Forgiveness: A third-grade synagogue class and the wounds of the world.

Thomas examines His wounds: unknown, Cameroon

Thomas examines His Side: Carravagio

     

                                                            

For Christians, forgiveness is central to the Jesus story and message.  In his teaching on prayer he says, “Forgive us our debt, as we forgive our debtors.”[1]  He repeatedly enrages the local religious types by declaring that this or that person’s sin is forgiven.[2]  On the Cross, as death approaches, He calls upon His Father to forgive His killers.[3]  Indeed, it may not go too far to say that forgiveness, offered by his obedient death on the cross, is the means by which God in Jesus “reconciles all things”.[4] 

Yet I fear many Christians underplay the scope and centrality of forgiveness.  I’ve been in numerous adult small groups where two versions of forgiveness are commonly offered by participants.  First, there is the notion that forgiveness is necessary as a psychological relief for the one who forgives.  “You can’t carry around the burden of a grudge.  You’ve got to forgive the person.”  Second there is the notion that forgiveness is free and costs nothing: “Jesus paid the full price.”  My Jewish wife complains that Christians are always yapping about getting right with God, but seldom talk about the hard work of getting right with their neighbor.  For many Christians, if you say the right words or have the “right” attitude or something[5], what you did is no longer of much consequence.  The far bigger issue is that God forgives you.  There is truth in both of these notions, yet I think forgiveness is not primarily about “my soul” or “my salvation”.  Forgiveness, as personal as it may be is narrowed too far when it’s just about me.

When the Scriptures speak of forgiveness, I think it’s about a sort of cosmic reconciliation.  Forgiveness, through the faithfulness of Jesus to God’s call to the Cross, is the way in which God, “. . .  was pleased to have all his fullness in dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood, shed on the Cross.”      

So forgiveness, the central message of the Christian faith may just be a little bolder brew  than saying a couple of words to soothe the soul or “get right with God”.  I hear a bit of this boldness during the holy day of Yom Kippur.  The entire congregation confesses to a heinous list of crimes, adultery, murder, xenophobia, theft, that most never committed.  We say them aloud and together so that those who may have walked those paths may have room to aloud, in front of others, begin the long hard road of forgiveness from your neighbor, forgiveness for yourself, forgiveness from God,  We say aloud, we confess together, we plead for mercy in front of the ark together. 

Another place to find out about forgiveness is the mouth of a temple school classroom assistant.  My daughter leads a 3^rd grade class.  During the High Holy Days she taught on forgiveness.  The exercise involved writing down the sin you needed to confess to your neighbor before you went before God in services.  You wrote folded the paper, confessed to those you need to confess to, then you unfolded the paper and only then was the paper side blank.  As Anya was going through this remarkable lesson, her assistant said, “But the paper still has folds in it.” 

She hit the nail unerringly on the head.  Forgiveness isn’t just “look, all gone now” There are still folds that don’t go away.  Christians love to read a story we have labelled “Doubting Thomas”.  Yet that title gets it all wrong.  The story, like the entire Gospel, is not about us and our doubts or insights, it is about Jesus.  The flow of the story even directs us toward Jesus, Thomas, put you hands here in my side.  Jesus, resurrected, a living material body, wants to show Thomas that the pleas of Israel have been answered, bodily salvation (no ghost stuff flying away to some other place, remember the opening cry of the story at creation----it is good), a rendering of justice, are on the way.  The pains and spear wounds of this life are not meaningless and covered over, there are still folds that tell of days of trial, of days of meaningful choices (some well made, some needing forgiveness), of, well, life.

Forgiveness is hard. It costs dearly on that long Friday afternoon.  Be ready for it for it changes a life.  But be ready for it for scars will show.

                                                                                    

 

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[1] Note that forgiveness seems to be conditional.  Read the word ‘as’ to mean ‘insofar as’.  Makes a difference eh?  Get busy with offering forgiveness.  Hey do it 7 times 70 times if necessary.  Your own forgiveness depends upon it so it seems.

[2] Their outrage is twofold.  First, only God can forgive, so who the heck do you think you are?  Second, God forgives at the Temple in Jerusalem.  Bring your offering there, go through the rites, and expect forgiveness.

