Greetings from Dunedin, New Zealand! I trust all is well at saint ben’s and that friends old and new are thriving there. I recall with tremendous affection the six months I spent with you as Deacon. The music, the liturgy, and the fine preaching were seriously refreshing. Anyhow, I have written another book. It is called Ethics in the Presence of Christ (London & New York: T&T Clark). It explores the contemporary ministry of Jesus Christ–what he can be said to be doing–and what difference this makes for ethics. I certainly enjoyed writing it, and would hope that you would be nourished in the faithfulness of Christ by reading it. Blessings and keep in touch.

Yours, Chris Holmes

Of Chris’s book, John Webster of the University of Aberdeen wrote, “This is an elegant and absorbing essay in moral theology, the fruit of sustained reflection on the presence of Jesus Christ as the principle of human life before God.” Joseph Mangina of Wycliffe College observed that while “much of what passes for ‘Christian ethics’ today fails to rise above the level of asking ‘what would Jesus do?’, Chris’s book “constitutes a frontal assault on this way of thinking. Taking John’s gospel as his point of departure, Holmes would instead have us ask ‘who is Jesus and what is he doing?’

We’ve also got a couple of podcasts  of really solid lectures Chris gave as part of our ideaExchange series. His first session with us was The One Who Threw a Spoke into the Wheel: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Resistance to Hitler. In what amounted to something of a sequel, we also offer Christianity is basically amoral: Bonhoeffer on ethics.

Although I really don’t enjoy waiting for many things in life (who does?), the ‘waiting’ aspect of Advent is something I anticipate each year. Advent waiting doesn’t focus alone on Jesus Christ’s return at the end of time, but also entails a time of waiting and watching for Christ to appear in my own life today. And He does, at times in astonishing ways if I have eyes to see it.  In Frederick Buechner’s words, “I look at what there is to be seen in the world and in myself and hope, trust, believe against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface I see there is vastly more that I cannot see.”

Seven years ago during Advent, I began a two month wait for brain biopsy results, and with each day of waiting the fear grew that I wouldn’t live to see another Christmas with Len and the kids. They were critical weeks for me, my mortality crashing into my consciousness every day, and many nights.

Fear

Wells up from below…

Fear of the unknown ….

Fear of the known.

Gag to quell it.

Gulps of tears to drown the fears.

The key of release from the stifling cage … Breathe.

 

 

But through the days of Christmas and through to mid February, a peculiar peace settled in my heart, and our home, and at times the memory of it brings me tears. Seven years later the crisis of having to consider tumours and cancer is long past, but the peace has not passed. The peace that carried me through crisis seven years ago, has carried me through chronic illness in the ensuing years providing a ‘chronic’ wellness … a steady presence that permeates all areas of my life, so that my physical decline doesn’t define who I am. That presence, the Spirit of Christ, is powerful and paves my way with a peaceful perspective that colours everything. Lewis’s words in The Weight of Glory ring true for me. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

I’ve recently read a book, The Gift of Pain by Dr. Paul Brand, world renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist, that served to counter encroaching self-pity. The book is the fruit of Brand’s many years of working with people who suffered from pain and people who suffered from the lack of it. He worked closely with people groups from England, America, and India and their diverse responses to pain informed his thoughts over many years. Though not a pain expert, Dr. Brand’s vast experience allows him to write about managing pain across the board, not just the pain associated with leprosy. He chose the form of a memoir for his book, “with all its loops and detours because that is how I learned about pain: not systematically but experientially. Pain does not occur in the abstract – no sensation is more personal, or more importunate.” Dr. Brand’s book came out of the conviction that, in his words, “Most of us will one day face severe pain… and the attitude we cultivate in advance may well determine how suffering will affect us when it does strike.” The book was a tonic for me, and reading it refreshed my perspectives on several fronts, and perhaps most importantly made me grateful that I’m challenged by Multiple Sclerosis  rather than by a much harsher neurological disease like leprosy.

Living with MS, I experience pain in my feet, hands, legs, arms, face and eyes and parts of my back. Besides the surface, or skin pain, my neuropathy also manifests itself at a muscular level, causing weakness and cramp-like pain deep in my muscles, mainly my legs and arms. My legs, more so the left, feel like logs and a slight limp at times seems to be how my body is dealing with this. And yet I’m still running, without a limp, I’ve not fallen recently, and for this joy in my life I give God thanks! My chief grievance is the fact that my neuropathic pain is without respite.

C.S. Lewis was no stranger to pain, directly and vicariously, to both physical and emotional pain and I appreciate his perspective from A Grief Observed:

What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bomb each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.   (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)

 

I thought Lewis’s trench analogy characteristically incisive; and true and tender his perspective on God’s apparent silence when Lewis questions Him about suffering.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace child; you don’t understand.”

There certainly are fragile days when God seems silent, and dangerously distant from my plight, but the sense of well-being remains even so and I am grateful that His peace keeps pace with the challenge of living with the chronic as it did with the challenge of facing the critical.

 “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”  – Luke 1:78-79

In the Joy of the Season,

Colleen Peters

Colleen Peters is married to Len, and is a mother of two girls and twin boys. She taught at Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute before beginning to raise a family, and as her children grew she returned to teaching on a part-time basis. Neurological anomalies surfaced in 2004, and she was eventually diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, the condition with which she continues to live.

A note from Jamie Howison: This sermon includes something of a landmark quote from the final speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. Audio of that speech is included in this post, and I’d highly recommend you  give it a listen… please do scroll down.

S

ince the middle of August, the lectionary has had us chipping our way through the story of Moses and the Israelites, as told in the Book of Exodus. In case you were counting, we’ve been ten Sundays in these texts, which might seem like a fairly long run until you realize how much we actually left out. It is a forty year story of life in the Sinai wilderness, and that doesn’t even include all the years from Moses’ birth to the point where he leads the Hebrew slaves out of captivity in Egypt and into their long desert sojourn. And we did it in ten weeks?

