Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, August 9, 2015
Readings: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6: 35, 41-51
It’s hard to imagine a more oddly assorted set of readings than the ones we’ve just heard: a bit of family tragedy from the story of David, a Psalm making a desperate plea for help, some sober moral advice from Ephesians, and a very obscure speech about bread from John’s Gospel. My usual approach to preaching from texts like these is to pick one, develop some of its meaning and implications, and bypass the others.
Today, though, I want to look at all four readings. One reason for that is just to underline the fact that this is what the Scriptures are really like. They’re not organized by topic. One passage differs dramatically from another. There’s no single theological thread that ties everything together.
The one thing that does tie it all together is that God is for ever trying to speak to real human beings in the worlds where we live. And given how different our worlds can be and how different we can be, Scripture is bound to use a variety of voices. Sometimes, it plays poet, sometimes story-teller, sometimes advice columnist, sometimes teacher of spiritual mysteries.
How, then. does Scripture address us in this morning’s readings? Probably the most powerful of them, the one we all immediately relate to in some way, is Psalm 130. When we’re really in a bind, really at the end of our rope, this is the go-to passage:
Out of the depths have I called to you;
O God, hear my voice. . .
It says just about everything you need in a desperate situation. It admits that we’re not perfect and appeals to God anyway. More than that, it expects God to help—even insists on it:
I wait for you, O God; my soul waits for you;
in your word is my hope.
My soul waits for you,
more than sentries for the morning,
more than sentries for the morning.
And notice here how the perspective has subtly shifted. It starts in the pit, the depths, the place you can’t see out of. It winds up on the city wall, watching for the dawn with the sentries. Up here, we can see out again—and see forward into a future that we weren’t sure would come to pass when we were trapped down there in the depths.
We’ve turned from desperation to hope, from being trapped by the immediate danger to seeing future possibility. It doesn’t preach hope, or command us to hope. It embodies it—and invites us to express it even before we can quite feel it.
The story from Second Samuel, by contrast, is drenched in grief. Absalom is David’s favorite son, despite having been a lifelong problem. And now, he’s rebelled and is actually trying to kill his father so that he can be king himself. Despite that, David can’t bring himself to hate him—even tries to protect him. He puts his commanders under specific, public orders not to harm him. But Joab, who was a brutal man but a clear-eyed politician, knows better and has his bodyguard kill ill him when they find him hanging in the tree. David is completely overwhelmed by his grief. The scene where he cries out for Absalom is as devastating as anything in Greek tragedy. And it’s almost as well-known as our Psalm this morning—maybe because it allows us to revisit our own griefs in that of David.
But there’s more to this story—a part that doesn’t get read in church, but is equally important: Joab gives David a while to grieve, but then he goes to him and reminds him that, however deep his distress, he is still the king: “Today you have covered with shame the faces of all your officers who have saved your life today and the lives of your sons and your daughters, and the lives of your wives and your concubines, for love of those who hate you and for hatred of those who love you. . . . So go out at once and speak kindly to your servants; for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night.” (2 sam. 19:5,7)
It was brutal, but Joab was right. He forced David out of his despair by confronting him with the needs of his kingdom, of the people for whom he was responsible. In our Psalm, we experienced a turning from despair to hope, from past to future. In this story there is another, related kind of turning, a turning outward. David leaves his private grief because his community needs him. And this turning brings a certain hope. I would guess that it saved not only David’s kingship but probably his sanity as well.
It’s a shock, after the story of David and Psalm 130, to turn the pages of the Bible over and get a little moral pep talk from the author of Ephesians. Pep talks like this were a standard feature of ancient letter writing—so much so that ancient rhetoric had a technical term for them, parainesis. Almost every New Testament letter has a section like this near the end. You can almost see the finger wagging while you listen, but much of the advice was standardized and is actually pretty good: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger. . . ” Well, yeah!
Still, it runs the risk of making religion sound like just a matter of following rules—or at least of feeling guilty for not following them. The first Christians, we think, must have been goody-two-shoes. But look again. What is this bit about? “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.” Wait a minute! There are thieves in the Christian audience? They weren’t all perfect? They didn’t all come to church justs to show how good they were? That’s surprise number one.
Surprise number two: the author doesn’t rake them over the coals, doesn’t say “Bad! No! Stop that!” Instead, he says, “There are people who need your help. Figure out how to make a steady income so that you can give it.”
