Sharing in God’s Life

1 Samuel 25:14-19, 23-25, 32-34, 42-43

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

1 September 2024

               As I said, Wilda Gafney hopscotches through this story, only highlighting some of the details.  So, let me fill in the blanks a little.

            At this point in the larger story of David’s rise to power, he has fled from the court of King Saul after Saul threatened his life, because David had become too popular and powerful.  David then operates as the leader of a band of warriors, living in the wilderness, and occasionally hiring out to one town or another for protection or to fight on their behalf. 

            When the Bible first introduces us to Nabal, we are told that he is surly and mean and that Abigail his wife is beautiful and clever.  One feast day David sends some of his men to Nabal seeking hospitality, but they are insulted and turned away.  In ancient cultures not granting hospitality was an ethical violation.  Eugene Peterson, in his commentary, points out that sheepshearing time was traditionally a period of festivity and generosity. 

            David finds out about the insult and, enraged, decides to attack Nabal. 

            But Abigail hears from one of the servant boys what has happened and she takes action.  She doesn’t tell Nabal what she’s going to do. She takes gifts to David and falls down in front of him, imploring him to save her husband and household.  In her speech she declares that God’s favor is upon David and he is going to rise to power.  And that if he destroys Nabal, he will damage his own reputation and bring blood-guilt upon himself.

            David, apparently struck by the beauty and power of this woman, grants her wish and sets aside his rage.

            Abigail returns home to find Nabal drunk at his feast.  She waits until the next day, when he’s probably suffering from quite the hangover, to tell him what she’s done.  Which, of course, is an insult to his honor.  Nabal appears to immediately have a stroke and lingers a few days before he dies.  And then Abigail seeks after David, who makes her his wife.

            Of this story, the Bible scholar David Jobling writes, “The more I read it the more I dislike it.”  He finds it a distasteful story in which nobody behaves well.  Even Abigail he dislikes.

Wilda Gafney says that David is a “thug” and Nabal a mean-spirited man and “abusive husband.”  Unlike Jobling, she takes a different perspective on Abigail.  She thinks Abigail is a survivor who has learned how to deal with and survive these toxic men.  Doing the best she can in this scary situation to save the day, spare the community violence, and create a future for herself.

            We’ve talked a lot this summer already as we’ve read these stories about toxic masculinity and the clever ways the women of these stories try to survive and thrive and shape the world.  So we want explore those topics today.  Instead, I want to follow what Wilda Gafney thinks is a core theme of the story—generosity and hospitality.  She writes, “While some biblical passages equate wealth with blessing uncritically, these lessons look more deeply at what one does with one’s wealth as a measure of character.”

            Of course this is Labor Day weekend, a good time to reflect upon such issues.

            In her book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism the Yale Divinity School theologian Kathryn Tanner writes that our current finance-dominated capitalism “is incompatible with fundamental Christian commitments.”  She adds, “there is surprisingly little reason to think Christianity has direct interest in developing a work ethic at all.”

            Christianity teaches us to trust in the grace of God.  And, as Tanner writes, “the fulsome character of grace” means that “one has all one needs now to meet the present challenge.”  Which works against the scarcity mindset, competition, and conspicuous consumption prevalent in our current economic system.

            The world’s value is also not created through human labor.  The things of this world have intrinsic, non-purposive value as part of God’s creative activity.  God created the things of this world to be reflections of God’s glory.  Kathryn Tanner writes, “God simply wants to share God’s life, so that the fullness of that life is reflected” in us and the world.

            Value then is not established by the market, the invisible hand, or even human labor.  Our focus on use and consumption of earthy goods has robbed us of the spiritual practice of attending carefully to what God has given us.  Attention teaches us to appreciate and honor the ways the things of the world share in the glory of God.

            Rather than use and consumption, we are instead invited by God to enjoy God’s gifts.  And to participate with God as co-creators.  The abundance of the earth is for sharing, so that all might flourish.

            That such deeply traditional Christian ideas sound so radical in contrast with current global economics, is because our imaginations have been malformed.  We struggle to imagine how we might live any other way than what we are used to, except with maybe small improvements.  The biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls this malformation of the imagination “idolatry.”  We worship idols and aren’t even aware we are doing it.

            Our enjoyment of God’s gifts does involve work.  The meaning and purpose of our labor is different though from what the market teaches.  We are connected to God through our creativity and making.  This is part of the divine image in us.  Our labor should share in God’s glory.

The artist Makoto Fujimura has reflected deeply and theologically upon human creativity and making and they ways they connect us with God.  Fujimura writes that the goals of our making are to mend what is broken in ourselves and in the world and to cultivate beauty and mercy.  In our making, we should be collaborating with one another, with compassion, empathy, and care.  Our labor is glorious when it moves with the Spirit in these ways.

Earlier we read an excerpt from Kevin Hector’s Christianity as a Way of Life in which he writes about the practices we need to engage in if we are to learn how to love as Christ wants us too.  Points relevant to our collaborative labor as God’s people.  Our spiritual practices train us to see beyond ourselves and our own interests, and instead to see the worth and value of others, to attend to their particularity and see them as images of God.  We learn to offer them our beneficence, generosity, and hospitality.  And to set aside vengeance and forgive one another, seeking reconciliation when we are wronged.  When we do these things, by faith and grace over time, they grow our ability to love and transform us.  And our work shares in God’s work.

Hopefully highlighting these Christian ideas sparks your imagination, curiosity, and reflection.  Because these concepts merit deeper and fuller consideration.  If we are to share more fully in the life of God, how will that change the things we do?  Including our work and how we spend and manage our money.

I’m still learning and growing in these areas myself.  It’s difficult to break out of the ways we’ve done things in the past and make all things new.  Difficult to reform the imagination.

The story in First Samuel provides a glimpse of some of the harms that can be done when we don’t live according to the simple maxim that God wants to share God’s life with all of us.  The failure to be hospitable, generous, and welcome, almost leads to violence.  Grace is required to set vengeance aside and do something different.  Thankfully, Abigail imagined another way.