So last Sunday we had a story in which Moses asks God, “Show me your glory, I pray,” (Ex 33:18), and quite stubbornly presses God to be openly and obviously present to the people… and particularly to Moses himself. And now this week we read of his death and burial. There’s a lot of material in between these two episodes… the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Such a leap leaves my friend, the Old Testament scholar Walter Deller, shaking his head at the amount we don’t read. Sure, if you’ve ever tried to read the bible through from beginning to end, you’ll be well aware that these three books have what feel like endless lists of laws, and that Numbers includes chapter after chapter of census data. It is in these books that people often bog down and throw in the towel on their lofty bible reading goals. But these books also include a good deal of rich narrative, and in fact even the list of laws and standards—which can sometimes seem arbitrary, sometimes harsh, and often just plain weird—remind us that for this people what they did with their time, money, bodies, neighbours, and even pots and pans were all caught up in their identity as the people of God.

• To listen to the sermon, simply click the arrow

We heard a reading tonight from the Gospel according to Matthew, in which Jesus tells a lawyer that the most important law is the call to, “[L]ove the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” “This is the greatest and first commandment,” Jesus says, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40) We shouldn’t, however, imagine that Jesus is the first or only teacher in Israel to have offered such a perspective, and in fact in the century before the birth of Christ the great Rabbi Hillel famously made the exact same move. I suppose that most of you are grateful that rather than reading aloud the entire torah with its 600+ laws, long lists and detailed census counts, we proclaimed this great summary of the law; fair enough. Just be aware of how much we’ve skipped past!

And so we are given this picture of Moses, standing in the presence of God on Mount Nebo, looking across the River Jordan toward the land of promise that will be home to God’s people.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’ Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. (Deut 34:4-5)

Hold on a minute here; he died, then and there, at the Lord’s command? The leader whom the text will go on to describe as a prophet unlike any other in the story of Israel, “whom the Lord knew face to face,” doesn’t get to lead the people into their new home? Forty years in the wilderness, and it ends here? And you know, the writer is quite clear that Moses still had a good deal of life left in him; that while he was “one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigour had not abated.”

Earlier in the book of Deuteronomy (32:48-52), Moses was told by God that he would not be allowed to enter the promised land because years prior he had failed to respect and uphold the holiness of God before the people at the waters of Meribah (Numbers 20:1-13). That’s the incident where, when the people are in desperate need of water, God gives it to them through a spring flowing out of the rocks of Meribah. Moses is told by God to take his staff and stand before the rock, calling water to come forth, but for whatever reason Moses also struck the rock twice. A bit of dramatic flair, perhaps? Given what a pain in the neck the people often were, who can blame Moses for flexing his leadership muscle a bit, and putting on a show? And for this he is told he will not be allowed to lead the people out of the desert and into the promised land? Seems a bit heavy handed on the part of God, doesn’t it?

Century after century, both the Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions have tried to make sense of this piece of the story; have tried to make it seem somehow more fair or more just. In the end, though, all we have is the story. And in the story I hear this unspoken subtext that reads, “Moses, you can’t do everything.” Similar to when the great King David is told that the Jerusalem temple is not going to be his to build, here Moses finds that he will not lead the people across the river, he will not plant his feet in the new land, he cannot do it all. Time to let go, to pass along his mantle, and to lie down in peace and die.

It is a hard thing to contemplate, this business of not being able to do it all; of having to release our hold on our own lives, work, vocations and dreams, and to admit that it might be time for someone or something else. We’d like to keep steering things, of course, for who better than me? What if someone else changes it all, or worse, screws it all up? And I wonder if in the back of his mind Moses might have been thinking that while Joshua was pretty solid material, he might not be up to the task?

But maybe not. Maybe Moses was grateful that it was time to die, and that he didn’t have to do it all. Maybe for all that he was a gifted and transformational leader, in the end he knew it was not about him, but rather about a people together under God.

The image of Moses on Mount Nebo looking across into the land of promise was evoked in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people will get to the promised land.

• To hear the audio of King’s speech, click the arrow

The speech seems almost eerily prescient, in that less than twenty-four hours later King was shot dead by an assassin. Yet maybe it was less a case of foreknowledge, and more one of being both deeply aware of the violence of the times, and at the same time of being schooled in the wisdom and insight of this text from Deuteronomy. No less than Moses, King could not do it all. And no less than Moses, King was part of something much bigger than his own self, his own personal vision and abilities.

And so with us. We are not called to do it all. We are called, each of us, to be faithful in the context of a people together, whose identity is forged in God. And if we get to climb Mount Nebo and to look across the river toward that place to which God is leading this people—to catch a glimpse of God’s vision for humanity or to hear the strains of what Bruce Cockburn calls “rumours of glory”—that will be enough. For now, and forever; we can’t do it all. But in God, it can be done.

Amen.

Jamie Howison

I

n our cultural context, conversations about money tend often to be awkward, and even more so when that “conversation” comes in the shape of a sermon. Money is a hot button topic, but this isn’t just a modern phenomenon.

It is with a question of money that a group of Pharisees along with some “Herodians”—Jews who favoured collaboration with the Romans—sought to corner Jesus. Their question of whether or not it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor is a classic “catch 22,” in that no matter what Jesus answers they can accuse him of being allied with a particular camp. If he says “no,” then he can be discredited as a zealot and a revolutionary, while if he says “yes” then he is as good as a Roman collaborator. Either way, his reputation will be compromised in the eyes of his public.

• To listen to the sermon, click on the arrow

But Jesus backs them up with another question: Whose head is this, and whose title is it on the Roman coin? Well, there is only one answer; it is the emperor’s image. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” It is a statement that beats them at their own game, and so Matthew tells us, “When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.” To which Stanley Hauerwas adds, “Unfortunately, through much of Christian history, Christians have not been amazed by this answer. Rather, they have assumed that they know what Jesus meant…”

In different ways and at different times we have assumed that it meant an absolute divide between the sacred and the secular; between the things of faith and the things of the world of politics and economics. Tragically, it has at times led good Christian people to remain tolerant of corrupt or compromised rulers, and mute in the face of unjust and violent governments.  We have too often divided the things of earth from the things of heaven—the ethics of God’s reign from the ethics of this “real world” in which we live—and in doing so have allowed the emperor to co-opt us into doing unspeakable things.