There’s actually an echo here of our story about David. This passage is also calling for that turn outward, to the larger world. David was interested only in his grief. The thief is interested only in oneself. David had to do turn outward because he was king. We Christians have to do it because we’re part of a community where everybody has gifts to share. Our author wants the thief not just to “stop doing that” but to turn around and become part of this community of gifts.
So what do we have so far? Three turnings. From despair to hope. From devastating private grief to renewed kingship. From a life concerned only with self to a life that embraces others. These are all turnings toward fuller human life, toward a future that can still bring good, despite past sufferings and losses and wrong-doing.
And the reading from John’s Gospel is also about turning forward and outward. It has often been misread as something else—as a doctrinal pronouncement that Jesus has founded the one true religion and that everyone must agree with Christianity and receive its sacraments. Otherwise, too bad for you.
But that’s wrong. The Jesus of John’s Gospel isn’t talking about Christian doctrine here. He’s talking about his own life and the kind of turning that he wants to bring about in our lives s well: a turn from defensiveness and fear and self-justification to a life seen as the gift of God. I believe the whole Gospel of John is about this turning, as I argued years ago in a The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel.
When Jesus says things like “I am the bread of life” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he isn’t speaking literally. His audience is quite right to say that this makes no sense on the literal level. He’s saying rather that the kind of freedom with which he lived—even to the point of risking and losing his life—can make us free, can sustain our life, can help us claim the full gift of the humanity God has willed for us. His life offers us a turn forward into the future, a turn outward into human community—a turn toward hope, toward kingship, toward generosity, toward life itself.
None of these texts, on the surface, seems to have much to do with the others. But sometimes the Scriptures show a deeper level of coherence underneath their surface. Here it takes the form of a call to turn toward new hope and trust and love. That turning is not made in a single moment of human life, but over and over again. And probably the greatest gift that God gives us in the Scriptures is the repeated reminder of it in so many different forms.
It’s not easy to explain why one likes one performance of a work better than another, but two recent purchases have set me thinking about it. One of these I bought because I heard part of it on the radio and recognized some music I had struggled to play long ago, Bach’s Inventionen und Sinfonien. The performer was Till Fellner (ECM New Series). These pieceswere written as exercises and don’t get performed all that much by professional pianists. But I always thought the ones I tried to play were really exciting music—if only I could have played them better. This is hardly surprising, of course, from a composer who could turn something as formal as a fugue into a transcendent experience.
Patrick White described the effect: “The organ lashed together the bars of music until there was a whole shining scaffolding of sound. And always the golden ladders rose, extended and extended, as if to reach the window of a fire. But there was no fire, only bliss, surging and rising. . . ” (Riders in the Chariot, chapter 9). The little Inventionen and Sinfonien don’t reach that high, but they find great range among the lesser human emotions, from sadness to peaceful content to a somewhat bumptious jollity. Fellner communicates all that.
This isn’t a matter of sentimentality. When Bach is played in an effort to evoke a particular emotion, it usually doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, Bach played only as a technical exercise or a demonstration of virtuosity can be tedious. How to describe the middle ground? I suppose it is a matter of performing with an awareness that the music does convey emotion and a willing cooperation with that. I’m not sure this is very clear or helpful, but it comes close to what I was hearing in Fellner’s performance of these “student” pieces—and of the Fifth French Suite that completes the album.
I think the complex structure of Bach’s music has sometimes been treated by modern tastes as equivalent to abstraction in the visual arts—the submergence of recognizable subject matter into pure form. But it’s hard for me to imagine that any Baroque music is truly divorced from emotion. It was an era fascinated by temperament and its accompanying emotions. Handel’s L’Allegro, il Pensoroso, ed il Moderato is a sterling example with its complex representation of the sanguine and melancholic temperaments. Even the turning away from them in the closing duet, which hails the advent of Moderation and the restoration of “intellectual day,” is full of deeply felt relief. (The poetry in that duet is lame, but the music may be the most stirringly beautiful Handel ever wrote.)
The other recording I purchased recently is Alexander Melnikov’s performance of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues (Harmonia Mundi), written two centuries after Bach but inspired by his Preludes and Fugues. This is—very unusually for me— the fourth recording of this work that I have owned. I don’t often acquire multiple versions, but I have an odd history with this work.