So, let’s do better. 

We can work at cultivating some basic virtues.  To live more simply and sustainably.  To practice generosity and hospitality.  As kids remind us, “sharing is caring.”  To spend and invest with an eye toward justice and doing the most good.

We can also renew our spiritual practices, particularly the spiritual practice of attending to other people and things in their particularity.  To see the ways they share in God’s life and glory.  And how the world is given for our enjoyment, not use.

Finally, our financial decisions and our workplaces should center grace and mercy.  Our labor, our work, our making should create beauty and mend what is broken. 

When we do all of these things, together, then we will share in God’s life and all of us can flourish. 

What a Covenant

1 Samuel 17:55-18:9; Hosea 11:1-4, 8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

18 August 2024

               David is fresh from his victory over the giant Goliath.  King Saul wants him for his armor bearer.  The women of the land sing victory songs celebrating David.  And Prince Jonathan falls in love with him. 

            If he looked anything like Michelangelo imagined him, then it’s easy to understand why everyone wanted David.

            The love between Jonathan and David has long inspired the imagination.  It begins in this scene but continues through quite a few others, until Jonathan’s death in battle, and David’s great outpouring of grief upon hearing the news.

            Reading their words of love and affection for one another, it strains credulity to read this story as anything other than some form of same-sex love.  What they have is clearly an emotional bond, transcending any political arrangement between the two young heroes.

            At minimum, their affection became the model of friendship in Christian theology.  Aelred of Rievaulx, the medieval Scottish monk who wrote the classic work on Spiritual Friendship, sites Jonathan and David for his model of friendship that “is the medicine of life.”  Aelred wrote that a true friend is someone worthy to be “the companion of your soul, to whose spirit you join and attach yours.”  With a spiritual friend you hide nothing, fear nothing, but fully entrust yourself.  Aelred writes that with a spiritual friend “you wish to become one instead of two.”

            The late Ted Jennings, who preached here once, wrote of Jonathan and David that they became “the very paradigm for all love.”  He also believes the story reveals a radical change in the culture of ancient Israel.  What we have in the books of Joshua, Judges, and First Samuel is evidence of a warrior culture.  One rises to prominence through feats of bravery on fields of battle.  But David himself represents a shift from a warrior culture to a new image of masculinity and a new culture.  Yes, he’s a military victor, but he’s also celebrated as a poet and musician, and he reveals a vulnerability.

            Part of what Ted Jennings sees in this story of Jonathan removing his armor and giving it to David is “the abolition of male rivalry on the basis of love.”  Jonathan is the prince, while David is the youngest son of the king’s servant Jesse.  David has no status in the social hierarchy.  Yet, Jonathan surrenders his privilege and treats David as an equal. 

            One could imagine the young prince, himself already a military hero, viewing this new young man David with jealousy, as an upstart and a threat to his succession.  But Jonathan is not like that.  Even when it becomes clear that David will one day be king instead of himself, Jonathan never gives up his affection for David.  In fact, Jonathan seems to play a part in helping to assure David’s rise to prominence and power.

            And in that way, they are shifting from a warrior culture based on hierarchy and power to a more equitable version of society and one based on relationships.

            This change is represented in the covenant that Jonathan and David make with one another.  A commitment to each other.  The commitment clearly is emotional and involves affection.  But it also includes their support for and protection of one another.  And it persists, such that later in life, when David is king, he provides for the surviving son of Jonathan and makes him part of his household.

            The Bible is full of covenants.  Some are between people, like this one between David and Jonathan or the pledge that Ruth makes to her mother-in-law Naomi, which I preached about at the beginning of this summer sermon series.  Many of the covenants are between God and individual people.  Like God’s promise to Hagar that she will give birth to a mighty nation.  Or to Sarah that she will have a son in her old age.  There’s God’s promise to all creation, given after the flood, never to destroy the Earth again with water.  And mostly importantly the covenant between God and the people of Israel that shapes so much of the Old Testament.

            The idea of a covenant between God and the people seems to first be spoken by the prophet Hosea, in passages like the one read earlier.  Hosea models the relationship between God and the people upon the commitment that a couple makes when they get married. 

            Yesterday, we celebrated a wedding.  Jake Sharpe, who grew up in this church, married Maives in a beautiful and joyous ceremony.  And I talked about how their love is a sign of God’s love for all of us.  A connection first made in the prophecies of Hosea.

            And this idea of covenant shaped the people of Israel.  Jacob L. Wright, whose book I’ve been teaching in First Forum the last month, talks about how the Hebrew scriptures were a project in forming a people.  That when Israel and Judah lost their kings, nations, and temples, they had to identify other ways to be a people.  And so they created the book we know as the Bible.  And they taught people to read, so they could pass on the stories and laws and study them. 

            And central to this project of peoplehood was the idea of covenant.  That the people covenant with one another and with God.  And the lesson is that if they are to thrive, then they must build a just and righteous society together, by following the laws of God.

            This Old Testament idea of covenant has also deeply shaped who we are as a Christian people in the United Church of Christ.  In the very back of the red pew Bibles is a brief description of who we are in the United Church of Christ and core expressions of what we commonly believe.  Under the discussion of “responsible freedom,” it says, “we are called to live in a loving, covenantal relationship with one another.”  And later it makes clear that our freedom and autonomy as individuals and congregations is  “constrained by love to live in a covenantal relationship” with each other so that the unity of the church can be manifest and God’s mission to the world can be carried out more effectively.

