"Be Still and Know"

Psalm 62.

I.

            Psalm 62 begins, “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”

            We Presbyterians do not do silence well.  Were we to add more intentional silence to our worship, I suspect that we would have to do it very gradually with a lot of explanation and preparation.  And even then, I would have to anticipate the anxiety to build after about 20 seconds, with the requisite coughing, rustling, shuffling and so forth.  If we persisted, I imagine complaints would invariably start rolling in.

            It is not completely our fault, this aversion to silence.  Our whole culture hates and fears silence, avoiding it at all costs.  There is virtually no public space – except maybe for libraries – that does not have some kind of noise going all the time.  Not just the sounds of people going about their business, but some piped in music or radio, or a TV going on the wall.  We are bombarded with human-made sounds incessantly.

            Most mornings I do my prayers and meditation, if the weather is at all cooperative, outside on the back patio.  I try to do this even through the winter, if it is not ridiculously cold and icy, which of course this past winter was.  But all through the year and all day long there is one sort of base-line sound under everything else, which is this dull roar coming over the ridge from the traffic on 287 and 22.

            But, of course, even if I were in the middle of some expanse of wilderness, it would not be completely silent.  There would be sounds of nature – the wind, birds, insects, moving water, and so forth.  There is no pure silence on the living earth, and we should give thanks for that. 

            Even in a sensory deprivation tank, they tell me, that a person hears the sound of their heart pumping and blood rushing through their veins.  From one perspective, silence is death.  Perhaps the vacuum of space is silent, but there is very little life out there. 

            The Psalm does not say that the world is to be silent; the silence has to rest in one’s soul, one’s being.  It is not telling the world to be quiet, but the person.

            It is unquiet, noisy people that often drown out and prevent the silence of the soul, and silence of the soul is necessary if we are to hear the presence and Word of God, from whom comes our salvation.

            The Psalm goes on to address this in a kind of oblique way.  “God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall never be shaken.”  Our silence is an act of trust in God.  Which at least implies the opposite, that our chronic lack of silence, the fact that we habitually generate noise and seem to need to have human-made noise all around it at all times, is an expression of our lack of trust in God.  Something about silence scares us.

II.

            The next two verses complain against human violence.  Reading these verses reminds me of what goes on in my mind when I do sit down to be silent and wait for God’s voice.  I start off with an ambitious affirmation about silence, trusting in God, and never being shaken in that trust.

            But invariably my mind wanders.  And the most toxic and draining places to which my mind wanders is anger, resentment, and fear, about people and difficult situations in my life.  Sometimes I just start thinking about my to-do list for the day, and that is relatively easy to put aside.  But when my mind commences to dwell on people’s unfairness, injustice, violence… how they attack the ones who are already weak – the “leaning wall” or “tottering fence” – or when they gang up on someone trying to make a difference – the “person of prominence” – or when people are disingenuous, liars, and hypocrites… then that is a lot harder to push out of my mind any thought of them.  The anger simmers, the adrenalin flows, and all hope of interior silence is lost in the rush of indignation.

            Until I collect myself, and refer myself back to the silence I seek, and, like verse 5, repeat the original affirmation of verse 1.  “In God alone my soul waits in silence.”

            Commentators on this passage sometimes talk about how we have to remove the bad stuff from our soul before it would do any good to cultivate the good.  I think they are interpreting silence as a kind of emptiness which results from banishing bad thoughts and quieting the negative narrative.  Then, into that clean, clear, empty silence, God may speak.

            So, this little repeated phrase – “In God alone my soul waits in silence” – may have the effect of doing just this.  It gets rid of this little rant, and refocuses on building interior silence, expressing trust in God, and waiting for God’s voice.

            When we do wait in silence, which is to say, when we do quiet that interior noise, what happens?  For me it means hearing once again the world around me.  I do hear that traffic noise in the background, and aircraft overhead… but I also hear the various sounds of nature, and my mind comes out of its resentment and is able to be present once again.  I am able to be where I am, which is the only place God can speak to me because it is the only place that is real.  As long as my attention is somewhere else, as long as I am dwelling on some past event or anticipating some future one, I am not present. 

            So silence, interior silence, an intent listening and openness to what is going on around us right now, is one important way to hear God’s voice.  Silence connects us to the living present, the here and now.

III.

            This kind of waiting in silence is an expression of trust and openness.  Thus we get to verse 8, about trusting in God and pouring out our hearts before God, who becomes our refuge.

