The Last Laugh (Genesis 18:1 - 15)

      Twenty-five years before our passage begins, God came to Abraham for the first time.  Remember?  He was called Abram at the time  . . . and God came to him in Haran and made him a promise: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great" and that's pretty cool, but there was catch: "I will bless you," God said "so that you will be a blessing . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."  And although the covenant is not dependent upon Abraham's being a blessing – that is, it's not null and void if Abram isn't – it's clear what God expects, nevertheless.  It's kind of like with us Christians, isn't it?  Our forgiveness is in no way dependent upon any good works we may do, but God expects us to do 'em anyway.

      And in the years since God's first appearance to Abram, things have been, well . . . interesting.  He is often held up as a paragon of faith – he just up and went when God told him, where God told him, and now he's just a-waitin' for the promise to be fulfilled . . . but if you really look at the story, you'll get a different perspective . . . somebody counted, and came up with only four instances in the entire, 11-chapter Abraham story where he is shown in a positive light.  In fact, Abraham's story is more of a story of un-faith, or misplaced faith, than anything else.

      Let's look at some of the highlights of the quarter-century between God's first appearance and this ome.  Abram does do as he's told, he heads South from Canaan, but when he gets there, there's a famine in the land . . . so much for the promise, right?  I mean, this God of Abraham and Moses and Joseph et al., must have a strange sense of humor to make a huge deal out of sending his faithful follower to a land where there's no food!  And so immediately, Abram has to leave Canaan, because the only thing you could do in ancient times if there was a famine was move.  So he picks up and heads to Egypt, and there he gets into a peck of trouble . . . and as he's approaching Egypt's border, he says to Sarah (who was named Sarai at the time): "I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account." And he does it . . . he says Sarai’s his sister, and the Pharaoh takes her into his house – undoubtedly to be just another woman in his harem – and for her sake, he takes good care of Abram, giving him all manner of good things.  But God keeps the promise – God curses Pharaoh, afflicting him with all kinds of plagues, until Pharaoh throws both Abram and Sarai out of the country.  So much for Abraham's faith in God to follow through  . . . he's willing to sacrifice his wife to save his own skin.  And he's not exactly a blessing to the Pharaoh and his people, is he?

      And what about Ishmael?  Sarai comes up to him and says "Here's my slave Hagar . . . take her to your bed so you can get yourself an heir."  And Abram thinks that's a pretty good idea: after all, it's been many long years since the promise, and no heir yet . . . besides, everybody knows that Sarai is barren . . . and so, once again, he takes matters into his own hands instead of trusting God, and we all know the disastrous results – Sarai's jealousy gets the best of her, and she almost kills Hagar and the boy . . . but once again, God's faithful to the promise, even though Abram has problems, and Ishmael is saved, and indeed Abram's seed spawns a great nation . . . traditionally, the Islamic nations.

      Finally, about a year before our story, God appears to Abram again . . . and this time he reiterates the promise to Abram: "I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God."  And oh, by the way, your name is no longer Abram it's Abraham, and Sarai's now called Sarah, and just so there's no confusion, your heir will indeed be out of Sarah's womb.  And so what does Abraham – avatar of faith – do?  Does he fall on his knees in wonder at the mighty promise, the power of God to open the womb of a barren woman, to truly do a new thing?  No . . . he falls on his face laughing and protesting the ridiculous notion that a hundred-year-old man and ninety-year-old wife could ever have kids, and so God – ever the playful one – tells him that his heirs name will be Isaac which, of course, means laughter.

      And so Sarah's not the first one who laughs, who shows something less than a full, trusting, faith at the prediction of her pregnancy, and I detect a little chauvinism in the fact that we all know this story of the woman laughing, and skip over the one of Abraham falling on the floor in mirth . . . after all, Abraham is the faithful father of a people, and Sarah's just a jealous woman . . . and Christians over the years have tended to blame the women of scripture for everything, starting with Eve . . . but note that it's Abraham that, not to put too nice a face on it, pimps out his wife, not the other way around . . .