            The idea of covenant is central to all the various streams that joined to form the United Church of Christ.  Covenant language is there in the writings and commitments of our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors on the Congregationalist side.  The Christian churches, often formed on the frontier of American settlement, emphasized the freedom to associate with one another in commitments of love.  The Reformed Church of German immigrants developed a “close-knit denominational life” in order to support each other’s ministries.  The German Evangelical churches emphasized how the covenant should focus on the mission God is calling us to.  And, the Afro-Christian stream was always communal and justice-oriented, rooted in African ideas of kinship and family.  Yvonne Delk writes that from the Afro-Christian perspective “Covenant can be seen as a way of giving gifts and receiving gifts.”  In fact, that’s why we are here as human beings, she writes, “because you are, I can be also.”

            Randi Walker, one of our UCC historians, writes that the merging of these streams meant that our denomination arrived at an understanding of the church as “the beloved community of followers of Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit into covenant communion with each other and with Christ, for the purpose of carrying out God’s mission.”

            And in this local congregation, we have covenanted with each other to “pray for hearts that open, minds that understand, and lives that serve.”

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on the Jonathan and David story, writes that this language of covenant “invite[s] us to think about the full personhood of each person” and, thus, “we [Christians] are able to imagine and shape a world where we engage people as equal across gender, culture, and ethnic lines as we covenant together to build a world that reflects the love of the gospel.”

            What a covenant!

Frontier by Can Xue
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I just didn't care for this book. It had some magical moments, but overall it seemed a lot of nothing. Not sure on what her reputation rests? I wanted to read her since she is often predicted to win a Nobel.

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Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eh.

There are some good books on Genesis written by non-specialists, particularly Karen Armstrong's and Harold Bloom's. But I didn't get much from this one.

But upon finishing I do appreciate the general point she seems to be making, that in scholarly discussions of the book what is often missed is the note of grace that permeates story after story. Even if often that note of grace is only relative to the context.

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Christianity in Blue: How the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Theology Shape Progressive Identity by David A Kaden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A really good, quick intro to progessive theology.

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Presence

1 Samuel 4:2, 5-11, 19-22; Psalm 77:1-12, 19-20

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

21 July 2024

               Wilda Gafney writes that in her “exegetical imagination” the voice we hear in today’s psalm is a survivor of the battle that the Israelites lost to the Philistines.  Or the widow of a solider.  Reflecting on her sorrow, in the midst of this awful defeat, the Psalmist asks, “Has God’s faithful love ceased for all time?  Has her promise ceased from generation to generation?  Has God forgotten to be gracious?”

            The psalmist proclaims that she is not comforted, even when contemplating God.  Especially when she remembers God’s past wonders on behalf of the people, the times they have been delivered, and she doesn’t understand what just happened and why the people have been defeated.

            And so the psalm echoes the sorrow of Phinehas’s wife as she suddenly goes into labor on hearing the news of the defeat and the death of her husband.  Today’s reading skips over the story in which the priest Eli hears the news of the defeat and the deaths of his sons.  Eli immediately drops dead.  Now all the bad news comes to Phinehas’s wife in this odd little story that has probably escaped our attention in the past.

            In her shock and sorrow, she immediately gives birth.  The story is rather vivid, isn’t it?  And then she expresses her pain in the naming of her son.  She feels that God has departed from her and from the nation.

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on this story and the psalm, writes that these passages are really about the presence of God.  She says, “Each of these texts speak of the companioning God but not always in the way or with the results that persons wish.” 

            The soldiers on the battlefield assumed that God was with them and would defeat their enemies when the Ark appeared.  But that was not the case.  I actually think that stories like this are included in the Bible in order to prevent us from having bad theology.  Bad theology that interprets God’s presence or action always on our side, for our benefit, doing what we want God to do.  Stories like this one remind us that God’s ways are not our ways, and that we should be careful to claim God’s action on our behalf.  Much that occurs in life is just the outcome of normal causation.  Much is just random.  Many things we fill with meaning are probably just coincidence.  Stories like this are there to teach us humility and skepticism in how we understand God’s presence and action.

            In this moment God was there, but not in the ways the people expected.  They made decisions and behaved with false assumptions.  God did not show up as a warrior, fighting on their side.  But God was there.

            This week at church camp with Sebastian, Virgil, and Wyatt, our curriculum was about the ways we are linked by love.  And the second day we learned about being present for each other.  We counselors experienced the beauty of watching the kids live out these lessons, as they were present for each other.  When someone fell and got hurt.  When someone was crying because they missed their parents or their pets.  The kids were wonderful in the ways they gently cared for and supported one another.

            We also learned that we can love one another because God first loved us.  God is the very power within us, making us capable of giving and receiving love, linking us to one another.  We can be present because God is present with us.  In fact, God is present to us in the people who care for and love us.

            And so, we people of faith have learned that God is actually present with us in our sorrow, our hurt, our pain, our grief.  That is where the glory of God resides.  Not in the victories on the fields of battle.  So Phinehas’s wife was wrong.  The glory of God had not departed from her or from Israel.  The glory of God was there in her pain.  God doesn’t guarantee victories in war.  That’s bad theology.  God does give love and comfort and compassion.  That’s good theology.  And these ancient stories teach us and form us in these truths.

            Another of the human problems this story highlights is the way we other one another.  The Israelites believe that God is theirs and only present with them and will assure their conquest over their enemies.  I’m sure the Philistines believed something similar.  And once we believe such falsehoods about God, then we begin acting upon it to treat people as other than us.  We are the chosen, the elect, the ones with a special destiny, and these folks who aren’t us are other than that.  Less than that.  And so we don’t have to treat them the same way we treat ourselves.  We don’t have to treat them with respect and dignity.  We don’t have to honor their autonomy, their agency, their feelings.

            This is a timely story to read, because right now there is a war going on in the exact same place between two people who trace their histories back to the same two peoples at war in this story.  A reminder that contemporary global events can have long and ancient histories.  And those long and ancient histories can contribute to making current resolutions even more difficult to reach.

            And so I as a preacher must handle this story gently.  Because this story isn’t just an ancient one.  This story has meaning and implications for our human siblings in our time.

