Seek Peace and Pursue It

Seek Peace and Pursue It

May 19, 2020

1 Peter 3:8-12

Two days ago I put a piece on this blog with the simple title “Peace.” It’s a meditation on Jesus saying to his disciples “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” John 14-27. I say in that essay that peace is my favorite word and something I want more of in my life, especially an inner spiritual peace. So I was struck when I read the passage from 1 Peter that’s in the daily Revised Common Lectionary for today and found the line “seek peace and pursue it.” 1 Peter 3:11b. If I recall correctly my wife had a bumper sticker on a car she used to have with that line on it. Seek peace and pursue it. In John Jesus just leaves his peace and gives it to his disciples. 1 Peter seems to develop the dynamic of peace a bit farther than that. In that letter peace isn’t just something we receive, it is something we have to work at. It isn’t just lying around for us to pick up. We have to go after it, a very different dynamic from the one in John indeed. So I thought I’d meditate a bit here on what it means that we are called not just to receive peace as in John but to seek it and pursue it.

Our call to seek peace and pursue it assumes first of all that we don’t have it. You don’t seek or pursue something you’ve already got. You seek or pursue something you need or want but don’t have. Is 1 Peter right that we don’t have it? For a great many of us, perhaps for all of us, the answer is yes. We long for peace in our world and in our lives. Most people, perhaps all people, see peace as a great blessing but one we so often lack. So 1 Peter tells us to go after that great blessing that we crave but so often don’t have.

But how? 1 Peter doesn’t tell us. We have to figure it out on our own. When we work at figuring it out we discover that how we seek peace and pursue it depends on what peace we’re going after. There are at least two broad categories of peace that we can seek and pursue. There’s inner peace and outer peace in the world. Many of the world’s sages say that to get the second one we start with the first one, so I’ll start with the first one. How do we seek and pursue inner peace? The world’s spiritual traditions have all found ways to do it. To quiet the turmoil in your soul you start by being quiet. Take a few deep breaths and let go of all that judgmental noise that’s always going on in your head. You could read up on and practice transcendental meditation or centering prayer, then practice one of them. Don’t expect a wave of peace to come over you right away. Inner peace takes practice, but with practice you will find yourself to be more at peace.

Then of course there are other spiritual disciplines that help us attain inner peace. The foundational practice for any spiritual quest and even just for life is prayer. Ask God to grant you inner peace. Turn your worries over to God. God can handle them better than you can. Practice letting go and gently settling into God’s peace. Once again practice is necessary, but there’s a peace to be found in God that truly does surpass understanding. There are other spiritual practices that help too. Some of them are physical. Take up yoga, or find a labyrinth and walk it. Or just take a quiet walk in nature and open yourself to the world’s beauty. You can find inner peace there. There are lots of ways of seeking and pursuing inner peace.

Seeking and pursuing peace out in the world requires some different methods, but it too begins with prayer. I once heard a wise person say that the way prayer works is you pray for people who are hungry, then you feed them. It works the same way with world peace. Pray for peace, then go work for it. Join an organization whose mission is to work for peace. The Fellowship of Reconciliation is one that has chapters in many cities. Or join Amnesty International, or perhaps your religious tradition has ministries that work for peace. If you can, donate money to organizations that work for peace. Support UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders. Contribute to and work for political candidates committed to peace. World peace doesn’t just happen. If it is ever going to happen at all it will only be because a great many people who desire it work to make it happen.

Pope Paul VI once said “If you want peace, work for justice.” He was right about that. Injustice is a common cause of violence in the world. People in positions of power use violence against people with no power. People who have long been the victims of injustice sometimes react with violence. So to work for world peace join and support organizations that work for justice. Join the ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Center. Work with your local political leaders to root out the systemic racism that so tarnishes virtually all of our American institutions. Work for legal system and penal reform. There are lots of things we can do to work for justice. Justice is of course a great blessing in its own right, but it also leads to a world more at peace.