Quite clearly this confrontation between Jesus and his questioners is not merely about money. It is tangled in with what that particular coin symbolized. It was imprinted with the image of Caesar, and as such was actually in violation of the commandment against graven images; according to the strictest reading of the law, those Pharisees shouldn’t have even been carrying those coins. And so Jesus effectively turns the question into one of loyalties and of faithfulness. And in doing so, he turns it right back on those who would have cornered him.

But frankly, conversations about money are always loaded, because money is inevitably laden with meaning. It can represent power, success, comfort… or lack thereof. It is always a symbol. The other night we gathered a group of our music leaders for a workshop, to which Larry brought this wonderful array of fresh baked goods from Tall Grass Bakery. He handed me a paper receipt for something like $25, which I will put through our financial books and then sometime next week I will hand him a green twenty dollar bill and a blue five dollar bill, and it all be square. But what possible relationship do these pieces of paper have to the flour, sugar, chocolate, butter and human labour that went into the making of those cookies and squares? Surely I got the better deal… after all, you can’t eat the paper. But it is not just paper, any more than the coin that Jesus used to make his point was just metal. It is money, the agreed upon symbol for goods, time, work.

Which is why we easily get nervous when the conversation turns to money, and particularly when the preacher begins to speak about it. If you imagine that at any moment this preacher is going to make some sort of an appeal that involves money, you’re right. Not just any money, either. Your money, which means the symbol of your goods, your time, your work, maybe your good fortune or even your freedom. And you know, it is quite true that money does symbolize those things. All the more reason to not hold it too, too tightly. Because it symbolizes so much, it can convince us that it is the one thing most worth having.

When I was in New York last January on my study leave, I worshipped four times with black congregations in Harlem. Now I was quite obviously a visitor, but I wasn’t there as a tourist or spectator. I was in New York to work on my proposed book on the intersection of theology with jazz music, and had been told by the black liberation theologian James Cone that if I were to understand jazz I would need to go to church. “Not one of the big congregations that draws the tour buses,” he told me. “Find smaller local churches, that are truly part of the community and join in the worship there.”

Twice I ended up at Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ—a church in the Pentecostal tradition—once with a predominantly black Anglican congregation, and on my last Sunday in New York I joined with the community at Greater Hood Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Along with the music, the preaching and the hospitality, one of the things that was really striking at both Greater Hood and Kelly Temple was their practice around offerings. I hardly have to tell you how understated we are here in terms of offerings, with the baskets sitting on the table at the back, and that little note on the song-sheet informing you that “If you feel a connection here (or maybe just like what we’re doing), we’d welcome your support.” I will stand by our practice of not passing an offering plate, as I think that what a passed plate does is to make our guests and visitors feel pressured to contribute toward our ministry. But it can create a bit of an illusion that gifts and offerings are little more than a footnote, which in turn can create an illusion that what we do personally with our money is not all that important.

Apparently in many churches in Harlem, there are no such illusions. It is not even that a plate was passed; instead the collection plates were set on a table at the front of the church, and we got up from our seats, went down the side aisle to drop our offerings at that table, and then returned up the centre aisle. Congregational elders sat at the table, and actually sorted the cheques and cash right then and there.

Through the whole process, we sang. I have this vivid image in my mind of this one woman all but dancing in the aisle at Kelly Temple, as she waited her turn to make her gift. Have you ever seen anyone dance up to baskets on the table at the back of our church? Of course, for all I know there was someone sitting in the congregation that morning thinking, “Oh there she goes with her dancing again…” What’s more, when I was searching online for churches to attend, I came across a blog in which someone had posted a photograph of a very expensive car sitting in front of a very run-down building, with a caption suggesting that this car belonged to a pastor who was getting rich on the offerings of his poor parishioners. And maybe that was true. Money has a funny way of getting distorted, and of distorting us.

We had a bishop in this diocese some twenty-five years ago, who was very keen about promoting tithing. He even ordered bumper stickers for all of the clergy, which read “If you love Jesus, TITHE… anyone can honk.” The challenge to think of stewardship in terms of percentage giving was by no means a bad thing, yet mixed into some of the literature around this approach was this suggestion that if we learned to give 10% of our income, we would reap even greater financial benefits, almost as if it was a pure investment scheme. Money does have a funny way of getting distorted.

So, let me say that we are not going to start passing a plate, nor are we going to be ordering any bumper stickers. And while the people who keep an eye on our finances might suggest I’m a bit crazy here, I’m also not going to press the point that we are currently running a deficit in our finances. You see, to simply push the idea that we need to “break even” on the budget misses what is really at stake here. And I’m not even going to tell you about all of the exciting ways in which we could put increased congregational income into action. We can talk about our dreams, goals and vision another time. No, today I want us to think about the biblical challenge to cultivate a set of habits and disciplines that will help to keep us from getting distorted in how we hold our money.  That could well be by adopting the idea of a tithe or of percentage giving—simply look at your income, and set aside that 5% or even 10% right off the top—or it might be by setting yourself some other goal or standard. That is not for anyone else to determine other than you. Yet underlying our decisions about money and givings is a critical question.

“Whom do we belong to?” asks Clayton Schmit in his comments on today’s Gospel reading, and then he wonders if sometimes it does feel as if we belong to Caesar, or to our job, or to our material possessions. Schmit continues:

But to whom do we really belong? Take a look at any person. Whose inscription is on him or her? Each is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). There can be no doubt, then, what Jesus means here. Give yourselves to God because it is to him that you belong.

All else is commentary.

Amen.

I

’m not sure if you arrived here tonight expecting a Thanksgiving service, with scripture readings emphasizing the bounty of the harvest, God’s goodness, and a general spirit of thankfulness; if you did, the two readings we’ve just heard read aloud might have given you pause. We listened to the story from Exodus, of how at the very time Moses had gone up the mountain to receive the covenant law from God, the Israelites fashioned a golden calf and gave it credit for freeing them from slavery in Egypt. Talk about a story that embodies the opposite of thankfulness… and this act of making a golden idol causes God’s wrath to “burn hot against them.” The text even suggests that the only reason they aren’t obliterated is that Moses pleads for God to, “Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel…” Happy thanksgiving.