[3] John, in his Gospel, tells us repeatedly that the fullest possible revelation of God, His character, His visage, His Glory, is the moment His Son is lifted up on that Cross to die.  You want to know what God looks like?  He looks like an empire crushed Jew forgiving the troops who tortured and executed Him.

[4] Colossians 1:20

[5] Inevitably, someone will say, “God knows the heart.” That seems to indicate that what you show the world and what’s inside may be two different things.                                         

A Long Sleep, A Long Walk, A Long Wait

     After near 22 hours of sleepless and uncomfortable travel, the plane bumped down too sharply onto the Cebu tarmac, bounced heart stoppingly to the right, screeched back on course, and stopped too quickly, squealing brakes and all: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mactan International Airport in Cebu.  The local time is 21:05 for an on-time arrival.  The temperature is 27C."  By then our squeals had subsided but we continued to exchange wide-eyed glances.
     The vets knew the real race started now.  I, the Cebu rook, just shook my head as the shoving started.  Passport control was ahead.  Little did I know there were 4 lines for Philippinos and one line for all others.  This is a time of moderate rains and temperature in the Philippines.  Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese come here like New Yorkers head for Florida in February. An hour and a half later, through customs, and out the terminal, I see the guy holding my name on a sign.  I head over, and off we go.  Check-in was a breeze and within 20 minutes my head hit the pillow, not to rise for over 10 hours!
       The very late morning was just made for a luke warm shower, washing swampy clothes, and heading down for some coffee.  Out my window I spied a fish joint in the street behind the hotel.  At the front desk, I got directions for my amble and a sort of map, a warning that 3k was too far to walk and set out for stop number 1: fish lunch.
     By daylight my hotel is perfectly nice.  Every thing around it looks to be subject to individually initiated urban renewal.  Mounds of debris are everywhere ( it is expensive to get rid of 'stuff') and each mound seems zealously guarded by a street dog who has no problem telling you, 'This my mound so just move the heck along or we'll have trouble.'
     The fish joint was great.  Lunch was long over and dinner wasn't for hours.  I sat outside and yukked it up with the staff who congregated around the 55 gallon drum grill scarfing up tasty bits of chicken and beef the grill guy doled out as he prepped dinner (yeah the par cooked food was going to sit in ambiguous refrigeration for a few hours--thus fish).  I have been told to be leery of the water, so beer it was.  I am not a day drinker so I got tipsy just sipping and waiting for my fish and rice lunch.  I got to watch the young construction workers across the street josh with the girls working the restaurant they were repairing.  Motorbikes delivered pipe, concrete, and wire up and down the street in a never ending flow.  I loved every minute of it: warm, tipsy, good humor with gentle folk, and smiles all around.
     The 3k walk was a bit more than I expected.  Either the hard prior day or chemo fatigue came over me. I sat twice.  I drank a coke.  I drank two waters.  I love bustling Asian cities--the smells, the crowds, the exotic to me normal to residents mind shift, but my weary legs made this a bit of a slog.  Yet the end paid in dividends large.  I was headed to Santo Nino basillica.  Supposedly somebody 'found' an image of the Holy Infant in 1565 and a church was founded there in one of the early Spanish settlements in the Philippines.  Outside the church the lame in body and mind gather, sit, and shuffle to sell candles.  Maybe they hope to get to the water when the angel disturbs it like in the story.  If not they are busy reminding us to look close without smug pity and give because Jesus is before our eyes.  I got there just as Mass in English and, I suspect, Cebuano started.  There were so many folk the officiant was outside.  Inside there were video screens beside the altar.  I took my place and was transported.  Catholics know a thing ot two about joining mind and body in worship to puncuate praise: stand for the gospel, kneel before the bread and wine, sit for the homily, sing aloud, and join hands with neighbors in peace.  All they need is a loud shout of praise when the bread cracks broken, but then I guess they been proclaiming the Gospel for 2000 years without my help.  Guess what--weepy me, wept.  Tired, missing my wife, thankful, so very thankful to be with the faithful calling for mercy and proclaiming grace.  Thankful so very thankful to be alive, simply alive in a world so full of wonder.
I left for dinner already full--- and now, I wait for what seems to be endless hours for Rachel to arrive and more adventure to unfold.
Buen Camino

Urban renewal

Grill guy

I was kind of waiting for the end of the week parade on this one, but no luck.

