Genesis 1:24-31   Colossians 1:15-20     Luke 8:1-3

 

Are you an angel, a devil or an animal? As a matter of fact different writers have argued that humankind is at bottom an angel in disguise or a devil in disguise or an animal that thinks it’s more than an animal. Two decades ago Mr Desmond Morris’s book, Trousered Apes, told everyone what Morris thought: we humans are animals who dress up and think that dressing up elevates us.

What about you or me as individuals? Are we merely an insignificant cog in a powerful machine? Chinese and Korean communists would say yes. Or are we merely a twitch, as short-lived and unremarkable as any twitch? Jean Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher, would say yes. Or am I as a male a nuisance; worse than a nuisance, an oppressor whose presence ought always to be monitored? Feminists, at least many of them, would say yes.

Then what am I? What are you? Who is a human being? The question is crucial, for unless we answer it correctly our misunderstanding of what we are will impoverish our own humanness and threaten the world of the non-human as well.

In answering the question, “What is it to be human?,” let’s imagine an extra-terrestrial being, like “ET” of yesteryear, visiting us. What would an extra-terrestrial being discover about us? What should it discover?

 

I: — It would surely notice immediately that we human beings are rooted in the world of nature.   We belong to the realm of plants and animals. According to the old story in Genesis we were created on the same “day” as the animals. Animals need plants to survive. We need plants to survive. The Hebrew poet reminds us that we come from the dust of the earth. Humus is the Latin word for “earth.” We humans ought to remain humble (even though we don’t;) humans ought to remain humble because however high falutin’ we think ourselves to be, we come from humus, earth, and our remains shall return to it. We are never angelic; that is, we humans are never pure spirit, never unembodied spirit. We never escape our earth-ness. We are intimately bound up with nature. And of course the most modern ecologist agrees. Ecologists tell us that either we humans are going to rediscover and re-own our inescapable oneness with nature or we are going to perish at the hands of the nature we have poisoned.

If ever we think we have left the realm of nature behind all we have to do is wait until part of our body doesn’t work properly. And if the breakdown in body-part is accompanied by pain, we can think of little else. Pain alters personality; pain is a challenge to character. Protracted pain threatens sanity. And even if there’s no pain, a very small amount of extra tissue growing in one’s brain will unhinge personality and undo stability frighteningly.

In saying that we humans never escape our earth-ness we aren’t saying there’s nothing more to us than there is to the plant or the animal. We aren’t denying the unique features of our humanness: art, music, poetry, imagination, abstract thought. They are wonderful indeed, and they are part of what distinguishes us from the animal world. Yet they all occur in us humans whose fragility is linked to the fragility of nature. William Shakespeare could write matchless plays inasmuch as the plant and animal world sustained him, there was non-toxic air to breathe, and his body hadn’t broken down to the point where his mental functioning was impaired.

In the interest of helping human beings we do massive medical research on animals. We don’t use animals just because they are plentiful and cheap; we use animals because there are the most significant physical similarities between them and us. If there weren’t then medical research with animals wouldn’t profit humans at all.

We must be sure to note that our earth-ness doesn’t diminish our humanness; it doesn’t degrade us. Instead it exalts the realm of nature. It doesn’t rob us of our honour; instead it recognizes that honour which God intends nature to have. Our affinity with nature doesn’t demean nature; instead it dignifies everything God deems necessary for us who are apple of his eye and alone made in his image.

Most people look upon reptiles, for instance, as ugly. We might fondle our dog but we’d never kiss an alligator. Still, if alligators could talk they’d say, “Shepherd, you may not be fond of me. But you had better understand that you need me while I don’t need you. Remember that, Shepherd: you need me, but I don’t need you. So if you are wise at all you won’t trifle with us alligators and with the whole realm of nature that supports us and you.”

The first thing ET has to notice about us is that we are inescapably rooted in nature.

 

II: — The second truth about us humans is equally obvious: every one of us is either a male or a female, a man or a woman. “And God said,” reads the ancient text in Genesis 1, “Let us make man (’adam, mankind) in our image; male and female created he them (plural).” Two matters leap out at us here. One, the distinction between male and female God has built into the creation; two, we are human only in the context of our gender opposite. Both of these matters require comment.

There are many matters that divide people today, such as differences in wealth, in education, in social opportunity. None of these distinctions, however, is God-ordained. None is built right into the creation. All such distinctions can be overcome in principle, and many of us would say that we should do all we can to overcome them. Differences in financial resources, for instance, are glaring and gruesome. At the same time, we have graduated income tax and social subsidies in order to redistribute wealth and re-equilibrate the divisions among us fostered by disparities in wealth. In the same way we have tax-supported public education to give those who would otherwise have no educational privilege the opportunity of adequate schooling. There remains, however, one distinction in the creation that we ought not to try to overcome: the distinction between man and woman. God has pronounced our gender polarity “good” and we are not to try to transcend it in a “unisex” mentality. For this reason, for instance, scripture forbids cross dressing. Now I notice that many of the women in this congregation, my wife included, wear slacks or trousers to church. Good. There’s nothing wrong with that, for the women who wear slacks are manifestly not trying to pass themselves off as men; there’s no attempt to hide one’s gender or misrepresent oneself sexually or deceive anyone in any way. There’s no attempt to deny that one is a woman and therein deny the gender specificity that God has pronounced “good;” no attempt to obliterate the one and only distinction in the creation that God has said should never be obliterated.

The second comment to be made here: each of us is gender-specific – a male or a female – in the context of the gender opposite. To say that I’m a male is to say that I’m a male with respect to a female. To be sure, the animals are male or female too. But with the animals the male/female distinction serves only the purpose of procreation. With humans, however, the male/female distinction first serves the truth that we are made in the image of God.

This is not to say that God is either male or female, or both male and female. God is not gender specific at all. Still, when we are told that we are made in God’s image two things have to be noted. One, the individual human being is made in God’s image. The individual man, the individual woman, is made in God’s image. Two, the individual man is man only in the context of woman, and the individual woman only in the context of man.   While a dog is dog, male or female, irrespective of gender-opposite (in other words, a male dog all by itself is 100% dog), a male human all by himself can’t be 100% human, can’t be human at all. Humans are individually made in the image of God even as no individual can be individual only. Each of us, man or woman, needs our gender-opposite to be properly human.

