Electric Circuit Rider

As many of you know, my daughter-in-law is a Rabbi. My son, Jim, converted to Judaism before he and Rachel married and their little son and daughter, who are two of the four cutest kids in the world, are growing up in a devout Jewish home.

People might wonder what I, as a Christian minister, do with this?

One response I have to people who ask that question is to send them to Jim’s mother who says, “Do I believe God wants me to stop loving my son because he converted to Judaism – No, She wouldn’t make me do that!”

Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology withers in the face of a Mother Bear’s love. If God doesn’t love us as much as Jacquie loves Jim and his family, we are all in trouble.

But Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology is still going to ask what I think Jesus meant when he said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).

Answer: I struggle with it. I wrestle with it. Just like Paul does in chapters 9, 10, and 11 of the Book of Romans. Paul is so disturbed that his fellow Jews have not believed that Jesus is the Messiah, that he says he would be willing to be accursed by Christ if that would, somehow, save his people.

I’ll come back to this dilemma in a couple of weeks, but right now I’d like to talk about wrestling with God. The Old Testament Lesson for August 3rd tells about Jacob wrestling with “a man” in the middle of the night. They wrestle all night and neither can make the other say, “uncle”. As dawn breaks, the Stranger tells Jacob to let him go, and Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”.

The Stranger then tells Jacob that his name from then on will be “ Israel ”, which may mean, “the one who wrestles with God.” And the Stranger also leaves Jacob lame in one hip. When the Stranger leaves, Jacob calls the place: “I-have-seen-God (and lived to tell about it)!”

We wrestle with God when we have big questions like: “How do I resolve John 14:6 with my son’s obvious devotion to God and his wife’s clear calling from God to be a leader in the Jewish community?”

Other people have other questions:

“How can a good God allow good people and innocent children to suffer and even die before their time?”

“How can the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination when my friends’ love for each other and faithfulness to each other puts to shame a lot of heterosexual couples I know?”

“Does someone who lived a terrible life but accepts Jesus as their savior at the last minute go to heaven and someone who lived a wonderful, caring, loving and highly ethical life but never said, “Jesus is my Lord” goes to hell?

I’ve wrestled with all of these questions and continue to wrestle with some others:

“Do I need to sell all I have and give it to the poor in order to really follow Jesus?”

“What does it mean to love my enemy and turn the other cheek when my enemies fly airliners into big buildings full of innocent people?”

The purpose of wrestling I think is less to get an answer than to get stronger. What gets stronger is not the ability to think theologically – in fact, I think that gets lamed, because we lose the cocksure arrogance of the True Believer who knows he’s right. What gets stronger is that part of us that holds on to God. I’d call it “faith” if that hadn’t been hijacked by those who want to make “faith” to mean “the intellectual assent to a list of doctrines”. So let’s just call it “The-Part-of-Us-that-Holds-On-to-God”.

I can’t tell you how many people I know who tell me that they are agnostic or atheist but who are people who hold on to God – and do so with greater tenacity than some good church folks I know. I used to kid one atheist friend that he talked more about God than most of the people I know who devoutly believe in God.

So, for now, let’s just say that I hold on to my love for Jesus and I hold on to my love for my son, Jim, and his family, even though some would say I am betraying my Lord and condemning my son to eternal fire. If you believe that religious faith is about logical consistency, you and I belong to different religions. If you believe logical consistency is unimportant, you and I belong to different species. When we hold on to God in the darkness of confusion and contradiction and even despair, our grip on the Eternal grows stronger, our confidence in our religious “answers” grow weaker, and we become part of Israel – wrestlers with God.

In his sermon, “The Right to Hope”, Paul Tillich makes a distinction between foolish hope and wise hope.

Any fool can hope. We can hope to win the lottery. We can hope that some, as-yet-unknown rich uncle will die and leave us millions. We can hope that science will discover a way to genetically modify chocolate so that it removes fat. And we can sit and watch TV waiting for our hopes to be fulfilled.

