Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God by Elizabeth A. Johnson
The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis by Martha C. Nussbaum
Fishing in a Shallow Sea: Church Strategies for the 21st Century by Michael S. PiazzaRevolutionary Joy
Matthew 3:1-12; Isaiah 11:1-10
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
8 December 2019
Matthew 3:1-12
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.
Because in the wider culture it is already Christmas season, we often overlook that the biblical lessons for the first few Sundays of Advent are filled with darkness, doom, and gloom. The First Sunday of Advent is actually not about the first coming of Jesus, but the second coming, and the biblical lessons are about apocalypse and judgment. The second Sunday isn’t much better, as we get this cantankerous wilderness prophet John the Baptist speaking of judgement, righteounses, and fire and requiring everyone to repent of their sins. Not too many carols of the season include “burn with unquenchable fire” among the lyrics.
Yet this negativity is essential for Advent and Christmas to make sense. The birth of Jesus is not about warm sentimentality, as much as we all enjoy our warm sentimentality. It is about light in the darkness, blossoming desserts, the destruction of the weapons of war, in other words—the struggle between good and evil. So, you can’t adequately prepare for the birthday of light and peace without spending some time waiting in the darkness.
Which is why we chose “Radical Joy” as our Advent theme. No seriously.
Early in the autumn I sat down to read the introductory essay of a new book of poems that had just arrived—Joy: 100 Poems, edited by Christian Wiman. Wiman is one of the leading Christian poets of our age. In 2017 he published this volume of 100 mostly contemporary poems about joy. So much contemporary poetry is focused on pain and injustice, and he wanted to elevate that joy is there too. He also was vividly aware that we live in deeply troubled times, and he writes about how many of his friends were suspect when he said he was working on a book about joy. But he decided now is precisely when we need joy.
Reading his introduction in the early autumn, that spoke to me. The message was reaffirmed a few days later when I listened to the podcast of Krista Tippett’s interview of Ross Gay who has also been writing about the need for joy, delight, and gratitude precisely at this time. Here’s part of what he said about joy:
I have really been thinking that joy is the moments — for me, the moments when my alienation from people — but not just people, from the whole thing — it goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, like, everything becomes luminous.
And for Ross Gay that moment of connection with other people is usually a connection in our pain and our suffering and the reality that we are all going to die. That is the deep connection between us what he calls a “joy-ning” spelt j-o-y-n-i-n-g. Despite all that is wrong with us and with the world, we can connect to each other and work together to create life. Ross Gay says that is the source of our joy.
In the interview Krista Tippet got him to talking about the community garden he works with in Indianapolis and how the public space of the garden and the act of gardening are joyful. Here’s how Ross Gay describes it and how gardening makes his life better:
For one, it’s just fun to be in a garden, for me, dreaming about what could happen: that kind of mystical space, actually, of trying to figure out what this thing that I do here could be in five years, that kind of strange dreaming space that it is.
There’s also something really moving about putting a seed in the ground and it turning into something really different, and a lot of something really different and, potentially, on and on and on, a lot of something very different.
I’m crazy for smells, and a garden gives you smells. I’m nuts about that. I’m nuts about that.
And I know the soil makes you happy, too, put your hands in soil. We know that. There’s many things.
To walk out your door and get a little food — I can go on and on about this.
What is joy? And is it different from happiness, delight, and pleasure?
The poet Yehuda Amichai says that we are blurry when it comes to joy. It is pain that our language is precise about. He wrote, “I want to describe, with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness and blurry joy.”
Rainer Marie Rilke wrote that “Joy is a moment.” I always felt the opposite, that joy is a cultivated attitude toward life and that happiness is what comes and go. But I get what Rilke means. Maybe we are using one word to describe too many different things? The dictionary gives us three definitions: 1) “a condition or feeling of high pleasure or delight,” 2) “the expression or manifestation of such feeling,” and 3) “a source or object of pleasure or satisfaction.” Joy, then, can describe the thing, the feeling, and the expression of the feeling.
Christian Wiman describes joy as “that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word.” Indeed. Which is why he gives us 100 poems. Poets are the people with the vision and gift for language who might help us to better understand and better describe and better experience joy. Here’s one of my new favourite poems from the book, entitled “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee:
From blossoms come
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty, skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Wow, I love that poem. Partly because I know that experience. Oklahoma, where I’m from, is a peach growing state. And to me there is no eating experience that is better than a fresh peach, warmed by the sun, eaten on the side of the road, bought from the farmer’s fruit stand. And the juices run down your chin and drip onto your clothes and you have sticky hands afterwards. Nothing better.