I have said we need our gender-opposite. I haven’t said we need to be married; I haven’t said we need to be sexually active. Jesus wasn’t married, wasn’t sexually active, but was human. Indeed, so far from being deficiently or defectively human he is the instance of God’s intention for our humanness. At the same time, we should be sure to note that while Jesus wasn’t married and wasn’t sexually active he moved among women every day, moved among them with no awkwardness, and moved among them in ways that horrified the people of his day. He called at the home of Mary and Martha, unmarried women. This wasn’t done in his day. He allowed a menhorragic woman to touch him. This wasn’t done. He spoke in public with a woman of the shadiest reputation (five times married) when men didn’t even speak to their wives in public. He had several women in his larger group of disciples (Luke tells us), when some of these women were single and some were already married. It was women who were last at the cross (at least they didn’t abandon him) and first at the grave on Easter morning. Obviously they loved him. They relished his company and he relished theirs. They enriched him and he enriched them. At bottom, apart from them he wouldn’t have been human and apart from him they wouldn’t have been either. (This, by the way, is a truth that the shriller feminists fail to grasp.)

There was nothing inappropriate in these encounters. At the same time there was everything necessary in these encounters. The truth is God ordains, requires even, a mutual, complementary engagement and delight for all men and women, including those who aren’t married and never will be.

To be human is to be gender-specific and gender-complemented.

 

III: — Our extra-terrestrial visitor notices a third thing about us. We are individuals who live in societies. Both the individual and the society must be protected. When you asked an ancient Israelite his name he always gave you his name together with the name of his tribe. (Jesus belongs to the tribe of Judah .) Why? Because he knew that he is who he is only in the context of his community.

But the converse is true as well. A community differs from a crowd in that a community cherishes and protects individuals while a crowd submerges individuals. Our world is burdened with societies that trample individuals. The USSR did so for 75 years and could revert to doing so at any time. Germany did so in a Reich that lasted only 12 years but intended to last 1000. Not to mention China (the single largest nation in the world), North Korea , Indonesia (now we are identifying right-wing disdain for the individual), many countries in Africa, and of course so very many countries in Latin America that we shan’t attempt to list them. After the “disappeared” people of Argentina had remained “disappeared” for several years, the government of Argentina shamelessly announced what everyone had surmised already: the disappeared were dead. They were dead, the government announced, inasmuch as the government had killed them.

Christians must always recognize the balance between individual and society, individual and community. We must always recognize the need for the balance and the exquisite delicacy to the balance. We must always recognize why individual and community are essential to each other. After all, without the preservation of the individual the community becomes a crowd (also known as a mob.) On the other hand without the preservation of the community the individual person becomes a thing. The balance is exquisitely fine and exquisitely challenging to maintain.

One place in our society where this necessary balance is visible, together with its attendant sensitivities, is the school. Parents expect the school (which is a mini-society) to educate their youngsters for personal edification and employment, promote character formation in them, and all of this to the end of producing solid citizens. But every educator knows that no school can uphold standards of intellectual rigour and decency and deportment and civility and ethical integrity; no school can uphold these if the individual parent doesn’t or the community doesn’t. On the other hand, no conscientious parent can uphold what a school consistently undermines.

Individual and society always interpenetrate each other and regulate each other. Jesus belongs to the tribe of Judah .

 

IV: — Our extra terrestrial visitor might notice one last feature of us human beings, even though it isn’t last in importance. Then again, our “ET”’ visitor might not notice it since it isn’t obvious as our gender specificity is obvious. This feature is that we are made for fellowship with God. While we are discussing it last this morning it’s actually first. It’s not the case that our engagement with God is an add-on, a decoration, a frill, an after-thought. Rather it is the profoundest truth about us. To be a human being is to be God’s cheerful, grateful obedient covenant partner.

Christians know that human existence is always relational. When we speak of a thing like a tree or a termite we know that where trees and termites are concerned to exist is simply to be. But where humans are concerned to exist is to be-in-relation. We have already seen this with respect to gender specificity: to exist at all is to exist either as male or female; and to exist as male or female is to be-in-relation to female or male.

It’s the same with respect to God. While God doesn’t need humankind in order to be God, God has willed himself not to be God apart from humankind. God has willed himself to be God only in intimate, undeflectible covenant solidarity with humankind. And as for us, we can be human at all only as we are human in relation to him. To say that this is truth, this is reality, is not to say that everyone is aware of the truth or welcomes the truth or one day will own the truth. But it is to say that truth remains truth, reality remains reality, just because God has willed himself to be God only in relation to us and has willed us to be human in relation to him. Doesn’t Jesus say that it is his meat and drink to do the will of his Father?

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners we shall ravage nature, foolishly thinking that our attitude to God’s creation and our sustenance doesn’t matter.

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners then we, as men and women, are stuck with a hostile standoff where all we can do is torment one another. We shall then have men exploiting and brutalizing women. (This aspect of the standoff is centuries old.) Or we shall have women sneering contemptuously at men. (This aspect of the standoff is centuries old too but has come to the surface only recently.)

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners we shall rant and rave about our individual rights, caring nothing for anyone else. Or we shall undiscerningly support those social collectivities that promise much, deliver little, and always manage to brutalize and bury individuals.

Our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners is our call to communion with him. This dimension of the human isn’t the least and the last of many; this is the foundation of all others and their preservative as well.

We must be sure notice something too readily overlooked: it is only our appointment as God’s covenant partners that confers and conserves our dignity and worth. Even when God’s invitation goes unheeded; that is, even when there is lacking the response of faith and obedience, nevertheless the fact of God’s invitation continues to confer a dignity and worth that can’t be eliminated and can’t be forfeited. There is no other source of human dignity and worth.

When Maureen’s mother was institutionalized in a nursing home Maureen visited her faithfully, never complaining about it, thankful that such provision was available. One afternoon, having been exposed to the nursing home scene yet again, Maureen stumbled home and said to me, “There is no such thing as innate human dignity or innate human worth. Apart from God’s having appointed us to covenant partnership with him there isn’t any dignity or worth at all.” She was right.   There is no evident, observable dignity in people who are mindless, toothless, toiletless.

