Treasure hunts: Re-teaching ourselves what is important

2 Kings 22:1-10, 14-20; 23:1-3

There’s this whole genre of TV shows these days about hidden gems from the past lurking in somebody’s basement. You know, American Pickers and Pawn Stars and the like. You go back a little further and there’s Antiques Roadshow on PBS (and it probably says something about my social life that I remember that from my grade school days). There are plenty of other TV shows (many of which happen to be on the History Channel) that are about missing treasure being sought in various places. These are all quasi-non-fiction (though some of them are more than a little conspiracy-laden), but there are also many, many fictional accounts like these as well. Once upon a time it was Indiana Jones, then National Treasure, now The Librarians and the like.

            All of these shows tap into some yearning we have to discover something exceptional that has been forgotten. There is something important about finding buried treasure that goes beyond even wealth. After all, in all these stories (at least the fictional ones) the greedy ones end up succumbing to their greed and those who find the treasure happen to be the ones doing it for the right reason. If you don’t know what Pawn Stars is, however; it’s basically what I just described but backwards. The wealthy greedy ones get the historical artifacts and the ones who bring them go off and waste all their money gambling in Vegas. But that’s another story.

            Anyway, in today’s reading we have an unexpected treasure hunt. Most of the best treasure hunts go down this way. Hilkiah, having been sent by King Josiah to find workers to repair the temple, stumbles upon scrolls from the Torah (specifically a part of the book of Deuteronomy) forgotten in the temple. This has all the making of an Indiana Jones plot minus the melting Nazi faces, except Shaphan doesn’t seem to understand the importance of what he is bringing to Josiah.

            We have to remember that books of the Bible were not just lying around in Josiah’s day. You couldn’t go down to the corner Hebrew book store and find yourself a scroll of the Torah. In all likelihood, this was one of few that existed and it was all-but-forgotten in the dilapidated temple that was supposed to be the center of the faith of the Hebrew people. It’s kind of amazing to consider the temple being in such disrepair, and it is a testimony to how little the faith of the people mattered any longer in those days. If our church gets dust in the corners I get phone calls on Tuesday morning. And we are just a little church in the far edges of creation. The temple is the very heart of the Jewish faith, standing in Jerusalem at the very heart of the world. The fact that the Torah was left behind in the temple is almost unfathomable. The fact that Shaphan, a priest, could bring the book to Josiah with barely a comment, as if he doesn’t seem to care about what it is, is equally astounding.

            The people of Judah had completely forgotten about God’s law.

            How could this happen?

Work. Rest. Two commandments of equal importance.

“Work is the reward of work, just as rest is the reward of rest.” –Aviya Kushner in The Grammar of God.

            As I’ve been reading through this wonderful book on Hebrew grammar and the way it informs how a person reads the Bible I’ve been struck by the ideas of language and how it changes our attitudes, our beliefs, and even how we act. This is evident enough in the politically-charged world we see in the media. Words matter. And half the war is in how they are arranged to paint a certain picture.

            But, ultimately, the way things are portrayed on TV, the radio, and the internet is not the only story. As we enter into Advent and eventually Christmas, now is the perfect time to reflect on all the ways we can paint a different picture of the world around us. Now is a great opportunity to think differently. For me, it starts with the quote at the beginning of this article. Work is the reward of work; rest is the reward of rest. To me, this means that even though there are many things outside of my control—wars and refugees and terrorism and the economy and the political issues du jour—none of that out there offers me any reward. That sounds selfish, but what I mean by this is simply: Doing things is what will leave me fulfilled. This can be work done for me and for my family, and it can also be work done for somebody else who I don’t know as well or at all. It’s the work itself that is the reward, because that’s what we were created to do.

            But there’s also a second part of this that some of us forget: rest is the reward of rest. It’s easy to think that work is where all positive contributions happen, but I think this is not at all the case. I believe there is a very good reason that God commanded rest (Sabbath)—right alongside not killing and not stealing and all of that business. Rest is reward to you and also where we are primed to work again; it’s where we are reset and reminded that work is actually a reward; not tedium, not pointless, but it all serves the good of our fellow friends and neighbors.

A litany of thanks

Today we give thanks for the many things that have blessed us. We do so understanding that not all have received all of these gifts; that each of us has reasons to be thankful as well as needs as yet unrealized. In this world of haves and have-nots we give thanks not by way of comparing ourselves, boasting, or demonstrating our superiority; instead we do so to remind ourselves of God from whom all blessings flow. That one who appears to have little to be thankful for, like the widow with her small offering, may be comparably rich in all that God values. That everything we have is a gift from God, so with praise in our hearts and thanks on our lips, we give thanks to you, O God...

