A failure of creativity

Luke 2:1-20

Human beings tend to have a failure of creativity. It is not remotely the same thing as being too conservative or too liberal, or too young or too old; in fact, part of the issue itself is our tendency to create simple categories for things and for people. No, a failure of creativity is much more significant than that. It’s maybe best illustrated with a few examples.

            The priests and the lawyers who one day met the grown Jesus had a failure of creativity. Hamstrung to their narrow interpretations of the law they were not open to the possibilities that emerged when God came down to earth. Herod also lacked creativity. It was he who ordered the execution of the children of Bethlehem, imagining only one way to be a king, which was to overthrow the kingdoms already established. For the first time with Herod we see what the opposite of creativity is, and that is fear. Fear that manifests itself in prejudice, anger, and hate.

            Creativity is always pitted against fear. This is why, in that most creative of nights when the Son of God entered the world, the angels appear to the shepherds with a word, “Fear not!” Do not be afraid because it is the natural tendency in such times, but rather be open to the presence of God, which will seem scary—very scary, indeed—until you come to understand the depths to which you need this. For Jesus, anything was possible—he was creativity-incarnate; the only time when creator and creation became utterly and indistinguishably one—which is why grace is so utterly astounding. Jesus could have done anything, become anything, achieved anything, and the life he chose above all others was a life directed toward the cross. God chose creativity through death, not apart from it.

Bullying into prayer, swords into plowshares

Scripture: Isaiah 36:1-3, 13-20; 37:1-7, 2:1-4

            This is a story about bullying. Sure, it uses kings and nations as the characters, guys with long names that distract us. Who names their kid Sennacherib? All of that merely serves as a distraction from a story about a person with a loud voice, shouting “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” This is a story about bullying, about fear, and about all the terrible, awful, untrue things that people say to try to grab your attention. So this is a perfect story for our age.

            The Rabshakeh always gets a lot of attention. He’s the guy—or gal—who yells the loudest, who is the most threatening, and who seems the most sure of himself. I’m reminded of a time on The Simpsons when all the characters are bemoaning that nobody listens to them and Homer Simpson chimes in, saying, “I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.” That’s what it feels like when there’s somebody yelling from a place of power. We feel like we need to engage with the person shouting on the TV or the radio because he or she is loud and given air time; even though that engagement only gives them more power.

            There are a lot of bullies out there. Some of them live in our schools—that much is still true. More and more of them live online these days. Plenty of them, like the Rabshakeh, are willing to stand up on a chair and scream to instill fear in the masses. Isn’t that what we expect from our legislators when they are passionate about an issue? Stand up and shout to show us how passionate you are. The loudest voice is the one that gets heard, after all.

Does fear of the Lord still matter? (And other leading questions)

Scripture: Micah 5:2-4; 6:6-8

The book of Proverbs reminds us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Now, that doesn’t get much play these days. I suspect most people would say that the beginning of wisdom is found in college, or the beginning of wisdom is discovered in the process of aging, or the beginning of wisdom is starting a career, or having a family. Fear of the Lord may be biblical but we rarely consider fear of a thing to be good—not today—and certainly wisdom must start somewhere else. “Why should we be afraid of God?” we might ask in our best modern voices. We love God, or we have faith in God, but fearing God? No, no. That’s something for less civilized folk.

We’ve done our best to make God into the flavorless communion wafers that we serve as his body. He can be loving, and powerful, and good, but fearful? Nope, no good. We have become afraid to ascribe to God any attribute that we do not consider proper in our fellow human beings, and the end result has been a kind of arrogance in our understanding of who God is and what God does. We first decide what it is that a good God will look like, then we decide which parts of our God fit that description, and finally we only believe those things we have already decided befit the God of our choice. In this way we make God in our image. God has all the traits we like and likes the people we like.

Because this Old Testament God doesn’t act like the God we have created in our image we make this God out to be a different God that, because of Jesus, we can ignore. We do this even though Jesus seemed perfectly happy to pray to this God whom he called “Father” and even though our creeds confess this God to be one and the same with the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This is important when it comes to reading the prophets, like Micah, because our weakened images of God mean that we are tempted to take shortcuts and find in the prophets what we want to find. When Micah says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” we read that as if it is a moral-ethical imperative. Do these things and you’ll be right in the sight of God. Perfect. After all, that’s exactly what Jesus says when he’s asked what a person has to do to inherit eternal life: “Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Remember the good ol' days?

