You’re not even conscious that you’ve got a song going on your soul, and then suddenly you hear your lips hum, your mouth sing, or even your fingers tapping out the rhythm of the beat.

I’m willing to admit that it happens to me, but I am not willing to admit how often.

On occasion, when I discover that I’ve got some notes and lyrics in my mind…and others external to me are noticing…it’s because a certain apparently random tune was in fact triggered by a word or a phrase or an event: when I’m standing before an open fridge, an exasperated, “I’m all out of milk,” becomes “I’m All Out of Love,” or while making stew I discover myself singing our family favorite lullaby “Little Potato,” or (back in the days when my beloved baseball was actually played), when I’m looking for the weather radio to take into my garden so I can hear the Minnesota Twins play (sigh), I discover that I’m humming “Brown Eyed Girl,” which, by all informed accounts, is the best song ever, and while it may have overtly nothing to do with a baseball (though I’m sure that the ‘stadium’ which is mentioned is obviously one built for baseball and no other) has everything to do with baseball, not to mention young love, the best of which has to do with baseball.

But the other day, I woke up with Tracy Chapman in my head.

 Straight away, at 5:37, eyes opened and there she was.

But because it was 5:37, it took me about 15 minutes into the day and a couple of sips of my coffee to realize that she was singing me into the day, and quite possibly into a new world.

It was released in August of 1988, and I was entering my second year of college at St. Olaf.

By that time, I’d fully embraced the Birkenstocks/head-wrapped-in-scarf/meeting-at-friends’-homes-to-make-broccoli-tofu-and-rice vibe, and therefore, in all of my hippy naïve whiteness, I loved Tracy Chapman.

I stuck her cassette tapes in the player of any car the driver would let me, I bought my mama a copy so that she could be enlightened like her daughter, and I felt so very very cool.

So, yeah; I heard her music all the time.

But I didn’t listen to her.

And I sure as the hell our nation is in right now didn’t understand her.

I’m also sure that by virtue of the color of my skin that I never entirely will.

~~~~~

Cities are in shambles, across the U.S., and I fully expect that more protests and destruction are in our collective near future, and our far future too.

Our President (may God have mercy on our souls) had his own peaceful citizens teargassed and shot with rubber pellets so that he could stand in front of a Church he never attends while holding upside down a Bible that is not his for a photo op that captured more of the moment and who he is than he intended.

~~~~~

“Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”

Jeremiah 31:15

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe,” cried Mr. George Floyd.

And to whom did this child of God cry?

Not just to the white police officers who kept a knee on his neck while they turned their hearts away.

But Mr. Floyd cried out to and wept for his mama, his dead mama, who was no more.

~~~~~

White Christians, we are culpable for this chaos and for Mr. Floyd’s death in every possible way.

Etymologically, the word ‘culpable’ means ‘worthy of blame,’ and ‘deserving of censure.’

It’s a key point, one that we have shirked to own, itself a very sign of the privilege we are willing to own even less.

But, as Tracy Chapman says, the poor people are gonna rise up.

The tables are being turned.

People aren’t just talking about a revolution: a revolution is happening.

White culpability is being exposed, and the censure which is long in coming for whites is coming, and, in fact, may already be here.

~~~~~

All to often, Christians do not understand that our baptism and our faith change our allegiance and therefore change our lives.

As Father Robert Farrar Capon said,

“…it is not only that the human race’s business-as-usual desire to be on the side of a winner is inappropriate to Jesus’ mission: it’s that none of our usual bits of business, however virtuous or proper, has the last bearing on the mystery of redemption.

‘Follow me,’ [Jesus] says flatly. ‘…Nothing counts now expect being last, least, lost, little, and dead with me.”

I fret a lot that we don’t grasp that truth.

There is nothing of American culture, and what is indeed American religion, that emulates being last, least, lost, little, and dead with Jesus, or anyone else for that matter.

Trouble is for Christians, it is fundamentally impossible to both embrace the tenants of Christianity and the tenants of United States of American exceptionalism, and don’t even get me going on capitalism.

Can’t do it.

To be clear, it just can’t be done.

~~~~~

Christianity, turns out, is neither a social club nor a cultural norm, but is an upheave-your-life’s-identity-thing.

Christianity is not just about going to services on Sunday, but about being in exclusive service to the Lord on every day.

Christianity is more than bringing the lemon bars to church (bless those who do), and is more like bringing bottles of water or, as we’ve seen necessary these days, jugs of milk, to protests.

Christianity may be about belonging to book groups gathered in comfortable living rooms, but it is certainly about belonging to protest groups gathered at uncomfortable spaces in our society.

Christianity may move you to wear a cross around your neck, but then it should move you to walk the way of the cross.

Christianity, it turns out, may not be all that down with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” but might hear Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution” as a modern Mary’s song, or the “Canticle of the Turning” as a hymn for the ages and the Church universal.

And by no means is Christianity about condoning, let alone supporting, let alone remaining mum about a leader who separates children from parents, who puts children in cages, who mocks people with disabilities, who disdains the care of creation, who removes protections from GLBTQIA people, who rejects policies which care for the rich over against caring for the poor, who lies faster than fact-checkers can keep up with him, and who uses the sacred word of God as a photo op which necessitated gassing and shooting his own peacefully protesting citizens.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life, not a way of condoning, ignoring, or dealing in the ways of death.

It certainly is not about self-protective life.

It’s about living life convicted by and living according to the conviction that now that we know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.

It’s about being neither quiet nor passive in the face of abominations or injustice.

It’s about rejecting anything and anyone who puts their agenda before Jesus’, including our own.

It’s about understanding that this Scripture passage below (that would be this last section from Matthew 25) is not a theory, but is the mark of those who follow Jesus.

Pro tip: after reading it, note that you can’t follow Jesus and follow Trump, or, for that matter, much of the agenda of the present day GOP.

³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

⁴⁰And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

Christians, this is a moment that calls us to righteousness.

We are called as baptized people to renounce the Devil and all his empty promises.

Racism and systemic racism is a sure mark of the Devil.

Whites are called, therefore, to renounce it.

That means, of course, that we are called to renounce the privilege that we gain from it, and those who engage in it.

I renounce racism.

I renounce the racist policies and culture of policing in the US, and of the politics of the US.

I renounce Donald Trump.

I renounce the inexcusable repression of those who protested peacefully.

I regret the violence but I renounce that which led to its expression: when a word or a cry or a shout is not heard, even over centuries, sometimes, as Martin Luther King said, a riot is the language of the unheard.

I renounce what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Sean Reed and Tony McDade and a host of other names that must be said.

~~~~~

I imagine all of us have had an opportunity to wonder: if I’d been alive during slavery, during the Holocaust, during the Civil Rights moment—heck, even when Voldemort was on the run, what would I have done?

If I’d been alive when a black Jesus was being lynched by the authorities, what would I have done?

Now’s your chance to check it out.

Because finally the tables are starting to turn, and a righteous revolution is going down, right now.

These days, it’s sounding less like a whisper, and more like a holy clamor long in coming.

~~~~~

We have just entered the season of Pentecost.

Long has the Holy Spirit been imaged as a dove, also associated with peace.

She’s also, though, especially in Celtic traditions, been seen as a goose.

Geese are not pleasant.

They nip and attack and cajole you into doing what they want you to do and going where they want you to go.

They are neither peaceful nor safe.

Turns out that the same can be said of the Holy Spirit.

“Come, Holy Spirit,” we say and pray, but I do not believe we really mean that.

First thing that the Spirit did on Pentecost? Got the disciples in a mess of trouble.

We seem to forget that, we who tell children to not play with matches, and then gather these same children together for worship and pray “Come Holy Spirit, breathe your fire upon us.”

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never burn down our structures, we fool ourselves into thinking.

Just those bad ones.

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never blow away our ways of having done things, we lull ourselves into believing.

She’ll Just blow away the riff raff chaff.

Come Holy Spirit, we pray.

Just come, please and of course, and even stay, but in a respectable, predictable, controllable way.

We actually and intentionally and audaciously say that to the Holy Goose!

We audaciously say such things to the unquenchable, unrestrainable, Holy Fire.

~~~~~

I can’t help believe that the Spirit has been in the streets these days.

She’s not respectable, not predictable, not controllable.