For the life we have been given, for air to breathe and water to drink, for food and family, shelter, a place to sleep at night, and loved ones to share it with. For those who have died--for the memories we cherish--for the temporary and the everlasting. For safety and freedoms. For the sacrifices of those who have gone before and those who still live in our midst. For our military, for our veterans, for our peace-seekers, for our judges and prosecutors and lawyers. For all those who earnestly seek the good of all people.
We give thanks to you, O God...

For the harvest. For soil and fertilizer. For humus. For earthworms and nitrogen. For the wind and the rain, the sun and the snow. For hired hands. For mechanics. For family businesses. For combines and tractors and sprayers and the people who drive them. For the food we eat and the food we share. For organic food; for GMOs. For small-scale farming. For large-scale farming. For livestock and poultry and the gift of animal husbandry. For gardens and lawn mowers. For those who tend to all things living. We give thanks to you, O God...

For the gift of Christ-incarnate. For seeing the face of God in one another. For those who look the same as us and remind us of God's presence in us. For those who look different from us and remind us that God’s face is diverse. For those with whom we agree. For those with whom we disagree. For the freedom to have an opinion. For the freedom to withhold an opinion. For quiet reflection; for loud cheering. For sports teams. For meaning. For perspective. For wins and for losses. For pushing ourselves to become better people. For the assurance that we are enough. We give thanks to you O God...

For the gift of salvation. For grace and for mercy. For forgiveness when we err. For communion. For friends who value honesty and who tell us as it is. For family who does the same. For unconditional love. For a God who became human and ultimately died for us on a cross. For the love of a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend; for the love of all friends. For brothers and sisters—blood relatives and those who are adopted and claimed. For those we see often, and those we seldom see any longer. For children and grandchildren. For times when we feel weak and times when we feel strong. We give thanks to you, O God...

For Christ in other people, for strangers who demonstrate love, for random acts of kindness. For technology that makes life easier. For remembering the way work was once done. For medicine, doctors and nurses. For our hospital and nursing home. For teachers and social workers. For our school, for co-ops. For accountants and bankers, highway workers, electricians, farmers and ranchers. For plumbers and cashiers, for homemakers, day care providers, and all parents. For garbage haulers. For police officers, highway patrol, sheriffs and deputies. For border patrol. For firemen and government workers. For mayors, senators, council members, representatives, governors, and presidents. For all those who do good work, who value their occupation and their vocation. We give thanks to you, O God...

For the gift of music. For the gift of worship. For the gift of youth. For the gift of the elderly. For the gift of parents and baptismal sponsors. For the gift of pastors. For the gift of lay staff. For the gift of Sam and Heather and Karen and Frank. For church council members. For Renee and Brian. For Karen. For all choir members and soloists. For sound board and video workers. For altar guild. For women's groups. For M.O.P.S. For quilters. For A.A. For Cornerstone Food Pantry. For Wednesday School teachers. For Confirmation students, facilitators, and parents. For property committee. For personnel. For all those active in the church in their own way. We give thanks to you, O God. We give thanks to you, O God…

The Christian moral obligation to refugees (or why I'm sick every time I open Facebook these days)

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26)

This passage has always been a stumbling block for me. It fits alongside several other examples from Jesus' teaching of leaving family behind for the sake of becoming a disciple (cf. Mark 10:29, Luke 14:20, etc). I've always assumed Jesus talks like this to emphasize the importance of the kind of life that God offers over the life we can find in the world; that even love of family cannot hold a candle to the love of God. Contrasting these verses with Jesus on the cross in John's Gospel telling the beloved disciple that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is now to serve as his mother, and vice versa, has always struck me as a difficult tension. A person can't seriously argue that Jesus doesn't value family, but a person can't really argue that family is the most important thing either.

I think about this quite often, but it hit a sweet spot for me in the last couple days as the political world has erupted on the subject of refugees in light of terrorism in Paris, ISIS, Syrian ties and all that. The reason this strikes me is because I see many Christians opposed to refugees coming to America (or Europe, or wherever they might be), and I must confess I have a hard time understanding the logic. I understand if my atheist friends don't want Syrians in their towns; after all, that feels pragmatic and they have no political-moral obligation to them. But Christians do have a moral-ethical obligation to refugees. It's about as clear as any ethical obligation in the Bible, and I am struggling to understand how Christians can come to the understanding that it is OK to close their doors to those in need on the off chance they might do them harm.