            The next few verses are a kind of reflection on why it does no good to dwell on the things that people project as of ultimate importance.  Our estate, our status, where we fall on the wealth scale… none of this matters.  Questions like that are immaterial because whether we are rich or poor, compared to God we are lighter than air. 

            And the strategies and tactics that people use to obtain wealth, like extortion and robbery, are not trustworthy, and neither is the money gained by them.  Money and the things people to do get and keep it are about the biggest distractions of the human mind, and the loudest interference of our interior silence, the most powerful thing keeping us separate from God and cutting us off from God’s voice.

            Once we can get out of your head that just sitting in silence is utterly unprofitable and a waste of time as far as the rat-race is concerned, we can be open to God.  We have to get over the fact that people resent this kind of useless behavior, and the world would much rather us spent our time listening to advertisements and the news.

            Only when we are free of such distractions can we really listen and trust in God enough to hear God’s voice informing us of God’s power and steadfast love, as the Psalm says.  That is important because listening and presence are not about being somehow neutral or objective.  There is no unbiased listening, and if we are not careful we will hear our own fears or our own desires.  We listen for something we know is there, which is the power and love of God.

            So when we do quiet our minds and wait in silence, it is not for whatever, but for God.  Therefore, when I listen in silence and I hear bird calls, I am not trying to distinguish the crows from the blue jays and cardinals, for whatever reason.  No.  I am hearing evidence of God’s power and love.  That is how Jesus sees nature.  The birds and the flowers are manifestations of God’s power and love in caring for and sustaining creation.  When I feel my own weight on the ground, or my own breathing, it is evidence of God’s power and love.  Even when I feel my ears or toes freezing, it is because of God’s design of this planet, shaped by God’s power in love to be the perfect space for the emergence of life.

            Perhaps my favorite Christians of all time are the Irish monks of the 6^th century, who worshiped and prayed outdoors all year round in all kinds of weather, as a celebration of God’s creation and the privilege it was to be a part of it.            

IV.

            The final words of the Psalm – “for you repay all according to their work” – is often taken as a general statement.  But in the context of the Psalm I wonder if it doesn’t really mean that God rewards the one who invests some energy and time into being silent, banishing distracting and negative thoughts, and listening for God’s power and love.  For it does take considerable work to be silent in our souls and wait for God.

            So, now we’re going to do something different and unusual.  We are going to observe a time of silence.  It won’t be long, say 3 minutes?  Can we handle that?  Not even a normal commercial break?

            We’re going to sit in silence.  Listen to whatever is happening.  If you find your mind wandering, I want you to say to yourself, “For God alone my soul waits in silence,” and go back to just sitting in silence and listening.

            After two minutes, I will bring us back.  I want anyone who wants to share say what they heard.  And we will reflect together on how what we heard expresses or witnesses to God’s power and love.

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Liberating Sabbath.

Psalm 92.  (Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Isaiah 58:13-14; Mark 2:23-3:6)

I.

            In all four gospels, one of the big things that gets Jesus into trouble with the authorities is his approach to the Sabbath.  Arguments over the Sabbath are so common in the gospels that we could almost take the reformation of the Sabbath as the main purpose of Jesus’ ministry. 

            Jesus’ Sabbath practice involves healing, liberation, and justice.  He sees that the Sabbath is made for the benefit of humans and of the whole creation.  He rejects the imposing of Sabbath restrictions on a community merely as arbitrary religious prohibitions, or for the maintaining of national identity.

            He gets his understanding of the Sabbath directly from the Torah.  In the Torah, the Sabbath is given as first of all, in Exodus, as a time to imitate God’s resting at the conclusion of God’s work of creation.  God is saying that it is not our work, our production, that is most important.  The purpose of human life is a good and content resting in creation’s beauty, balance, benefits, and blessing.  It is a recognition that all that God has made is very good, and celebrating that truth together.

            The Torah goes even further in the book of Deuteronomy.  There, the Sabbath is also about justice.  It is not just for the Israelites, but for everyone.  Foreigners, slaves, and even animals are embraced by the Sabbath resting from productive work.  Later we see that even the land itself is allowed to rest.

            When God brings the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, God gives them the Torah as an explicit guide in how not to be like Pharaoh.  Pharaoh presided over a system of relentless production, 24/7, where the demands of economic growth were absolute, and where the burdens of that growth were placed upon a class of slaves who were worked mercilessly.  It was a system of gross inequality and terrible, daily, routine violence.

