What Time Is It?
August 12, 2007
August 12, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:35-40
Timing is important – it’s true in telling a joke, it’s true in music, it’s true in investments and it’s true in athletics. One of the places where timing is most important is in hitting a baseball – a perfect swing that cuts the air a nanosecond after the ball has been there is nothing. Well, not nothing. It’s a strike, and three of them will get a batter back to the bench quicker than hitting the ball. But hitting the ball is the goal, and timing is critical in it – critical, but not everything. Coordination, form, and for the home run ball: strength, are also critical. Timing is also critical for celebrity – just ask Barry Bonds, who achieved homerun record status on Tuesday by breaking Hank Aaron’s record – Aaron had held the homerun title for 33 years. But of course the timing of Bonds’ ascendancy to this position in baseball has resulted in considerable ambivalence among baseball fans and baseball writers because it seems clear that Bonds achieved this record with the aid of steroids, and at a time when the culture and the rules have rejected steroid-enhanced performance. It turns out it really isn’t just about winning or losing, but how you play the game, at least at this time. Timing is important.
What was accepted or lauded in one era becomes unacceptable, and sometimes even criminal, at another point in time. This isn’t just an accident of history, it can also be the result of cultural or legal progress. We grow in our understanding – think about the progress that has been made in caring for children. Cultures over time have practiced child sacrifice, child labor, and child abuse – now all these practices are illegal, if not totally nonexistent. Unfortunately, some of our progress seems to be of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety – long-held practices can be slow to be abandoned, even after people begin to look at them differently.
The reading from Isaiah highlights some of this kind of response to change – the prophet, speaking for God, is telling the people of Israel that faithfulness is not simply a matter of presenting sacrifices to God. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?” God is telling the people that making sacrifices is not the way to show faithfulness – responding to God with our whole lives is what God seeks: “remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Practicing justice, not making sacrifices is what God desires, according to this reading.
The sacrifice mentality has been slow to die though – and the scriptural record is mixed: in that way that the Bible itself seems to echo the two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of growth in human understanding. The language of sacrifice continues on, side-by-side with many of the prophets and Jesus as well criticizing the practice. Yet, despite that consistent record of prophetic speech against sacrifice, even Christians have continued sacrifice-centered faith – in language and theology if not in the actual slaughter of humans or animals. Many Christians believe that the purpose of the ministry of Jesus was for Jesus to die as a sacrificial offering to appease God. Even though Jesus, in his ministry, undermined the theology and practice of sacrifice, many in the history of Christianity have ignored the teachings of Jesus while assuming that the death of Jesus is what God desired. Most Christians persist in calling the furniture at the front of the church an altar, as if we were prepared to offer sacrifices to God. I don’t mean to offend here – I know that most people have never planned to offer a sacrifice here – I haven’t noticed any stream of church members showing up with doves or small animals to kill during worship. And many people have never heard that we call this furniture a “communion table” – but the theology is important: we share a meal that God gives us, and we offer thanks for it (the word eucharist comes from the Greek for thanksgiving); we don’t offer sacrifices to God. The theology of grace is a recognition that God is reaching out to us, that God is loving us, that God gives us gifts in every moment – and our faithfulness comes as a response to the love and generosity of God, not as a way to earn God’s love.
So Isaiah tells us that God desires for us to learn to do good – to rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow – we’re called to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In ancient culture, widows had no standing in the community, and usually no means of support – God is telling the people of Jerusalem not to make gestures of sacrifice in worship and then ignore people in need – faithfulness requires justice.
The letter to the Hebrews also talks about faithfulness – and gives many examples, some of whom are in today’s reading, and some of whom we’ll hear about next week. In this reading, another dimension of faithfulness emerges, and that is that the results are not always seen – “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This definition has been burdensome to many folks – it seems to fly in the face of intelligence, and it leads to people defining faith as starting where reason stops. We talk about the leap of faith, as opposed to logical steps. But I think what’s being described here is not so much faith as opposed to reason, but faith as opposed to reward. The sense is that we do things on the basis of faith that might not seem to bear an immediate reward in terms of our own self-interest. It requires faith to give money to feed the hungry when we know that the end of hunger is unseen, but what we are doing without is seen. The stories that are related in this chapter are of people who persisted in doing what they understood God to be calling them to do, even when the results were not obvious, or even realized in their lifetimes, for some.
Abraham and Sarah are lifted up as examples of faithfulness in this chapter, because they believed God would provide them descendants even though they had not had children yet in their marriage, and they were both elderly. Some people see their faith as out of reach – how could they persist in believing that God would provide them an heir? Yet, if you are familiar with the whole story of Abraham and Sarah, their faith is quite normal, and very much of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety. They tried to trust God, but they often also tried to arrange events themselves.