But She is Holy nonetheless, and She is ushering in a Revolution.

~~~~~

Personal note: I very much should have written sooner about Mr. Floyd and the protests.

I am sorry.

These days have been full of heaps of personal commitments, and so I haven’t been able to string thoughts together—or, rather, amidst other clamors for my attention, there are so many strings of thoughts that I haven’t been able to pull them together.

This entry is but one of five or six blogs that I’ve set out to write, truth be told.

If you would like to follow my more…succinct and immediate thoughts, feel free to follow me on my personal Twitter @RevDrAnnaM, or find me on Facebook.

Peace, and moreover shalom, be with you all.

It makes me fairly gleeful.

The thing is tiny, but jeepers is it powerful.  Heats the whole blame house.

This is a good thing, as the blizzard that is sweeping across the upper midwest has just in the last few hours announced its arrival here in Two Harbors.

Co. Zy.

And don’t miss the plate with the imprinted Norwegian proverb! På engelsk, it says:

I built me a flame
late one night
God will my flame
never die out

Some websites with a sense of humor have posted that they were disappointed to actually learn the translation.  They thought it was Norsk for “Warranty void if over-fired.”

Grin.

But nope: it turns out to be a poem of hope in the promise of warmth and God’s undying presence.

This marvelous wood stove makes our whole house feel like that, especially as snow and below-zero temps bear down: a poem of hope in the promise of warmth and God’s undying presence.

My lovely Black Bear is famous for something called the cigar burn principle: the fire burns from the front of the stove to the back, and just a couple of logs last for 5-8 hours.  A long, slow burn keeps our home toasty for far longer than this tiny little black rectangle would make you guess.

So when the thing is ready to be stoked again, I open up the door, reach into the back with a long-handled shovel where the hottest embers are (that nasty burn on my wrist reminds me that I really need long-sleeved fire gloves…and way more coordination), and I scrape them toward the front. With them, I whip up my next batch of kindling and fire.

I can tell you with sinful pride that I haven’t had to relight my Jøtul for over a week, because the stove keeps the coals so very hot. Just place a few cedar siding cast-off chunks (donated to our family’s cause from my friends the Cedar Coffee Company: thank you again, good people), a bit of newspaper, and my breath blown on the red-yellow embers lights the coals in a flash.

It’s unreasonable how much satisfaction I get from that fact.

For the last few nights, though, after I had gone through the ritual of re-lighting the fire with the embers and my breath, I’ve had reason to sit in front of my stove for a long spell.

As is often the case with Scripture, when you have an experience that directly connects to a certain text, the words and import become all the more real.

For example, my father led and participated in some archaeological digs over in Israel, back in the day.  I grew up, then, with a variety of oil lamps from different eras.  Holding these tiny clay pots, with evidence of ash where the wicks were laid into the oil, makes the references to them in the Bible all the more powerful: You realize that “Keep your oil lamps lit” is a lot harder than you think, because it meant you had to be constantly vigilant, since they were sometimes smaller than the palm of your hand, and didn’t hold much oil to being with.

So thanks to my Jøtul and some matters in my world, here’s the image that has come to my mind in the last nights: the one of heaping coals on an enemy’s head.

You can find it in Psalm 140:

6 I say to the Lord, “You are my God; give ear, O Lord, to the voice of my supplications.” 7 O Lord, my Lord, my strong deliverer, you have covered my head in the day of battle.  8 Do not grant, O Lord, the desires of the wicked; do not further their evil plot. -Selah- 9 Those who surround me lift up their heads; let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them! 10 Let burning coals fall on them! Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise! 11 Do not let the slanderer be established int he land; let evil speedily hunt down the violent.

And in Proverbs 25:

20 Like vinegar on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the human heart. 21 If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; 22 for you will heap coals of fire on their heads, and the Lord will reward you.

That particular text caught the Jewish attention of the Apostle Paul, who repeated it in Romans 12:

19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengenance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ 20 No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’  21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Turns out, the more I did some poking around, that scholars aren’t always so sure about what the phrase can mean: cases can be made for and against any and all of them.

But a quick run-down:

1) Our quick tendency to want retribution, judgment, and lasting pain on one who harms us has many people of faith gravitating to the image of fire as one of lasting punishment: eternal hellfire and brimstone, and all of that.

I get it.

As I may or may not have said on this blog before, generally gentle person though I (think I) am, I confess to finding some small comfort in imagining where, were I of Dante’s ilk and theological persuasion, would I stick someone who really, really ticked me off?  What fitting punishment would be rendered for their wrong?

And then I feel bad and go back to working on forgiveness…while, perhaps, returning to the image now and again if necessary.

But in point of fact, many scholars believe that the image of fire is embedded in the refiners’ vocation: it is a purifying fire, a fire that destroys that which is impure, and which not only retains, but cleanses and perfects and beautifies that which is left behind.

That is, the point of fire and brimstone is to condemn the evil and restore the good.

For good reason, we tend to avoid getting burned.  In fact, those who are immune to feeling pain are in real danger of harming themselves, and even others, because they cannot perceive when the fire is hot.

They and others get burned anyway, of course.

But if you are into refining, you know that a hot fire is exactly what you need to make your creation stunning.

What is left is quite, quite breathtaking…as was, to be sure, the breath-taking process that was necessary to get there.

So, in short, as far as the text from the Psalm, one can read it as vengeful wrath, and have good reason to do so.

I prefer to read it is a righteous wrath, as referring to a blaze of fire that does not miss impurities, but rather is stoked precisely for them, the hot blaze leaving the created thing as it was obscured from being, and as it was meant to be.

2) Seems as if the Proverbs text takes a different slant on it; or, depending on the scholar, a couple of different slants.

The first way of considering it is the most obvious.  If someone has been a complete and reckless idiot, call the person back by kindness.  Shower them with love, and gentleness, and mercy.  They will be called back to the right path by way of example and by way of shame.

The hope is that when others love the wounder through and despite their obnoxious harm, ideally, the kind acts will recall them to their better selves.

It’s always struck me as potentially passive aggressive, manipulative, bordering on cheap grace, and dangerous, particularly when the onus of responsibility for healing is put on the one who is already, by definition, in one or more ways vulnerable.

But I see the point, and can see, depending on the circumstance, value to the method of seeking healing and reconciliation.

The second piece is interesting to me.  According to a variety of sources I found, in some parts of the ancient near east, if a person were foolish enough, distracted enough, apathetic enough, to forget to keep their own coals burning, so that their fires would go out, they would be forced to go to a neighbor for help.  They’d have to admit that they had been negligent to tending their own flames, and needed assistance to get their stoves relit.  Without other people intervening, even when inconvenient to them, the person would (admittedly by their own fault) be hungry and cold.

So the neighbor would offer not only coals, but would put the coals in a bowl fashioned precisely to fit on the tops of a head, and place it on the head of the impossible neighbor so that she or he would have a shot at rewarming their fire.

As any person of faith knows, even if by the neighbor’s own idiotic doing, his or her own cluelessness and/or carelessness and or complicity in the crisis, no one should ever be left out in the cold without getting help to again find and maintain the fire necessary to live.

————–

As I have sat in front of my fire these last several nights, and now on this blizzarding day, and mulled these texts and mulled matters in life, it seems like the best interpretation isn’t an either/or, but an all-of-the-above.

Burning coals singe.

I know.

And as far as Scripture is concerned, the over-arching message is that God is committed to exactly what my Jøtul is: that our flames never die out.  God has dedicated Godself to restoration, to mercy, and to grace.

But that does not mean that God doesn’t get righteously pissed, nor that we don’t whip up reasons for God to be so…some of us more than others.

So there is also a consistent tradition in the texts of God’s wrath when we harm others.

The wrath is real, and God’s anger is hot, and righteously so.

But it never burns our essence.

Our essence, I am convinced, even when all and everyone else says otherwise, our essence is good, and is breath-takingly beautiful when restored, and is worthy of being refined.

That is the intention of God’s burning fire: to burn away our harmful impurities, and to rediscover what has been hidden by them.

I think also that there is something to be said for offering kindness to people who do harmful things.  When safe, and when there is some confidence that a hurt will be acknowledged, the approach can indeed be redeeming and healing.

But that last piece, that bit about putting coals in a bowl on the head of someone who let their coals run out, that one has intrigued me most.

That one is an image both of someone who had taken for granted that their fire would always burn, but who discovered, when suddenly quite, quite cold, that they were wrong.

They need help.

They can’t relight their fire, for they not only have no embers: they have no, or very little, breath.

So, as I stare at my Jøtul, and I realize that my embers are many, and they are hot, and that I have breath and wood to keep it going, I am aware of those who have none of those things.

And I am aware that they are cold, and their rooms might be dark, even if by their own idiocy.

In addition to being called out as need be, they equally need help, and they need kindness, and they need breath.

Come to think of it, a really large bowl of crazy hot coals placed on their head, and a poem of hope in the promise of warmth and God’s undying presence, might be what they need more than anything.