            As the Israelites gather at Mt. Sinai the one thing God wants to prevent is that this new people fall into a system that is anything like that of Pharaoh.  That is because Pharaoh’s corrupt regime of production and profit was toxic and fatal to creation, especially to the people being forced to do the work.

            So God gives them these commandments, the hinge and center of which is the requirement to keep the Sabbath.  The people shall not be worked, and the creation shall not be exploited and exhausted, 24/7.  Economic growth is not a value in itself; it is relativized and contextualized by something much larger, which is the shalom, or peace, of God.  God’s vision of the new community is characterized by equality, justice, and love.  The commandments mean that the economy has to serve those values.

II.

            God’s institution of the Sabbath goes further than just that one day in seven.  In Leviticus the Sabbath is extended into periodic sabbatical years, culminating in the 50^th year festival of Jubilee, when all debts were canceled.  The whole point of Sabbath is to reorient and reground the life of the people back toward God and God’s justice and shalom.  The weekly Sabbath is a foretaste and anticipation of the great Jubilee.  It is intended to sever the bonds of “economic growth” by which people were enslaved.

             So the Sabbath is nothing like our “weekend” in which we catch our breath and rebuild our strength so we can be more productive when we are injected back into the rat-race on Monday.  It is not like the medications we take so we can cope better, be more cooperative, compliant, and content with our role as cogs in the economy. 

            Rather, the Sabbath is a regular antidote and counter-measure, a reset button, intended to stop and even cripple the relentless ideology of economic growth.  It’s like a weekly ritual pulling the plug on the system, forcing it to start over. 

            Jesus knows this.  That’s why he redeems the Sabbath by intentionally reasserting the Sabbath’s true meaning as a time for healing, liberation, and justice.  This is not supposed to be a day for God’s people to be in synagogue listening to the Pharisee rabbi drone on about technicalities in the Torah, mostly reminding people how poorly they are keeping it.  Jesus uses the Sabbath as the best time to counteract the regime of disease, disability, demon-possession, and dispossession.  These conditions were largely the sour fruit of a corrupt and oppressive system.

            That’s why his work upsets the authorities so.  It’s not that they don’t want people to be healed, you understand.  But they just didn’t want healing associated with the Sabbath.  That’s not what the Sabbath was supposed to be about, for them.  For these authorities, the Sabbath was one of the means by which they maintained their place and power in the complicated social hierarchy.  Like most human systems where one group dominates others, for it to be maintained people had to become and remain in some sense sick.  They had to be blind, or lame, or addicted, or in debt, or outcast, physically or otherwise.  Healthy and awake people do not waste their lives making bricks for Pharaoh.

            When Jesus connects healing and Sabbath, he is explicitly saying that what he is about is not just physical or even psychological health.  He is about that, to be sure.  But he is also, more profoundly about addressing the root causes of our diseases, in a larger society that is itself sick. 

            Just as Sabbath is not an institution designed to give people a break so they can be better workers, so also Jesus does not heal people for that reason either.  His healing on the Sabbath means that he has come to overturn the whole order, reverse the hierarchies, and reorient the whole society back towards God.

III.

            We see this expressed in Psalm 92, the only Psalm specifically designated for the Sabbath.  Whenever Jesus heals on the Sabbath, it will have been after the people have sung this Psalm.  The other Scripture readings for synagogue worship changed each week; but this Psalm was sung every Sabbath.

            Psalm 92 begins with an exclamation of thanks and praise to God.  It says that God alone is the focus of this Sabbath time.  It doesn’t even mention what we are to be thankful for, because that doesn’t matter.  We don’t want to get into the possibility of naming things to be thankful for, because first of all the list is infinitely long, and secondly, it might cause us to think that our thanks is only based on some of the things that God has done, as if we put ourselves in a position of God’s supervisor, evaluating God’s work.  No, praise and thanks to God should be something we do all day long, morning and night.

            The Psalm goes on to talk about our joy and gladness about everything God has done.  Remembering that the Sabbath is the seventh and final day of creation, it is also a time to look back on the work of creation as a whole.

            This affirmation of creation’s value and even holiness, as the opening hymn of Sabbath, is part of what Jesus is getting at with his healing ministry.  Disease and brokenness, injustice and oppression, are not listed among the things that God created.  They are not made by God and they are not declared very good.  There is no day in Genesis when God created epilepsy or scoliosis of the spine or diabetes or depression or heart disease or cancer.