Jesus left his peace with us. He gave his peace to us, but unless we pick it up it will just sit there doing nothing. So let’s pick it up. Let’s make it our own. Let’s do the hard but sacred work of making peace real in our lives and in God’s world. As people of faith who long for peace we can do no less.

Where Are the Corpses?

Where Are the Corpses?

May 18, 2020

Scripture: Genesis 6:9 – 7:24

Ah yes. The story of Noah and the flood. God decides that people have become so wicked that God will make a great flood to kill everyone off so God can start over again with Noah and his family. We love to tell children this story, or at least a version of it. We put pictures of it, or part of it, on the walls of our Sunday School rooms. There’s a big boat for Noah, his family, and a pair of every kind of animal that lives on dry ground. Noah is a kindly, grandfatherly man welcoming all the animals aboard the boat. The animals are so cute, and everything is so peaceful. Sometimes we give our children a plastic toy boat with plastic figures of Noah, his family, and at least some of the animals so our children can play at enacting this story, or part of it, themselves. It’s a lovely scene. Some nice people and animals are going for a boat ride.

And I always want to ask: Where are the corpses? There ought to be corpses! Of course we don’t include the floating corpses of people and animals in our scenes of kindly Noah and the nice animals because, well, because that would be so unpleasant. That would be so ugly. That would ruin  our nice picture with the peaceful pairs of animals going on a boat ride with kindly Grandpa Noah. So no. No corpses please. Floating corpses aren’t appropriate for Sunday School children.

OK, corpses aren’t appropriate for Sunday School children, but what that means is that the whole story of Noah and the flood as it appears in the Bible isn’t appropriate for Sunday School or any other children. Folks, the story of Noah and the flood isn’t sweet and gentle. It is a terrible story of God’s wrath and the death by drowning of everything on land except the few creatures that made it onto the ark along with Noah and his family. Here’s how the story really goes.

It starts with God seeing that humans have become horribly wicked “and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” Genesis 6:5. God gets so fed up that God is sorry God ever made humans in the first place: “It grieved him to his heart.” Genesis 6:6. So God decides to “blot out from the earth the human beings I have created…for I am sorry that I have made them.” Genesis 6:7. Of all the people on earth only Noah “found favor in the spirit of the Lord.” Genesis 6:8.

God goes to Noah, and the text gives us a little more information about what humans are doing that is so awful. The earth “was filled with violence.” Genesis 6:11 and 13. God gives Noah instructions for building a big boat on which to escape the coming deluge along with instructions (somewhat contradictory instructions by the way) about what to put on it. Noah does as instructed and the flood comes. Whereupon “all flesh died that moved on the earth….” Genesis 7:21. Human beings and animals alike “were blotted out from the earth.” Genesis 7:23.

How this story ever got to be a gentle story for young children absolutely escapes me. First of all it gives us a picture of an angry, vengeful God, so angry and vengeful that all life on dry land (except Noah et al.) is doomed. It gives us a picture of humanity as so unrelentingly evil that all God can think to do about it is wipe humanity off the face of the earth (except Noah et al.). God then sends rains that  drown every land creature except those on the ark. Millions upon millions of people and animals suffer a miserable death by drowning. The God of the Noah story sure isn’t a God I want children to learn about. An angry, vengeful God produces angry, vengeful people or at least frightened ones. The God of the Noah story is not the God I know in and through Jesus Christ and is not the God I want our children to know and to love.

So once again: Where are the corpses? Where are the floating dead bodies of the women, men, and children God has just killed? Leaving them out of our depictions of the story creates a false impression of the story and of the God the story presents. So please. Let’s be done with the sweet pictures of a big boat, a kindly old man, and cute animals on our Sunday School walls. The story of Noah and the flood is a terrible story. I for one would be happy to do without it.

