The way to withness
Commentary
Religion is about a relationship. It is about a relationship with God that can shape our relationship with life. It is our relationship with life that determines the way we live and the quality of our lives. Some people live in relationships with life that can be described as alienation or againstness. Those kinds of relationships with life can be corrosive or destructive, to ourselves and to all that we touch. It is the nature of our faith that it works to move us into a relationship with God and with life that can be called loving withness. God takes the initiative in opening the way to withness for us. But we must respond. Our three scripture lessons for today take three approaches to showing us the way to withness.
Joshua 5:9-12
This passage describes the first taste of the fulfillment of a promise long held. It will be a difficult passage to preach. It is a part of a narrative and its meaning depends upon its role in the narrative. But we cannot count on our people knowing the narrative. Starting with the first of chapter 5 will help -- but not much, and we cannot count on our people knowing the significance of the narrative.
The theme that runs throughout the Hebrew scriptures is a story of God working to establish a unique relationship with one chosen people, and through them with the whole human race. This relationship is a covenant in which God promises to be faithful to humankind, to love, to provide, to guide, and to save. In response, the people are expected to relate to God in trust and in loving obedience. The Bible tells us that God first established a covenant with all humanity through Noah (Genesis 9:1-17), then with the family that would become the people of Israel through Abram (Genesis 12:1-3). In this last covenant, God promised to make Abram's descendants into a great nation and to give them a land of their own.
The people of Israel really had to grow into that special covenant relationship in that event in their history that was called the Exodus. The Exodus was the historical event in which God came to a family that had become refugees in Egypt during a famine and then grew to a whole race of people but were reduced to slavery. God reminded them that God had a special purpose in mind for them. God sent a leader named Moses who told them that God had promised their ancestors that they would become a great nation and possess a good land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and that they would be God's unique servant in the world: God's chosen people. But in order to claim that heritage, they would have to follow Moses out of the security of slavery into a frightening adventure that would take them out beyond any of the things on which they were accustomed to depending and force them to depend upon God alone for sustenance and guidance. The people accepted the challenge, though not without misgivings. They had all of the men circumcised as an act of obedience to God. They celebrated the first Passover as an act of putting trust in the promise of God. Then they set out on the journey.
It was not an easy journey. There were years of life under a burning sun and through cold desert nights. They were constantly struggling with the fear that they were on a foolish venture that would result in their deaths. At one time, when they were on the verge of entering the Promised Land, they lost courage and had to wander in the wilderness for more years until all of those who had lost courage died. During that time in the desert, God provided for their needs with a mysterious natural food called manna, a sort of emergency ration on which they lived until they came to the Promised Land.
Finally, the people came to the land that would be the fulfillment of the promise they had held on to so tenaciously for all of the lives of those who survived the ordeal. They were about to begin the conquest of the Promised Land. At that time the people renewed the rituals of their covenant relationship with God. Our text for today says that the people no longer depended on the manna that God provided. They finally began to eat the produce of the Promised Land.
Sometimes it is hard work to hold on to the promise of God and to be faithful to him until the promise is fulfilled. Is there any experience in your life, or the life of your community, your church, your nation, in which you have had to hold on to some promise for a long time, so long that you began to doubt that it would ever be fulfilled? What shape has the promise of God taken for you? What would it mean for you to finally taste the first fruits of the fulfillment of that promise?
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
The lectionary invites us to pay a second visit to this pivotal passage in the writings of Paul. We passed this way on Ash Wednesday. Today we have a second opportunity to think about what it means that God acted in Christ to reconcile the world to himself and about what it would mean for us to be reconciled to God.
In some parts of the composite letter we know as 2 Corinthians, it is obvious that Paul is working out some kind of a conflict that he was having with some members of the church in Corinth. It is obvious that in the present passage Paul is defending his ministry. In the process, he makes some references to the message he had preached to them. He does not spell it out in anything like a comprehensive way. He just reminds them of portions of the message and counts on them to remember the rest. A more comprehensive statement of the message to which he refers can be found in Romans 5:6-11, one of the great summaries of the Pauline gospel. It is interesting to notice that in the passage from Romans, justification and reconciliation are the same. They are both recognized as the way into righteousness, a right relationship with God. (This is fortunate because having a metaphor based on human relationships may be more meaningful to many than a metaphor based on action in a court of law. The "forensic" metaphor becomes troublesome to some when they take it too literally.)