And this parable from the gospel according to Matthew? At the very least, we might have read the version that is related by Luke (14:16-24), which is considerably understated compared to what we just heard. In Luke, “‘Someone gave a great dinner and invited many,” in Matthew’s version it is a king, and the event is “a wedding banquet for his son.” In Luke, the servants head out with invitations to the feast, but are met with all sorts of pretty lame excuses as to why the invited guests can’t attend. In Matthew, those who receive invitations “made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them.” That is so over the top as to be almost cartoonish, but Jesus is just getting started. With the broadest brush possible, he adds the next scene: “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” Happy Thanksgiving.

• To listen to the sermon, simply click the arrow

At this point, the versions in Luke and Matthew become quite similar. There is an empty banquet hall needing to be filled, so the host instructs his slaves to go out and find new guests. “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet,” though in a verse unique to Matthew, Jesus comments that “Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

Well, there finally is something for which we might all be thankful. It would seem that admission to the kingdom of heaven is based on one thing, and one thing only; a willingness to accept the invitation. It isn’t about good behavior or about living the upright religious life, but rather about a willingness to come in, sit down, and share the feast. You see, in spite of those vivid and even violent images in the version from Matthew’s gospel, it is a parable of grace after all… or is it?

In Matthew there is this odd second part to the parable, in which the king comes into his feast and notices that one character is not wearing a wedding robe.

“Friend,” the king asks, “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” Well, I find myself answering on the poor guy’s behalf: “I didn’t even know I was coming to a wedding until one of your slaves handed me an invitation out there on the street.” But Jesus says that this particular guest “was speechless,” which leads the king to order the attendants to “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Oh? And then the concluding statement to the whole works—“For many are called, but few are chosen”—which seems to cut directly against the grain of that picture of the banquet being filled by anyone and everyone willing to accept the invitation.

Are we dealing here with a parable of grace or a picture of judgment? And how is it even remotely fair that this poor schmuck gets tossed into the outer darkness, simply because he wasn’t wearing the right clothes?

Biblical interpreters have often bent over backwards to try to reconcile parts one and two of this story. I once read the suggestion that it was a common practice in those times for wealthy hosts to issue wedding garments at the banquet door, and the problem here is that this guy didn’t put his on. Thing is, I can’t seem to find that interpretation taken in any of the standard commentaries.  Some biblical critics have suggested that the two parts of the parable didn’t originally belong together, and that it was Matthew who connected them. That, however, is a bit of a blind alley, because that just leaves us cherry-picking the bits we like and ignoring what we don’t. Besides, Jesus had a habit of playing hardball, particularly when he was engaging the religious elite of his day. He didn’t shy away from saying things that pressed every button and raised every eyebrow.

But maybe the issue isn’t so much about the guy’s clothes as it is about his silence. I’m with Robert Farrar Capon on this one:

“If he had said anything, anything at all—if he had, even for the worst and most stupid of reasons, put himself in relationship with the king—he would have been alright… But because the man said nothing—because he would not bring himself to relate to the king in any way—all the reassurances the king might have given him remain unheard.” (Capon, The Parables of Judgment)

He needs to speak in order to be in relationship with the king, but he won’t. He won’t trust the fact that he has been invited, and that this king might just dig out an extra robe for him to wear. He just sits in mute silence, out of relationship with the king. And so yes, with those great broad story-telling strokes, Jesus has him tossed out.

As Jesus draws his parable to its close with that saying “For many are called, but few are chosen,” I see him looking straight into the eyes the chief priests and Pharisees. This invitation is open… but they won’t trust it, and they certainly won’t place themselves in any real relationship with Jesus. They’d much rather trust the familiar path than think about a banquet in which they’ll sit down with the blind and the lame, the losers and the lost. Alright then, but you need to know that this is the only banquet in town.

Which brings us back to the story of the golden calf. The Israelites couldn’t muster the courage or the imagination to trust a God who could not be fashioned out of gold and carried around as a visible symbol for their religion (Exodus 4:20). They didn’t know what it might mean to trust a God upon whose name they weren’t to invoke for their own power (Exodus 20:7). So they convinced Aaron—who apparently had a bit of a weakness as a people-pleaser—to engineer the construction of their kind of god; solid, golden, tangible. Not a pretty sight in the eyes of the Lord.

Which brings us back to us. In our own religious constructions, we too can manufacture our own golden calves and try to set the terms of our own attendance at the great wedding feast. Which is why it is good to face head on the parables of Jesus, including those that are rather tough and broadly drawn. In fact, we should give thanks for these stories that rattle and unsettle us, because they are part of what keep us in relationship with the king who desires us to be at his feast.

“W

e’re turning this place into a camp!”  Those words started it all.

As a family we enjoy many sports including climbing and mountain biking.  So when we moved to the country a number of years ago, a network of bike trails all around the bush on our property, and a number of bike bridges and stunts soon became part of the landscape.  One summer evening, we stood in the backyard, looking over the way things were developing there, and those “We’re turning this place into a camp” words were spoken.  An idea was spawned.

Maybe we could run a day camp – we could have a group of kids here for a week for a great time, and also give our own older kids some valuable and practical leadership experience.  In some ways this just felt like returning to our roots, as we directed a camp for over a decade.

One night, sitting around the campfire in our backyard with Jamie Howison, the camp idea came up in conversation.  Jamie said, “Hey, maybe we could run that as part of saint benedict’s table.”

A year later the first ever saint ben’s day camp became a reality.

And now, 3 years later, we have wrapped up the 4^th summer of running the week-long camp.  Over the years the camp has expanded to include 17 campers – kids from the st. benedict’s table community, kids from the area where we live, and 6 kids coming from an EAL classroom of African immigrants that our family volunteers with during the school year (their participation in the week made possible due to campership donations).  Our dream has always been to have a mix of ages of kids involved, and our campers were ages 8-15.