            And I think we can read the story as a reminder that we shouldn’t believe that God is only on our side, always assuring our victory.  We should instead understand that all humanity are the beloved children of God.  All humans are our siblings, deserving of respect, dignity, compassion, and love.

            It’s interesting what modern archaeology and genetic studies have revealed about the peoples of the ancient near east.  For one, most of the stories about Israel as told in the Bible have no basis in the historical or archaeological records.  I’ll be teaching more about those details in my First Forum series beginning next week.  This lack of support has reaffirmed for us that much of the Bible should be understood as literature, a series of stories written much later than the times described.  And so the Bible isn’t intended to tell us what happened, but to teach us by inspiring our reflection and our questioning about matters of faith and morality.

            This ancient strip of land, known as Palestine, has for four thousand years been the home of a diverse and mixed group of people, often dominated by outside empires, always a major route of trade and cultural exchange.  And it’s difficult to determine any real racial distinctions.  The people always seem to have been a cosmopolitan mix.  The Philistines were not some foreign usurpers, but the indigenous folks who lived along the coast and built great cities that flourished because of international trade.  Some of those cities, such Gaza, survive to this day.  It is only in modern Europe that the term “philistine” took on its pejorative meanings of being uncultured and backwards.  The ancient Philistines were the opposite of that actually.

            The ancient Israelites were the people who inhabited the interior of the land, living in the hills and not the fertile plains.  If anything, they were the rural, more tribal people.

            So this story expresses ancient prejudices.  And our challenge as readers is not to continue the prejudices, but to learn from them and overcome them, so that we might learn to create the global beloved community that God intends.

            One of the great challenges of the 21^st century is for us to become more cosmopolitan.  As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, cosmopolitanism seems to name the challenge and not the solution to our problems.  How can all of us become citizens of the world, overcoming our biases and prejudices.  Appiah writes:

Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.  The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

            And he admits this isn’t easy.  That cosmopolitanism remains an adventure and an ideal.

            Martha Nussbaum, in her work on the topic, reminds us that “to build societies that aspire realistically to global justice and universal respect, we need a realistic understanding of human weaknesses and limits, of the forces in human life that make justice so difficult to achieve.”

            But this challenge should inspire us, nonetheless.  That all of us are striving to flourish, should inspire “wonder, respect, and awe.”

            This strange, ancient, yet timely and current, story, opens up an opportunity to consider presence.  How God is present with us.  How we are present with each other.  And how we can aspire to the great moral adventure of respecting each other’s presence.  This is our human challenge.  This is the great mission for people of faith and goodwill.

Abundant Lives by Amanda Udis-Kessler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I highly recommend this new book from our denomination's publishing house (Pilgrim Press). It's a quick read that is very thoughtful and good. It presents a clear, comprehensive vision of the good life as envisioned from our theological perspective. I kept wishing I had written the book, or something very like it. I'll have to figure out how and when to develop this into either a sermon series or a class or some combination of both.

View all my reviews

An opinion piece in today's NY Times about the gay marriage fight annoyed me.  The author was critical of the way the legal fight for gay marriage was framed and blames that for some of the backlash over the last decade.  He believes more time should have been spent persuading people about the dignity of gay people.  He writes:

American gay activists would be wise to recalibrate their activism, shifting from a rights-based approach, with its emphasis on litigation, to one more oriented toward citizenship and dignity. They may also want to embrace a more ambitious and idealistic mind-set, aiming squarely at public persuasion.

As someone who was a gay rights activist--and in some of the toughest states of the heartland--I don't recognize this criticisms at all.  In fact I've always said that our most difficult work was changing hearts and minds, much of which we had to do before any legislative or judicial decisions.   I know I was deeply involved in such work, as were many that I know.  We weren't running the national orgs in DC or lawyers taking the cases, but we were in communities doing the difficult work of persuasion, generally by living our lives with authenticity and joy.  And doing it in public, as a public witness, and despite the hateful responses we could generate in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. 

I think one reason the author misses the work he references, is that there is no mention of the role of faith communities.  Troy Perry, the founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches was maybe the very first gay leader to begin the work for marriage equality.  And he understood that as a religious rite and sacrament, those arguments would need to be framed in spiritual, moral, and emotional ways.  My current denomination, the United Church of Christ, was the first mainline denomination to endorse marriage equality--a decade before the Obergefell ruling.  The work in our denomination and others centered around precisely the sorts of issues, ideas, and arguments that the author thinks was missing in the US effort for marriage equality.

I was simply shocked at the ignorance the column revealed.

What We Need

1 Samuel 1:19-28; 2:1-10

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

23 June 2024

               Through persistence and faithfulness in God Hannah achieves her goals.  And once again we see her taking matters into her own hands, not intimidated by religious authority or the way things are normally done, as she engages in worship—a ritual to dedicate her son to lifelong service to God.

            This Bible story got me remembering the weekend of Sebastian’s baptism, when family and friends came into town, and we had a house full of folks.  My mother-in-law, Sebastian’s Lola, spent two days fixing homemade Filipino food, and HyVee roasted us a pig, and after Sunday morning’s worship, we feasted together. 

            In January when I attended Conversations, the annual gathering of United Church of Christ senior ministers, our keynote speaker was the professor Mary Luti talking about the ethical demands of the sacraments—baptism and communion.  The sacraments, she said, are

rituals that announce, embody, and enact the good news of Jesus Christ. By grace and faith over time, they can infuse in us the gospel’s revolutionary joy, its indefensible mercy, its liberating honesty, its risk and danger, its distinctive ethics.

            The gist of her remarks was that while we do good and beautiful things with the sacraments, what we normally do is insufficient for the power and potential that they possess to form us into who God desires us to be.  And so she focused on their significance in the ethical dimension, proclaiming:

The sacraments are a vital source of the church’s public witness. And yet when we’re talking about Chritstian justice-making it’s rare that anyone says, “For these moments we have our baptisms; for these challenges, we come to the table. This is a baptismal imperative, this is eucharistic action. We can do hard things drenched in baptismal waters. We will persist, for we have been fed.” 