In grad school every summer at the height of peach season, I’d round up a car load of friends, everyone had to bring along one song to share with the group, and we’d drive an hour to the peach orchards, buy our peaches, eat them, and then drive back. Sometimes other people thought this a silly waste of time. Yes, that was part of the point.
In preparation for a worship season of Radical Joy I finally read C. S. Lewis’s memoir of his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, which is entitled Surprised by Joy. Lewis has a rather unique understanding of what joy is. For him it is something of a technical term he uses to describe “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy is an experience that comes in a moment and is fleeting, leaving us some sense of loss but also the longing to experience joy again. He writes about the various times he had that experience—reading adventure tales and myths and walking among the hills are the primary ones. Joy is a by-product, that arises from our experience of something else (like being the by-product of eating a warm fresh peach). Lewis writes that if you aim for joy itself, you are missing the point and won’t experience it.
What he came to realize over the course of his intellectual and spiritual development, is that joy itself was a sign, given to us by God, and pointing us toward God. For God is the true fulfillment of our longing, “the real Desirable,” according to Lewis. So our experiences of joy are signs pointing us toward the true goal of our life.
John the Baptist comes preaching judgement and repentance for the reign of God is coming. But what does that mean? What is God going to do when God gets here? For that we need the vision of the Poet Isaiah: righteousness for the poor, equity for the meek, the end of wickedness. Peace will come to the natural order. Children will lead us. Children will play, which implies we all will. There will be no hurt or destruction. And knowledge will be everywhere. This will be glorious.
Isaiah is describing the revolutionary change that God intends for the Earth. This is a vision of a more just world. It is also a vision that delights us and fills us with joy.
Back in that On Being interview, Krista Tippet asks Ross Gay about the connection between justice and joy.
Ms. Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves, as much as what one must fight.
Mr. Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. And I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often. Often. Not everyone. And I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.
Ms. Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said, “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”
John preaches judgement upon our sinful and troubled world. He calls for us to repent, to change our ways, to become righteous people. Righteous and just. And the justice he’s working for, demanding that we work for, is God’s vision of a peaceful, playful world that Isaiah has described for us. A vision that is wonderful and adorable that we should exalt and celebrate.
Joy is radical because it is a sign of the great Desirable—God. Joy is renegade because our troubled times want us to be cynical and despairing, angry and fearful. Joy is revolutionary because it imagines and insists upon a beautiful, wonderful vision of our future together upon this earth.
Resist the forces of cynicism and fear. Instead, “bite into the round jubilance of peach.” “Put your hands in soil.” Ask a one year old what joy is and laugh knowingly when “cookie” is the answer. Hold in your imagination what is wonderful. And rejoice at all the good things of God.
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. ScottAn interesting interview about the kinds of moral people we want in our lives. Most of us want to date and marry people who think deontologically and elect consequentialists.
I've never agreed with Patricia Churchland's philosophy of mind, but in this interview some of her comments on morality resonated with me. Excerpts:
I think what’s troubling about Kant and utilitarians is that they have this idea, which really is a romantic bit of nonsense, that if you could only articulate the one deepest rule of moral behavior, then you’d know what to do. It turns out that’s not workable at all: There is no one deepest rule. We have all kinds of rules of thumb that help us with a starting point, but they can’t possibly handle all situations for all people for all times.
***
Of course we always care about the consequences. But the important thing is that’s only one constraint among many. Moral decision-making is a constraint satisfaction process whereby your brain takes many factors and integrates them into a decision.
Jurgen Moltmann calls the rise of national a setback for humanity.
Of course he has personal experience growing up under the Nazis. An excerpt:
He challenged Christians to reject nationalistic ideas.
"The church of Christ is present in all the people on earth and cannot become 'a national religion'," he said.
"The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity."
He added: "The church of Christ is not national, but it is a church of all the nations and humanity."
Kingdom, Power, & Glory
Exodus 33:17-23
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
24 November 2019
This autumn our worship series has been exploring the Lord’s Prayer, going line by line, and examining in some detail the meaning of the phrases and their theological and spiritual implications. Today we arrive at the very end, to the final line of the prayer as many of us know it, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.”
For my text today I’ve chosen an Old Testament story, when Moses the leader of the Exodus and the lawgiver of Israel, while in conversation with God asks God if he can see God’s glory. Hear now the word of the Lord.
Exodus 33:17-23
The Lord said to Moses, “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” And God said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” God said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
For the Word of God in scripture,
For the Word of God among us,
For the Word of God within us,
Thanks be to God.