She said she wrapped these herself.  I was sure tempted.

The altar

A painting of adam and eve

Jollibees is Philippine Mik

I am skeptical of anyone not working at ISR claiming this title!

History is full of ambiguous moral content.

No real pubic transportation,  just jeepneys

Thoroughly mediocre  dinner at a chain (what was I thinking), but this was good.

I was not prepared for blessing!

Prayers for healing have always perplexed me.  Of course, I want those prayers answered.  Who doesn’t want to see healing?  Yet when folks ask others for prayers for healing, I wonder does God need volume to hear and answer?  Are the stories of Yaweh being “roused” by prayer to be taken literally?  When folks report the blessing of healing, I wonder why some are healed and some are not?  Healing violates my equalitarian impulses.  Prayer violates my scientific impulses.  What happens inside a body when we pray for healing?  You and I know that all prayers fail.  Everyone you or I have ever prayed for has died.  What happened?  I’m more of a C.S. Lewis guy, “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”

For two and a half years now, I have been waging war against cancer. When I first heard the news, I wept.  I mourned for my life, for my wife, for my children.  Sorrow, fear, regret and rage took their turns in my heart.  After living with disease and treatment for these years, I thought I was prepared for what lies before me.  How wrong I was.

I have been fortunate in a way.  The cancer has been slow to grow.  I have had time to adjust.  I have had time for treatment. I had lung re-section surgery.  I had one half of a round of chemotherapy, but the side effects were so severe my oncologist stopped it.  The cancer metastasized into my spine. I had immune therapy.  I had radiation to relieve the pain in my back.  Yet none of these treatments stopped the slow growth of the tumors spreading through my lungs.  The sluggish speed of the growth furnished me with time to contemplate the road I walked. 

All through this time, prayer has supported my oncologist’s work.  My prayers rise daily.  I’m sure, in their own way, my wife and children have prayed.  I send out email missives and my sister, and her Sunday school class, my niece, my cousins, my friends from across the years, all have lifted me up in prayer.  When I told my Sunday school class of my diagnosis, one of the women came to me, laid hands on me and exclaimed, “Begone!”

In December of 2018 my oncologist stopped the immune therapy because it had proven ineffective.  She enrolled me in a clinical trial that combined an older chemotherapy drug with a new drug.  The old drug shrunk lung cancer tumors in about 10% of patients.  The new drug was being tested to see if it would goose up that number.  The side effects of the first round were very difficult.  I got a blistering body rash, nausea, neuropathy in my feet, the skin peeled off my hands, the hair on my body thinned, and I lost the hair on my head.  During Christmas’s 12 days, I shaved my scalp and sang “Chrome for the holidays.’

Others say they offer fervent prayers for my healing.  I am sure they do.  Instead of praying for healing, I usually prayed to walk into the looming valley of the shadow without fear (well, much fear) in the face of despair.  I told several of my pastor friends, “All prayer runs out, all prayer fails.  Jesus is Lord and that comforts me in the face of the inevitable. That’s all I need, the affirmation that Jesus is Lord.” 

I went to church with my mother back in the late fall.  She has dementia.  Every day, near every moment, is new for her.  Yet as the choir launched into “Jesus loves me this I know” she still knew all those words.  I wept.  That is all she, and all I, needed or wanted for the road ahead.  The firm conviction that I was in the wounded hands of Jesus sustained me because, “Jesus loves me this I know.  Even as the side effects of the new chemotherapy trial knocked me down, it was not the hope of sudden cure, but the deep theology of my mother singing the song “Jesus loves me this I know” that kept me from falling.

Because of the clinical trial protocols, I had a follow-up CT scan in early January.  The evening of the scan I left for Florida to be with my father-in-law as he faced his own cancer diagnosis and to be with my mother-in-law as she descended the steps of dementia too.

Two days after I arrived, the oncologist office called.  Colette, my oncologist’s nurse said, “The new scans are back.  Your tumors have shrunk.”  I was stunned into shouting “Praise God”.  I danced.  I wept for joy.  My Jewish father-in-law gave me an embarrassed smile.  I called my wife and told her I wanted nothing more than to plant a big wet sloppy kiss right on her warm lips.  I wanted to hold my children.