Yet is that any more foolish than a childless couple going through all sorts of gyrations in order to get pregnant and failing over and over again and having their hopes worn down like a river wears down the stones in its streambed until, as the Bible delicately puts it, “It ceases to be with her after the manner of women” (Gen. 18:11)?

Tillich says that there is a difference.

Genuine hope is hope in something in the future in which the seed is already present.

“In the bulb there is the flower,

In the seed an apple tree,

Unrevealed until its season,

Something God, alone, can see.”

 The wise see in the tiniest things signs of real transformation. It’s not just the daffodils that are signs of spring, but the sharing of a loaf of bread and a cup of wine by all sorts of people: rich and poor, powerful and weak, young and old, brave and fearful that is a sign of the kingdom of heaven.

But there is something else about the hope of the wise. It needs to be strong enough to die and to be reborn.

There is little doubt that Abraham and Sarah’s hope that they would have a biological child died some years earlier. That’s why they laugh when God tells them that they will soon hold their child in their arms. The laughter is the rebirth of hope.

We laugh when the hope we thought we gave up a long time ago as a foolish hope peeks up out of the snow of despair. We laugh at ourselves for ever hoping. We laugh at all the work we put in to trying to fulfill that hope. We laugh at how disappointed we were at first when the hope failed to materialize. We laugh at the way we have accommodated to not having that hope anymore. And we laugh at the foolishness of believing, even for a second that a living hope could be reborn in us.

After she completed her Ph.D. in Theology, a good friend of ours was still stuck at home in a parsonage in a very small rural community, which could employ her husband as the pastor of one of the three churches, but had no work for a specialist in Ecumenics. So, for awhile, she watched soap operas every afternoon.

These were a revelation. The ethical dilemmas, relational difficulties, evil twins and even the occasional resurrection (You see, Darling, I didn’t really die in that plane crash, I just wandered around the Amazon for eight years with amnesia) seemed to her fertile soil for religious reflection, if only someone would exploit this goldmine of narrative theology.

Someone has – the book of Genesis.

Let’s update Abraham, Sarah and Hagar’s triangle, shall we?

For example, a wealthy childless couple forces their illegal immigrant housekeeper to become a surrogate mother who bears their child. Or, the housekeeper suggests that she could help the couple out by bearing a child for them because she sees this as a chance to take the place of the wife. Theological Reflection: Is sin a deliberate misuse of human freedom?

Or suppose the couple feels vulnerable because they have no offspring in a world that believes that the only real immortality comes through one’s descendents. And that illegal immigrant housekeeper agrees to be used because she can’t afford to be sent back to her homeland, which she fled because the dictatorship had marked her for execution. Theological Reflection: is sin a limitation on human freedom?

Do we sin because we freely decide to sin? Or do we sin because we are trapped in the sinful systems that run a sinful world? Can’t you see Morrie, Maureen and Mohammed, the three current writers on this show, spinning off various scenarios from these setups that will keep the show running for four thousand years?

After all, when people get tired of news about the Middle East, or documentaries about human cloning or special reports about sexual slavery in the third world, or appeals to help people in a famine – they can always turn to “The Journey” (Trinity Broadcasting Network), “The Promised Land” (Israeli Broadcasting Authority), or “Ibrahim’s Jihad” (Islam Channel).

If they stay true to the story, however, at the end of every episode, nothing much gets changed, except in some mysterious way, by some form of spiritual intuition or divine intervention, just when things are at their worst, a baby is born to a childless couple or a mother finds a well and gives a drink to a child dying of thirst.*

I know those are always improbable plot twists. All three of the religions that devote themselves to this particular soap opera call those improbable plot twists, "grace". Grace can cause problems, too. But it always ensures that there will be another episode tomorrow.

*Note: as in the soap operas, Ishmael is both a teenager and an infant at the same time.

It was the Sabbath at the end Passover. I had brought my mother to visit my son’s family in southeastern Connecticut and she and I were sitting with Jim and his two kids, Amina – 3 and Ziv – 15 months,in the evening service at Temple Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, where the mother of those two cute little kids is the Rabbi.

