Palm Sunday: Forgotten Women of Holy Week

 

Forgotten Women of Holy Week

Monday through Friday in Lent some of us have taken time to carefully study the book of Ruth online. Ruth is the story of how a widowed foreign woman from the wrong-side of the River Jordan becomes a valorous woman supporting her widowed mother-in-law, marries into her dead father-in-law’s family, and becomes the great-grandmother of the shepherd boy David who is anointed King of Israel. Although the God of Israel makes no appearance in the book of Ruth, it is the essence of God’s character that focuses the entire narrative around the Hebrew word hesed. Hesed, often gets translated into English as “steadfast love,” “mercy,” and “faithfulness,” is perhaps best understood as an “act of good faith.” Hesed is a quality that humans share with God: that generous ability to put the interests of another, weaker, party before one’s own, most especially for the poor, widows, orphans and resident foreigners – all categories that describe Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi. Because everyone, all of us, is created in God’s image, this makes hesed the one characteristic we share in common with the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When the Bible speaks of love, it is often hesed, which is not a feeling, but an act of faith on behalf of others – all others who are in need.

 

As if to illustrate that his entire ministry of Good News is really all about hesed, Jesus singles out two women during his time in Jerusalem for the Passover Festival – a festival recalling God’s act of redemption and liberation of a disparate group of slaves out of Egypt who become the people Israel, people who share God’s hesed with one another, with those in need, and even with strangers from other lands who for one reason or another end up sojourning in Israel.

 

After entering Jerusalem, we read that Jesus looked around the Temple and then retired to nearby Bethany where he had friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. [Mark 11:1-11] Each day he would return to Jerusalem, and each evening retire to Bethany. One day, while in Jerusalem, he sits down opposite the Temple treasury and watches people putting in money, noting that many rich people put in “large sums.” Along comes a poor widow who puts in two copper coins – likely the lepta, the smallest coin in circulation. Never missing the teachable moment, Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything, all that she had to live on.” “Truly,” at the beginning, is really “Amen,” a word connected to faith and means something more like, “So be it.” And “all that she had to live on” in the Greek is really, “she gave her whole life”! One way to hear what Jesus is saying, “So be it! As it is with this poor widow, may it also be with you! Her repeated acts of hesed exemplify her generosity, faith and trust not only in the God of Israel, but the people Israel.” For in those days, people made offerings and tithes to the Temple so that the Temple priests could feed those who were poor and hungry, like our poor widow, as an example of community hesed, community acts of faith! The story is not about the money, but about the widow, and is meant to make us wonder, How might we serve her and all others like her who are in need?

 

Later in the week of Passover/Holy Week Jesus is again in Bethany [Mark 14:3-9], where he shares a meal with “Simon the leper.” A woman walks in from off the street and crashes the dinner party. She carries an alabaster jar with ointment of pure nard. She breaks the flask and pours it over Jesus’s head - anointing him in the very same fashion in which Israel had always anointed her kings – back when they had kings like David and were not under Greek or Roman control. Some folks at the table are indignant. “Why does she waste this ointment? It might be sold for 100 denarii or more and given to the poor!” One hundred denarii would feed a family for a year. Again, never missing the teachable moment Jesus says, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. Amen! So be it! Wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” Like the widow, she is another exemplar of generosity, faith and trust. This is what God’s hesed looks like. So be it! May it also be with you. Again, it’s about the woman’s hesed, not the money or the ointment.

 

How much trust in God in Christ does it take to give your whole life away? How much faith and trust in God does it take to risk walking into a strange house? To crash a dinner party? To risk being thrown out? To risk being humiliated? To anoint Jesus as a king like David? And to lavish a year’s income to do so?

 

Wherever and whenever the Good News is preached in the whole world, what these two women have done is to be told in their memory! Like Jesus, they empty themselves and give their whole lives to God! [Philippians 2:5-11] Jesus calls our attention to these two women in Holy Week, the week of the Passover. The week of his Passion. His passion is for us to become a community of God’s hesed, God’s acts of faith, God’s mercy and steadfast love. Yet, we routinely rush past these two stories to get to the story of his arrest and execution. We routinely overlook these two nameless women he calls all of us to see and to remember and to tell their story. Because their story is his story. Just as his story is theirs. And his story and their story are to become our story. He knows he is going to die. Two of his last faith-acts of hesed ask us to remember them. To tell their stories. To be like them.