I, who talk a good game about God’s mercy and care, was not prepared when it came my way.  I was completely floored.  Blessing, blessing, blessing rolled over me and I was thoroughly unhinged. 

The psalms sing of blessing.  Jesus names those who mourn, and I sure mourned, as special recipients of blessing.  The great biblical story ends with tears being wiped away in a city with streets lined with trees whose leaves bring healing to entire nations.  And me, purportedly a student of that great story, well I guess I just learned something quite new—prepare for blessing.

It still doesn’t seem fair—why me and not the young gaunt girl I saw in the infusion center today?  Why me and not the old frail man in the wheelchair?  Yet, inexplicably I have apparently been given more than I expected.  There is so much I don’t understand, I just accept this with joy.  The end will still come, but for now, I sing the Doxology in the tune of the Old One Hundred.  Praise God the author of all blessing: expected and unexpected alike.  I thought I knew all about it.  I was prepared for the worst (well sort of), but for now, unprepared as I was, my mourning has been turned to dancing.

Once when I was 57 years old, I walked 500 miles across northern Spain on pilgrimage.  Buen Camino!

Advent, Christmas, Epiphany

I have never simply re-posted something on my blog site, but this is a new year eh?  A pastor from Rochester Hills, Kenneth Tanner, whom I read on FB periodically, wrote this meditation on Christmas as practiced/envisioned by the Church.  With his permission, I reproduce it here.

I have fortunately been married to a Jew for near 40 years.  Our household reflects that wonderful tradition---no Santa’s, fake trees, and Black Friday storms. I just find it kind of, at best, superfluous --- especially when accompanied by appeals to “Remember the reason for the Season.”

For the last couple of years my own devotions have carried me toward celebrating Advent, Christmas in 12 days, and Epiphany.  So, this essay by Tanner says a whole lot about Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany that warms me.  Enjoy and be filled.

I love it when the retail-driven cultural Christmas draws to a close and the ancient, worship-oriented celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas begins.

Yet below the tinsel and lights and shopping malls and parades, there is a genuine longing in many (most?) to connect to the deep hope offered by the real Christmas.

And this anonymous desire for Christ, these pursuits of joy in disguise, indicate that many still understand that something authentic needs to be celebrated even if they cannot name the hope and peace and love they long for, and Christians need to rejoice that this is so.

When the rest of the world—and too many of my brothers and sisters in Christ—moves on, when the hustle and bustle of pre-Christmas frenzy comes to an abrupt close on December 26, then the church can get down to the authentic work of worship, of communion, of contemplating the unfathomable mystery that God has become human so that humanity might participate in the divine life.

An angelic messenger. A conception. A visitation. A prophecy. A census. A journey. No place to shelter the virgin. A cave. Oxen. Sheep. Shepherds. More angels. A birth. The profound humility of God in coming among us as a helpless, silent baby in obscurity and poverty, amid shit and straw. A woman clothed with the sun. A child with an iron scepter to rule the nations. A dragon. A cosmic battle between Light and darkness. Three Maji. Herod. Warnings in dreams. A slaughter of innocents. The flight of a refugee family from political terror.

Christmas is an endless story with innumerable chapters and yet an earth-bound event of blood, sweat, labor, dirt, and breath—of struggle with evil and glory in the highest—that changes everything in the cosmos, changes all times and spaces.

G.K. Chesterton understood a hundred years ago that we humans want to distract ourselves by ornamentation and sentimentality and kitsch from a life-converting, dramatic encounter with the deeper meaning of the Incarnation, from a meaningful encounter with Christmas, one that requires *everything* about us to change.

And part of the great rush to busyness and distraction is precisely that the real Christmas imposes serious challenges.

Real Christmas asks humanity to at last comprehend what manner of God made the world—One who discloses their eternal community in the weakness of a human child placed in a feed box—instead of projecting false gods from our vain imaginations, making idols of envy and anger and vindictiveness and hate and coercion and power that look all-too-human.

Real Christmas asks humanity to understand what it truly means to be human, and we are not human until by grace we become human as God is human.

