If
you’re like us, we have big back-to-school emphases on August 27. So I find myself drawn to the OT, Exodus
1:8-2:10, a good Bible story (with children involved!), and also the Epistle,
Romans 12:1-8, whose opening verses portray an alternate view of what we’re
about with school – and life: it’s not education per se, or getting ahead, and thus it’s not about conformity! The Christian gig is Transformation. My college roommate’s girlfriend
cross-stitched Romans 12:1-2 and hung it in our dorm room – perhaps a favorite
verse, maybe as a bit of a warning to sophomoric college dudes… but it’s thus
been an important, memorable passage to me.
Matthew 16, as demarcated in the
lectionary, lops off the whole point, which unfolds after verse 20 – so we
shall return to that the next week!
Check the blog below for Sept. 3.
It’s
tempting but ticklish to open with a salvo against “empire” (as I was trained
to do) – as people have such sensitive political antennae. At the same time, Exodus clearly exposes with
clear hints of mockery the massive yet anxious power of the Pharaoh. Walter Brueggemann, in his lovely recent book
Sabbath
as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (which I reviewed –
glowingly! – in Christian
Century), shows how sabbath is not merely a spiritual discipline, but
an alternative to our busy, frenetic, workaholic consumer culture. What socioeconomic system did the Pharaoh
legitimate? One different and yet
scarily like our own…
– and the preacher can speak of this in
ways that people will comprehend, and feel loved and understood. It’s about obsessive work, requirement for
ever more production, money flowing upward toward the top. With Egypt’s deities, like our society’s,
work is never done. I love his way of
phrasing it: “It is not accidental that
the best graphic portrayal of this arrangement is a pyramid, the supreme
construction of Pharaoh’s system.” Who
is the most anxious one of all in this anxious system? The one at the top – which tells us something
about that whole upwardly mobile pyramid.
He “dealt shrewdly with them” – and we have to laugh out loud, which the
Hebrews couldn’t do back then. He
provides less straw, and wants to kill off the males – his labor supply, and
also those who will father the future labor supply. His nervousness makes his behave in
self-destructive ways.
But God knows, God hears, God comes
down. The saviors in the early portions
of Exodus are the unexpected – following the Bible’s quirky logic. Two young women, Shiphrah and Puah (whose
names mean “little flower” and “lovely”), do not mind disobeying the law; civil
disobedience has an honored place among God’s people, although for church people,
one person’s civil disobedience is the other guy’s lack of patriotism or
troublemaking. I love the way they defy
Pharaoh with a sassy impertinence: Why didn’t they kill the babies? “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian
women; they are so strong they give birth before the midwives can even get
there!” Revolutions – and God knows we
need them today – require some pluck, and a bit of subtle braggadocio. We are not merely victims! Jonathan Sacks, in his wonderful Lessons
in Leadership, commenting on the midwives, reminds us, “There are
crimes against humanity that cannot be excused by the claim that ‘I was only
obeying orders.’”
Preachers can explore the heroic – in
society, and certainly in the church. I
like to introduce this theme with Charles Dickens’s great line from David Copperfield (and used to great
effect by John Irving in Cider House
Rules): “Whether I shall turn out
to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody
else, these pages must show.” Your life
must show whether you will be heroic. So
I’ll rattle off some instances. Huge
stories – like Albert
Schweitzer, ridiculously brilliant, Bach scholar, consummate organist, the
world’s leading New Testament scholar – and then he left Europe behind, became
a doctor and moved to Lamparene.
Why? “I wanted to make my life my
argument.” See preaching stuff here?
Then I try to find simpler things. Rosa Parks just sitting there is something
really anybody could do, no muscle power or unusual IQ required. Find examples in history (my little summary
of heroes in church history, Servants,
Misfits & Martyrs: Saints & Their Stories is my packaging of my
favorites, all of which I’ve used in sermons) – and maybe some close to
home. Maybe it believable, doable, and
even joyful.
Jochebed
defied Pharaoh in her own way by hiding her son. But this gambit could not last
long. In desperation, or in faithful hope (and we may ask how different these
really are), she placed her three-month-old son in a basket and set it afloat
on the Nile River.
The Hebrew word for this basket, tevah,
occurs only one other time in scripture: and that is to describe Noah’s ark.
Both ark and basket were rudder-less, lacking locomotion, carrying the future
hope of humanity toward who knows where. This tevah
floated right up to the spot where Pharaoh’s daughter happened to be bathing.
Nothing is explicit, but we sense God somehow brought basket and princess
together. You could say she “cast her
bread upon the waters” (Ecclesiates 11:1).
I like to tease people toward the coming
Sunday, or Sundays – so in this case, build a little anticipation, reminding
your people that they didn’t know how things would turn out; even those who
clung to hope had to teeter on the brink of despair. Things certainly got way worse before they
got better… But then we do have the
larger perspective to know the end of the story. That Pharaoh, if we calculate the way many
historians do, was Rameses II, the greatest, longest-ruling and most powerful
of all the Pharaohs! How cool – that the
deliverance came not under a wimpy excuse of a Pharaoh, but under the biggest
dog of all; in much the same way, Jesus was born, not in the reign of one of
the measley, impotent caesars, but when Augustus, the greatest of them all,
ruled from Rome.
The
fate of all the scary powers is destruction.
