a good reader.
Reading means more than that to me. Reading means making meaning in an intimate act with another’s consciousness. Reading means bringing your whole life and whole self into communion with someone’s version of what it is to live and be. Reading is suspending what you already think and feel and believe – while never really losing your own self – enough to be affected and vulnerable and changeable. Reading is wrestling with an other who challenges you to go new places. Reading is trying out a new way of perceiving the universe. Reading is offering yourself up to a chance to grow. We read stories and newspaper accounts and situations and people and our own lives. Whether or not we read deeply or with reflection depends on choices we make, but we are all reading all the time.
So, what about reading the Bible?
The scriptures contain God experiences going back thousands of years. Individual people, communities, editors, leaders, prophets have recorded their stories, their shaped tellings of their lives with God. They believed, and I believe, that God can be found in and through our everydays and our histories. They tried to put life with God into words.
When I read, when I bring all I have lived of God to my encounter s with these words, they come alive. I believe the Spirit of the Living God works in me to speak to me and to change me and to open my heart when I read. I believe that these are living words and that I can catch glimmers of the Living God when I read them. I pray to listen for and to hear -- and to act upon -- the Word of God as it is found in and through these words.

Genesis 1 -2:3

2009-09-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

It is early afternoon on a Tuesday, September 1st, to be exact. My work week begins on Tuesdays, so these mornings are always full to overflowing. I’m behind when I start, or, at least, it feels that way. I try to remember that I love my work – most of it. Even the tasks that seem to go against my nature need to be done so that the “good stuff” can actually happen, so I try to like those parts, too, rather than just grit my teeth and “go to work.” In order to do my job, my vocation, I need to come up with words, and separate out ideas from each other so that I can make decisions. I need to arrange what I’ve been given (whether it be words, or storage boxes or curriculum pieces), and I need to come up with new possibilities.
So, a few minutes ago, I picked up another of my tasks: to start reading through the bible so that I can post my engagement with the scriptures and we can all then be in conversation, or at least, in contact. I got a cup of coffee and smiled. This part doesn’t seem like work. Opening the bible seems to me like a treat, a reward, a respite from the list of things to be done. Reading is glorious, and the bible always pulls me in.
Begin with the beginning. Bereshit. Genesis. I read about God working. Each day God does a little bit more. Each day has its own task – sometimes creating order, sometimes rearranging, sometimes making up something new. As God finishes each part, God says, “Good.”
Is that because what God did, the product itself, was good? Or, is that because what God was doing, the process itself, was good?
Yes. Both, I think.
The first chapter of Genesis is here insisting that the world is good, that God is in it, creating and endorsing and loving it, loving us. Driving along Riverside Drive, that bend where the road is briefly between the river and a pond, with the sun leaving behind one last petal pink surge of light over the river on my left and with the heron keeping guard over the quiet pond on my right – in that brief glimpse -- I echo that “good” of God’s and I give thanks. Watching my daughter tilt her head just so as she considers some new possibility, I echo that “good” of God’s and I give thanks. What has been made in this universe of ours is good.
And the making is good, too. The process, the commitment, the calling of all one’s resources and being and gifts for a single purpose, the act of creating and rearranging and imagining is good. Made in the image of the Holy One, we work. This, too, is good.
So, is the seventh day. The day of ceasing or of resting (shavat or Shabbat) is part of the story, too. God pauses. God finishes. God says enough for now. On the seventh day, God doesn’t seem to do anything. God blesses this day of not doing. God simply is.
And that is everything.