PAUL AND THE “SUPER APOSTLES”: Whether “Super Apostles” was a name they gave themselves, or whether it was one that Paul gave them in irony, they seem to have been a regular problem for the apostles of Jesus, in that they often followed up the work of Peter, Paul, Timothy and others, insinuating themselves into the churches and substituting a “different gospel,” one that may have had Judaiizing elements, such as circumcision or dietary restrictions, all the while appealing to the cultural tastes of the new Christians, such as through classical Greek oratory. Those who came and alienated much of the Corinthian Church against Paul appear to have had some “letters of recommendation,” (ch. 3). From whom we don’t know. Like the most popular wandering Greek philosophers of the day, they demanded and lived off the financial support of their disciples (the more they charged, the more they were valued), something which Paul often declined to do (especially in Corinth), and which they used against him.

And they didn’t suffer for their ministry. Even that they used against Paul, obviously insinuating that his sufferings are proof that he is doing things wrongly, even that he is not God’s apostle. All these insinuations appeal to the triumphalistic, social climbing, class-conscious mindset of cosmopolitan Corinth.

But Paul turns their argument around to argue that his endurance of his many sacrifices and sufferings, on their behalf, and God’s sustenance of him, are precisely his marks of divinely-called apostleship.

   24 “Consider carefully what you hear,” he continued. “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more. 25 Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”

Because he neglected to finish something that he had started, Treehorn found that he was shrinking. Because he got distracted for too long, took his eye off the ball, didn’t pay attention, and didn’t follow through, Treehorn woke up one morning to find that he had to jump down out of bed, a surprising, scary distance to the floor. Not because the bed was getting bigger, but because he was getting smaller.

Has anyone here read Treehorn’s story in the old classic children’s picture book, The Shrinking of Treehorn? I’d put Treehorn at about 8 or 9 years of age, just when parents should have to buy new shoes and new clothes for a growing young boy at least once that year. But instead of growing, Treehorn is definitely shrinking.

The adults around him of course wonder why. His parents ask each other, “Do you think he’s doing it to get attention?” They tell Treehorn, “You can shrink all you like; just don’t do it at the dinner table.” When his teacher finally notices him, she says, “Kindergarten is down the hall, little boy.” Treehorn explains to her “I’m Treehorn, and I’m shrinking,” but all she can say is, “Well! There’ll be no shrinking in my class.” And when Treehorn tries to explain to the school principal why he’s jumping up and down to reach the water cooler, the principal says, “Shirking? There’ll be no shirking in my school.”

You can imagine what a crisis shrinking would be for any child. They often feel so small as it is. As to why Treehorn is shrinking, I’ll tell us later. But to all the children listening, let me explain; this is just a story. Its not for real. You’re in no danger of shrinking like Treehorn did. I can assure you: one day you won’t have to stand up on tiptoes to drink from the water fountain or turn on the tap to wash your hands. You’ll be reaching down or even bending over.

But first I want to cut to the chase and get to the question that Jesus is putting to us in today’s Gospel text. Its like the one Treehorn would have asked himself: Am I growing or am I shrinking? Or to put it in the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel text, Are we gaining or are we losing something important? Because those are our only two options. Is more being added to my faith, my character, my life of discipleship, my most valued relationships, or is the little I have slipping away? Its one or the other. The answer depends on whether or not we too keep paying attention, if we follow through on what we started, or if we let ourselves get too distracted, for too long.

Now it wasn’t easy getting that one question out of today’s complex passage. When we looked at today’s Gospel passage over the Sermon Roundtable Breakfast last Tuesday, we saw we could have gone in at least four other directions. First, in verse 21, Jesus asks, “Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand?” just like elsewhere in the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount. So is this passage about our witness to the world?

Then in verses 22 and 23 we read, “For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.” So, all of a sudden, we were back in 3^rd Grade Sunday School singing, “So, be careful little eyes what you see…..” or “So be careful little mouth what you say……Cuz your Father up above/ is looking down with tender love, so be careful little mouth what you say.” Because all our secrets are known to God, and will be revealed.That sounds like a call to integrity and transparency.

Then in verse 24 we’re on to “Consider carefully what you hear,” because “with the measure that you use it will be measured unto you—and even more,” words that elsewhere Jesus applies to generosity. In the measure that you give, so shall you receive. And in another passage, he applies them to judgment. In the ways that you judge others, so shall you be judged. And then we get to verse 25: “To him who has shall be given more; to him who has not, even the little he has shall be taken.” That poses the question, Are we accumulating treasures in the kingdom of God, or are we losing them? And there, within the space of five verses, we have five possible sermons. We got dizzy just thinking about it.

So what ties all these ideas together? Or did Mark just need a space to throw some random, left-over words of Jesus that he didn’t have any other place to put?

Well, as long as we confuse these verses of Mark 4 with the other times that Jesus has talked about secrets and measures and judging and candles under bushel baskets, and generosity, this will be a confusing passage. But when we connect them to what went before and what comes after in this very chapter of Mark’s Gospel, they gel together.

For these words and images all come on the heels of Jesus’ story about the Sower who scattered seeds everywhere. Seed fell on the roadside, the briar patch, the stone field, as well as on good soil. If you heard last week’s message, hopefully you remember that the Sower is God, and that the story reveals the secrets of what God is up to in this world. He’s sowing seeds of grace and gospel, everywhere, including in places and among people who might not have ears to hear and understand them, places where they will grow and bear fruit, and places where they will disappear.

So instead of applying all these different images to ourselves, like Jesus does in other places, let’s apply them in this context to God, the sower of grace and gospel. God is bringing a lamp out from under a bushel and shining light into the world. It is God who is revealing what was hidden beforehand.

Now, since this is a time for the unveiling of divine secrets, then what’s our responsibility? What does Jesus want of us? To pay attention. Verse 24: “Take heed how you hear.” That is, “Heads up! Listen up good. For with the measure of attention we give to what we hear, the more will be measured out to us, to hear even more. The more we hear and understand and apply what we hear, the more we will be given to hear and understand and apply.” Its called growth. That’s how we grow.

But if we tune out, if we take our eye off the ball, if we don’t follow through on what we began, like Treehorn neglected to do, then we’ll go backwards. We’ll ungrow; or shrink. In the things of God, I mean.

In the kingdom of God then, as disciples of Jesus, we’re either growing or shrinking, gaining or draining away. There’s no comfortable, static, safe middle ground at which we might arrive and then rest comfortably forever on our laurels, much as we might like to. For something there is about human nature that wants and seeks a comfortable, predictable and familiar stasis, a static, unchanging condition at which we arrive, and which requires no more work, thought or care to maintain.

I call it the Grandma’s-China-hutch approach to life. Some of us might have, or had, Grandmothers who had a diningroom hutch for their very special chinaware plates, saucers and cups, displayed neatly and carefully behind glass doors, visible all year round, but taken out only for a very few special occasions. Maybe we do, too. After all, chinaware is beautiful and fragile stuff. Naturally we want to protect it. And yet we want to be able to see and admire it, too. Something there is about human nature that wants life to be like that china hutch. Once everything is in its rightful place, let nothing move nor change, never, ever, ever, at all.

But real life is hard on chinaware and Grandma’s china hutch. Things have ways of breaking, changing and moving out of their assigned places. We no more get something the way we like it, and we have to make sense of it all again. There’s no holding onto yesterday’s perfection. Same with the kingdom of God; we’re either gaining or losing, never just keeping time or holding our place. We’ll never have arrived; we’re either growing or shrinking.

And if that sounds unfair, I can only say that what is true in the kingdom of God is also true for so many other things. Athletes or body builders never get to the place where they can say, “I’ve hit the ideal weight and strength now; I don’t need to exercise nor watch my diet anymore.” Musicians never get to the point where they can say, “I’m so good I don’t need to practice anymore.” Just to stay in place, they have to keep pushing their limits. Or pity the poor woman who asked her husband, “Do you love me?” and he replied, “I told you I did thirty years ago, don’t you remember?” Pity him, too, until he finally gets it; that all our most meaningful things and relationships require constant, daily work and attention to keep them growing and fresh. Or they’ll die on the vine.

But that work and attention-giving is actually where the joy is. Whenever life starts forcing change and adaptation on us, can we embrace the God-given opportunities for joy and growth in them? Sure, not every change is wonderful nor desirable, like losing a loved one or getting a scary diagnosis. The normal human response to any significant change naturally contains some element of fear and grief. Even when its a good change. But whenever time takes away or changes things we value, can we trust that God is able to eventually give us something better? The God of redemption will, and does, but we have to look for the growth opportunities, and tend to them.

