26 September 2010

A Little Piece of Land


Yesterday was the Crystal Beach Triathlon. Daniel Hiler ran it, I swam it, and one of the students I used to work with in Charlottesville, Kristin Brubaker, was our biker, (though she did the whole thing). It was a beautiful day. A really unique event. And it reminded me again of what an interesting place the Eastern Shore is. It is the kind of place that inspires me to get a little piece of land and stay. I know there are troubles. I know these are hard times on the Eastern Shore. But I don’t think God is through with this place, this little piece of land and water, yet.


This makes me think of Jeremiah, who bought a little piece of land in the story we read for today. And it makes me think of a week in late September nine years ago when I had an argument with a radio preacher and felt convicted that God is not content with our pious words; God is ready for some action.


September 2001. If you were alive then you remember it. The towers had fallen. We had been attacked. We were beginning to talk about war in Afghanistan. I was a campus minister in Charlottesville and a part-time preacher at a small church north of town and trying to work on a PhD in theology. I don’t know who I thought I was and how I could do it all. I guess I thought I was Peter Surran.


At any rate, a few weeks after 9/11 I was going to Philadelphia for a conference at Villanova on the thought of St. Augustine. Surprise, surprise. I know you’ve never heard me talk about him, but anyway, that’s what I was doing. The trip to Philadelphia was about five hours long and I had a lot of time to listen to the radio. I listened to music, I listened to radio preachers, I listened to the news, I listened to commentators reflecting on the terrorist attacks, I argued with the commentators I didn’t like in a very loud voice—you can do that when you’re driving alone in a car—and I struggled with this text from Jeremiah, because it was up in the lectionary. What was I going to tell my congregation and my students in worship this week? What in the world would God have me say in those crazy, upside down days?


My first hint of God’s discontent came when I was almost to Philly. A music reviewer came on the radio to talk about how music had helped him through the days after the planes crashed and the towers fell in New York City. He said that he was not a very religious man, but he found himself going to church anyway in the days after the attack. He enjoyed the music. It moved him in ways that words could not. It helped him identify all those emotions he had inside that he just didn’t know how to deal with. But the words of the preacher, he said, came across as the kind of smug self-confidence that churches always seem to display. I listened to his evaluation and I felt indicted and then I felt angry.


I was thinking: Is that how the church’s reaction to the events of September 11 came across? Smug? It was really just a passing remark. He wasn’t really trying to make a big point about church language, he was just trying to point to how powerful the music was---and I understood that, and I even agreed that we had used far too many words. We hadn’t allowed for silence and music and other things that transcend words to touch us and move us. We had tried to move on with life and fill up the void we felt with more words and more activities, and I’m doing it right now as I go on this tirade—filling the air with more words—but how dare he! Smug! Does he realize…I thought…does he realize what a tremendous cost bought those words of assurance we used in prayer vigils after the event? Does he realize how much pain and suffering lie behind the words when we say things like, “Fear not, for I have overcome death.” When we say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” we’re not saying that everything is just hunky dory despite appearances to the contrary. We’re not saying that there is nothing to fear, that the world is not a scary place, that death and destruction and grief don’t get their licks and that we can be Pollyanna prophets always looking on the bright side of life as if it were just a matter of calling the glass half-full instead of half-empty. Every one of those words of confidence and hope was bought in the pain of slavery in Egypt, in the wrenching experience of exile in a strange land, in the trials of persecution in Ancient Rome, and most importantly on the wood of the cross of Calvary. Don’t tell me, Mr. Reviewer, that those words come easily, that they ignore the struggles of the world, that they turn us away from what we should really be looking at, because those words know the pain of human life and death and still they claim that the end is assured because of the crucified Christ that we serve.


It would have been fun to watch if you had pulled up beside me on the way into Philly. Me yelling at the car radio. And I realized that it wasn’t just the poor reviewer, who had no idea he was going to spark such a reaction…it wasn’t just the reviewer who was discontent—it was me, and it was God. God is not content with our pious words; God demands action. That’s when I realized how smug and self-confident my faith had really been in these weeks since all hell broke loose. It was time to put my money where my hope is.


This is where Jeremiah comes in. Because, you see, Jeremiah knows about this very problem. Whenever I think that the preaching conditions are bad for me, I remember poor Jeremiah, who was called to preach just as his country was falling apart.