            Jesus’ healing is about restoration to our original created goodness and wholeness.  Sabbath observes and celebrates this wholeness and integrity.  To leave someone, some member of the gathering, out of this blessing and order would be just wrong.  It would be a visible contradiction of creation’s goodness.  How could Jesus just let that go?  How could he not use the Sabbath as an opportunity to restore a child of Abraham to fullness and wholeness?

            To ignore that, to tolerate in the gathering of believers exclusion and judgment, disease and injustice, would be to act like, well, the Psalm calls such a person a “dullard,” and “stupid”… and even “evil”, “wicked”, and “enemies of God”.  It would mean that our praise and thanks to God for creation was empty.  I wonder if Jesus isn’t pointedly looking at the authorities at this point in the singing of the Psalm.  Maybe he doesn’t have to.

IV.

            The destiny of evildoers is sealed.  They are “doomed to destruction forever”.  Not as a matter of retribution and punishment; the Psalm does not have God actively doing anything to them.  It is more like simply the natural fate of people who do not understand God’s creation, and who live contrary to God’s laws, God’s truth, God’s will, and God’s life.  They may flourish temporarily, like grass, but in the end, in terms of forever?  Their end is sealed.  They have no future.

            The Psalm contrasts these people with the righteous.  The righteous are those who give thanks and praise to the Creator, and sing for joy over creation, the works of God’s hands.  Clearly the difference in this Psalm between the wicked and the righteous is determined by how one responds to creation.  The righteous rejoice with gratitude, while the wicked are about quick growth and ephemeral flourishing, leading ultimately to destruction.  The wicked have no understanding that creation belongs to the Creator, but presumably act as if it is there to dispose of as they please. 

            The righteous have deep roots and long lives because they do know that creation is God’s house, a place responsible to God, where God’s shalom and justice reign.  They do not reduce God’s Word to dry and dead facts, but God’s life and energy flow through them like sap in a living tree.  They produce fruit, the fruit of good works here and now that have a positive legacy moving into the future.

            This is exactly the approach to Sabbath we see in Isaiah 58.  The prophet is emphatic about the Sabbath not being a day to pursue your own private interests or go your own individual way.  It is not about selfish profit or what you can personally get out of it.  The Sabbath is not about what you want; it is about delighting in the Lord, the Creator.

            So when Jesus declares that the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath, he is saying that people are part of creation and that this giving thanks and being glad means partaking in creation’s bounty.  Creation is for us to enjoy together… which is wildly different from exploiting creation for private gain. 

            In Mark 2, Jesus and his disciples pluck and eat grain growing in someone’s field.  The Pharisees complain that he is technically “harvesting” on the Sabbath, doing prohibited work.  To which Jesus basically retorts that they have made the Sabbath oppressive.  It’s just an excuse; their real agenda is protecting the property of private farmers, exactly the opposite of what the Sabbath is about.  He says the Sabbath was made by God and given as a gift for us to enjoy.  All of us.

V.

            The Psalm concludes with a marvelous picture of the righteous whose fruitfulness demonstrates the faithfulness, trustworthiness, and righteousness of God, the Creator, the Lord.  That is the basis of a Sabbath rest.  Sabbath is a time for God to shine in and through us.  It is a time for all to see the goodness of the Creator, in us.

            This is what Jesus does.  He is himself the Creator, in whom the Sabbath is a time for celebrating, renewing, restoring, redeeming, and revealing the wonder and miracle of creation, integrating broken people back into their true shape and place.

            During his mortal life Jesus keeps every Sabbath; he even keeps the Sabbath that happened while he was dead.  For him the Sabbath is for liberating creation and people from bondage. 

            We, his gathered witnesses, are also called to do Sabbath in the Spirit of this Psalm.  It is our time of joy, praise, and thanksgiving, demonstrated in our witnessing to God’s liberating and healing power, and establishing among ourselves and in our world God’s shalom, God’s peace and justice, by welcoming, healing, restoring, and blessing creation and people.

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Receptivity.

Psalm 104.

I.

            Psalm 104 is one of the two great creation-centered Psalms; the other is Psalm 148.  For centuries, many Christians and monastic communities have recited these Psalms daily: 104 in the evening and 148 in the morning.  Psalm 148 was part of daily prayer in the Jewish synagogue even before the time of Jesus.  Jesus knew all the Psalms, of course.  And he probably knew these particularly well.