Scripture: Exodus 14:10-14, 21-29

             I love the Israelites. They invented the “good old days.” Remember how great it was back in Egypt? Didn’t we tell you we wanted to stay in Egypt? We told you this would never work, Moses. We have always stayed in Egypt. We tried to leave Egypt before and it didn’t work; it never works. Please allow us to go back to Egypt… please, pretty please?

            Has anybody ever heard anything like this?

            These were slaves. They were in slavery in Egypt—there’s no way to spin it otherwise. Never minimize our ability to delude ourselves into thinking that the past was better than it was. Remember the good old days? Yeah, sure, we were worried about getting drafted into the war, and the family farm was barely making enough food to feed us (let alone anybody else), but it was a simpler time then—a better time. The church was filled with kids—never mind that they were only there because there was literally nothing else to do and their parents would do things to them if they didn’t go that today would be illegal. People weren’t more faithful back in the day—they were more bored and they were more scared; and maybe not all of that was so bad, but better? Was it really better?

Many of you remember those days because you lived through them. Today we are afraid of terrorism… then we were afraid of communism. Today we are afraid of dwindling numbers of people… then we were afraid that we couldn’t support the people that we had. Today we are afraid that our church no longer matters in our culture… then we were afraid that our church had too much stake in our culture. Every age has its advantages and disadvantages, but certain times—like the Israelites on their way out of Egypt—we delude ourselves into thinking something that clearly isn’t true. Egpyt was never the “good old days.”

The thing we fear the most: Silence and the presence of God

Scripture: I Kings 9:9-18

            One of the things I worry that my children and grandchildren will be most deprived of in this busy world they are entering is silence, especially when it comes to being silent together. Being silent together is a lost art. Every day there are more and more things that fill our lives with background noise, making it harder to think, harder to meditate and harder to discern God’s voice in all the madness.

            You see this with the various screens that we put in front of ourselves: TV screens and computer screens and smart phone screens and tablet screens and many more. The audio and visual noise is comforting, even the vibration of a phone on so-called “silent” mode gives us positive feedback with every text message or Snap Chat. Every month and week and day silence is more elusive.

You can't run away from the questions: Abraham and the binding of Isaac

Scripture: Genesis 22:1-17

            Difficult questions scare us. Seriously, we don’t like them. “What do you want for dinner?” is a challenging enough question most days; don’t even consider asking us anything deep and existential. Of course, since we don’t like these questions it’s a bit annoying when they show up in places like the Bible, because we like to think that we like the Bible. It’s convenient when the Bible says nice things we can agree with, but it’s not so convenient when the Bible actually challenges us with a situation, or a God, that we don’t like to imagine. 

Every one of us faces difficult questions in our daily lives—questions that we mostly choose to ignore, because they often hide in everyday situations. Here are a few:

Why don’t I do the things that I know I should do?

What is it that worries me about the future?

Why am I so afraid of making mistakes?

Why do I matter?

When should I speak up and when should I be silent?

What mistakes do I make over and over again?

And maybe most importantly: Why am I a Minnesota Vikings fan?

The most complicated of existential questions.

The Beginning of Wisdom: A sermon on fear and the harvest

Text: Isaiah 6:1-13

            I have to admit something today that may or may not make me a horrible sinner. I’m leaning toward not, but I could be convinced otherwise. As many of you know, we have been following a narrative lectionary put out by Working Preacher throughout the fall, which means that instead of reading scripture that centers on a theme for the day we have been following story-lines. I think so far it has been a modest success—at least nobody has threatened to burn down the church unless we return to the good ol’ Revised Common Lectionary. But partly because I have been freed from the constraints of preaching on the same things as every other mainline church in the world I have also felt a little freer to edit the readings as I see fit, and today I am guilty of doing that. Here’s my rationale: I think the tendency among people who create lectionaries—or reading lists—is to skip over the parts that sound harsh, even though some of these are really important parts of the story. I think, being the Scandinavian Lutherans that most of you are, you can take a little verbal abuse from time to time, so I decided today to put it back in—in the case, the prophetic message that Isaiah receives in verses 9-13.

            As far as I can tell, the only reason that the powers on high didn’t include this reading in the reading in the first place is that it is a little lacking in the hope department. How long should Isaiah preach? Verse 11: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.”

That’s not exactly your classic Harvest Festival good news.

