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A CALL TO ADVENTURE

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

Second Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2020

Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

We have many ways to think of Lent. It can be a season for bringing more discipline and focus into our lives, a season to renew our attentiveness to God in prayer and meditation, a season for spiritual stimulation through reading, a season for cultivating quiet and centeredness, a season to reflect on our mortality—it does start off with those admonitory ashes! These can all be good ways of practicing Lent. They meet a variety of needs in our spiritual lives. Perhaps each of us has our own preference—a preference that may change at different points in our lives. 

But today’s readings have prompted me to think of Lent in yet another way—as a season of adventuring, of risking a break with our existing assumptions about life in order to see if God has something more to tell us, something more to give us, something more that we hadn’t been aware of yet or, if we were, were perhaps feeling inadequate to.

Begin with Abram. In antiquity, leaving your family was a very chancy business. People in our time and place move pretty freely away from their families. You can stay in touch by electronic means; you can go visit without too much trouble; the laws may even be more or less the same in your new place. In other ages, there was much more risk involved. And, at this point, Abram had nothing more to rely on than a promise. 

When he left Haran, he couldn’t know exactly what problems he might face, what resources he might have to face them with, what enemies he might encounter, what allies he might find. Nor could he know what family of his own he might build, still less what an extraordinary history would attend his many descendants. He started out trusting the God who had promised him a blessing, and he ventured everything on it. And all the rest of the Biblical story, from this point on, of course, depends on Abram’s venture. 

And in the process—through dangerous times and peaceful times, through hard times and prosperous times—Abram came to know the God who called him more and more deeply. He come to understand that God’s call was a sign of love for him, something he could never have expected, much less worked for. He came to see that God had offered him friendship and that God wanted Abram’s friendship, too.

Would God have abandoned Abram if he’d refused to take the risk? I don’t think so. The God I have come to know in my life isn’t short-tempered or huffy or quick to break relationships. God would still have been at Abram’s side. But Abram came to know God in ways that became possible only as he took that initial risk, stepping out into the unknown on the strength of a promise.

It’s not so different with Nicodemus in the story we heard from the Gospel of John. Jesus is inviting him to an adventure—a different kind of adventure, but still an adventure. Nicodemus is a person who ought to know God pretty well. He’s very devout; he’s even a teacher of religion. And he’s a person of high status both religiously and politically. And yet, he recognizes, in Jesus, odd outsider though he is, someone who is closer to God than he is himself. 

Nicodemus isn’t a unique figure. It’s fairly easy for people to be very devout or to know a lot about religion without in fact being very close to God. Religion can become an end in its own right—a way to organize your life, a fascinating subject to dig into and learn more about, perhaps a way to reassure yourself that you are among the chosen, while God really couldn’t much like all those rather careless, indifferent, self-indulgent people around you. 

It’s not that religion is bad in itself. It’s almost the only way we have of thinking and speaking about God. But like everything human, it’s subject to abuse. That’s one reason why so many people are deeply suspicious of religion in our time. They’ve seen the abuse in action. But Jesus doesn’t ask Nicodemus to give up religion. He asks him to pass more deeply into it and through it to communion with God’s own self, to a new awareness of God’s love. Nicodemus has all the right words, but he needs to grasp the poem. He has the right notes, but he still has to grasp the tune. He has the right moves, but he isn’t dancing the dance. He needs to be born anew—or from above (the Greek word in question can mean either thing). He needs to be born of the Spirit. 

That could be a big risk for a community leader who is an expert on his religion and a prominent practitioner of it. It could wind up getting him in a dangerous spot in terms of public opinion. But it could also be like Abram arriving in the Promised Land. “Oh, this is what it’s all about—this trust, this hope, this love, this friendship with God, this new way of being in the world.”

And it seems that Nicodemus took the risk. For we will meet him again later in John’s Gospel. As a member of the Sanhedrin, he will later try to secure a fair trial for Jesus when some of his colleagues are more in the mood for a lynching. After the crucifixion, he will join Joseph of Arimathea, another secret disciple, in burying Jesus (19:39). It seems that he did indeed find something of what Jesus was pointing him toward. His first adventure was in looking deeper into his religion and finding there the love and friendship of God. And the adventure continued as he began to live that love and friendship out in his world, sometimes at real risk to himself.

And Paul is making the same point when he brings us back to the figure of Abraham. What was so distinguished about Abraham? Was it his piety? No. It was his willingness to venture. Abraham didn’t wait till he had made himself worthy of God; he just took the gift of God’s love as it was offered to him and launched out into the world. And that, says Paul, is what we all need. 

