Covenant Dreams (1 Samuel 16:1 - 13)

      The Hebrew people wanted a king.  They were jealous of their neighbors, among them the much-maligned Philistines, and they said “Give us a King to govern us.” God, on the other hand, wasn’t too thrilled with the idea, and came to Samuel—the last of the judges, who was having rejection issues—and said: “Come on now, they’re not rejecting you they’re rejecting me, from being king over you.  So this is what you do: hear their words, give ‘em a king, but warn them first, tell them what’ll happen to them when they have a king.” And so he did, he told them what the king would do to them, he says “a king’ll take your sons and put ‘em in the army, he’ll take your daughters and make ‘em his servants, he’ll take the best of your land for his vineyards and orchards and give ‘em to his toadies and hangers-on . . . he’ll take your livestock and a tenth of your grain, and you will be his slaves, but don’t’ come running to me, don’t come running to the Lord your God, because I warned you.” But the people didn’t listen to him, they were jealous of those Philistines, and they said “We’re determined to have a king over us, so that we may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

      So Samuel went out and found ‘em a king, and it was Saul, and he was a good-looking guy, you know?  There wasn’t a man among the people of Israel better looking than him, he made the Nomad Times’ cover-story for most handsome man of the year, all the ladies of the Meggido Bridge and Frotiledge Club wanted him for their daughters, only problem was he was a crummy king, he didn’t do what God told him to do, he did things that God told him not to do, and so God decided he had to go . . .

      And now, in our passage, Samuel’s mourning Saul, worrying about him, maybe feeling a little guilty, to boot—after all, he was the one who found him in the first place.  So God says “How long are you gonna mope around?  How long are you gonna grieve?  Snap out of it, man, it’s over, I’ve rejected him already.  I’ll send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite—that’s Jesse from Bethlehem, you understand—because I’ve gotten myself another king from his sons.”

      So Samuel saddles up ol’ Paint, heads out into the boonies—Bethlehem was so out of the way—but he’s worried about Saul, and what he’d do if he found out he was consecrating another king, while he was still alive, even, and so God sighs and says “all right, all right” and designs a little subterfuge, a little white lie, he says “take this heifer, and say I’ve come to sacrifice to the Lord,” and so he does, and he gets to Bethlehem and they see Samuel—the last of the judges, he was an imposing man, he had fine clothes, a Rolex on each wrist and a 256 Gigabyte iPhone—and they know who he is and so they send out the elders to meet him, all shaky-of-hand, saying “do you come in peace?”  Because judges had been known not to, you understand, and he tells them about the supposed sacrifice, he tells them to sanctify themselves and come to the sacrifice; then he himself sanctifies Jesse and his sons and invites them along as well.

      And this was a big deal in those parts, because it wasn’t everyday that a muckety-muck like Samuel came down from the city, and everyone who was anyone went to the sacrifice, it was covered by Bethlehem News at 6—covering the Galilee basin for over 20 years!—and when all Jesse’s sons were there, he took one look at Eliab and said—“Surely this is the guy, surely he’s the one, I mean just look at him—strapping and handsome and, at the same time, sensitive . . . and God said “hold the phone! Not so fast . . . don’t look at his appearance or the height of his stature, cause we’ve been down that road before”  And the almighty of course was thinking of the last king, who was like a bad apple, pretty on the outside, but rotten to the core. “Don’t look at his handsome mug, or the height of his head . . . I’ve rejected him, already . . . for the Lord does not see as mortals see . . . mortals look on the outward appearance.”

      And all I can say is Amen to that, and there’s no time more obvious than the one we just got through, an election season . . . humans tend to look on outward appearance, we dote over candidates’ hair-dos and the color of their skin, we worry about whether or not they're too old or too young or whether their haircut cost too much or whether they use fake spray-on tan or not.  Is it any wonder that candidates single-handedly support the television networks during the election season?  Television is the ultimate surface-lover, the ultimate pretty-people machine . . . and each of the candidates spent millions of dollars on television ads alone.  There’s a famous observation that Abraham Lincoln, with his squeaky voice and gangly demeanor couldn’t get elected dog-catcher in this day of 30-second sound bites, film at eleven . . . we mortals do indeed look on outward appearances . . .