      But here, in today's story, we have an example of a benevolent Abraham . . . he's pictured as a model of hospitality . . . when he spies the three travelers, he runs from the tent entrance and bows real low, and although we know that this is – somehow – a theophany, an appearance of God, Abraham doesn't know it . . . he looks up and sees three men standing there.  And he has no idea who they are – for all he knows, they're bandits or wandering vagabonds or shepherds looking for work.  But he treats them as if they were royalty . . . he calls them "lord" – and notice that this is in lower-case in our bible, to indicate that we're not talkin' about God here – and he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to make them comfortable.  "Let a little water be brought," he says, "and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves . . ."  There is no thought of recompense, no thought of currying favor . . . he shows them hospitality no matter who they might be, no matter what they might have done.

      Once again, does this sound familiar?  Showing grace, showing loving-care and nurture to someone no matter what they've done, no matter who they are?  Remember back in the creation story, humankind is made in God's image, God's likeness . . .  and therefore humans represent God to the rest of creation . . . and here we see Abraham fulfilling that vocation – for once – through his hospitality.

      In the movie Chocolat, a mysterious and appealing woman is blown by the wind into a small French town . . . she sets up a chocolate shop, with almost magically-delicious wares . . . she has the ability to see peoples' innermost needs, and to embody them in her chocolates . . . she invites all she meets into her shop, from the outcast gypsy-river-rat to the town mayor, who has the Church under his thumb and is persecuting her.  But her kindness and empathy slowly seeps out into the town, and into its citizens, until it is clear that a deep and abiding transformation is taking place.  It all culminates when even the stuffy, hide-bound mayor is transformed by her chocolate, a rebirth, a resurrection, if you will, that happens just at Easter's dawn.

      The woman – whose name Vianne sounds suspiciously like French for "come" – clearly practices the biblical concept of hospitality, and the biblical writers knew – as does Vianne – that hospitality has the power to transform lives.  It winds through both Old and New Testaments, coming to fulfillment in the figure of Jesus Christ, who taught that hospitality is to be practiced as a matter of course.  And he summed it all up with one rule, which he described as one of the two greatest commandments: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

      And so, Abraham is a pointer to God’s ultimate concern for "the other," God’s ultimate invitation of all into the loving embrace, of the divine, and it's expressed in Abraham's simple, heartfelt hospitality to three men on a dusty Canaanite road.    

And as he stands attentively, as a servant, watching his guests eat, they ask him "Where is your wife Sarah?"  And without stopping to wonder how they knew who his wife was, he says: "There, in the tent."  And then one of them says: "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son."  And Sarah, listening from just inside the tent opening, hears this pronouncement, and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women, and so now she laughs to herself – only a little rueful chuckle, quite unlike Abraham's falling down on the floor before God– she laughs to herself and says "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"  And this question holds more than just a skepticism about opening a barren womb . . . it's wistful, bittersweet, pensive . . . after all these years, shall I have pleasure?

      Then the Lord's voice booms out – still speaking to Abraham – "why did Sarah laugh and say "shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?'" and its finally clear just who it is that's visited Abraham and Sarah there at the Oaks of Mamre . . . or is it?  Let's recap: we're told that the Lord appears to them, not specifically that God is one of the three men . . . when God finally speaks to Abraham, questioning Sarah's laughter, we're not told that it's the same person – identified as one of the three – who predicted Sarah's pregnancy.  In fact, there's a delightful, deliberate ambiguity at play here . . . the three men to whom Abraham shows hospitality include God in their number . . . maybe.

      If you go to a Benedictine monastery, you'll see written over the portal to the guest quarters "Treat all guests as if they are Christ."  Hospitality is a watchword for the Benedictine order, it's one of the reasons for their existence.  And in this, they are following the dictum of Christ himself, who will tell those at his right hand "I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me . . ." and when those at his right hand say "When did we do these things, Lord?"  do you remember his reply? "just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me."  Christ himself is somehow – in some mysterious, undefinable way – identified with the least of these, those to whom we are to show hospitality . . . and here we see it in a story written a thousand years before Christ, in the marvelous ambiguity of the three wanderers at the oaks of Mamre, one of whom may – or may not – be the Lord God's own self.

