B
Proper 15 BFC
Proverbs
8-9
August
16, 2015
I’m sure that all of you have heard
the story by now. As you well know, when
the search committee heard me preach for the first time in Bozeman . . . a
shaft of light came down from the heavens, the glory of the Living God shone
around me, and a voice shook the room saying, “This is the candidate destined
for Billings First Congregational United Church of Christ,” and, members of the
search committee will have to help me out here, was it, “Yea?” or
“Verily?” Ok, “Verily, this Metamoron
shall guide you.”
So maybe it didn’t happen that way,
maybe it is just that we live in such a fact fundamentalist age yearning for
mythically static and certain answers.
We want to know we are blessed, that God, or at least fate, has smiled
our way, and we know our path has been foreordained by the angels or signs—the bright,
gleaming yellow bricks sung about in a very popular musical with Dorothy and
her friends.
We might bring our critical hearts and
minds to that “shaft of light” story to say we know it did not happen that
way. But there is no doubt that deep
within us some times, we yearn for that story to be true.
We also live in an age where we not
only yearn for the story to be true, we have given in to that story and made it
gospel, the good news. We so desperately
want to know that we are the blessed ones, that God is present and available to
us in the midst of all the world’s alarms, forecast of gloom and doom, real
terror and fear.
Sometimes the marriage of a culture
which wants to know itself blessed and also wants to imprint upon us that we
are consumers makes for some interesting cultural marriages. Sometimes I am so immersed in it, I’ll have
to admit that I do not have the eyes to see the strange ways we have joined
God’s blessing with our consumer culture.
Perhaps we all need “other eyes” to
truly see ourselves.
Not too long after the terrible and
evil events of 9/11, I was working with the Witness for Peace New England team
to decide whether to bring our fall speaker to the United States for his
tour. Jóel Suarez Rodés, the General
Coordinator of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Havana, Cuba, the tour’s
featured speaker, shared with me that the terror and grief experienced by
Amercans was a terror and grief shared by the world on behalf of
Americans. He and his people had openly
and regularly prayed for us after 9/11.
After arriving in the States, Jóel was
a bit bemused, though, by the confluence of culture the tragedy provoked. While I was too enmeshed in American culture
to notice, Jóel would point to different signs around the University of New
Hampshire campus he found, well, curious.
“These colors don’t run, twin lobsters, $15.99,”; “United we stand,
bedroom and dresser sets at low prices,” and, of course, “God bless America,
Big Mac Extra Value Meal $2.99.”
Whether we be conservative or liberal,
we have done an unusually good job of bringing God’s blessings under our control,
throwing God into a recyclable cardboard container and serving him up with fries and drink for an
extra low price. We demand that God
remain static, certain, and available to sell our merchandise.
Within Scripture, wisdom literature
offers a balance to such easy domestication of life and the Living God. For example, the book of Job asks difficult
questions about why the righteous and innocent suffer. The book of Jonah asks whether any people or
nation is beyond the love and mercy of God.
And the book of Ecclesiastes asks whether life has any real meaning at
all. Or is life just a “puff of breath?” Biblical Wisdom literature, part of our
Revised Common Lectionary for this late summer and then in late fall, sees the
double edges, the paradoxes, the boundary crossings as part of living in the
real world.
Woman Wisdom, the one who crosses
boundaries between the human and divine in Proverbs, frequents both public and
private places, calls out from the marketplace, streets, city gates, and walls,
but also invites people to come and enjoy her fine wines and choice meats in a
house that She has built. Woman Wisdom
crosses boundaries and domains and thereby unites all of life, both public and
private, economic, social, and governmental to an order which is relational and
holistic.
In contrast to much of the Bible,
which emphasizes an order that has humankind dominating and overseeing
creation, Woman Wisdom emphasizes play, delight, and love into the ordering
process of creation. And, as theologian
Claudia Camp writes, “no oppressive order . . .is secure where children play,
lovers meet, and life comes forth.’[1]
We have seen this, haven’t we? We have enough life experience that when
someone comes at us with rules and regulations and structure, we know the truth
lies somewhere outside of their tightly knit box.
Indeed, Woman Wisdom cannot be ordered
or boxed, contained or domesticated. She
is a direction in relationship, an invitation to nurture and sustenance, a life’s journey to a distant horizon. It may be too simplistic to say that this is
just a female or Divine Feminine way of knowing as opposed to a male or Divine
Male way of knowing. If all the male
archetypes and men becoming real is still about having power over instead of
power with and under, it seems we have all lost something in the Christian
narrative.
Feminist theologian, Carol P Christ
writes,
New research
suggests that in matriarchies, there is no divine masculine per se,
because though men have their own important roles, both males and females are
encouraged to embody the values associated with mothers and mothering—in other
words to be loving, giving, caring, and generous. In this context there is no
opposition or sharp contrast between the divine masculine, the divine feminine,
and any other divine gender or transgender.