      But it doesn’t stop at television, of course—it filters down into everyday lives.  Many folks immediately judge people by what they look like, if their clothes are a little worn, or they wear a gimme cap or not . . . they immediately brand them, size them up, categorize them as to class, then dismiss them if they aren’t up to theirs, or suck up if they’re higher.   . . . one time I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, the gas pump gone on a little red car that I used to drive, and there wasn’t a person within miles, I was up on this wild tableland in the Cascade mountains, and this guy pulled up in a ratty ol’ pickup, looking like he hadn’t visited a dentist in 30 years, had a stringy, greasy mullet hair, and he asked if he could help, and I said “Naw, I got it . . .” but I didn’t have it, of course, I just didn’t like his looks, and 20 minutes later, he came back by and I swallowed my whatever it was and he was the one who got me down off that mountain . . .

      And churches can often—not all the time, but often—be the worst places, they stratify according to class, with middle-to upper class congregations and “lower-middle class” ones, blue-collar congregations as opposed to white-collar professional, and I tell you what:  it doesn’t take long in a lot of Presbyterian congregations—not all of them, but many—before visitors from the “lower” socioeconomic classes—and why do we call people with less money than we have “lower” class?—it doesn’t take long in a lot of Presbyterian congregations before visitors from “lower” socioeconomic classes to see that they’re not welcome.  The members don’t have to even say anything . . .  we humans look on outward appearances, how others are dressed, how much money they have, the color of their skin . . .

      But not God  . . . as God tells Samuel, there at the Bethlehem sacrifice, “the Lord looks on the heart.”  And so big, strapping Eliab is rejected, tall as he was, and Jesse calls Abinadab, and parades him in front of Samuel, and Samuel says “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.”  Then Jesse makes Shammah pass by, and once again he’s told “Neither has the Lord chosen this one,” and one by one, all of Jesse’s sons—the seven of them that were there—are passed in front of Samuel like Miss Bethlehem U.S.A. and they’re all rejected, and Samuel's a little worried by now, and wondering why indeed the Lord of Hosts had sent him to this little backwater town, so he asks “are all your sons here?”  And Jesse says “Well, there’s the youngest, but he’s minding the sheep,” and Samuel says “Send and bring him, cause we‘re not going anywhere until I see him.”

      And Jesse sends and brings him, and he’s ruddy and has beautiful eyes, even though he’s a boy, just a kid, really, the runt of the litter, but God says “Rise and anoint him for he’s the one.”  And of course he’s the one, he’s the eighth son, one greater than seven, the perfect number, he’s beyond perfect!  And I think there’s a hint of a new creation, a hint of the eighth day in this . . . and so they anoint David king in the presence of his brothers and family and the elders of Bethlehem, and the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him at his anointing and it stayed on him all the rest of his life . . .

      And at this season of Lent we read this passage because David was the original anointed one, from Bethlehem, no less, and this is one of the foundational passages for our faith.  And of course, the Hebrew word for anointing is Meshach, from whence comes the word Messiah, and David is the original Messiah, the original anointed one, but not the last . . . Jesus is our Messiah, our anointed one, a new creation as Paul would say, but even he’s not the last.  Because somewhere this morning, another is being anointed, another is having oil signed on her forehead.  And I'm not talking apocalyptically, here, I'm not some Presbyterian Hal Lindsey or John Hagee, saying the end will come on June 3^rd at 9:47 a.m. so you’d better get your act together and send me money, I'm talking about some everyday girl or boy or man or woman, in that ancient act we call baptism.  Because when Jesus was baptized, the spirit of God came upon him, just as it did upon David, and by that he was anointed as God’s beloved.  And for us, our anointing as children of God, heirs according to the promise, is bound up in our baptism, and because we generally can't see the spirit come upon us, we are visibly anointed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads in oil.  In this way, we too become messiahs, perhaps with little “m’s,” but messiahs nevertheless?  We are visibly designated children of God, in whom God is well pleased.

      But our passage looks forward not only to Christ, the Messiah, our anointed king, not only to our own anointings at our own baptisms, but toward a new covenant as well.  Years later, years after that Bethlehem scene, God entered into a covenant with David . . . listen to what God said to David, through the prophet Nathan: “I will not take my steadfast love from [your son] . . . your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me.”  This unconditional covenant with David—everlasting, and not dependent on anything he or his offspring would do—foreshadows our own new covenant with God, sealed in our participation in Christ.  Like the covenant with David, this new covenant is an unconditional one, depending not on anything we have done, or will do, but only on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we contemplate at this season.  Amen.