Our camp mornings begin with a Bible time of imagining Bible stories together, and then are spent in skill development in the areas of biking and bouldering.  After lunch, comes “Silly Stories” – crazy skits! Two of the skits allow campers to participate in them and they ALL wanted to be part of these, which kept me up late the night before writing in parts to accommodate them all!  Activities such as Capture the Flag, photo scavenger hunts, group bike rides at Birds Hill Park, a drum circle, a massive water fight, the trampoline, and a water slide down the slope of our backyard fill our afternoons.  The campers leave at 4pm, and then the preparations for the next day fill our evening.

Why do we do it?

As spring approaches, the real work starts.  Advertising, administrative tasks, registration forms and waivers.  New bike trails to build, free wood to find for building bridging on the trails, bridge construction, three days of weed-whacking said trails to get them in shape for riding again.  First aid materials to gather, the bouldering wall to tweak, change rooms to put up, the water slide to get ready.  We provide bikes for about half of the kids, and those bikes need to be kept tuned up and in good working order.  So, bike maintenance.  Trips to Value Village in search of  hideous dresses and wigs for our skits, creative, interactive Bible times to put together, skill classes to prepare so kids are challenged and learn, skits to write and practice and practice so that they bring great laughter and participation from the kids, games to research and work out that will be full of teamwork and fun.  And believe it or not, the list does go on!

Those that know us well see the amount of time and work and effort that goes into this, and the natural question they tend to ask is, “Why do you do it?

Yes indeed – why do we do it? We do it because we believe it matters.

It matters.  The kids who come matter.

It matters that they have unforgettable experience – not because we “wow-ed” them with entertainment, but because of their experience of an environment where they are free to be themselves, to not have to look around them and wonder what others are thinking of them or if they are acting in the culturally expected manner.  It matters to be part of a group that welcomes them to be part of shaping the experience.

It matters that they are in a place where they can work hard to be all they can be at whatever they are doing, to challenge themselves and push themselves to see what they can accomplish in the various skill areas offered.

It matters for us to, despite huge diversity of age and culture, form unique communities where we can connect, laugh together, create together, care for one another, help each other, and share from our hearts.  Rich community experiences shape and form us and create a hunger for more of this good thing called community – of something that feels like spending the week with a big family.

It matters to be nurtured spiritually through experiences that touch upon the deep integration of body and spirit – ways of relating, living, playing in creation and sharing community that bring together our activities and our spiritual formation.

And it matters to be nurtured spiritually in ways that are intentional and deliberate,  where time is set aside to encounter Christ in new and fresh ways as we together move into stories from the Bible, imagine them together, and open our hearts to what God what might want us to hear through those stories.  It matters that they can share their insights as they imagine these stories – imagine themselves in these stories of a shining man rolling a huge stone away from a tomb, imagine the face of Jesus and the life-giving words of hope and healing he offers  a woman as the powerful scent of perfume fills the room, imagine the thoughts and feelings of the crowd that is fed so very much from so very little, imagine what Jesus might be able to do and the good he might bring if we just offer him what we have – our hands, our mouths, our hearts.

“This was the best week of my life.”  “Can I come back again next year?”  With sweat pouring down his face during a bike ride: “That was SO much fun!  Can we ride some more?”  “This has been the most incredible week ever!”  After an interactive Bible story time: “I think Jesus is telling us that no matter how bad things seem, he will always be with me.”

Yes, it matters.

Corinne Plett

F

irst of all, a bit of an apology. The way the lectionary cycle of readings is set up, the next several weeks are going present this preacher with a serious conundrum. Week after week, we’ll be faced with some very important narrative texts from the Book of Exodus—tonight it is the institution of the Passover—as well as some rather challenging words from the Gospel according to Matthew. It seems a bit irresponsible to not speak to tonight’s gospel reading, but that means skipping right over the Passover text. If it is any consolation, I will dig back into the Exodus readings as the autumn progresses.

So, on to the reading from Matthew. “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone,” Jesus teaches. “If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” This opening part of the teaching might well make us nervous, particularly those of us who are not big fans of conflict. In the instance that another Christian wrongs me in some way—and this is very much about instances where one believer sins against another—Jesus seems to be suggesting that it is my responsibility to go to that person and try to set it right. That’s never an easy thing to do, and many of us will have examples of times when such a straight-up approach actually backfired. It can be so much easier to just harbour a bit of a grudge than to actually go and talk to the person we think has hurt us or messed us over. Yet as Stanley Hauerwas phrases it, “peace between brothers and sisters of Jesus must be without illusion.”

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Okay, so what if I screw up my courage, set aside my conflict-avoider default settings, go and talk with this person I believe has hurt me, and they get all defensive? They blow me off, push the blame back in my direction (and maybe I am partly to blame…), and things just get worse. “If you are not listened to,” Jesus tells his followers, “take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” Now, this business of having witnesses is in keeping with the standards of the torah (Deut. 19:15), but it sure feels as if it would ramp things up doesn’t it? If the person with whom I’ve got an issue was defensive prior to this, imagine what he or she will feel like when I show up with two or three other people from the church. And if the person still won’t deal with things, Jesus tells his followers to “tell it to the church.” Oh man, this is getting serious now. You see, I should have just dropped it and avoided this whole mess. I could have lived with my little grudge, but this is getting really ugly. “And if the offender refuses to listen even to the church,” Jesus continues, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.” Great. Now we’re excommunicating and shunning people.

And sadly, that is precisely the way in which this text has sometimes played out in the life of the church. It gets interpreted as a kind of template for institutional church discipline, in which the church (or maybe the church legislative board) acts in a highly legalistic manner as judge and jury. And I think it misses the point.

Jesus is not speaking to a developed institution with a constitution, by-laws, and formal statement of faith. In fact, at this point in the gospel Jesus is speaking directly to the disciples, and in preserving this story Matthew is speaking to the first generation of Christian believers; basically an organic house-church movement, in which the lives of the members are by definition deeply intertwined. It is risky to be a part of this movement, so the need for trust between brothers and sisters in Christ is extraordinary. In short, to take the matter to the church is not to carry it into some institutional disciplinary forum, but is more a case of turning the issue over to the community to which both persons are committed; a community in which trust is not simply a virtue, but actually a life and death reality.