Jeremiah was a prophet in the small kingdom of Judah, which was all that was left of the great King David’s great kingdom. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had been defeated and destroyed, its peoples exiled or dispossessed of land, some 150 years earlier. The kingdom that had once stretched from the land of Egypt to the headwater of the great Euphrates River, a nation that had been at the crossroads of the known world, was now reduced to a small patch of land in the hill country of Palestine, not much larger than the Eastern Shore of Virginia.


But Judah still had the king, who was a direct descendent of David. Judah, still had its independence, despite the fact that it had to pay tribute to foreign superpowers. It still had its sense of invulnerability and destiny. And Judah still had Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple, a reminder of Yahweh, its God.


Jeremiah got the plum job of going to the king and leaders of Judah, while the Babylonian army was besieging the city and declaring that it was doomed. You can imagine what a popular guy this made him. The whole country is about to go under and he’s going around saying, “The Babylonians are going to win.” Must have sounded pretty treasonous. Which is why Jeremiah ends up thrown in prison and thrown in a pit.


Jeremiah didn’t like his message. It didn’t feel like good news to him. He talks about how hard it is to have to keep talking about destruction and ruin. The only thing that keeps him talking is that it is more painful for him to try to close the message up inside, where it becomes like a fire in his bones, demanding to be released.


In this passage, Jeremiah does something absolutely amazing. Anyone who knew what he knew would have been guarding his resources for the terror to come. He knew the Babylonians would overrun the city. He knew Jerusalem would be destroyed. He knew everything they had would be lost. He should have been pulling his money out of the stock market and socking it away in precious metals. He should have been liquidating his assets before the bottom dropped out of the market. But what does Jeremiah do? He buys some land.


At ground zero, Jeremiah buys some land. It’s going to be a worthless, abandoned lot without a person even to till it. It’s going to be in a country that everyone assumed was God-forsaken and God-awful. But that’s where Jeremiah places his hope.


God tells him to do this, of course. Jeremiah was sitting in the king’s house under arrest. He hears God telling him that his cousin, Hanamel, was going to come and ask him to buy a piece of property that had been in their family for generations. And what do you know, old cuz’ Hanamel comes to him and asks him to buy a piece of property that had been in their family for generations. So Jeremiah does it. He makes a big deal about getting the appropriate witnesses, paying a fair price for the land, executing a proper deed, and placing it in an earthenware jar for safe keeping. But why? Why does he do this when the Babylonians are knocking on the door, when the world as he knows it is coming to an end, when he knew that his people and he himself were going to be exiled, either to Egypt in flight, or to Babylon by force? Buying a piece of land might seem like a not so hot investment.


Jeremiah buys the land because he knows that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Exile are not the last words to be spoken over God’s relationship with Israel. No, Jeremiah says, I am buying this property because “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” It’s all about hope, you see? Jeremiah is not just a prophet of doom and gloom after all. He sees the hope as well—even though he himself might not see the fruits of the future. And he is not just spouting platitudes; he is making a real investment in this future. He is placing his money and his faith in the hope that comes from God. God didn’t want his pious words; God wanted action that revealed the hope by which Jeremiah lived.


Now, I still disagree with Mr. Music Reviewer. The words that were spoken in churches and in other parts of our land in the days after September 11 were not just fond wishes for unbelievable outcomes. We weren’t just whistling in the dark. In the Christian Church we were turning back to the story that gives our lives meaning and which is behind everything we do. That story didn’t change because the world changed on that day. We still find our lives in Jesus Christ. We still live out of a kingdom of heaven that is both now and yet to come. We still are claimed and called and saved by that story that was initiated by God and begun before we ever had the opportunity to respond. That’s our story.


But it does not leave us as passive recipients of God’s grace – it moves us to action. And like Jeremiah, God calls us not to circle the wagons and pull our resources in so that we can protect what little security we feel we have remaining. God calls us to put our resources at the service of the future, believing that our hope is built on something far more lasting than we are.


What Jeremiah does is fairly risky by the financial security standards of the world. He invests in hope, in the future. He places himself where he would not be if the message he proclaimed were not true. Jeremiah would not buy property if it were not for his absolute conviction that God was not through with Israel, even at that dark moment.


We have that opportunity as well. We have the chance to place our resources and ourselves where we would not be if the good news we proclaim is not true. Because when you get right down to it, what we have committed to God, even if it’s only the brief amount of time we spend in this place of worship each week, even that makes no sense if we do not hope in a future that is different from what the world promises. We are here because we want to put our money where our hope is. And not just our money but our very lives.


