Everything Must Change
November 25, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Luke 23:33-43
Yesterday’s book review in the Chicago Tribune has the review of a new biography of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle Daniel. The biography is simply titled Boone and claims to tell the true story of Daniel Boone, a reality which Publishers Weekly claims is more interesting than the myth. We learn that Daniel Boone didn’t actually like coonskin caps, but preferred to wear beaver felt hats; also that he was a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter, whose real genius lay in building relationships, not achieving dominance. He became a legend during his own lifetime, so that it became harder to achieve the solitude he continually sought; and ironically, his passion for and exploration of the wilderness led to establishing byways which led to more rapid expansion of settlement into the west. It turns out that the more closely we look at Boone, the more challenging it is to characterize him simply as an explorer or a settler, a naturalist or a hunter, an enemy or ally of the Indians, and so on. Looking at the whole picture necessitates recognizing the complexity of both the man and his times. And as we strive to understand what his impact was on his world, we have to acknowledge that the categories we are trying to fit him into come from our world – perhaps our efforts at understanding him tell us as much about ourselves as they do about him. It’s only now, when we are grappling with the effects of over-civilization and unsustainable development that we are able to even notice the irony of his passion for the wilderness leading to it being more rapidly tamed and settled.
We have many of the same problems trying to develop a clear picture of Jesus. And our own context creates both challenges and opportunities in this – we in 21st-century America have so much distance from the Palestine of 2,000 years ago that we lose some of the richness of the imagery that is used in the Bible, even when we have a technical understanding of it. Let me give you an example. In the ancient Middle East, it was not uncommon to make the comparison between shepherds and kings – as we heard in the first reading from Jeremiah. In our culture, we have neither. We know what they are, but we don’t really fully appropriate the imagery in all that was conveyed to the original hearers. For example, kings in the ancient world were not the figureheads that our modern rulers are. The ruler who we are probably most familiar with is Queen Elizabeth the Second of England, who has a title that is impressive, even if her rule seems more symbolic than actual: she is Queen Elizabeth II by the Grace of God, Queen of this Realm and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
Actually, kings in ancient Israel were also seen as defenders of the faith – their primary duties were “…to see that the community lived in covenant with God and one another and that the community provided for the care of the poor.” So the passage from Jeremiah that is discussing shepherds is really talking about the kings of Israel, and their failure to care for the people and keep them faithful to the covenant with God. In the Jeremiah passage, God says that he will raise up a new king, who will “execute justice and righteousness in the land.” [Jeremiah 23:5] Justice has to do with fairness and equity, righteousness concerned following God. Theologian Douglas John Hall points out that the Biblical view of sin is entirely relational – think about the Ten Commandments which discuss our relationship with God, our relationship with our parents and our relationship with our neighbors. Even those commandments related to coveting things are described in terms of coveting our neighbor’s things.
And the understanding of king as shepherd is certainly relational, which is something a little foreign to us. I realized this during my recent trip to Africa, when every flock of cattle, goats or sheep I saw was tending by a shepherd or two. When was the last time we saw a shepherd? Our flocks are kept by fences, not by shepherds. And our society is governed by laws, not by relationships. Small wonder that our understanding of sin is breaking a rule or a boundary, rather than breaking a relationship. And no wonder many Americans think of God as someone who is primarily concerned with the rules, keeping us in bounds, than as the One who tends us, as all flocks are tended.
I noticed also in Africa how relational the culture was. They have laws, yes, as did Ancient Israel, but perhaps because there is less stuff, their security is not founded on material wealth and laws protecting it, but on relationships – every transaction is more relational than we experience here. Most of our shopping involved bargaining, and what is bargaining but relational pricing? And again and again people reached out to us – welcoming us, greeting us, asking about our experience in Tanzania and our thoughts about the U.S. government. The greetings bore warmth that went beyond the perfunctory “have a nice day” that seems to punctuate transactions here in the U.S. Our travel there helped me to understand that relationships are not as foundational to our culture, or as critical to our sense of wellbeing and safety, as they are in some other places and times.