In such a context, to nurse a grudge is dangerous. And of course, people being what they are, grudges are seldom nursed privately. Before you know it, it has become the stuff of gossip, as the one with the grudge begins to privately share their grudge with anyone who will listen… it is poison.

Well, it is fine to talk about the urgency for such a community to deal openly with an issue like this, but we are still left with Jesus’ apparently uncompromising words, “And if the offender refuses to listen even to the church let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.” Funny how we assume that means some kind of shunning or excommunication, given how Jesus actually deals with Gentiles and tax collectors. Far from pushing out the tax collectors, Jesus draws them into his circle, and with grace and mercy he challenges them to look again at how they’ve been carrying out their lives. And two chapters prior to this reading from Matthew, Jesus has heard the plea—and challenge—of a Gentile woman, and has met her in her need. It seems to me that in the case of Jesus, to treat someone like a Gentile or tax collector is not to push them out, but to find a new way to draw them in.

This is actually born out by the context of this text in Matthew’s gospel. This reading is directly preceded by the parable of the shepherd who goes in search of the one lost sheep, and it is followed by Jesus telling Peter that if another believer wrongs him he must forgive, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Endlessly, in other words.

For all that the community that is the church is to be characterized by trust and transparency, it is not meant to be a closed club of insiders. The one who has broken the circle of trust by doing wrong to another is the lost sheep, and even more so if he or she is unwilling to deal with the issue with which they’ve been confronted. “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Even as Jesus speaks those words of how “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,” it is in the context of his being present to them. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” And when Christ is there among his people, he infects us with the grace of the Good Shepherd who is not interested in seeing one of his sheep remain lost.

Two thousand years later our church context is quite different from that of those early Christian believers. We aren’t intertwined in the same way that they were, we don’t in this country live with anything like that level of risk and danger, and perhaps sadly we don’t know each other or need each other in the same way that they did.

But you know, unresolved hurts and grudges can easily go toxic on us, and to default into avoidance for the sake of “keeping the peace” offers no peace at all. Certainly one of the great poisons for church communities is the kind of gossip mill that often unfolds from unaddressed conflict. Bad news for any community, but for a community that seeks to fashion itself after the person of Christ it is all but blasphemous.

From our very different social and cultural context, we still need to hear Jesus’ call to move to a place where hurts and differences can actually be voiced openly and respectfully to each other, not as a way of getting my due but as a step toward real reconciliation. I think, too, that part of what this piece of gospel teaching alerts us to is the truth that when two people have some divisive issue between them, it actually impacts the community of which they are members. That being the case, might it not make sense to think that other members of the community might be in a position to offer a bit of wisdom or mediating insight? This is risky stuff, make no mistake, and almost a foreign language in this culture of ours; a culture that wants us all to be strong enough and individualistic enough to manage our own issues. (Failing that, it wants us to resolve them through litigation and the courts or privately in the therapist’s office…) Yet I actually hear Jesus calling us to reframe those cultural assumptions, and to think differently about our life together as a people called the Body of Christ.

Amen.

A

few back weeks back when I was winding up a series of sermons based in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, I made the observation that as a preacher I tend to be drawn to narrative. Not that it is unimportant to read and preach the epistles, but story catches our imaginations in a very particular way. Well, the preacher certainly has a story to work with tonight, in our reading from the book of Exodus. In many respects this is one of the most significant pieces of text in the whole of the Hebrew scriptures, for it not only recounts the calling of Moses, it also says some rather remarkable things about the nature and character of God.

The sentence with which the story opens probably sounded rather unremarkable as it was read aloud: “Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.” Yet there are two things here on which to remark. Firstly, the great and transformational figure of Moses is working for his father-in-law as a shepherd. On the one hand, those of us who know the longer biblical narrative will be aware that shepherding is ultimately a very strong symbol—King David and Jesus each in their own way being understood as shepherd kings. Yet the shepherd’s work is ultimately hard and of low status, and that is the nature of Moses’ life at this point. Secondly, he is working for his father-in-law, who is described as a “priest of Midian.” Not a priest of Israel, for there is not yet an Israel. Jethro is a priest of the Midianite religion, and yet as the larger story unfolds it will become very clear that his counsel to Moses is of the utmost importance; the Midianite holy man will become one of the wise and holy ones in this new thing called Israel.

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Are you remembering the back-story to this? How it was that Moses has married into a Midianite family and is living deep in the wilderness of Sinai? Born to Hebrew slaves in an Egypt that had begun to fear that these Hebrews were becoming too populous, as an infant Moses had narrowly escaped being killed in a government sponsored program of infanticide. In a marvelous twist of events, he is actually raised in the Egyptian royal household as an adopted child of the Pharaoh’s daughter. Yet as an adult he comes to an awareness of his Hebrew roots, and in defending one of the Hebrew slaves Moses actually kills an Egyptian, and so is forced to flee for his life. Where better to hide than deep in the wilderness?

Years have passed by the time this experience with the burning bush takes place, meaning that Moses has pretty much settled into his life with the family of Jethro. He is married and has a child, and presumably life in Egypt is just a distant memory. Or so he thought. On that mountainside with his flock, Moses sees a bush blazing with fire, yet not consumed. “Let me turn and see this strange sight,” Moses says, yet as he draws close he is met by the presence of God. “Moses! Moses! Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” As told in the book of Genesis, some people had experienced and even conversed with God, but this is of a different order. As the Jewish commentator Everett Fox observes, “nowhere thus far does one find a biblical hero encountering God with such intensity and purity of vision.” Any wonder, then, that “Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God”?

But God continues to speak, and to essentially disregard Moses’ fear.  And here I want to offer you Everett Fox’s translation of these verses:

I have seen, yes, seen the affliction of my people that is in Egypt,

their cry have I heard in the face of their slave-drivers;

indeed, I have known their sufferings!