The sacraments just might be the church’s most underrated source of formative power for persevering engagement with the world. Centering them more than we normally do in our worship and formation could go a long way towards sustaining the public witness of the Body of Christ. 

            Last week we talked about Hannah’s prayers, arising from pain and expressing her faith and desires, as helping to give birth to the nation.  Today we read a story about her act of worship.  Eugene Peterson highlights that in her story there are seven different times she prays or worships.  She seems to be grounded in spiritual practice, and that spiritual practice comforts her pain, gives her confidence, inspires her vision, and empowers her actions.  Peterson writes that Hannah is an example that “worship is a way of life.”

            He also points out—“This story began with Hannah weeping.  It ends with Hannah singing.”

            And the song she sings is filled with power and vision.  Not only that her own needs will be addressed by God, but that God will intervene radically on behalf of the people to deliver them from evil and establish a better, more just future.  Hannah’s acts of worship have ethical imperatives too, just like our Christian sacraments.

            This song is a source for the radical, justice-making vision of the people of God.  At his best, David embodies the vision of this song, and at his worst, he is judged for failing to live up to it.  The words and images and ideas in this song become central to the visions of the prophets and the lyrics of the poets.  It is Hannah’s song which Mary covers and remixes and makes her own—the Magnificat.  And this vision, originating in Hannah’s song, growing and developing over the centuries, is what Mary taught her son Jesus, who embodied as fully as one can the grand ideas of justice that Hannah sang.  What a song!

            And talk about the ethical imperatives we can draw from worship!

            This magnificent song, this act of worship—full of gratitude, praise, thanksgiving, and forward-looking radical hope—arose from the needs, the pain, the grief and sorrow, of this one woman.  Her persistence and faithfulness.  And her confidence in a God who listens and responds.

            This summer I’m leading a Theology Book Club.  We’ll be meeting once a month to discuss a book, and the book for August is Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman.  Cleveland is a social psychologist and founder of the Center for Justice + Renewal.  Cleveland writes about growing up in an evangelical church and her youthful embrace of faith, religion, and spirituality.  Yet her growing struggles with that faith and her dawning awareness that not only did it not meet her needs, that it actively worked against them.  Specifically, it did not meet her needs as a black woman.  And fundamentally what didn’t meet her needs was the image of God she grew up with, what she starts to call “whitemalegod” and “fatherskygod” (both all one lowercase word).  And the more she studied and experienced life and began to question, the more she wondered if this image of God met anyone’s needs.  If we believe in a God who listens and responds and loves us, then we must reject whitemalegod and all of his negative effects on people and society.

            And so Cleveland went in search of images of God that arise from the Christian tradition and that did speak to her needs and the needs of all humanity.  Like Hannah, she took matters into her own hands, was not intimidated by religious authority and the way things are normally done, but sought out a life-giving spiritual practice and worship of God that met her needs.

Cleveland encourages the use of imagination when exploring God.  She writes that we cannot believe what we cannot imagine, and that too often traditional views have limited and inhibited our use of imagination, which leads to control.

            The divine image she discovered that spoke most powerfully to her were the Black Madonnas of rural France.  In villages throughout France, churches and shrines have centuries-old images of the Madonna and Jesus that are black.  In these sculptures and their stories and traditions, she discovered the God who listens and responds to her need.

            Cleveland argues that whitmalegod not only doesn’t meet human need but seems disgusted by it.  Toxic forms of religion compel us to conceal and repress our needs, particularly teaching women to do so.  Leading to a spiral of shame.  Instead, we must be liberated to identify and express our needs and take action to meet them.  Cleveland writes:

Echoed throughout these imaginings is a desire to authentically express our needs and for them to be cherished by those around us.  In other words, we long for nurturing . . . We yearn for a society that beckons our most authentic selves and celebrates our glorious quirks and foibles.  We long for a community that sees our need as an invitation to deepen our collective connections.  We crave a world in which our humanity is honored first and foremost.

            In the Black Madonna of Vichy, Cleveland discovered an image of the divine “She who cherishes our hot mess.”  For her, the needier the better.  This image of God gets “down into the thick of human experience.”  And God empowers us to create communities based on meeting our needs.

            I feel a resonance with Hannah, who believed in a God who listens and responds to our pains and our needs.  And with persistence and faithfulness, through acts of worship, she took decisive actions to bring about the changes she longed for.  Her worship and spiritual practice led to a set of ethical imperatives.  Cleveland does something similar in her spiritual awakening and her pilgrimage to discover the faith and the God she needs.

            Cleveland draws on research that shows matriarchal, as opposed to patriarchal, societies are “need-based societies that are centered around the values of caretaking, nurturing, and responding to the collective needs of the community.”  Our vulnerability is valued and affirmed.  And society is structured to lift up our needs and respond to them.

            Hannah was alarmed by the corruption, disorder, and violence against women in her time.  She chafed under the patriarchal conditions of her life.  She envisioned something new, different, and better.  A world of greater justice. 

            She became a mother, who dedicated her son to this transformative work, to leadership among the people, guiding them to something better. 

            For Christena Cleveland, the work of creating needs-based communities is what it means “to mother.”  She proclaims, “No matter our gender identity, we are all invited to mother by creating life out of pain, by creating loving, interdependent community in response to violence.”

            Hannah may not have been the paragon of nurture—giving up her son to live at the shrine and be raised in service to God.  But she is an icon of creating life out of pain and taking the steps to respond creatively to the violence of her world.  From her individual pain, she envisioned something better.  She believed that God would listen and respond.  And so she centered her life on worship and spiritual practice—on her own terms, not bound by convention or intimidated by religious authority.  Her acts of worship, of persistence and faithfulness, became the source of a tradition that continues today, in us and the work that we do to nurture communities of care and outreach, supporting and encouraging one another, and engaging in the work of justice. 