But I don’t want to romanticize – other times and places have been concerned with power also. The kings in ancient Israel soon grew to depend on power rather than be guided by their relationship with God – this was the root of God’s complaint in the Jeremiah passage. And so when God came among us as Jesus, rejecting divine power in order to establish solidarity with humankind, and rejecting human power even as he sought to build relationships, his ministry and his teachings were an indictment of those who embraced and abused civic and religious power in his day…and everyday since. This is why his ministry was largely rejected by those in power, and embraced by those at the margins of society.
Jesus didn’t challenge those in power by asserting power, but by embracing non-violence which is in itself a rejection of power. So that by advocating “turn the other cheek”, “pray for your enemies”, “sell all you have and give to the poor” his teaching was a rejection of the physical, social and economic power in his culture, and this rejection was profoundly threatening to the power structures of his time, as non-violent activism continues to be threatening – both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were non-violent activists who were assassinated in our era.
There are two ways that modern teachings about Jesus tend to dilute him and render him a king in the modern sense – more symbol than substance. The first is to ignore his more difficult teachings and to assume that he really isn’t challenging us as he did the people of his time – that way we can ignore his more troublesome teachings. We tend to dilute the challenges of Christ, to simplify his teachings as simply “love God and love each other” without acknowledging how he expects that love to reshape us. Our second area of confusion is about the crucifixion of Jesus.
Now the theology of the cross has been discussed by many scholars over the millennia. Most of us understand that the cross of Jesus has to be central to the Christian faith – it wasn’t merely something incidental that happened. And it is fascinating that the Gospel reading for today is assigned for the Sunday celebrating the kingship of Jesus – this is Christ the King Sunday. I spoke last week about my conviction that the classic formulation of Jesus dying on the cross in order to provide a blood sacrifice to pay penance for the sins of humankind is a misunderstanding of the crucifixion of Jesus. Obviously such an assertion, which I won’t go back over this week – there are copies of last week’s sermon on the bookcase in the hall – such an assertion leads to the question, well then, what is the crucifixion of Jesus all about?
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading a book by theologian Douglas John Hall called The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World. Hall reminds us that the theology of the cross is, at its heart, incarnational theology at its fullest. Usually when we think of the incarnation of Jesus – the enfleshment of Jesus, God coming among us as a fully human creature – we think about the birth of Jesus. After all, Christmas is also known as the Feast of the incarnation. But Hall points out, fleshly creatures are born and they die. If God in the incarnation was coming into our experience as one of us, revealing God’s commitment to us, God’s solidarity with us, God’s embrace of us in all our grittiness, then when Jesus realized that his ministry was going to lead to the cross, his decision to accept that was revealing that God’s commitment to us holds nothing back. God stands with us in our pain, and enters into human suffering for our sake. God’s commitment to us is not conditional on our being good, or things going well. God’s solidarity with us is total. As Douglas John Hall writes, “Here the decision to be God-with-us is brought to the final test…That is why, what Jesus of Nazareth struggles with at Gethsemane, that second Garden of Temptation, is not simply whether he will or will not submit to the execution that his human enemies have been planning for him, but whether he will or will not reaffirm the divine decision to be Emmanuel….whether…he will take this final step toward the world….”
And this understanding of the crucifixion – Jesus, when the choice is before him, choosing to enter fully into our world and its suffering – has consequences for our own discipleship as well. Because if our faith is merely about assenting to the fact of Jesus, merely believing in Jesus, that trivializes not only the teachings and death of Jesus, but our own lives as well. Our discipleship has to ask more of us, or our own lives don’t hold any intrinsic significance. As Douglas John Hall explains, the connection between the crucifixion and our own lives is that we, too, are called to embrace the suffering of the world, to enter fully into engagement with the world and not indifference toward it. He writes, “We, whose movement in one way and another had always been away from the world, whether into our own private little worlds or to some theoretic superworld of our own devising –we through our ‘baptism into his death’ (Romans 6:1f), are being directed toward the world where his life is being lived…. Discipleship of Jesus Christ is nothing more nor less than being sent with increasing insistence ‘into all the world’ – or, in other words, embracing our freedom to manifest something like a new nonchalance about self and a new attention to the other.”