            That the people of God would habitually begin and end their days with hymns of creation should be instructive for us.  We Protestants have historically had a tendency to ignore or play down creation and nature, preferring to focus on what we consider to be loftier matters of faith and spirituality. 

            And yet the tradition seems to want to maintain as a kind of anchor this grounding in matter, where animals, weather, trees, streams, birds, and humans all respond to the presence and activity of their Creator, all the time.

            I suspect that if you were to ask people where they experience God in their lives, a very high percentage would say something about nature.  The glorious sunset, the flock of geese taking off in concert, the awesome power of a storm, the beautiful vista of a mountain lake, the miracle of our own bodies, or something like giving birth… without any theological training at all, many people encounter God in creation.  God seems more easily accessible in a forest than in an oil refinery or on the New Jersey Turnpike.

            Sometimes Christians who emphasize creation are suspected of getting too close to paganism.  But a Psalm like 104 comes to us as an explicit rejection and critique of paganism and pantheism.  The whole meaning here is that creation is under the dominion of the Creator.  God orchestrates the order, balance, beauty, and power of nature.  Creation is not God; but it is God’s expression, God’s handiwork, and, as Calvin said, the theater of God’s glory. 

            We meet God in creation.  God is reflected in the things that God has made.  And we hear God’s voice in creation.  The first place we need to pay attention to when we listen for God’s voice is creation.

            The Psalmist makes the point that God did not just create the earth and the rest of the universe, give it certain laws, and then let it go to run on its own like a machine.  This is the view of many of the founders of the Modern age most of us grew up in, before they dispensed with God altogether.  On the contrary, God remains intimately involved in nature.  God continues to act and intimately interact with creatures; it is by God’s will that the rain falls and the grass grows, that birds build nests and young lions roar for their prey.  Creation is not an inanimate object that God made; it is alive with God’s life and God still speaks in and through it.

II.

            Everything that God creates is inherently and essentially receptive to God.  That includes all of us creatures of dust as well.  We are made for receptivity, we are born to listen to God, to praise God, to thank God, and to bless God.  And as the creatures with somewhat more developed consciousness, we are in a position to do this.

            Or not.  We are also in a position to refuse to acknowledge God as Creator.  Instead of recognizing God’s Lordship and dominion, we aspire to exercise dominion ourselves, as we, in our characteristically self-serving and self-aggrandizing way, choose to understand it.  The dominion that God gives to people in Genesis is meant to be exercised as an extension of God’s dominion, with Jesus Christ, the truly human One, as our model and example.  And Jesus sees creation, not as something to be commodified and used up, but as a wonderful panorama of parables teaching us about God.

            Lilies, foxes, sparrows, fig trees, sheep, the sun, the sea and more, all figure in Jesus’ teaching.  They all tell us something about the God who made them.  They all communicate to us something of God.

            Notice that the Psalmist merely stands back in awe and wonder, respecting creation and celebrating its complexity and grandeur.  There is no sense of creation as an object for humans to dispose of as they please.  It is inconceivable that, after extolling nature’s beauties and harmony, the Psalmist wants to take a bulldozer to it.  There is even less sense that these are “resources” given to humans to exploit for the sake of economic profit.

            No.  Awe and wonder are the attitudes we need to cultivate here, with respect and love.  These are the prerequisites for any kind of listening.  The Psalm asks people to open the doors of their perception to nature’s marvels.  Watch.  Observe.  Listen.  Receive.  Partake.

            This approach is not passive and inert, but participatory.  God wants us to share in the creativity of creation.  Verses 14 and 15 talk about how we are fed by God through creation.  “You cause grass to grow for the cattle and plants for the people to use, to bring forth food from the earth.”  That describes a hunter-gatherer kind of life that receives from God directly and immediately what God has placed in nature for our sustenance. 

            But then the Psalm goes on and mentions “wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.”  Wine, oil, and bread, of course, do not occur naturally; they require human initiative and ingenuity.  Yet they still come from God who made the plants from which they are made, and the human heart which made them and benefits from them.

III.

            Wine, oil, and bread are also used sacramentally in worship by God’s people.  This says that our use of creation must be sacramental in the sense that it glorifies God and functions in harmony with God’s will and plan.  It participates in creation’s holiness and benefits life.