As we did when we came here today to pay attention to God and the gospel in worship. And whenever we fellowship with each other and serve each other in our homes, our ministries, commissions, and small groups. And as we have a church business meeting today to consider where we have been and where we are going. And so we are seeking to discern God’s vision and calling for us over the next five years. And so we reach out around the world and across the street, not only so that the kingdom of God might grow and the world be changed for the better, but so that we too might grow, that we too might keep changing for the better. And so I hope we give God time daily in prayer and study. Did I say yet that our only alternative to such growth is not resting in place, its sliding backwards? The only option to gaining is losing. Whatever it is we value most in life, we will have either grown it, or blown it.

And that’s what Treehorn learned, so that he could start growing again. In the children’s story book, Treehorn kept shrinking until he could walk underneath his bed. There, underneath his bed, he found a board game that he had pushed under there the night before he started shrinking. Halfway through the game he had lost interest and went on to something else, so that the pieces were still on the board exactly where he had left them. He got that board game in the mail for having sent in the required cereal box tops. It was called, “The Game to Grow On.”

Treehorn spun the spinner and moved his piece until he finished ”The Game to Grow On,” and won. With “The Game to Grow On” completed, he started growing again, like he should. Like every living, breathing thing, like every meaningful relationship, like every talent and virtue on God’s green earth and in God’s kingdom just naturally wants to do. And when we get to the point where our bodies stop growing and even start declining with age, our spirits and our souls and our relationships still want to grow. And they can. Because the God who gives the seed also gives the growth. That’s how God is, and that’s what God is doing in the world: making good things grow, like Christ’s disciples and discipleship. But only if we pay attention, keep our eye on the ball, and tend the soil of our souls and relationships, until the time of harvest has come.

A minority of scholars also suggest that the problem around speaking in unknown tongues in Corinth was not so much about ecstatic utterances in miraculously-given languages, as in Acts 2, but the problems of interpreting (or not) the various languages spoken among believers in the cosmopolitan, polyglot city of Corinth. That would make sense of how tongues could be a sign for unbelievers (14:27) and yet, if everyone is speaking in [their native?] tongues in an assembly, unbelievers will consider them crazy (14:28). Try reading these passages with openness to either the traditional understanding (ecstatic glossolalia) or the minority one (the courtesy of interpretation). Either interpretation leaves some questions unanswered.

The image of the body with many parts (12:12-30) would have been a familiar one to the ancient Corinthians. It was commonly used to explain why slaves were slaves, soldiers were soldiers, nobles were nobles , the royals were royal and why some parts (slaves and soldiers) were expendable on behalf of the other parts. But Paul gives it a stunningly surprising twist when he says that this new body, the body of Christ, the church, works together to give the most honor to the humblest parts, the most protection to the weakest parts, such that no parts are dispensable, and any part’s suffering is every part’s suffering.

That some first-generation Christians would challenge the resurrection of Jesus (chapter 15) betrays the common notion today that people first believed it because they were all gullible, pre-scientific, magical-thinking primitives, unlike us scientifically-minded moderns. The idea of resurrection was just as stunning then as now. It was what brought Paul’s address on Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17) to a premature end. But the ancient Greeks did not only object to a bodily resurrection on grounds of evidence or science; they just didn’t want a resurrection, not of the body, at least. For they tended to be captive to a kind of dualism that saw matter as inferior, even evil, when compared to spirit. Their philosophies and religions were full of stories and beliefs about the journeys and challenges of the disembodied soul after death, which was seen as a liberation of the spirit (good) from the body (bad or indifferent). That is in direct contradiction to the biblical and Hebraic understanding of the essential goodness of the material world, and of how spirituality is expressed in bodily ways. This is most likely the reason why an anti-resurrection teaching was rampant among the Corinthian Christians.

II CORINTHIANS 1-2 lays out the groundwork for Paul’s varied and difficult, perhaps conflicting, tasks in this letter. Internal evidence shows that it is actually at least his third letter to the Corinthians, the second, written with “many tears” (2:4) could not have been I Corinthians. The tears may have had to do with the blatant immorality in at least one house church and their pride and tolerance of it, as well as competence and interference from some self-styled “super apostles” who carried alleged letters of reference, unlike the letter of reference that was the Corinthians themselves (ch. 3). These self-styled “super-apostles” may have been more palatable to the triumphalistic and social-climbing Corinthians in that they didn’t have to suffer, scrimp and work the way Paul and his team did. Where Paul will see his sufferings and his endurance of them as his marks of recommendation for apostleship, the “super-apostles” and many Corinthians will point to them as disqualifiers. Why should anyone who is doing the will of God, they wonder, have to put up with shipwrecks, persecution, beatings, prison, etc.? Thus, while Paul is still laboring to straighten out the Corinthians morally and spiritually, he has to straighten out their attitudes and assumptions which are rupturing their relationship with him. On top of that, Paul is also needing to arrange their participation in the offering for the Jewish Christians in famine-wracked Judea.

So, Farmer Jones drives his combine out of the barn, pulling his computerized, GPS-guided planter, all loaded up with Cargill corn seeds of course, lowers the planter and the disc harrows and starts planting corn, with the discs tearing up the dirt and turning it over onto the seeds he just planted. Sounds good? Well, unfortunately, he’s doing this out on Interstate 35, northbound out of Owatonna. When he gets to Fairbault, he turns around and does the same thing in the southbound lane of I-35, until he’s pulled over and arrested for destroying public property and impeding traffic.

Now you and I know that farmers don’t plant seeds out on the Interstate. Even though sometimes the road feels and looks like they just did. The same was true 2100 years ago when Jesus told this parable about the sower. His audience heard it and likely said, “Hunh? Planting seeds in good soil, that has been turned over, fertilized and weeded, that we can understand. But what kind of fool would waste valuable seed on the road, or on thin, rocky soil, or among weeds? Its so precious, you either plant it or eat it; some years there isn’t enough to do either, let alone both. Why would any farmer sow such precious seed so recklessly, indiscriminately and generously on worthless, marginal soil?”

That’s why the disciples and followers of Jesus would come to him after his teach-in and ask, “What was that about?” And if I might paraphrase Jesus just a bit here, the meaning of his answer would be: “Of course normal farmers worth their salt do not scatter seeds so generously, recklessly and indiscriminately, especially not over such questionable or marginal places.

“But God does.

“And that’s what God is doing now through me, Jesus, the Sower. And that’s what God will do through you, when you learn to join me in this kingdom of God endeavor: to sow kingdom seeds of God, goodness and gospel wherever you go, and to do so recklessly, generously, abundantly and even indiscriminately. In fact, its what God has always done. Its what God does; its how God is: generous, fruitful, abundant and indiscriminate in ways that people often find reckless, even scandalous.”

We can see that seemingly reckless generosity and scandalous abundance in Creation. If you’ve ever done vegetable gardening, you know that one zucchini plant is not enough for proper pollination. But two zucchini plants are way too many. You won’t be able to give all the zucchini away. Soon, you’ll be looking for cars parked with their doors unlocked, so you can leave zucchini inside them for perfect strangers. That’s just one example of how generous, extravagant, and recklessly abundant God’s creation can be.

Or lift your eyes from the tiniest grain of zucchini pollen to the stars and galaxies of outer space and the extravagance, generosity and reckless abundance of the universe is all the more striking. We may think of the infinite expanses of outer space as cold, distant, empty, sterile and hostile, where, as the movie trailer said, “They can’t hear you scream.”

But there’s more there than meets the eye. To think that all the little pinpoints of light we see with the naked eye are actually gi-normous stars or galaxies that are millions of light years wide, and billions of light years away, stretching across infinitely vast distances that dwarf our imaginations and crash our calculators, each sending massive waves of powerful energy that we can see, like light, and massive waves of powerful energy that we can’t see, like radiation, is humbling at the least, even spooky or scary at worst. Some people look at all that power and size and distance and say, “I see neither God nor heaven out there, so there must be neither. And it is all so vast compared to our tiny selves, that we must not matter in the end.”

Or you can say that all that time and distance and power and energy and mind-blowing size and complexity have resulted in creatures that can see it, study it, contemplate it, and marvel at it all: US. As Carl Sagan put it, “We are the stuff of which stars are made,” because the elements and energy that make up stars and galaxies make up us, too. We are reconstituted star dust contemplating the stars.