My first exposure to it was an LP with selections of the preludes and fugues performed by Shostakovich himself. I fell in love with them—not so odd for me, as I’m a sucker for fugues in general. After reaching a time when I no longer played LPs, I decided to look for a CD. My old recording was not then available in that format (though it now is) and I bought one by Tatiana Nikolaeva (Melodiya). It seemed the obvious choice, since she was regarded as the work’s great interpreter.
But I was disappointed. The pieces were beautifully played, but rather bland. I missed the wry sense of humor that animated Shostakovich’s own playing, the humanity he gave the pieces. I found that I seldom played my new purchase. When Keith Jarrett’s recording (ECM New Series) came out to great acclaim, I bought that. Much better, to my tastes. The music felt more transparent, more varied, less like a museum piece. But it still felt to me as if the humanity of the work was obscured.
After reading reviews of Melnikov’s recording, I debated for about a year whether I wanted to try again. I’m very glad I did. His performance has all the human vitality of Shostakovich’s own. Not that he imitates Shostakovich’s performance. The pieces I knew from the old LP sound quite fresh and distinct in his performance. But they convey an overall sense of the joys and sorrows, the dangers, stupidities, wonders, and even comedy of human life—perhaps intensified by the environment of the Stalinist era—transmuted into the abstract forms of prelude and fugue and waiting to be awakened and retranslated into a non-verbal message for heart and mind together.
Messrs. Fellner and Melnikov have accidentally united to give me new delight in music that I have long loved. Forgive my unseemly exuberance if I respond with an Amen! Hallelujah!
A trip south to the Los Angeles area to visit family and friends took us through familiar terrain along Interstate 5. For some years, we have seen signs proclaiming that the drought was the fault of Congress (the specific object of wrath being environmental regulations protecting downstream waters). On the whole, however, we have not seen many signs of major damage until this trip. Yes, there were a few groves of dead trees. But orchards have their own life cycles, and we saw more orchards in infancy or youth than we saw dead ones. This time, however, we saw some mature orchards actually in the process of dying and more fallowed fields than we have been used to. The drought is tightening its grip, with or without the help of Congress. New signs are appearing that now lay the blame on the water consumption of California cities.
There are still green lawns in the LA area, but fewer than there used to be. Even the Getty Center, being the good citizen, had turned off most of its beautiful water features, leaving only the rivulet that runs down the to the pond by the great bougainvilleas. The gardens there were designed from the start to use relatively little water otherwise. Despite tales of people who continue to use water lavishly, there are many signs of civic responsiveness.
Just to keep us off guard, nature reminded us that this is a time not just of global warming, but of global weirding, giving us a first-class, midwestern style thunder storm in the middle of our ever-dry summer. It hung for an hour or so over Silver Lake where we were staying. Flashes of lightning followed immediately by deafening claps of thunder. Jon watched a tree on the other side of the street fall to the storm. The Fire Department arrived about fifteen minutes later, inspected, and apparently found no danger.
But the more interesting part of the trip from a gardener’s point of view was the return. On the advice of our friend Scott, we went north through Ojai, a beautiful little town with a very interesting artists’ collective called Ojai Valley Arts, then on north on state highway 33. The scenery is beautiful even when dry, but we found ourselves ascending into clouds and drizzle and an unfolding carpet of yellow flowers along the roadside—a lupine-like flower, about two feet tall, and a lower-growing thistle-like one. I’ve been unable to identify either more precisely from the two books I have.
From highway 33, we turned west down the Cuyama Valley, which looked much more desolate than the country along I-5. Much of the land seemed to have been fallowed; but, not having been there in a normal year, we found it hard to guess what it might look like in more favorable times..
We spent the night in Pismo Beach, with the bonus of a good view of the Pacific, complete with whale splashing about in the middle distance. Then north again on 101 till we turned off toward Carmel on Arroyo Seco Road and then Carmel Valley Road. There were places along Arroyo Seco Road that looked truly desolate. Even the oaks appeared to have died. Only when we crossed over toward the ocean side of the hills did matters improve. There we found great swaths of classic California: golden grasses under the broad, dark green branches of live oaks.
The impression, over all, was that the drought is certainly working major damage, not only to agriculture but to some of the native plant life. The dead oaks were particularly troubling. Had the water table been lowered by indiscriminate pumping? Possibly. Other terrains, however, seemed to be weathering the drought, albeit in a subdued state. And it didn’t seem to take much rain to bring the flowers on highway 33 out of hiding.