Peace

Peace

May 18, 2020

Scripture: John 14:27-29; 16:33

Peace. To me peace is the best word in the English language. Its equivalents are the best words in other languages too—Frieden (German), mir (Russian), pais (French). paz (Spanish), pax (Latin). When I used to do contemplative prayer (which it wouldn’t hurt me to take up again) I used peace as my sacred word. I use Peace as a benediction at the end of most of my correspondence. Peace is the best thing there is. It is the opposite of the worst things there are—war, other kinds of violence, troubled minds, hearts and souls. Almost everybody says they want it. The world’s militaries say they fight to maintain or to bring peace, never mind that violence mostly just begets more violence. The UN and NATO put together “peacekeeping forces,” and I guess they do sometimes stop warring parties from fighting. Sages of all the world’s great spiritual traditions want peace in the world. They say that to get peace in the world we must start by finding internal peace, peace for our hearts, minds, and souls. I suspect that I find peace to be such a powerful concept because I long for more of it in my life. In my heart actually, for externally my world is not particularly violent. I hear about violence all the time, but I’ve rarely seen it. I have no personal experience of war, having been medically ineligible for the draft during the Vietnam War when I was of draft age. Still, I long for peace. Peace in my heart. Peace in my soul.

I long for peace, but just what exactly is peace? On one level peace is the absence of certain things. It is the absence of violence, all kinds of violence whether personal or military. When a nation is being defeated by another nation in war it may “sue for peace,” with peace meaning an end to hostilities and to violence, and end to the maiming and killing of some human beings by other human beings. Sometimes police forces “restore peace” when they put down some king of public disturbance. So on a very basic level peace is the absence of conflict, especially violent conflict.

As he nears the end of his life on earth Jesus speaks to his disciples. At John 14:27 he says to them “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” Just what does he mean? Perhaps he means that he wishes them an absence of violence in their lives. His disciples were facing if not actual violence against them then at least the threat of violence against them. They were after all living in the Roman Empire and were part of a movement Rome certainly wanted to put down. Rome never had any qualms about using violence against people it perceived as a threat, and the threat of violence against the earliest Christians was real indeed.

Still, Jesus just wishing them an absence of violence doesn’t quite add up. He knew they were almost certainly going to encounter violent opposition no matter what he said to them. At John 16:33 he says to them “I have said this to you so that in my you may have peace. In the world you face persecution….” We just saw that at John 14:27 he says specifically my peace I give to you. These statements of his are quite enigmatic, as Jesus’ statements in John so often are, but he sure seems to be talking about peace as something other than a mere absence of violence. Peace is something that he has that he can give to his friends. Jesus’ peace is  something they may have “in him.” What are we to make of these puzzling statements?

First of all Jesus clearly is not talking about peace merely as an absence of violence in the world. It seems clear that he is talking about an inner peace rather than an outer one, a spiritual peace rather than a physical one. He offers it to his friends, and they can have it in him if they will live their lives in him. Living in him means, I think, living the eternal life that in John means a life lived with the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ. See John 17:3. He means, I think, living as close to God as he did or at least as close as we are capable of. The peace he gives them is the peace of knowing the love of God that we see in him and know through him is ours too. Jesus rather clearly intends that the peace he gives and which in him we can know is first of all an inner peace. That intention of his raises a couple of important issues. What is this inner peace that he offers? Once we know what it is, how do we attain it?

The inner peace that Jesus offers is a heart, mind, and soul free from whatever it is that is keeping them from peace. What that is will vary from person to person and from time to time. Perhaps it’s anxiety or fear. Perhaps it’s frustration or disappointment. Perhaps it’s loneliness, or maybe it’s overwork. It can be physical illness and anxiety about one’s life coming to an end. There are all kinds of things that Jesus’ peace can address. Faith in Jesus Christ is not a substitute for medical care for any medical condition including mental illness. Yet holding on to Jesus helps a lot with the kinds of things that keep us from a blessed inner peace.

So just how do we do that? By turning to Jesus mostly in prayer. Praying for inner peace is a big part of finding inner peace. Also by turning whatever it is that we’re dealing with over to God. Admit that you need help, ask God for that help, and then let go of whatever it is you need help with. Let it go to God. I know that it’s a lot easier for me to say it than it is for most of us, myself included, to do it, but please remember. Practice helps. Don’t turn to God once and expect to feel that inner peace that Jesus wants to give you. Turn to God every day. Pray every day. Read the Bible every day. Go to church when you can even if that means doing it on line these days. Practice, practice, practice. That’s how we reach the inner peace that Jesus offers.