Almost four years ago, I wrote here about Else’s nightly ritual of asking to be told about the story of Jesus.

She preferred it if we began “In the beginning.”

Every night.

That gets long, and so we settled to conflate the tales as found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and then a little of Paul thrown in there too, in 5-7 minutes or less.

Every night.

One night, however, after I ended with the news of Jesus being raised from the dead, and the women hearing the news and telling others of the news, so that now I was able to tell Else the news that death doesn’t win, and that we need not be afraid, and isn’t that good news to tuck us into bed, along with a good night kiss, Else looked at me.

She looked at me with narrowed eyes, and she said, slowly and with determination, “Mama, what did the soldiers say when they saw Jesus the second time that he was alive?”

I stared at her.  “I have absolutely no clue,” I told her.

I had a ringer, though, a ringer in my Dad, who is a New Testament theologian.

I rung up my ringer, and I told him the story, and I said, “Dad, what do you think?  What did they say?”

Long pause.

And then, “Probably, ‘Sheeeeeeeit.’”

One of my hopes, through OMG, is to provide a place to ask questions that people had never thought about before, or had never thought to ask before.

Sometimes, it takes non-Christians to ask the best ones.

After this column of mine came out last Sunday, I had a man, a man who is definitively and happily not Christian, ask some really good questions.

One of those questions had to do with the resurrection.

How, he wondered, how is it possible for an intelligent person to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead?

It’s 2014, after all.

Resurrection defies everything that we know is physically possible.

We Christians tend to have some stock responses to these sorts of questions: We scoff, we laugh, we shrug, we change the subject, or we say, “Because,” and hope that that cuts it.

Now, there are things in which people put their faith that are worthy of scoff, at least if you’re an adult, and certainly an adult living in 2014: Santa, for example.  The Great Pumpkin.  The alien space craft trailing the Haley-Bopp Comet.

Substantively, though, many agnostics and atheists wonder where, exactly, we Christians see the difference between waiting for a dead-guy-who-is-purportedly-alive-again-and-promises-to-return-sometime and those folks who were ready to hitch a ride on a visible heavenly body.

See, within the enclave of faith, we Christians rarely hear a question like this posed.

Jesus is risen!  He is risen indeed!

It’s a fact!

Right?

Well…not a provable fact like say, carbon dating, or proof that gravity keeps us from flying off into space, or a display showing that middle C has a certain frequency.

Some Christians are uncomfortable with the request for reason to have a role in faith.

I understand the discomfort, for faith is just that, a trust in something that is unseeable.

We Lutherans tend especially to be anxious about belief coming in any way other than faith.

We come by that discomfort honestly.  Martin Luther himself was deeply troubled by the idea that we could, somehow, by our own efforts, get closer to God.  It didn’t matter to him what sort of effort, though paying God/the Church off really crazy annoyed him.

But be it by confessing, by personal piety, or by good works, Luther didn’t like any whiff of any thing that suggested that we could, on our own merits, come to belief in God, or earn God’s favor.

For some, trying to involve intellect or reason moves dangerously close to working our way to God on our own power, trusting in ourselves rather than God, and, specifically, God’s grace.

I get their concern, and I get why they have it, but…I’m not that kind of Lutheran.

It’s worth remembering that Luther was a professor.  He loved learning, and he loved teaching.

His objection to reason wasn’t that he didn’t like thinking, but rather that he didn’t like the idea that our intellectual ability could ever grasp God.

I am, you see, almost certain that I couldn’t count all of the dangers of making our brains off-limits when it comes to believing in God.

That I can’t count very well anyway is beside the point.

We live in the 21st century! We have cyclotrons, we have CERN colliders, we have microscopes and telescopes and rockets and deep-diving subs.

We’ve got physicists and chemists and biologists and all manner of other highly trained experts who have rational reasons to explain, for example, why we don’t fall off the earth, how decomposition works, and how–or whether–a substance can change its state.

They also can explain why water can’t become wine, and why virgins can’t become pregnant, and why dead people can’t become alive again.

And if we want to be intellectually honest, people of faith must concede what these scientists teach us.

They are, in a word, right.

So, given that, how can one be at all intelligent while simultaneously putting an asterisk by these findings to say, “except for when God decides to work inexplicable miracles that seem to come to pass largely in ancient Scriptures.”

It’s a real question.

And a really good question.

And the more that we Christians can address it honestly, can look at the inconceivabilities and the absurdities that lace themselves through our faith, the more we honor both our intellect and the mysteries of faith.

So, let’s take a closer look at the resurrection, and look to see whether there are indeed reasons why reasonable people can and do put their trust in it. By no means, of course, is this an exhaustive reflection.  It’s an initial response to a very deep, very good question.

My seminary professor Walt Bouman teased out a few ways of thinking about it.  He used NT Wright’s work The Resurrection of the Son of God  as his springboard.  Let’s take a look at what they offer up.

1.  So each gospel has some reference to the resurrection, as does Paul.

And, let’s be honest, they don’t all line up.  Each writer has a detail that is added, missing, or changed, one from the other.

Seems to me that there are at least three ways to look at the inconsistencies between these books.

a) Say that somehow, if you smush them all together and squint at the same time, they really do all fit, and those parts that apparently contradict really don’t.  If you just look at it sideways and with the sun at just the right angle it’s all good;

b) laugh mockingly at the tradition and show that even our original sources can’t agree on what the story is;

c) figure that the differences point to the story-tellers telling the story as they remember or heard it, instead of conspiring with one another to all get the same story straight.

There’s a paradoxical, breathless authenticity, that is, to the fact that everything doesn’t fall into aligned place.

2. (And this one is my favorite) Women were the first preachers and the first witnesses.

Let’s be clear: women had less than no standing in this ancient Middle Eastern culture.

If you would have wanted to convince people of the radically unreasonable claim that a dead man is now alive, you would have exactly not written that women–whose testimony in court trials, even as victim or eyewitness was not allowed–saw the risen Jesus first…or at all, actually.

So, depending on the text, either “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1) or “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” (Mark 16:1) or “Mary Magdalene, Johanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them” (Luke 24:10) or just Mary Magdalene (John 20:1 and 20:11) were the first preachers (which, of course, is a fact worth noting to those who refuse to allow women to serve as ordained clergy, but that’s another blog a’brewing)!

Women!

Not the men, but the women.

That, my friends, is no small thing, even yet today.

3.  The tomb was believed to be empty.

N.T. Wright points out that not only were there no shrines created at the site of Jesus’ tomb (expected for someone who had generated as much attention as had he), but there are no (extant, anyway) references to the typical second burial rite of the bones left after the flesh had decayed.  Both of these rituals would have been expected for Jesus and noted in the texts.

4. Last (at least for the length of this blog), back then, dead people tended to stay dead as often as they do now.

That is, to convince even one person, let alone more than one, let alone those who are not predisposed (for a variety of religious, political, let alone logical reasons) to buy into resurrected people is not easy work.

So while we can’t prove that Jesus actually was raised from the dead, we can prove that first a few, then a few more, than way more than a few more, then hundreds and thousands and millions of people believed that he was.

Their belief was not to their advantage.  Not only would it open up believers to mockery, not only would it create ruptured relationships (both religious and personal), but those who believed that Jesus was risen from the dead could lose their own lives for trusting in a religious king other than the reigning political one…and they had no guaranteed resurrection three days later.

Being a Christian, then, was not a choice that gave advantages, a fact which alone should make us lean toward trusting the early believers’ conviction that Jesus is risen from the dead.

But let’s go at it another angle.

Let’s look at it from the point of view of a skeptic: a really intelligent, really witty skeptic by the name of Terry Eagleton.

In his book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, he is both critical of those who critique Christianity, and of Christians themselves.

He’s not particularly impressed with any of us.

For starters, Eagleton is bothered by those who say that reason and science is where it’s at, and only where it’s at.

While he’s all for scientific exploration and knowledge (as am I, for the record), Eagleton’s deeply bugged at the habit of not noting where science itself has gone awry, or has holes of reason.

“A belief…can be rational but not true,” and the opposite is also so.  So it was rational for centuries to believe that the sun moved around the earth, although that was very false; it is true that the same nuclear particles can go through two openings simultaneously, but that isn’t rational (112-13).

He goes on, “Nobody has ever clapped eyes on the unconscious.  Yet many people believe in its existence, on the grounds that it makes excellent sense of their experience in the world….We have faith in the knowledge of specialists.  It is also true that plenty of people believe in things that do not exist, such as a wholly just society” (115-6).

In other words, we have “faith” in all sorts of things that either make no sense, or have never been seen or experienced, or in which we must simply blindly trust.

Sometimes, no reason can be given for our trust, such as in the case of love.  The emotion and the commitment behind the emotion cannot be proven, but it exists.  Others can doubt it, but for the one in love, it is as real as day.

In fact, depending on, trusting only provable facts (facts, he would say with great caution, which are provable only until they aren’t) “is a neurosis….like the man in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations who buys a second copy of the daily newspaper to assure himself that what the first copy said was true.”  (124)