It sounds good, doesn’t it? God loves you, has always loved you, will always love you. You don’t have to be perfect. In fact, you can’t make God love you any more than God already does because there isn’t such a thing as more love than God is already pouring out on you. It’s the whole bucketful, dumped right on you. 

It should make us glad, right? Actually, it tends to make us nervous.

Why? Because love like that is pure gift, pure grace. You don’t own it. You can’t take charge of it. You can’t even manipulate it, because God knows you inside and out already—probably better than you know yourself. All this can be a little scary. We may wish we had some claims of our own in the matter, some virtues of our own in the bank that we could leverage for what we want. I think that’s why religious people are always to some degree in danger of shutting ourselves up inside our religion and treating it as something that belongs to us and makes more worthy. That way, we think we can earn God’s love.

But there’s nothing of ultimate importance in this life except the love of God, which invites you to share love with God and with all the others God loves. And it’s the consciousness of that love that enabled Abram and Nicodemus and Paul and any number of other saints since to take risks, to venture out, to do new and wonderful things in their lives. 

Perhaps your call, like Abram’s or Nicodemus’s, is to new places or tasks or spiritual discoveries. But for all of us, always, the call is to accept the reality of this extraordinary, all-embracing love of God for each one of us and to take it as our intimate companion as we step into the future that lies ahead of us.

And our Psalm today gives us the right music for the adventure. Bear it in mind this Lent:

I lift up my eyes to the hills;

from where is my help to come?

My help comes from God,

the maker of heaven and earth.

God will not let your foot be moved;

the One who watches over you will not fall asleep.

. . . . . 

God shall preserve you from all evil,

and is the one who shall keep you safe.

God shall watch over your going out and your coming in,

from this time forth for evermore.

[translation from The Saint Helena Psalter, copyright 2004]

IT WAS A DARK TIME, AN UNCERTAIN TIME. . . .

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CHRISTMAS EVE 2016

Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)

It was a dark time, an uncertain time. The rich were getting richer, the poor poorer. The people were deeply divided about public issues, some favoring the government of Rome because it had brought peace, others calling for revolution. The religious were at odds with the less pious. Everybody resented the taxes except the people who were collecting them.

And one Galilean couple was dislodged from their familiar surroundings to make the long trek to Bethlehem so that they could sign a government register and pay a government duty. There was no place in town to stay but the stable behind one of the inns. And there Mary realized that she was going into labor.

Joseph ran quickly to find the local midwife. He had already built a fire to keep her warm. Now he was heating water on it and doing all the midwife’s bidding. Poor Mary! None of her more experienced female relatives there to help and reassure her—just the midwife and Joseph.

But the child got born and the mother was doing fine. The midwife bathed and swaddled the infant. Joseph could breathe again. And the midwife left with a promise to return in the morning.

They had barely settled in for the night when they heard a rustling and some hushed voices outside and then a quiet knock on the stable door. Joseph got up and, not inclined to take strangers in the middle of the night lightly, he picked up his staff before he went to the door and raised the latch. He opened the door a crack to see a small huddle of rather dirty and nervous looking shepherds with a lantern.

After a bit of shoving and jostling, they pushed an old man forward to be their representative. “Sir,” he said—and fell into an embarrassed silence. This was more than a little odd. Joseph wasn’t used to being addressed as “sir.”

After a moment, the old man tried again: “Your excellency,” he said this time. Joseph’s brow furrowed and his eyes crossed a bit at this compounding of excess. But after clearing his throat rather noisily, the old man went on.

“Your excellency, we was directed here by a certain personage—a knowledgeable personage, I think—what told us that we should come straight here and pay our respects to the new baby what he went so far as to say is the Savior, the Messiah. We be most sorry to disturb you so late in the night, but the, uh, personage was most insistent and specific and said to come right here and no place else.”

This was all very odd, but then odd things had been happening to Mary and to Joseph, too. And, since the little huddle of shepherds really didn’t look threatening, he invited them in.

He began at once rifling through his saddle bag to find some little refreshment he could offer them. One couldn’t have guests, even uninvited guests, without offering refreshments. But the shepherds would have none of it. They had brought gifts for Mary and Joseph instead: good cheese, some hard bread, a bit of wine (not so good) and some spring water (quite refreshing). And they laid these out on a cloth as an offering to the new parents.