            However, I wonder if our attempts to censor the Bible don’t keep us from gaining a more complete understanding of God. I think most of us are probably at least a little scared of what the Bible actually says. But what this jaunt through the narrative lectionary has taught me, even in only a couple of months, is that scripture is so rich we only really ever dip our toes in the water; we never dive in. We all pick and choose our focus. We do this with every biblical story or issue that stems for it—contentious or not. Even though we might have a sense of the trajectory of the whole Bible, it is so much easier to cite a verse or two than it is to craft an argument using the whole Bible. One of challenges with honestly talking about what scripture says is that it holds together multiple viewpoints. Is God wrathful or loving? Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, or quick to judge, mighty and powerful? Or is God somehow both?

            The God who comes to Isaiah in a vision is that classic, Old Testament model who teaches us that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This is not a cuddly God. The message God gives to Isaiah is not something anybody wants to preach. Tell the people: “‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, stop their ears, and shut their eyes.” Now, some of you might be thinking that’s what I do—make the mind of the people dull, stop their ears and shut their eyes—but that’s another matter.[1]

It’s verses like this that make faith in God seem unfair. We are given these senses—sight, hearing, touch—and then we’re told that they are completely unhelpful in knowing God. Seeing God will kill you. Listening won’t help. Touch is a sign of a lack of faith—ask the disciple Thomas. Our senses enable sin. All of this makes us fear a God who is not only unapproachable but who demands unreasonably from us. You’re beginning to see, I can imagine, why we don’t read these verses.

This God—our God—commands fear.

Our problem—and the reason we cut off readings when they get harsh—is that we have come to think that this is a bad thing. Fearing God is not high on our list of religious priorities.

But maybe it should be.

I mean, if God is the most fearful of all things… then what more do we have to fear? And if God could be understood simply with our senses… then what more could we hope for? So, even though we have this Bible with so many prophets, like Isaiah, to condemn us and to induce fear, we also have these threads of tremendous promise woven through these stories. The Bible is interested in showing us a God who is both far away and near, a God who is frightful and loving, a God who puts to death and a God who resurrects. When we focus only on one side of God we actually lose the ability to cope with the darker side of life.

Isaiah’s call is to preach judgment, and the fact that this call exists in the Bible means that God cares enough to set us straight. These are not godless moments. God realizes that, on our own, human beings will always believe that what we create is a product of our own genius. We will forget God as quickly as Peter denies Christ on his way to crucifixion. Without fear, we make ourselves into gods. It’s the same story in 785 BC as it is today. God uses Isaiah to remind us that nothing is so sacred that it is left standing before God. Our idols will be razed to the ground, because only when everything is put in its place can it be resurrected.

*****

There is this thread of metaphors that run from the beginning of Genesis, through the entirety of the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, through Jesus and the Gospel witness, through Paul’s writings and through Revelation to the end of our Bible—beginning to end. It is the thread of agricultural metaphors that appears here in Isaiah. Whenever agriculture turns up in the Bible it is to teach us something about the nature of death and life. What happens when fields or forests burn? The same thing that always happens: new life.

Isaiah is called to tell the people that the land has been emptied and God has burned the last remnants of the fields. Everything will die. This is God’s slash and burn philosophy to farming. But then there’s this line about the holy seed and the stump. It is a strange turn at the end of the reading—and the Hebrew is incredibly difficult to translate—but for those of you who have lived in an agricultural community for a long time you should know why that turn of phrase is there at the very end. The fields are dead… but the seed is planted.

There are plenty of times where the pastor is honestly less qualified to talk about the Bible than the farmers.

Can you imagine if farmers were as scared of facing harsh realities as we are when we read scripture? Nobody would ever grow anything. In fact, farmers provide us the model for how to read scripture. Good farmers are interested in every little aspect of the farm, but they never lose the big picture. When we read the Bible we are interested in every little aspect of the Word—not because we like it all, not because it all makes sense, and certainly not because every part of it is as important as every other part. No, we read the whole picture, because just as a farmer is concerned with the whole farm so are we concerned with the whole picture of God—the parts we like and the parts we don’t. At the same time, a farmer could obsess over one beet—or one acre—but it would be to the detriment of the whole. The winds will howl, the snow will blow, and everything will turn to muck—frozen, dead muck. Winter has come. The harvest is over. Isaiah brings us a message of death and despair. Green has turned to yellow has turned to brown has turned to black.

Still, underneath it all, buried under snow and our fears of what may come, something lies dormant; a seed you cannot see. Holy, holy, holy, say the seraphim. Holy, holy, holy, we sing—both merciful and mighty—worthy of fear, the God who will lay waste and the God who will plant seeds. Winter has come. Harvest is over. The promise is hidden.
            …

But the seed is planted.

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[1] This reminds me of Jesus in the Gospel of John saying to the Pharisees, “‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains’” (John 9:41).