 

How might we best do that? What does it mean to remember them and tell their story? How might we give our whole life to Jesus in ways that he would respond by saying, “Amen! So be it”? If two unnamed women, a widow and a stranger from off the street, are exemplars of generosity, faith and trust, of what it means to follow Jesus, what in their stories might become a part of our story as well? So that one day we may hear Jesus say to us, “Amen. So be it! You live a life of God’s hesed! Wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what you do for others in my name will be told in memory of you!” Amen! So be it! So, Be it!

 

 

 

Lent 5B:A Priest after the Order of Melchizedek

Lent 5B: A Priest after the Order of Melchizedek

In John 12:21 we are told that “among those who went up to worship at the Passover Festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’” As soon as I read this, I recall a time just after I had been ordained a priest in December 1983. I was at Christ Church in Winnetka, IL and part of an active Ecumenical Clergy Group. Bob Hudnut, the local Presbyterian pastor had invited me to lunch and we met at his church. As he was showing me the sanctuary, Bob was called away for a phone call and left me to explore on my own. Eventually, I found myself standing in the pulpit gazing out at the rows of empty pews imagining what it would be like on a Sunday morning, when my eyes glanced down to where one might place notes or a manuscript and suddenly, I froze. Carved into the wood where every time one would look down at one’s notes were the words, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus!” It was a moment of transcendent realization as to what my task is to be every time I preach: that whatever I say or do is meant to help people like these Greeks in our text to see Jesus in new and transformative ways. I caught my breath and was still standing there pondering these words as Bob returned to take me to lunch.

 

To help us see Jesus happens also to be the primary concern of whoever wrote the little treatise we call Hebrews. It used to be called the Letter to the Hebrews, but it is neither a letter, nor is it necessarily addressed to “Hebrews,” but rather seems likely to have been addressed to early first or second century Christians in Rome, which very likely may have included some Jews who resided there as well. Throughout this theological treatise, the primary argument is that Jesus is a new kind of High Priest, which immediately ought to strike one as ironic since in John’s gospel it is the High Priest Caiaphas who suggests that Jesus needs to be killed to save the community from destruction by Rome. Which of course did happen anyway some 40 years after Jesus.

 

Caiaphas makes this suggestion because just before coming to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, Jesus had stopped to see his friends in Bethany, a suburb or Jerusalem, only to find his close friend Lazarus dead and in a tomb for four days. Jesus drew a larger crowd of believers after raising Lazarus from the dead. Caiaphas sees that if Jesus were to go on ‘performing signs’ like this, “everyone will believe in him.” [John 11:48] It is this that drives him to have Jesus arrested, and Lazarus as well since he is part of the reason why, as the Pharisees proclaim in the verse just before our story, “Look, the whole world has gone after him!” Which is confirmed by the arrival of “some Greeks” who wish to see Jesus. We do too. That’s why we’re here.

 

The author of Hebrews in chapter 5, and indeed throughout the treatise, makes an astonishing and curious claim: Jesus is a new kind of High Priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” Melchizedek is mentioned only twice in the Hebrew Bible: in Genesis 14 and again in Psalm 110. Melchizedek, the king of Salem, translates as “king of righteousness, the king of peace.” His singular appearance in Genesis is to Abraham, at the time still Abram, who had just successfully defeated King Chedorlaomer of Elam and others to rescue his nephew Lot, is visited by this King of Righteousness, King of Peace, who brings Abram an offering of ‘bread and wine.’ Abram offers him a tithe. Melchizedek, “a priest most high,” blesses Abram saying, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High; who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” And that’s the last he is ever seen until Hebrews invokes him as the very kind of “priest most high” that is Jesus.

 

Curiously, in a book called “beginnings,” i.e., Genesis, there is no indication where Melchizedek comes from or where he goes. So, Jesus is like a high priest who has no beginning, and becomes a high priest who has no end. And of whom it is said, the whole world is going after him, and who declares he will draw the whole world to himself. This he says after he asks his “Abba, Father” to glorify God’s own name, and a voice from heaven replies, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” Some in the crowd who heard it, which includes people from all over the ancient world like our Greeks, thought perhaps it was thunder, while others think that it was an angel. But Jesus assures them the voice was for their sake, saying, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” [John 12:28-33] All people. The community of Christ is to welcome all people.