Next winter? Anyone’s guess, though the current prognostication is for a major El Niño event, which usually means rain for California. My own garden would be glad of that.
And a side-note, not climate related: we went to the Getty Center to see the Andrea del Sarto show—mostly drawings and a few oils. The drawings are mind-boggling in their elegance and detail and liveliness. Our friend Joseph told us to be sure to see the small exhibit on Degas and pastels, which proved to be a great treat, too. The little computer show on the making of pastels provided a fascinating enrichment to a choice set of works by Degas and contemporaries. We had a pleasant lunch on the terrace and returned to the galleries only to find them overrun by children with smart phones, taking pictures of everything as fast as possible and, as near as I could tell, actually looking at nothing. Their parents pretended not to know them. We decided to call it a day for the museum.
The Gospel of Mark is something of a riddle. Lacking the narrative polish of Luke, the theological coherence of John, or the judiciousness of Matthew, it gives us few clues as to the perspective of the author. I think one such clue has gone largely unnoticed. It is found in what seems like a great contradiction at the heart of the work.
Early in his ministry, Jesus says to his chosen disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand. . . .'” (4:11-12, quoting Isaiah 6:9, NRSV) And yet, from this point on, the disciples never really get anything right while a succession of outsiders, mostly nameless, show themselves to be people of great clarity, understanding and faith.
Mark gives the disciples a bad press, and some scholars take this as evidence that he distrusted them. Yet, his Gospel depends for its existence on the tradition they represent. It is primarily a story about what Jesus did with them and it ends—at least in the oldest ending we have for it (16:1-8)—with the angel sending them a message to meet Jesus in Galilee, as if they were about to begin the story all over again. Yet, the Gospel’s final words assert that the women who found the empty tomb and heard this message “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A book that is hardly intelligible except on the assumption that its intended audience already knew the story of the resurrection winds up with yet another failure to grasp the message.
Mark’s book is addressed to a particular community, that of Christians, and narrates a tradition of Jesus’ teaching that lived on in that community. And, at the same time, he tells us that the disciples who preserved it did not understand it. Peter, for example, recognized Jesus as Messiah, only to rebuke him for predicting his own death at the hands of the authorities (8:27-33). And despite Jesus’ sayings about the necessity of his followers’ taking up the cross and their need for humility, the disciples are found arguing among themselves as to which of them was the greatest. At his arrest, one betrays, one denies him, and the rest disappear.
By contrast, we meet quite all these perceptive outsiders: people who had the faith to be healed by him and even the courage to be insistent with him (the Syro-Phoenician woman, 7:24-30; the father of the epileptic boy, 9:94), people who used his name to cast out demons and whom he defended against his disciples’ criticism (9:38-41), a blind beggar who dared to interrupt Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem (10:46-52), a scribe (part of a group usually seen as enemies in the narrative) whom Jesus described as “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:28-34), a poor widow whose piety Jesus held up as model (12:41-44). At the end, it was another outsider, Joseph of Arimathea, who did the pious deed of burying Jesus’ body after the disciples had fled and left the women without other help.
In this short series of posts on the scriptural witness to the tension between the universal and particular, Mark has a particularly important place. The Gospel is clearly focused on the Christian community and narrates a compendium of its tradition. This is specifically a Christian book. It belongs, one would think, pretty far toward the “particular” end of the tension. It is about how God has become the God of this particular community through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
At the same time, it undercuts any Christian effort to claim unfailing wisdom, understanding, or insight, much less unique possession of God’s truth—the ever-present danger whenever we claim God as our own. Even though the first disciples were given the mystery (or “secret”) of the kingdom of God, they never, at least within the confines of this narrative, understand it. Nor does Mark imply that he or his generation of Christians possesses such understanding. What he hands on is the mystery itself. There remains for the faithful a lifelong journey into understanding it. And they may well meet some people along the way who have the kind of inexplicable insight that the Syro-Phoenician woman or the blind beggar had.
To put it another way, the God who works through the particular revelation of Jesus or the particular people of the church, always remains free to work with any human being and in the world at large. Even if we are steeped in the mystery, the tradition, the faith of our particular group, we remain quite good at getting its real meaning wrong and we may be found in fact less faithful and less perceptive than some outsider with no credentials at all.