So I have come down

to rescue it from the hand of Egypt,

to bring it up from that land

to a land, goodly and spacious,

to a land flowing with milk and honey…

(Everett Fox, The Schocken Bible, Volume 1: The Five Books of Moses)

I have seen and heard, and “I have known their sufferings,” and I am about to set this people free from their misery and take them into a whole new land. That is the force of the first part of God’s word to Moses. The next part is where it gets really interesting. “So now Moses, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

Right. The first act in God’s liberation of this people is to send a shepherd—and one who happens to have a bit of a history back there in Egypt—to go and deal with the Pharaoh.  “Who am I,” protests Moses, “that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And though Moses’ protest is really quite fair, God persists. “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” This is the first of Moses’ five attempts to refuse the job, and in all but one of those God’s primary response is “I will be with you.” Oh, there is other reassurance given, and even some tactical advice and one very practical tool. And when Moses protests that he is not much of a public speaker, his more eloquent brother Aaron is even railroaded into the bargain.

But before all of that happens, Moses asks the question that really sits at the heart of this story.  “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” Notice that what Moses is concerned about here is not what he is going to say to Pharaoh, but rather what he is going to say to the Hebrew slaves. He has no established credibility with them, and maybe even a bit of a tarnished reputation as one who was raised in royal comfort. How could he possibly know anything about their pain, their plight, their story?

The answer God offers to Moses is both remarkable and remarkably elusive for the translator. The fact that the Hebrew name is elusive is itself significant. Unlike the other deities of the ancient near east, all of which come with very clear names and very reproducible images, this God will not be so easily harnessed. Both the New Revised Standard Version and the New International Version render the name, “I am who I am,” and both offer “I will be what I will be” as a possible alternative translation. Following the tradition of the great Jewish scholars Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, in his translation Everett Fox offers a third option: “I will be-there howsoever I will be-there.” “Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel, ‘I-Will-Be-There sends me to you.’” This has a great deal of resonance with what God keeps saying to Moses each time he tries to deny this calling, namely “I will be with you.”

In the end, it is precisely that which enables Moses to push forward into this task that has been given him. He is still fearful and a bit liable to go weak at the knees, but it would appear that he has found himself able to trust the promise that God will be present with him.

Taken as a whole, what emerges in this story is something we would do well to bear in mind. Moses is not called because he is such a strong character or the obvious choice for the job; he’s called because God chooses to call him. He’s met there in the wilderness in the midst of his work-a-day life, and challenged to trust so profoundly and foundationally that he will walk straight back to the very land—the very palace in fact—that he had fled in fear. And the role he will play in the liberation of that enslaved people will be real, because the work of God is so very often carried out through the lives and choices of very real people. Very real, very flawed, and very much called.

And the name of his God—and ours—is “I will be there.” Like Moses, we need to trust that word.

Amen.

Jamie Howison

L

arry Campbell claims that in the church in which he grew up, his Baptist pastor preached on the Epistle to the Romans for eight consecutive years; eight years. The very idea simply boggles my mind. While I’m not going to begin to suggest that I’ve done justice to all that this rich biblical book holds for us, I’m winding up my series of sermons on Romans after just six weeks. The next two Sundays will find me away on vacation, and I would not presume to dictate to Helen Manfield the focus for her sermons over those weeks—for all I know, you might get Romans next Sunday—and when I return we’ll have begun to make our way through a series of readings from the book of Exodus.

My instincts as a preacher tend to lean toward story and narrative, whether from a gospel, the Book of Acts, or the Hebrew scriptures. I believe that story shapes and forms our imaginations in a very particular way, which is why Jesus himself so often used parables to stretch the minds and hearts of those who came to hear him teach. And you know, when a story is read aloud, we tend to be able to really hear it.

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In contrast, when a portion of an epistle is read in public worship, it can be tougher to digest. The reader begins, some phrase catches your attention—or maybe not—and then your eye wanders up and you find yourself thinking that there is an awful lot of dust up there on those arches and doesn’t the light look wonderful filtering through the stained glass and man I wish I had one of those cushions… All of sudden the reader is saying “The word of the Lord,” and as you respond “Thanks be to God,” you’re not entirely clear as to what it is that you’re thankful for.

That might have been particularly so tonight, because in the section that was read aloud Paul weaves together a series of quotes from the Old Testament in order to demonstrate something he needs us to hear. But the way in which he does that is not particularly natural for us, so it can be very hard to follow. And in my estimation, the designers of the lectionary cycle decided to start today’s reading one verse too late. I think we need to back up that one verse, to hear Paul’s starting point: “Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.” (Romans 10:4) Christ is the end of the law, which doesn’t mean the law is irrelevant and therefore has been ended, but rather that Christ is that to which the law—the torah—has been directed all along. The word in Greek is telos, which means purpose or end point, which is quite a different thing from something being merely finished or done with. What is it that Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount? “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17)

So that is the context for Paul’s series of references from both the torah (Leviticus 18:5; Deuteronomy 30:11-14) and the prophets (Isaiah 28:16; Joel 2:32), which in itself demonstrates this point about these sources being not abolished in Christ, but fulfilled. Frankly, had they been abolished or over-ridden or declared over and done with, Paul would hardly have been quoting them, right? And he’s dealing with them in a specifically Jewish manner known as midrash. The New Testament scholar Matt Skinner offers the following:

“What we discover in these verses is not a scriptural ‘proof’ meant to convince us. Rather, Paul collects biblical voices to provide resonance for his theological assertions. As a skilled midrashic deejay, he remixes a scriptural conversation for the Roman churches to hear, a conversation in which — in Paul’s arrangement — Christ sits at the center of the voices. All the words gravitate around him, thus acquiring new meaning as they express God’s work through Christ.”

Skinner’s point is that Paul is not proof-texting here—drawing select verses out of context to try to hit his audience with indisputable proofs for why they should believe. Instead he’s acting as “a skilled midrashic deejay,” drawing from ancient voices to create a whole new song. And because for Paul this new song has been at work from the very beginning—“Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15-16)—his sampling of those ancient voices has a basic integrity.

