Distress the Comfortable

CERTAIN WORDS cause problems. When I ask first-year seminarians to take seriously the importance of using inclusive language for God and humanity, who would have thought my urging would generate such panic and skepticism? To my suggestion that “Father God” is grammatically (and theologically) on par with “Heavenly Parent” or “Mother God,” I can see in their blank stares and grimaces that they feel, yet again, that the God known to them is being tampered with.

Perhaps the term “inclusion” is difficult for some because it means that all things done in word and deed that do no intentional harm to others are at worst permissible, because God’s love is boundless. Equally fraught is the term “expansion.” Notions of colonialism, manifest destiny, and Christian triumphalism come to mind.

How did the words “inclusive” and “expansion” become problematic, polarizing terms? One might place blame squarely on the shoulders of postmodernity, with its demand that Christians shed their husks of credulity and theological defensiveness. Others argue that for Christians to be taken seriously today, they must join the postmodern conversation with a revelation that can hold up in a world of scientific advancement and Twitter.

In these Pentecost season readings, we are given tools to see how examination of the past informs the present and ushers us into the wide embrace of a loving God who sends believers out to do big things. God invites non-Israelites into wholeness, leads the fainthearted to joy, distresses the comfortable who cooperate with evil, and reassures followers sent out as “lambs before wolves” that the promises of the sender are trustworthy.

[July 7]

Scenes and Signals

COMMUNITY WELLNESS is a divine concern. God enters and exits the moving scenes of scripture in unsuspecting places and in the acts of unlikely people to signal God’s presence. In 2 Kings, unnamed servants act as divine emissaries who lead the powerful and mighty commander Naaman to shed his cultural arrogance, heed the wise counsel of the prophet Elisha, and confess faith in YHWH. Unnamed actors play pivotal roles in God’s liberative work. We see the divine at work in the voice of the captured Israelite servant girl of Naaman’s wife (2 Kings 5:2), in the desperate appeal of Naaman’s servants (5:13), and in the emboldened testimony of the 70 commissioned evangelists (Luke 10:1) who put demons to flight (verse 17). An all-star cast of anonymous diplomats is pressed into the service of God to ensure that God’s agenda for communal restoration is accomplished. For this reason, it would be unbiblical for anyone to claim that one’s scriptural anonymity would necessarily equal absence of agency.

Each year CNN recognizes culturally anonymous heroes who do life-giving work around the globe. They build wells in drought-stricken areas; they forgo vacations to repair cleft palates; they join Teach for America to aid educationally underserved communities. It is easy to focus our attention on the singular charismatic leader who rallies the troops into action when harm is done to communities of struggle. But we cannot underestimate the generosity of soup-kitchen chefs and environmental engineers who elect to do the work of community repair and maintenance behind the scenes, without fanfare and fuss. In a time rife with political
chaos, it is difficult to remember that at the signal of a beneficent Creator, unrecognized angels have been dispatched to perform their holy work in the world. Unnamed lives matter.

Through scripture’s unnamed actors, communal restoration comes in the form of healing leprosy, soul rescue from formidable foes (Psalm 30), gentleness and burden-bearing after transgression (Galatians 6:1-2), and victory over Satan and other principalities that block God’s mission to save not only Israel but the entire world (Luke 10:16).

[July 14]

World Prophet

JUDGMENT AND MERCY are at the heart of God in a world gone awry. The prophet Amos forecasts the death of King Jeroboam and Israel’s exile to Babylon as God’s punitive judgment for the king’s iniquitous behavior (Amos 7:17). The doomsday oracle comes to unwelcoming recipients. No wonder the prophet refuses the designation nabi (prophet) and says, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and dresser of sycamore trees” (Amos 7:14). To which God says, Not so fast, buddy! I have an assignment for you, Amos, because you alone can be trusted to report what you see in your age of mass deception. This is the expressed nature of the prophet’s duty. And according to Amaziah, “the land is not able to bear all [Amos’] words” (verse 10).