So, we could say that all that time, energy, space and substance went in to making it possible for us to be here, in wonder and in worship today. How recklessly extravagant, abundant and generous is God, on our behalf, just for his pleasure in our existence and company. Just so we might be, and might marvel at it all.

What is true for our creation is also true for our re-creation through Christ. God so loved the world that he gave us not another principle, not just a few more rules, not a practice, nor just another prophet, but God’s very self, in the face and flesh of Jesus. And God’s invitation to this relationship with himself, the Gospel of the Kingdom, goes out recklessly, abundantly, extravagantly, some would say, foolishly, even scandalously, to all, including to those who ignore it, or worse, despise it.

And that’s what Jesus is calling his students to be: generous, even scandalously, recklessly trusting in the abundance and generosity of God while they share the treasures of God’s kingdom, even though Jesus here guarantees that many people will not appreciate them. Or many things will strike them as much more important, such as the cares of this world. But the disciple’s generous stance of love toward Creation and people is not dictated by the responses of the world, but by the generous, abundant and extravagant love of God.

So much for the disciples’ question to Jesus, Why would any farmer sow so much seed, so recklessly, generously and indiscriminately? More important are the two questions that Jesus and his parable pose to all his hearers, including us:

1. What kind of soil are we? And:
2. What kind of sower are we? [That's a better, more succinct way of putting the question than the longer one that I put in the bulletin—but it came to me after the bulletin was printed] What kind of sower are we? Like God, can we be persistent, extravagant, generous, and indiscriminate in casting kingdom seeds, and sharing kingdom treasures? In other words, how much and how long are we willing to persist in scattering gospel seeds even if and when we don’t see growth, and might never see it in our lifetimes?

Now for that first question: Just what kind of soil are we? Speaking personally, sometimes it depends on which day it is and what time of day. If we’re wondering what it takes to be good, fruit-bearing soil, Jesus gives us some clues in the story. Some people are like shallow soil, he said, in which the seed can sprout no roots. So, is there some depth to us, and some depth to our commitment and character? Are we willing to do some digging and deepening, by way of self-examination, contemplation, prayer and study, regularly, with some discipline, in order to be more fruitful?

Some people are like soil that is full of thorns, Jesus said, thorns that choke out the growth of God’s life in us, through the cares of the world, pleasures, persecution and opposition. So, are we, by contrast, able to keep the cares, duties, distractions and worries of life in some perspective? There’s always something else crying to be done, someone else wanting a piece of us and our time. There’s always one more movie or TV show or round of the computer game begging for our time and attention. But can we give God enough priority to turn off the perpetual distraction action machine, or will we be like the person I saw with the t-shirt that said, “Help! I’m talking and I can’t stop?”

If Jesus is using this story to ask us what kind of soil we are, then that means that we have some power to examine ourselves and do something about whatever it is we find. That’s how I think of the spiritual life and disciplines, that’s why I regularly see a spiritual director: to unplug the perpetual distraction action machine and do some digging and turning over to find out what’s in and under the topsoil of the soul. Wherever I find it shallow, weedy or stony, then its time for some clean-up through repentance, confession, and restitution. Then its time to dig and fertilize. And to sow, in place of weeds, seeds of God, of goodness, and of Gospel. If we tend to the condition of our souls and relationships, then God will give the growth.

Perhaps the greatest sign of spiritual fertility and fruitfulness is our steadiness, our patience and persistence in sowing seeds of God, of goodness and Gospel in the world, because we take our cues from the One who gives us the seed, and not from the world into which we spread it. Which brings us to the second question: What kind of sower are we? How extravagant, generous, and indiscriminate are we in casting kingdom seeds, and sharing kingdom treasures with the world? How much and how long are we willing to persist in scattering gospel seeds even when we don’t see growth, and might never see it in our lifetimes? Or will we let the delay between planting and harvesting dismay us?

An example: Over at Cristo Rey High School on Wednesday nights, I am sitting in on the parenting classes, at the invitation of Susana Espinosa, the Director of Urban Ventures’ Latino ministries, and getting to know participants from this neighborhood. Its a good program in any language. The main teacher, Juan Morales, is starting to talk with the class about the seeds that parents sow in terms of actions and words. Not just seeds, they can be like time bombs. Tell a child he is bad, stupid, evil or worthless, and that message could sit and bide its time in that child’s mind and heart until it goes off like a time bomb the next time the child is under stress or temptation. If I’m so bad, stupid, evil or worthless, what’s the worth in trying to act otherwise? he might think.

Or consider the opposite: treat a child and talk to him or her like a valued part of God’s creation and the child will find it all the more easy to believe and act upon that belief later, when temptation arises, or opportunity knocks.

Juan also uses a lot of scripture concepts and phrases in his teachings, usually without giving the Bible reference, because he knows some of the students will walk out of there if they hear mention of the Bible, or if they think that this is a catechism class, instead of a parenting class. And yet these truths are available to all, useful to all, whether or not you believe the whole biblical package. So take from them what you can, Juan thinks, and if you want to know more about the whole big picture they come from, he’s available. He’s planting seeds too, and sometimes, months or even years later, people come back to him and say, “What you said about generational stuff really helped me,” or even, “I want to know more about where your wisdom is coming from.”

Now, that kind of planting takes a lot of patience. Lest it discourage us, let me tell a parable of my own, this one a true story: Not too long ago, the Nature Conservancy bought land from a farm along the Illinois River on which it wanted to reestablish some of the original Illinois tallgrass prairie. For generations that land had pushed up the usual corn and soybeans. Or, some years, for variety: soybeans and corn. To restore the prairie, they would have to find seeds for the rare, endangered prairie grasses and wildflowers that used to flourish there. Fortunately, a few universities and nurseries still have some around.

In the meantime, come late winter, they did a controlled burn. Then, they took out the dikes along the Illinois River that kept the land from flooding in the spring. So it got wet. Immediately after the natural cycle of flooding and burning was restored, what should start to appear but some of the very grasses and wildflowers that they were hoping to scrounge up somewhere, flowers that had not been seen practically since the time of Lincoln? Their seeds were there all the time, for over a hundred years, under all the dirt, the crops, the Roundup, the plowing and the planting, just waiting for the right conditions—flooding and burning– to reappear. And they did.

And so it can be with the seeds we plant, whether in other people’s lives or our own. Whether as teachers, preachers, parents, co-workers, neighbors, whoever, whatever we do, we are always planting seeds of some sort, in our own lives as well as the lives of others, seeds that will blossom and bear fruit some day, for good or for ill. Might as well make them good seeds then, seeds of God’s Word, seeds of good works, and good words. Because we never know just when and how some seed that we plant for God and for goodness will take root and grow. But it just might surprise us too some day.

For that kind of patience, we have to keep our eyes on the One who gives the seed and the growth, rather than on the world in which we sow, and the fruits we might see. Or not. Which brings us back to the first question, What kinds of soil do we find within ourselves?

Let’s take a moment to think and pray about either one of the questions that I have mentioned this morning, that you find highlighted in the order of worship. Or both of them. Feel free even to write a few notes in the bulletin, or come back to them later in the week for your own prayer, reflection, or journaling. Do that and we’ll be preparing and improving the ground of our own lives for more seeds of God, grace and the gospel. The one who gives the seed will also give the fruit.

But the same is true with verse 1 of chapter 7. Paul is most likely quoting the Corinthians who said, “It is good for a man to not have sexual relations with a woman,” to which Paul also takes exception, with certain exceptions. If it seems strange that Paul would have to counter both prudes and the promiscuous, ironically, both errors come from the same source: Classical Greek dualism, the idea that the spiritual is separate from and at odds with the material, and that what is spiritual is good, while what is material is bad, or at least negligible. Nothing could be further from the Biblical, Hebraic world view out of which Paul, the gospel and the New Testament come. From Genesis 1 on we read that the created world is good, and that the spiritual life is lived materially, physically. But if you accept the classic Greek dualism that separates matter from spirit, you will either stray into a rigid, puritanical asceticism that disparages the material world (like the ancient saints who sat for years atop pillars), or you will plunge into the depths of a depraved sensuality, on the notion that nothing done in the body matters spiritually nor eternally. Oddly enough, the Corinthian church was being torn in both directions, perhaps with one extreme faction reacting to and feeding off the other.