God of wrath, God of grace

Hosea 11:1-9

One of the challenges of doing theology is that, if you’re honest with yourself when you read the Bible, there are so many peculiar tensions between things. I guess I might even go so far as to call them contradictions. In one place the Bible says one thing; in another place something else. Most of the time we don’t talk much about those contradictions because, frankly, it’s easier not to. Our modern, rational minds don’t deal well with contradictions and ambiguities and the like; they make us afraid—that the Bible isn’t what we think it is, even that God isn’t real. Contradictions can cause us to question our faith.

            But they also serve several purposes: For one, they make us humble. A person can’t figure out the Bible; it’s un-figure-out-able. And the Bible is just one way of God manifesting God’s self in the world, so if this most-tangible of God’s manifestations is sometimes ambiguous and confusing and self-contradictory, then God is bound to be awfully opaque. Again, rational minds rebel against this. So, we have fundamentalists claiming, “The Bible says. I believe it. That settles it.” We have relativists, suggesting that certain things are just fairy tales. Both miss a splendid opportunity to wrestle with the word of God. But the word of God is to be wrestled with. We live in a world where we are never completely safe, where terrorism is both extremists with assault rifles and even other kids at schools. The fact that we have a God capable of holding two opposing views at the same time in a way that we are not challenges us to look deeper—past politicizing opinions and into the depths of what it means to be human. This is an interesting thing to consider as we turn to Hosea.

            The reason this concern arose for me with this reading from Hosea is because of how God reacts to Israel’s disobedience. In the book of Genesis, God utterly decimated Sodom and Gomorrah alongside the two lesser-known cities of Admah and Zeboiim (mentioned in the reading today). God did this (so the story goes) because they were bad people who disobeyed God’s commands. This is the relatively karmic God of the Old Testament we expect. Israel’s history can be summed up by being good and then bad, receiving God’s blessing and curse, on repeat over and over again. Yet, here in Hosea we find something different. When we get to the point of judgment—the time when God has done the same destructive thing over and over and over again—for some reason God’s heart warms strangely. The God of judgment becomes a God of mercy and compassion.

The Punctuation of Life

Today I was reading Aviya Kushner's book, The Grammar of God, when I was hit by a rather small thing that I think makes a rather big difference. She was talking about periods. Full stops. Ends of sentences. This paragraph is full of them.

Specifically, she was talking about the way English Bible translations tend to render Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 as separate entities. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void." Period. Full stop. While Jewish translations, echoing longstanding midrash on the Hebrew, sometimes connect the two verses: "When God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light" (Jewish Publication Society translation).

This is fascinating for purposes of understanding how grammatical constructs influence our ideas about God, and I commend Kushner's book to everybody's attention for that reason, but there is another reason I am intrigued by this, namely: How we imagine rests and breaks is part and parcel of how we live.

Some people live lives that are run-on sentences, continually moving on to the next thing, never spending more than a comma here or there. Others live from one period to the next; in short, purposeful bursts. I imagine what we consider busy lives to be like this. Every idea must be succinct and, above all, certain. There is no time for waste. So I think it's no surprise that some of the most American of biblical translations start, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Period.

Creation? Done. Orderly. Simple.

I see a lot of fruitless arguments between those who live run-on sentence lives and those who live period lives. For all their effort, they might as well be speaking Hebrew and English back and forth. And it's not as straightforward as suggesting that some people want to keep things simple and others want to dig deeper, because this is not so much about the depth of understanding as it is the culture in which that understanding is lived. A person can know a great deal and prefer to use that depth to come to a full stop conclusion; another is very happy combining ideas into a nexus that seems, to the full-stop person, unnecessarily vague.

The trick doesn't seem to be so much choosing between the two as it is acknowledging that the two exist and figuring out how to meet one another in translation.

I have more thoughts on this, but I have to get back to reading. Maybe another day.

Keeping Christ in Christmas

            It’s almost that time of year again when we descend into the madness of shopping centers and malls and Walmart and Amazon to find the next big present that will satisfy us for the next year (or at least a few weeks). And, in so doing, we’ll encounter folks who wish us all sorts of things, “Happy Holidays” and “Happy Kwanzaa” and “Happy Chanukah” and, of course, even “Merry Christmas.”