I believe that that we need a multiplicity of images
for divine power that express the diversity and differences of our bodies and
all bodies in the web of life. We also need new images of how to be strong and
powerful, yet loving and caring above all, in male, female, and other bodies.[2]
Jesus borrowed heavily on the Jewish
wisdom tradition for his teaching. In an
age of structure to maintain order, Jesus introduces paradox and parable,
double edges and boundary crossings that fully advocate for power from below
and power with. Christ ends up being
that life’s journey to the distant horizon.
You will hear me consistently talk and
act as if God is present with us, but I also know that we need to regain that
understanding of a God who is transcendent, lies beyond ours or anyone’s
ability to fully comprehend or understand.
We would know that none of the answers are certain and could not be
fully convinced that any one of us alone can see the path God has prepared for
us. Then, in humility and hope, we could
point to and journey toward that distant horizon together in
play, delight, and love.
Sometimes I think Christianity appears
to outsiders as a set of strict rules we are to follow rather than a life of
play, delight, and love, a way of defining power as we stand with each other. Instead of demanding a static God from on
high bless us, maybe the outside world would see us different if we began
talking about a God who crosses boundaries in compassion and refuses to be put
into a box—a God who stands with and yet leads out . . . and invites to a place
beyond us.
Ruby Schroeder, my Christian Education
professor at Eden Theological Seminary, required that all seminarians spend a
day observing the local preschool housed by the seminary. I knew nothing much about the preschool other
than I enjoyed having preschoolers on campus.
During my morning observing the preschool, I remember receiving one of
life’s great lessons.
Preschool teachers shared a change
they had made in moving children from one classroom to another. The teachers explained that the old model
used to be a teacher behind the kids speaking above the din of the children’s
voices and toys to get them to move to the adjoining, still dark
classroom.
The
new model was for a teacher to go ahead of the children, cross over into the
new, adjoining classroom, and turn the light on in the adjoining
classroom. Without moving from the lit
room the teacher would then invite the children into the new classroom. Meanwhile, another teacher silently turned
off the light in the old classroom.
The
old model asked the children to walk into a dark classroom with someone pushing
them from behind. The new model invited
the children into a lit classroom with a teacher who already stood in the new
classroom.
I
believe that is a beautiful metaphor for the way God calls us. God crosses before us into the unlit
room. Like the benevolent and hospitable
Wisdom, I believe it is God who calls out and invites us, while standing in
that lit room. God waits in the lit
room. The banquet has been prepared, the
table is set, and now God calls out from the marketplace, the streets, the city
gates, the walls, and the lit room.
In
play, delight, and love, God is on the move.
As it says about the God who traveled in a tent with the Hebrew people,
God does not need a “staying-in” place for God is always “going about.”[3]
So
even though there may have been a shaft of light when I preached for the search
committee at Bozeman, it did not stay there long. God was moving on. What the search committee will tell you is
that even though they liked my sermon, they were a little afraid of how the
congregation in Bozeman might have received my words were received that day. And they had to meet to decide whether you all
were ready for me. I’ll admit that to
feel like you preached from your heart and soul and then have a search
committee wonder about that, scared me a little. Was God inviting me out of my box?
I
do believe that as well share our hopes and dreams together for what the
Billings First Church shall be far out into the future, as we continue to
fashion ourselves as a place of play, delight, and love, I think, I believe
that God is indeed calling us from the lit room, the distant horizon. When we recognize, as wisdom literature
teaches, that we do not have to control God to receive God’s blessing . . .
that, in fact, God’s blessing is forever offered to us from the lit room beyond
us, we can move and walk with God. May
we have the courage to move and walk into that lit room together. And then, may we share in the delight, love,
and hospitality of God by holding out our hands, from the lit room, to
others. Amen.
[1] Claudia V. Camp, “Woman Wisdom as Root
Metaphor: A Theological
Consideration,” The Listening Heart: Essays in
Wisdom and the Psalms in Honor of Roland E. Murphy, ed. by J. Hoglund, K.
Huwiler, E. Glass. (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), pp. 45, 55,61.
[2] Carol P. Christ, “What if Divine Feminine and
Divine Masculine are not Oppositional Categories?,” Feminism and Religion, May 18, 2015, http://feminismandreligion.com/2015/05/18/what-if-divine-feminine-and-divine-masculine-are-not-oppositional-categories-by-carol-p-christ/,
looking at research from Societies of Peace by Heide
Goettner-Abendroth. In
Goettner-Abendroth’s research she finds that matriarchies were not about “mother-rule”
but about embodying the values of “mothering”—care, generosity, and nurturing. Men are not dominated. This confirms much of the work done by Rianne
Eisler who wrote the seminal work, The
Chalice and The Blade. When I
attended the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago several years ago,
Eisler’s workshop was packed. It should
say something about the hunger there is for a different mythology.
[3] Trans. by Everett Fox, Give Us a King!: Samuel, Saul,
and David: A New Translation of Samuel 1
and Samuel II. (New York: Schocken Books, 1999), pp. 178-179.
No comments:
Post a Comment