In fact, feminists have raised the question about how power and privilege determines the definition of what is true.  Now, I’m not calling Christianity oppressed here, but I am saying that it’s important to note who decides what is in, and what is out; what is legit, and what isn’t.

So Eagleton notices that science takes for granted the assumption “that only ‘natural’ explanations are to be ruled in.  This may well be a wise supposition.  It certainly rules out a lot of egregious nonsense.  But it indeed is a postulate [assumed truth], not the upshot of a demonstrable truth.”

In other words, if provable reason is all that “counts,” then something that is not provable reason is dismissed even before it’s invited to the party.

I’ve been reading physicist Richard Feynman lately, and he agrees–though I don’t know that anyone would ever call him a feminist!  He says:

…if a thing is not scientific, if it cannot be subjected to the test of observation, this does not mean that it’s dead, or wrong, or stupid.  We are not trying to argue that science is somehow good and other things are somehow not good.  Scientists take all those things that can be analyzed by observation, and thus the things called science are found out.  But there are some things left out, for which the method does not work.  This does not mean those things are unimportant.  They are, in fact, in many ways the most important. (16-17).

His point, in part, is to say that science and religion need not be natural enemies.  They can complement each other, even.

But each have boundaries of inquiry and purpose, and yet, I believe he would say, either one left in isolation poses danger.

As far as Eagleton says, if we trust in science exclusively, the discoveries of which presume to lead to progress, then we have what he sarcastically calls “local and temporary setbacks” and “hiccups,” oh, like Hiroshima, apartheid, and ecological disasters.  (87).

And then he says this:

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.  There is even a sense in which humanism, looking around our world, seems at times almost as implausible as papal infallibility…As far as reason goes, what are we to make of a capitalist system which is at once eminently rational and one enormous irrationality, accumulating as it does for accumulations sake and generating vast amounts of waste and worthlessness in the process? (89)

In other words, we place our trust in the irrational all the time, and yet have the crazy notion that somehow it is more reasonable than a story which identifies with the down-trodden, the ill, the forlorn, the forgotten, and offers them communal hope.

THAT SAID, Eagleton lodges a head-on critique of Christians as well.

He says, rightly, that we have abdicated our story for simplistic pietistic moralities and a cozy relationship with power and success.

Here’s an uncomfortable rant that’s worthy of an extended quote:

This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of a female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor.  It laments the death of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U.S. global dominion.  By and large, it worships a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image–a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting, sexually obsessive God with a special regard for that ontologially privilged piece of the globe just south of Canada and north of Mexico, rather than the Yahweh who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of their comfortable settlement into the tracless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely informs them that their burn offerings stink in his nostrils…The Christian church has tortured and disemboweled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning its critics alive.  It has been oily, sanctimonious, brutally oppressive, and vilely bigoted.  Morality for this brand of belief is a matter of the bedroom rather than the boardroom…

In the light of all this, the bellicose ravings of [Christian critics] are, if anything, too muted.  It is hard to avoid the feeling that a God as bright, resourceful, and imaginative as the one that might just possibly exist could not have hit on some more agreeable way of saving the world than religion. (55-57).

He’s right.

If you want a reason, in other words, not to believe in a raised-from-the-dead Jesus, it’s those who call themselves by his name and don’t act in it.

Scripture and tradition have so many nuances: historical, textual, cultural, geographical.

Faith–in anything–has so many imperceptibles.

To simply dismiss Christian faith because it is unreasonable dismisses the complexity of all of the above; forgets our blind trust in the unreasonableness of that which we assume to be the routine of “daily life;” and ignores our routine trust in science’s discoveries…until something else is scientifically discovered.

However, to dismiss Christian faith because of Christians who have not lived in the light of the empty tomb in which they say they believe, who do not see that that Easter act reveals God’s agenda not just for the future but for the now, who are more concerned with preserving their lifestyle than offering their lives as Jesus bids them to do, well, that makes reasonable sense.

As even the skeptic Eagleton says, “If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do.” (27).

You have some explaining to do, not least of all to those who are peering into the Christian mindset, the Christian world-veiw, and into the reasonableness, the trustworthiness, of the Gospel that Jesus is risen.

The paradoxical point, the one that Luther got, was that the Christian story makes no sense at all.  It is terribly unreasonable.

Come, follow Jesus, and die.

And that’s good news (!?).

Come, follow Jesus: feed, forgive, heal, house, clothe, and so do not because you have to, but because you are freed to.  You are freed to offer up your security; in fact your very lives, in trust to the eminently unreasonable promise that despite all evidence to the contrary, life wins.

You can trust that more than death.

I know that it makes no sense.

But that doesn’t make it nonsense.

Faith in the risen Jesus is something more than just reason (though there are reasons for it), and more than just intellectual agreement (though Jesus’ life resonates far more with my view of the world than does US capitalism, for example).

Faith in the risen Jesus is trust in mystery, in hopes of an upside-down-world righted, in the power of promise over lived experience.

And that, by the way, is also why I’m a Twins fan.

Below please find both the text of a sermon I preached on Sunday, July 28 at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, SD, and the link to the website on which you can find the audio version as well.

I hope this post finds you all well!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Two confessions related to this very sermon based on this very passage from Luke.

Well, three, if you count what I wanted say to Pastor Lori when I realized that she’d stiffed me with this text.

First one:  I am the world’s lousiest pray-er.  Never been good at it.  Positively awful about it, really. I’ve gone to workshops, spiritual directors, and, paradoxically, I’ve even tried praying about it, trying to improve my pray-er aptitude.

Didn’t work.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m worse now than I was before.

Partly, it’s because I get lost in thought during the actual prayer.

I really do.

I’ve gone into so many other thought-lands that I can’t find my map back, let alone my way back.  Truth is, sometimes I actually forget that I was praying.

In seminary, we all had to take a personality inventory called the Myers-Briggs.  Some of you might be familiar with it.  I came out (then) as an ENFP.  One day, a classmate brought in a Prayer Profile based on the Myers-Briggs Eval.  Under ENFP, the little cartoon had a stick person earnestly trying to pray, and the thought bubble went something like this: “Dear God, thank you for…Look!   A bird!”

And it still goes like that.  “Dear God, thank you for all that you have given our family: love, a home, food….wait: we need groceries.  Where’s my list?” And so it goes.

I’ve even gotten to the point where I have stopped saying “You’re in my prayers,” because that optimistically suggests that I will pray.  I want to pray.  I should pray.  But I don’t, unless I am absolutely positive that I can and will do it right then and there.  I do say, however, “You are in my thoughts,” because that is undoubtably true.

Some have tried to console me by saying that there are different forms of prayer, and that thinking about someone, or fixing meals for those in need, or writing blogs, or reading theology, or teaching are all forms of prayer.  I appreciate the thought, but it’s cheap grace.  It’s not true.  I just need to own that I am a terrible, lousy, pray-er.

That’s the first confession.

The second confession is that sometimes, Scripture makes me angry.  I don’t mean that it makes me angry when I hear something in it that is too challenging, or uncomfortable.  I mean that the words in Scripture seem so out of touch with reality, so insulting to our intelligence and experience, so simplistic, that it simply ticks me off.

You see, then, that these two confessions (these three of them, because I have no doubt that Lori knows that I cannot pray out of a paper bag and that Scripture irritates me) conflate in the very text I have as the springboard for my sermon.

One more thing: I learned in seminary that it is exactly the text you don’t want to preach on that you should, and that chances are, some or all of your objections are echoed by others in the congregation.  And so, hoping that there is some truth to both of these claims, I rolled up my sleeves last week and wrestled with Jesus’ words about prayer.

Let me tell you the part that irked me about our passage today.  It’s the verses 9-13.  “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches find, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.  Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish?  Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”

It was interesting to read the range of ways that theologians try to come to terms with these words, try to make some sense out of them.

Some commentators say that it is true.  Pray hard enough and all that you ask for in God’s name will be true.

That take, my friends, can be a lie.  It’s not necessarily true.  It’s a set-up for disappointment and anger and feelings of being betrayed by God.  How many of us have prayed to this God of resurrection for healing, for reconciliation, for hope, for faith, only to be answered with a deep and echo-ey silence, a silence that betrays the central essence of God? As bad, we might even “receive” the exact opposite of what we believe to be right and good in God’s name.

Others say that God does answer our prayers, but just not in the way that we expect or want.

That’s sophistry, an argument born out of a need to make sure that Scripture is literally true, more than a need to attend to the real and justified feelings of being abandoned by God in a moment, or several strung-together moments, of deep need.