When we do that amazing things happen. Mostly what happens is that we enter into God’s assurance that no matter what we’re dealing with, no matter what may come, no matter how our life unfolds, we are existentially safe with God. When we turn to Jesus for peace we know that God’s love will never forsake us. We discover that Jesus has very broad shoulders. They can bear whatever worries, anxieties, or fears we put on them. Perhaps most importantly when we turn to Jesus in any time of need we come to know that we are not alone. We are never alone. God is always there for us to cling to, trust, and rely on for a safety that surpasses understanding but that we can come to know is far more real than anything that threatens or disturbs us is or ever can be. So turn to Jesus Christ. That way lies peace. May we all cast our cares upon Jesus Christ and find that blessed peace that only God can give. Amen.

On the Majesty of God

On the Majesty of God

May 17, 2020

Scripture: Psalm 93

Psalm 93 is powerful testimony to the majesty of God:

More majestic then the thunders

          of mighty waters,

     more majestic than the waves

          of the sea,

     majestic on high is the Lord! Psalm 93:4

I just read Psalm 93 perhaps for the first time because it’s in the Revised Common Lectionary’s daily lectionary for tomorrow. When I read it I had a strange reaction. I thought: I don’t normally think of God as majestic. I so think of God as a God of grace, love, distributive justice attained nonviolently, and peace that I rarely think of God as powerful and certainly not as majestic. Which is not to say that that I don’t think God is powerful and majestic. It’s just to say that I don’t usually think of God that way. I want to reflect here on what my reaction on Psalm 93 says about how we humans think of God.

We cannot think of God in any terms other than human ones. That’s because we’re human and nothing else. They say that if camels thought of God, God would look like a camel. It’s not that I think that God looks like a human being. I don’t know what God looks like, although it’s certainly true that God doesn’t look like anything we familiar with. God doesn’t look like anything we can visualize that we aren’t familiar with either, for God utterly transcends any image of God we could possibly come up with. Still, like every other human I can’t help but think of God in human terms. I can know that God transcends our human terms, but human terms are all we humans have with which to think and speak of God.

I have a set of human terms that I usually apply to God. Love. Grace. Distributive justice achieved nonviolently. Peace. I tend to think of God in human terms that convey gentleness. Yes, God makes demands on us, but God does that subtly, gently. God at most prods us. God never forces us. I think we see as much of God as we are capable of seeing in Jesus Christ. Jesus could get angry, but mostly he was gentle himself and praised gentleness in others. Blessed are the meek he said, not blessed are the majestic. He came as a man of no worldly account, a poor man from a poor town in a backwater province ruled by Rome. I’m sure that the last word to describe him that came to those who saw him was majestic. He wasn’t majestic. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey not on a magnificent war horse. Being majestic just wasn’t his thing.

Being majestic wasn’t his thing, I think, because being majestic mostly isn’t God’s thing. At least when God came to us in Jesus God didn’t think we needed more revelation of divine majesty. Does that mean that God just isn’t majestic? Not necessarily. It may be well-nigh impossible for a human being to be both majestic and gentle. Few if any of us have ever been both. Yet surely it isn’t at all impossible for God. I see God’s gentle side in Jesus, but then I think: just look at what God has created! Not just this tiny planet we live on and seem hell-bent on destroying. Look at the whole universe. It is vast beyond our comprehension. Scientists can express its size in mathematical formulas, but even with those formulas we can’t really comprehend how big it is. The distance light travels in billions of years? I can say it, but I can’t really comprehend it. There is power in God’s universe beyond our greatest imagining. Billions upon billions of stars, each one a nuclear reactor generating more power than we can ever imagine.

