Just a Moment

A couple of days ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote and asked me where to find in the Bible a passage that says the dead have no consciousness. I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. I pulled down my exhaustive concordance to find that there are about 358 appearances of words translated “dead.” I could not find one on the list that remotely resembled anything he might be referring to. When I wrote back, he explained that he and his boyfriend were mentoring two castaway brothers who knew nothing about how to live and behave. They wanted to teach them something about the Bible. Wasn’t it true that only a hundred thousand or so people would make it into heaven? Didn’t the Bible say that we are at peace when we die until God comes back and takes us to heaven?

It is almost impossible to give people a handle on something so massive as the biblical tradition when they understand virtually nothing about it. And if you feel anywhere between ignorant and less-than-secure about the Bible, be aware that you are not alone, nor in this place will you be put down because of what you do not know. On the other hand, we don’t want to encourage illiteracy. So, I pointed my friend to the online Book of Common Prayer and the Outline of the Faith that it contains, which is a totally accessible summary of Christian teaching at least having the virtue of being dependably accurate without being simplistic.

If you happen to pick up a copy of the King James Version of the Bible, you don’t have to read beyond the title page to hit upon the main idea in the whole book. Because on the title page you will see “Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments.” The word “Testament” is the same as the word “Covenant.” And there you have the point of the Bible. It is a book about covenant.

Today, as always on the Second Sunday in Lent, we focus on the seminal story of Covenant in the entire tradition. It is, of course, the story of Abraham. There are several stories of the Covenant involving Abraham. The one we hear today comes from a priestly writer who lived several hundred years before the time of Christ. It is based on much older stories, and probably reflects even stories that are older than anything in the Bible itself. Because the quintessential story of humanity is the story of a journey, and that is essentially what the story of Abraham is. A few chapters before our reading today, God calls Abram to leave the land of his upbringing and to move to a totally new place. Abram obeys. He strikes out on a journey of faith. There is no covenant at this point, only a call, a promise, and a response. A little later on we discover what the journey is all about. It is about the unfolding intention of God to create a human community that will respond in faithful obedience in a way that the first humans did not.

There are all kinds of covenants, both in the Bible and outside it: covenants between friends, between equals, between kings and vassals, between superior and inferior parties, between husbands and wives. God is clearly the initiator of the covenant with Abram, and its everlasting nature is rooted in the sovereign will of God, not in human behavior. What is interesting is that Abram does not ask for anything in this story. He does not have to. He is offered “the world,” so to say. “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Get that. This is not a covenant that encompasses just one people, but a whole array of peoples. Moreover, the covenant involves not only a whole new relationship, but a profoundly new identity. Abram and Sarai are no longer known by their old names but as Abraham and Sarah respectively, "Ancestor" and "Princess." A part of the covenant is that Abraham and his descendants will have a land to call their own, and another part of the covenant is the way it is sealed: with the rite of circumcision. And most important, God says, “I will be their God.”

This has everything to do with you and me. This is our story, our holy story, because the story has claimed us. And I am not talking about “us” as an in-group. I am speaking of anybody in the entire human race who cares about finding a place in this world, the meaning of his or her life, a way of living that accords deep joy, a ground of hope for the future, and a profound sense of identity. It is open to you and me, and while the expectations and demands of living in a covenant relationship are serious and rigorous, it is the most freeing—and free—thing you can imagine.

You can claim your part in the heritage of Abraham, if indeed you have not already done so. And if you have, you can renew your place in that great caravan of people that are more numerous than the sands on the seashore and who have it in them to outshine the stars of heaven. But be aware. This story, and its facets like covenant and blessing and promise, is not the only one out there, nor the only one competing for your attention and allegiance. And the stories that have the most appeal tend to be the stories that claim to be valid expressions of the Will of God. I am not talking, of course, about other religious traditions, but certain versions of the very biblical story itself. There is a quite popular gospel of prosperity that hooks up religious affiliation and behavior with material success. There is also a version of so-called biblical religion that presents the relationship with God as fundamentally making no demands whatsoever beyond what we consider to be our convenience. And there are versions of our own story that twist it beyond recognition into a program for self-aggrandizement and tribal promotion. You know what I mean.