Two weeks ago I told Sebastian, our four-and-a-half-year-old son, that I was preaching on “Deliver us from evil.” He asked, “Are you talking about the part with the 'power'?” I told him it would be the next week, and he responded “Yea!”
For some months now, during our bedtime routine, when I pray the Lord’s Prayer, Sebastian has taken to repeating the various phrases after me, so he is slowly learning the prayer himself. Besides adding butter to the prayer for our daily bread, he has one other interesting affectation when we pray the prayer. When we get to “thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” when he says power, he thrusts his fist upward.
I have no idea where he got this. Maybe some superhero image?
On Wednesday I picked him up at preschool to bring him to Wednesday night church. He immediately asked, “Are you talking about the power?” “Not tonight,” I answered. “That’s Sunday.” He then responded, “Well, I want you to talk about the power a lot.”
I’m now getting sermon advice and feedback from my four-year-old.
Clearly “the power” is his favourite part of the prayer.
On Facebook this week, I posted that story, and Pam Branscome replied, “What’s so attractive about power? Even a 4-year old knows!”
Indeed. In a life that is often complicated and messy, when we aren’t sure what to do, when other people are often telling us what to do, where things sometimes don’t make sense at all, we humans want at least a little power. A little choice, freedom, authority. Right?
Today, then, let’s ponder what is this divine power we are praising? How is it connected to God’s glory and God’s reign? And how does the divine power affect our lives?
This final line of the prayer that so many of us have memorized appears in modern translations of the Gospel of Matthew but not in Luke’s version of the prayer. Yet, even in Matthew it is apparently an addition to the text and not original. The line seems to have originated from the Didache, a first century Christian text that almost made it into the canon, and which remained an influential source for understanding the early Christian life.
Despite it probably not being original to the Gospel, it is still a grand ending to the prayer. Theologian Timothy Bradshaw describes how it “catches the mood of the whole prayer. It expresses trust and joy in God.”
God is the goodness we crave, so we focus our attention and our desire on the highest good. We are drawn to God’s glory, magnify our praise, and rest in contemplation of the one who love us. And through that love we are strengthened and encouraged.
The Exodus passage I opened with is a somewhat odd story. During the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, they are in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula where Moses is in conversation with God about what will happen next. This is the time when God is sharing the covenant. Part of the covenant, the Ten Commandments, will be written on stone tablets by God.
In this moment of intimate, divine presence, God and Moses are talking, and Moses asks to see God’s glory. God warns that the glory is too much for a man to see and live, but God will grant the wish, to a degree. Moses will be protected in a cleft of the rock, somewhat shielded from divine power by God’s hand. And he won’t see the face of God, only the backside. Is there even a little humor in this story?
While exploring the concept of God’s glory this week, I was drawn to this uncanny story by the theologian Sallie McFague. McFague died last week after a long career as one of the great theologians of our time.
If you read my column in the church newsletter, you know I first encountered her work while a student at Oklahoma Baptist University when Warren McWilliams picked her brand new book The Body of God for his Contemporary Theology class. In an exchange with Dr. McWilliams’s daughter this week, she conveyed her dad’s message that he taught several of Sallie McFague’s books over the years and that “they usually stretched students, especially the more conservative ones.”
At the time McFague’s interests resonated with my own, as I was trying to reconcile my theology with science and to incorporate a more ecological way of thinking into my worldview. She indeed stretched me. McFague’s book was the first work of feminist theology I read, and the first work of eco-theology. She is often described as an eco-feminist theologian.
Her first major contributions to theology were in analyzing the role of metaphors in talking about God. I referenced her work in this vein in the very first sermon in this series, when we discussed the name of God that opens this prayer, “Our Father.” McFague taught that all speech about God is metaphor. The traditional metaphors for God, including names like Father, King, and Lord, have served important functions in the life of the church. But she wondered if, in our contemporary context, they were helping us. She wrote that the metaphors and the names for God we used should heal and not harm. So, in her work Models of God, she proposed the images of Mother, Lover, and Friend for talking about God.
McFague’s interest eventually became focused on ecology; she even spent some time working with the Dalai Lama on this topic. She wanted to renew theology to help us address our ecological concerns. Her book The Body of God: An Ecological Theology was a bold proclamation moving the Christian church forward.
My copy of the book is falling apart from overuse. It came apart even more this week, as I was reviewing the work, remembering McFague and her influence upon me. And, thus, I came across her discussion of God’s glory, centered in this uncanny story from the Book of Exodus where Moses asks to see the glory of God.