Dallas Willard, professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California, describes the kingship of Christ and its implications for us as follows: a kingdom is where the effective will of the king is done – so the kingdom of God is wherever what God wants done is done – wherever people are living the dream of God for this world, living in right relationships with each other, with the earth, and with God. So that in our discipleship, in the way we live our lives, in the relationships we have with one another, with our planet, and with the creator of all, we can actually extend the kingdom of God. It’s pretty clear that what God wants done isn’t done all through the world. Think of that – we in our own lives can actually make the kingdom of God bigger. That’s a mission worth having, and such a mission can provide a life worth living.
Last week, we also talked about salvation, and what it isn’t – it isn’t the single-minded self-involved quest to make sure we get to heaven. We are saved from ourselves, and the smallness of a life centered on securing our own happiness, and we are saved for a life of compassion, a life of justice, a life of deep relationships that extends the kingdom of God. Discipleship repeats the prayer of Mother Teresa: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Discipleship and salvation are very traditional words, but I have come to understand that they describe a truly countercultural practice of loving of the world, for Christ’s sake, so that both the world and we ourselves are transformed by that love. In that love, in that transformation, we are part of a radical re-creation of the world.
Brian McLaren is a minister who was in Burundi, Africa, at a conference. And after a session in which they had discussed how the core teachings of Jesus focus on personal, social and global transformation in this life, McLaren came upon a young woman named Justine who said: “Today, for the first time, I see what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. I see that it’s about changing this world, not just escaping it and retreating into our churches. If Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”
Loves changes everything – let us allow ourselves to trust the love that calls the world into being, that stands with us in the challenges and suffering we experience. Jesus came into this world to reveal God’s love for the world, and to change our hearts in such a way that the world would be transformed. We are called into love by the One who loves us deeply, enters our suffering with us and calls us into God’s own deep love for the world. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Luke 23:33-43
Yesterday’s book review in the Chicago Tribune has the review of a new biography of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle Daniel. The biography is simply titled Boone and claims to tell the true story of Daniel Boone, a reality which Publishers Weekly claims is more interesting than the myth. We learn that Daniel Boone didn’t actually like coonskin caps, but preferred to wear beaver felt hats; also that he was a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter, whose real genius lay in building relationships, not achieving dominance. He became a legend during his own lifetime, so that it became harder to achieve the solitude he continually sought; and ironically, his passion for and exploration of the wilderness led to establishing byways which led to more rapid expansion of settlement into the west. It turns out that the more closely we look at Boone, the more challenging it is to characterize him simply as an explorer or a settler, a naturalist or a hunter, an enemy or ally of the Indians, and so on. Looking at the whole picture necessitates recognizing the complexity of both the man and his times. And as we strive to understand what his impact was on his world, we have to acknowledge that the categories we are trying to fit him into come from our world – perhaps our efforts at understanding him tell us as much about ourselves as they do about him. It’s only now, when we are grappling with the effects of over-civilization and unsustainable development that we are able to even notice the irony of his passion for the wilderness leading to it being more rapidly tamed and settled.