But the covenant story that we inherit from Abraham and Sarah is quite different. It is, if nothing else, counter-cultural. And it is so precisely because it cuts across cultures of all sorts. It started out as a simple story of God calling a man to move and start a new life. Before too many centuries had passed, it became a story that his descendants used to ground their identity. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” became a way of referring to God that distinguished them from other tribes and peoples. But the story did not stop there. The covenant came to be seen as embracing all people everywhere, and the covenant people came to be called a light to the nations, so that all could be drawn into this community that acknowledged the God of Abraham as the universal God, indeed the only God.

But the Covenant did not stop there either. Centuries rolled by, and, as usually happens among humans, people took the very instruments of covenant and made them not a way to include the human family but a way to exclude those who somehow did not measure up to the terms of the covenant. God’s initiative in inaugurating the covenant was replaced by increasing emphasis on human behavior. And when humans messed up and transgressed not necessarily the covenant itself but various human interpretations of it, group upon group found themselves outside the covenant, which more and more became regulated by a power group. Sound familiar? It is, because it is that ordinary human cussedness that continues to assert itself and play itself out in human history.

Then, out of the blue one day, so the holy story goes, there appeared a messenger from God to a girl in a very improper town in a remote section of the Land promised to Abraham, which had been overrun time and again by armies and occupiers. Its people were worn down with waiting, and the dream of God’s community, when it had not become a nightmare to the disenfranchised, had dimmed beyond recognition. Like her ancestor Abraham, the girl said yes. “Be it unto me according to your Word,” said she to the messenger. The covenant was on its way to being renewed in a way that no one—no one in the world—could have predicted.

The girl, whose name was Mary, gave birth to Jesus. From the beginning he was the instrument by which God initiated once again the construction of a new humanity. His life manifested a breadth of acceptance that set the teeth of those controlling the covenant community on edge. Full of Spirit, everywhere he went he made things come alive. The sick recovered. The hungry ate. The blind saw and the lame leapt. Good News finally got preached to the poor, and the old idea of Jubilee took on new meaning as joy ran through the wadis and wastelands of Israel. Suddenly the Promised Land was abloom, and looked as if God might actually be walking around in it; for how else could one explain the dead being raised to life? The Covenant God, El Shaddai, the Mighty One, who had appeared to Abram at age 99, and who had delighted old barren Sarah with the promise of a child in her old age, was known to bring life out of bodies as good as dead. Now in the person of Jesus people saw the old power return with indescribable results.

In the middle of it all arose a thing called baptism—which initially was a simple ritual bath outwardly signifying an inner change of heart and mind. Jesus’ disciples took it over from a prophet known as John the Baptizer, and made it the way of making disciples that would follow the Way that Jesus walked, an entrance into a radically reshaped covenant community. But one does not reshape communities radically or otherwise without running into resistance. Conflict brewed. Fear proved to be just the heuristic needed to manipulate the right people into doing what Power always needs, which is to secure itself. Again, you know what I mean, because it is a dynamic you see every day. Power had its way. Jesus was executed. Not only did Jesus die, so did the dream of God. But if there is one thing God knows how to deal with it is death. In bodies as good as dead, like those of the Ancestor and the Princess, God had stirred new life and brought forth the first birth in the covenant community. So God did it again. In a tomb, in a lifeless body, God stepped in and became the midwife of a new birth.