            What do you need?  How do you experience God responding to your needs?  What sort of relationships and community would address those needs?  How might your needs shape your worship and your spiritual practice?  And how might your worship and spiritual practice flow back into the ethical dimensions of your life?

            Let’s imagine the more we might become.  And then let us live into the ethical demands of our faith and practice, to be a people who repond to human needs, and in that way embody God, who cherishes our hot mess.

Franklin Foer's April cover story for The Atlantic, which I finally took the time to digest yesterday, is a must read, I believe. Though it is deeply sobering and alarming. 

And it prompts deeper, critical thinking about some of the language and concepts the American Left has embraced in the last decade. 

Here are some important reader responses also worth reading. 

Anne Applebaum is always important to read and never more so than this cover article for The Atlantic about how the West is losing the war of ideas.

She demonstrates how the authoritarian powers have learned that they cannot only control and censor information internally, they must be actively sowing information against the West and its values at home and abroad, including in the Western countries themselves. She reveals how new information and media networks have been created to spread this information in developing countries. And then how that information is also shared within the democracies. Some by the far Left but much more by the far Right. 

It is revealing that what Stalin once tried to do with the American Left, Russia has succeeded at doing with the Right. And what was then surreptitious, is now done brazenly.

 

A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK by Gary Dorrien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good book to finish on the eve of Juneteenth.

The three volume journey through the Black Social Gospel has been deeply informative and inspiring. I've learned a lot and identified other books that I need to read.

This particular volume focused on the era after the assassination of Dr. King. First he covers Andy Young and Jesse Jackson in their efforts to live into Dr. King's vision through their political activities. Then he dives into detail discussing Black theology in its various forms--liberationist, womanist, liberal, feminist. Dorrien gives thorough presentations on various thinkers and major works. Then he discusses the celebration and challenge of the Obama years for the Black Social Gospel, including the relationship between Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Finally, he brings the topic into the current moment, with the impacts of Black Lives Matter and the prominence of Traci Blackmon, William Barber, and Raphael Warnock, with Warnock largely representing the drawing together of the political and theological efforts post-King.

View all my reviews

David von Drehle's column in today's WaPo attacking the anti-IVF zealots is worth a read.  He states unequivocally (and from personal experience), "the perverse result is that the supposed champions of families and babies are targeting the very families that want babies the most."

The column concludes powerfully:

I don’t think any people alive care more about the miracle of conception, the viability of a fetus and the gift of life than IVF patients. No one suffers more acutely or weeps more bitterly over unborn babies; they are, after all, holes at the centers of our lives. How can a person of faith fail to see the creative power of God in the intelligence that makes such reproductive technology possible? What crabbed theology sees God at work in sperm and eggs and reproductive organs, yet finds only sin in the brains of scientists and doctors? Lord save us from the zealots.

Prayers of Parents

1 Samuel 1:1-6, 9-18

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

16 June 2024

            When Stephen and I were planning this worship series we noted that this story from I Samuel, centering a woman desiring a child, would, ironically, fall on Father’s Day.

            So, we decided to lean into it and focus our attention more broadly upon parenting and families. 

            But this isn’t a story about some conventional family.  For one, Elkanah has two wives.  A reminder that families come in various forms. 

The feature of the story that resonates for many of us in the 21st century is Hannah’s struggle in her effort to have a child.  Many families struggle with fertility.  Many must find alternative paths to form their families.  Two months ago, we hosted a First Forum in which some of our church families talked about the various routes they took in forming their families.  Adoption, in vitro, donors, surrogates—these and other methods have become common.  In a story like today’s, we can find parallels to our experiences.

Which is part of the power of the Bible.  As Eugene Peterson described it, “The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us: ‘Live into this—this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being.’”

So these ancient stories call for our participation—to find the ways that God connects to us and speaks to us and the ways these stories resonate with our own.

Before continuing, I do want to take a moment to comment on something.  This week the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination I grew up in and was ordained in, passed a resolution against in vitro fertilization.  Probably all of us know children born through this medical procedure.  Couples who struggled emotionally and physically to have children and experienced in vitro as a modern miracle. 

In vitro fertilization helps to create life, to create families, to expand our ability to love and care for one another.  God gave us amazing brains and with those brains we’ve gained scientific understanding of the world.  We’ve invented and developed medical technologies and procedures that allow us to address age-old human conditions, like infertility.  Why shouldn’t we understand these modern medical miracles as themselves part of God’s gift and blessing? 

Here at First Central, and in the United Church of Christ, we embrace the good that comes from these technologies.  More importantly, we embrace the children and families that they create.  God loves you, God embraces you, you are welcomed and affirmed here.

Let me give a little introduction to the Book of First Samuel, which is the text we’ll be exploring the rest of the summer.  First Samuel is part of a series of books recounting the stories of the nation, particularly focused on the southern Israelite nation of Judah.  These stories center around the Davidic monarchy and the Temple in Jerusalem.  So kings and rulers figure prominently in the stories of First Samuel.

But one of the most fascinating aspects of these stories is how they are in depth explorations of moral character.  Unlike most nations, who tell triumphant stories of their rulers that gloss over any defects, the scribes of ancient Israel recorded both stories of triumph and failure.  All the weaknesses and shortcomings of their rulers are made clear.  Which is one reason these stories still draw our attention all these millennia later.  We resonate with the moral struggles and psychological depths of these characters.

Last week I talked about the Book of Ruth, and how it is set in the time of the judges, which was a time of chaos, disorder, and violence.  Particularly violence against women.  Ruth appears in that context as a counter-story, focused on two ordinary women and the ways they survive and thrive in the patriarchy of their day through their initiative.

First Samuel begins similarly, by centering a woman—Hannah.  The Book of Samuel implies that the project of building the nation begins in the prayers of this woman.  So, let’s turn our attention to Hannah for a moment.  What is it that she desires?