 PSALM 119: 1-96 is the first half of a long acrostic wisdom psalm, (the longest Psalm and chapter in the Bible) the Word celebrating the Word. Each of the 22 strophes contain eight verses, each one beginning with the same letter of the alphabet, a different letter for each strophe, in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. That sounds very dry and intellectual, but each strophe and verse expresses something also about the disciple’s relationship not only with the Word, but with the world, which is often portrayed as being at odds with the seeker of divine wisdom in the Word. These themes or emotions include longing, trust, joy, suffering, sorrow and shame. A psalm about seeking God wholeheartedly, it also guides the reader in seeking God wholeheartedly.

 Today’s Gospel story confronts us with two questions:

• 1) How are we doing by our children? Not only our own children, if we are parents, but by the children of our church family, whether we are parents or not? After all, Jesus made that matter sound mighty important when he said, “… to such belongs the kingdom of God.”

• 2) In what ways does Jesus want us all to be like children? That sounds pretty important too, for he said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

There’s more at stake than whether or not families visit this church and say, “Here’s where we want to bring our children.” I love it when that happens. But what’s at stake is Jesus’ desire to create the beloved community of which the prophets spoke, when they said things like, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;  and a little child shall lead them.” (Is. 11).

The true measure of a church, then, is not how high our steeples go, but how low does our attention go? Does it go all the way down to those about whom Jesus said, “Whenever you give a cup of cold water to a child in my name, it shall not go unrewarded?” The true measure of a church is not how many people God gives us to love, but how much we love each person whom God gives us. If we’re not doing right by the ones whom God has given us, especially the neediest, most vulnerable and dependent, why would he give us any more?

So for that first question–How are we doing by our children?– how do we stack up? I observe that we have some top notch Christian education workers here, who regularly go the second mile to prepare for their classes, even when their classes turn out to be two children, or one, or, some Sundays, none. People have also remarked on the ways we seek to include children and youth in the life and ministries of our church, and not just for our annual Christmas pageant. Some of us just followed the lead of our youth last night to gather and work at Feed My Starving Children. And we have a Safeguarding our Congregation policy by which we protect both our children and youth, plus their teachers and sponsors, from the risks of abuse, even from the mistaken appearance of abuse. So when someone signs up to be a youth worker or a Christian education teacher, no one should be surprised when they get that form for a police background check. Nothing personal; its just standard procedure, precisely so that it won’t be needed.

But let’s not let up. I encourage us to keep thinking of ourselves as something like a village, or an extended family. Even if we adults did not come here with children, I invite us all to think of ourselves as having some responsiblity toward all the children in this family of faith. If for example you see a child doing something here that could be dangerous or destructive, feel free to get down at their level and say something like, “I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt doing that. Where’s a better place to run?”

But the responsibility doesn’t lie with us adults alone. Kids, if you in your Christian Education class are memorizing some Bible verses or learning a song, how about reciting them or singing it for us during worship? We’d love it, and you’d be ministering to us. And youth, let me remind you of our mentoring program. We remind you of it every so often, but we don’t get many takers. What can I tell you that would help you get on board with that again?

So how are we doing by our children? Pretty good, I’d say, but there’s always room for growth. Now that first question: How are we doing by the children? was the easy part.

Here’s the hard part,: Question #2, In what ways does Jesus want his disciples to be like children? Especially since, elsewhere in the Bible, we are always told to grow up? Like in Ephesians 4, where we read, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…”

Or when Paul says, in I Cor. 13: 11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” By that he means love. So the Bible tells us to grow up and to be like children. How do we square growing up with remaining childlike? What gives?

Well, let’s consider: What are the qualities typical of children that we do well to keep? One would be trust. In our very earliest stages of life, one lesson we hopefully learn is trust. Its at the heart of everything else we must learn. We learn it if Mom and Dad are always there to feed us whenever we’re hungry, and to change our diapers, hold us close, carry us around, smile and sing and talk to us; make funny noises to engage us and draw us out into the world. Hopefully we learn that the world is an orderly, dependable, trustworthy, welcoming and loving place, at least the world that our families make at home. If we learn to trust in that time and that setting, we can learn to trust others well enough to love, in our marriages, if so called, in the church, at work, out on the streets where hopefully most people are obeying the traffic laws. And hopefully we learn to trust God, as the source of all love and trustworthiness. I think that’s one way Jesus wants us to stay childlike: trust, or faith.

No matter what our age, every stage and lesson of life forces us to choose between trust and fear. Get the lesson right in one major life event, and soon the next exam comes. If we’re parents, when it comes time to let our children go, we have to choose trust over fear, just as our children do. If we’re changing jobs or retiring, its trust versus fear again. And when the doctor asks us if our affairs are in order and recommends a hospice care center for us, its time to choose trust all over again. It doesn’t necessarily get easier every time. But it helps if we’ve had some practice.

But trust implies that we know how much we depend upon God and each other, a second lesson from childhood: embracing our interdependence. For children this sometimes poses as many problems as it does delights. Especially when we get toward adolescence and can’t wait to be as independent as possible, as soon as possible, even while the parents still provide for our basic needs. The title of a book captured that dilemma: Mom and Dad, Get Out of My Life,!!! But First, Will You Take Me and Cheryl to the Mall? Over time we hopefully grow to become more responsible and supportive to others. But we never become truly and totally independent. There are no self-made persons. So, knowing and embracing our dependence upon God and each other, and being dependable to each other, is the other side of the coin of trust, something childlike that Jesus wants his disciples to keep.

A third thing would be a sense of wonder. As we grow up, we risk getting to the point where we think we’ve seen it all. Unless we push ourselves into new experiences, we can get to where we think we know everything, and everything is ho-hum. Been there; done that; seen it all. But little children have neither the lifespan nor the temperament to act so jaded and cynical. So in second grade, when suddenly the chrysalis in the terrarium on the teacher’s desk starts to break open and a monarch butterfly starts to emerge, there’s no dignity to protect by playing it cool and saying, “Whatever; Big Deal.” There’s no keeping the children quiet; there’s no keeping them in their seats, nor any reason to.

This kind of childlike awe and wonder is what the Proverbs and the Psalms mean whenever they say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Think holy fear, in the sense of amazement, appreciation, yes, wonder, reverence and awe. Its the difference between despising the world, or grabbing at the world, to own it and crush it, and cherishing it, protecting it, and holding it gently in the palm of your hand. That childlike sense of awe, wonder, and delight is another thing to sustain thoughout life.

A fourth childlike thing I’d recommend is play, or playfulness. Because we adults can get so drop-dead serious sometimes. Yes, I’m preaching to myself here. Of course we have serious, important responsibilities. But not everything has to be a terrible crisis, a dreaded threat to our dignity, our well-being, as though life were a zero-sum game in which no one can gain without someone else having to lose. So when disagreements, problems or complications arise, we are tempted to draw upon all the fears, disappointments and complications of our past and say, “Oh man; Here we go again; Why me?” The biggest example of that seriousness run amok is war.

Or we can say, “Well, it looks like we woke up human again today.” Anxiety is the biggest obstacle to creative thinking; nothing shuts down more options and slams shut more doors than heavy, deadly seriousness. Anxiety cannot be overcome with more anxiety. Some playfulness, humor and oddball, off-the-wall thinking can go a long way toward helping us deal creatively with many difficulties and disappointments.

That was part of the genius of the direct action campaigns of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s. The marchers and demonstrators knew they would likely go to jail for integrating lunch counters or refusing to move to the back of the bus. So, in their civil disobedience training, they prepared people to go to prison with an open, confident and peaceful attitude. You may even come out better for it; freer and stronger they said. Fifty years later, some of the marchers still say they had some of the best times in jail. Southern jails got full to the bursting with people who spent their time singing hymns and worshiping, telling stories, praying together, teaching and learning, making lifelong friendships and connections, sometimes even with their prison guards. Sometimes both the jailers and the inmates were sorry to part company. Because they refused to add anxiety to an anxious situation, they turned prison cells into freedom schools. That kind of openness or playfulness is also something childlike that Jesus would want us to keep.

But Paul says, “When I grew up, I put childish things away.” And that’s what I want us to remember today: the difference between being childlike and being childish. Childlike is good; childish is bad, at least according to our stage of growth.

Here’s what I mean: You ask a three-year old, Why is it that, while you’re riding in the back seat of the car at night, the moon seems to follow you? Everywhere you go, as long as you’re heading in the right direction, the moon is there moving along with you. Why? A three-year old is likely to say, “Because the moon is my friend.”