And this continues to be a dilemma for people of faith – do we just trust God, or is some action required on our part as well? There’s the classic story of the woman who was caught in a flood, and when the people came by in a truck to rescue her, she said, “No, I’m trusting in God to take care of me.” And when the patrol came in a boat as the waters were rising, she said from the upstairs window, “No, I trust God to take care of me.” And when the rescuers came in a helicopter to pluck her from her roof, she said, “No, I trust God to take care of me.” So when she drowned, and met God in heaven, she asked, “God, I trusted you, why didn’t you care for me?” And God replied, “I sent you a truck, a boat and a helicopter – what did you want?”
Where does our action become a lack of trust in God’s faithfulness? Or does our faithfulness require some action on our part?? Abraham and Sarah kept trying to work out God’s plans for them on their own – at one point Abraham impregnated a female slave, Hagar, to get an heir that way – but in this case, God provided an heir through Sarah. And even once their one son Isaac was born, they had to trust that the multitude of heirs would come later – through his descendents. Faithfulness requires discernment – being alert to the circumstances and possibilities and being willing to act, even sometimes when our actions don’t appear to have the possibility of bearing much fruit. In those cases it seems that our trust and our actions together form our faithfulness – we feed the hungry even when we cannot see that our actions can solve the problem. We extend kindness even when it seems unlikely to be received in the spirit it is given.
Often in our modern times, I hear Christians say about some proposed solution or another – well sure, that seems like a great idea, but in the real world, it wouldn’t work. These may be the places in our time when faithfulness requires acting without seeing the results – trusting that God is participating, too, and can leverage our actions into results we cannot see. Marcus Borg, in discussing this dilemma, and Christ’s vision of God’s kingdom, writes: “Does [this] mean that Jesus thought the kingdom of God, God’s dream, would come about through human political achievement? By no means. I do not imagine that he thought that. It is always God’s kingdom, God’s dream, God’s will. And it involves a deep centering in the God whom Jesus knew. So did he think God would bring in the kingdom without our involvement? I do not imagine this either. Indeed, the choice between ‘God does it’ or ‘we do it’ is a misleading and inappropriate dichotomy. In St. Augustine’s magnificent aphorism, ‘God without us will not; and we without God cannot.’”
So how do we know what to do? We center in God, Borg suggests – we take time to learn about God through Bible study, through learning with and from others. But, we don’t only try to learn about God, we try to get to know God as well, through our own participation in faithful living. William McNamara wrote in The Human Adventure: The Art of Contemplative Living: “Mentally we have made religion into a thing. What used to be the possessive and progressive experience of a people has become a circumscribed entity. Instead of flowing with the water’s current, we have crawled out of the stream, sat on the bank, and begun to study the stream….It is as Christians’ faith in God has weakened that they have busied themselves with Christianity, and as their personal relationship with Christ has waned that they have turned to religion. So many Christian today speak about believing in Christianity rather than believing in Christ himself and in God….They preach Christianity instead of the good news of Jesus Christ and practice Christianity instead of love….” That language will make some of us uncomfortable because it seems to veer a little close to the “my personal Lord and Savior, Jesus” of the evangelical camp – a personal relationship that all too often lacks a social and ethical dimension, that does not lead to the practice of justice to which Isaiah called us.
But God is a relational God, and not merely an intellectual proposition. One of the things that faithful people are called to is to see the challenges and opportunities of the times in which we live, and to discern our faithful response. One of the challenges of our time is that we live in a spectator consumer culture – we observe and think about things, and make our decisions based on the payoff to us.
Faithfulness runs counter to both spectatorship and consumerism – faithfulness calls for radical involvement: with God, with the Earth that God entrusted to our care, and with the people God calls us to love. We can’t just pay other people to care about people, about the planet, or about God, while we live our lives as usual – faithfulness requires our own personal involvement. And although times change, circumstances change, and exactly what actions faithfulness will call us to may change from time to time – faith still calls us to hope and involvement even when the results are not yet seen. What distinguishes our faithful actions from the actions of those who don’t have faith (and who still may be part of important work in our world), is that we trust that God is working in and through our actions, that we are not in it alone, that justice is not only our dream, but the dream of the Heart of the universe.