            When we listen to God in creation we have to realize that we are part of creation.  We cannot listen as if creation and God’s voice within it were something out there, apart from us; as if we were objective, disinterested, neutral observers.  Or worse, as if we were superior beings, analyzing and evaluating creation like some dead thing or object.

            No.  We are creation.  We were created on the sixth day with the animals.  We are dust, which is made more explicit in Genesis 2.  But God made all of life from dust, the soil, the various minerals of which the planet in made, mixed with water, and infused with God’s breath and Word. 

            We recently had two funerals related to our church family.  The funeral liturgy, as well as the service for Ash Wednesday last week, emphasize “you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  But this focus on dust does not denigrate or reduce in importance who we are.  We are not merely dust or nothing but dust.  For dust is made by God and God breathes existence and life into the dust of which we are made.  Dust is blessed and good and holy in itself, just by virtue of being created by God, even before God molds it into human form.

            We are creation conscious of itself to whom the Creator has been revealed.  The Westminster Catechism has that famous first question, which we now usually paraphrase: What is the chief end of human life?  And the answer is that the chief end of human life is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever, easily the best sentence the Puritans ever gave us.

            None of which makes any sense if we do not first listen with the attentiveness of the Psalmist to God’s voice in creation, which includes within ourselves, as animated dust, dust with life and soul, dust conscious of God’s breath and Word.  Dust on a mission from God.

            In order to achieve this listening we have first to be present, in the moment, in this space.  We have to turn off, or at least tune out, our chattering mind that is always somewhere else, always ruminating over the past, planning for or worrying about the future, imagining being somewhere else doing something else.

            Creation is here and now, and we can only glorify and enjoy God here and now, in the living present.      

              

IV.

            The first thing Jesus says when he begins his ministry is: “The time is fulfilled.  The Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.”  By saying that the time is fulfilled, Jesus is inviting us to take our minds out of the past and dwelling on what people said and did back then, and he is inviting us to take our minds out of the future, thinking about what will or might happen.  To say that the time is fulfilled means that the past is over and the future hasn’t happened.  Neither past nor future is real.

            By talking about fulfilled time, Jesus insists that we be here now, in this space, in this dust, in this creation.  Instead of looking ahead or back, Jesus would have us realize that God is always present.

            The Psalmist also blessed and praises and thanks God in creation in the present.  An astonishing number of the verbs in this Psalm are in the present tense; that’s what gives the psalm its immediacy, I think.  Even things that happened in the past, like God’s initial acts of creation, in this Psalm are happening now.

            The season of Lent has always been about reconnecting with our basic nature in the living present.  Disciplines like fasting serve to yank our attention back to here and now, as we become aware of habits we were performing unconsciously.  They take us off of automatic pilot, and put us back in touch with our dust nature, our physical being that gets hungry, feels heat and cold, becomes tired, walks, and breathes.

            Lent is not supposed to be about pain and discomfort.  But it is a time for realizing our body, our dust-self, and becoming present; bringing our minds back to here and now; connecting with the earth of which we are made; experiencing, feeling, sensing, and being.

            So in this first full week of Lent, maybe we could take some time and just be.  Feel and smell the air, watch the sunrise, listen for returning birds, watch for the first crocus, make a hopefully final cold, wet snowball.  Try to see the stars some night.  Taste food.

            And listen for God’s voice in it all.  We might hear God saying, “You are dust and to dust you shall return… and that’s not a bad thing.  I am in the dust that I made.  That dust is magic.  I send my Spirit, my breath, into that dust.  My son Jesus Christ took on that dust and sanctified it.  You are blessed to be dust… my dust.”

            Everything else in God’s whole creation is already glorifying and enjoying God by nature; we get to do it by choice and consciously.  Halleluia!

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Healings in Jericho.

Luke 18.31-19.10

I.

            Jesus and his disciples have resumed their journey to Jerusalem.  But they decide to swing down to the left, into the mostly barren Jordan valley, and south towards the ancient city of Jericho.

            I get the impression that Jesus is trying to get through to his disciples the fact that he will be arrested, and abused, and killed in Jerusalem, and then rise from the dead on the third day.  It is possible that he repeated this often and the gospel writers only give us a few instances.  Whatever the case, the disciples famously don’t get it.

            Maybe they think he is just being negative and even cynical; maybe they think he is trying to pump them up so they will prevent this catastrophe from happening; maybe they think he is telling a worst-case-scenario, so that if anything better happens it will seem even more wonderful.