Real Christmas answers both challenges with a person, with a Son, Jesus Christ, in whom the world encounters its genuine God and—for the first time—an authentic humanity.

Real Christmas challenges our politics. It says that all self-seeking rule, our tired struggle for domination of others, our desire to be “great” is at an end.

Real Christmas tells us that genuine authority and power is others-directed and self-sacrificial; that the real king does not seek his own, does not keep a record of wrongs, is not jealous or envious, or boastful or coercive but patient and kind and gentle and long suffering.

Real Christmas names Love as the very essence of the Creator and tells us that this God has become human, become flesh—forever—in Jesus the apprentice carpenter from Nazareth.

Real Christmas challenges our economics, our national identities, our international borders, our ethnic and family narratives, our sense that our tribe and way is the best and says there is now no distinction between rich or poor, young or old, male or female, Jew or Greek.

Real Christmas announces a new kingdom where everyone is welcome and cherished by the Father as co-heirs of an everlasting rule of love governed by a profound humility beyond description, that chooses to reveal itself to the cosmos it loves in unimaginable, surprising vulnerability and contingency.

Real Christmas challenges our violence and announces the arrival of a king who is not a warrior god but a peacemaker. Swords are beat into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and humanity must now get back to creation care and koinonia, our true vocations.

Real Christmas is about God becoming flesh so that humanity can participate in the divine life. God becomes part of the human story, so that we might become part of the divine story. He shares in our blood so that we might share in his.

Real Christmas challenges us to leave our distraction, our endless activity, and enter the mystery, to slow down long enough so that we not only approach in utter awe this great Love lying in the feed box alongside Mary and Joseph but that we cease being mere spectators and *enter* this great revelation by contemplation, by meditation on this new way of being human that participates without disruption in the divine life on the pattern of Jesus Christ.

And then this real Christmas challenges us to get down to living this new humanity *now* for the life of the world, for the life of *this* without end world that God cherishes, on the pattern of our helpless infant God.

And so we mark time by the Word made flesh and this reorients us, helps us truly live our days on the pattern of his great humility.

A blessed Epiphany to all my Western Christian brothers and sisters, and a blessed Christmas Day to all my Eastern Rite Catholic and Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. Christ is born! Much love and grace now and always.

Noah and God's Angry Flood

Noah and God’s Angry Flood

     Throughout my life the Biblical story of Noah was often referred to simply as Noah’s Ark.  In my elementary years, it was presented as a “just so” story about rainbows with water color pictures provided by the whole class to illustrate the tale.  As I grew older it was taught as a story of awe and wonder about building a great wooden boat, assembling a vast collection of animals, and rain that won’t quit.  God, when He appeared in various redacted versions of the tale, provided warning of the calamity to come and safety and refuge for Noah during and after the great tragedy.  Most recently, in my adult Sunday school lesson book, the story was offered as an opportunity to point out Noah’s virtues and as an exhortation for us to emulate those virtues: faith, patience and obedience.  As I read the story preparing for my Sunday class, none of the interpretations from my Protestant past or present seemed to capture the plain text of the story. 
    
     So, read it again and let the story startle you.  After you’ve read it a time or two, take a close look at the painting by Jan Breughel the Elder, circa 1601.  It has come to be called “The Flood with Noah’s Ark”.  Breughel’s painting, like the story itself, is a gut punch—the story of Noah and the Flood is a horror show.  It is a story of an enraged slaughter. Not only do offending humans die, but also every other living creature on earth as well.  Look at the painting’s details.  Mothers grab their babies.  People claw to get to higher ground.  Some try to save possessions, while others simply hold each other and scream. You can hear the din of their cries and wails, and you can see the human variety of reactions: puzzled looks, panic, despairing acceptance, and fear.  Pandemonium is here for Death is coming.  Death is coming to the whole earth.