The point to which he wants to take his original audience, that small circle of Christians trying to make their way in the world that was ancient Rome, is this: “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” “Everyone who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” which is his midrashic sample from the prophet Joel, pointing beyond a works-based understanding of righteousness and justification toward one of grace. Birthright is of no consequence, nor is a scrupulous observance of the law. The whole tradition of the law and the prophets is claimed by Paul as what the biblical scholar Paul Achtemeier calls a “summons to trust in God to uphold (our) relationship (to God) as an act of sheer grace.”

Again, Paul is anything but cavalier in his attitude to the torah, and he is not dismissive of the riches of the tradition in which he was formed. As I emphasized last week, he is passionate in his belief that in Christ he has not met a new God, nor has he joined a new religion. His conviction is that through Christ he has been placed in a new relationship with the God who he had been seeking to serve from his youth, even in the days in which he was an active opponent of those who followed Jesus. And his great and agonizing question is why so few of his Jewish sisters and brothers have been able to make the move to embracing Jesus as the messiah of God. He can only trust that in the end God will be faithful to the sons and daughters of Israel.

And in the meantime, he will do all that he can to tell the good news to any and all; male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free. No one can engineer their own redemption, but that is just fine, because, “the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’” Rather than getting tangled up in issues of who is saved and who isn’t, and rather than preaching an ancient version of the revivalist’s hellfire and brimstone sermon, Paul’s framework here is entirely positive. You know those sometimes lurid billboards that dot the prairies? The ones facing drivers with questions like, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” Paul would not have known what to make of such signs. Instead, he is utterly convinced that to be caught up in the grace of God is sheer joy, true freedom, perfect liberty, and he will do everything he can to tell that story.

And each in our own way, so should we.

Amen.

A

s was the case a couple of weeks ago, with the forecast suggesting that this was going to be a hot and humid night, I decided to craft a slightly shorter sermon than usual… Oh I know; if I were a properly earnest preacher, I’d just have us plough through the heat, and perhaps give you an even longer sermon than usual. Happily, I’m not that earnest.

So, as we continue to chip our way through excerpts from Paul’s letter to the Romans, for tonight the designers of the lectionary have actually given us a fairly short reading of just five verses. That should make a ten-minute sermon a snap, right? Except that these verses find Paul bumping up against what for him is the most challenging of issues, and one that causes him what he calls, “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in his heart.” His agony—and it quite clearly is an agony—is that his own people have for the most part not accepted Jesus as messiah.

There’s no question that this is a deeply personal issue for Paul. He had been a pretty virulent opponent of the Christian movement in his earlier days, prior to having his head spun around through his experience of an encounter with the risen Christ. That experience is often referred to as his “conversion,” but really he isn’t so much converted as he is reoriented and redirected into a new calling. He was a devout Jew of the Pharisaic movement, carefully and faithfully following God according to the traditions and theology of his heritage, and suddenly he is reoriented by God to recognize that Jesus of Nazareth is in fact messiah. This is the same God, and Paul is still very much a Jew. He is renamed—from Saul to Paul—and he is redirected, but it is not so much that he is converted as it is that his understanding is transformed. He is to serve the same God—how could it be otherwise?—yet with utterly new eyes. Ironic, then, isn’t it, how his experience of being met by the risen Christ leaves him physically blind for several days? A new way of seeing that literally blinds him for a time.

For years he’s been hard at work in response to the calling he experienced that day on the road to Damascus. He’s worked tirelessly to proclaim the good news, and he’s really the one who has carried it beyond the borders of Judaism and into the whole of the world. He is the apostle to the Gentiles, yet no less a Jew for all that.

Which is why he is in agony. Paul is increasingly aware that he is out of step with his own people, his own heritage, and his own deep history. “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ, for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh,” he writes, and it is pretty clear that he’s not kidding. This is more than just feeling that he’s lost touch with his roots, and it is certainly not something that is going to be remedied by doing a Google search of his family tree. This is about a fundamental identity of a whole people, of which he is a part. “They are Israelites,” he says, but he just as well could have said, “We are Israelites.”  That’s how deeply this is felt.

“…and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.”

At heart Paul’s question is whether God’s past promises—the covenant made with this particular people and nation—matter for God’s future. It is a question of the character and trustworthiness of God. Paul actually seems to be thinking that if the history of God’s dealings with God’s people has been voided, then he might be inclined “to wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ, for the sake of my own people.” Far from passing judgment on his own people, who apparently are for the most part not going to follow him in turning to Christ, he will ultimately try to make theological sense of the whole works. As the New Testament scholar Matt Skinner observes, “The question driving this section of Romans (9-11) is “What’s God doing?” It’s not “What’s wrong with these unbelievers?”

In his typically provocative manner, Robert Capon once said to me that “in the circumcision of Jesus, the whole world is made Jewish,” which is his way of picking up on an image that Paul will use just a couple of chapters down the line. The gentiles—that’s us—are the wild olive shoot, grafted onto the “rich root of the olive tree” that is Israel. (Romans 11:7) We don’t replace it; we are grafted on to it. In case anyone might miss the deeper meaning of that, Paul adds, “do not vaunt yourselves over the branches. If you do vaunt yourselves, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” (Romans 11:18)

Extraordinary, then, isn’t it, how quickly the church began to define itself as a new Israel to replace the old? How quickly the church went from being the persecuted to being the persecutor? We look with horror at what Nazism stood for, yet the Holocaust is merely the logical outcome of close to two thousand years of anti-Semitism. For centuries we have been the wild olive shoot, madly trying to convince ourselves—and God—that we have supplanted the root. Not a chance, for God is faithful.

And I actually think that one of the more frightening faces of this is to be found in a stream within North American Christianity, which has allied itself with the modern state of Israel—and therefore effectively against Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian—so that the temple might be rebuilt and the world brought to its end. That’s not an ally; that’s just a sorry attempt at manipulation, almost bound to result in more violence and more division.

No. We need instead to stand with Paul, as he affirms the trustworthy character of God, and to perhaps seek a new humility in our identity as the wild olive shoot, grafted by grace into a much deeper and older story.

Amen.

Jamie Howison