14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Proper 9)

    God - Confounding Expectations

Over and over again, God uses the unconventional to speak truth, to bring peace, to shape the life of faith in new and surprising ways. On a donkey, the one who brings peace to the nations confronts mighty armies who bear down upon the nation in their intimidating chariots. Here is our Ruler — not looking or acting the way we expected, not following the way of common sense or conventional wisdom. So, too, even Jesus does not appear as he “should.”

This week's lectionary Bible passages:

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 & Psalm 45:10-17 or Song of Solomon 2:8-13 or Zechariah 9:9-12 &Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

“Will I worship a God who demands human sacrifice? Decidedly not! But this story of Isaac and Abraham seems to me to say that God continues to communicate and calls us to keep our ears and hearts open to new understandings of God's will in our lives. I can embrace that!"

Nate Metrick

“If obedience to God can only be proven through one’s willingness to sacrifice one’s child, then faithful disobedience is required."

Julienne Buenting

“As we listen for God's word amid all that we hear — as we try to discern what comes from the Spirit and what is false prophesy — these texts guide us.  They call us to listen for the word which saves, which challenges us with its truth-telling, which calls us to be instruments of God's goodness and grace, and which invites us to welcome all in God's name.” 

Timothy J. Sandoval

“Faithful discipleship sometimes requires engaging a world of conflict. Our desire for peace and our longing to raise the ‘festal shout’ ought not to be satisfied with vain hopes and cheap imitations of shalom, but only with the real thing, which requires, as Jeremiah knew, a truth-telling about our vulnerability and our failings.”

Scott Haldeman

    What's Out in the Conversation
    A conversation about this week's lectionary Bible passages

In Zechariah 9:9-12, we see a description of life that is not wholly unfamiliar.  Mired in a war without end, we remain vulnerable and afraid. Terrorism is a tactic, not a discrete group of people. It cannot be defeated; it can only be proven ineffective. We need a peace-maker. But will we recognize our “king”  (verse 9b), our new leader, if she appears?  We may expect a general. We may wish for a “decider.” We may even get one — and regret it! But, entrapped by the wisdom of the world and notions of a leader as one who is strong, authoritative, charismatic, mighty — we may miss the arrival of the one who is meek, self-effacing, vulnerable. Yet it is precisely the “weak” sort of leader that may be the one sent by God to interrupt business as usual, to “command peace” (verse 10).

The prophet may also make us wonder if we misrecognize ourselves. Are we the blessed of God under threat from invaders, terrorists and radical clerics? Are we those confined in the waterless pit (verse 11) , who have forgotten our need, lost our way, become entrapped by our own self-concern? Are we the ones who are vulnerable outside of our stronghold or those who build the walls to bar the way of the stranger and alien? It seems we may be all of these at the same time — at once understandably fearful of the many dangers that may harm us and regretfully preoccupied only with our own fate, reluctant to dismantle barriers and build bridges to those whom we see as enemies.  May we yet become “prisoners of hope”(verse 12)  rather than of cynical self-interest.

	Are you willing to be a “prisoner of hope,” one who risks humiliation and scorn to bring a word of peace, to declare that the conflict is over and a new day is dawning?

While our bodies have often been labeled as the occasion of sin, as Paul writes in Romans 7, we have nonetheless been promised rescue.  That Paul was at war with his body can be some comfort to those of us who feel at war with our body — especially if that body does not reflect our sense of our own gender in a society that strongly enforces that one is either “man” or “woman” (and that the body is the determiner of that identification).  For any of us who identify along the trans and gender-queer spectrum, for any of us who have come to resent or even hate our bodies (the ways they’re shaped, the particular fluids they produce, the various ranges of sound they make, the sort of barrier they can be to other people seeing us as we want to be seen), Paul can offer both company in that frustration, and a deeply felt faith in the rescue of Christ.  It is not clear how Christ is rescuing us — and has already rescued us — but it is easy to imagine that this rescue might take many forms.  These forms include, but not limited to: reconciling us to our bodies, helping us through the process of transforming them, guiding the transformation of our communities and the ways they perceive and perform gender.  What Romans makes absolutely clear, however, is that we are meant to “delight in the law of God in [our] inmost [selves]” (verse 22), whether or not our bodies feel like a sin against us, whether or not our flesh feels like something in which nothing good can dwell.  And it gestures towards the knowledge that God comes into the frustration and the wrestling and confusion to be with us and to free us, and to support that truest law of love and alignment in us.