Then what are we?   Angel? Devil? Animal? Twitch? Cog? Feminist fodder? We are none of these. We are those creatures with whom God wanted fellowship and whom he wanted never to be without before he created so much as one atom. In fact all that he’s created he has created for the sake of us who are made in his image, who are the apple of his eye, and whom he loves, Good Friday’s cross tells us, more than he loves himself. Why wouldn’t we love him now and want only to love him forever?

 

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                   

March 2004

 

Genesis 2:8-9; 15-17 

Genesis 3:1-7   Deuteronomy 21:22-23   Galatians 3:13

1 Peter 2:24   John 19:16b-30

 

I: — What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with me?  What’s wrong with the world?  What’s wrong with the world is something the world would never guess: it slanders the goodness of God.

The old, old story (saga, legend) of Genesis 3 is a timeless story about the history of every man and every woman, for “Adam” is Hebrew for “everyman” and “Eve” for “mother of all the living”.  According to the old story God has placed us in a garden abounding in trees: “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food”.  God has placed us in a setting that delights us and nourishes us abundantly.  In addition to the myriad trees in Eden (“Eden” being Hebrew for “delight”) there are two extraordinary trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The tree of life symbolizes the fact that the origin of life and the conditions of life and the blessings of life rest in God; the tree of life symbolizes this and reminds us of it.  As John Calvin says so finely, “God intended that as often as we tasted the fruit of the tree of life we should remember from whom we received our life, in order that we might acknowledge that we live not by our own power but by the kindness of God.”

In addition to the tree of life there stands the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  “Good and evil” does not mean “good plus evil”.  “Good-and-evil” (virtually one word) is a semitism, a Hebrew expression meaning “everything, the sum total of human possibilities, everything that we can imagine.”  To know, in Hebrew is to have intimate acquaintance with, to experience.  In forbidding us to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil God is warning us against intimate acquaintance with the sum total of everything that we can imagine.  He is warning us against thinking we must experience or even may experience whatever we can dream up.  In other words, God has set a limit to human self-extension; God has set a limit to our extending ourselves into anything at all that the mind and heart can invent.

Why has God set such a limit?  Why does he urge us to become intimately acquainted with everything that is both nourishing and delightful, both essential to life and culturally rich — and then in the same breath warn us not to become intimately acquainted with “good and evil”?  He sets such a limit just because he loves us; he sets this limit for our blessing.  This side of the limit is blessing; the other side is curse.  This side of the limit there is the blessing of curative medicines; the other side of the limit there is cocaine, curse.  This side of the limit there is the one-flesh union of marriage, blessing; the other side there is the curse of promiscuity and perversion with their degradation and disease.  God, who is good in himself, wants only what is good for us.

Good?  We don’t think that God is good when he tells us, “Every tree except the one tree”; we think he’s arbitrary.  After all, he didn’t consult us when he decided where the boundary line was to be; he simply told us; arbitrary.

The root human problem is that we disparage the goodness of God.  We disparage the goodness of God when we scorn the tree of life, dismissing the goodness of God and the truth of God, even as we tell ourselves that he has proscribed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he longs to bless us but just because he’s arbitrary; and not only arbitrary, but a spoilsport as well since he won’t allow us to extend ourselves into all those possibilities that would surely enrich us.

The tree of life represents discipleship; the tree of life represents what it is to be profoundly human: human beings are created to be glad and grateful covenant-partners with God.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil — prohibited! — is the alternative to discipleship, the alternative to glad and grateful covenant-partnership with God.  The root human problem, then, is that we don’t want life from God’s hand under the conditions God sets for our blessing.  We prefer an alternative; we want to be the author and judge and master of our own life.

According to our ancient story the garden of profuse creaturely delights continues to delight us as long as we hear and heed the creator who gave them to us.  As soon as we try to “improve” upon him, however; as soon as we disobey him, proposing an alternative to the covenant-partnership of discipleship, the creaturely delights no longer delight us.  They become the occasion of endless frustration, emptiness, futility, curse.

II: — The process by which we typically arrive at God-willed curse in place of God-willed blessing is subtle.  The serpent is the personification of this subtlety.  The serpent asks with seeming innocence, “Did God say?  Did God say you weren’t to eat of that one tree?”  The serpent hasn’t exactly lied: at no point does it say, “God never said….”  While the serpent never exactly lies, neither does it ever exactly tell the truth.  The serpent (subtlety personified) smuggles in the assumption — without ever saying so explicitly — that God’s word, God’s command is subject to our assessment.

The subtlety takes the form of a question that appears innocent but in fact is a doubt-producing question with a hidden agenda.  What’s more, the doubt-producing question is an exaggeration: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’”  Any tree?  There’s the exaggeration.  God has forbidden us to eat of one tree, one tree only.

Eve (mother of all the living) decides to correct the serpent.  Surely there’s no harm in correcting an exaggeration.  But for her there is, for as soon as she attempts to correct the serpent she’s been drawn into the serpent’s territory; now she’s dialoguing with a subtlety to which she isn’t equal.  When first she heard “Did God say?” the only thing for her to do was to ignore the proffered subtlety.  Correcting it looks harmless but is ultimately fatal, for now she’s been drawn into the tempter’s world.

Isn’t it the case that as soon as you and I begin to reason with sin we are undone?  As soon as we begin to reason with temptation we’re finished.  Temptation can only be repudiated, never reasoned with, for the longer we reason with it the longer we entertain it; and the longer we entertain it the faster our reasoning becomes rationalization — and rationalization, as everyone knows, is perfectly sound reasoning in the service of an unacceptable end.

As soon as Eve attempts to correct the serpent’s exaggeration she exaggerates.  “God has told us not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; we aren’t even to touch the tree, lest we die.”  God had never said they weren’t to touch it.  They were certainly to be aware of the tree, always aware of it, and never to eat of it, never to experience it.  In trying to correct the serpent’s exaggeration, Eve now exaggerates.  In trying to undo the serpent’s distortion of the truth, she now distorts the truth.  Of course.  To dialogue with a subtlety pertaining to temptation is invariably to be seduced by it.