The old man began again. “It’s a strange tale—nothing like it in my time, though I’ve heard stories from long ago. It was like a person made of fire—lit the place up like broad daylight. We all ducked, of course—afraid of getting singed. But he said, the way those, uh, personages do: ” No need to be afraid. I’ve got good news.” And he sent us off here straightaway.

“We’d have been too blinded by it all to find the track down the hill, but then the whole sky lit up and we heard music coming at us from all sides. I never heard such music! And found our way down the mountain and into the town, and here we are. And here you are. And we brung the baby a wool blanket to keep him warm—here, it’s pretty clean; almost new.”

And it was still a dark time, still an uncertain time. Indeed, it seemed to be getting darker. The rich went on getting richer, the poor poorer. The people were still deeply divided about public issues. The religious were still at odds with those who were less pious. Everybody resented the taxes except the people who were collecting them.

But something was unleashed on the world there in Bethlehem that is still making trouble for the oppressors and giving hope to the poor, that’s still offering hope in troubled times, still proclaiming that love is more important than rigorous piety. It is the astonishing news that “Immanuel” is here. God is truly living alongside us—weak as a baby and yet strong enough to change the world in and with and for us.

The greatest of transformations springs from the humblest of beginnings. We are here with the shepherds to witness it again in awe and wonder—and to be filled again with the courage to live faithfully even in dark and uncertain times.

THROUGH WATER AND FIRE (FEAST OF THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST)

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Bill Countryman, Good Shepherd Berkeley

FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, JANUARY 10, 2016

Year C: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

 

Water: it’s never been quite so much on my mind as it has lately. Even though I don’t like gray days, I rejoice to see rain falling here; and even though I’m not interested in skiing, I rejoice to hear of snow in the Sierra. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that.

Water is essential to life—something I’m reminded of even in the science news. Astronomers have been talking about it a lot over the last year because nobody has quite managed to explain why Earth has so much of it or where it came from. But, then again, they’ve turned up signs that there’s still liquid water on Mars, which pumps up people’s curiosity about life there.

Here at home, of course, all of us in California have been feeling the pinch of drought this past year. And, in that, we have a lot of company the world over. The drought in Australia, the African Sahel, and the Near East is much graver at this point than ours. Some people suggest that it’s a contributing factor in the political and religious conflicts in Africa and the Near East. It’s certainly causing some conflicts in California politics just now.

But the drought has made us particularly grateful for the recent rains. I’ve been totaling up the water in the rain gauge, breathing a sigh of relief with every additional tenth of an inch. At moments like these, it becomes difficult to think of water as just a given, something we don’t have to think about.

Rain in dry times gives a boost to everyone’s spirits. Even the most confirmed non-believer can be excused for feeling some sense of thankfulness—to the creation at large if not to the Creator. For those of us who know our lives to be touched by God in a great variety of ways, water reveals itself as something holy. I’ve often sensed the presence of God in a particular way where we find water in the desert, in the occasional pool fed by an aquifer, in a spring-fed creek, or in a great river like the Virgin at Zion Canyon. There, you get unmistakable evidence of the life-giving power of water.

But there’s another side to water, of course. Even as we welcome this year’s rains, we’re being warned about the danger of flooding. I haven’t heard of any significant instances of it yet, but we know it’s possible—probable, in fact, if we get too much rain in too short a time.

So this element that’s basic to our life can also threaten it at times. I think again of water in the desert, where storms far upstream can unleash terrible flash floods without much warning.

Our Psalmist today must have seen storms like that. Where else would such vivid description of their power come from?

3 The voice of God is upon the waters;

the God of glory thunders; *

God is upon the mighty waters.

4 The voice of God is a powerful voice; *

the voice of God is a voice of splendor.

5 The voice of God breaks the cedar trees; *

God breaks the cedars of Lebanon.

7 The voice of God splits the flames of fire;

the voice of God shakes the wilderness;

We live in a world both generous and dangerous. And the Psalmist tells us that the God who made this world is both generous and dangerous.

We know this, of course, though at times we try to forget it. And then, in one way or another we get brought up against the fragility of human life and we learn all over again that God is not a sort of gauzy character out of a fairy tale with a wand, scattering fairy dust and making everything right. No, God is someone much bigger, much more loving—and also much tougher than that.

But if our Psalmist warns us of the danger, Isaiah, in our first reading this morning, reminds us of the love and care exercised on us by this mighty God:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you. (43:2)

God promises to pass through the storm—the floodwaters and the lightning—with us

Hmmm—passing through water. That’s exactly what John the Baptist offered people in his ministry, isn’t it? He gave them a chance to be immersed in this life-giving and life-threatening element. People walked into the water with him in the hope that they would emerge with a new confidence in God. In the sacrament of water, they faced up to both the wonder and the danger of life. And they found it gave them strength. Embracing the fear and the hope together gave them a new sense of God’s power and God’s goodness at work in their lives.