     Read the text again.  A wrathful God decides things in the world He created are not going as planned.  The text reads, “the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil.”[1]  So, the narrator informs us that, “. . .the Lord regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart.”  God’s regret is so strong that He decides, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.”   This is all recounted in Genesis 6.  Earthworms and aardvarks all must be destroyed because the Lord is having creator’s remorse about those humans.   Then, you know the story, 40 days and nights of rain.  Floods rise.  Everything and everybody, except Noah, his family, and all the animals on his boat, drowns. My Sunday School teachers never dwelt on the homicidal part.  We only heard about how big the ark was, how miraculously the animals came, and of course, the rainbow.  Yep, we glossed over the genocidal part, the part that makes the great mass murders of the 20^th century look like amateur hour.[2]

In the Noah tale, there is a puzzle that might help us return the horror of mass extinction to the central place in the story and drive us to think more deeply about God, humans and our role as his agents on earth.  To begin, note the rationale for homicide in Genesis chapter 6, “the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil.”  The human creature’s congenital evil demands the extermination of every living thing on earth.  Now, read on into chapter 8.  After God “remembers” Noah (Gen. 8:1), the floods recede, and Noah builds an altar and offers burnt sacrifices from every kind of clean cattle and clean bird. [3]  As those fumes waft upwards and please God, He pledges eternal mercy to reemergent humanity, “For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth.  And I will not again strike down all living things as I did.”[4]  The rationale for justice in Genesis 6, the compulsive evil of humankind, is, in Genesis 8, the grounds for showing mercy.  God looks at humans in Genesis 6 and says they are evil.  They mar His creation.  They deserve destruction.  After the devastation He has unleashed, God looks at humans in Genesis 8, notes again their congenital evil, and this time, He offers mercy.  

Justice is the rendering unto others what they are due.  The Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels and the Epistles are just chock full of calls for justice, stories of injustice, appeals for justice, and more.  Mercy is often thought of as the far end of the scale of justice: harsh, capital punishment at one end, and mercy, olly olly oxen free, at the other.  We seem to think that mercy is a lightening of the sentence, a reduction in penalty, a tipping of the scale until sometimes there is no penalty at all.

Who deserves justice and who deserves mercy?  Our social and political life certainly is full of debates over this sort of question.  Criminal justice, redistributive policies, even foreign policy decisions feature debates over what someone or some group is “due” and which characteristics or situations might mitigate harsh judgement.    

       This time, as I read the Noah tale and struggled with its horror, I found another, and no less startling, lesson.  God’s mercy may not be at one end of a sort of scale of human justice at all.  The story seems to indicate that God has a change of heart about the humans and the world that He has created.[5]  What in the human situation has precipitated that change?  As the judge might ask, “What in this situation might merit tipping the scale towards mercy?”  The answer is nothing.  Humans have not changed one bit. Noah is still human.  Read on through the rest of the Scriptures.  It’s abundantly clear that humankind, the children of Noah, is just as full of mischief, murder, and idolatry after the flood as we were before the flood.  Nothing in the text suggests that God has suddenly seen something heretofore unnoticed about human beings.  And God offers the whole creation mercy:

As long as all the days of the earth -

seeedtime and harvest

and cold and heat

and summer and winter

and day and night

shall not cease."

You see, later in the holy tale, God tells Moses that His very name is “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”. (Ex. 33:19).  God uses the same formulation of ineffability that He uses when he originally whispers His Name to Moses.  Mercy and the offer of mercy “to whom I will” is God’s very Name. The Noah tale, I suggest, teaches that mercy, the mercy of God that is, is, orthogonal to the scale of justice.  It is for all of creation, murderous humans included.  It is a divine offer and a divine promise.  We see it repeatedly in the holy story.  When Jacob meets Esau (Gen. 33), he expects the knife in the neck for his birthright bargaining and theft of blessing.   Instead Jacob receives mercy.  He cries out in surprise and relief that to look at Esau is to see the face of God!  Indeed, “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”.  Do you want to ‘see’ what God looks like?  John tells us to look for a Jew dying on the empire’s cross pleading to his Father to offer mercy to his executioners.  “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”. 

I still don’t rest easy with the mass murder at the center of the story.  Breughel’s painting haunts.  There is just no way I can put on the moral blinders that justify extermination.  Yet I have known the offer of mercy.  I have experienced the power of mercy undeserved, of mercy unrelated to my conduct.  Face to face, heart to heart, I have been offered that mercy.  Without that mercy, I would be a wreck of a man with a life of shambles.  That mercy is my liberation.  Because of that mercy I have a chance at shalom.  That mercy is the seed of my transformation into a person who loves and who offers mercy to others.  When I looked into the eyes of the one who offered mercy to me, like Jacob, I saw the face of the main actor in the Noah tale and in all of the holy tale.