Spring Space (John 4:5 - 42)

      Springs create their own space in the Middle East, they make their own atmosphere, lush with humidity and haze. Water is the stuff of life, miraculous in the stone-dry Palestine heat—it speaks of life in its burble, in its still deepness and cool darkness alive with teeming, bulging life . . . springs are magnets in rocky places, drawing the wanderers, the travelers, the herders-of-sheep, they all know where the springs are, they’re mapped with radar-like precision in their brain-pans because their lives depend on them, depend on the bubble of cool air made by the spring . . . and within that bubble, life stews and brews and breeds, its earth funk assaults nostrils more used to sterile desert smells . . . life breeds frantically, automatically before the water goes, before it boils off into bone-dry air . . . reproduction is always in the air at a spring.

      Wells are springs made tame, springs cosseted and corseted and constrained, bricked up and cobbled together, straight-round sides and ropes and buckets, but they’re still places of power, places where life is just a little wild . . . drovers bring their sheep to them and lift the water, sloshing up from the dark, slapping and lapping at bucket sides . . . and women come to wells, clay jars on shoulders, or strapped to cross-beamed arms. They come for household water, or for the family sheep, out from their sheltered tents, and things . . . develop, things in keeping with the fever-pitched goings-on in the envelope, in the spring-space that surrounds even tame old, bricked-up wells . . . women come and things . . . happen. Like when Jacob stopped at the well near Haran, and his relatives were there, and so was Rachel, come to water the sheep . . . and he was smitten in that fervent place. Or when Moses was running from the Pharaoh and collapsed exhausted by a well, and seven – count ‘em seven! – Midianite daughters came along, and Moses married one of them, and it changed his life. Spring space is magical space, where love soaks the charged atmosphere and husbands appear and wives are obtained.

      And so like his ancestors, Jesus sits beside a well in the full-bore Palestine sun, and a woman comes, and he asks about her husband – husbands and wives meet in spring space – and he says “Go, call your husband, and come back . . .” and at this point she doesn't know who he is, exactly. . . just some guy asking her for a drink . . . although she was amazed that a Jew would even talk to her, much less ask her for help . . . and she said as much, she said “How is it that a Jew asks a drink of me, a Samaritan?” And his answer was elliptical and vague, he didn't answer the question, but presented a puzzle instead – “If you knew the gift of God, and who asked you for drink, you would've asked him, and he would've given you living water.” And this living water thing really stumped her. How could he get this living water? He didn't have a bucket or a jar, how was he going to get it out? And just where do you get this living water, anyway?

      But although he sounded like a lunatic, babbling about living water and all, something about how he said it, maybe it was his quiet authority, gave her pause, and she asked, perhaps not altogether innocently “Are you greater than Jacob our ancestor, who gave us this well?” And again, he didn't answer her directly . . . “If you drink of this water,” and he gestured down at the well “you’ll get thirsty again, but if you drink of the water I will give, you’ll never be thirsty again . . .” and in the charged atmosphere at the well, in that spring-space where courtship was always in the air, she marveled at what he spoke, for it was unlike anything she’d ever heard before and what he said next blew her mind:  “The water I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life!” And immediately an image came upon her of a leaping, dancing spring of life, continuously pouring from her innermost being. Surrounded by spring space wherever she went, a nurturing spirit-system, humid with life, welling up from within. She wanted it!  “Sir – give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or come here to draw water again.” 

      And that’s when he asks her about her husband, and she’s taken aback – what's he trying to do? Here he is talking to her, and she's a Samaritan, and a woman to boot, and so she assumed he was willing to deal with her, that he’d give this living water to her, but abruptly he asks her to get her husband . . . “Go, call your husband, and come back.” Does he want to give it to a husband?  It was a man’s world after all . . . or maybe he was trying to see if she was married . . . after all, people went to wells for more than just water, and was that what this was all about?  Was it some elliptical courtship dance?  Was he asking if she had a husband?  But she answers truthfully – “I have no husband.” And immediately he says “You’re right . . . what you have said is true – you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband!” And it dawns on her that this man has the gift, the sight, the way of seeing what others cannot see.  “I see that you’re are a prophet,” she says, and she asks a question you might ask of a prophet, about where it is right to worship God, just to test him a little . . .

      And Jesus answers in the mode of a prophet – he talks about the Kingdom of God, which is coming and at the same time already here, and how at that time – which is already here – people will worship in spirit and truth, and they won’t worship at any given place . . . “God is spirit,” he says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

      But though he answers in prophetic style, what he says is like no prophet she knows of, and it begins to dawn on her just who she is dealing with, so she says “I know that when the Messiah comes, he will proclaim things to us”  – just as Jesus was doing – and in his next breath he confirms it by saying “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” And just then, the disciples return, and she drops her water jar and goes back to the city. And as she goes, she says to all the people she meets – “Come and see a man who’s told me everything I’ve ever done! Could this be the Messiah?” When it clicks in, when she figures it out, when she finally comes up with his identity, she can’t help her self. She instantly becomes an evangelist, and many Samaritans came to believe because of her. They even invited Jesus to stay with them so they could see for themselves, and this was unheard of, for a Jew to stay with Samaritans.