	Are you willing to allow yourself to be rescued from dualistic notions that in the flesh there is nothing good, from the war so many of us wage against our bodies, from the condemnations of the churches who cannot see us as anything but sinners?  What are the things you need to be rescued from in your relationship with your body?  What role does God play in that relationship, or rescue?

As they are juxtaposed by the lectionary, our selected verses from Genesis 24 and the Song of Songs seem to define faithful forms of erotic relationship in rather stereotypical forms. Isaac needs a wife, it seems. The wife must be of respectable lineage — not a Canaanite but a relative of his leading servant, the one who “had charge of all that [Abraham] had” (verse 2). And so the unnamed servant is dispatched to his home country to procure a maiden. All pretty familiar stuff and pretty awful —ethnocentrism, sexism, the arbitrary exercise of patriarchal authority, the epitome of an arranged marriage, the wife as comforter of a beloved son who recently lost his mother.

Still, the story is far from simple. Rebekah consents without coercion to leave her family and set out on an adventure. She brings both her nurse and her maids. As soon as she sees Isaac, she “slips from the camel … took her veil and covered herself” (verse 64) — this covering may reflect conventions in which the public exposure of a woman’s shape is suspect, but given that she apparently rode her camel without the veil, Rebekah may also be feeling the stirring of attraction at the sight of a new love. It is, at least, made clear that Isaac “loved her” (verse 67). While few today would agree that this is the best way to find a spouse and begin a marriage, in the end, it seems, Isaac and Rebekah establish a relationship built on love and consent.

For the lovers in the Song of Solomon, sex is not confined within marriage. But the scandalous nature of the book is well-hid from our eyes by the lectionary. Here, especially in relation to the romance of Isaac and Rebekah, we are almost stifled by gauze and lace hearts as the handsome young stag calls the beautiful maiden out of the garden and into fields of wildflowers where they will make passionate love (verses 8-10). For the LGBT community, it may be crucial to emphasize the unconventional descant above the familiar melody of heterosexual coupling. Loving partnership, mutual care in the context of uncoerced consent provide some pleasant, if rather safe, harmonics — but the unfettered passion of lovers embracing beyond the confines of institutional bounds, gender complementarity, and vanilla sex in other portions of the Song (to which the lectionary does not point us) are indulgences that we should also savor.

	Are you willing to risk sharing the depths and complexities of your erotic life as witness to the liberating power of the transforming love of our promiscuous God?

In Matthew 11:16-30, Jesus expresses his frustration that so many signs have been revealed to so many and yet misrecognition continues. His outburst that constitutes our passage is prompted by a question from John the Baptist, who is in prison but wants to know more about what Jesus is up to. “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” says Jesus (verse 11). But the crowds do not understand. They did not understand John. They do not understand Jesus. They do not enter the kingdom, the new age that is “at hand” and offers the opportunity to live differently, to know forgiveness, to practice justice. John, an ascetic, was ridiculed as one possessed by demons. Jesus, who loves a good meal, appears to many as a glutton and a drunk. The promise of liberation, healing and embrace is fulfilled before us — but we do not allow ourselves to see it, to join in the party.

Such misrecognition has consequences. On the one hand, we could be “greater” than John the Baptist, but we refuse the honor. On the other hand, in verses the lectionary unfortunately leaves out, ignoring the signs provokes Jesus’ wrath: “Then he began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, because they did not repent. ‘Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades. For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for you” (verses 20-24).  Hmmm.

Let those who have ears hear! The punishment comes not because of anything we do, but because we don’t join in the celebration. The King is in the camp! Wisdom is vindicated! The Spirit moves among us!  Get on board, little children! Open your eyes. Open your hearts. The New Age is now. The promised land is wherever you are. Turn, grasp, embrace, serve — live differently — and the Holy Party Boy named Jesus of Nazareth will meet you on the dance floor, at the banquet table, at the peace protest, in the AIDS ward, in the leather bar, in the board room, in the halls of Congress — anywhere that justice is being done, bonds are being loosed, strangers are being embraced and the hungry are being fed. And, when we acquiesce to take on this yoke, the yoke of this gentle Savior, where we expect a burden, we find an easy load. Thanks be to God!

	Are you willing to leave behind your expectations of who God is, of what it means to be a disciple, of what it means to be church and to allow your eyes to be opened again and glimpse the promises that are already coming true?