That’s the provocative question asked by biblical scholar David Jobling in his magnificent commentary on First Samuel.  A commentary I’ve been mining for treasures to preach for fifteen years now.

Jobling takes an interesting approach to this story, beginning with how he views Elkanah.  In many commentaries, Elkanah is interpreted as a man of great integrity and moral character, with deep affection for Hannah.  David Jobling isn’t so sure.  He says its possible that Elkanah with his two wives is enjoying a best-of-both-worlds available to a man in that kind of polygynous patriarchal system—he has one wife for bearing and raising children and another wife free of all those complications.  Jobling wonders, Elkanah “has no need of children from Hannah, and perhaps fears that she would cease to be attractive if she were worn out by childbearing.”

Hannah goes into the shrine and pours out her heart to God about how she feels in this situation and the way she’s being treated.  She wants a son.  But, as David Jobling points out, it’s not exactly clear why she wants a son.  Because she does not raise this son; she gives him away to be a servant of God, to grow up at the shrine.  It doesn’t seem that she wants a son for Elkanah—he’s already got children and Hannah in no way commits her son to her husband.  Nor does she seem to want a son to nurture and care for.

So, what does she want?  David Jobling says the story suggests that she wants a son who will be in service to God.  A son who will be a leader among the people.  He writes, “Perhaps this is an ambitious woman who, having little scope herself, hopes to satisfy her ambition vicariously through her son.”

Here is Jobling’s interpretive theory.  Hannah sees the state the nation is in—disorder, violence, and chaos.  She also sees the corruption of the priests at the shrine.  In the next chapter we are told about how the sons of Eli the priest have extorted people and also engaged in sexual harassment and probably worse. 

So she takes the initiative to do what she can to address the situation. Her patriarchal society limits what she is capable of doing herself, but she envisions a son who will become a leader of the people and serve without corruption.  Jobling writes, “As the initiative-taker in her story she is the cause of the restoration and glorification of judgeship in Samuel.  Through her son she achieves the resolution of the . . . scandals of her time.”  Through Hannah’s persistence and faithfulness, change for the better is brought to her people.

So, she is, in many ways, a mother of the nation, helping to give birth to a new order.

Hannah begins her revolutionary work with prayer.  Some commentators call her a “prayer-warrior,” to parallel the warriors we so often encounter in these stories.  Eugene Peterson makes much of Hannah’s prayers.  He points out how she’s not intimidated by religious authority, and that she goes around the prescribed rules for religious rituals, and takes matters into her own hands.  He writes, “She uses her own words, her own voice, without intermediaries.”  She boldly asserts her needs and is confident that God has addressed them.

Which suggests that she believes in a God who listens, who is present with us, who lives in solidarity to human need and suffering and responds. 

Today we sang “This Is My Father’s World.”  I love this hymn, and we don’t often sing it in its traditional form.  One thing I love about it is that the God it celebrates is not some removed and distant judge.  God in this hymn is immanent, present everywhere, gently discovered in nature—“in the rustling grass I hear him pass, he speaks to me everywhere.”  This hymn does celebrate God as Father, but it is a loving, affectionate, present father.  The best kind.  The ideal, really.

And because God is so intimately present, God is the power that strengthens us to fight the evils of our time.  When I find myself in times of trouble, or dismayed about the situation of the world, I will sing that last verse—“Oh, let me not forget, that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. . . . The battle is not done; Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and heaven be one.”

Another aside.  Two weeks ago the greatest living Christian theologian died.  Jurgen Moltmann grew up a youth in Nazi Germany.  As a teenager he was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery and experienced the horrors of bombing, watching his friends die.  He spent time in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and there discovered the Christian faith in its fullness.  Over the last seventy years he’s been one of the most prominent and influential of Christian voices.  Realizing that after the horrors of the war, the Holocaust, and the atom bomb, belief in God was endangered.  What was needed was a theology that arose from these experiences of suffering.

And so Moltmann wrote about a God who suffers with us.  Not a God that is remote, free of emotion, and unacquainted with the human condition.  But a God who feels, who loves deeply and compassionately, and who took it upon God’s self at the cross to experience the depths of human evil and suffering. And because of the crucifixion, God is a power always present with us in our suffering and pain.

Moltmann, though, was primarily a theologian of hope.  That we must always be looking forward to newness and possibility.  That we are the eternal beginners.  And what we hope for is a fullness of life, an eternal livingness, that enriches our experiences every day.  He celebrated the ways we encounter God in all that is joyful, good, beautiful, and fun.

And so the Christian church mourns the passing of this, our brother, one of the greatest Christian voices of all time. 

I see a parallel with Hannah’s belief in God.  She is confident that God will hear her and respond.  That her child will bring about the changes she desires, a nation that lives more fully into God’s vision for humanity.

The story of Hannah is not one of an ideal parent, as we usually conceive it.  Frankly, she doesn’t seem all that maternal.  Her vision is big and bold and far transcends her own family.  So, she becomes an interesting model for us and a reminder that families come in many forms, and that there’s not just one model for how we parent.

To those who are parents or who long to be parents, what is it you desire?  What do you hope and dream for your children?  What are your prayers? 

For God, who is also our parent, our mother and father, is listening.  God has dreams and desires to.  Of how each of us can transform and grow into our best selves.  Of how we can all learn to be family to one another.  Of how our society can become more just and kind and good.

So, let us pray for what we desire—for our children, our families, our world.  Trusting that God is with us as we work together to make our longings a reality.

Beloved Community

Ruth 4:9-17

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 June 2024

               A couple of weeks ago, in the daily email from the Atlantic, Charles Sykes wrote about what he called the “airsickness” of our current moment in America.  He described the airsickness as experiencing “a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see.”  And what has caused this?  Sykes explains:

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

He summed it up—"we find ourselves in a land of confusion.”