Muestra misericordia.

Buen Camino

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[1] Here and below I’ve used the Noah text as translated by Robert Alter.

[2] Today, I don’t know which I find worse, glossing over the murders or attempts to justify God’s murders.

[3]There is a puzzle here as well.   In Genesis 6:19-20 Noah is told to bring into the ark two of every kind of animal, male and female, on the face of the earth.  In Genesis 7:2 Noah is instructed to bring into the ark two of every kind of clean animal.  Further in Genesis 8:20 God instructs Noah to take of the clean animals and make sacrifices.  The distinction between clean and unclean animals doesn’t reappear until the Law is given in Leviticus 11:1-47.  The easy interpretive way out is to claim that years later an editor picked up the scroll, clearly after eating a kosher lunch, and added the pious gloss to the Noah text. Of course, note the assumption that “we”, today in all our wisdom, know better than those foolish editors of long ago who add an anachronistic comment in one place but ignore the other places they could have inserted the same sort of material.

[4] Mercy not just for humanity, but also for the entire creation. ”I will not again damn the soil on humankind's score.” (v. 21).

[5] Many are loathe to say things like “God changed His mind.”  There are certainly claims in scripture that God is unchanging.  There are also certainly stories in which God changes.  Here is one for instance.  Further, the narrator in Exodus describes how God wants to wipe the Israelites out after the Golden Calf incident, but Moses reminds Him of His own purposes and promises and God “relents”.  Why do the metaphors of God as unchanging have precedence over the stories of God changing?  I suggest that a rationalist approach to theology, an approach that seeks orderliness of the logical and rational kind at the expense of all other forms of order, forces us to choose between biblical metaphors and assign priority to one set over other biblical images and metaphors.  Think of all the times the text says something like “God walked in the garden in the cool of the day.”  Immediately, theologically driven folks will clear their throats, hem and haw, and begin to explain that we don’t take too seriously what the inspired writer clearly wrote. Language deemed too anthropomorphic, well it doesn’t bear up to our theologically informed readings.  For the theologically minded we should, however, take seriously the equally inspired writer who informs us that God is Spirit and conclude of course, spirits don’t go for a walk. For me, the Scriptures are a sea of metaphors that don’t always fit together in rational order.  The whole variety of metaphors are the revelation of God. Their sheer variety may well provide multiple doors for folks to enter into a relationship with the One who is revealed there.  Our task is not to be’ smarter’ than the inspired writers but to read, re-read, and be transformed by what they tell us.

Gifts

     I was supposed to be writing.  I had been at my desk for over two hours. I assembled my notes.  I checked email. I looked over the title I'd selected. I looked at Face Book. I reorganized my notes.  I read an Opinion piece in the Washington Post.  I re-checked email.  I wrote nothing.

     Frankly, I can't concentrate.  It seems that since the ever narrower and looming sides of the shadowed valley have come, concentration has gone.  

    So many that I know and love have cancer. I almost dare not call to mind their names as I will moan in anger and grief.  I, too, have cancer.  Two years I've lived with this mess.  My back reminds me of that grim reality every time I move.  I lay under whirring machines preparing for radiation therapy.  I endure needles that deliver immune therapy.  Every one is so kind and careful, but the reason for their kindness and care is, after all, my illness.

    Anya found a meme that superimposes the shout, "Fuck cancer!" over a cartoonish raised middle finger salute.  And you know what right now I couldn't agree more. 

    I am supposed to be composing a sermon to encourage the saints on Sunday.  All I have done is fidget and fume.  The texts prompted an idea that seemed so clear.  The hymns seemed to match the texts and sermon theme.  Yet as I sought to get beyond musing to actual words on a page...nothing but mouse clicking to mask anger and sorrow.

     A walk was the only answer.  And there I found gifts.  Not one more word for the sermon, but gifts for my anger, sorrow, and fear.  Sun dappled paths that led to calm waters.  I can want for nothing else.  Gifts. Relentless mercy and long nurtured goodness just waiting for me.