Eve doesn’t know it yet, but she’s undone.  She doesn’t know it, but the serpent does.  For this reason the serpent leaves subtlety behind and accosts her blatantly.  “You won’t die”, it tells her as plainly as it can, “You won’t die; you’ll be like God, the equal of God.”  It’s the tempter’s word against God’s; it’s temptation’s contradiction of God’s truth.

But God has said that we shall die if we defy him; we are going to be accursed if we extend ourselves into areas and orbits beyond blessing.  “You won’t die.”  Please note that the first doctrine to be denied is the judgement of God.  Doctrines are the truths of God, and the first truth of God to be disdained is the judgement of God.  We should note in passing that Jesus everywhere upholds the judgement of God.

Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the result that “their eyes were opened”.  They had thought that by defying God they were going to be enlightened.  By defying him, however, they have moved to a new level of experience; their eyes are opened — but they are anything but enlightened.  They now know “good and evil”.  They now have intimate acquaintance with, first-hand experience of, what God had pronounced off-limits.  Too late, they now know too why it was pronounced “off-limits”: it’s accursed.

To sum it all up, the primal temptation to which every human being succumbs is the temptation to be like God, to be God’s rival (actually, his superior).  The primal temptation is to regard God’s truth as inferior to our “wisdom”; to slander God’s loving “No” as spoilsport arbitrariness; to regard obedient service to God as demeaning servility; to pretend that a suicidal plunge is a leap into life.  Ultimately the primal temptation is to look upon God’s goodness as imaginary, his will as capricious, and his judgement as unsubstantial.

III: — The result is that Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden.  Expelled means driven out.  By God’s decree.  Does forced expulsion strike you as too heavy-handed for a God whose nature is love?  Then be sure to understand that the forced expulsion is also the logical outcome of disobedience.  After all, Jesus insists (John 17:3) that life, eternal life, is fellowship with God. And fellowship with God is precisely what humankind repudiates.  Then a forced expulsion from the garden — a forced expulsion that issues in estrangement instead of intimacy, creaturely goods that frustrate instead of delight, daily existence that is cursed instead of blessed, and a future bringing the judge instead of the father — all of this we have willed for ourselves.  We think the expulsion to be heavy-handed?  We wanted it.
In the ancient story the cherubim, spirit-beings who safeguard God’s holiness, together with a flaming sword that turns in every direction; these guarantee that God means what he says: humankind is out of the garden, can’t find its way back in, is now living under curse, and can’t do anything about it.

IV: — We can’t do anything about it.  Only the holy one whose holiness cannot abide our sinfulness can.  Only he can.  But will he?  Has he?  Peter cries, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree!” (1st  Peter 2:24)  He himself did?  Who is “he himself”?  It is our Lord Jesus Christ, he and none other.
We must never think, however, that after Peter had denied his Lord and run away he suddenly came to the happy conclusion that Jesus is the great sin-bearer for the whole wide world.  At the cross he had concluded only that Jesus was accursed.  After all, the Torah said it all clearly: “…a hanged man is accursed by God.  Therefore, if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and you hang him on a tree, don’t leave his body on the tree overnight; remember, anyone hanged on a tree is accursed by God.” (Deut. 21:22-23)  Since Jesus had been hanged on a tree (of sorts), Jesus had to be accursed by God.  Such people weren’t accursed because they were hanged; they were hanged because they were accursed; and they were accursed because they were unspeakably debased sinners.

It was only in the light of Easter morning that Peter understood what had really happened.  It was through his Easter morning encounter with the risen one himself; it was in the light of the Father’s Easter vindication of the Son that Peter saw several things simultaneously.
[1]  Jesus was accursed; he had died under God’s curse.
[2]  Yet Jesus wasn’t accursed on account of his sin; he was accursed on account of humankind’s sin.  That is, while he was not a transgressor himself, he was “numbered among the transgressors”.  While not a sinner himself, he identified himself so thoroughly with sinners as to receive in himself the Father’s just judgement on them.
“He bore our sins in his body on the tree.”  To “bear sin” is a Hebrew expression meaning to be answerable for sin and to endure its penalty.  The penalty for sin is estrangement from God.  In bearing this penalty — demonstrated in his forlorn cry of God-forsakenness — Jesus answered on our behalf.
[3]  Because Jesus Christ is the incarnate son of God he possesses the same nature as God.  Father and Son are one in nature, one in purpose, one in will.  It is never the case that the Son is willing to do something that the Father is not, that the Son is kind while the Father is severe, that the Son is eager to pardon while the Father is eager to condemn.  Incarnation means that Father and Son are of one nature and mind and heart.  To say, then, that Jesus bore the judge’s just judgement on our sin is to say that the judge himself took his own judgement upon himself.  But of course he who is judge is also father.  Which is to say, when Jesus bore our sins in his body the Father bore them in his heart.   The just judge executed the judgement that he must; then he bore it himself and therein neutralized it, and this so that his characteristic face as Father might be the face that shines upon you and me forever.  Father and Son are one in judgement, one in its execution, one in anguish, and one in pardon.  What the Son bore the Father bore, in order that justice uncompromised might issue in mercy unimpeded.

In the light of Christ’s resurrection the truth of the cross and the nature of its curse flooded Peter.

V: — When Peter cried, “He bore our sins in his body on the tree” (the Good News of Good Friday), he went on to say in the same breath, “in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”

Then the only thing left for us to decide this morning is whether or not we are going to die to sin and live to righteousness.  Here only do we have anything to say, to do, to become.  We can’t do anything about Eden. We have been expelled, and rightly expelled, having disparaged the goodness of God and disobeyed the wisdom of God and disdained the blessing of God.  Just as we can’t do anything about Eden we can’t do anything about our consequent condition: we can’t overturn it, can’t right it, can’t alter it however slightly.  In the same way we can’t do anything to effect atonement, can’t do anything to make ourselves “at one” with God once more.  We can’t do anything here for two reasons.  In the first place, offenders can’t finally achieve reconciliation in any personal relationship anywhere in life.  Reconciliation is always finally in the hands of the offended party anywhere in life.  Since we are offenders any possibility of reconciliation rests with the God we have offended.
We can’t do anything to effect atonement, in the second place, just because it’s already been done.