Even here on our little planet there is evidence of God’s majesty. Massive land formations lifted thousands of feet into the air. Canyons eroded thousands of feet into the earth. Oceans with tides and currents we can never control. As I write these words I’ve just seen images of Yosemite National Park on PBS. I’ve never been there, but even in pictures of it I can see a majestic beauty no human could ever create. There’s evidence of God’s majesty even in us mortal humans. Our spirit always strives to know more, to control more, and to connect more with God. So I may not normally think of God as majestic, but when I stop to think about it I can see just how majestic God really is.

There’s an important lesson for us in the way we can come to think of God in ways we normally don’t. God transcends all of our ways of seeing God. God is every way we think God is and so much more. No way we have of thinking about God can ever fully encompass God, not even close. Yet think of God we do, and think of God we must. As we do we must always remember that our images of God are not God. Only God is God. So let us never make our understandings of God absolute. They aren’t. Only God is absolute. So let us be temperate in our claims about God. Only God is God, and we humans get into worlds of trouble when we forget that divine truth. So let’s remember it, OK? Amen.

Unconditional Praise

Unconditional Praise

May 16, 2020

Scripture: Psalm 116; Romans 8:38-39; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18.

The psalms in the Bible are full of praise to God, with God often referred to as “the Lord,” that is, as Yahweh. Psalmists express it many times. Psalm 116 is a good example. It says:

I love the Lord, because he has

          heard

     my voice and my supplications.

Because he inclined his ear to me,

     therefore I will call on him as

          long as I live. Psalm 116:1-2.

The psalmist so loves the Lord and promises to call on him as long as he lives because

The snares of death

          encompassed me;

     the pangs of Sheol laid hold

          on me;

     I suffered distress and anguish. Psalm 116:3

In his distress he called on the Lord to save him, and the Lord did save him. So he promises to offer the Lord praise and sacrifices of thanksgiving:

I will pay my vows to the Lord

     in the presence of all his

          people,

in the courts of the house of

          the Lord,

     in your midst, O Jerusalem.

Praise the Lord! Psalm 116:18-19.

The psalmist gives praise to his God because, he believes, his God answered his prayer and saved his life.

Now, giving God thanks and praise in situations like that is perfectly appropriate. There’s no problem there. It often happens with me however that a biblical passage which isn’t in itself a problem nonetheless raises a problem. Psalm 116 does that. The problem it raises for me is this: Isn’t the psalmist’s  love of God here conditional? He says “I love the Lord because he heard my voice.” He’s going to offer God thanksgiving because when his life was at risk God saved him. But what if God hadn’t saved him? All of us have times in our lives when it sure can seem like God hasn’t saved us. The psalmist of Psalm 116 escaped death—for now. Yet he was as mortal as the rest of us. He didn’t die in whatever the situation was that threatened his life and led him to write Psalm 116, but God rescuing him from death then didn’t make him immortal. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t some day suffer the misery of illness and pass away. How did he respond to God when he suffered? How did he respond to God as he died? We don’t know, but those questions sure get me thinking about how to respond to God in the bad times as well as in the good. Here’s what some of my recent thinking on the matter has been.

I start with a proposition that is at the core of my Christian faith. God’s grace for every single person is completely unconditional. Perhaps St. Paul said it best:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39.

Nothing separates us from God’s love. Nothing we do or don’t do. Nothing we say or don’t say. Nothing we believe or don’t believe. Absolutely nothing separates us  from God’s love. God’s grace is God’s love in action. If nothing can separate us from it, then it is completely unconditional.

God’s grace doesn’t depend in any way on us, but it does call for a response from us. God’s unconditional grace calls us to do God’s work in the world, but it also calls for our praise and thanksgiving to be as unconditional as God’s grace is. Again perhaps St. Paul said it best: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances….” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. Notice: Not give thanks for all circumstances but give thanks in all circumstances. The psalmist of Psalm 116 give thanks for a particular circumstance, but Paul’s understanding of prayer and how we should respond to God’s grace is much deeper than that. Pray without ceasing, he says, not pray only in the good times. Give thanks in all circumstances, he says, not give thanks only in the good circumstances. God’s grace is unconditional. Our response should be unconditional too.