McFague describes this Exodus story as “a wonderful mix of the outrageous and the awesome,” because it implies a physicality to God. That God has a body with a face and hands and a backside. What she finds in the story is the revelation that “God is not afraid of the flesh.” Here is an incarnationalism that she wants to lean into. What if we took this idea seriously, that God has a body. If so, can we see God’s body in the things around us? She imagines so. Here’s what she says,
Like Moses, when we ask, ‘Show me your glory,’ we might see the humble bodies of our own planet as visible signs of the invisible grandeur. . . . We might begin to see the marvels at our feet and at our fingertips: the intricate splendor of an Alpine forget-me-not or a child’s hand. We might begin to realize the extraordinariness of the ordinary. We would begin to delight in creation, not as the work of an external deity, but as a sacrament of the living God. We would see creation as bodies alive with the breath of God. We might realize what this tradition has told us . . . . we live and move and have our being in God. We might see ourselves and everything else as the living body of God.
If we were to do that, if we were to lean into the idea that God is physically present with us, and that physicality is contained in the world around us, how would that alter our understanding of God?
McFague continues:
We would, then, have an entire planet that reflects the glory, the very being . . . of God. We would have a concrete panorama for meditation on divine glory and transcendence: wherever we looked, whether at the sky with its billions of galaxies (only a few visible to us) or the earth (every square inch of which is alive with millions of creatures) or into the eyes of another human being, we would have an image of divine grandeur. The more we meditated on these bits of the divine body, the more intricate, different, and special each would become.
She writes that we would become more compassionate toward painful bodies: “We cannot in good conscience marvel with aesthetic delight at the one and not identify with the pain of the other: bodies are beautiful and vulnerable.” She continues, “Praising God in and through the beauty of bodies entails caring for the most basic needs of all bodies on the planet.” Thus “the aesthetic and the ethical unite.”
If we experience God’s glory this way, not as something remote, but something present in all physical existence, then we will reconceive our notions of power. According to Sallie McFague this organic model rejects the image of God as king where “the world is the realm of a distant, external ruler who has all power and expects unquestioned obedience from his subjects.”
Instead, we would locate divine power in the ordinary bodies all around us and that would lead us to wonder. Which would make us better people, more responsible to ourselves, to our neighbors, and to the earth.
To see the world as God’s body would transform our understanding. We would then “reconstruct [our] lives and [our] work to help our earth survive and prosper.”
We mourn this important thinker who has helped to guide the Christian church into a new and better sensibility, a richer understanding of the Gospel, and a deeper commitment to the issues of the world.
McFague’s interesting reflection upon God’s glory didn’t enter deeply into the topic of divine power. For that I returned this week to Rita Nakashima Brock and her classic book Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. Brock writes that our conventional notions of power are “colored by our experiences of life in societies of male dominance.” But these conventional notions are mistaken. The real power of life is born into us and has the capacity to heal, make whole, encourage, and liberate. This power emerges from our hearts. This is the power of incarnate love.
For Brock divine power is found “in the community of those who heal and minister to each other.” The power Jesus proclaimed and participated in is available to us in the church. She writes, “the community sustains life-giving power by its memory of its own brokenheartedness and of those who have suffered and gone before and by its members being courageously and redemptively present to all.”
Divine power arises in us, then, when we work together to heal our broken hearts. Divine power arises out of our vulnerability. Our capacity to feel deeply, which brings to us both pain and ecstatic delight. Divine power is the connection we feel to one another, the nurture and care we provide, sharing from our vulnerability to help heal each other.
Divine power is not distant and remote, but deep within each and every one of us. It is born into us, and we nurture it in relationship and community. God’s spirit works with us and through us to give us the support and encouragement we need to survive and thrive.
If Christ is going to reign in us, then we need to see God’s glory evident in everything around us and in ourselves. We need to reconceive our notions of power away from domination and toward healing. We need to tap into the power already present in us and in our relationships.
What we learn from these thinkers is that we are already vessels of God’s glory and God’s power. Our spiritual task in prayer is to awaken that vitality, so that it might be for us a source of energy and strength. Filling us with all the other good blessings of God.
In prayer we are led to contemplate God in all of God’s beauty and awesomeness. To delight in goodness and enjoy the blessings. To rest in God’s love and by that love to receive strength and encouragement.
The final line of the Lord’s Prayer, this grand statement of adoration and praise, is a realization—the goodness we crave, the fulfillment of our desires, the love of God, is already with us. To pray is to be attentive to this reality.
So, let us pray as Jesus taught us to pray, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”
These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. LewisA philosopher uses logic to examine the various impeachment "defenses" used by those continuing to support Donald Trump. A helpful read for refuting the various "defenses."