God wrought our reconciliation to him in the cross.  To think we can improve upon it is to disdain the blessing he has fashioned for us; and this is to commit the primal sin all over again.

Then there is only one matter for us to settle.  Are we going or are we not going to die to sin and live to righteousness?  If we intend to do this today or to go on doing it today we must cling in faith to the crucified one himself.  He is the son with whom the Father is ever pleased.  Then in clinging to him in faith we too shall become that child of God who delights the Father.  He is the wisdom of God.  Then in clinging to him we shall forswear our folly and know blessing instead of curse.  In clinging to him and following him throughout life we shall know that his service, so far from servility, is in fact our glory.  His tree, the cross, is now become the tree of life.  To become ever more intimately acquainted with it is to relish the rigours of discipleship, recognizing all alternatives as the spiritual suicide that they are.

VI: — As we cling to our Lord Jesus Christ in faith the psalmist will say of us what he said of others so long ago:

They are like trees planted by streams of water,
        which yield their fruit in its season,
               and their leaves do not wither.
    In all that they do they prosper.
       For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
        but the way of the wicked will perish.     (Psalm 1:3,6)

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                             

Revised  March 2013

Genesis 3:1-9

Part One

Anyone who loves Jesus cherishes his parables. As a matter of fact many of us came to know Jesus by means of his parables. We began hearing these stories when we were four years old. At first they were intriguing stories. As we grew older they became moving stories. As we grew older still they became revelatory stories; they revealed the truth of God concerning God, concerning us, concerning our world.

No one dismisses the parables of Jesus just because the parables don’t describe historical events. “A certain man had two sons”, Jesus begins his best-seller about the prodigal. Jesus isn’t referring to an actual historical figure, Mr. X on 42nd Street, Mr. X being a man known to everyone in Nazareth who happens to have two sons. The parable, rather, is a story that Jesus makes up on the spot. Luke tells us (Luke 15) how the parable of the prodigal came to be. Our Lord’s opponents are mumbling and grumbling and grousing and not-so-quietly accusing him of dirtying himself by befriending irreligious people. Jesus, never as stupid as his opponents think him to be, is aware of what they are saying about him. They are faulting him. In order to exonerate himself and the people he’s befriending he spins out the parable on the spot. The parable is utterly fictitious. Jesus makes it up on the spot. It is utterly fictitious, and utterly true; true, that is, in that it tells us the truth about ourselves under God, true in that it tells us the truth about God over us. Wholly fictitious, wholly true. No one denies that the parables of Jesus are revelatory just because they are fictitious.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are parables too. Like the parables of Jesus, the parables in Genesis 1-11 tell us the truth about ourselves under God and the truth about God over us. Then why is it preachers have been expelled from pulpits for saying so, hearers have been crushed or enraged at hearing so, and congregations have been split over it all?

If someone says, “But if we admit that the first eleven chapters of Genesis aren’t historical, where will it all end? What will we deny to be historical next?” If someone advances this argument, the immediate reply is, “But if we ever admit that the parables of Jesus are parables, everything is lost!” This is not a very profound argument.

All of the parable-stories in Genesis 1-11 are profound. One such story is the Tower of Babel.

I: — Our story begins with humankind’s cry, “Let us make a name for ourselves! Let us build a city, and a tower, a tower so tall that everyone will be able to see our tower. As our city becomes famous on account of our tower, our name will be known everywhere. Let’s make a name for ourselves!”

“What’s wrong with building a tower?”, someone asks. “Is there something wrong with creativity?” Of course there is nothing wrong with creativity. God is creative. We are made in his image and likeness. We have an inborn urge to create. To stifle this urge is to impoverish ourselves and to disdain his good gift. There is nothing at all wrong with creativity.

“What’s wrong with building a tall tower, even the tallest tower?”, someone else adds. “Is there something wrong with the pursuit of excellence?” Of course there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of excellence. There is everything right with it. We need to see more of it. After all, we live in an era that congratulates mediocrity. Mediocrity is sin. The pursuit of excellence can only be commended.

“What’s wrong with building a city, the venue of civilization?”, a third questioner asks. “Is civilization bad? Is culture bad? Should we be more holy or more virtuous or more human if we lived in caves and swung from trees and ate bugs and grunted in monosyllabically?” Of course there is nothing wrong with culture. Culture is riches without which we should be humanly poorer.

“Then what is the problem with fashioning city and tower? What is wrong with making a name for ourselves?”

According to the parable the problem with making a name for ourselves is that we reject the name that God has given us. He has named us his creatures. When he names us his creatures he emphasizes both words: “his”, “creature”. He is Lord and life-giver. We come from him, we belong to him, we can be blessed only in him. Because we come from him and belong to him and can be blessed only in him, to reject him is to reject blessing and therefore be stuck with curse.

“Name”, in Hebrew, means “nature”. The name God gives us is our nature. Our nature is to be God’s loving, obedient, grateful, faithful covenant-partner. Anything else is unnatural.

But we don’t like the name God has given us. We are irked by the nature God has given us. Be his obedient covenant-partner? Surely it is servile to have to obey anyone! We want to make our own name, make a name for ourselves. The name we give ourselves will be a better name; it will render us superior.

The problem is, of course, that there is no agreement among humankind as to what this name is going to be. The name we give ourselves will render us superior? Superior to whom? If I find it demeaning to be inferior to God, how much more demeaning do I find it to be subordinate to my fellows! Then I shall have to be superior to my fellows. I shall have to give myself a name that establishes my superiority over them!

And so we set about naming ourselves.

(i) One such name is race. The name of racial superiority isn’t mentioned in polite company, yet it is a name that no one renounces readily. Professional boxing is always looking for what it calls “the white hope”: a superior caucasian boxer who can end black domination of the “sport”. Several years ago when Sean O’Sullivan was in the newspaper every day it was hoped that this Canadian welterweight (147 pounds, the most competitive division in boxing, whose champion is nearly always the best boxer in the world) would become world-champion. The media “hyped” him. The fact of the matter is, O’Sullivan was never in the top 20 welterweights; I don’t think he was even in the top 30. Still, he was “hyped” as a future champion, only to lose in the second round to a black man who has never distinguished himself. Nevertheless, for a few months we had our “white hope”.