We have many of the same problems trying to develop a clear picture of Jesus. And our own context creates both challenges and opportunities in this – we in 21st-century America have so much distance from the Palestine of 2,000 years ago that we lose some of the richness of the imagery that is used in the Bible, even when we have a technical understanding of it. Let me give you an example. In the ancient Middle East, it was not uncommon to make the comparison between shepherds and kings – as we heard in the first reading from Jeremiah. In our culture, we have neither. We know what they are, but we don’t really fully appropriate the imagery in all that was conveyed to the original hearers. For example, kings in the ancient world were not the figureheads that our modern rulers are. The ruler who we are probably most familiar with is Queen Elizabeth the Second of England, who has a title that is impressive, even if her rule seems more symbolic than actual: she is Queen Elizabeth II by the Grace of God, Queen of this Realm and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
Actually, kings in ancient Israel were also seen as defenders of the faith – their primary duties were “…to see that the community lived in covenant with God and one another and that the community provided for the care of the poor.” So the passage from Jeremiah that is discussing shepherds is really talking about the kings of Israel, and their failure to care for the people and keep them faithful to the covenant with God. In the Jeremiah passage, God says that he will raise up a new king, who will “execute justice and righteousness in the land.” [Jeremiah 23:5] Justice has to do with fairness and equity, righteousness concerned following God. Theologian Douglas John Hall points out that the Biblical view of sin is entirely relational – think about the Ten Commandments which discuss our relationship with God, our relationship with our parents and our relationship with our neighbors. Even those commandments related to coveting things are described in terms of coveting our neighbor’s things.
And the understanding of king as shepherd is certainly relational, which is something a little foreign to us. I realized this during my recent trip to Africa, when every flock of cattle, goats or sheep I saw was tending by a shepherd or two. When was the last time we saw a shepherd? Our flocks are kept by fences, not by shepherds. And our society is governed by laws, not by relationships. Small wonder that our understanding of sin is breaking a rule or a boundary, rather than breaking a relationship. And no wonder many Americans think of God as someone who is primarily concerned with the rules, keeping us in bounds, than as the One who tends us, as all flocks are tended.
I noticed also in Africa how relational the culture was. They have laws, yes, as did Ancient Israel, but perhaps because there is less stuff, their security is not founded on material wealth and laws protecting it, but on relationships – every transaction is more relational than we experience here. Most of our shopping involved bargaining, and what is bargaining but relational pricing? And again and again people reached out to us – welcoming us, greeting us, asking about our experience in Tanzania and our thoughts about the U.S. government. The greetings bore warmth that went beyond the perfunctory “have a nice day” that seems to punctuate transactions here in the U.S. Our travel there helped me to understand that relationships are not as foundational to our culture, or as critical to our sense of wellbeing and safety, as they are in some other places and times.
But I don’t want to romanticize – other times and places have been concerned with power also. The kings in ancient Israel soon grew to depend on power rather than be guided by their relationship with God – this was the root of God’s complaint in the Jeremiah passage. And so when God came among us as Jesus, rejecting divine power in order to establish solidarity with humankind, and rejecting human power even as he sought to build relationships, his ministry and his teachings were an indictment of those who embraced and abused civic and religious power in his day…and everyday since. This is why his ministry was largely rejected by those in power, and embraced by those at the margins of society.
Jesus didn’t challenge those in power by asserting power, but by embracing non-violence which is in itself a rejection of power. So that by advocating “turn the other cheek”, “pray for your enemies”, “sell all you have and give to the poor” his teaching was a rejection of the physical, social and economic power in his culture, and this rejection was profoundly threatening to the power structures of his time, as non-violent activism continues to be threatening – both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were non-violent activists who were assassinated in our era.
There are two ways that modern teachings about Jesus tend to dilute him and render him a king in the modern sense – more symbol than substance. The first is to ignore his more difficult teachings and to assume that he really isn’t challenging us as he did the people of his time – that way we can ignore his more troublesome teachings. We tend to dilute the challenges of Christ, to simplify his teachings as simply “love God and love each other” without acknowledging how he expects that love to reshape us. Our second area of confusion is about the crucifixion of Jesus.
Now the theology of the cross has been discussed by many scholars over the millennia. Most of us understand that the cross of Jesus has to be central to the Christian faith – it wasn’t merely something incidental that happened. And it is fascinating that the Gospel reading for today is assigned for the Sunday celebrating the kingship of Jesus – this is Christ the King Sunday. I spoke last week about my conviction that the classic formulation of Jesus dying on the cross in order to provide a blood sacrifice to pay penance for the sins of humankind is a misunderstanding of the crucifixion of Jesus. Obviously such an assertion, which I won’t go back over this week – there are copies of last week’s sermon on the bookcase in the hall – such an assertion leads to the question, well then, what is the crucifixion of Jesus all about?