Aaaaaw. For a three-year old, that’s so sweet. Their’s is a magical universe, with themselves at the center. When they’re even younger, they are the universe. But for your average fourteen year old or a forty-year old, that kind magical, wishful, self-centered thinking is not only dumb, its dangerous. I don’t think Hitler ever outgrew it.

Or if you ask a two-year old why they should obey their parents, often they’ll say, “Cuz they’re bigger than me.” That’s a toddler’s first take on morality: might makes right. Fortunately, that doesn’t last. Its not long before you hear them saying, “But that’s not faaaair!” (That was our youngest daughter’s first complete sentence, by the way). So the childish things we have to relinquish, as we grow up in Christ, include self-centeredness, lack of self control, magical, wishful thinking, and this might-makes-right thinking, among others. There’s more, but I don’t want to start another sermon.

So, in summary, as we grow up into the fullness of Christ, into adult Christian maturity, the choice before us is either to become more childlike or more childish. Will we be childlike, in the sense of trust, interdependence, wonder, openness and playfulness, or will we be childish in the sense of the magical, wishful, self-centered thinking that so often masquerades as faith? Life has a way of forcing that question upon us, again and again, at deeper and deeper levels of the soul. But don’t worry: as the children’s hymn we sang today put it, “Neither life nor death shall ever from the Lord his children sever. Unto them his grace he showeth, and their sorrows all he knoweth.”

 There, we just heard Jesus name a terrible threat to marriage, and it has nothing to do with anything on the ballot this election year. Yes, I’m talking about the constitutional amendment up for a vote this November, the one that would prohibit same sex marriage. I mention it because some some pastors and churches are already under pressure to join the crusade for or against it. So, now that I have your attention at the start of this election year, I might as well jump into the deep end and make this commitment to you: You hopefully know my commitment, in practice and teaching, to what the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective and the Bible, as I understand it, say about marriage. But I will not use this pulpit, nor my ministry, to tell anyone how they should vote on that amendment, or even if they should vote on it, as is being done in some churches already. Nor will I make your beliefs about marriage or the amendment a litmus test of your Christian faith and discipleship. And I hope no one else does, either.

Besides, no constitutional amendment can ever neutralize the threat to marriage that Jesus has in mind. If law and constitution could help save marriage, or marriages, I would propose that we first make a constitutional amendment against low-wage working poverty, for financial strains are surely killing marriages right and left. I would also propose an amendment against pornography, for that too is harming marriages, as well as the women and children whom it exploits. But the threat that Jesus has identified is so insidious that it not only hurts marriages, it hurts, even kills, all sorts of relationships, including our relationship with God, and thus, our eternal souls.

This threat is the same one I mentioned last Sunday: hardness of heart. In verse 5, Jesus told the Pharisees: ”It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law.”Note that he was not talking to promiscuous, party-hardy. loose-living libertines. He was warning righteous, rigorous, religious people, the moral crusaders who were striving to bring the nation back to God: the Pharisees.

And that crusading tendency just might be a symptom of the problem, if it means that we’re looking for dragons and monsters, enemies and adversaries to fight and defeat outside ourselves, while ignoring the dragons and enemies inside of ourselves. That’s one sure symptom of hardness of heart: projecting onto others what we least want to see in ourselves. And it seems to be a sadly recurrent theme in history, that triumphalistic, moralistic crusaders eventually show themselves just as susceptible to the sins that they crusade against, as are the sinners against whom they crusade.

That was the case in this First Century controversy about divorce. When they tested Jesus with the question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” they were dragging him into a long-standing debate among Jews of the time over that very question, “How easy should divorce be?” Jesus was not the only rabbi of the time to set a very high bar over and against divorce. But oddly enough, these most rigorous moral crusaders, who were trying to discredit him with this very question, were the most indulgent about divorce: to many Pharisees, a man could divorce a woman for just about anything that displeased him, as soon as she displeased him.

Not only was that terrible for marriage; it was especially terrible for women. Turning them out onto the streets was a ticket to poverty, and maybe even to prostitution as their only means of survival. But that was of no concern to these strenuous moral crusaders. They were hard of heart.

So hard of heart are they that even their way of reading the Bible was skewed. For the answer that Jesus gave them showed that their differences were over more than just divorce. He differed with them over how he read the Law of Moses. They saw every detail of the Law of Moses as an end in itself. So if Moses permitted divorce, then divorce must be okay.

Tragically and sadly, sometimes divorce is better than being bound forever to someone who abuses or betrays you. Nor am I saying that everyone with divorce in their history is guilty of hard-heartedness. We must not rush in with judgment where angels fear to tread. God knows how all marriages struggle, and how hard all couples must work at them. Whenever someone says to me, “I wonder if men and women can ever even be compatible,” I want to ask, “ What did you expect?” and “That, my friend, is precisely why God puts us together.” Couples make wedding vows for the same reason that all Christians make baptismal vows: the things required of us on our journey of discipleship, whether single or married, do not come easily nor naturally; they must be promised, not just suggested, worked at, not just taken for granted. That’s why I urge no one to give themselves intimately, in body and soul, to another person until such promises have been made and trust has been earned.

Nor do I take Jesus to mean that, after divorce, no one can ever remarry, when he says that “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” I wonder if he’s telling the Pharisees, “You can’t dress up adultery as divorce whenever you expel your wives, to look for a better spouse, instead of working at being a better spouse.”

Still, nobody should rush from divorce into another marriage; rupturing the one-flesh bond between man and woman, whether there’s a ring or not, is one of the most painful things ever. Time and care must be taken to address what went wrong. The burden of proof should be against divorce and remarriage. But to say that no one gets any forgiveness, or any second chances after divorce, is at odds with all the other second chances that Jesus gives for everything else.

So, when it comes to reading the law of Moses, Jesus points us to an even greater good in the Law. It’s right there in the first three chapters of Genesis, and it takes priority over the permission to divorce. “At the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female” he says,….. “therefore, they are no longer two, but one.” Its the melding of very different beings–man and woman– each one a reflection of God–into a unity of body and spirit that also reflects God, through the love, respect, dignity and care they show for one another, mutually and equally. This harmony can happen in marriage, supremely, but not just.

Even if we are not married, this is well worth reflecting upon, because we all owe our very existence to this powerful drive toward the union of genders that God has built into creation. This drive and desire is nothing less than a reflection of God’s very nature, and of God’s delight in and desire for each of us, by name. What’s more, the Bible compares our glorious destiny of redemption to a riotously joyful wedding celebration: the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the marriage of heaven and earth. In that sense, all Christians are married, at least once. So, the tender-heartedness that Jesus advocates for marriage is a survival skill that all of us need in our spiritual journey, whether married or single.

So, lets examine the nature of our love and respect for the other gender, whether we’re married or not, as a sign, an indicator, of our love and respect for God. Its what I mean by “tenderness of heart.” Another way of putting it is with the words I most want us to remember today: they are “willingness” and “willfullness.” Those are two words that the Christian psychologist, Gerald May, uses for what the Bible calls hardness of heart and tenderness of heart. Tenderness of heart is akin to willingness, while hardness of heart he calls, willfulness. Here’s how May described the two: “Willingness implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering into, an immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is the setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence. More simply, willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment. Willfulness is saying no, or perhaps more commonly, ‘yes, but…’ But willingness and willfulness do not apply to specific things or situations. They reflect instead the underlying attitude one has toward the wonder of life itself. Willingness notices this wonder and bows in some kind of reverence to it. Willfulness forgets it, ignores it, or at its worse, actively tries to destroy it. Thus willingness can sometimes seem very active and assertive, even aggressive. And willfulness can appear in the guise of passivity.”

For a supreme example of willingness, consider Jim and Della, a young, poor, hardworking couple in O’Henry’s classic story, The Gift of the Magi. Each wants to honor and thrill the other with a Christmas gift. But being poor, they have to hock their most prized possessions to be able to buy it. Jim sells his heirloom gold pocket watch, which belonged to his father and grandfather, to buy Della a set of beautiful combs for her long, gorgeous hair. But unbeknownst to Jim, Della cuts and sells her long, gorgeous hair, to buy him a platinum chain for his heirloom gold pocket watch, that he has just sold, to buy her beautiful combs for the beautiful hair she has just cut and sold. We can laugh over the irony of each one getting a gift that the other cannot use. But O’Henry’s point is that their tender-hearted willingness to please each other, to the point of sacrificing their most prized possession for each other, is their true gift to each other.