Paul reminds the Corinthians that the death of Christ was a cosmic event in which God reconciled all humanity to himself, not holding their trespasses against them. It is always a mistake to oversimplify the soteriological mystery. The more we explore it, the more dimensions of meaning we will discover. In Christ, God took the initiative and embraced the whole lost and broken creation in his arms of love. In that act, God brought us all into a right relationship with God. But it is necessary for us to intentionally respond to that saving work and to "Be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). We must learn to live in that right relationship with God. "So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The parable of the prodigal son is a multifaceted story. It sums up much of the dynamic of the relationship of humanity with God in terms of family relationships that we can all understand. When it is set in the context of an understanding of Jewish customs, this story represents an estrangement and reconciliation that are even more profound than they seem to us. The younger son's selfish and thoughtless request to receive his inheritance while his father was still living was a terrible offense against a loving relationship. And the father's decision to allow his son to find his own way was an act of profound trust. When we set this story in the context of the tensions between the culture of Jewish communities and that of the Gentile world, deeper meanings keep unfolding. The setting of the story in the chapter suggests that Jesus told the story first to address the self-righteousness of the "good people" of his day who, like the older brother in the second part of the parable, did not know to celebrate the salvation of those who had not always lived up to their high standards. The first part of the story may have been intended to set the stage for the second.
But the first part of the story is a very beautiful dramatization of the working out of God's unconditional love. It brings us the good news that a better possibility is always there for us no matter how badly we have "messed up." It is very fortunate that this passage appears in the lectionary at the same time as the passage from 2 Corinthians 5 in which Paul describes salvation in terms of being reconciled to God. The parable dramatizes the meaning of reconciliation in a way that most of us can understand. In this simple story, profound concepts like atonement, propitiation, justification, and reconciliation are summed up in one picture of a father who loved his son so much that he was eager to run to meet him and embrace him and to welcome him back home into a father-son relationship in spite of all of the rotten things the son had done. The bottom line is this: God loves you with that same kind of love. That opens a wonderful possibility to you. You only have to be willing to enter into it.
Application
The New Testament readings for this Sunday move us to the very heart of the Christian gospel. We hear words that we have heard over and over and remember explanations of those words that we have remembered and taught as if simply understanding the words could make a difference in our lives and the lives of others. But much more is required of us than that. We need to discover for ourselves and to help others discover the very real and painful need that these words address. That is going to take more than just shouting at people and trying to make them feel guilty. It is going to take some recognition of something wrong that has been there in our lives all along.
Then there will be an even more difficult task of discovering, and helping others discover, behind words like crucifixion and reconciliation and grace a recognizable reality that is -- or can become -- a part of our experience of life in the real world. Somehow we must get beyond that blank stare we encounter so often when we are explaining our theology to someone. We have to get beyond the abstractions and help people encounter the reality they represent.
The theologian Paul Tillich described sin in terms of separation. He said "We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong and with which we should be united" (The Shaking of the Foundations [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948], p. 155). He says that separation is present in all of our relationships: with ourselves, others, life, and God. Our relationship with God is most important because it includes all of our other relationships. In the space left by that separation all sorts of destructive things grow, things like guilt and fear and hate. It is exactly this estrangement that needs to be overcome by the reconciliation about which Paul writes.
How can we help people recognize that separation in their lives? Can we somehow move them to take an honest look at their relationships with themselves? We seldom do that. Could we ask them to sum up in one word the way in which they feel that they are related to life? How can we help people to think "Yeah, that is me! That preacher has been reading my mail. I need some of what he is selling."
For those who recognize that need in themselves, there is good news. God moves toward us in love to make it possible for us to be reconciled, brought into a trusting, accepting, loving relationship with God and with life and with others. The Bible gives us powerful symbols of God reaching out to us in love: God making covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, Jesus dying on the cross, a father running to welcome home a rebellious son, an apostle compelled by God's love to preach the message of reconciliation. We can and we must help people to recognize in those symbols a movement toward us of that greater reality that meets us in all other realities.
How can we help people experience that? Paul Tillich described an experience in which he said it seemed he was hearing a voice from one greater than himself saying "You are accepted," words spoken in contradiction to all of the separation he was experiencing at that time (The Shaking of the Foundations, pp. 161-162). We really need to move this message out of the realm of theological abstractions and into the realm of human experience.