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible of Esther – who because of her great beauty became the queen of Persia. While she was queen, there was an opportunity to save the Jewish people, but to speak to the king was going to be very dangerous. When she wondered whether she should risk the displeasure of the king to try and save her people, her uncle reminded her, “Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
For such a time as this, we too are called…faith is about our involvement – with God, with each other, and with the world in our time. As a result of our centering in God, and learning about others and the world, we discern what time it is – what faithful living calls us to in this time, and this place. We’re called to alertness – as Jesus said, “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit….” – our centeredness in God is not a call away from action, but a call to faithfully discerning to just what actions we are called. What time is it? It is always the task of faithful living to ask, and answer, this question. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:35-40
Timing is important – it’s true in telling a joke, it’s true in music, it’s true in investments and it’s true in athletics. One of the places where timing is most important is in hitting a baseball – a perfect swing that cuts the air a nanosecond after the ball has been there is nothing. Well, not nothing. It’s a strike, and three of them will get a batter back to the bench quicker than hitting the ball. But hitting the ball is the goal, and timing is critical in it – critical, but not everything. Coordination, form, and for the home run ball: strength, are also critical. Timing is also critical for celebrity – just ask Barry Bonds, who achieved homerun record status on Tuesday by breaking Hank Aaron’s record – Aaron had held the homerun title for 33 years. But of course the timing of Bonds’ ascendancy to this position in baseball has resulted in considerable ambivalence among baseball fans and baseball writers because it seems clear that Bonds achieved this record with the aid of steroids, and at a time when the culture and the rules have rejected steroid-enhanced performance. It turns out it really isn’t just about winning or losing, but how you play the game, at least at this time. Timing is important.
What was accepted or lauded in one era becomes unacceptable, and sometimes even criminal, at another point in time. This isn’t just an accident of history, it can also be the result of cultural or legal progress. We grow in our understanding – think about the progress that has been made in caring for children. Cultures over time have practiced child sacrifice, child labor, and child abuse – now all these practices are illegal, if not totally nonexistent. Unfortunately, some of our progress seems to be of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety – long-held practices can be slow to be abandoned, even after people begin to look at them differently.
The reading from Isaiah highlights some of this kind of response to change – the prophet, speaking for God, is telling the people of Israel that faithfulness is not simply a matter of presenting sacrifices to God. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?” God is telling the people that making sacrifices is not the way to show faithfulness – responding to God with our whole lives is what God seeks: “remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Practicing justice, not making sacrifices is what God desires, according to this reading.
The sacrifice mentality has been slow to die though – and the scriptural record is mixed: in that way that the Bible itself seems to echo the two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of growth in human understanding. The language of sacrifice continues on, side-by-side with many of the prophets and Jesus as well criticizing the practice. Yet, despite that consistent record of prophetic speech against sacrifice, even Christians have continued sacrifice-centered faith – in language and theology if not in the actual slaughter of humans or animals. Many Christians believe that the purpose of the ministry of Jesus was for Jesus to die as a sacrificial offering to appease God. Even though Jesus, in his ministry, undermined the theology and practice of sacrifice, many in the history of Christianity have ignored the teachings of Jesus while assuming that the death of Jesus is what God desired. Most Christians persist in calling the furniture at the front of the church an altar, as if we were prepared to offer sacrifices to God. I don’t mean to offend here – I know that most people have never planned to offer a sacrifice here – I haven’t noticed any stream of church members showing up with doves or small animals to kill during worship. And many people have never heard that we call this furniture a “communion table” – but the theology is important: we share a meal that God gives us, and we offer thanks for it (the word eucharist comes from the Greek for thanksgiving); we don’t offer sacrifices to God. The theology of grace is a recognition that God is reaching out to us, that God is loving us, that God gives us gifts in every moment – and our faithfulness comes as a response to the love and generosity of God, not as a way to earn God’s love.
So Isaiah tells us that God desires for us to learn to do good – to rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow – we’re called to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In ancient culture, widows had no standing in the community, and usually no means of support – God is telling the people of Jerusalem not to make gestures of sacrifice in worship and then ignore people in need – faithfulness requires justice.
The letter to the Hebrews also talks about faithfulness – and gives many examples, some of whom are in today’s reading, and some of whom we’ll hear about next week. In this reading, another dimension of faithfulness emerges, and that is that the results are not always seen – “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This definition has been burdensome to many folks – it seems to fly in the face of intelligence, and it leads to people defining faith as starting where reason stops. We talk about the leap of faith, as opposed to logical steps. But I think what’s being described here is not so much faith as opposed to reason, but faith as opposed to reward. The sense is that we do things on the basis of faith that might not seem to bear an immediate reward in terms of our own self-interest. It requires faith to give money to feed the hungry when we know that the end of hunger is unseen, but what we are doing without is seen. The stories that are related in this chapter are of people who persisted in doing what they understood God to be calling them to do, even when the results were not obvious, or even realized in their lifetimes, for some.
Abraham and Sarah are lifted up as examples of faithfulness in this chapter, because they believed God would provide them descendants even though they had not had children yet in their marriage, and they were both elderly. Some people see their faith as out of reach – how could they persist in believing that God would provide them an heir? Yet, if you are familiar with the whole story of Abraham and Sarah, their faith is quite normal, and very much of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety. They tried to trust God, but they often also tried to arrange events themselves.