      Look at how it goes for the Samaritan woman – she comes to the well, without the protection of a husband, handed down from man to man, through five men who owned her like a sheep, to whom she was but a possession . . . and now she’s in a less than perfect relationship, and therefore less than optimal for her well-being, and she might have come to the well with marriage on her mind, or at least in the back of it . . . and there’s this man sitting there who asks her for a drink even though he’s a Jew and she’s a Samaritan, even though she’s a woman alone, and that alerted her to his different-ness.

      But her awareness of just how different he really was grows in stages, as their conversation progresses. At first, she suspects he’s a patriarch, maybe like Jacob – who, after all, met his wife at a well just like this one . . . and when he does a sign, divining just what her position was, right down to the number of husbands, she knows him as a prophet, one chosen to speak God’s word . . . but it’s not until he calls God “Father,” not until he speaks of Spirit and truth, and says the word “salvation” straight out, that she comes to the full realization of the truth that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the one who has been promised.

      And note her reaction to this revelation, to this realization there in the spring space around Jacob's well . . . her response to the spirit and to the truth and to the living, rushing water is to enable others to drink.  The woman at the well goes from outsider to evangelist in the blink of an eye, or perhaps in the babble of a brook . . . when her faith is fully present within, when the living water is raging and sighing and welling-up inside, she runs immediately to spread the Word, to proclaim the Gospel to her people. She can't seem to help herself, she just has to do it. “Come see the man who knows everything about me . . .” And so her faith is reproduced, along with the algae and microbes and water-striders, there in the spring-space, where the air is full of water, teeming with life and hope and love . . .

      Our faith comes in stages too, doesn’t it? Our faith journeys are not unlike that of the woman at the well, only they happen over a longer time than just a single afternoon . . . often, ours aren’t as smooth as hers . . . sometimes, they seem to go in fits and starts, two-steps forward and one back –  or even one step forward and fifty back –  and often our urge to evangelize as well.  I know my own faith journey’s often like that . . . I just seem to get to some plane of spirituality or another, just seem to arrive somewhere, when I fall off the cliff and onto a ledge below. But God always seems to be there to catch me, God never lets me fall . . . And maybe one of the reasons we go through this stop-and-start progress, this stutter-step of faith is we try to walk the journey on our own, we try to put one step in front of another ourselves, instead of leaving it up to God in the first place.

      The woman at the well was totally passive in her movement toward belief . . . things just seemed to dawn on her, elicited by what Jesus said, not her . . . she asked questions, but they didn’t seem to be the right ones, and Jesus didn’t really answer them, anyway. It was what he said that grew her faith, not anything she did. There at the well, the water was given to her by the Word, both spoken and incarnate, in spite of anything she did. There in the spring space, where anything can happen, something did: belief dawned, a woman was converted, and a whole town was evangelized . . .

      It’s been almost five years since Pam and I came to Greenhills.  We’ve celebrated four Advents, four Epiphanies, five Pentecosts . . . and now we’re into our fifth Lent, and as we’ve gotten to know Cincinnati, as we’ve visited other churches and gone to Presbytery meetings, we’ve run into scores of folks who have been touched by this church.. . . over the years, many people have been nourished within these walls, within the bubble of rarified atmosphere here at Cromwell  and Winton . . .

      Because sisters and brothers, you don’t have to go to the desert for living water, you don’t have to go out into the woods or by a stream or up into the mountains . . . you don’t have to retreat, because here, in this place, we are a wellspring . . . we are a spring space, a space where faith can grow and progress. Sure, sometimes our individual and collective faiths do a little shuffle, a little two step forward and then back, but here in this spring space God has always steadied us, always caught us when we fall.  And I am convinced that God will continue . . . let us make Greenhills a space where flowers of Christ can bloom in the secular desert in which we are embedded, a place where the atmosphere is saturated with the love of God.  From generation to generation, for almost 80 years, folks have come here to drink of the living water, and God has made them full.  By the grace of God, we will continue to be a bubble of refreshing air, a spring space for 80 years more.  Amen.