 

Those like the authors of John and Hebrews see Jesus as a “king of righteousness, the king of Peace,’ who comes not to condemn us, but to draw us closer to himself and to his Father, Abba, YHWH, in an effort to redeem all humankind and the world itself. On our better days, we too see Jesus in a similar light – one who welcomes all people and goes so far as to instruct us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. All people really means all people.

 

As I write this, and indeed over the last year of the Covid-19 Pandemic, violence against Asian-Americans, and in fact Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders worldwide, has increased, in part because of the constant referring to the virus as the “China Virus.” The majority of documented cases are against women. The recent mass shooting of South Koreans and others in the Atlanta, GA, area has only been the most recent and most attention-grabbing example of a kind of racism that has existed for decades if not longer, even in regions as isolated as Australia and New Zealand, as well as in Great Britain and Canada. As a member of an Asian-American family, all of this is of great personal concern. Many of you know, our oldest daughter is from South Korea. This makes our grandson Asian-American as well. The kinds of yelling, spitting in the face and violence going on here and around the world must stop.

 

As someone who realized long ago that all that I say and do in the pulpit must help others to see Jesus, I can’t help but feel as if there has been a colossal failure among all of us who are proclaimers of the faith with the kinds of racism and violence against “others” that persists against those who do not look just like us – despite the indisputable fact that we all share fundamentally the same genetic code, the same DNA, and the same biological beginnings as Jesus, Melchizedek, Abram and all the people of faith we read and hear about week-in and week-out. Surely it grieves the King of Righteousness, the King of Peace, the Most High Priest who gives us his body and his blood, and who calls us to be a people of welcome and prayer for all people. Not some. Not most, but all people. No matter what.

 

Next week is Palm Sunday and the beginning of the most Holy Week of the year. As we become increasingly aware of the tragic results of racism that infect us more deeply than any Pandemic ever can, our prayers in this Holy Season must call us to be witnesses not only to the One we know as King of Righteousness and King of Peace, but to vow, covenant, promise never to remain silent as all the various kinds of racism and anti-Semitism persist all around us. We must be those people who pray, but who also speak out against all that goes against our Lord’s desire to draw all people, the whole world, together as One, just as we and Christ are One. Amen.

Lent 4B: Your Image of God Heals You

 

Your Image of God Heals You

One comment we heard from Richard Rohr at Noonday Prayer & More has stuck with me for a couple of months now – in fact it is written on a sticky-note and posted on the window in front of me Monday through Friday: Your Image of God Creates You. Think about that for a moment. Genesis tells us that male and female, we are “made in the image of God.” That is, what makes us who we are is how we imagine God to be. Today’s lessons suggest to me a corollary to Rohr’s observation: Your image of God Heals You. 

 

Undoubtedly the story in Numbers 21:4-9 at first strikes us as odd. The people who have been redeemed from being debt-slaves in Egypt complain about the food given during their 40 years sojourn: they are tired of daily portions of manna and quails. In response to their grumbling, the Lord “sent poisonous snakes among the people.” The people then recognize they have sinned against God and Moses. They ask Moses to pray for them. God’s solution: place a bronze serpent on top of a pole so that anyone who gets snake-bit can look up at the serpent on the pole and live.

 

As odd as this all seems, over time ancient civilizations came up with the Rod of Asclepius, a single serpent wrapped around a staff, and Caduceus, a short staff entwined by two serpents, sometimes surmounted by wings. To this day we look at these symbols and understand what they represent – healing and the medical arts.

 

In John 3:14-21, summing up a conversation with Nicodemus, “a leader of the people,” Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted-up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” That is, to stop and look up at Jesus is similar to looking up at the bronze serpent. It is a sign of God’s forgiveness and, we are told, God’s love “for the world” – the whole and everything and everyone therein. To be healed, we need only stop, look up and live.  

 

One commentator asks, “Why? Why does God persist in saving humankind, when humankind itself persists in rebellion and sin? The answer comes in the familiar language of John 3:16: God acts again and again for the benefit of human beings because God loves the world in spite of itself. Even as the world resists and opposes God’s Son, God persists in loving the world.” [Texts for Preaching, CD-Rom edition, Walter Brueggemann, et.al; Year B p.220-21] Our image of God loving and saving us from ourselves can in turn make us people who love and save others.