It also is a thinly veiled way of suggesting that everything that happens must be because God wants it that way.

How many people prayed for Hitler to stop, for wars to end, for hunger to be sated, for hate to evaporate, and yet they persist, and grow?

Do we really want to say that God answered our prayers by letting Hitler and war and hunger and hate run rampant?

So no.  It is not satisfactory to say that when we don’t get our prayers answered the way we want, what we get must be what God wants.

In fact, some say that the reference to snakes and scorpions gets exactly to that point: Fishermen sometimes could catch a sea snake instead of their needed fish, and a scorpion, when curled up, could look like an egg.  It’s only a cruel joke to arrange it so that one gives something painfully other than the thing it was promised to be.

So no.  God does not play these sorts of perverse games.  It is not satisfactory to say that when we don’t get our prayers answered the way we want, what we get clearly must be what God wants.

Instead, hope for some sense-making comes in verse 13.  “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Ah.  Breakthrough coming.

The Holy Spirit.

Allow me to bust into some Pentecost for a moment.

There are all sorts of spirits: school spirit, Christmas spirit, mob spirit, community spirit, spooky spirit, and so forth.  The adjective, the word before spirit, clarifies what sort of spirit we’re talking about.  And so it would make no sense, for example, to have your school spirit on when hanging ornaments on your Christmas tree.  You see?

The word “Holy” defines the kind of spirit Jesus has in mind.  It’s the Holy Spirit, the set apart Spirit, the hallowed Spirit.

Remember that the whole context of this passage is that of the disciples wanting Jesus to teach them to pray.  It was customary that each rabbi, which is what Jesus was, of course, a Jewish rabbi, it was customary that each rabbi had a defining prayer, a prayer that not only was unique to him, but was an encapsulation of this rabbi’s essential teachings, of who this rabbi was.

So when the disciples were asking Jesus to teach them to pray, they weren’t so much asking Jesus to teach them to pray in the way that I have (by taking classes and going to monasteries and enrolling in prayer workshops).  They were asking Jesus to tell them who he was, and what his vision of God was, and what his vision of those who followed him was.

“Teach us to pray” could just as well have been a request to “Teach us to align ourselves with you.”  Teach us who you, in the name of God, are.

With that in mind, then, we look both at the end of this passage, at verse 13, where Jesus promised that if we prayed for the Holy Spirit, it would be offered to us, and we look at the beginning of today’s passage, verses 1-4, where Jesus teaches us (a version of) the Lord’s prayer, differently.

We see that both have something to do with the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit has something to do with God, and that the Holy Spirit has to do with community, even the community of those whom we do not know and we do not like.

The prayer isn’t even about my wishes, but it is about God’s wishes for us.  It’s a prayer in the plural.  Give us. Forgive us as we forgive those indebted to us. Do not bring us into trial.

It’s a prayer for the community by the community to the God of community.

And notice, the in-between verses are about expansive hospitality, even hospitality that costs annoyance to people as it is brought into being.

And here is where my anger at this text abates.  Some years ago I was invited to go to a Sioux Falls Professional Women’s Organization meal.  The journalist Lisa Ling was the presenter there.  Almost as an afterthought, at the very end of her speech, Ms. Ling told the audience that she was agnostic, but that she married a dedicated Christian.  One day, after a particularly rough series of stories she had done on trauma and hardship and violence done to the Least of These across the globe, she said in exasperation, “I do not understand why this God of yours doesn’t do something about these situations!”  And he looked at her and said, quietly, “God did. God sent us you.”

This prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, and still teaches us, is a communal touchstone, a grounding point for aligning us with God’s vision, God’s agenda for the world.  All should be fed.  All should be forgiven, sins and debts.  All should be protected.

It is a prayer that is powerfully political: God’s kingdom is not ours, and yet is, in fact, defined by our feeding, and our forgiving, and our protecting, and our welcoming.

Let that kingdom come.

That sort of inbreaking and action takes breath.

It takes Holy breath.

It takes Holy Spirit.

And so, Jesus seems to be saying at the very end of this passage, that when we pray that prayer, in effect, we are praying for the Holy Spirit to come to fill us, so that we can be ambassadors of feeding, and forgiving, and protecting, and welcoming.

And that when we pray it, God promises that the Holy Spirit will come.

Let us recall that the only reason that we are still paying attention to this prayer is because these very same disciples believed that Jesus is risen from the dead.

That means that life, not death, is God’s agenda.

That life is a mark of God’s reign.

And when we pray that prayer, we become disciples too; disciples of this sort of reign, this sort of agenda, this sort of vision.

Praying this prayer, then, is dangerous stuff.  It is freeing stuff.  It is powerful stuff. It is communal stuff, for those we know, and don’t know, and like, and don’t like.

You see, it invokes the Holy Spirit, which I don’t advise doing lightly.

And it’s wily strategy on Jesus’ part too.

For even I can remember the Lord’s Prayer, and follow it through all the way til the end.

I do see a bird occasionally, though, when I pray it.  It looks remarkably like a dove.

That’s what a pastor friend of mine said in a large group conversation about the changing views in the Church around homosexuality, and all the recent stirred up trouble and pain and dicey discussions and risky decisions made by people of faith with deeply conflicting views.

Today is Pentecost, and many Christians are gettin’ their red on, and we are praying “Come, Holy Spirit.”

Because that’s what you do, on Pentecost.  You pray fervently for the Holy Spirit to come.

Check out this powerful ancient prayer: Veni Sancte Spiritus:

Come, Holy Spirit,

send forth the heavenly

radiance of your light.

grant eternal joy.

grant the deliverance of salvation,

Come, father of the poor,

come, giver of gifts,

come, light of the heart.

Greatest comforter,

sweet guest of the soul,

sweet consolation.

In labor, rest,

in heat, temperance,

in tears, solace.

O most blessed light,

fill the inmost heart

of your faithful.

Without your grace,

there is nothing in us,

nothing that is not harmful.

Cleanse that which is unclean,

water that which is dry,

heal that which is wounded.

Bend that which is inflexible,

fire that which is chilled,

correct what goes astray.

Give to your faithful,

those who trust in you,

the sevenfold gifts.

Grant the reward of virtue

grant the deliverance of salvation,

grant eternal joy.

Read it again.

Those are some serious petitions.

Now trying praying it.

I dare you.

Try really praying it.

“Cleanse that which is unclean, water that which is dry, heal that which is wounded. Bend that which is inflexible, fire that which is chilled, correct what goes astray…”

If I were Montoya, I’d be led to say, “I do not think the Holy Spirit means what you think She means.”

I heard it said recently, but for the life of me I can’t track it down, that whenever the Holy Spirit shows up in Scripture, change is in the air.

What you had presumed to be safe, isn’t.

The Holy Spirit isn’t safe.

Two weeks ago in church, a small child wandered up to the children’s sermon with a grin and a helmet on.  I was reminded of this quote by Annie Dillard:

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

There are a lot of people in the church these days reaching for helmets and life preservers and seatbelts for protection.

It’s dangerous, here, these days.

When you think about it, though, danger infuses something as necessary as driving in a car, as adventurous as hopping on a rocket, as fun an amusement park ride.

The necessary and the adventurous and the fun are all dangerous.

That’s sort of where we are in the church these days; a dangerous fusion of the necessary and the adventurous and the fun.

I think we are there, right in that dangerous intersection of the necessary and the adventurous and the fun, because I think that the Holy Spirit has heard us.

I think she’s come.

I think she’s stirring up trouble, knowing that we mistake placidness for faithfulness.

I think she’s setting us–and some of our sacred cows–on fire.

I think she’s birthing newness, and birth is never painless, never not messy.

I think she’s teaching us new words for a new culture.

I think she’s blowing a wind that is hurling all sorts of our idols through the air and out the door.

I do think she may have forgotten to supply us with helmets, but that’s a quibble.

Come, Holy Spirit.

Really.

…..

Gulp.

___________________

Two brief matters:

First, here are two links to previous Pentecosty OMG blogs.  It’s been suggested that I link to previous pieces I’ve written on similar topics, so here goes:

http://omgcenter.com/2011/06/holy-adjectives-pentecosty-musings/

http://omgcenter.com/2012/09/detecting-the-holy-spirit/

Second, I apologize that there has been such a delay between the last post and this one.

A few matters have caused a delay: among them, I have a bug in my brain to introduce OMG readers to different Big Deal theologians.  Pastors “meet” these world-shakers and shapers in seminary but then have few occasions to get laity to get to know them too.  Because of some great questions that I’ve gotten post-Easter about the historicity of the resurrection, I’ve been brushing up on my Bultmann.  That’s taken some time and strong drink of the caffeinated and non-caffeinated variety.

Second, we’ve found out in the recent weeks that my mother’s cancer is fiercer than we wish.  We are not conceding the battle, of course, but therefore posts may be less frequent as we shore up our fortresses and fight the good fight.  For those of you new to OMG, you can learn a bit more about my mother here.

Come, Holy Spirit,

Cleanse that which is unclean,water that which is dry,heal that which is wounded.

For weeks!

But now, the food is prepared, the cookies baked, the friends and family assembled, the candles lit, and we can finally sing, “Let earth receive her king!”

Presents exchanged, children tucked in, stockings brimming, morning awaiting. “Let every heart prepare him room!”

Ice luminaries flicker light in the crispy night, frost climbs the windows as if it wants to get inside, and then fires blaze beside spiked Christmas morning coffee; “And heaven and nature sing!”

And heaven and nature sing.

And for many, myself included, at least for one night out of the year, we have a good measure of tangible peace.