Born From Above (John 3:1 - 17)

      How many times have you seen it?  On a bumper sticker or a billboard.  On a sign in the end zone of the big game.  Or—and this is my favorite—on those little, cumulative signs out on Route 66:  For God so loved—telephone pole, telephone pole—the world—telephone pole, jackrabbit, telephone pole—that he gave—wait for it, wait for it—his only begotten son . . . and it's Jesus and Burma Shave and See Rock City, together again, but not for the last time. We’re talking John 3:16, of course, and it’s beloved of Christians everywhere, especially of the more evangelical flavor, and it’s so iconic that all they have to do is put up the reference—John 3:16, John 3:16—and you get the point.  “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.”  But as in anything that gets taken out of context, anything that gets proof-texted, as the saying goes, there’s danger when it’s read alone.

      The verse is actually at the tail end of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, the Pharisee John describes as a “leader of the Jews,” and we should put the episode into context within the Gospel of John . . .  he’d just come up to Jerusalem from Cana where he’d just done the first of his signs—turning the water into wine at some relative’s wedding—and John says that he revealed his glory in this miracle, and his disciples believed in him . . . and note the order: he does his miracles and then the disciples believe, and then his entourage heads to Jerusalem and the temple, and in the temple he drives out all the money changers . . . and when the temple authorities ask him for a sign, he says destroy this temple and in three days I will build it back up, and they think he means the temple on the mount, but he means the temple of his body . . .
      And so we’re introduced to one of John’s favorite themes, the inadequacy of seeing as a basis for belief . . . many believed, John says, right before our passage, because they saw the signs Jesus was doing, but Jesus would not entrust himself to them, because he knew what kind of belief signs produce, he knew that belief from signs was not belief at all . . . and the ultimate sign he would give would be his body, murdered on the cross and then raised from it, and here comes Nicodemus, doubtless one of the temple leaders who’d asked him for a sign, and he comes to Jesus by night, and . . . just what does that mean?  Is he on the swing shift down at the temple?  Does he come to Jesus after he gets off work, on his way home to the wife and kids?  Is he sneaking down from the temple mount?  Throwing pebbles at Jesus’ bedroom window, saying “psssst . . .  Jesus!  I got some questions for you”

      It’d be like Bill Clinton sliding out of bed next to Hillary—she’s got her sleeping mask on, muttering about electoral votes and Michigan—it’d be like Bill slipping on over to the White House, knocking on the door, asking the Donald about economic policy vis a vis the Middle East, or something . . . it just wouldn’t have been done, Jesus had already challenged the religious establishment to which Nicodemus belonged, he’d turned over those tables and  kicked up a fuss . . . and Nicodemus says “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God”—what an admission that was, huh?—“we know you’ve come from God, for no one can do these signs you do apart from the presence of God.”

      And you can almost here the tires screech, Jesus stops him right there, because Nicodemus has fallen into that same old trap of seeing and believing—or perhaps I should say believing only what he’s seen?—and Jesus’—and John’s—big thing, right in this section of John’s gospel, is that that’s just not right.  Didn’t John just get finished telling us that many believed because they saw the signs, but Jesus didn’t trust ‘em?  And so he interrupts Nicodemus with one of his patented non-sequiters, only it’s really a sequiter, after all, because—again as John’s just got finished telling us—he knows what’s in Nicodemus’ heart.  He says “Very truly I tell you”—and if he says that you know he’s serious—“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

      And here’s where we have to come to a screeching halt and do a little ‘splainin’, ‘cause if you go over to the New International Version, it says “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again,” which in meaning is very different from “being born from above,” and in English, it looks very different as well.  But—and here’s the thing—in Greek it’s the same word, the Greek adverb anothen can mean either “from above” or “again,” and in fact, this is the crux of the passage—Jesus means “no one can see the kingdom without being born from above,” but Nicodemus thinks he means “no one can see the kingdom without being born again.”  And long-suffering translators are always faced with this problem in this verse: do you translate it as Jesus means it—from above—so we can understand Nicodemus’ mistake, but not understand why he made it?  Or do you translate it like Nicodemus does, as again, so you see why he made the mistake, but not why it’s a mistake in the first place?

      Whatever, Jesus corrects him, or he makes it more clear: no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.  And he’s talking about the Sprit of God, which descended upon him in the water, at his baptism, and one thing’s for sure: Jesus is not saying you must be born again, as in a second time, as our evangelical brothers and sisters have it. He’s saying you must be born of God, and that doesn’t put a time-stamp on it . . . it may be after your physical birth, it may be at your physical birth or it may be—interestingly enough—like Jesus, who was, remember, from the beginning the Word.