Of course it’s easier to give God praise and thanks when things are going well for us. It’s harder when things are tough. Many people around the world today are facing tough times because of an unusual circumstance, the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet we know that God is with us, holding us and loving us, no matter what our circumstances may be. So let our love of God be as unconditional as God’s love for us. It’s isn’t easy. It is God call. Amen.

It's a Myth!

It’s a Myth!

May 15, 2020

Genesis 1:1-2:3

God created everything that is in six days. Well, seven if you count the sabbath, but that’s for the Jews not for us Christians. It says so right there at the beginning of God’s word in the Holy Bible. A bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals try to tell is it ain’t so, that’s not how creation happened. But God knows how He did it, and He told us how He did it. It’s right there in black and white. So don’t tell me that some smart guy with some sort of fancy education knows better then God. It just ain’t so. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Sound familiar? Despite all the discoveries of modern science there still are Christians who think and talk like that.[1] And I suppose I’m one of those pointy-headed intellectuals with some sort of fancy education; but no, God did not create all that is in six days. Chapter 1 of Genesis[2] sure makes it sound like that’s what God did, but actually the unknown author of that text never intended his beautiful words to be a factual account of creation. We children of the Enlightenment are all hung up on facts as the only kind of truth. That’s why so many of us think that Chapter 1 of Genesis must be factually correct or it isn’t true at all.

The thing is, people in ancient Israel where this text was written didn’t think that way. Surely the author of this beautiful piece of writing knew that he had no factual information about how everything came to be. He did know that God somehow created everything that is, that God’s creation is good, that God created men and women in God’s image and likeness, that God put humans in charge of the earth, and that the sabbath day was a sacred day of rest. So he did what people in the ancient world did when they spoke of profound truths about God. He wrote a story. He didn’t write a theological essay. He sure didn’t write a scientific research paper for a peer reviewed journal the way scientists do today. He told a story that presents what he believed to be true to people who were used to truth being conveyed in stories. Not factual truth so much, but much more profound truth than mere facts. Genesis 1 isn’t factual, but it is profoundly true nonetheless.

There’s a word for what Genesis 1 is, but it’s a word that  causes all sorts of problems because in this context it doesn’t mean what people mostly think it means. That word is myth. Yes. I know. I’ve heard it a hundred times. A myth is something people think is true that isn’t true, but please bear with me. I’m going use the word myth and give it a different, theologically correct meaning. In theology-speak a myth is a story about God or God and humans that points beyond itself to a truth too deep for words. A truth science cannot give us because it is a truth beneath or behind the physical world of scientific research. A myth doesn’t convey facts, or at least that’s not its primary function. Rather it points us toward the spiritual dimension of reality. It points us toward a reality human words can never fully encompass. It points us toward the spiritual dimension of reality, toward the depth dimension in all that is, to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich. To take a myth literally is to misunderstand completely what it is and what it is not. In our world today people do that with Genesis 1 all the time. They do it with the second creation myth in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as well. When they do they completely misunderstand what those stories actually are. Taking a myth literally is to reduce it to mere fact when it truly is so much more than mere fact.

You may well ask how we know that the author of Genesis 1 didn’t intend for us to take his words as mere statements of fact. We know that in a general way because we know that the ancient world conveyed truth in a different way than we do. We know it more specifically about Genesis 1 because we know that it was written specifically as a refutation of the creation myth of another ancient culture with which ancient Israel in the late sixth and early fifth centuries when Genesis 1 was written was painfully familiar, namely, the creation story called Enuma Elish, the creation myth of the Babylonians.