            Brothers and sisters, as society gets more and more fearful, as we get more and more isolated and insular, more and more wrapped up in our own concerns and lives, it's difficult for us to show hospitality to those who live next door, much less those we don't know, who show up at our doorstep in need . . . but that is our lot, it's a part of our creation vocation, of being the image of God to all we meet.  And I'm not gonna kid you . . . it's not particularly easy.  It's often a hard, thankless task.  But just as in Chocolat, where Vianne is blown about by the wind, we are powered by the Holy Spirit, who blows strong through the woods and over the waters of the Ohio, and who cares for us, sighing with sighs too deep for words.  We are never alone in our work of being a blessing to all we meet, for Christ is with us through the power of the Holy Spirit, to comfort and teach and advocate for us, until the Kingdom is fulfilled here on Earth.  Amen.

Great Commissioners (Matthew 28:16 - 20)

      Christian studies can be roughly divided into theology--talk about God--and ecclesiology--talk about the church. And there are few passages that are so chock-full of both as this one. On the theology side, Jesus mentions the three persons we now know as the Trinity--although Matthew, for one, wouldn't have called it that--and he says that all authority had been given to him. And Jesus' authority is a major topic of both practical and theological concern in the Gospels.

On the ecclesiological side, this passage contains the Great Commission, the marching orders for the church. "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations," Jesus says, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,"--there's that Trinitarian formula--"and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." And to top it all off, it's the last scene in Matthew, and like a lot of important stuff, it happens on a mountain, but unlike in Luke, there's no ascension. Or at least Matthew doesn't mention one . . . Maybe he'd never heard of the ascension (remember he was writing decades after the fact) or that he knew about it, but thought it not worth mentioning. Or maybe he thought it complicated the picture too much: Jesus' last words can be read as a promise: “I am with you always, to the end of the age," and then if he left, well . . . it would be confusing, to say the least.

Anyway, I think it's fascinating how the two--theology and ecclesiology, God-talk and church-talk--entwine in this passage. In particular, how one flows from another, depends on another, and it hinges on the word “therefore. " As in "Go, therefore, and make disciples." That one word makes the entire Great Commission--a word about the church--a dependent clause, and what it's dependent upon is the the theological fact that "all authority has been given" to Christ. Our authority to make disciples and baptize them and teach them and preach at them does not come because we are wonderful, morally upright souls--although of course we certainly are--but because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Christ. Our authority to be the church comes from the authority of Christ, who grants it to us. We serve, in other words, at the pleasure of the King.

But who does the King serve at the pleasure of? Who is it that has given all that authority to Christ? Well, right at the beginning of Matthew's gospel, at the start of Jesus' ministry, on another mountain top no less, we see Satan offer him the whole world. Remember? The devil takes him up onto the highest peak and shows him everything, all the people and rivers and rocks and ants, the whole shootin' match, and offers it to Jesus for the measly little price--just a trifle, really--of falling down and worshipping him. But there's only one catch: ol' Scratch has been known to lie from time to time, and that's what he's doing here. He can't give Jesus the world to rule: he's the adversary, not the creator, so it isn't his to give.

In fact, we know that the only one with the capacity to give authority over anything is the one who owns it all, who created it all, and that's God the Father, maker of, and ruler over, heaven and earth. And by the end of Matthew's gospel, and the end of Jesus' ministry, he's done just that. God the Father has given the Son power over the earth--all of creation--and heaven--all the spiritual realms--to boot.

And so the church's authority derives from God the Son's authority, which derives from God the Fathers's authority, and it makes a nice little chain, doesn't it? In fact, that's how it works here on earth and, as far as we know, all of creation: the universe, the cosmos or whatever you choose to call it. Whenever we do something in the cosmos, when we preach the gospel with our actions--using words if necessary--we do so under God's authority. When we do otherwise, when we do what we want to, without the blessings, without the permission of the Divine, what we do is not destined to turn out so well in the end.

But it's so much more than permission ... it's an umbrella of power, of aid, of comfort, and that's where the Holy Spirit comes in. We may not know where or to whom the Spirit goes, but we do know that if we are acting under God's umbrella, under God's sponsorship, it is there for us.

And speaking of the Holy Spirit, here's where the Trinity comes in . . . As part of this bubble, of this force field, this transcendent atmosphere within which we operate, we are to invoke the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are to wrap ourselves and our ministries in the full life of the Divine in all its aspects. The awesome creativity of God the Father, the transcendent source of all; the redemptive and incarnational work of the God the Son; and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the world as the one who empowers, comforts and advocates.