      And there’s another thing I want to say about this terribly misunderstood passage: the whole metaphor of birth—whether it’s from above or again, it doesn’t matter—works against the notion that it’s in any way up to us.  I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have any say in the matter of whether or not I was born. . . I didn’t have to initiate my own birth, I didn’t have to accept it in any way, shape or form.  It was entirely up to my mother and father, and that’s how it is with being born from above, of the spirit—you have no say in it one way or another, it’s all up to our heavenly parent, who is father and mother all rolled into one.

      And one other thing—he’s talking about belief here, don’t forget, this whole story is a meditation on the nature of belief . . . Jesus tells this Pharisee, this poster-boy of logical, by-the numbers religion, that true belief, which Jesus calls “seeing the kingdom of God” comes from above.  Not from studying the law, not from some conscious choosing to follow some set of propositions, like, “Man! That makes sense!  I think I’ll follow this.”  You can’t do that, Jesus is saying, you can’t see signs and see the kingdom.  It all comes from above, it all comes from God.

      But what about this phrase “seeing the Kingdom of God?”  In Greek, the word “seeing” implies acceptance, embracing, faith, and so “seeing the kingdom of God” isn’t a metaphor for salvation, but for belief in the kingdom of God, which at the time was standing right in front of them in the person of one Jesus of Nazareth.  The Kingdom of God is before you, he says elsewhere, and he means himself.  Same thing about “entering the kingdom of God”—I am in you and you are in me, says Jesus, to enter into the kingdom of God is to have a deep relationship with Christ, and no one can do that without being born of water and spirit.

      So, Jesus tells Nicodemus don’t be astonished that I’ve said to you “You must be born from above, because the wind—and here’s another play on words, “wind” in Greek is the same word as spirit—the spirit blows where it chooses, it lands where it chooses, it comes upon whom it chooses, it fills whom it chooses . . . but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  You must be born of the spirit, but that spirit goes where it will, to whomever it will, we have no control, no say in the matter, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

      And now we pause for a word from our sponsor, Lent—do you begin to see a theme developing, here at this Lenten season?  Do you begin to see a pattern?  Last week, the first week, was all about Jesus’ temptation to do it himself, to feed himself, to save himself, to take the reins of the kingdom himself.  To, in short, rely on himself as if he were God . . . and here we have a Pharisee, that very model of a modern Torah scholar—the Torah being emblematic of do-it-yourself, if-I-just-fulfill-these-613-mitzvahs-I’ll-be-all-right religion—here we have a Torah scholar, who thinks that he can choose to believe based on some sign or another—from the flesh, from below—and Jesus says no, you can’t do it yourself, you can’t decide to believe, you can’t accept it, it’s not up to you.

      And that’s a signature malaise of the modern era, isn’t it?  We like to have control.  We like to think that we have a choice in the matter.  God loves us so much that God gave us the choice about whether to believe or not, whether to see the kingdom of God.  But no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above, without being born of water and spirit.  No one can believe without it coming from above.  In everything else we can do it ourselves, but not this—you cannot believe without it coming from God.

      Nicodemus saw a sign and believed, but Jesus knew how much that was worth . . . the next guy to come along, who does a better sign, he’d just switch his belief on over to that . . . we’re in an age of miracles and wonderment, we can do anything with Industrial Light and Magic and a couple million bucks . . . but it’s all just snake oil, it’s all just flash and bang and sizzle.  The real message, the real world, the real kingdom of God, is before us, right in front of our faces, it’s in Jesus Christ, and he’s come from above.

      The spirit goes where it chooses, the wind blows where it will, it lands or doesn’t land, as it chooses, and we do not know where it comes from or where it goes, and at this time of reflection, at this season of meditation, it is well to meditate on that.  For as much as we hate the thought, as much as I hate the thought, it’s not up to us, we’re not in control, I’m sorry, we’re not.  And I thank God for that, ‘cause if it were up to me, I’d just mess it up . . . I’d just come in with some way to fix it or another, some program or process or procedure or another, but it isn’t gonna be me that does the deed, it isn’t gonna be me—or even you, or even the church leaders—that does the job.  It’ll be the Spirit, who blows through the trees outside, who sighs through the eaves of this very church, even now.  It’s gonna be God who revitalizes us, who renews us . . . we will see the kingdom of God, and it will come upon us from above.  Amen.