All relationships, require the willingness to cherish, honor and protect, rather than the willfulness to grab, take and exploit; the willingness to invite and engage, to welcome and receive, rather than the willfulness to demand, impose or, should someone disappoint us, to expel; the willingness to serve and support, rather than the willfulness to control and to use; the willingness to listen and to learn, even when the truth hurts, rather than the willfulness of defensiveness and denial; the willingness to learn, grow and change, rather than the willfulness of dominating and demanding that others change.

Consider then what damage a hard-hearted willfulness can do to any relationship, especially to the intimate bond of marriage. Men and women are equally susceptible to it. But as a man I have to take some responsibility for the male versions of this willfulness against women, because they are staples of mainstream male culture, all over the world. Consider the contempt that is all too common toward women, even though we all came into the world through women. Go figure. This contempt for women and all things female is called mysoginy.

The worst examples of misogyny are physical, verbal, emotional or sexual abuse. Or when men withdraw from their wives into work, TV, sports or alcohol. Or pornography. Or the kind of crude talk about women that you often hear in locker rooms or some business board rooms. As the Pharisees show in today’s passage, there are religious ways of being willful and hard-hearted, too. In the church, whenever men interpret biblical words like “headship” and “submission” to mean domination, superiority or hierarchy over women, we’ve missed the whole biblical meaning of submission and servanthood according to Jesus.

Remember how Adam pointed to Eve that day in the Garden and said to God, “That woman, that you gave me, she offered me the fruit and I ate it.” That says to me that there has long been a deep wound of estrangement, shame, fear and distrust running through the male and female expressions of God’s nature in creation. I wonder if that wasn’t the fall: Adam blaming and rejecting of Eve, and God, in the same willful, accusing breath. Because of that wound, men are still tempted to use their unique, God-given masculine powers in willful self-assertion and dominance over women. Or failing that, in passive resistance and withdrawal from them.

The Law of Moses did not intend to heal that wound. The Law only served to bandage that wound, so we might limp along as best we can in our fallen condition. That’s the best that any law can ever do.

But as John the Beloved said at the beginning of his gospel, “Law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” When God administers grace and truth to us through the Holy Spirit, we’re talking about nothing less than lifelong radical spiritual healing heart surgery of the kind that God promised through the Prophet Ezekiel, when he said, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

In other words, justice between the genders require nothing short of a radical spiritual heart surgery that would uncover and remove our hardened shell of willfulness and replace it with tender willingness, a willingness to love, cherish, honor, delight in and please God and all those whom he gives us to love, especially our spouses, if God has called us to marriage. To survive and to thrive on the journey of marriage, and indeed in any relationships, in life itself, no human law or amendment can heal us where we hurt most. We must choose, as often as necessary, to be and to stay on that journey of the transformation of the heart, from stubborn, fallen willfulness, to gracious, tender-hearted willingness. Let’s pray about that:

You are love. We love because you first loved us. But only your love is perfect, complete, unalloyed with fear. You called and welcomed each one of us by name into existence through the very love that makes us so dependent upon each other, so inter-related, with not a one of us sufficient unto ourselves. We thank you and bless you for the mystery and the majesty of such love that ties the world together. With the strength of our weak and fragmented loves, we would respond to you. Reveal and heal all that is broken, bruised or hardened within us or among us. Make tender our hearts, and willing our souls, that we would not shrink from you nor ourselves, nor any others, when you reveal how much we have yet to grow; that we would not rush to defend nor justify ourselves when it is you who so willingly justify us. Bless and strengthen all the connections and relations among us, by conforming us ever more into the image of Jesus. For he is the gracious and truthful human face of your love to us, in whose name, for whose honor and will we pray. Amen.

]]> http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/jesus-and-marriage-moses-and-law/feed/ 0 http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/a-mirror-to-ourselves/ http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/a-mirror-to-ourselves/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:34:37 +0000 Mathew Swora http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/?p=1376

Mt. 15: 21 Jesus left Galilee and went to the area of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A woman from Canaan lived near Tyre and Sidon. She came to him and cried out, “Lord! Son of David! Have mercy on me! A demon controls my daughter. She is suffering terribly.”  23 Jesus did not say a word. So his disciples came to him. They begged him, “Send her away. She keeps crying out after us.”  24 Jesus answered, “I was sent only to the people of Israel. They are like lost sheep.”  25 Then the woman fell to her knees in front of him. “Lord! Help me!” she said.  26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to their dogs.”  27 “Yes, Lord,” she said. “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners’ table.”  28 Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! You will be given what you are asking for.” And her daughter was healed at that very moment.

This is a difficult story. Naturally, the first question that comes to mind whenever we hear it is, Why would Jesus compare anyone to “a dog?” Especially since that was a racial term used sometimes by Jews for Gentiles? Is Jesus setting the wrong example here, especially on the day before we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. day? If so, how is it that Dr. King himself could appeal to the example and teaching of Jesus for his prophetic ministry against racism and bigotry?

But don’t let that question distract us from the other question that this story poses to us, namely: In relation to Jesus, who are we most like in this story? The disciples or the Canaanite woman? If we deal with that second question first, I believe we will be better able to resolve the first one: Why Jesus would put this mother off, even implying that she and her people were “dogs?”

So, are we like the Canaanite woman or the disciples? Let’s look first at the woman, and mother. She’s not Jewish. Yet she prays to Israel’s Lord and Messiah, at least when she meets him on the roadside. Maybe you too can identify with moments when your most urgent prayers seem to have gotten the same cold shoulder that this Canaanite woman got from Jesus at first, in verse 23: “Jesus did not say a word,” times when heaven seems to have left the phone off the hook, and our prayers not only seem unanswered, we wonder if they were even heard.

Not just unheard or unanswered; actually rebuffed. Rejected. Like when Jesus said to the Canaanite woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” But her prayers were first rebuffed by the disciples, when they said to Jesus, “Send her away. She keeps crying out after us.” That’s why we heard today from St. Matthew’s telling of the story, even though this year I’m preaching through St. Mark’s Gospel. Because Matthew includes that detail about the disciples’ initial reaction to this desperate woman. Jesus seems to have waited for them to respond to this woman, and they did. “Send her away!” they said.

So let’s look now at the disciples. Just when this woman needs friends and advocates to intercede with her, and for her, she gets the boot. I can identify with them, too. I’m not particularly proud of it. It happens whenever someone in need shows up at an inopportune moment, a very inconvenient time, and upon seeing him, I’m thinking, “Why now?” Or, “Oh; You again.” Not anybody here, of course. But haven’t there been people in all of our lives who have stretched our patience with their persistence? People who don’t seem to understand the proper way of getting things done, which half the time is no way at all? Maybe they are people to whom we really want to say, “Why should your irresponsibility become my responsibility All of a sudden?” Or, “Again? If I help you out, am I really helping you, or am I only reinforcing some learned helplessness?” Or worse?

And whenever the answer to that last question is Yes, then sometimes we do have to say No. When we just don’t have what our neighbor needs, or when we are the one in great need, there’s no shame in that, and no shame in even saying, Can you help me? We can’t give what we don’t have. There’s only one among us who has everything that everyone needs: God, and God alone.

But that wasn’t the case with the disciples in today’s story. They had rebuffed and rejected her, when she needed friends to pray and intercede with her. If they had any justification for such attitudes, I bet it went like this: “What do you gentiles and pagans expect for worshiping idols, engaging in magic, sorcery and divination, and all around dabbling in the occult, but demonic possession? Isn’t that why you are as unclean to us as……DOGS?” Isn’t that why God gave us the Promised Land and turned your people out?

Technically, they may have a point. But…… there’s a child involved. Even if the mother did something to open the door to the dark, demonic depths, this child cannot be held responsible for it. Same as when someone comes to us looking for help, and you see that morning’s hospital discharge papers, or the prescription that needs filling, or their children in tow, and Community Emergency Services is closed until tomorrow, and the only open overnight shelter with any space is in St. Paul. So, you get the prescription, or the bus tickets, or the grocery store coupon as though you were getting it for Jesus himself.

Because, in effect, you are. Especially when it comes to children.

Naturally we don’t want to be taken advantage of. But our even greater fear should be that other occupational hazard of life: hardness of heart and indifference, to the point that we turn even Jesus away “in his most distressing disguise of the poor,” as Mother Teresa used to say.