 

The biblical word for this saving love is the Hebrew word hesed. Ellen Davis, in her translation of the book of Ruth, describes God’s hesed as “good faith” or “faith-act.” Usually translated as mercy, compassion, love, grace, and faithfulness, none of these completely summarize the quality of hesed. For hesed is not merely an emotion or feeling. It involves action on behalf of someone who is in need – a faith-act. Hesed as love implies doing something merciful and compassionate and useful for someone in need. Hesed, found some 250 times in the Old Testament, expresses the essential essence of God’s character. Which is why the God of the Old and New testaments persists in saving us, forgiving us, and loving us no matter what.

 

“From a biblical perspective,” writes Ellen Davis, “the moral ecology of the world functions properly when God and humanity are engaged in the perpetual exchange of hesed, good-faith and the acts that follow.” Created in God’s image, hesed is meant to be the most basic characteristic of humanity as well. We are to exercise hesed toward God and one another. [Ellen Davis, Who Are You, My Daughter, p xiii-xiv] The essence of the good news of Christ is to accept that we are, like Jesus, God’s Beloved. This is the essence of being created in God’s image. To exchange hesed with God and with others who are in need is what it means to live our lives “for the sake of the gospel.” We who are forgiven and loved no matter what.

 

What might it mean today to stop, look up and live? This weekend we mark the one-year anniversary of our first public acknowledgment that we are in the midst of a nation and world-wide Pandemic. For a variety of health and practical reasons, when the pandemic began, I had some N-95 surgical masks and nitrile gloves. About that time, I went to get some items I would need in time of a lockdown at CVS. Before going in I put on a mask and some gloves. As I turned and looked up from what I was doing, I saw an Asian woman approach me from across the way holding her hands out with a pleading look in her eyes. With no words I could see she was asking if I might give her a pair of gloves. I nodded, reached back into the car and handed her a pair. We looked into one another’s eyes. We bowed to one another and went about our shopping at CVS. No words were spoken. An act of hesed, a faith-act had just occurred. Simply because I stopped and looked up, we both experienced an act of faith and a sense of being healed from the fear of the coronavirus that had already begun to take hold of us.

 

These odd stories of ours can help us see what it means to be human. Our image of God creates us. Our image of God heals us. Throughout the Old Testament God is described repeatedly words like these: “… you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” [Jonah 4:2] We are a busy people, even in the midst of a Pandemic. Sometimes we just need to stop what we are doing and look up. When we do, we just might experience God’s hesed, God’s steadfast love. We might feel a real sense of being saved, or of being healed of whatever it is that makes life feel in any way broken or fearful. Sometimes to stop and look up from whatever else we are doing opens us to receive a healing and saving gesture from another person – another person, who like us, is also created in the image of God. Of the God who persists in forgiving, loving and healing humankind. Just because God forgives us our rebellious nature and loves us anyway, no matter what. When this is our image of God, we reflect that image in all that we say and do for others. As the prophet Joel calls to us, “…rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.” [Joel 2:13] This is Good News for all people! Amen. It is so. It is truth.

Lent 3B - Jesus on the Temple Mount

 

Jesus on the Temple Mount

We need to stop calling this episode in John 2:13-22, also reported in the other three gospels, “The Cleansing of the Temple.” It suggests that Jesus thought that something terrible and dirty and wrong was going on there. As has been pointed out by Amy Jill Levine in her book, Entering the Passion of Jesus [Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2018], Jesus did not hate, nor did he reject, the Temple. Since he was a boy he and his family had been going to Jerusalem and the Temple for many if not all the appointed pilgrim feast days: Sukkot, the feast of Booths; Shavuot or Pentecost, the Giving of Torah; and Passover, the Feast of Freedom from slavery. It is this last that brings him there a few days after his generous gift of wine, good wine at that, at a wedding reception in Cana of Galilee. He likes going to the Temple. He even calls it “my Father’s house”!  He is there to stake a claim and to let people know who he is.

 

Nor is Jesus there because he is opposed to the purity laws that allow one to participate in the Temple Sacrifices. Over and over again, he restores people to ritual purity and even instructs them to go to see the priests at the Temple!