All races attempt to make a name for themselves through pretended racial superiority. Wherever black people have assumed power in African countries they have treated brown people savagely. And if you want to commit a huge social blunder and call down someone’s fury on you, simply mistake a Japanese person for a Korean.

(ii) Another such name is harder to describe. It isn’t racial, it isn’t even nationalistic. It is deep-down ethnic. When I was studying in Britain I noticed that war films appeared on TV every week; not Hollywood movies about war, but actual film-footage of World War II: the Battle of Britain, Rommel in North Africa, submarine warfare in the North Atlantic, and so on. When I returned to Britain in the mid-80s I saw the same films on TV. I thought this must be unhealthy, since it must surely inflame anti-German hatred. And yet I kept noticing that the British appeared much fonder of the Germans than of the French, when the French had been their allies twice in this century. I was puzzled and spoke of it to one of my relatives. Whereupon he smiled cheerfully as he said, “It’s not difficult to understand why we like the Germans but not the French. The British and the Germans are descended from the same Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic stock. We and they constitute the master-people. But the French are Latins, inferior.” There is no end to the ways we can make a name for ourselves.

(iii) Another name is social class. The jokes about social-climbing are legion. The jokes are legion, of course, just because social-climbing itself is never-ending.

A woman, no longer in our congregation, tore into me one day inasmuch as she felt I hadn’t made enough of her husband’s Ph.D and his work-place position. His Ph.D had elevated him in the work-place. His work-place ascendancy issued in social ascendancy, according to this woman. By not fussing about his Ph.D I was failing to acknowledge his social superiority. Her parting shot was, “You are a phoney. You won’t recognize a Ph.D, but you worship the ground that M.D.s walk on.” (And all along I had thought myself to be rather hard on M.D.s!)

(iv) Language is another “name” we give ourselves. In our saner moments we might think that language-diversity can only be enriching. At the very least another language exposes us to another literature. What is more enriching than this? Besides, thinking in another language is a good check that our thinking really is thinking and not merely the shuffling of cliches. Yet most of the time any suggestion of another language begets suspicion and hostility.

There is a delightful touch in the parable we are probing today. When we have finished building that tower so tall that it reaches to the heavens, God still can’t see it! Our tallest tower, as high as the heavens, we think to have penetrated even the abode of God himself. But in fact our tall tower is such a pipsqueak thing that God can’t see it. The text in Genesis tells us that he has to “go down”; he has to leave his abode, get down on his hands and knees with his magnifying glass in order to see this puny fabrication.

The racial superiority we deem simply obvious; the ethnic advantage that is surely self-evident; the social elevation that declares itself to the world; all of these are so paltry, so puny, such trifles that God has to get down on his hands and knees to see them.

In any case we have achieved what we set out to do: we have made a name for ourselves. But others have just as effectively made a name for themselves too. They are now boasting of their superiority in blind ignorance of our boasting of ours. The consequences are far-reaching. Our story-teller tells us of two consequences. We are “scattered over the face of the earth”; which is to say, there is no community. There are crowds everywhere, but no community. The second consequence is that we do not understand each other. We talk, we listen, we even claim to hear. But we don’t understand each other. We certainly know the meaning of the talk we utter; we know the meaning of the talk we hear. We say we understand others even as we insist they don’t understand us. Everyone claims to understand but not to be understood. In other regards, regardless of the words we understand, we don’t understand each other. Of course we don’t. People understand most profoundly not with their ears but with their hearts. Our hearts are clogged and calcified. We don’t understand each other. But we keep talking anyway. We talk past each other. Our attempt at communicating has become babble. The builders of the tower of Babel can only babble.

Part Two

What is the solution to the “Babel-babble” that is endemic to humankind? Many solutions are proposed, virtually all of them one form or another of social engineering.

One man, a schoolteacher, bent my ear several times about Esperanto, an artificial language whose devotees are attempting make the international language. A common language will undo everything that the parable of the Tower of Babel describes, says this man. Most of us needless to say, find this naive, albeit harmless.

Equally naive, but not harmless, are the attempts of totalitarian states to enforce conformity, including thought-conformity. Citizens don’t appear to understand each other? don’t appear to understand their rulers? don’t seem to know their place? won’t surrender their pretension to individual superiority even as they are told to support a national superiority which finds them dead on battlefields? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet alike insisted that people appear to understand much more quickly when threatened with torture; solutions seem to be forthcoming much more quickly when a gun is held to people’s heads. But of course what such tyrants describe as a solution is actually a brutal manifestation of the problem.

The Ba’hai religionists and the New Age ideologues are touting world-government. Why do they think that world-government is going to solve what governments on a smaller scale have never been able to solve?

The only genuine solution to Genesis 11 is the one that begins in Genesis 12. Genesis 12 begins with the calling of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham and Sarah are promised that through them all the families of the earth will be blessed. Through Abraham/Sarah and their descendants the curse of Genesis 11 will be overturned. Through Abraham’s and Sarah’s lineage there will come someone, finally, who doesn’t have to make a name for himself in that he honours the name which his Father has given him; someone who knows not only that he is the Father’s creature but the Father’s son; someone who doesn’t have to twist himself grotesquely in the attempt at rendering himself superior just because he is willing to be humbled, humiliated even, for the sake of those whose preoccupation with “climbing” is killing them. The turnaround comes fully and finally in Abraham’s descendant, Jesus of Nazareth.

The turnaround which Jesus is is magnificent as God’s triumph over humankind’s self-victimization. As magnificent as it is “out there”, as an event in world-occurrence, it is nonetheless useless for us unless what occurs “out there” also occurs “in here”. That turnaround which our Lord is is useless for me unless it also turns me around. Can it do this? Can he do this? Is our risen Lord merely risen (i.e., risen but also ineffective), or is he risen and able, able to turn us away from our self-destroying and neighbour-destroying tower-building and name-making? The event of Pentecost answers this question with a huge “Yes!”. Pentecost, after all, is the incursion of that Spirit who is simply the power in which Jesus Christ acts upon us and within us; Pentecost is the celebration not merely of Christ risen (resurrection), not merely of Christ ruling (ascension) but of Christ reversing and reforming; reversing the curse of the tower and reforming the people who are otherwise fixed forever in the curse.