And when we baptize folks in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as we still do 2000 years after these words of Jesus, we acknowledge that this fullness has indeed come upon the one we have just baptized. And do our actions, our invocation of the holy names somehow help enable the action of the Godhead? Do we cooperate with the Divine in this like we do in the nurture and maintenance of our world?

Well. We're to make disciples of everyone--that's what "all nations" means here: black or white, young or old, male or female, Ugandan or Sicilian, gay or straight--we're to make disciples of everyone. And we usually think of “disciples” as followers of Jesus, and of course they are that, but the Greek word we translate as disciple means, literally, "one who is being taught." That's right: the primary meaning of disciple is student. Thus the Great Commission can to be understood as: first, we're to make students and second, we're to be their teachers. And here's what we're supposed to teach them: to obey all that Jesus has commanded.

Ok. So that includes quite a bit, doesn't it? Doing unto others, getting the log out of your own eye first, judging not lest ye be judged and etc. And over in the Gospel of John, we're assured that whatever the Son tells us, the Father has told him to tell us, and so all of his verbal commands are as if they came from the Creator (there's that chain thing again).

But over in John we're told something else: not only is Jesus the mouthpiece of God, but he is the very Word of God, incarnate. Embodied. In the flesh. So God's words, God's commands are instantiated, made tangible, touchable by the flesh of Jesus. This means we're talking not just verbal commands, or even primarily verbal commands. That's one of the main points of the incarnation.

And so Jesus' actions--the things he does--are literally words from God, commands, just as if they had been spoken by the Divine. For example, Jesus' extreme (at least for the time) inclusivity, his conscious welcoming the outsiders of the time into his fellowship, into the circle of who is welcome in Gods kingdom, is an embodied Word from the Divine, a command just as much as if one of the Ten Commandments had said "Thou shalt be extremely inclusive, welcoming the marginalized into the fellowship of God's kingdom." Jesus' actions in healing the sick--both mentally and physically--is a word from God, a command every bit as much as if he had said to his disciples "oh by the way, guys, you gotta heal the people, no ifs, ands or buts about it." That's what being the Incarnate Word means.

And Jesus' actions--healing the blind man, speaking to foreign women at wells, overturning the tables in the temple, I could go on and on--are not only his commandments but God's, every bit as much as those first ten up on Mount Sinai. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he goes up onto a mountain this one last time.

So. Here are our marching orders: we're to make disciples, to make students of Christ and teach them to obey his commandments. In doing so, we consider Jesus' life--his words, actions, and all the rest of it--the subject of our teaching. When we hold up Jesus' earthly life as a model for ur own, that's what we're getting at.

But wait a moment . . . Aren't we disciples as well, aren't we students? We are indeed, we are students who teach other students. And if we cease to teach others--using words if necessary--if we cease to teach other students by example and word, do we not cease to be followers of Christ, cease to follow the Great Commission? And by the same token, if we cease to be students, if we cease to be taught to obey Christ's commandments, embodied as they are in deed and word, do we not cease to be disciples? Hmmm . . . All things to think about when pondering the decline in Christian Education attendance . . .

Well. Always leave 'me smiling, and that's what Jesus does: after giving them a seemingly impossible task--he tells those eleven people, huddled shivering on a mountain top to go convert everyone--he ends on a hopeful note: Remember, I will be with you always, until the end of the age. Only the Greek original doesn't have "Remember" as in our translation, it has "Look! Behold!" Jesus is not a mere remembrance, Jesus as the Christ is a living presence. We are not alone in this, we have not been given a Herculean task, an impossible task, and expected to go do it by ourselves. Behold! Jesus is with us in our trials, in our sufferings, in our triumphs and setbacks, always, until the end of the age. Amen.

Windy City (Acts 2:1 - 21)

     Our son Mike and I were home when the tornado came.  Mike and I and our menagerie, that is . . . And so our task was to get everybody into the proverbial inside room with no windows, which for many of us in Tuscaloosa—land of very-few-basements—passed for a storm shelter.  But before we did, I looked out our front door into the teeth of the storm and saw the stop sign acting like the one in the Spielberg movie . . . You know . . . The one where the space ship sneaks up on Richard Dreyfus while he's in his pick-up?  It was waving back and forth like that.  I closed the door and locked it (fat lot of good that would do) and started rounding up pets.