It took awhile for people to realize what had happened. But clearly what had happened was not just the raising of a corpse, as wonderful as that might been. It was the raising to new life of the ancient dream of a covenant community. It dawned on them what Jesus meant on that night before he was handed over to suffering and death when he had given them bread and wine saying, “This is the New Covenant in my blood.” The covenant had not died, but had rather awakened in a new body. And that body was this group of people that Jesus had managed to collect around him. They took this thing that they had been using to make disciples—baptism—and realized they could no longer pour water all over people without staging something that looked quite like burial and resurrection. Within a few years what had once been a simple bath became the community’s way of broadening the covenant community to include all comers. No longer did one become a member of the covenant people by circumcision—by definition and nature something reserved to males only—but by birth-bestowing water, a gift from God to women and girls as well as men and boys. The covenant community was at that moment blasted open so that every man, woman, and child in the entire human race had an invitation to join the caravan—as equals.

And join they did. The covenant community grew. Persecutions could not stop it. Martyrs’ blood merely nourished it. They surprised themselves, and maybe even surprised God. For something like four or five hundred years they took seriously for the most part that they were not just ordinary people on a pilgrimage to self-actualization or something of the sort, but indeed the body of Christ, doing what he had done, healing and feeding and teaching and guiding.

Through the years and centuries the covenant has been sidetracked, hijacked, warped, twisted, manipulated, bought and sold. And every now and again, such as in the thirteenth century, there appears a Francis of Assisi who, like Abraham, says yes again. Or in the sixteenth century, a Luther who, like Mary, says something memorable like, “Here I stand. God helping me, I can do no other.” And the covenant struggles with the birth-pangs of renewal, as the community, sometimes stalled, sets out anew on its pilgrimage.

And that is where we are, you and I, today. This is a moment in some ways like any other. But so was the moment just before El Shaddai appeared to Abram saying, “I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. I will make my covenant with you and make you exceedingly numerous.” So was the moment before Gabriel appeared to Mary saying, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with thee.” So was the early morning before the sun had risen and some dejected women padded their way through the darkness to a tomb. The world is waiting for the covenant once again to take on new life, hesitant to believe that it really could be true that God will once again open up the future, call together a liberating people, and announce through them to all the world, “I shall be their God and they shall be my people and I myself will be with them.”

Where is Abraham? Where is Sarah? Where is Mary? Could one of them be hearing this?


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Good Neighbors

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, July 11, 2010

Text: Luke 10:25-37

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” begins one of Robert Frost’s best known most often quoted poems. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

…That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. …

What it is that doesn’t love a wall is, of course, frost. The poet is punning on his name. It is frost that destroys walls. But more than that it is Mr. Frost himself that doesn’t like walls. He says as much to his neighbor:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'

The neighbor is a bit conservative, one might say, repeating his father’s proverb, savoring it, handling it like a stone from the dark stone age. Of this neighbor, the poet says,

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."*

Many people quote Frost’s poem as they do the Bible, imagining that the proverb at the end is a chunk of common sense not to be disputed. The poet might think so, too—since he participates in this annual ritual of rebuilding the stone wall—but he is ambivalent. Something in him doesn’t love a wall.

“Who is my neighbor?” is one of two questions that dominates today’s gospel lesson. The other question is one that lies silently beneath Jesus’ story. “Why the walls?” The first century religion into which Jesus was born was as convinced as Frost’s neighbor that walls were necessary, and not only to make good neighbors, but precisely to keep some people from being neighbors. Some of those walls had to do with honest attempts to order society. Priests and Levites, temple officials, did not touch corpses without becoming ritually defiled (and quite possibly disease carriers, although that was not exactly the point). Something there is in people that does love walls. It is that part of us that wants to make sure that power and privilege are secure. Funny thing about that. As it turns out, one does not have to be a person or a member of a group that boasts of power and privilege. The powerless and the underprivileged sometimes have as big a stake in erecting, repairing, and maintaining walls as do those who demonstrably profit most from them. It seems to be, like Frost’s annual wall-mending day, something that human beings just do, whether they profit from walls or indeed like them much.