God is not content with our pious words. God doesn’t want a little bit of our time or a little bit of our money like every other good works organization in our lives. This is not the PTSA or the Rotary Club. God wants everything, our whole lives, our entire hope, all of our trust in the future. And God wants us to move and act like people who have been invited to participate in the greatest work there is—the work of love. And God wants us to accept that invitation. Where’s your little piece of land? Thanks be to God.


Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-19 (NRSV)

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar.

At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah, where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him.

Jeremiah said, The word of the LORD came to me: Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours."

Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself." Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD. And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales.

Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; and I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard. In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

After I had given the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah, I prayed to the LORD, saying: Ah Lord GOD! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you. You show steadfast love to the thousandth generation, but repay the guilt of parents into the laps of their children after them, O great and mighty God whose name is the LORD of hosts, great in counsel and mighty in deed; whose eyes are open to all the ways of mortals, rewarding all according to their ways and according to the fruit of their doings.

You showed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and to this day in Israel and among all humankind, and have made yourself a name that continues to this very day.

You brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and outstretched arm, and with great terror; and you gave them this land, which you swore to their ancestors to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey; and they entered and took possession of it. But they did not obey your voice or follow your law; of all you commanded them to do, they did nothing. Therefore you have made all these disasters come upon them. See, the siege ramps have been cast up against the city to take it, and the city, faced with sword, famine, and pestilence, has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it. What you spoke has happened, as you yourself can see.

Yet you, O Lord GOD, have said to me, "Buy the field for money and get witnesses" -- though the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans.

19 September 2010

I Have to Pray for Whom?!

So there was Bob in mid-life. His life was a wreck. He was a mess physically – out-of-shape, wheezing to climb the stairs. He smoked. He ate poorly. He had an office job where he sat all day. And he was lonely. It all came to a head for him when he asked a co-worker for a date and she practically laughed at him.


So Bob said, “This is it. I’m going to change some things.” He quit smoking. He started exercising. Took Zumba classes. Lost a lot of weight. Got an expensive hair implant. Changed his diet. He was a new man.


After six months he got up his nerve to ask the same woman out and this time she said yes. So Bob showed up on her doorstep, looking sharp in brand new clothes, bounding up the steps, feeling better than he ever had. He was just about the ring the doorbell when a lightning bolt struck him and knocked him off the front steps. He was lying there and he looks up into the heavens and says, “Why, God? Why now? After all I’ve been through to get here, why do this to me?”


A voice came from the sky and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”


Now I don’t believe that God does such things. I don’t believe that God sends lightning bolts for the purpose of zapping us. But I do think God asks some difficult things of us. For instance, as we read in 1Timothy today, we are asked to pray for everybody. In this letter of the early church, the apostle writes, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone.”


Everyone. Not just our friends and our neighbors. Not just our loved ones. Not just our fellow Christians. Not just my cat and my dog. Not just the people I can tolerate. No, the call is to pray for…and even to give thanks for…everyone.


It’s not easy to pray for everyone. We’re not always wishing everyone well. We’re not always feeling like giving thanks for everyone. Some people really get on my nerves from time to time. Some people do some pretty rotten things. Some people make my life difficult. Some people think funny. Some people have some pretty crazy ideas about politics and some of them are in high office. I’ve got pray for them?


Well, according to 1 Timothy, it seems that the answer is yes. And then it goes on to get specific. Pray for kings and all who are in high position so that we may lead a lquiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is the language that has always disturbed me. We don’t have many kings around anymore but we know the history and we know that they were often not noble, upright characters. They were often flawed. Greatly flawed. And our leaders today are no different. They are all too human. All too easy to mock. All too easily corrupted. 1 Timothy and Romans 13, where it tells us to be subject to the governing authorities, seem to be telling us to do something that can be morally dangerous. What if the people in high positions are not worthy of our allegiance? Pray for them. Be subject to them. That’s the response.


In his recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas talks about the struggle of the German church in the early days of the Nazi takeover there in the 1930s. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young professor in Berlin who would go on to become a pastor and then a participant in a plot against Adolf Hitler. He died in a Nazi concentration camp just days before it was liberated in the waning days of World War 2.


It was a crazy time. Germany had been through a long period of instability. Many Germans felt that their country had been bankrupted and crippled by the terms imposed on them following the First World War. Their democratic institutions were weak and there was the constant threat of revolution or governmental overthrow. In a period when there seemed to be no leaders, Hitler put himself up to be that leader and he did it by demonizing Jews and socialists and others that he could point to as destabilizing forces.