All empires, the ones that loom through history and even today,
including our own great nation, will eventually crumble. I like to remind people of that poem about
Rameses (whose Greek name would have been Ozymandias) penned by Percy Bysshe
Shelley: "Two
vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
/ Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and
sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, / Which
yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them,
& the heart that fed / And on the pedestal these words appear: / "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look
upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" / Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and
level sands stretch far away."
It is
for this reason then that we cling to God, to Christ – and don’t vest ourselves
in this world, no matter how shiny or scary it might be. Which brings us to Romans 12.
N.T.
Wright (in his New Interpreter’s Bible commentary) says “The
opening 2 verses of this section are as dense as any passage in Paul.” Agreed.
Read slowly. Preach a whole
series on the thing. I won’t attempt
every detail, but here are a few that leave me thunderstruck and appear to be
fertile preaching ground.
The “Therefore”
is huge! Paul assumes you’ve just been
listening to somebody read out loud chapters 1-11 – so remind yourself about
grace, faith, the Spirit, baptism. Paul
seems to be shifting from faith to action – an unfortunate “seems,” as
Christians forever focus on belief and then forget to get to ethics,
simultaneously forgetting they are one and the same. N.T. Wright again: “Belief and behavior are
inextricably woven. They are the breath
and blood of Christian living, the twin signs of life.”
Paul
gets at the nucleus of what the “therefore” is picking up from chapters 1-11
with the phrase “by the mercies of God.”
Notice the plural: mercies!
Pope
Francis has rightly catapulted Mercy front and center as the essential theme of
what’s in God’s heart, what the Christian life is about, and how to be the
church; I’d commend his favorite book on mercy to you: Walter Kasper’s Mercy. Profound, wonderful. On this topic and passage, John Calvin wrote,
“Men will never worship God with a sincere heart, or be roused to fear and obey
Him with sufficient zeal, until they properly understand how much they are
indebted to His mercy.”
Mind
you, in our culture there is so little mercy, and we even forget our need for
God’s mercy – so some considerable re-education is needed. Although… I find in preaching that when I
pause and explore our hunger for mercy, and how hard it is to find it (I’ll say
things like “There’s not much mercy at work, none at the mall – and lots of
people don’t find a lot of mercy even at home” – and quite a few people flinch,
or nod).
Paul “beseeches”
(the Greek, parakalo, is an exhortation of intense urgency and earnestness!)
them/us to “offer up your body as a living sacrifice.” I remember playing football and our captain
repeatedly shouted “Give up your body.”
Okay, not a brilliant illustration…
I admire Wright’s observation that Paul strikes “a fine balance between
sacrifice and fulfillment, between an ethic of self-denial and one of
self-discovery. Even the self-discovery,
however, is the discovery of the new self one is called to become in Christ and
by the Spirit. Grace fulfills nature.”
We all
worship some deity with our bodies all the time. Paul blazes a path along which we might “please
God.” “Pleasers” are regarded dismally –
but pleasing God is a profound, ennobling thought. I tell my people: you can please God. How cool is that? How cool are you? God made you with that ability.
But of
course, we more typically fail to please God, or we displease God. And it’s not a matter of gritting your teeth
and trying harder. Paul says it’s a
matter of “being transformed.” Ponder
this: the Greek metamorphousthe (do you
see metamorphosis in there? does the preacher describe the caterpillar to
butterly morphing?) is a passive imperative.
Amazing. Imperatives imply Go do
this – but the passive imperative is Go have this done to yourself, or don’t go
actually, just let it be.
This
metamorphosis goes hand in hand with the decision to abandon conformity. The passive imperative is all about God’s
doing; and yet we are responsible. We
need not be victims; I’m only human?
Humanity distorted is humanity in conformity. I wear, buy, act and think in ways that are
dumped into me by this vapid culture; I’m barely cognizant of it going on.
But a good starting point is the way J.B.Phillips, in his perennially popular paraphrase of the NT put it, “Don’t let
the world around you squeeze you into its own mould.” And then I dig C.E.B. Cranfield’s remark (in
his fabulous ITT commentary on Romans): “There is only one possibility open to
us – to resist this process of being continually moulded and fashioned
according to the pattern of this present age with its conventions and standards
of values. The good news is we are no
longer helpless victims of tyrannizing forces, but we are able to resist this
pressure which comes both from without and from within, because God’s merciful
action in Christ has provided the basis of resistance.”
Tying
Romans 12 to Exodus 1-2? Moses in that
basket is obeying a passive imperative of sorts; and doesn’t being transformed,
being metamorphosised, involve things like civil disobedience, not conforming,
embracing the risks of faith, giving up the security of what we can control and
manage?
And then every good sermon asks What kind of church
does this text asks us to be? To what
degree do our churches conform to the paltry habits of society? We baptize political ideologies, we pander to
people’s self-interests and conformity, and we hardly look like a butterfly
that used to be a caterpillar; we dare not disobey civilly. Lord, have mercy on us. It is worth pressing a little further into
Romans 12:3-8, where we see that when I give up my body, I become part of the
Body – which is what God intended for my body in the first place.
************************************
** My newest book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, is available. My forthcoming book, Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, will appear before too long.
"I have my weaknesses and I have my fragility, physical ailments of the heart, I have to take things quietly. And intellectually, I get tired much more quickly. So it’s just the acceptance of reality. And you see, the big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be to this reality, and somewhere to love reality and then discover that God is present in the reality."
** My newest book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, is available. My forthcoming book, Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, will appear before too long.