Ah, Wilderness! (Matthew 4:1 - 11)

      One of my mentors in ministry said that her class was maybe the last one taught at Columbia Seminary that there is only one interpretation of any given scripture passage . . . and if you think about it, we knew it all along . . . each generation interprets scripture in fresh and surprising new ways, every racial/ethnic group in every socio-economic location in every physical location colors the gospel in its unique palette . . . we can no more apply every word of Paul's – written almost 2000 years ago to churches in Corinth and Philippi – we can no more apply those words uncritically and whole-clothed to our own situation than we can suppose they have no application at all.  And there may be no deeper interpretive well, no passage that illustrates my teacher's comment more than the tale of Jesus in the wilderness.  It gets preached every year on the first Sunday in Lent, and it never gets old, it never fails to surprise me with its capacity for revelation which, of course, is the whole point of scripture, the revelation of the mind and will and heart of the divine.

      We preach it at Lent because during this season's forty days we are to mimic Christ's wilderness experience, we are to enter a wilderness of our own, embedded in the framework of our everyday lives . . . and so a valid question might be—what did Jesus do in the wilderness?  Matthew says he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.  I know I would be . . . forty days without food, forty days without a bath, forty days with no human contact?  Jesus was bedraggled and wan, and here comes the devil in the robes of an old desert wanderer . . . "here, eat a little, have a little chicken soup . . . or maybe command these stones here to become loaves of bread."  Fragrant, hot, steaming bread . . . it makes my mouth water just standing here, and I'm nothing if not well fed.  And what the devil is saying to Jesus is "You know you want it, you know you're hungry, you know you've got the power . . . just do it."  And that wily old devil's tempting him with instant gratification, with taking matters in his own hands, and not waiting for God to take care of him in God's own time.

      And Jesus' says: "One doesn't live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God's mouth."  And I used to think "Yeah, right . . . the Word's a good thing and all, nice to have on the bedside table, but you gotta have a little something to eat as well, gotta get those old building blocks of life into you somehow . . .” but of course he's not talking quite so literally here . . . he’s talking about the word that blew across the waters at creation, God’s creative force, that makes our lives anew and afresh every day.  Everything we have, and I mean everything, our homes, our livelihoods, our lives, comes from every Word that breathes from the mouth of the Divine, who will take care of Jesus in God's own time . . . or not.  Whatever, it's not up to Jesus to do it for himself, he will be sustained by the Word of God.

      And this story ought to sound familiar . . . it’s the same trap the serpent set in the Garden, isn't it?  Grab that fruit, take matters into your own hands . . . use your own powers, your own intellect, your own competent, problem-solving self to transform that church—oops, I mean turn those stones into bread . . .  

      And maybe that's the point, that it’s the primal temptation, the mother of all temptations, to put yourself in the place of God, to do it all yourself, to not rely on the providential grace of the Almighty.  It’s idolatry with a capital “I”, as in me, myself and, as in self-worship, putting ourselves in the place of God . . . But wait a minute . . . aren't we promised, ultimately, just that?  Aren't we promised that we will rest in perfect union with God, that we will at last – as Paul put it – know fully, even as we have been fully known?  If we want complete knowledge, if we want complete power, don't we just have to wait?

      Scholar Gil Bailie picks up on this when he says "The Fall is simply our impatience with God's gift. Adam and Eve . . . want God-likeness right now. They don't want to receive it over time. They don't want to grow in faith and love. They want it right now, and so they grasp at it." When Satan tempts Jesus to provide his own food, the temptation is to satisfy his hunger now, to not wait for God's own good time . . . and you might be thinking "Right.  Impatience . . . isn't that kind of trivial?  Isn't it kind of banal? How does something as trivial as impatience stack up with pride, power and avarice as major temptation topics?”

      Well, look at all the harm it does . . . you're sitting at a stop-light, and you're so impatient that the minute it turns green, you're out of there . . . so you fail to see the guy who runs the light and broadsides you, who in turn was too impatient to get where he was going to stop at the light.  I suspect impatience is the major cause of traffic accidents, which cost more lives in the U.S. in a year than did the entire Viet Nam war.  And what about the child – or co-worker – that you brush aside in your hurry, what damage does it do to their sense of worth, their sense of self to have some screaming speed freak take over that which they were getting done, albeit at a snail's pace?  And what about the lives and families sacrificed everyday to the need to scramble up as many of the rungs of the old corporate ladder as you can before you retire or, worse, kick the bucket