It is important for us to notice that reconciliation has two sides. God takes the initiative: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself..." (2 Corinthians 5:19). And we must make a response: "...be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). We are provided with a very meaningful image of one who did that in Luke 15:17-20. How can we help people know what it would mean for them to do this in their own real lives? It would require a person to dare to believe something that life sometimes makes seem unlikely and to bet his life on it being true.
It is important for us to help people realize that this reconciliation Paul is talking about is not just a reconciliation with one person who lives in heaven and had charge of the admission tickets to eternity. It is a change in relationship with one who comes to meet us in all of reality. It is a change that can turn our relationships with ourselves and with others and with life as a whole from relationships of guilty, angry, againstness into relationships with loving, trusting withness. If that happens, we will know what it means that "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation..." (2 Corinthians 5:17).
An Alternative Application
The story of the young son's journey into a far country offers us an image that can help us bring to the surface a decision that is being made by many American people and by American culture as a whole. It can help us to help people put their own situations into perspective and to make some important decisions about them.
The lifestyle of a Galilean farming community can represent the lifestyle of a Christian. It can also represent the American way of life at its best. It is a lifestyle in which integrity, moral discipline, hard work, religious devotion, and love are valued.
The lifestyle of the Greek cities of the Decapolis was very different. The "far country" was not really very far away geographically. They were within a day's walk from most Galilean communities. But the distance in terms of cultural difference was tremendous. A visitor to the excavated remains of one of these cities will find something very revealing. The architecture was Grecian and monumental. The Grecian theaters where a Grecian philosophy were dramatized was very prominent. So were the racetracks and the gymnasiums where athletes competed in the nude. The brothels and the baths where orgies of pleasure were staged were very prominent in the center of the city. There were monuments to pagan gods. Clearly, material wealth and pleasure were the things most valued. And things like sexual morality and integrity were not. The glamour of the cities of the Decapolis was very similar to the things that seem glamorous to many of us today.
It is not hard to see how the rumors of the glamorous lifestyle of the far country would have been attractive to a young man who had to work hard on his father's farm and conform to the disciplines of his community. They seem attractive to many young people -- and not-so-young people -- among us today. They seem to be drawing our whole culture toward the way of the "far country." Is it drawing you toward it?
Eventually the young man came to himself. He realized how hollow the values of the far country were. And he realized what it was that was missing. Love was missing. So he went back seeking it. How long will it take us -- and our culture -- to come to ourselves?
(This theme was developed in a sermon in my book What Does The Lord Require? [Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing], pp. 123-128.)
Joshua 5:9-12
This passage describes the first taste of the fulfillment of a promise long held. It will be a difficult passage to preach. It is a part of a narrative and its meaning depends upon its role in the narrative. But we cannot count on our people knowing the narrative. Starting with the first of chapter 5 will help -- but not much, and we cannot count on our people knowing the significance of the narrative.
The theme that runs throughout the Hebrew scriptures is a story of God working to establish a unique relationship with one chosen people, and through them with the whole human race. This relationship is a covenant in which God promises to be faithful to humankind, to love, to provide, to guide, and to save. In response, the people are expected to relate to God in trust and in loving obedience. The Bible tells us that God first established a covenant with all humanity through Noah (Genesis 9:1-17), then with the family that would become the people of Israel through Abram (Genesis 12:1-3). In this last covenant, God promised to make Abram's descendants into a great nation and to give them a land of their own.
The people of Israel really had to grow into that special covenant relationship in that event in their history that was called the Exodus. The Exodus was the historical event in which God came to a family that had become refugees in Egypt during a famine and then grew to a whole race of people but were reduced to slavery. God reminded them that God had a special purpose in mind for them. God sent a leader named Moses who told them that God had promised their ancestors that they would become a great nation and possess a good land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and that they would be God's unique servant in the world: God's chosen people. But in order to claim that heritage, they would have to follow Moses out of the security of slavery into a frightening adventure that would take them out beyond any of the things on which they were accustomed to depending and force them to depend upon God alone for sustenance and guidance. The people accepted the challenge, though not without misgivings. They had all of the men circumcised as an act of obedience to God. They celebrated the first Passover as an act of putting trust in the promise of God. Then they set out on the journey.
It was not an easy journey. There were years of life under a burning sun and through cold desert nights. They were constantly struggling with the fear that they were on a foolish venture that would result in their deaths. At one time, when they were on the verge of entering the Promised Land, they lost courage and had to wander in the wilderness for more years until all of those who had lost courage died. During that time in the desert, God provided for their needs with a mysterious natural food called manna, a sort of emergency ration on which they lived until they came to the Promised Land.