Rachel, my daughter-in-law, had warned me that the readings for that Sabbath were not very interesting. It was from the Holiness Code in Leviticus, so she wove it into the significance of the weeks ahead between Passover and the festival of Shavuot (which we Christians call Pentecost) during which they “count the omer”.

The omer is a measure of grain and in ancient times the Hebrews brought an omer of grain to the temple as a sacrifice on Shavuot. Today, it means that they count up the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot.

Rachel made a point of the fact that they count “up”. It’s not a countdown, like at a rocket launch, but each day adds to the last – to the sum of life’s experiences.

These weeks of the church year following Pentecost are known as “ordinary time”. Usually we think that means, between now and the beginning of December, there are no big celebrations like Christmas and Easter to add luster to what is otherwise “ordinary time”.

But that’s a misunderstanding of what “ordinary time” means in the Christian year. “Ordinary time” is time that “counts”, they can be set in "order" by being numbered with "ordinal" numbers.
 We have several ways to count time during this period:

• We can count Sundays after Pentecost – this Sunday will be the fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
• We can count Sundays in “ordinary time”, which adds the weeks after Pentecost to the weeks of Epiphany (from the 12^th day after Christmas until Ash Wednesday). This Sunday will be the 10^th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
• We can count “Propers”. These are the readings that are designated for certain weeks of the Christian year. This weeks reading is “Proper 5 A” meaning that the readings are for the Sundays closest to June 8 in year “A” of the 3-year-calendar of readings that we call the “lectionary”.

But the point is that time counts. Our days add up. It’s up to us to decide what they add up to. We are not killing time. We are not wasting time. We are not counting down the days until we graduate, get married, retire or die. We are adding to the sum of our lives and to the totality of human experience.

One website actually suggests that we count our age in days instead of years. As I write this, I am 21,857 days old – a figure that makes me a little queasy – mostly because I’m asking just what have I done with all those days? What will I do with even one more?

That is why the psalmist says “so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12.  

Ron Delbene asks, “Have you have ever felt vaguely hungry and gone to the refrigerator and looked inside? You don’t know what you are looking for, but finally you take something out and eat it. Then you are still not satisfied. Perhaps you want something to drink? You find something to drink. You are full and you aren’t thirsty, but you still aren’t satisfied.”

That is often the way a spiritual search begins. Our century is seeing more and more people on this search. Many of them are young. Many of them have very thin spiritual resources like Julius, a character in the movie Pulp Fiction. After miraculously surviving a fusillade of bullets, Julius decides to “walk the earth” like Caine in the TV show Kung Fu, which was his only exposure to any kind of religious tradition.

In a sermon, Pope John Paul II described a young man who had grown up in an atheistic communist home in Poland , since his parents were minor government officials. The young man had almost never heard the word “God” mentioned during his youth. Yet one day he stood knocking at a monastery door because he was looking for something and he believed the monks might know what it was.

Fruitful churches recognize that people open the door of a church like we so often open the refrigerator door; looking for something – but they don’t know what. So these churches offer to help people find what they are looking for. Much of this takes place in Intentional Spiritual Formation. This goes way beyond Sunday School for kids.

They offer small groups that get together for study, prayer and service. They give people a chance to learn the “basics” of the Christian faith. They give people a chance to reflect on the meaning of their life experiences in the light of scripture, tradition and reason.

In our church, we have Disciple Bible studies, and other mid-week studies – some that run all year and others that run for only a few weeks. These help people find meaning and faith. So does the Faith Weavers class on Sunday morning.

Right now, we are looking at ways to bring together men and women, seniors and teens, singles and families, in different groups in different ways to help each other grow in faith. One of our current projects is setting up a series of classes on just the “basics” of the Christian faith that will run through May and into June. Designed primarily for those who would like to explore membership in our church, it will also be open to members who want to “begin again” – or maybe for the first time – in growing in faith.

OK, you’ve stared into that refrigerator so long the butter is starting to melt. What are you really looking for?  

Some years ago when I was serving another church, a parishioner complained to me that I never preached from the Book of Revelation.

The truth is that I often preach on it during Advent and during this season that we call Easter that runs between Easter morning and Pentecost.