On the first Pentecost, Luke tells us, there are crowds of people in Jerusalem who have come from civilized lands. They hear the apostles declare the gospel. As the apostles speak and the gospel is declared hearers understand “the great things God has done”, says Luke. Hearers, scattered in places near and far, are alike grasped by what God has done. As they are grasped by what God has done for them, God does it afresh in them. Pentecost is God’s reversal of Babel. In Jesus Christ alone, and through the power of his Spirit alone, people find that they don’t have to make a name for themselves, glorying as they are now in the name that God has given them. They don’t have to invent something like Esperanto in order to understand each other, for now they understand with a heart refashioned by the heart-specialist himself. They don’t have to exhaust themselves in a quest for superiority which only disfigures them and afflicts others. They are content to identify themselves with him who ate and drank with anyone at all and was glad to do so.

Are we still tempted to make a name for ourselves through nationality or nationalism? But Jesus Christ has made us members of his body, the church. And the church, St.Peter reminds us, is the holy nation. Are we still tempted to advertise ourselves as extraordinarily talented at tower-building? But we are now identified with the tower, “towering o’er the wrecks of time”, the cross. Are we still tempted to make a name for ourselves, give ourselves whatever nature we want to have, through that city whose cultural achievements let us strut and boast and sneer? But we are citizens of another city, the New Jerusalem. Not only are we citizens, we are heralds of this new city; we point to it and point others to it, therein pointing them away from those other cities where they trample each other in pursuit of a name that isn’t worth having.

These other cities are many, old and varied. They are Rome, Babylon, Sodom, Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Montreal, Mississauga. Jerusalem is the city that slays God’s prophets and crucifies his Messiah (i.e., Jerusalem is every city inasmuch as it spurns the gospel). Sodom is the city of those whose sensuality will prove destructive on all fronts. Rome (ancient Rome) is the city of admirable cultural accomplishment and also the site of every idolatry imaginable. Modern Beijing is the city of conscienceless cruelty. (Think of Tiannemen Square.)

Babylon is almost in a class by itself. Babylon is the city that gathers up all other cities. Babylon is the city whose paganism grows with its wealth and whose affluence swells only as a blind eye is turned everywhere. Everybody lives in Babylon; we can’t help living in Babylon. But as Christians we aren’t citizens of Babylon. We are citizens of the New Jerusalem. We belong to the holy nation; we are people of a new name and a new nature and new understanding and a new community.

There is a most important feature of the parable of the Tower of Babel which we must not fail to mention. The Hebrew bible puts forward the tower of Babel as the Hebrew equivalent of Babylon, Babel and Babylon alike being Jewish and Gentile monuments to humankind’s God-defiance. But paradoxically the literal meaning of the word “Babel” is “gate of God”. Bab-el is the gate of God. God meets us at our point of greatest defiance (the cross of him whom we crucify) and by his grace renders it the point of our access to him.

Pentecost is that miracle of grace, that miracle of the Holy Spirit, that wonder at the hands of Jesus Christ risen and ruling whereby our God-defiance collapses just because we are granted access to God. Babylon (“babble on”) is rendered the gate of God, where we hear each other as never before, understand each other, cherish each other, find community in each other — and all of this because we are no longer desperate to make a name for ourselves, but want only to be named citizens of that city which cannot be shaken, the city of God, the holy nation, the church of Jesus Christ.

Pentecost, everyone knows, has to do with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is that power whereby the victory of Jesus Christ becomes his victory in us. Our Lord was never driven to make a name for himself in that he cherished the name his Father had given him. He never had to bend himself out of shape by trying to give himself a nature he was never meant to have. He was son by nature. You and I are to become sons and daughters by faith, thereby regaining that nature we have long since forfeited through our building and babbling.

Pentecost means this: the Holy Spirit is the power by which Jesus Christ does in us what he has already achieved for us. In other words, Pentecost celebrates that power by which the wreckage of Babel-babble is turned into the gate of God, as by faith we own our place in the holy nation and in faith cling to him whose name is above every name, above all the silly, false and dangerous names we should otherwise give ourselves.

                                                                              Victor A. Shepherd        

June 1995

 

Genesis 6:9-22; 8:13 & 20; 9:8-17                   Hebrews 11:1-7           Matthew 24:36-44

 

It’s the child’s all-time favourite bible story.     And why not? The story has the adventure of an ocean voyage plus the warmth of a zoo.

All children assume that the animals enter the ark two-by-two.   Few people, whether children or adults, read far enough to know that only the animals notused for sacrifice in Israel ‘s worship enter two-by-two. Animals offered up in worship enter seven-by-seven.   (Had they entered only two-by-two and been offered up in worship the species would plainly have become extinct.)

How are we to understand this ancient story?   We have to understand that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are best understood not as history but as parable.   To say that the story of Noah’s Ark is a parable doesn’t mean that it’s “untrue” any more than the parables of Jesus (fiction) are untrue. Since our Lord’s parables are his parables, they are true; that is, they tell the truth about men and women under God at all times and in all places. C.S. Lewis has said that since the Jews are God’s chosen people, their parables are God’s chosen parables — and therefore stories such as Noah’s Ark are profoundly true, everywhere and always humanly true.

I(i): — The story begins starkly:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the

earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their

hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry

                        that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to

                        his heart. (Genesis 6:5-6)

 

God is heartbroken that the only creatures whom he has crowned with his own image and likeness persist in rendering themselves wicked.   He is sorry that he has created humankind at all.   Plainly, according to our simple, primitive story, God is distressed that those whom he fashioned the apple of his eye should turn out so badly.

The narrator of our story amplifies the matter of humankind’s wickedness: “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” Everyone knows what is meant by “violence.” But “corrupt”? The Hebrew word translated “corrupt” literally means “destroyed.”   In other words, what God decided to destroy was already so very corrupt as to be self-destroyed.   What rendered the earth self-destroyed?   Wickedness, one of whose principal manifestations is violence.   The story-teller tells us that the earth was filled with violence. There is violence everywhere.