But what if God seems not to be attending to the evident woes in our world, and the divine response to injustice is stalled? The psalmist advises that we not lose hope. Despite what is seen, God rouses in response to our pleas for justice and is poised to do battle for the weak, the orphan, and the destitute because God has taken up residence in the divine council—a residence for judging the nations of the earth (Psalm 82:1-4, 8).

The opposite of judgment is hesed (mercy). In Jesus’ parable, mercy is epitomized in the actions of a supposed religious heretic, a Samaritan, whom Jesus elevates to sainthood because of his behavior. Jesus teaches the lawyer in the story’s front matter that loving God with heart, mind, soul, and strength “is all good” but is only the midterm exam. Going out into a world beyond the safety of one’s tribe and into the heart of another of a different cultural or religious stripe—that is the final exam. The two other actors in the passage, whom we are expected to believe will be mercy-givers, failed the test due to reticence or unwillingness.

Neighborliness is often found in the heart of socially disqualified people. Who knows? The social pariah next door may be our window of hope when we are left for dead (Luke 10).

[July 21]

Act for Others

NAMING OUR SOCIAL location is a fundamental first step of truth-telling. In line with this logic, let us muse a bit about more about Amos, a sheep herder, sycamore tree dresser, and country prophet. During the relatively peaceful reigns of King Uzziah in Judah and King Jeroboam II in Israel, Amos prophesied doom and destruction. Having this backdrop in mind is terribly important for a well-formed picture of the prophet’s central concerns, which are inseparably tied to his social situation: merchants defrauding customers in the marketplace (Amos 2:6); the religiously arrogant defaming worship (2:8; 5:21-24); father and son committing morally reprehensible sexual acts (2:7); the wealthy and self-indulgent minority enjoying and parading their material excess (2:8; 6:4-7); acts of bribery and dishonest governmental practices privileging few and disenfranchising others (5:11-12).

Then, as interpreters of scripture, we arrive at chapter 8 with eyes wide open to hear the rationale behind the judgment of the exasperated Sovereign, who says to the reluctant-turned-strident message bearer, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day ... the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place” (8:2-3). Why? Because the powerful “trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor of the land” (8:4).

When the abuse of the poor represents the spirit of the times, while the deceitful “all day long ... are plotting destruction” for others (Psalm 52:1-2) because they “love evil more than good ... lying more than speaking the truth” (verse 3), then what the psalmist intones as true for the ancients bears truth for those of us who fail to take refuge in God today. Truth be told, “God will break you down forever; God will snatch and tear you from your tent; God will uproot you from the land of the living” (verse 5).

[July 28]

Come and Pray

AFTER JESUS FINISHED praying in a certain place, one of his disciples requests spiritual guidance: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1). Jesus responds by offering them Christianity’s best-known invocation—the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, this is the only prayer that Jesus gives us. It is the model. In its words of petition, we get a glimpse of an alternative reality, what it means to participate with God in repairing the severed lines of communication between creature and Creator. Luke’s Jesus, the rabbi of all rabbis, is a sage and prayer teacher who provides wisdom for finding safe haven in an unsafe world.

But the curious thing to notice about this prayer is its petitionary tone. Luke’s record contains no appeals for divine favor. What we have here in Luke’s record are five requests for God to act. Every petition in the Lord’s Prayer is a request for nearness: Teach us to pray so we can know we are not alone in this world, give us food daily for our bodies, embrace us so we might know we have been forgiven, and let your kingdom come, let it come as near as it is out of our reach. These are all requests for real presence, except the final petition: Let no trial come our way. Do not bring us into the time of trial.

The Lord’s Prayer is not some perfunctory prayer for the faint at heart. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother was slain by a mentally deranged man while she was at her church’s organ playing the Lord’s Prayer set to music. If we carefully consider this prayer, we discover that persistence—asking, seeking, knocking—gets rewarded with the gift of divine compassion.

God’s gift of real presence is the site of God’s kingdom at hand. When we pray as Luke’s Jesus instructs us to pray, we find a God who meets our needs and teaches us how to give of ourselves in benevolent and gracious ways.

“Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.