            Their response is confusion.  And that is a bit more honest than ours because, of course, we have heard the spoiler, we know how the story turns out.  So while the disciples kind of disregard this as Jesus being all mysterious and incomprehensible, we too are not particularly worried by these predictions of his suffering and death. 

            What we fail to realize is that these predictions are a completely consistent part of his ministry.  Giving his life is not something that Jesus only does on the cross; the giving of life has characterized his whole career so far.  When he blesses, when he heals, when he liberates people from bondage to demons, and when he teaches, the message is the same message we will receive when he is killed.  That is, that our life is about giving.  It is about giving our all.  It is about pouring ourself out in love to others.

            For the things Jesus talks about and does are revolutionary.  They will be seen as a threat to the established order.  Last week he advised the wealthy and powerful man to sell all that he has and give the proceeds to the poor, as a precondition of following Jesus.  That is not a message that makes any sense to us.  It is not something we want to hear.  It is a threat to those who have dedicated their lives to gaining things, and those are the people who have the authority in this world.

            So the healings and teachings of Jesus anticipate his murder.  They are all summed up in his death.  In his death we see that all of his life is about giving.  In his ministry Jesus is the perfect conduit, channel, vessel, and medium of God’s love.  But these all look ahead to his ultimate blessing, which is the final demonstration of the depth, height, breadth, and width of God’s love for us and for creation.  His shed blood represents the very life of God flowing through him and into our world.  It is not something new and contradictory or out of character that Jesus says here.  But even so, the disciples do not understand.

II.

            The entourage enters Jericho.  Jericho is an oasis at the center of which is a spring though which people were enabled to live in what is otherwise a desert.  It has already been a trading city for 8 thousand years before Jesus arrives.

            And Jericho is the scene of one of the great battles of what is called the conquest of Canaan by Joshua.  You remember the rudiments of the story.  The Israelites, after crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land, come to Jericho.  They walk ceremonially and silently around the city several times until Joshua gives the order and the priests blow their shofars, and the walls of the city come “tumblin’ down,” as the song goes.  The inhabitants of Jericho, except for Rahab and her family who helped the invaders, are all killed.

            Without making this a sermon on the fall of Jericho, I suspect we may have misread the conquest stories.  There is historical and textual evidence that what may have been really happening was an uprising of peasants and poor people of the land against the exploitative and violent, wealthy tyrants who walled themselves into these city-states in Canaan.  The local people, inspired by story of the Israelites’ defeat of Pharaoh, and by the egalitarian, decentralized Law that God gave them, join them when they invade, and overthrow the kings who had been oppressing them.

            In any case, in the time of Jesus, Jericho remained as a living reminder of the liberation of Canaan, of God’s power to bring victory, and of how God’s people need to maintain their trust in God to do justice.  Jericho stood as a perpetual warning about what happens when idolatry and injustice pervade a land; eventually you get confronted by God and God’s people.  Eventually there is a reckoning.

            Neither would it have been lost on anyone that the instrumental figure in the Israelites’ victory was Rahab, a prostitute, exactly the kind of exploited, victimized, abused, and marginalized person Jesus himself associates with.  This is the class of people for whom Jesus was a blessed way out of their tragic predicament.  These are the ones the rulers – of Jericho or New York – assume are defeated, wasted, objects of desire and violence, commodities to be bought and sold, and discarded when the rulers are finished with them.  They are too weak and insignificant for the rulers to even notice them… and yet it was Rahab whose information enabled the Israelites to gain the victory.

            Jesus knows and preaches that it is the weak, the gentle, the persecuted, the hungry, and the grieving who are the victors in God’s world.  Jesus chooses to launch his movement into Jerusalem from Jericho for a reason.

III.

            As Jesus and his group approach Jericho, they approach a blind man who is sitting by the roadside, begging.  He asks what all the commotion is, and when he is told that it is “Jesus of Nazareth” he immediately starts shouting at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 

            Even though people tell him it is “Jesus of Nazareth” passing by, the blind man calls Jesus, “Son of David.”  This reference to King David as Jesus’ ancestor is a political affirmation.  So Jesus’ reputation is not just as a healer but as a potential new king, and the blind man calls out to Jesus by this title. 

            Calling someone Son of David could have easily been taken by the rulers as an affirmation that Jesus is the new, true king, and thus a threat to them.  But maybe if you’re blind you get away with stuff like that.  It is the blind man who correctly sees who Jesus is, while the people with 20/20 vision only perceive Jesus as someone from Nazareth... not a complement.