We bust out the best we’ve got and we spread the table and the day with all of our hopes and fears of all the years, and they are all redeemed where it is warm and joyful and so very good in this sweet safe space of home.

Still.

Still, if we’ve attended to our Advent preparations, the tangible peace is not complete, and we owe it to those who suffer to name that too.

We know that there are fewer stockings hung in Newtown, and also here, in Sioux Falls, where on Saturday three children died in a fire on the same day that a young mother died of ill health.

We know that windows of the cars in which people live are frosty, and these panes are not nearly as quaint for those peering out of back seats.

We know that sometimes, for any number of reasons, the end of this obligatory family time could not come soon enough.

We know that not all are feasting.

We know that the earth is groaning.

And we know that there is grief and loneliness and cynicism and anger.

And if Advent has settled into our bones and souls as well as the now 3° South Dakota wintery cold has, we are reminded that Jesus came not into the scene pictured above, but into chaos and anxiety and uncertainty and a very unsafe world.

So on this Christmas Eve–now Day, as I look at my clock, writing this while sugar plums are choreographing in my children’s dreams, I’d like to offer you a bit of  Bruce Cockburn, Lou Reed, and Roseanne Cash.

A bit of a dose of the as-it-should-be and the as-it-is.

A bit of the reminder that mistrust and incredulity and skepticism and profound grief and deep nastiness all still exist, no matter whether we are talking about that first Christmas, so long ago, or ours...and a bit of a reminder that sometimes, sometimes, a shot of the ideal, even the very edgy, edgy ideal (“Forgive me…I thought you’d been with some other man….” “What if I had been? But I wasn’t anyway, and guess what? I felt the baby kick today!”) courses through.

It can course through this world, this life of ours.

“Like a stone on the surface of a still river/Driving the ripples on forever/Redemption rips through the surface of time/In the cry of a tiny babe…”

To shepherds and street people, to hookers and bums, Jesus was born, he took on the flesh of good wine and deep grief, and he made some promises.

He made some promises that it doesn’t need to be this way; that there are those who act in his name who can be trusted; that together those who act in the spirit of determined kindness and fierce compassion have tremendous power to transform the world from greed and violence and sick power to stewarded hospitality and persistent comfort and unbridled freedom to love.

He is come.

Here.

In this place.

In you.

In us.

To be in the world.

To change the world.

So.

No more let sins, and sorrows grow!

Nor thorns infest the ground!

He comes to make his blessings flow,

Far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found, far as, far as the curse is found.

____________________

Cry of a Tiny Babe

Bruce Cockburn, Lou Reed, Roseanne Cash

Mary grows a child without the help of a man
Joseph get upset because he don’t understand
Angel comes to Joseph in a powerful dream
Says “God did this and you’re part of the scheme!”
Joseph comes to Mary with his hat in his hand
Says “forgive me I thought you’d been with some other man”
She says “what if I had been — but I wasn’t anyway and guess what
I felt the baby kick today”

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

The child is born in the fullness of time
Three wise astrologers take note of the signs
Come to pay their respects to the fragile little king
Get pretty close to wrecking everything
‘Cause the governing body of the Holy Land
Is that of Herod, a paranoid man
Who when he hears there’s a baby born King of the Jews
Sends death squads to kill all male children under two
But that same bright angel warns the parents in a dream
And they head out for the border and get away clean

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

There are others who know about this miracle birth
The humblest of people catch a glimpse of their worth
For it isn’t to the palace that the Christ child comes
But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums
And the message is clear if you’ve got [you have] ears to hear
That forgiveness is given for your guilt and your fear
It’s a Christmas gift [that] you don’t have to buy
There’s a future shining in a baby’s eyes

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

___________________________________________

Grace to you and peace from the Triune God.

I really don’t have a problem being angry.

I kind of like it.

And I think I’m pretty good at it.

I learned it well from my father, and I still sit at his feet, actually, to learn many tricks of the tirade.

Now, I am not talking about petty, capricious irritability, nor am I speaking about impetuous temper flares.

I am talking about deserved contempt, withering and grounded critique, righteous indignation.

It’s especially fun when I’m feeling all of the above and I write letters.  Penning an epistle when I’m hot under the collar comes so easily to me.  The words seem to fall out of the air, the quotes appear to me as if in visions, the rhythm of the phrases is as forceful as their point.

It is then and almost exclusively then that I use my titles: The Rev. Dr.

So it’s with great relief that I read Ephesians and hear that I get to be angry.

Did you hear that?

It’s o.k. to be angry.

It’s in the Bible.

You, too, can be justifiably ticked!

We just can’t sin.

It’s an important detail.

But for the moment, let’s stick with anger.

And as far as anger goes, let me be clear: I’m not being rhetorical about anger.  I’m not setting anger up to mock it and knock it down.

There are things about which to be really angry.

The word we translate as “righteous” is, in Hebrew, tzadek.  It means, wonderfully, to be “properly aligned.”  Joseph Sittler, a late Lutheran theologians and patron saint of all of us who crave to be one, explained it more or less like this: if your car drives over a bumpy Jerusalem road, the axels get all bent out of shape, you get it into the shop, and then you go out for a kosher bite to eat.  After a while you check back in and hear from the mechanic, thankfully, that the car is “tzadek” again.  It was out of alignment, and once fixed is properly aligned, which means that it drives straight again.

It’s righteous.

And so righteous indignation is anger that is properly aligned.

You have a right to be justifiably ticked.

IF, that is, you have aligned yourself with something that is itself righteous.

Which gets to the whole “Be angry but do not sin” piece of that text.

Your anger is reflective of something.  It is reflective of a standard, a guide about what is right and good, and what falls short of right and good, and whether there is some culpability about the gap between these two.

Your anger reflects your values.

Your anger reflects your God.

And your God can be righteous, and your God can also be, well, unrighteous.  Recall that God said not that there are no other gods, but that we shall have no other gods.    There are choices.  And our choice of God directs our sense of peace, and our sense of anger.

Gods that call us to worship self-protection, self-security, self-aggrandizement at the expense of others more vulnerable, will be angry when they are threatened..

But the God of which the Bible speaks is a God of a community built on, what does it say again in Ephesians?  Kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness, and sacrifice.

The Bread Cycle in which we sit these days also suggests that our God has a passion for feeding the hungry, too.

God seems somewhat obsessed with the care of the Other, in other words.  The well-being of the One Who Is Not Me.

It is interesting, it seems to me, to see what ticks people off these days.  There is a phrase I’m hearing often: “First World Problems.”  I’ve suffered a lot of those in recent days: a new couch that was delayed by several months, a fence that was delayed by several months, a way-delayed repair due us by a tree company after they busted our fire pit during their work.

Our fire pit!

I got angry.  I don’t know how righteous it was, but I got angry.

And then there’s the whole Chick-Fil-A Event of last week: people lining up to demonstrate, as a friend of mine said, their Christian righteousness on the basis of whether they eat or don’t eat at some fast food chain.  Angry people dressed up as chickens. Now there’s something to take seriously.

And in politics, people have moved beyond angry and into reactionary.

Each of these expressions of anger have varying degrees of sinfulness, because they are bound up less in the care of God’s community as God sees it, and more in our own petty agendas and wants.

So when Scripture tells us to be angry but don’t sin, it catches our attention.

Who hasn’t felt anger?

Not least of all toward the self?

Anger is o.k.  It is acceptable in God’s sight.  It, like pain, can be a sign that something is wrong.

But two things:

1.  It is key to check our anger’s alignment.  Is it, or is it not, properly aligned?  Is it, or is it not, in keeping with the sorts of things that tick God off: hunger and poverty and oppression and isolation and self-absorption and haughty spite, for example?

2.  Is it expressed with love?  I am utterly convinced, to the degree that I don’t know what a person could say to me that would dissuade me from my conviction, that that depth of one’s love for the other is demonstrated most when deep anger is at hand.  Nowhere, I believe, can one see whether the profession of love is to be trusted and is true, then when two or more are so angry that they want to spit, but don’t.

I’ve always found comfort when, in John’s gospel, we hear that Jesus commanded us to love one another.

He didn’t say that we have to like one another.

It is not the proper place, here in the pulpit, in order to make my point, to name all the people whom I don’t like, and to list all the righteous reasons why I don’t like them.

But it is the proper place to say, here in the pulpit, that there are a whole heck of a lot of people I don’t like, and I most probably unrighteously am of the mind that God doesn’t like them either, but that that’s neither here nor there because our calling, according to Ephesians, is not about liking them, but it is about loving them by avoiding wrangling with them and speaking evil of them and maliciously slandering them.

Because when we do these things out of anger, we sin.

Instead, our anger is to build them up.  To call them back to righteousness.

To remind them of their right God.

You can do that in anger.  There are good reasons to be angry.  Sometimes somebody needs a holy holler, a righteous what-for.

Jesus was not just meek and mild, let us remember.  He was known to throw around a few healthy insults (next congregational meeting, when a few are annoying you to no end, you try calling them a brood of vipers and see how far you get).

Good Friday was a source of anger and pain for God.

Make no mistake.

But Easter is the source of reconciliation for us.

That empty tomb is a reminder that God’s final word is not condemnation, not judgment, not exclusion, not separation.

It is not everlasting anger.

It is not Good Friday.

It is reconciliation, it is rapprochement.