Finally, the people came to the land that would be the fulfillment of the promise they had held on to so tenaciously for all of the lives of those who survived the ordeal. They were about to begin the conquest of the Promised Land. At that time the people renewed the rituals of their covenant relationship with God. Our text for today says that the people no longer depended on the manna that God provided. They finally began to eat the produce of the Promised Land.
Sometimes it is hard work to hold on to the promise of God and to be faithful to him until the promise is fulfilled. Is there any experience in your life, or the life of your community, your church, your nation, in which you have had to hold on to some promise for a long time, so long that you began to doubt that it would ever be fulfilled? What shape has the promise of God taken for you? What would it mean for you to finally taste the first fruits of the fulfillment of that promise?
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
The lectionary invites us to pay a second visit to this pivotal passage in the writings of Paul. We passed this way on Ash Wednesday. Today we have a second opportunity to think about what it means that God acted in Christ to reconcile the world to himself and about what it would mean for us to be reconciled to God.
In some parts of the composite letter we know as 2 Corinthians, it is obvious that Paul is working out some kind of a conflict that he was having with some members of the church in Corinth. It is obvious that in the present passage Paul is defending his ministry. In the process, he makes some references to the message he had preached to them. He does not spell it out in anything like a comprehensive way. He just reminds them of portions of the message and counts on them to remember the rest. A more comprehensive statement of the message to which he refers can be found in Romans 5:6-11, one of the great summaries of the Pauline gospel. It is interesting to notice that in the passage from Romans, justification and reconciliation are the same. They are both recognized as the way into righteousness, a right relationship with God. (This is fortunate because having a metaphor based on human relationships may be more meaningful to many than a metaphor based on action in a court of law. The "forensic" metaphor becomes troublesome to some when they take it too literally.)
Paul reminds the Corinthians that the death of Christ was a cosmic event in which God reconciled all humanity to himself, not holding their trespasses against them. It is always a mistake to oversimplify the soteriological mystery. The more we explore it, the more dimensions of meaning we will discover. In Christ, God took the initiative and embraced the whole lost and broken creation in his arms of love. In that act, God brought us all into a right relationship with God. But it is necessary for us to intentionally respond to that saving work and to "Be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). We must learn to live in that right relationship with God. "So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The parable of the prodigal son is a multifaceted story. It sums up much of the dynamic of the relationship of humanity with God in terms of family relationships that we can all understand. When it is set in the context of an understanding of Jewish customs, this story represents an estrangement and reconciliation that are even more profound than they seem to us. The younger son's selfish and thoughtless request to receive his inheritance while his father was still living was a terrible offense against a loving relationship. And the father's decision to allow his son to find his own way was an act of profound trust. When we set this story in the context of the tensions between the culture of Jewish communities and that of the Gentile world, deeper meanings keep unfolding. The setting of the story in the chapter suggests that Jesus told the story first to address the self-righteousness of the "good people" of his day who, like the older brother in the second part of the parable, did not know to celebrate the salvation of those who had not always lived up to their high standards. The first part of the story may have been intended to set the stage for the second.
But the first part of the story is a very beautiful dramatization of the working out of God's unconditional love. It brings us the good news that a better possibility is always there for us no matter how badly we have "messed up." It is very fortunate that this passage appears in the lectionary at the same time as the passage from 2 Corinthians 5 in which Paul describes salvation in terms of being reconciled to God. The parable dramatizes the meaning of reconciliation in a way that most of us can understand. In this simple story, profound concepts like atonement, propitiation, justification, and reconciliation are summed up in one picture of a father who loved his son so much that he was eager to run to meet him and embrace him and to welcome him back home into a father-son relationship in spite of all of the rotten things the son had done. The bottom line is this: God loves you with that same kind of love. That opens a wonderful possibility to you. You only have to be willing to enter into it.
Application
The New Testament readings for this Sunday move us to the very heart of the Christian gospel. We hear words that we have heard over and over and remember explanations of those words that we have remembered and taught as if simply understanding the words could make a difference in our lives and the lives of others. But much more is required of us than that. We need to discover for ourselves and to help others discover the very real and painful need that these words address. That is going to take more than just shouting at people and trying to make them feel guilty. It is going to take some recognition of something wrong that has been there in our lives all along.