And I think that’s why Jesus first responded to the Canaanite woman the way he did, putting her off at first. Not because he was afraid of being taken advantage of. Nor because he was a racial bigot who really thought of Gentiles as dogs. I think Jesus was teaching the disciples something about their own hard-heartedness and indifference to the woman, by holding a mirror up to them, in his own words and actions.

Some people say that this encounter, with this woman, is when Jesus first learned to see Gentiles as something other than subhuman, or “dogs.” But that doesn’t make sense. By this time in his ministry, Jesus had already demonstrated amazing care and compassion for Gentiles. He had already shown a scandalizing disregard for the customs that kept Jews and Gentiles apart from each other. He waited a moment to see if the disciples got the lesson, and obviously, they did not.

Besides, if Jesus really meant to put her down, to put her in her place at the time, as a woman and a Gentile, why didn’t she just wither and slink away at his rebuke? If Jesus is the human face of deity, and if, as the Psalm says, at God’s rebuke the mountains quake and the waters flee, how much more might a mere mortal stand up under the rebuke of him who terrified demons? The Saducees and the Pharisees did not, whenever they tried to argue with Jesus. So, where did this woman find the courage and the wit to come right back at the Messiah with this amazing comeback?

I think its because she realized pretty quickly that this was a test, that Jesus was mirroring to the disciples their own callous indifference and hardness of heart, so that they might see it in full view, in all its sordid, ugly detail. Musicians among us know what that’s like. Don’t you just hate it when you’re taking lessons and your teacher says, “Here, listen while I play back what I just heard from you?” Or if you’re in any kind of class at all, or a business meeting, and the teacher, or your boss, repeats what you just said, and then asks everyone else, “So, what do the rest of you think about that?” Don’t you just want to crawl under the nearest table?

If that’s the case, then Jesus is teaching the disciples something, by answering their prayers quite literally, in such a way as to show them what they’re really made of. That had to be embarrassing. The embarrassment of having your blind spots revealed. The embarrassment of suddenly seeing how steep the learning curve before you is, and how far you are from the end.

I can’t prove one hundred percent that that is why Jesus first said what he did to the woman. But it best explains why the woman is so emboldened to come back at Jesus. Why else does she earn Jesus’ words of praise and honor for her comeback, for her faith, unless some spur-of-the-moment conspiracy took shape between Jesus and the woman? And why else would there be such a conspiracy around the word, “dog” but to give the disciples a taste of their own medicine? If I were writing a screen play of this, I would have Jesus winking at her when he first puts her off. And she would be smiling when she comes back at him. Then the disciples would be shocked, and then cut to the heart when their indifference and hardness of heart are exposed.

And that, to me, is what this story is most about: Who are we most like? The woman with her Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of faith, or the disciples with their indifference and hardness of heart? In the Bible, according to Jesus, the worst that can happen to us is indifference and hardness of heart, whether its indifference toward God or indifference toward people. That is also precisely the most common occupational hazard of Christian discipleship. For we are often like those disciples up in Tyre and Sidon, modern-day Lebanon, wanting to get away from it all, and finding that, no, we can never quite get away from it all. Its so easy to get cynical, tired out and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and persistence of human need.

But I don’t think that fatigue was the only reason why these disciples first put the Canaanite woman off. Between Jesus and the disciples they had what her daughter needed. It didn’t take but a moment. Their indifference and resistance were most likely born out of fear, the fear of someone so different from themselves. And the fear of losing control in this situation to someone so strong, straightforward and pushy.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had something to say about that kind of fear-based indifference. In 1963, while sitting alone in solitary confinement in a Birmingham, Alabama, prison cell, he had long hours to think about the civil rights campaign in that city. But someone smuggled into him a newspaper. In that paper he read an essay by some white clergymen, saying that they agreed with Dr. King’s aims, but they disagreed with his means, and the speed with which he wanted change to happen. “Justice and equality will happen eventually,” they said, “but not if you keep making demands, pushing the matter and upsetting the politicians, the business owners and the police. Be patient; your day will come.” They sound like the disciples, asking Jesus to just send this pushy woman away. She doesn’t know her place.

Dr. King wrote in the margins of that newspaper his brilliant response to those fellow clergymen, his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And this is what he said about the indifference of those clergymen: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

As for the faith of that Won’t-take-No-for-an-answer woman, here is what Dr. King also had to say in that same Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Whenever people, like the Canaanite woman, create tension by their persistent claims for their share at the table of community, they also force us to ask ourselves, Who are we most like? If we see them and their needs as just another tragic interruption to what could have been a nice outing in the park, or just as another likely scam, then indifference has hardened our hearts.

But if we see them as breakthrough opportunities for the kingdom of God, then we share the great faith of the Canaanite woman, and the compassion of Jesus. Every such inconvenience and interruption is a question that heaven puts to us, asking Who are we most like? and What are we made of? Warm, loving faith, or cold, hard indifference?

But the intent of the letter, as far as Paul’s mission, and the church’s life and ethics are concerned, come just before, in 11:13-25, where Paul says he is explicitly addressing the Gentiles (as he addressed the Jews directly in chapter 2: 17ff), “So do not become proud, but fear,” and “lest you become wise in your own sight.” In other words, lest the Roman Gentile Christians rupture the church and thwart the mission of God in the world through anti-semitism, Paul reviews the sovereign work and nature of God in the world, and reminds the Gentile believers that they are johnny-come-latelies, wild olive branches grafted into the original tree of Israel, as foreseen by Israel’s own prophets. All the talk in these chapters about God’s sovereign choice, down to the hardening of Pharoah’s heart (like Caesar’s?) is about God’s work on the grand canvas of history, beginning with his choice of a people, and his use of even their worst enemies toward his sovereign purposes. We still have a role in our individual stories of salvation, depending upon whether our response is that of humble, dependent faith, or proud, willful self-reliance, “by works.” But God has chosen to have a people, a new Israel, of both Jewish and Gentile believers, and he will accomplish that as much through Israel’s resistance to the new work of God as he did through the hardness and resistance of Pharoah. But the Gentile Christians are told in no uncertain terms: God has not abandoned Israel.

This sets the stage for the advice for life together, as the new Israel, beginning with chapter 12 through 15, culminating with 15: 7, “Receive one another as Christ has received you,” that is, with all your diversity of background, whether Jew or Gentile, or whatever kind of Gentile, receive and welcome each other. In light of the unifying work of God in a new humanity, a new Israel, Paul’s other discussions about food (ch. 14), the observance of special days, the suspension of judgment over questionable matters of preference and custom make sense, culminating in a new focus not on getting one’s own rights and honor, but on each other’s welfare, that we might “each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up (15:2).” A society in which each member competes to give honor, rather than to get it (12: 10) is a revolutionary sign of God’s kingdom breaking into the world, another sign that says “Under New Management.” This is all based on the “transformed world” of 12: 2, which is based on the sovereign work of God described in chs. 9-11. The best translation of that verse would be, “Be not conformed to this world, but to the transformed [one] by the renewing of your mind.” That is wholesale, the rest, from chs. 12-15 is retail.

PAUL AND GOVERNMENT in Romans 13:1-7 is a subject of controversy, more for its misuse in history rather than its actual meaning. German Christians during the Third Reich heard a terrible distortion of it, to the effect that whoever ruled at any given time must have been installed by God. Therefore, whatever the ruler demanded or commanded was the demand and command of God. To disobey the ruler was to disobey God, allegedly.

But while Paul calls for “subjection” or “submission” to the rulers, which he fleshes out as taxes, abiding by the rule of law, and showing respect. But the rulers of the time (and many since) called for worship, or at least blind obedience, which neither Jesus nor Paul ever gave. Yet Jesus and Paul displayed submission to the authorities by treating the persons respectfully and truthfully, and by submitting themselves to the rule of law. If there was something required by government that they could not give (worship or silencing the gospel), they still submitted to the consequences of their disobedience (crucifixion, or prison). The things which government does, such as punishing evil doers, serve a function within God’s government of the world. But they are not things that Paul commands Christians to do. If they obey the laws of God, they have nothing to fear from government, not even should the government persecute them for it.

CHAPTER 16 gives us a glimpse into the multi-cultural nature of the Roman churches, as well as their structure as house churches, meeting in the homes of those named. Some of them are women, pointing us toward the likelihood that women led and hosted house churches and did other gospel work from the first generation of believers.