It is righteous alignment with the risen Christ.

We’re called to be ambassadors of it even now.  Ambassadors of righteous indignation, and of righteous reconciliation.

And please leave the chicken outfits at home.  Significantly more effective without the chicken outfits.

Amen.

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1 Kings 19:1-15

19

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. ²Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” ³Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. ⁴But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” ⁵Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” ⁶He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. ⁷The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” ⁸He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

⁹At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ¹⁰He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” ¹¹He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; ¹²and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. ¹³When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ¹⁴He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” ¹⁵Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram.

Psalm 34

¹I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

²My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad.

³O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together.

⁴I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

⁵Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed.

⁶This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved from every trouble.

⁷The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

⁸O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.

⁹O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

¹⁰The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

¹¹Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

¹²Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good?

¹³Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.

¹⁴Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.

¹⁵The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry.

¹⁶The face of the Lord is against evildoers, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.

¹⁷When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears, and rescues them from all their troubles.

¹⁸The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.

¹⁹Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.

²⁰He keeps all their bones; not one of them will be broken.

²¹Evil brings death to the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.

²²The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

²⁵So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. ²⁶Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, ²⁷and do not make room for the devil. ²⁸Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. ²⁹Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. ³⁰And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. ³¹Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³²and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

5

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, ²and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

John 6:35-51

³⁵Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. [³⁶But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. ³⁷Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.” ]⁴¹Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” ⁴²They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” ⁴³Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. ⁴⁵It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

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The maxim holds: the thing that you love most about someone is also the thing that makes you insanely berserk about that same beloved.

For my mother, it’s her determination.

My mother is nothing if not determined.  Determined to be her own person, determined to love her family with every fiber of her being, determined to make that love tangible by acts of presence and kindness and cookies.

Her determination, however, mutates when something material is in her way.

If something is stuck, is hooked, is just visible but some unlucky object is in its way, she’ll pull, yank, flip, push, and smash with astonishing determination in order to dislodge, free, or reach it.

It never occurs to her that some gentle repositioning might accomplish the same thing without all the collateral, not to mention primary, destruction.

It makes me crazy.

And when I see my daughter doing it, it about puts me around the bend.

So not too long ago, I found myself screeching, “AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGG!  You’re Doing An Oma!  Please Quit Doing An Oma!”

Mom, of course, happened to be there, and heard me.

She’s decided that the phrase pisses her off.

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Cancer pisses me off.

Pancreatic cancer is the biggest bully on the block.

Just googling it, or googling the only credible cure available, the Whipple, does nothing for emotional well-being.

Not just the cancer needs to be taken down and taken out, but most anything in the near vicinity.  She’ll lose a decent chuck of her pancreas, duodenum, and stomach.

That said, we are one of the few who appear to have a fighting chance.  Mom and I share a PA with uncanny instinct.  Her hunch led us to catch it at a very early Stage One.  We are told that this daunting procedure might just do the trick.

I need the docs to Do An Oma.

For that matter, I need Oma to Do An Oma.

And I wouldn’t mind God Doing an Oma too.

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We’ve been led to have uncomfortable thoughts and conversations.

She is 75, after all.  You get to a certain age (or even experience certain experiences) and realize that nobody gets out of here alive.  At some point, we will all close our eyes for the last time.

You can rail against death all you want, but it still will close in, and sometimes with nary a neener.

It just Is.

Walt Bouman shaped me with his words, “Now that you know that you’re going to die, there’s more to do with your life than preserve it.”

It’s all true.

And yet, one doesn’t need to concede one to death before it’s time.  I’m sure Walt would agree.

As crotchety Ecclesiastes says in a moment less crotchety than quietly reflective:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

And I am of the mind that it’s not yet my mother’s time to die.

She might be 75, but she’s a damn spritely, damn determined 75.

Instead, it’s a time to heal.

(Though Ecclesiastes might be right that it’s my time to break down, and to weep, in the name of righteous indignation, and against this insidious disease).

I do believe that there’s a time when inevitable death comes as Peaceful Grace and not Triumphant and Taunting Finality.

I’m not interested in preserving my mother into infinity and beyond.

I am interested, however, in protesting death when it enters uninvited and before its time.

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Some might say that it’s about God’s timing.

I get that.

I get that there are a whole lot of things in the Grand Scheme that I don’t and won’t ever know.

But I also get that I’ve got some things to work with, some knowledge that I have to trust.

I know that God is in the business of life and health and healing, and so where there is that, I want to work harder on its behalf.

I know that saying “It’s in God’s hands” leads awfully quickly to passivity, to quietism.  That is not how I tend to operate, and it sure isn’t how my mother operates either.

I know that death comes in many forms, and resignation to it is but one of its starkest and sneakiest guises.

Death, in the form of pancreatic cancer and all of its implications –for that matter, death in any untimely form–is not welcome here, in this family of mine.

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In the name of my beloved mother Marge, then, where there is untimely death, I invite you all to Do An Oma.

Do An Oma against death which arrives outside of its season.

Do An Oma against that which surrenders before premature death.

Do An Oma against forces which work against soteria, that is, salvation: health, healing, and wholeness.

Determined Protest.  That’s what it means.

Do an Oma.

Instead, I’ve been too busy reading about the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish.

Well, that and my daughter came down with strep and we’ve been busy making fairies and watching Little House on the Prairie. And we’re moving.

But my delay has mostly been bound up because I’ve been distracted by Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and have been happily geeking out for over a week straight.

(And I am not alone: one friend put me onto the children’s book version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a friend said, “Oh, and remember that Star Trek episode when Picard travels to the planet which speaks in metaphor, and he ends up reciting the Epic of Gilgamesh!” Made my heart flutter.  My father, from whom I get most of my geekly tendencies, has several copies of both.  The other day, over at my parents’ home, I realized that I’d forgotten my volumes at my OMG study.  I whispered to my little boy with a traumatic brain injury, “Sweet boy Karl, can you ask Opa whether he has some spare copies of the Enuma Elish?” Which he did, clearly enunciating the title, and giving my father extra cause to pour an extra libation in celebration that geekiness carries more truck in our family than a TBI)

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Warning: this is a long post.  But if you want to hear about a paradise, an ark and flood and doves, a tree of life, firmaments being stretched out and so forth that come from literature far older than the familiar tales from Genesis, it’s worth your time to slog through the below, and even more to read up on the links at the far bottom.

Geeks of the world, unite.

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I began fussing with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish because a group of people with whom I work were curious about Noah.

And I can’t, of course, teach about Noah and the Flood without teaching about the different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.

And I most assuredly can’t do them any credit if I don’t make a nod to other Ancient Near East literature.

(Utterly unrelated to the task at hand, this little nugget from Gilgamesh [and I love it that my spell-checker knows this word without even being so programmed.  Smart Mac.] caught my little eye.

“Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering? Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands. Gilgamesh, fill your belly, day and night make merry, let days be full of joy, dance and make music day and night. And wear fresh clothes, and wash your head and bathe. Look at the child that is holding your hand, and let your wife delight in your embrace. These things alone are the concern of men.”

Some say it is the oldest recorded advice in literature.

Just saying’.)

But vis-à-vis Old Testament tales of creation and floods, these two stories shaped the texts we know so well…even though we don’t know these primary texts well.

Or at all.