Lots of people were showing up for that: people who felt insecure in their world, uncertain of their God, unsatisfied with their lives, burdened by their failures and inadequacies, hoping for a new beginning and prepared to put some effort and energy into it. It was a mass movement and, unlike some recent popular movements we could name—political, social, religious—it seems to have had a thoroughly beneficent effect. People began to live more honestly, more generously—began to take care of one another and recreate genuine human community among themselves.

And then Jesus shows up to be baptized. John, you may recall, was Jesus’ cousin. And I always wonder about that. Sometimes close relatives work together well, and other times we have trouble taking each other seriously. In this case, John took some persuading, but finally agreed to baptize Jesus.

“And,” you might say, “so what?” Isn’t that just what John did, what John’s ministry was about? Yes. But there’s more. The real “so what” becomes evident only in the moment of vision that follows, when the voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

In this moment, God’s promise in Isaiah becomes realized quite literally:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.

The flood, the lightning—it isn’t just we who pass through the waters of life and death. God passes through them alongside us. God takes the risk, God dares to experience this creation the same way we do.

“God sits enthroned over the flood,” we said in our Psalm. Yes. And God also wades through it alongside us. And recognizing this grants us the power to live lives of hope and energy even in a world that encompasses so much danger as well as so much blessing.

THINKING ABOUT KIM DAVIS

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The case of Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is giving me cause to reflect. On the one hand, I am strongly opposed to what she has done. Gay and Lesbian people have struggled long and hard to achieve, in practical terms, the full citizenship that, in theory, we always possessed. It is not easy to be gracious when one person who happens to be in a position of power feels free to nullify our most recent legal advance.

On the other hand, I am, like Kim Davis, a Christian who has occasionally felt it necessary to place myself sideways in some community process for reasons of conscience. To be sure, she may not regard my Episcopal tradition as Christian and I tend to look on her Christian tradition as a distortion of the historic Christian faith. Still, I fully understand the importance of conscience in matters of faith.

I am thus in the awkward spot of respecting her willingness to stand firm while at the same time believing that her understanding of Christian faith is mistaken on this topic and that she ought to reconsider. It’s unlikely that she and I will ever engage in direct conversation on the topic. Nor, I fear, is it likely that it would prove fruitful if we did.

My reservation is based on experience. For some years I functioned as one of the “point” people in the Episcopal Church’s long conversation on the topic of sexual orientation. I repeatedly found that Evangelical Episcopalians who attended (many simply stayed away) refused to engage in any real sort of conversation at all. They listened only in order to to decide how they were going to attack. As a result, they never really comprehended what was being said on the other side. They refused to treat faithful lesbian or gay Christians as anything more than interlopers. And they claimed the authority of Scripture for their position even while they were unwilling to go back to scripture with an open mind in order to discuss the interpretation of others. Their own presentations consisted in repeating what they had already said over and over, as if one more repetition might finally persuade where the previous hundred had failed.

In short, I have no expectation that people from the broadly Evangelical spectrum, including the Pentecostal tradition to which I am guessing Ms. Davis belongs, will or even can engage in straightforward conversation with those of us who belong to other Christian traditions. Happily, there seems to be some conversation on the issues of sexual orientation arising within the Evangelical world now. I pray that it may be more productive than what I experienced as an outsider.

My continuing question, however, as I think about and pray for Kim Davis is how Christian people arrive at points of such great intransigence on issues that are not really central to Christian faith. Christian perspectives on marriage have varied widely over two millennia. Many of the earliest Christians were profoundly suspicious of heterosexual marriage, which they saw as the enemy of true Christian faith and life. It was a distraction, exerting a constant pull toward worldliness and giving rise to the anxiety that undermines faith. Never was it conceived as a fundamental aspect of Christian belief. The Evangelical exaltation of marriage (and of the relatively modern nuclear family) owes little to the Bible and not much to ancient Christian tradition. It began as a twentieth-century reaction to the increasing visibility of same-sex oriented people—effectively a theologizing of homophobia—and not much different from the use of the curse of Ham/Canaan to justify first slavery and then the continuing degradation of people of African ancestry—a defensive move by slave holders and racial bigots.