Of course there is endless frustration among Christians regarding all of those greetings that don’t contain the Christmas tag. Some will even go out of their way to frequent those businesses that are explicit in their Christmas-celebrating, because that is the reason for the season (after all). We all make choices about where we shop for various reasons, so I suppose there are worse reasons for choosing one business over another than their holiday greetings. I’m just skeptical that the best way of keeping Christ in Christmas is words said at a cash register by an underpaid, overworked person who represents the customer service side of some large, faceless corporation.

So, rather than focus on things that probably don’t matter much (i.e., your religion is not being oppressed if somebody wishes you happy holidays or, for that matter, a blessed Kwanzaa), I’m going to offer five ways that we can keep Christ in Christmas in a meaningful way. Now, whether you gift these ways forward or throw them away with the wrappings is completely up to you.

A Perfectly Rational Story

1 Kings 18:20-39

“If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”

            This sounds so simple. It should be that simple. Who is the real God? Follow him. Except… most of us don’t get to run this kind of test. We just don’t. Instead, we get hints and wonders and little things that make us yearn for something better and a quiet assurance that such a thing is there. Most of us don’t get to see God hurling down lightning bolts from the heavens. This is a wonderful story and a difficult story for that reason.

            I mean, I love this story. I expect some of you do, too, because it is a story that is thoroughly modern (even if it is three thousand years old). What I mean by calling it a “modern” story is that the grounds that are established for God’s existence are thoroughly rational. Elijah sets the premise: Worship a God who actually does something. And then he goes about constructing a challenge where only the real God could succeed.

            He gives Ba’al every advantage. The home field of Mount Carmel. The weapons of choice: Ba’al being the god of fertility, what better advantage than lightning? He plays in front of the home crowd—four hundred of Ba’al worshipers. Elijah makes it so lopsided that the only way Yahweh—his God, our God—could possibly win is if he is real and Ba’al is not.

            I wish we could do a similar demonstration for you today. Wet down the altar and have a little competition between the God who we know in the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and all the other gods we have. Wealth, fame, sports teams, deer season... But this is not how God normally works. This story with Elijah is the exception and not the rule. Deuteronomy 6:16, which predates Elijah by hundreds of years, says “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” which is exactly what Jesus quotes to Satan when he is tempted in the wilderness. The honest truth is that Elijah gets a free pass here that the rest of us do not. He gets to put God to the test in a way we cannot.

            This may be unfair, but it is also a reminder that, as much as we might think otherwise, we are not the heroes of the faith. God tends to work through nations, telling a big story, crafting a big plan. This is why that oft-quoted passage from Jeremiah, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to proper and a future with hope” (Jer 29:22) is misinterpreted again and again. It is not an individual promise to you and me but rather it is a national promise; a promise, we might say, for the whole body of Christ. Sometimes you won’t prosper. Sometimes you won’t be very hopeful. Sometimes—probably often—you’ll have a tough time crafting a rational test for God’s existence. This is not evidence against God; it is simply proof against your methodology.

Age, Divisions, and All the Saints

1 Kings 12:1-17, 25-29

Today we enter an interesting period in our yearly Bible reading, because today we leave King David behind, and with David we conclude what most of us know about the Old Testament. I don’t want to assume—because some of you are very biblically literate—but for many, probably most here, our knowledge of the Old Testament goes something like: Adam and Eve into Noah’s ark into something about Joseph and a technicolor dreamcoat into Moses and the Exodus with Pharaoh, then some business about wandering in the desert, then the Promised Land, fast forward to David, a little bit about Solomon and his wisdom, then a good deal of blank space that we fill with prophets and look forward to Jesus.

            How many people actually know the name of Solomon’s son who takes over for him as king?

            It’s Rehoboam. He’s right there in today’s reading. But, honestly, until I read the scripture this week I didn’t remember that, and I’m guessing if I didn’t know that most of you didn’t either. The biggest thing I knew about Solomon’s predecessors is that it all went to pot and the two tribes—Israel and Judah—would end up decimated; first Israel destroyed by the Assyrians and then Judah in exile to Babylon. So, today is mostly setting the stage for why that happened.

            …And it’s also All Saints Day—a little strange combination.

            There’s at least one thing in this scripture that I want to focus on today that sort of, but not quite, bridges All Saints Day and this story, and that is the advisers who come to Rehoboam—the old men and the young men—and the kind of advice they give.