Suddenly Everyone is a Theologian!
I don’t know about you, but I am getting tired of people hurling hateful rhetoric at our U.S. presidents. It does not matter who it is: it can be Joseph Biden, it can be Donald Trump, and for goodness sake, since I was old enough to pay attention, around eight or nine years-old, I have always been puzzled at people who still hate Franklin Deleno Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln! What has happened to having some modicum of respect for the office of the President and whomever it is that currently holds that office? Okay, you hate “my” president, then I will hate “yours.” I cannot see how it helps us to be 50 “united states” to behave this way.
And surely such behavior flies in the face of the most fundamental dimensions of what some would call a “biblical world-view.” God’s vision of Shalom, oft translated “peace,” for all the earth, all creation, all creatures, the entire cosmos, is that all persons are children of a single family, members of a single tribe, heirs of a single hope, and bearers of a single destiny, namely the care and management of all of God’s creation, all of God’s people, all of God’s creatures, and all of this fragile Earth, our island home.
To act upon and live into our single destiny, from the outset the Bible makes the audacious assertion that we are all, male and female, created in the “image of God,” or in theological God-speak, imago Dei. Evidently there are those theologians who believe God speaks mostly in Latin! As to the content of God’s image, there is a long historical arc that asserts itself over and over again that our God is “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.” [i] For those of us who read the Bible with any kind of regularity, these qualities of God’s character are to be found in Exodus 34:6, Numbers 14:18, Psalm 86:5,15, Nehemiah 9:31, Joel 2:13, and Jonah 4:2. Which, among other things, insists that the God of the Old Testament is a God of Mercy, Love, Forgiveness, and Shalom.
It is important for us Christians to recognize that the young Jew named Jesus of Nazareth makes the very same claims about our destiny to embody the essence and image of God, most especially in what we call The Sermon on the Mount, which is his version of a Christian Magna Charta or Constitution. This teaching comprises all of chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Matthew, far more than just the opening salvo we call The Beatitudes. It includes such seminal ideals of Christian moral virtue such as to love our enemies and pray for them; in everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets; to be merciful as God is merciful; to be the light of the world. [ii]
In a truly dramatic moment in the life of Jesus is a sermon he preached in his hometown synagogue, reported to us only by the evangelist Luke (4:16-30), which curiously is assigned for us to be read this week and next. A fault of mine is that I abhor breaking such an important story into more than one reading, and we won’t hear it next week which will be the Feast of the Presentation. Yet, it seems to be pertinent to some of the events of the past week. Jesus is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and seems to choose to read from chapter 61: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." He then hands the scroll back, sits down, and as the eyes of the whole congregation were looking at him, he preached arguably the shortest sermon in the history of Christian homiletics: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
Both Isaiah and Jesus would be understood to be referencing The Jubilee Year as prescribed in Leviticus 25:9-10: a time when all debts are to be canceled, debt-slaves set free, and a full economic and community reset is to take place. It is a story that demonstrates what being merciful looks like: to care for those who are most at risk. At first the hometown crowd cheers the young man. Then after giving illustrations of Elijah and Elisha offering mercy to foreigners and perceived enemies, suddenly the crowd turns ugly and tries to run him out of town and toss him over a cliff. Somehow, he calmly walks away “through the midst of them.”
Can we see just how odd it is that we get this story this week? After all holy-hell broke loose the day after Bishop Marriann Budde made a plea for mercy for people who are legitimately scared and frightened in the current national climate? It was a prayer service for National Unity, something the president has stated as a priority more than once. A key element of prayer is making pleas. Yet, her plea has been characterized as everything from biblical and true to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to a tirade, a scolding, and worse. Against the back drop of two of Jesus’s best-known sermons, and Paul urging the church in Corinth to embrace all the different parts of the Body of Christ, as all are necessary, and all depend on one another, it has been baffling for many that so many people have reacted much like that crowd in Nazareth when Jesus made a plea for mercy for people both within and beyond the immediate community. It’s almost funny that the Bishop’s plea has resulted in everyone all of a sudden becoming theologians!
A few thoughts. First, watching the video over and over, Bishop Budde embraced the humility of which she had spoken as foundational to unity, and spoke fearlessly, gently, and quietly. She did not try to make her plea with bombast or speaking louder. She sounded humble and with a sense of the very mercy of which she spoke. Second, she lifted up those who feel at risk, those who feel marginalized, not attacking either the president nor specific policies. There was no taking individuals to task. It did not feel or sound like an anti-administration plea, but rather a pro-those-who-are-afraid-right now plea. Third, as I hear it, she invited all of us, the whole nation, to something higher than politics or winning and losing. She called us to a value that ought to unite us: mercy. She wasn’t arguing for a particular policy, but for a particular posture. The profoundly Christian posture of merciful compassion, especially for the marginalized and those at risk.
Finally, all speech that seeks to bring the community to anything like unity is political. All of Jesus’s speech with the Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, Herod and Pilate, even his speech in his hometown synagogue that day in Nazareth, was political. It took place in a culture that does not recognize a divide between religious speech and political speech. Political, from the Greek polis, means “citadel, city, or community.” All community speech, even in the community of love, is political by definition. It is such speech that is meant to protect us like a citadel on a hill.
It feels risky to attempt to frame this all within the context of the portions of God’s Word which some thirty years ago were placed in the lectionary just, as it turns out, for this week of all things. It is impossible not to see how relevant the scripture we are meant to hear and interpret turns out to be. And I fully understand and honor that others may hear all of this in a different way. I would love to hear about that as well. For if anything is needed in the present moment, it is to be merciful in how we speak and live with one another. We need not agree, but to respect one another no matter what is at the very heart of becoming merciful as our Lord himself is merciful.
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