Just as the main themes of the letter were revealed in the opening greeting of the letter (1: 1-7), so are they reprised in the warning (16: 17-20) and the final doxology (16: 25-27).

I CORINTHIANS 1 introduces us to the themes and conflicts that made this letter necessary. Acts 18 tells us how the church began in Corinth, fresh on the heels of Paul’s ministry in Athens. He arrived there, he will say, in Chapter 2, “in fear and trembling,” resolved to preach “nothing but Christ, and him crucified.” In contrast to his previous effort to speak to the Athenians in terms of their own wisdom, Paul evidently confronted the worldly, cosmopolitan wisdom, the class and status system, and all conventional notions of power current in Corinth with the shocking and humbling preaching of the cross, for it symbolizes the true wisdom and power of God. Throughout the letter we will see how the cross is a recurrent theme for dealing with divisions and schisms, mistreatment of the weak and less powerful, immorality, and controversies over food and holidays. The cross, as a reflection of the wisdom and power of God, is an inverse mirror to the mentalities and structures of power, privilege, status and wisdom in the world.

The Corinthian Christians would need such a shocking confrontation, because of the way in which their worldly pride, power (economic and political) and wisdom had generated schisms and controversies. Situated on the isthmus between the lower and upper Greek peninsula, Corinth was the crossroads for shipping traffic going east and west, and for land traffic going north and south. This likely made Corinth and its citizens very diverse and cosmopolitan. It also would have lent to a feeling of power, superiority and indispensability. They were “progressive,” “with it,” and “abreast of the times.” Except for the ones among them who weren’t, who they could treat like dirt. In this first chapter, Paul wastes no time in introducing the themes, naming the conflict, and presenting the remedy: the cross of Jesus, and a proper orientation toward it.

PSALM 116 is one of the Hallelujah psalms, ending as it does with that Hebrew phrase that means, “Praise the Lord.” It reflects the ancient Israelite practice of fulfilling vows to God of sacrifice and worship upon God’s fulfillment of the petitioner’s prayers.

PSALM 117, for as short as it is, still encapsulates the missional destiny of Israel, to be a light to the nations, that they too might join Israel in the praise and worship of YHWH God.

PSALM 118 contains elements of liturgy, perhaps to celebrate the king’s return, victorious, from battle. Some of the responsive, liturgical elements include the phrase, “His love endures forever” (vv. 1-3; also in other psalms) and the dialog between verses 19 and 20. This psalm also figures strongly in the New Testament. Jesus is “the stone which the builders rejected,” which “became the cornerstone.” (Mt. 21:42). When he entered Jerusalem in what we now call “The Triumphal Entry,” Jesus was greeted with the words of verse 26. That crowd understood him to be a conquering king, returning to Zion from battle.

Paul poses and answers this question because he is looking to the Roman churches to be his springboard of mission to points west, notably Spain (15:24), making this possibly the first letter of missionary introduction and support. We don’t know from the Bible whether or not Paul actually made it to Spain, but Spanish church tradition says he did. The Roman Christians need to understand the answer to this question (What is God doing in the world and how is he doing it?) so that 1) they might support Paul in his missionary work and 2) they might be strong and well-enough united to be able to support the work of God. From the list of Roman Christians whom he already knows and greets (16: 1-15), we can see that the members are both Jewish and Gentile. But Rome has a history of anti-semitism and tension between Jews and Gentiles, such as the time that Claudius Caesar expelled the Jews from Rome not long before (Acts 18:2).

With that end and thesis in mind, here’s a crude outline of Paul’s argument through the first eight chapters:

I. Introduction of self and of main themes to come: 1: 1-7

II. Introduction of letter’s purpose: 1:8-17

III. Exposition of Universal Human Need

A. for Gentiles: 1:18-31: the moral and spiritual results of idolatry

B. for Jews: 2:1-3: 5: moral and spiritual results of the law and failure to live up to it.

C. Jew and Gentile in same straits: 3: 9-20

IV. God’s Universal Answer : 3: 21- 5: 11

A. (for Gentile and Jew) 3: 21-31

B. The same answer as God gave to Abraham: faith: 4: 1-25

C. Peace with God, Peace between Jew and Gentile: 5: 1-11

V. Living Into This Peace: 5: 12-8

A. Christ and Adam Contrasted: 5: 12- 21 Christ the Source of Life

B. Our Death to the old sinful order of society, through baptism: 6:1-14

C. Slavery to righteousness: 6: 15-23

D. Release from Law: 7: 1-6

E. How Sin Corrupted the Law and through it enslaved us: 7: 7- 25

F. How God’s Spirit Does What the Law, Human Nature and Sin could not: Chapter 8

SOME NOTES:

Romans 1 is at the heart of the church’s controversy today over homosexuality, even though that is nowhere near the center of the letter’s focus or purpose. Paul mentions it in passing among many signs and symptoms of humanity’s fallenness. So it is not such a uniquely terrible thing that it is more deserving of selective Christian wrath than the many other sins listed, some of which we sometimes esteem, like greed. But I remain unconvinced by arguments that say this passage has little or nothing to do with any of the expressions of same sex attraction we may see today, such as committed lifelong same sex marriages. Graeco-roman society was as open and experienced with homosexuality as ours is becoming today; people (at least the wealthy) were considered bisexual until proven otherwise. And like most Jews of the time, Paul would not have countenanced any of it. But nor would he have singled it out any more than he does here.

The most stunning thing about his description of human bondage to sin in 1: 8-31 is Paul’s understanding of the wrath of God. No thunderbolts fall from the sky, no cracks open up in the earth. Instead, God simply “hands them over” or “delivers them up” to the evil we desire, so that they and their consequences, and what we become, are our punishment. And we would otherwise confuse this “handing over” for blessing and freedom! So, the Fred Phelps of the world who are so quick to ascribe specific events to divine punishment for specific sins are claiming more clarity and prophetic insight than the Bible writer here does!

IN WHAT WAYS ARE WE “DEAD TO SIN?” (Rom. 6) Some holiness traditions tell us to expect and to pray for anointings and experiences of the Holy Spirit that will lift us up to, or at least toward, perfection, so that we are not only dead to sin, we are dead to temptation. I am all for Holy Spirit anointing and experiences. But not even Jesus was dead to temptation until after his death and resurrection. If anything, temptation assailed him like it did no other man. Given the setting (Rome, recent Jewish riots against Christians, and the recent attempts to expel of Jews), “death to sin” can have a social meaning, as well as spiritual. Once one was baptized, whether Jew or Gentile, one was counted “dead” by the society, often the family. Then, one was dead to sin as in the sinful social order, not to temptation itself. So, Paul argues, with your bridges to the world burning behind you, you might as well move forward with the life that is life indeed.

OR CONSIDER YOURSELF A SLAVE to righteousness (6: 15-23) since so many of Paul’s Christian letter recipients would have been slaves, literally, to people. Just as importantly, slaves to sin.

PSALM 113 is a hymn of praise that celebrates God’s work in the world, from his mastery over the nations (v. 4), to his care for the poor, the oppressed, the homeless and barren, that is, to put us into life-giving relationships.

PSALM 114 shows how important the Exodus remained as a theme by which Israel interpreted its relationship even to creation. God’s liberating confrontation with the sea, the Jordan, the hills and the rocks was more than what it appears to modern eyes; it was a confrontation with the gods and goddesses of Israel’s neighbors. For the sea, the hills and other natural phenomena were worshiped as deities among these people. Ps. 114 thus celebrates not only Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, but God’s victory over the deities behind Israel’s oppression among the nations.

PSALM 115 is like the previous psalm, in that it celebrates God’s victory over the gods of the nations, which in this psalm are the man-made idols. That “those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them,” (v. 8) is an important spiritual principle: we become like whatever it is that we worship; we eventually take on the characteristics of whatever or whoever it is we are gazing upon with our spiritual eyes. Should that object of desire, worship and attention be violent, dominating or sensual, would it surprise us that its worshipers should become so, too? Similarly, should the object of our desire, worship and attention be like Jesus, what might we expect of its worshipers? The psalm ends with blessings for the powerful and the poor alike.

That “The dead do not praise the LORD,  nor do any who go down into silence,” (v. 17) shows how murky and unclear was the hope of life after death in the Old Testament. For Ps. 115, the closest thing to eternal life is in verse 18:”But we will bless the LORD  from this time forth and forevermore.” In other words, eternal life was clear for the nation, the people of Israel, in a relationship of worship to the Eternal God.

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