We got them into that inside room—the bathroom, of course—and it was pitch black, the electricity having gone out some time before, but when Mike slipped in the door one of the cats slipped out, so he went after her, and I had visions of the roof collapsing on him while getting that darned cat, but he made it back, and the cats and dogs were all snarling and snapping at one another in the dark, and then we heard it come over, and they always say it sounds like a freight train, and you know what?  It did . . . It sounded like a great, big, scary freight train bearing down on us all.  And when it was over, and the animals had scuttled off to hide under various pieces of furniture, Mike and I looked out the front door, and that stop sign was twisted up like a pretzel.

I don't think the apostles would have described the sound of the Spirit’s coming in just that way . . . For one thing, freight trains wouldn't be invented for some 1800 years, give or take a half century.  There was no “listen . . . Here comes the Bethany Limited” or “is that a fighter jet engine?” and I wonder: did that help or hurt?  Did the lack of a human-made referent make it even more scary, even more out of this world?  All they could say was that it sounded “like the rush of a violent wind.”  Come to think of it, it was like they compared the coming of the Spirit to a tornado, or maybe a typhoon . . . Certainly the fisher-folk among them were familiar with storms on the Sea of Galilee.

They'd just filled the slot left open by Judas, and now they were back to 12, and you gotta think maybe the new guy wondered what he’d gotten himself into with this Spirit business.  There they were, lounging around on Pentecost, maybe noshing on some chips and dip, and then this happens.  A sound like a violent wind . . . violent!  And notice that Luke doesn’t say what it was, just what it was like, just like he says that the divided tongues weren't fire but were as of fire, they could have been big slurping tongues, for all I know, especially given the multi-lingual event that was about to happen.  Just imagine it: we'd be celebrating with dancing, streaming glottal appendages instead of flames.  It just wouldn't be the same . . .

But Luke's inability to adequately describe the coming of the Spirit, his reliance on simile language—as and like—is typical when faced with the Divine.  Later on in Acts, Peter is waiting for his supper when he falls into a trance, and he sees something like a sheet, not an actual sheet but something like one, with animals wiggling all over it.  And Ezekiel beholds “the likeness of the glory of the Lord” as something like gleaming amber, in the middle something like four living creatures, of human form with four faces apiece, in the middle of them something like burning coals, like torches moving to and fro among them, there were something like wheels within wheels, which moved with the four creatures . . . and there was a lot more, but you get something like the picture.  Whatever the Divine looks like, it's probably not a sheet with critters stuck to it or four, four-faced, winged creatures accompanied by fiery wheels (at least it didn't look like a breaded, grumpy old man).  The transcendent is by nature indescribable, because it is outside our experience.  The best we can do is use simile and metaphor.

As you all know, I've been attending Richard Rohr’s Living School, and one of our tasks is studying Christian mystics, and as good a definition of a mystic as any is one who has so-called mystical experiences, who participates to some extent in the ineffable.  And the thing is, though they often don't like to describe these experience, when they do, they can be pretty vague.  Some say it's like an emptiness.  Others—sometimes the same ones on different occasions—say it's a nothingness . . . Well, if the experience is empty or nothing, how do they know they're having it?  Clearly, it's not really nothing or empty, but describing it that way is as close as they can come.

It's why poets—dealers in metaphor and allusion—are often the best guides to God, and Scripture is full of great poetry.  In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.  As the deer longs for flowing water, so my soul longs for you.  But of course it's not just in Scripture: the medieval Hildegard de Bingen described God like this: “O most noble Greenness, rooted in the sun, shining forth in streaming splendor upon the wheel of Earth.”  The Sufi poet Rumi wrote “You are like water and we are like millstones. You are like wind and we are like dust. The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.”  And Rainer Marie Rilke: “My God is dark and like a web of tangled roots all drinking soundlessly.”

What are your images of the Divine?  How do you think of God, picture God, experience God as you approach the almighty in prayer?  It's Pentecost, and the Spirit has come upon us like wind and fire.  Can we even imagine what that might mean?  Amen.