      For Christians, impatience is a refusal to let God do it in God's own good time, to place the matter in God's loving hands . . . and if that's true, then patience, for a Christian, is akin to . . . faith.  Faith that God's time is good enough, faith that God will get it done, faith that it is definitely not all up to you.  And when the Devil – who must have been grinding his fangs by that time – takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple, in full view of all of Jerusalem, and more importantly of all the Temple authorities below, he says "If you are the Son God, throw yourself off, my pretty, for it's written God will command his angels and on their hands they'll catch you" and this must have been really tempting, because as soon as that happened, the jig would be up, and all the thronging hordes and temple-authority types below and indeed all the world would know who he is, and the world – not to mention Jesus himself – would be saved a lot of pain and heartache and time . . . it would sure speed up the coming of God's holy reign, all right . . . but Jesus refuses again, he refuses once again to take into his own hands that which is in God's, he refuses to force an issue that will come to fulfillment in God's own time, he continues to have faith, he continues to be patient.

      Why are we impatient?  Why do we not rest in the arms of God, content to leave it all up to God, content to let go and let God, as the saying goes?  There's a silly country music song-title that might give us some insight . . . "The Girls Get Prettier at Closing Time."  Knowing there's a deadline, knowing there is a time limit, the song-writer implies that he'll "lower his standards," maybe go home with a not-so-desirable woman, rather than not go home with one at all.  Now, I hope you'll forgive me for being so sexist, but you can see the point: when you know you've got limited time, a certain desperation can set in . . . and of course, what's more of a final deadline than death itself?  Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.  Get what you can, what you need before it's too late, for soon – all too soon – you're going to kick the bucket.

      Gil Bailie calls this "nihilism passing itself off as cheerfulness," and says that the world we live in is saturated with this sort of thinking . . . in the shopping mall, we're urged to spend, spend, spend, like there's no tomorrow, because you can't take it with you, because tomorrow you die . . . at the health club, we're caught between putting off the inevitable – so we can spend, spend, spend some more – and our fear of leaving behind a pretty corpse.  How to get ahead in business, the Art of War by Sun Tzu, business as mortal combat . . . our whole culture is founded on it, soaked in it, competition raised to the level of a God . . . hurry, hurry, hurry, acquire, acquire, acquire, stab in the back, 'ack, 'ack, for tomorrow we die.

      And finally, ol' Scratch takes Jesus up on the highest mountain, even higher than the pinnacle of the Temple, and he shows him all the kingdoms below . . . he looked South and saw herdsmen on the plains of Africa, great ships, plying the Indian Ocean . . . over to the East, Asian warlords, sweeping across the steppes . . . and in the West, the towers of New York City and the crashing California coast . . . all the kingdoms of the world, past, present and future, spread out before his eyes, and the devil says "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me" And once again we know that all the kingdoms of the world will be Christ's, sooner or later, in the fullness of time, in God's good kairos time . . . he doesn't have to make a Faustian bargain with the Devil, he doesn't have to take it upon himself to bring God's loving kingdom into being just at that moment, he has all the time in the world . . . and so he resists the final temptation, he turns the devil down, and his wilderness days are over.

      We asked this question at the outset: what did Jesus do in the wilderness?  The answer is that he fasted and prayed, and that's what a lot of traditions encourage, first, that we "give up something for Lent," if not a day or so of food, then maybe alcohol or tobacco or meat or caffeine . . . and we use the six weeks to deepen our spiritual journeys, to contemplate our place in God's salvation history . . . but Jesus did another thing in the wilderness, didn't he?  In addition to fasting and praying he demonstrated patience, as well . . . he demonstrated trust in God – whom he called Abba – he demonstrated leaving everything in God's capable hands.

      We often treat patience as a quality, like either we have it or we don't . . . we say "I don't have a lot of patience, pastor, I just want to get on with it" or "I ran out of patience with you a long time ago" as if there's a finite amount, and if it's gone it's gone . . . but I don't think that's how it works, and in our passage we see Jesus practicing patience, just like he practiced prayer and fasting . . . I think we can practice it as well, we can practice leaving it up to God, we can practice putting it all into God's hands, we can practice letting go and letting God.  And you know what?  Practice makes perfect . . . the more you do something the easier it becomes.

      And what better time to practice it than right now, as we are seeking a new path, seeking to let God re-invent us, seeking God’s preferred future?  It’s our inclination to want to do something right now, to start a new program, or tweak the worship service, start leafleting the neighborhoods, do something, but you know what?  That’s ol’ scratch talking, that’s our propensity to idolatry, to set ourselves up as God, as the one who provides all things. And so, during this blessed season of Lent, sit back, chill, and let the Spirit work.  Amen.