And this continues to be a dilemma for people of faith – do we just trust God, or is some action required on our part as well? There’s the classic story of the woman who was caught in a flood, and when the people came by in a truck to rescue her, she said, “No, I’m trusting in God to take care of me.” And when the patrol came in a boat as the waters were rising, she said from the upstairs window, “No, I trust God to take care of me.” And when the rescuers came in a helicopter to pluck her from her roof, she said, “No, I trust God to take care of me.” So when she drowned, and met God in heaven, she asked, “God, I trusted you, why didn’t you care for me?” And God replied, “I sent you a truck, a boat and a helicopter – what did you want?”
Where does our action become a lack of trust in God’s faithfulness? Or does our faithfulness require some action on our part?? Abraham and Sarah kept trying to work out God’s plans for them on their own – at one point Abraham impregnated a female slave, Hagar, to get an heir that way – but in this case, God provided an heir through Sarah. And even once their one son Isaac was born, they had to trust that the multitude of heirs would come later – through his descendents. Faithfulness requires discernment – being alert to the circumstances and possibilities and being willing to act, even sometimes when our actions don’t appear to have the possibility of bearing much fruit. In those cases it seems that our trust and our actions together form our faithfulness – we feed the hungry even when we cannot see that our actions can solve the problem. We extend kindness even when it seems unlikely to be received in the spirit it is given.
Often in our modern times, I hear Christians say about some proposed solution or another – well sure, that seems like a great idea, but in the real world, it wouldn’t work. These may be the places in our time when faithfulness requires acting without seeing the results – trusting that God is participating, too, and can leverage our actions into results we cannot see. Marcus Borg, in discussing this dilemma, and Christ’s vision of God’s kingdom, writes: “Does [this] mean that Jesus thought the kingdom of God, God’s dream, would come about through human political achievement? By no means. I do not imagine that he thought that. It is always God’s kingdom, God’s dream, God’s will. And it involves a deep centering in the God whom Jesus knew. So did he think God would bring in the kingdom without our involvement? I do not imagine this either. Indeed, the choice between ‘God does it’ or ‘we do it’ is a misleading and inappropriate dichotomy. In St. Augustine’s magnificent aphorism, ‘God without us will not; and we without God cannot.’”
So how do we know what to do? We center in God, Borg suggests – we take time to learn about God through Bible study, through learning with and from others. But, we don’t only try to learn about God, we try to get to know God as well, through our own participation in faithful living. William McNamara wrote in The Human Adventure: The Art of Contemplative Living: “Mentally we have made religion into a thing. What used to be the possessive and progressive experience of a people has become a circumscribed entity. Instead of flowing with the water’s current, we have crawled out of the stream, sat on the bank, and begun to study the stream….It is as Christians’ faith in God has weakened that they have busied themselves with Christianity, and as their personal relationship with Christ has waned that they have turned to religion. So many Christian today speak about believing in Christianity rather than believing in Christ himself and in God….They preach Christianity instead of the good news of Jesus Christ and practice Christianity instead of love….” That language will make some of us uncomfortable because it seems to veer a little close to the “my personal Lord and Savior, Jesus” of the evangelical camp – a personal relationship that all too often lacks a social and ethical dimension, that does not lead to the practice of justice to which Isaiah called us.
But God is a relational God, and not merely an intellectual proposition. One of the things that faithful people are called to is to see the challenges and opportunities of the times in which we live, and to discern our faithful response. One of the challenges of our time is that we live in a spectator consumer culture – we observe and think about things, and make our decisions based on the payoff to us.
Faithfulness runs counter to both spectatorship and consumerism – faithfulness calls for radical involvement: with God, with the Earth that God entrusted to our care, and with the people God calls us to love. We can’t just pay other people to care about people, about the planet, or about God, while we live our lives as usual – faithfulness requires our own personal involvement. And although times change, circumstances change, and exactly what actions faithfulness will call us to may change from time to time – faith still calls us to hope and involvement even when the results are not yet seen. What distinguishes our faithful actions from the actions of those who don’t have faith (and who still may be part of important work in our world), is that we trust that God is working in and through our actions, that we are not in it alone, that justice is not only our dream, but the dream of the Heart of the universe.
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible of Esther – who because of her great beauty became the queen of Persia. While she was queen, there was an opportunity to save the Jewish people, but to speak to the king was going to be very dangerous. When she wondered whether she should risk the displeasure of the king to try and save her people, her uncle reminded her, “Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
For such a time as this, we too are called…faith is about our involvement – with God, with each other, and with the world in our time. As a result of our centering in God, and learning about others and the world, we discern what time it is – what faithful living calls us to in this time, and this place. We’re called to alertness – as Jesus said, “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit….” – our centeredness in God is not a call away from action, but a call to faithfully discerning to just what actions we are called. What time is it? It is always the task of faithful living to ask, and answer, this question. Amen.