In that myth creation is a product of matricide. The son of a sea monster goddess kills her and makes creation out of her body. In this story creation is a consequence of a horrible evil act and is therefore evil itself. Moreover, in that myth the gods create humans not as lords of the earth as in Genesis 1 but as slaves of the gods. Israel learned that myth up close and personal during the decades of their Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. It didn’t express their understanding of their God, who they had come to believe by the time someone wrote Genesis 1 was the only true God of all creation.[3] For all its troubles and harshness they experienced God’s creation as good. They knew that God loved them, had liberated them from slavery in Egypt centuries earlier, more recently had brought them out of Babylon home to Israel, and could never want them to be slaves again, not to any humans, not even to God.

So someone, almost certainly a priest, crafted a magnificent story of God creating everything not through an act of violent murder but through the peaceful act of speaking everything into being. That story says that God found all creation to be good. It says that so far from creating humans as God’s slaves God created human beings, both male and female, in God’s own image and likeness. So far from being God’s slaves in this creation myth God makes those humans dominion over God’s good earth. The Hebrew people of the time when Genesis 1 was written knew what their Babylonian captors thought about gods, creation, and humans; and to that Babylonian understanding Genesis 1 shouts a profound and powerful No! No, Babylon God’s creation is not evil, it is good. No Babylon, God didn’t make us slaves, God made us in God’s own image and likeness. No Babylon, we’re not God’s slaves, for God has given us dominion over the whole earth. No Babylon, you conquered and captured us, but we know God’s truth far better than you do—or than you did, because by the time Genesis 1 was written Babylon had fallen to the Persians and no longer existed as an imperial power. With this myth we proclaim our God and God’s creation as good not evil. We proclaim our status as free stewards of God’s good earth.

Let’s imagine for a moment that instead of writing a magnificent creation myth the priestly author of Genesis 1 had written a theological essay in refutation of the Babylonian creation myth. Do you see how weak a refutation of that myth that essay would be? It might has stated divine truth, but theological essays are head work. Powerful myths like Genesis 1 are soul work. They come from and operate on a plane far deeper than head work. They convey and proclaim God’s truth far more powerfully than any scientific research paper or theological essay ever could. So let’s get over understanding Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as a statement of mere facts. It isn’t that at all. It is a myth. A powerful and profoundly true myth. For that let all of God’s people say “Thanks be to God!” Amen.

---

[1] For a meditation on the Bible as coming from God, or not, see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood, New York, 2019, pp. 193-211.

[2] The story we’re discussing here is actually Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, but I will often refer to it as Genesis Chapter 1 or just Genesis 1 for convenience.

[3] For a discussion of how the Hebrews developed true monotheism when they were in exile in Babylon see Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, op. cit., Volume Two, The Old Testament, pp. 281-290.

To Be Prophets

To Be Prophets

May 14, 2020

Numbers 11:24-30

What a true prophet does is something people often misunderstand.[1] Being a prophet has come to mean correctly predicting the future. If someone has predicted some future event that then takes place we say that person was prophetic. Of course most of us most of the time would like to know what the future will bring. People go to supposed seers to learn what their future holds. Science fiction writers tell stories of time travelers in which someone is magically transported into the future and tells us all about it. What they see is usually bad, but we so want to know the future that we read the stories anyway. We think that’s what prophets do. They predict the future. That’s what makes them prophets.

The problem here is that predicting the future isn’t what being a prophet was mostly about originally. The Hebrew Bible has many prophets in it. It’s where the concept prophet arose. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible functioned in relationship to the Hebrew kingdoms. They appeared at the beginning of the first millennium BCE with the creation of the kingdom of Saul and David. They disappeared  after the return from Babylon in the sixth century BCE once it became clear that there wasn’t going to be another Hebrew kingdom.[2] That the Hebrew prophets operated in relationship to a king tells us a good deal about what they actually did. They did speak some about what was going to happen in the future, but mostly what they did was speak a word they had received from God to the kings and others in positions of privilege or power. A prophet is precisely one who speaks God’s truth to power.

In ancient Israel prophet seems to have been a kind of profession. There are references to whole companies of prophets gathered around the royal courts. There were basically two types of prophet, one who told the kings what the kings wanted to hear and ones who spoke a true word from God that condemned the kings and the elite of the kingdoms for false worship practices and/or economic exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It’s prophets of the second type whose sayings made the cut into the Hebrew Bible, which is Christianity’s Old Testament.