The problem is that I never spend much time preaching about the problem the airlines will have when their pilots have been “raptured” or drawing parallels between what’s happening in the Middle East and the Battle of Armageddon.

I could do that. I grew up with a devout belief in Dispensationalism  that forms the basis of the Left Behind series and much of the preaching about the Book of Revelation in North America , today. I have memorized the timetable of the years of tribulation under the reign of the Antichrist, the Millennium, the great last battle between good and evil and the Last Judgment.  I know what to look for in the news  that will tip me off that the END IS NEAR.

I also know that, while not exactly a bunch of hooey, that interpretation misses the point of the Book of Revelation.

There are Bible scholars who seriously question whether comfortable North American Christians who feel “persecuted” because they aren’t allowed to dictate the prayers everyone will say in a public schoolroom, can really understand the Book of Revelation.

This book was written for people who had their backs against the wall. The Christians in the Sudan whose crops are burned, villages are pillaged, women are raped, men are killed and children are sold into slavery probably understand Revelation better than we do.

The basic message of Revelation is:

God is at work, even now, defeating evil, not with a lion, but with a Lamb. So then,

• Love will triumph over hate. Right will triumph over wrong. Peace will triumph over war. Inclusiveness will triumph over prejudice. And community will triumph over selfishness. 
• The poor will enter the Kingdom. The meek will inherit the earth. Those who mourn will be comforted. Those who try to do the right thing will succeed. The peacemakers will triumph. And the persecuted will be vindicated.

The Book’s vision of the New Heaven and the New Earth promises that, in the end, we will live, not playing harps in the clouds but working out God’s policies in a new world.

The Left Behind books aren’t wrong. There is a terrible end in store for all the false powers of this world – and for our false selves. But all that is real and all that is right will live forever in God’s light.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of watching more movies over ten days time than I ever have in my life. My wife, Jacquie, was one of the judges of the shorts program at the Cleveland International Film Festival.  She saw 160 short films over those 10 days. I didn’t see quite so many, but she and I did take in some great movies from all over the world.

In one of the short films from Bosnia, a teenage boy on a bike is hit by a bus and rushed to a hospital in the capital city of Sarajevo . The boy was hooked up to monitors, IV’s and other equipment designed to save his life and it looked like he would be all right as his parents sped from their rural home to be with him. Then a bomb dropped by a NATO bomber during the bombing campaign of 1995 knocked out the power supply to the hospital. By the time the boy’s parents arrived at his hospital room, their son had died – along with many others in the hospital whose survival depended on electricity.

I remembered, as I watched the movie, that I had been in favor of NATO intervention at the time. The news had been filled with reports of a huge massacre at Srebenica as part of the ethnic cleansing campaign engaged in by Bosnian Serbs. We couldn’t just stand by and idly allow another Holocaust.

The film, however, was a reminder that geopolitical opinions formed in the comfort of my armchair about what should be done on the other side of the world can have disastrous results if my political leaders decide to do exactly what I think they should do. Like most Americans, I wasn’t in favor of sending American soldiers to the Balkans to be in harm’s way. But bombs dropped from 20,000 feet – especially “smart” bombs that, of course, only kill bad people – wouldn’t that be a neat solution to a nasty problem?

I guess it was. The bombing eventually led to the Dayton Agreement, which brought the conflict to an end.

Still, a lot of innocent people died, not just because the “bad” people killed them, but “good” people like us Americans, killed them, too. And they are just as dead, whether murdered by the “bad” people or the “good” people.

I went away from the movie feeling a little like the people of Jerusalem must have felt after hearing Peter’s sermon on Pentecost. They, too, had acquiesced to – even approved of – the execution of the carpenter from Nazareth called Jesus a little over a month earlier. Now, they were learning that they had crucified the One who was both “Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).

What were they to do? They asked Peter.

He replied, “Repent and be baptized”.

My baptismal vows call on me to repent. They call on me to renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness (such as violence) and to reject the evil powers of this world. They also call on me to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.

Killing the bad people by dropping bombs on their cities from 20,000 feet isn’t in keeping with those vows as I understand them.

Lord, have mercy.