Walls keep people in and they keep people out. They make us at least feel secure, whether we are or not. And they advertise the boundaries that one dare not cross without considerable peril. The robbers who terrorized travelers on the Jericho Road had their own kind of walls, and not just the rocks they could hide behind to plan and execute their ambushes. They, like their gang descendants in Maratrucca-13 in Washington, had staked off their territory which one entered at one’s peril. The Samaritan lived behind another kind of wall. It was a wall of discrimination and hate. And when one is discriminated against, one colludes with wall-building. You hate me, then I’ll hate you. Leave me alone behind the wall you have built, and there I will nurse my pain, my un-belonging, build my bombs, get back at you.

Storyteller Jesus ingeniously sets up his hearers to expect a third traveler who would break the pattern of the first two. And since the first two are clergy, who better to break the pattern than a normal Israelite lay person, someone who might do a neighborly thing because that is what normal Israelites would do? Don’t stick your head in a book and pull your burro over to the other side of the road; go, check out the man lying in the ditch. But, surprise! It is not the average, faithful Israelite neighbor who acts in compassion and mercy or even curiosity. It is somebody from the other side of the wall. It is a Samaritan.

Remember the way the story got started. Jesus has had a conversation with a lawyer who, testing him, asked him a question about the Law: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus returns the question with a question: “What is written in the Law. How do you read?” The lawyer answers correctly by quoting the Shema: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all you soul, and with all your strength, and with all you mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” But unable to let it go, the lawyer, seeking to justify himself, asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

So the story tells us that neighbors are frequently those behind walls. Neighbors are the ones who are frequently invisible, often alien. Now the interesting thing about the story is how it ostensibly answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?” but really focuses on “Who does the neighborly thing?” It really does not matter whether one sees the Samaritan or the wounded man as “the neighbor.” They are neighbors to each other. But the only way that can happen is for at least one of them—in this case the Samaritan—to come from behind the wall. He does precisely what the priest and the Levite do not do: he crosses the boundary and acts as if the wall is not even there. Not only does he dismount and get involved; he treats the wounds, carries the hurt man to an inn, stays there and takes care of him overnight. On top of all that, he gives two day’s wages to the innkeeper with instructions to take care of the man until he comes back, and makes an open-ended promise to pay whatever more the innkeeper charges (trusting, I suppose, that the innkeeper might not be inclined to rip him off just because he is a Samaritan).

Given the way we pigeonhole people, we are inclined to give the lawyer in the story little more of a break than his tribe is willing to give Samaritans. He is a lawyer, very possibly a smart-aleck lawyer, trying to trip up Jesus with his fancy schmancy questions, a member of the religious and social elite—all the things that make us want to see him cut down to size. But Jesus will have none of that. “Which of these three proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” he asks. And the lawyer replies, “The one who showed mercy on him.” Jesus replies, “Go and do likewise.” Don’t be too quick to imagine that the lawyer turns away, disgusted at the thought of behaving like the Samaritan. This might have been the moment when he heard the Truth, and this the story that let him in on it. For after all, that is why Luke is telling the story to you and me: to let us know what the Reign of God is like, to let us see how it is that eternal life is not something won by maintaining walls but by practicing living as if there were no walls.

None of us is likely to think that boundaries are a bad thing, or in Frost’s terms, that all fences have no use. I certainly do not think so. But boundaries do not have to be walls and walls do not have to keep us captive. The life of God—eternal life you might call it—the only life worth living––requires behaving like God. And behaving like God means finding that part of us that does not love a wall. It means coming from behind the fences and daring to believe that the man in the ditch is as really a part of us as our own arm or leg or eye. It does not take much to see in the face of the Samaritan one whom we recognize. For the Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself, healing the wounded, caring for the stranger, taking the trouble to get involved, creating a relationship that could never happen if fences were paramount, behaving like God. “Go and do likewise” is not a judgment or a sentence. It is a statement of what the lawyer, you, I, all of us, have to practice and practice and practice until we become the place where the Spirit of God makes a dwelling.

* "Mending Wall," Selected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963), p. 23.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010