This doesn’t mean that the particular is of no value. Without it, there is no story of God’s dealing with us to hand on, to learn, to interpret. But it does mean that scripture directs us to embrace both sides of the tension—both the God who has created all the world and the God who has called particular communities—wants us to lay hold on this God without trying to short-circuit the tensions involved. We find it easier to be either universalists or narrow particularists. Scripture keeps pressing us to be both at once.
Amos was the first Hebrew prophet we know of who wrote a book. We can even date his work to a particular time—the decade between 760 and 750 BCE. This was a period of great success and prosperity for the sister kingdoms of Israel and Judah, mainly because the dominant imperial powers of the Near East were all in disarray, allowing the two of them (with Israel as the senior partner) to dominate the weaker states around them and garner immense wealth in tribute and trade.
The rich and powerful people of the two kingdoms responded much like the “1%” of the US in the last few decades—amassing great fortunes, spending extravagantly on themselves, and refusing to take any responsibility for the effects of their behavior on the public at large or, more specifically, the poor. Religion was very much bound up with the nation’s prosperity, since people attributed it to the favor of their God (with much the same enthusiasm as Americans attribute ours to the favors of capitalism). The Temples were well endowed, the festivals well attended, the clergy as well satisfied as the plutocrats.
In the midst of this, Amos appeared unexpectedly at Israel’s royal sanctuary in Bethel with a message of judgement and destruction. He insisted that he was not a prophet at all—not, that is, part of one of the regular guilds of prophets at the temples. Some understand him to have been a poor shepherd; others see him as a stockman, owning herds and groves of the sycamore figs used as cattle feed. However he made his living, he was a brilliant poet. And he made a particular point of the tension we’ve already noted in Genesis between God as the universal God and God as the God of a particular nation.
The opening oracle of the book (chaps. 1-2) makes a tour of surrounding nations, denouncing each for its sins and promising due punishment. This implies that God is the God of the whole world, able to punish anyone at all. But the Israelite audience will also have heard Amos as saying that this was the work of their God, the one who favored them. Then, at 2:4, things start going wrong. The seventh nation condemned is not the enemy, but Israel’s sister kingdom and ally, Judah. And rather than quitting, as expected, after the seventh oracle, Amos keeps right on into an eighth, directed now at Israel itself.
Amos denounces the surrounding nations not for their paganism, but for violence and cruelty toward their enemies. He denounces Israel and Judah primarily for cruelty toward their own poor and for betrayal of their relationship with their God. In other words, Amos catches them up short by turning their assumption of religious advantage into a threat. Further on, God will say to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” They expected “the day of the Lord” as their time of vindication. Amos says it will be not light and salvation, but darkness, judgement, and destruction (5:18-20). God will punish every nation for its inhumanity—Israel and Judah above all.
Amos’s God is indeed God of the whole world, as he declares in a short, but exalted poem that crashes into the sequence of oracles like a meteor:
The one who made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning,
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is his name,
who makes destruction flash out against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress. (5:8-9, NRSV)
There is no hint here of a God who is merely Israel’s God.
Amos repeats the point in another short cosmic poem:
The Lord, God of hosts,
he who touches the earth and it melts,
and all who live in it mourn,
and all of it rises like the Nile,
and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt;
who builds his upper chambers in the heavens,
and founds his vault upon the earth;
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out upon the surface of the earth—
the Lord is his name. (9:5-6 NRSV)
And then, Amos takes the matter still further as God tells the Israelites that they are no more special than any other nation, even the people furthest from them, even their enemies:
Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,
O people of Israel? says the Lord.
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,
and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir? ((9:7 NRSV)
The prophet resolutely adheres to both ends of the impossible tension. God will destroy Israel because God is the universal God of justice and God will destroy them because God is their own God whom they have betrayed by their cruelty to the poor.
Christians, over the centuries, have repeatedly lost our grasp on this necessary tension. This is what has allowed people of faith to be seduced into unquestioning support for violence against enemies and for oppression of people who have been marginalized in our own society. We suppose that God is ours and will judge us more favorably. No. Violence, inhumanity, trampling on the poor and weak—all will be judged wherever they are found. And we who think ourselves particularly favored will be judged, if anything, more severely.
The point is that we can claim the particular love of God for ourselves only insofar as we allow it to be extended to the whole world. It is a hard notion to hang onto and we keep losing our grip on it. The scriptures have no purpose more fundamental or more valuable than this: to hold us to this tension and bring us back to it when we abandon it.