 

Nor does Jesus say anything about the Temple exploiting the population. Rather, he is more concerned about the people who go there: are they generous like the poor widow with two coins? Or, humble like the Tax Collector? Or, self-righteous like the Pharisee? Further, people making a long trip to the Temple to make a sacrifice cannot risk taking a ritually acceptable animal all the way to Jerusalem as it may somehow become injured along the way. And one could not use coins of the Roman Empire with the image of Caesar as God for a Temple offering, but rather had to exchange such coins for the acceptable Tyrian shekels. There is no evidence suggesting that the vendors and the currency exchangers, not “lenders,” were overcharging anyone. The services were necessary for Israel’s worship. He was not there to protest Temple exploitation.

 

Some Christians claim that the Temple banned Gentiles and foreigners. Yet, the Temple had an outer court where Gentiles and foreigners were welcome to worship. They were also welcome in the synagogues of Jesus’s time as they are today. They may not have all the same rights and responsibilities as do Jews, and this makes sense. I cannot receive Holy Communion in a Catholic Church, but I am welcome to worship there. Just like Canadians cannot vote for President in the U.S., and I cannot vote in Canada!

 

Furthermore, the scene as depicted in Hollywood movies and two millennia of sermons, seems very disruptive and dramatic. Consider, however, that the Temple was the length of 12 soccer fields end-to-end, consisting of the Holy of Holies at one end (which only the high priest entered once a year on Yom Kippur), the Court of the Priests, the Court of Israel, the Court of Women, and then the Court of the Gentiles at the other end, where the vendors were located and this incident took place. It was a noisy place. Along with the noise of the marketplace, the sounds of animals and ongoing sacrifices, and people from all over the ancient world celebrating the Passover in their own languages, who would notice a few tables being turned over, coins tumbling to the floor and animals being driven out?

 

Which leads one to think that Jesus’s actions were symbolic. Symbolic of what is the question? Especially since there is clearly risk involved in what he does do. As we hear, some people notice. And the Temple has police. How well I know, as the only time I was ever on the Temple mount I was surrounded by several Jordanian police with Uzis asking why I was up on the Ramparts of the Old City with two cameras hanging around my neck! Like I almost was, Jesus could have been arrested right then and there, which would have greatly shortened John’s gospel which tells of Jesus visiting Jerusalem two more times for Passover. So, what’s he doing?

 

First, Jesus is there to make an announcement: This is my Father’s House! To which some in the crowd demand that he “show them a sign” for causing this minor disturbance. He might have said, “I already have. Don’t you get it? This is the kind of thing prophets have always done!” But instead, he answers them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!” Pointing out the obvious, they remind him that Herod Antipas had been rebuilding the shabby old place for 46 years and was not finished yet. One might begin to sense his mounting frustration with them not getting the difference between Temple, with a capital “T,” and “temple” with a lower case “t.” I’m talking about my body. My body is the new Temple. This one is going to be destroyed by Rome, mark my words, and presence of God that has resided in this and the First Temple and all the way back to the Tabernacle now resides in me – flesh and blood just like you!.

 

Instead, at this point narrator John offers the aside, “But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” That is, all the business with the animals and the tables was a way of announcing who Jesus is, foreshadows his impending death and resurrection, and points to the day when none of this commerce going on in his Father’s House will be necessary because Rome will burn it to the ground. And we are those people who, like narrator John, know it has not been rebuilt ever since.

 

Further, the narrator wants the readers to know that we reflect on the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus from the very same perspective as the disciples: that it is from the point of view of after the resurrection that the disciples and we “remember” what he announces that day on the Temple mount, which the narrator John hopes will lead us, like the disciples, “to believe.” To believe the word that Jesus had spoken that day on the Temple Mount: this is my Father’s House, and the presence of God now resides in flesh and blood – like you.

 

The narrator wants the meaning of the Jesus story to come alive for the for everyone who hears these stories that have been chosen from among “many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written!” [John 21:25] These are the last words of the Gospel of John.

 

The question for all of us during this season of Lent is: How does our hearing of this story deepen our experience of the Word made flesh, the “new Temple” in which God’s presence dwells? Our answers to this question have the power to transform our lives and change the world around us. It did for the disciples. It did for Paul. It will for you. Amen. It is truth. It is so.