It seems hard for us to believe, but that Nazi ideology also infiltrated the German churches. In the spring of 1933, at the instigation of Nazi figures, the German Protestant church considered a proposal to purify the churches of all Jewish influences. Any minister who was of Jewish descent was to be removed from his post and parishioners who were converts from Judaism or racially Jewish were to be asked to form their own congregations in a separate church. The church was now for German Christians.


Bonhoeffer recognized that if the church were to adopt this it would be more than a bad idea, it would be heresy. The church was not formed on the basis of racial identity; it was built on Jesus Christ in whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, man nor woman. He could see that it was wrong. He could see the church capitulating to the Nazis. And yet he was haunted by the command to pray for the ruling authorities and to submit to them. How could Christians put together respect for the state with their Christian identity?


Bonhoeffer wrote about it in a famous essay on the “The Church and the Jewish Question.” In it he said that the church should not interfere in the workings of the state as a matter of course. That it should pray for its welfare and its leaders. But the church could also help the state see and evaluate what it is doing, particularly in providing for an atmosphere of law and order. When the state failed to secure order in the society, then the church should point it out, since it could see the state for what it is. And when the state, through an excess of concern for order, deprived Christians of their rights to live and worship, then it was the duty of the church to reject that government as a grotesque distortion of what a state should be.


Finally, when the state creates victims because of an excess of ordering, the church has “an unconditional obligation to the victims…even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”[i] Bonhoeffer believed that this meant standing with the Jews, with the outcast. Even if they weren’t Christians. It was part of the identity of the Christian to identify with those Christ came to die for. And it was all built on the notion that none of us who are called by Christ’s name are here by our own merit. As it says in the first chapter of 1 Timothy, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost.” We’re all here by God’s grace and by the fact that Jesus came to identify with us.


Bonhoeffer knew that his stance was only going to get him into trouble. It took him to a Christian home for people with epilepsy and other disabilities – people whom the Nazis grew to call “useless eaters” or “life unworthy of life.” It took him into a movement to protest the bishop of the German Church, Bishop Muller, who started to talk about his opponents such as Bonhoeffer as “Pffafen,” monkey priests. Finally it took him into a new Confessing Church that refused to give allegiance to Hitler’s state above Jesus. Ultimately it took him to a hangman’s noose.


I think about Bonhoeffer’s story and I wonder if I have such a radical notion of the love of God for all people. Or do I pull my punches and not associate with some people for fear that I will be considered tainted? Am I so closed off by preconceptions that I begin to believe that there are some folks who don’t deserve a place at the table…who have set themselves apart by what they have done? Are there some people for whom Jesus didn’t come?


“This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,” Paul says in 1 Timothy. “God, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for just the Christians…no…just the baysiders…no…just the conservatives…no…just the liberals…no…just the Cavaliers…no…Christ Jesus gave himself a ransom for all…For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”


I can’t imagine our bishop, Charlene Kammerer, referring to some of her clergy as Pffafen – monkey priests. But if a bishop were to become so heretical as to believe as the Nazi bishop did, I hope that I would do something to deserve that epithet. I hope I could be Pffafen. I hope that they could say of me what they said of Jesus – that he ate with sinners. That he welcomed foreigners. That he was not afraid to identify himself with those the world had rejected.


Who do we have to pray for? Our nation. Our leaders. Even when we think they’re wrong. For our brothers and sisters who are caught up in debates that dehumanize them. When we talk about immigration…we are talking about real human beings who are our neighbors. They, like us, are caught up in a system that is broken and that needs to be fixed. Can we identify with them? When we talk about the plans for an Islamic center and mosque in lower Manhattan…we are talking about fellow citizens who love and appreciate the same right we have to worship in freedom. We may question what wounds will be opened by having this center on this site, but we cannot allow our fears to trump our freedoms. One day it could be us. Can we identify with these people outside the Christian community?


Who do we have to pray for? Ultimately, we have to pray for ourselves. That we may have the courage to follow where Jesus leads. And the confidence to know that Jesus knows the scandal of an open door and an open table. Jesus knows the cost. Jesus knows where the journey leads. And he knows who we are – unworthy all – yet he invites us to come. Who knows who we’ll meet around that kingdom table? Thanks be to God.


1 Timothy 2:1-7[NRSV]

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all-- this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.



[i] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010], ebook location 2923.