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading a book by theologian Douglas John Hall called The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World. Hall reminds us that the theology of the cross is, at its heart, incarnational theology at its fullest. Usually when we think of the incarnation of Jesus – the enfleshment of Jesus, God coming among us as a fully human creature – we think about the birth of Jesus. After all, Christmas is also known as the Feast of the incarnation. But Hall points out, fleshly creatures are born and they die. If God in the incarnation was coming into our experience as one of us, revealing God’s commitment to us, God’s solidarity with us, God’s embrace of us in all our grittiness, then when Jesus realized that his ministry was going to lead to the cross, his decision to accept that was revealing that God’s commitment to us holds nothing back. God stands with us in our pain, and enters into human suffering for our sake. God’s commitment to us is not conditional on our being good, or things going well. God’s solidarity with us is total. As Douglas John Hall writes, “Here the decision to be God-with-us is brought to the final test…That is why, what Jesus of Nazareth struggles with at Gethsemane, that second Garden of Temptation, is not simply whether he will or will not submit to the execution that his human enemies have been planning for him, but whether he will or will not reaffirm the divine decision to be Emmanuel….whether…he will take this final step toward the world….”
And this understanding of the crucifixion – Jesus, when the choice is before him, choosing to enter fully into our world and its suffering – has consequences for our own discipleship as well. Because if our faith is merely about assenting to the fact of Jesus, merely believing in Jesus, that trivializes not only the teachings and death of Jesus, but our own lives as well. Our discipleship has to ask more of us, or our own lives don’t hold any intrinsic significance. As Douglas John Hall explains, the connection between the crucifixion and our own lives is that we, too, are called to embrace the suffering of the world, to enter fully into engagement with the world and not indifference toward it. He writes, “We, whose movement in one way and another had always been away from the world, whether into our own private little worlds or to some theoretic superworld of our own devising –we through our ‘baptism into his death’ (Romans 6:1f), are being directed toward the world where his life is being lived…. Discipleship of Jesus Christ is nothing more nor less than being sent with increasing insistence ‘into all the world’ – or, in other words, embracing our freedom to manifest something like a new nonchalance about self and a new attention to the other.”
Dallas Willard, professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California, describes the kingship of Christ and its implications for us as follows: a kingdom is where the effective will of the king is done – so the kingdom of God is wherever what God wants done is done – wherever people are living the dream of God for this world, living in right relationships with each other, with the earth, and with God. So that in our discipleship, in the way we live our lives, in the relationships we have with one another, with our planet, and with the creator of all, we can actually extend the kingdom of God. It’s pretty clear that what God wants done isn’t done all through the world. Think of that – we in our own lives can actually make the kingdom of God bigger. That’s a mission worth having, and such a mission can provide a life worth living.
Last week, we also talked about salvation, and what it isn’t – it isn’t the single-minded self-involved quest to make sure we get to heaven. We are saved from ourselves, and the smallness of a life centered on securing our own happiness, and we are saved for a life of compassion, a life of justice, a life of deep relationships that extends the kingdom of God. Discipleship repeats the prayer of Mother Teresa: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Discipleship and salvation are very traditional words, but I have come to understand that they describe a truly countercultural practice of loving of the world, for Christ’s sake, so that both the world and we ourselves are transformed by that love. In that love, in that transformation, we are part of a radical re-creation of the world.
Brian McLaren is a minister who was in Burundi, Africa, at a conference. And after a session in which they had discussed how the core teachings of Jesus focus on personal, social and global transformation in this life, McLaren came upon a young woman named Justine who said: “Today, for the first time, I see what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. I see that it’s about changing this world, not just escaping it and retreating into our churches. If Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”
Loves changes everything – let us allow ourselves to trust the love that calls the world into being, that stands with us in the challenges and suffering we experience. Jesus came into this world to reveal God’s love for the world, and to change our hearts in such a way that the world would be transformed. We are called into love by the One who loves us deeply, enters our suffering with us and calls us into God’s own deep love for the world. Amen.