The sayings of those prophets, called oracles, fall generally into two types, judgment oracles and restoration oracles. In the judgment oracles prophets like Isaiah, Amos, and Micah excoriate those in power in Israel and Judah for oppressing the poor and the vulnerable. They call for justice for the poor, the alien, the widow, and the orphan. In these judgment oracles the prophets do speak some of what will happen in the future if the rulers don’t shape up (although sometimes they say it’s already too late for that). They say the Hebrew kingdoms will be conquered by foreign empires as God’s way of punishing the nations for their evil ways. The future they predict is one of conquest, suffering, and exile, about which they turned out to be right. That’s probably why they got included in the Hebrew Bible. When they spoke of God’s judgment in the future they saw what really was going to happen.

The restoration oracles also contain some prediction of future events. The prophets who speak damnation against the powers also say that God will not utterly forsake them, or at least most of the prophets say that. They speak of restored kingdoms and sometimes of a new peace so powerful that nature itself will be transformed. So yes, as part of their speaking divine truth to power the prophets do sometimes speak of the future. It is however important to understand how that future talk relates to the prophet’s primary purpose. They demand first that the rulers do justice, then they speak a dire future if they don’t. They also say God won’t completely abandon them, and they speak of a restored, just, peaceful future as a sign of that divine truth. Telling the future is never their primary mission. Speaking of God’s love and demanding that the rulers act justly is. Their future predictions are there only to reinforce their speaking divine truth to power.

There were no more Hebrew prophets, at least not in the Bible, after the early fifth century BCE, but that doesn’t mean that prophecy ceased. There have always been women and men who have spoken God’s truth to power. Few of us think of ourselves as prophets in that sense, but let’s pay some attention to that odd passage from Numbers that I cited above. The story is set in the wilderness of Sinai after the people have left Egypt but before they make it to Canaan. Moses selects seventy elders. He takes them to “the tent” outside the people’s camp. There Yahweh places some of Moses’ spirit on them, whereupon “they prophesied.” Two men, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, weren’t among the seventy elders that Moses chose. They weren’t with Moses and the seventy at the tent. They were back in the camp; yet spirit rested on them too, and they too prophesied. The text doesn’t tell us what either these two or the seventy elders said. It just says they prophesied. A young man from the camp runs to Moses and tell him that Eldad and Medad were prophesying back in the camp. Another man tells Moses to stop them. Moses doesn’t. He says: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.” Numbers 11:29.

“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Given what we’ve learned about what a prophet is, what does that mean? What would all God’s people do if they were prophets? They’d do some things most of us mostly don’t do. They’d—we’d—listen for a word from God. We’d study the great Hebrew prophets to learn what they did. They weren’t perfect. Elijah was a mass murderer by our standards for example. See 1 Kings 18:20-40. They did however speak divine truth to power. They bellowed that God wants justice not sacrificial worship. See Amos 5:21-24 for a good example of a great Hebrew prophet doing precisely that. If we were the prophets Moses wanted us to be we’d bellow against the injustices in our world the way Amos bellowed against the injustices in his. We’d denounce our unequal and unjust distribution of wealth racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, and all other kinds of violence. We’d demand that our country do justice for the ones Jesus called the least of these. See Matthew 25:31-46. Doing all that wouldn’t make us popular. The Hebrew prophets were anything but popular with the ones to whom they spoke God’s judgment. The powers of the world never like having God’s truth proclaimed to them. Doing it would however make us better Christians, better disciples of Jesus Christ. So let’s get on with it, shall we?

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[1] For a more complete discussion of what the biblical prophets actually are see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp. 255-260.

[2] Moses of course predates any Hebrew kingdom. He may be the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, but he’s an exception to the rule that Hebrew prophets relate to Hebrew kings, although of course he did speak God’s truth to an Egyptian king, to pharaoh.