            The people watching Jesus and his group come into the city tell the blind man to be quiet.  Was it because he was making a political statement that could get them all in trouble?  Or was he just too noisy and obnoxious, even though the crowd was surely pretty loud?  In any case, he only yells louder.

            Over the commotion, Jesus hears him and stops.  He has this man who has been yelling that he is the “Son of David,” brought through the crowd to him.  This finally shuts him up.  And when he is delivered to Jesus, Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

            That, of course is a loaded question.  What do any of us want Jesus to do for us?  This man knows what he is lacking, health-wise, and he asks for his eyesight back.  Our problem is that we often don’t know what we lack, so we ask for the wrong things, if we bother to ask at all.  The blind-man’s trust in Jesus is based on his affirmation of Jesus as king, and not an earthly monarch, few of whom developed reputations for healing or liberating anyone.  The blind man, because of what he calls Jesus and what he asks of Jesus clearly understands that Jesus is a different kind of king.  He is not the kind that lives in a palace and hands down laws; he is the king of the universe who has come to set things right and restore the creation to wholeness.

            Jesus recognizes this, and says to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.”    

IV.

            The crowd goes wild, as they say.  They are praising God, as the formerly blind man dances along.  They come into the city.  As they are walking along, under the trees, Jesus looks up and sees… a well-dressed man clinging to the branches up in one of the trees.  Recognizing him as Zacchaeus, a tax- collector, Jesus stops and calls to him.  “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”

            And the crowd, which had been jubilant, now turns sour.  Tax-collectors were hated functionaries of the empire, who made their living stealing from people, while being protected by the Roman army.  Jesus has made his reputation hanging around with sinners – “tax-collectors and prostitutes” describes his usual company.  This is the first time the people of Jericho get to experience Jesus’ scandalousness in this regard.  And they’re not pleased.

            He has just healed a man who practically hailed him as a new king.  Now he is socializing with a notorious collaborator.  The people are confused.  They expect Jesus to respect the usual political lines and boundaries.  Is he for Rome or against Rome? 

            Jesus doesn’t care at all about what the crowd thinks about him.  He has no regard for the usual political lines and boundaries.  He is actually far more revolutionary than merely wanting to overthrow Rome.  He wants to overthrow the reign of sin and evil in our hearts.  He cares about people, mainly people who are hurting. 

            Certainly Jesus has achieved a major buzz along the tax-collector gravevine.  Zaccheaus knows about him, and Jesus apparently knows about Zacchaeus.  When Jesus invited himself to his house, Zacchaeus climbs down, pushes through the scowling, grumbling crowd.  And he leads Jesus to his house, probably one of the nicest houses in all of Jericho. 

            Jesus probably has a long conversation with Zacchaeus over dinner.  After the meal, Zacchaeus stands up and addresses his friends, probably the wealthy and well-connected people of the city.  And he publicly says to Jesus, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”  That little “if” is a potential problem, but Jesus takes it.  Since defrauding people was the way tax-collectors made their living, we may assume that Zacchaeus is giving away almost everything he has.

            And Jesus says to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”  Remember last week, the rich man who comes to Jesus, but Jesus tells him it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle?  Well, here is a rich man who has entered the Kingdom of God.  He has done something impossible… but what is impossible for humans is possible for God.

V.

            The Son of Man has come to seek out and save the lost.  And it’s a good thing, too.  Notice that Jesus refers to himself here not as being from Nazareth or even as “Son of David.”  He uses the term which we traditionally render as “Son of Man.”  In Greek it’s more like “Son of Humanity” or “Human One.”  It could have been used just to mean anyone, a person, a human being.  But for Jesus we know it means the truly human One, the One who realizes in full the humanity we all share.  It is his way of saying that he is the truly awake and alive version of what we all are.

            In other words, what Jesus does in terms of healing, liberating, reconciling, forgiving, blessing, and welcoming is not something that only some supernatural being can do.  It is what we are all called to do in the life of discipleship.  We too need to seek out the lost, the losers, the broken, the failures, the confused, and even those whose souls are corroded by remorse and guilt over sins committed, like Zacchaeus.

            And we too need to save people by bringing them to the saving love of God revealed and given to us in Jesus Christ.  We save people as Jesus does, by gathering them into community, by welcoming, accepting, forgiving, and blessing them. We save people by bringing them into the Presence of the Lord Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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