And yet, I recognize that we all have to take our fundamental convictions seriously. Not just religious people, but all sorts of people. How then are we to live together without destroying our common civil society by trying to enforce our convictions in the public sphere? For that, of course, is the issue for the rest of us—not what Ms. Davis believes, but what she does or does not do in her office of County Clerk.

There is a parallel—in principle though not in gravity—to the much graver attack on civil society that now plagues the ancient center of the Muslim world (and laps over into other parts of the world). For some reason, we human beings find it possible to feel that the depth of our convictions exempts us from responsibility for their consequences in the lives of others. At that point, we forget that we are not in fact the God (or whatever other principle) in which we believe and we somehow turn ourselves into absolute authority. It is the deepest and most treacherous temptation of humankind, the true sin of pride. (It is also, of course, not limited to religious people. I need only name Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism to make that point.)

When we find that we are no longer willing to enter into conversation with the people we judge, that we only want to dictate to them, that we have decided that we can no longer learn anything knew or find a new perspective, that our faith is so complete as to admit of no addition or alteration, we are in grave danger. And we place the world around us in grave danger.

There are things in this world that would be worth suffering martyrdom for. God defend us all from them. But the privilege of denying other people their human and legal rights is not one of them.

CREATION AS EVOLUTION

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The hostility of modern Evangelicals (and their Fundamentalist forebears) to the science of evolution is founded less on scripture than on an ancient cosmology from the Hellenistic Era that drew a sharp distinction between the eternal unchangeability of God and the chaotic, unpredictable character of human life and of the world around us. (Think earthquakes and hurricanes, for example.)

This cosmology (often referred to as “Ptolemaic” because it was codified by the astronomer Ptolemy) held good for a couple of thousand years before Copernicus upset it. It envisaged Earth at the center of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres that carried the celestial bodies around us. The closest of these spheres to earth was the one that carried the moon and it served as the demarcation line between the perfection of the heavens above, where all the stars and planets were seen as obeying regular laws, and the radical imperfection of life here below—the sublunary regions of earth, air and sea.

There was a tendency to associate the perfection of the heavens with God’s perfect and unchanging creation and to attribute the chaos of life on earth to some other cause. Among Christians, it could be seen as related to the Fall of Humanity that forced us out of Eden according to Genesis 3. Paul, for example, seems to suggest that humanity’s failure forced the whole sublunary region into its existing distressed and chaotic state (Romans 8:18-25 ).

The Seven Days of Creation, as narrated in Genesis 1, could perhaps be seen as presupposing the idea of a cosmos perfect as it left its Creator’s hand. God did, after all, pronounce it “very good.” One might still ask, of course, whether “very good” necessarily equates to “perfect” in the sense of “beyond alteration or improvement” or whether it just means what it says: “very good.”

The Eden narrative, in Genesis 2-3, however, contains within itself, alongside the possibility of immortal perfection, the possibility of defection, of falling away, of death. Evangelical rejection of biological evolution rests largely on a presupposition that the perfect original creation could not have allowed for such dramatic subsequent change. But the Eden narrative (Genesis 2) actually suggests just the opposite. It says that God did not create the full reality we know as humanity in one moment, but began with the singularity of Adam and only afterward came to recognize that for one such creature to be genuinely human there had to be more than one.

The God of Eden, like other gardeners, seems to work in part by plan and in part by trial and error. Just read the text carefully—literally, in fact. It was such a reading that led to the Four Sonnets on Eden that appeared on this website in recent weeks. They emerged from paying attention to the strong element of change and uncertainty in Genesis 2-3.

It may, of course, have been possible for humans to grow in relationship to one another and to God while still remaining in Eden. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, there are some who did. But we can barely imagine what that would be like, so far is it from our own experience. Perhaps we can get a hint of it from those moments of human joy when we are most filled with love and delight in the creation—including the human creation. That’s the closest we get to Eden.

Christians in the seventeenth century found it difficult to abandon the ancient cosmology with its clear separation of unchanging celestial perfection from our human sublunary floundering. Poets like John Donne and George Herbert could not quite let it go, deeply embedded as it was in the Christian imagination. But, with Galileo and Newton, their successors learned to shift to a different perspective, displacing earth from the center of the universe and losing the orderly symmetry of the old model.

Darwin took this shift to a deeper level, a more concrete and embodied one. This did not prevent the mainstream of Christian theologians from acknowledging the weight of Darwin’s scientific work and that of his followers. Only in Fundamentalism and its progeny did evolution come to be treated as a stand-or-fall challenge to Christian faith. But if Evangelicals would take their direction from the Eden narrative, they might as easily come to a position friendlier to Darwin and to modern evolutionary biology. Here God creates in a less tidy fashion, with an element of the unforeseen and unpredictable. It is not “evolution” in the Darwinian sense, but it leaves ample room for a process like natural selection.