Then there will be an even more difficult task of discovering, and helping others discover, behind words like crucifixion and reconciliation and grace a recognizable reality that is -- or can become -- a part of our experience of life in the real world. Somehow we must get beyond that blank stare we encounter so often when we are explaining our theology to someone. We have to get beyond the abstractions and help people encounter the reality they represent.
The theologian Paul Tillich described sin in terms of separation. He said "We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong and with which we should be united" (The Shaking of the Foundations [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948], p. 155). He says that separation is present in all of our relationships: with ourselves, others, life, and God. Our relationship with God is most important because it includes all of our other relationships. In the space left by that separation all sorts of destructive things grow, things like guilt and fear and hate. It is exactly this estrangement that needs to be overcome by the reconciliation about which Paul writes.
How can we help people recognize that separation in their lives? Can we somehow move them to take an honest look at their relationships with themselves? We seldom do that. Could we ask them to sum up in one word the way in which they feel that they are related to life? How can we help people to think "Yeah, that is me! That preacher has been reading my mail. I need some of what he is selling."
For those who recognize that need in themselves, there is good news. God moves toward us in love to make it possible for us to be reconciled, brought into a trusting, accepting, loving relationship with God and with life and with others. The Bible gives us powerful symbols of God reaching out to us in love: God making covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, Jesus dying on the cross, a father running to welcome home a rebellious son, an apostle compelled by God's love to preach the message of reconciliation. We can and we must help people to recognize in those symbols a movement toward us of that greater reality that meets us in all other realities.
How can we help people experience that? Paul Tillich described an experience in which he said it seemed he was hearing a voice from one greater than himself saying "You are accepted," words spoken in contradiction to all of the separation he was experiencing at that time (The Shaking of the Foundations, pp. 161-162). We really need to move this message out of the realm of theological abstractions and into the realm of human experience.
It is important for us to notice that reconciliation has two sides. God takes the initiative: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself..." (2 Corinthians 5:19). And we must make a response: "...be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). We are provided with a very meaningful image of one who did that in Luke 15:17-20. How can we help people know what it would mean for them to do this in their own real lives? It would require a person to dare to believe something that life sometimes makes seem unlikely and to bet his life on it being true.
It is important for us to help people realize that this reconciliation Paul is talking about is not just a reconciliation with one person who lives in heaven and had charge of the admission tickets to eternity. It is a change in relationship with one who comes to meet us in all of reality. It is a change that can turn our relationships with ourselves and with others and with life as a whole from relationships of guilty, angry, againstness into relationships with loving, trusting withness. If that happens, we will know what it means that "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation..." (2 Corinthians 5:17).
An Alternative Application
The story of the young son's journey into a far country offers us an image that can help us bring to the surface a decision that is being made by many American people and by American culture as a whole. It can help us to help people put their own situations into perspective and to make some important decisions about them.
The lifestyle of a Galilean farming community can represent the lifestyle of a Christian. It can also represent the American way of life at its best. It is a lifestyle in which integrity, moral discipline, hard work, religious devotion, and love are valued.
The lifestyle of the Greek cities of the Decapolis was very different. The "far country" was not really very far away geographically. They were within a day's walk from most Galilean communities. But the distance in terms of cultural difference was tremendous. A visitor to the excavated remains of one of these cities will find something very revealing. The architecture was Grecian and monumental. The Grecian theaters where a Grecian philosophy were dramatized was very prominent. So were the racetracks and the gymnasiums where athletes competed in the nude. The brothels and the baths where orgies of pleasure were staged were very prominent in the center of the city. There were monuments to pagan gods. Clearly, material wealth and pleasure were the things most valued. And things like sexual morality and integrity were not. The glamour of the cities of the Decapolis was very similar to the things that seem glamorous to many of us today.
It is not hard to see how the rumors of the glamorous lifestyle of the far country would have been attractive to a young man who had to work hard on his father's farm and conform to the disciplines of his community. They seem attractive to many young people -- and not-so-young people -- among us today. They seem to be drawing our whole culture toward the way of the "far country." Is it drawing you toward it?
Eventually the young man came to himself. He realized how hollow the values of the far country were. And he realized what it was that was missing. Love was missing. So he went back seeking it. How long will it take us -- and our culture -- to come to ourselves?
(This theme was developed in a sermon in my book What Does The Lord Require? [Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing], pp. 123-128.)