The Enuma Elish was crafted around the 12 century BCE.

It’s a tale of two divine figures, the fresh-water male god Apsu, and the salt-water female god Mummu-Tiamat (she was called Tiamat for short).  Tiamat is depicted also as a dragon from the sea (think, “Leviathan”).

Their, um, waters mingled, and created more gods.  These ragamuffins made Apsu and Tiamut nuts with their racket.

What is inappropriate may be age-appropriate, I always say, but Apsu and Tiamut didn’t see it that way, and decided the best thing to do to quiet the noise was to kill the kids.

The kids, however, found out about this plot, and figured that doing unto others as they intended to do to you was a good policy, and so they offed Apsu.

Tiamat was displeased, and so according to established family dynamics, she decided to go to war with her children: finish them off, once and for all.

The god-lets realized that they had crossed the line, and like it’s been said, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Desperate to save themselves, they found Marduk, a warrior, who overcame Tiamat’s threat by blowing a wind into her as she gaped her mouth open to devour him.  Into her mouth he flung an arrow; that and the air which filled her belly, distending it, killed her, leaving only a carcass amongst the waters.

And so he split her body like a shell, pressing the top across the skies, and the bottom to become the earth, and insisted that her waters be held back.  He created constellations, and vegetation, and becomes the Man of the Hour.

That is, until the gods realize that he had assigned tasks: one had to be the sun god, one the star god, one the moon god, and so on and so forth.

The gods began to get irritable, and so to appease them, Marduk struck on the idea of creating humankind by mixing up the blood of Tiamat’s general so that the gods would have servants.

The End.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells a different tale.

It was written around 2000 BCE.

(We’re still working with Epiphany, believe it or not)

King Gilgamesh was unpleasant.  He was a dictator, a rapist, and capricious.  His people cried out to the god Aruru for relief, and Aruru sends Enkidu, a man-beast, who, according to Christine Hayes, was very Adam-esque.  He was to tame Gilgamesh, but before he could, Gilgamesh, who had heard of this Enkidu, sent a woman (perhaps a prostitute?) to tame Enkidu.

The two fell in love, and Enkidu found the inspiration, maturity, and transcendence to address Gilgamesh.

This decision, however, forces him out of paradise: he clothes himself, he loses his relationship and identity with the animals, and can not return.

Long and short of it is that Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight, they become fast friends as a result, and against the better judgment of all, they leave town to fight Humbaba, an evil monster god.

Together they overcome their fears and their disadvantage, and kill Humbaba.  Ishtar, goddess of war and sex (go figure), finds herself attracted to the man behind all of this violence and asks Gilgamesh to marry her.  He, however, doesn’t reciprocate her desire, in part because he’s well aware that she tends to inflict pain on her lovers.

She is displeased.

She vows revenge (trust me, this all has something to do with Epiphany) by way of harnessing the Bull of Heaven, which destroys Gilgamesh’s town Uruk.

But her revenge is short-lived, as Enkidu and Gilgamesh kill the bull and chuck its tail at Ishtar in a spiteful display of victory.

A word to the wise: do not annoy the Ishtars in your life.

In retaliation, she struck Enkidu with a fatal illness, and claimed him.

Gilgamesh was distraught at his death, and set out to discover the gods’ secrets of immortality.  He began a quest, then, and sought Upnapishtim, the legendary immortal human.

Upnapishtim, a very moral man, had been warned in a dream that a tremendous flood was imminent due to the evil of humanity.  He was commanded to build an ark with very specific dimensions, and gather the seeds of all living things to preserve life so that new life could begin after the waters subsided.  Three birds were brought on board and released to see whether land was near.  The dove and the sparrow returned, but the raven disappeared.

The god who caused the flood was reprimanded for the severity of the flood, and as compensation for the destruction, Upnapishtim and his wife were rewarded with eternal life.

This eternal life was not possible to be given to Gilgamesh, who was given yet a parting possibility at youthful living until he died by way of a plant of life at the bottom of the ocean.  He fetched it, only to have it stolen by a serpent.

Crushed by the futility of his quest, Giglamesh returned to Uruk, where he had to face his mortality and die.

Do you see the clear connections between what you’ve read so far and the season of Epiphany?

No, you say? Not at all?  Have I been imbibing of my daughter’s strep medicine, you wonder?

Well, let me help you have an epiphany then.

Clearly, there are overlaps between these two stories and the creation and flood stories in Genesis.  A man and woman in paradise, an ark with dimensions in which righteous creation is saved, firmament spread out keeping the waters above and below at bay, and so on.

Yet while there are similarities between these stories, there are also key differences, both of which reveal (i.e., offer the chance for an epiphany) something of the Jewish/Christian notion of God, and of creation, and of humanity.

Chances are, the ancient Hebrews had heard these stories, not least of all when they were in exile in Babylon.  So the tales were familiar to them.

Christine Hayes, professor at Yale, tells us that the famous first words of Genesis, “In the beginning” would be better translated with the sense of “When from on high,” the beginning words of the Enuma Elish…which are, by the way, “Enuma Elish.”

And she does such marvelous work with the connection between the wind of Marduk, and Tiamat being from the deep, that I’m going to quote her at length here:

Remember the cosmic battle between Marduk and Tiamat: Marduk the storm god, who released his wind against Tiamat, the primeval deep, the primeval water, representing the forces of chaos. And you should immediately hear the great similarities. Our story opens with a temporal clause: “When on high,” “when God began creating”; we have a wind that sweeps over chaotic waters, just like the wind of Marduk released into the face of Tiamat, and the Hebrew term is particularly fascinating. In fact, the text says “and there is darkness on the face of deep.” No definite article. The word “deep” is a proper name, perhaps. The Hebrew word is Tehom. It means “deep” and etymologically it’s exactly the same word as Tiamat: the “at” ending is just feminine. So Tiam, Tehom — it’s the same word, it’s a related word.

THAT’S SO COOL!

But as Christine Hayes points out, these same stories were rejected by adapting them.

Your gods are the moon and the stars and the sun?

Our God made your gods.

Your gods made humans to serve them?

Our God made humans to be in God’s image.  They are in that way sacred.  They are called to tend to creation, not split it, destroy it, and see it as an enemy.

In Genesis, evil need not be seen as inherent in creation.  Instead, God saw it all and called it “good.”  “Very good,” as a matter of fact.

Instead, evil is a choice that humans have by way of their autonomy.  Hayes notes that although there are all sorts of parallels to the tree of life in Ancient Near Eastern Literature (think of the plant on the bottom of Gilgamesh’s ocean), there is no parallel to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s only that tree that humans are commanded to avoid.  She writes:

It’s one of the things about God: he knows good and evil and has chosen the good. The biblical writer asserts of this god that he is absolutely good. The humans will become like gods, knowing good and evil, not because of some magical property in this fruit…but because of the action of disobedience itself. By choosing to eat of the fruit in defiance of God — this is the one thing God says, “Don’t do this! You can have everything else in this garden,” presumably, even, you can eat of the tree of life, right? It doesn’t say you can’t eat of that. Who’s to say they couldn’t eat of that and just live forever? Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

[But] it’s by eating of the fruit in defiance of God, human beings learn that they were able to do that, that they are free moral agents. They find that out. They’re able to choose their actions in conformity with God’s will or in defiance of God’s will. So paradoxically, they learn that they have moral autonomy. Remember, they were made in the image of God and they learn that they have moral autonomy by making the defiant choice, the choice for disobedience…

So the very action that brought them a godlike awareness of their moral autonomy was an action that was taken in opposition to God. So we see then that having knowledge of good and evil is no guarantee that one will choose or incline towards the good. That’s what the serpent omitted in his speech. He said if you eat of that fruit, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you’ll become like God. It’s true in one sense but it’s false in another. He sort of omitted to point out… he implies that it’s the power of moral choice alone that is godlike. But the biblical writer will claim in many places that true godliness isn’t simply power, the power to do what one wishes. True godliness means imitation of God, the exercise of one’s power in a manner that is godlike, good, life-affirming and so on. So, it’s the biblical writer’s contention that the god of Israel is not only all-powerful but is essentially and necessarily good.

Such epiphanic good stuff in there, good stuff that is perhaps best seen in relief to these formative stories.

Your gods are options, the ancient Hebrews seemed to say, but here is what our God is about, and not about:

It’s not that we are to be in servitude to other gods (what sort of gods are out there, offering themselves to your life, or to the lives of those whom you love, or to our culture?).

It’s not that creation is evil, and to be despised.

It’s not that immortality is where it’s at.

And it’s not even that the world was created exactly as this is written down.

It’s (in part) that God calmed the chaos; provided for God’s creatures; established expectations of goodness and reverence toward God, creation, and each other; and that creation is, at root, good.

As I told my daughter last Sunday, an epiphany is an a-ha moment, and Epiphany, then, is the season of a-ha moments.

My preparation for this presentation last week yielded a bunch of a-ha moments:

A reminder that the Jewish-Christian tradition did not begin in a vacuum; an offering of new knowledge about ancient Hebrew; a gift of renewed clarity that God loves creating and creatures, and…

an affirmation that I am unapologetically and irreversibly a geek.

Web resources:

Christine Hayes, Yale Professor.  Her lectures seen here can also be viewed online.

Dennis Bratcher, of the Christian Resource Institute.

http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/religion-flood.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/brown.htm