What is more, human and Christian life in this world is an extension of the same reality. We may represent a falling away from one kind of human perfection—that of Eden—but we also represent a new kind of human possibility, that of coming to know good and evil. Whatever humanity may become beyond and with this knowledge will be different from what we could have become before or without it.

Is one kind of existence better than the other? I would not venture to judge in a case where I know only one of the sides being compared. But there is an old Christian tradition that says our fallen and raised humanity will prove the better of the two. It is the tradition of felix culpa, the “fortunate fall,” which brought about the new and unforeseen wonder of Mary’s motherhood and the union of God and humanity in Jesus.

Thus God will gain some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.

UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR III: THE GOSPEL OF MARK

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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.

UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: AMOS

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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.

HOW TO READ SCRIPTURE

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Through an adult lifetime of teaching the Christian scriptures in churches and institutions of higher education, I have grown increasingly discontented with the way we read the Bible in both contexts. Not that I object to reading scripture from the perspective of faith; I do it myself and it informs my life. Nor that I object to reading it with critical questions about the history and sociology reflected in it or the literary forms that shape it; I do that, too, and find it profoundly instructive.

To a degree, my objection is to the separating of the two ways of reading. Academic Biblical Studies become trivial—even sterile—when they turn their back on the deep questions raised in scripture. And religious readings of the Bible that lack critical awareness tend to reduce it to a confirmation of our existing beliefs. Each way of reading needs the other as corrective.

In a larger sense, however, my objection is that all our readings tend to shortchange the sacred texts. We simplify the text and reduce it to the parameters of our particular set of concerns, which might be those of right-wing Evangelicalism or of Marxist sociology or any of a thousand other conscious or unconscious programs. We want to “make sense” of it on our terms, to get direct and simple answers out of it.

In reality, there is nothing straightforward and simple about the scriptures. They contain great, indeed unresolvable, tensions. Take Genesis as an example: it begins with a God who is the Creator of the whole universe and concludes with a God whose particular care is focused on a single family. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the sages who created Genesis tried to soften this tension, to subordinate one side of it to the other, or to make some kind of decision between the two poles. They simply leave us with the tension, a tension that in fact pervades all of human life.

This strategy isn’t unique to the Biblical writers. All writers whose work has proved its value enough to be called “classical”—such people as Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen—they don’t settle things for us; they awaken us to the tensions in our lives and our understanding. They give our own reflections on life more breadth and nuance that they would otherwise have. Christians are happy to accept this gift wherever we find it, but above all we count on finding it in the scriptures.

To many, this may seem an odd way to speak of the scriptures. The broad public impression of the Bible in the US today is quite different. It’s more likely to be seen as a weapon that preachers use to beat up on their congregations, one another, and the outside world. Exactly how it is used varies with the kind of preacher. The Conservative’s Bible is full of rules; it is a martinet with dangerous aspirations to theocratic tyranny. The Liberal’s Bible is full of reproof; it is a scold, a nag, a guilt-broker. (There are, thank God, many exceptions. This isn’t an accurate description of contemporary Christianity, only what I see as the broad public impression. At the same, the impression is not unrelated to reality.)

Both conservative and liberal approaches miss the real value of Scripture. Despite the common assumption, only a small percentage of the Bible is devoted to legislation. Perhaps somewhat more is devoted to prophetic reproof, though that’s not the whole of the prophetic message by any means. The central gift of scripture, however, is not rules or reproach, but the way in which the Scriptures place us in the presence of the One who shapes all reality and help us begin to think about our humanity and our world in the light of this God who is origin and sustainer of both.

For this, the tensions in the text are essential. We don’t live in a simple world. If it were simple, probably we would all “read” and interpret it much the same. That is far from being the case. For that matter, if the Bible were simple, we would probably all understand it the same. That’s just as far from being the case. What I hope to do is shift our attention from reductionist kinds of reading to a kind that allows scripture its full complexity and calls us into a truer awareness of ourselves and our world before God. I am confident that we will find this more useful in both the life of faith and the life of the mind.

In subsequent posts, I’ll explore this approach in terms of some specific texts—starting with Genesis, for what comes first inevitably affects our reading of everything else. I invite my readers to enter into conversation with me and with one another as we proceed.