               Those descriptions resonated with me as I was preparing this summer sermon series on Old Testament stories beginning with the Book of Ruth.  Ruth is set during the period of the Judges, before Israel had an enduring monarchy.  And if you’ve ever read the Book of Judges, you know that it details a society descending further and further into chaos, disorder, and violence.  Each generation appears to get worse, and the final story of the Book is one of rape, murder, mutilation, and horrific violence as cities and tribes attempt to destroy one another.

               Our time is obviously not as fraught as that period of ancient Israelite history, but there are parallels with the sense of disorder, dread, and confusion.

               And in this context, we get the Book of Ruth.  As Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis writes, “Ruth is the still, small voice after the cataclysmic storm of Judges.”  She develops that idea further:

In the wake of Judges’ scenes of large-scale violence, deeply problematic national leadership, and moral deterioration of the whole people Israel, Ruth is a story of personal relationships that prove to be redemptive in the lives of a few ordinary people—yet ultimately point in the direction of hope for Israel as a whole.           

               The Book of Ruth, then, might just be a great place to turn as well in the summer of 2024, here to find how ordinary, modest people enter into relationships that “sow seeds of hope in the midst of desperate situations.”

               Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the rest of the story that precedes what I’ve read already. 

               Naomi and her husband and two sons leave Bethlehem during a famine and move to the country of Moab.  Now, Moab is sometimes a rival and enemy of Israel and sometimes is occupied by Israel.  It is not necessarily the most friendly of places for them to live.  Yet, they stay.  Eventually Naomi’s husband dies and her two sons marry local women, one of them being Ruth.  Those sons then die, leaving the three women alone. 

               Naomi decides to return to her homeland, to Bethlehem, and releases the two women to return to their families.  A fraught situation in ancient patriarchal cultures, where a woman, most of the time, needed a father, husband, or son to provide for them.  The story turns attention to the unjust plight of women in such a culture. 

Orpah decides to return home, but Ruth commits herself to traveling with Naomi in what is one of the most beautiful passages of scripture, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following after you!  Where you go, I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.”

This pledge has often been used at weddings.  An interesting fact we gay marriage activists used to point out, because this is actually a commitment made between two women.  Not that they were married, because they weren’t, but it is one of those Bible stories that explodes traditional, patriarchal, hetero-normative gender and family relations.  These two women form a family and a household out of commitment and love for one another.  And then they use the survival strategies and coping skills necessary for two women to survive and thrive in the social setting they find themselves.

Because of this, Naomi and Ruth have long been icons in the queer community.  It’s irrelevant whether they were romantic partners or not—they exhibit the love and commitment of same-gender families and they embody the strategies and skills that our families have often had to evoke in order to survive and thrive in legal and social regimes that discriminated against us.  For these reasons the scholar Mona West proclaims Ruth to be our “queer ancestress.”  She exhibits the self-determination we require to live our full, authentic selves.  So, Happy Pride Month, from this ancient Biblical story.

Naomi and Ruth, then, return to Bethlehem and now must figure out how to live.  Ruth goes out into the fields to glean the leftovers from the harvests.  One of the ethical principles handed down in the Torah, is that when a farmer harvests their fields, they are to leave a remnant for the poor to come to collect for their survival. 

The Book of Ruth is also a story about the welcome and inclusion of foreigners, including those from untrusted rival nations.  The Book of Ruth is in the canon to counter the exclusionary perspective of some other biblical books, such as Ezra, which forbids the taking of foreign wives.  As biblical scholar Jacob L. Wright points out, the Book of Ruth is a challenge to the Old Testament laws, and evidences how the biblical canon includes stories about people of protest who provide examples of dissent and challenge, which themselves become core aspects of the biblical testimony.

(Many layers in this little book Ruth)

While gleaning, Ruth draws the attention of Boaz, who guarantees that she will be able to gather enough to support her and Naomi.  Naomi encourages Ruth to take matters into her own hands, so one night, Ruth enters Boaz’s tent, and they sleep together.  After that, Boaz takes the steps to publicly claim Ruth as his own, leading to the bit of the story I read earlier. 

A child is born, and the community celebrates that child as Naomi’s, recognizing that Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz have together formed a unique family and household that defies the hetero-normative, patriarchal standards.  And this family ends up being the most consequential of families—the origin of the Davidic Monarchy.

According to Ellen Davis this story “shows how the future opens up from the faithful, small-scale actions of three ordinary people, each of them serving the needs, spoken and unspoken, of the other.” 

This is a story of how people should act in a time of crisis and difficulty.  It centers women.  Modest, ordinary women.  And teaches us that relationships should be prioritized, even when those relationships don’t quite fit custom and law.  What matters is that we treat each other with generosity and loving-kindness.  That we trust one another and defer to each other.  We mutually take these risks with one another in order to create something new and better that helps all of us to survive and thrive.

               Ellen Davis writes, “The real test of covenant relationship is how one vulnerable person treats another who is likewise vulnerable.”

               In our own topsy-turvy time, that remains the true test.  How we vulnerable creatures treat each other in our vulnerability.  With proper care and attention, we can create the beloved community, where all are welcomed and included and given the opportunities and the capacities to flourish. 

               From our ordinary, daily acts of kindness, the future opens up to new possibilities.

               I like how UFMCC pastor Celena M. Duncan describes it in her commentary on Ruth:

For God’s realm to be realized concretely on earth, at the center of one’s life must be love of God, respect for self and for others, loving-kindness, responsibility, accountability, and integrity.  These are boundaries by which we recognize the dignity and personhood of ourselves and of each other, by which we acknowledge our common humanity, siblings all, children of the same Parent with the same spark of the divine that runs through one and all.  In the Creator of all, there is no straight or gay, asexual or bisexual, oriental or occidental, this nation or that one, old or young, not even Protestant or Roman Catholic.  There is only the diversity that the Creator in wisdom, love, and grace wants to share with us, diversity that we are expected to treat responsibly and respectfully.