 

A few years ago a man in Scotland entered an elementary school, shot sixteen children, shot the teacher, and then shot himself. A parishioner wrote me a letter describing the gunman, Thomas Hamilton, as singularly wicked.

I don’t wish to make light of the schoolhouse tragedy in any way. At the same time, I don’t think that Thomas Hamilton and his trigger-finger are what the story of Noah’s Ark is about. I am not a psychiatrist, but I strongly suspect that Hamilton was deranged. Violent, yes, but a violence born of derangement.

What Noah’s story is about isn’t derangement; it’s about the violence born of sanity; the violence born of people who are perfectly sane, the violence of sober citizens and pillars of whatever community. It’s about the violence that is premeditated, calculated, implemented, boasted about. The story-teller tells us that such violence comes forth from every person’s heart, not merely occasionally from the small percentage of people who are deranged.

I’m not making light of the sixteen children in Scotland . At the same time, I don’t wish to become sentimental. Every day in Argentina the police pick up homeless children who are living on downtown streets, take them away who knows where, and execute them. Every year Thailand sacrifices thousands of twelve-year old children to the sex trade, a tourist industry that the government of Thailand encourages. Seven thousand people are murdered in the United States every year.

Let’s not forget that during the worst days of the American Civil War, 25,000 men were succumbing every day. Let’s not forget that when the city of Dresden was bombed at the end of World War II ( Dresden was a city peopled with young children and seniors, a city of no military significance whatever), 100,000 civilians died in one night. How did they die? Instantly on account of blast? No. The air-raid started a firestorm, and the firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the air, with the result that children and old folks died wretchedly through asphyxiation.

Think of the more recent “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia . The full story there has yet to be told. Serbs, of course, are worried about reprisals. They should be worried, because the people they victimized are waiting to retaliate. All of which means that our story-writer is correct: the earth is “filled with violence.” Think of the thousands slain in Rwanda ; and then the same thing in Burundi . Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian who witnessed it, says he’ll never get over it. As horrible as the holocaust was in Europe, it happened again in Cambodia through Pot Pol and the Khmer Rouge. What about Saddam Hussein and the Kurds he gassed?

But we shouldn’t point the finger at anyone. When I was a member of the ministerial association of the City of Miramichi , New Brunswick , a fellow-clergyman proposed that we have a multi-denominational service on Dominion Day, July 1st. The theme of the service was to be “Gratitude for the gift of the land.” I looked at him as though he were from Mars. “The gift of the land?” I asked. “The gift? Our foreparents took it at the point of a gun and blew away anyone who disagreed with them.”

Then there’s the violence that is no less violent for having nothing to do with nations and armies. Think of the violence pertaining to the world of labour. At one time Henry Ford employed a strong-armed thug named Harry Bennett. Bennett had many jobs. One was acting as contact-person between the Ford Motor Company and the mafia. Another job was beating up, with the help of the Ford Company’s goon-squad, anyone whom Henry Ford and family wanted beaten up. Ford was especially eager to have beaten up anyone attempting to organize auto workers. Ford had Bennett and his men beat up Walter Reuther and his brother so badly (the Reuthers were the auto workers’ first leaders) that both brothers were hospitalized for six months. Is it any wonder that unions respond with their own kind of violence? Of course it’s no wonder — even as the proliferation of violence confirms the story-teller’s line, “…and the earth was filled with violence.”

In all of this we must not overlook domestic violence. Domestic violence is a huge problem everywhere. It is no less violent for being domestic. Our society must never wink at the man who told me that he slugged his wife several times “because it’s the only language she understands.” Do you know that the call to a home where domestic violence is occurring is the most dangerous call a police officer answers? That’s why older police officers wait twenty minutes before they show up at such a home.

We shouldn’t assume that violence has to be physical in order to be violence. Violence is committed when people are violated in any way. When I was in grade nine science the day came, in our introductory study of electricity, when the teacher taught us about hydro metres. We were taught what watts were, what kilowatt-hours were, how electricity-consumption was measured in terms of kilowatt-hours, and how metres were read. Then the teacher said, “Now you youngsters in this shabby part of the city (yes, my family was poor); none of your parents has a university-degree; your parents don’t know very much; your parents wouldn’t even know how to read a hydro metre.” I thought of my poor dad, poor to be sure, yet self-taught and giving me gems every day from the book-review section of the Sunday New York Times; I thought of his fertile mind, his ceaseless quest for knowledge; I thought of how much better educated he was than was this teacher, a vulgar ignoramus who insisted on slandering my family in absentia. I knew that day that I had been violated, and the entire class with me.

The story-teller is right: the human heart foams with violence.

(ii) How does our ceaseless violence affect God? What does it do to him? “It grieves him to his heart.” God’s first reaction isn’t rage or contempt; it’s grief, sadness too deep for words. God is heartbroken. He weeps over us whom he has made in his image, over us who have rendered ourselves monstrous.

(iii) At the same time, while God is grief-stricken he isn’t immobilized. While he is saddened, to be sure, he doesn’t wallow helplessly in the swamp of sentimentality. His grief issues in judgement. His grief has to issue in judgement. Did it not issue in judgement God would be devoid of integrity. He isn’t devoid of integrity; which is to say, judgement becomes operative.

 

II: — All of which brings us to the flood. It’s right here, frankly, that the child’s delight in the parable surprises me. After all, the story of Noah’s Ark resembles a horror movie. None of us would ever want our child to witness a drowning. And the spectacle of countless bloated corpses, animal and human, might give an adult nightmares. (To be sure, the story of Noah’s Ark is no more violent than many fairy tales. Children love fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and himself a death camp survivor, has written profoundly as to how it is that violent fairy tales help children past their childhood fears. We haven’t time to probe Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic profferomgs and must leave them for another day.)

We must take time, however, to note that the story of Noah’s Ark is not telling us that God is vindictive; it does not say that God is a cruel ogre who delights in mass drownings. It tells us instead that God’s judgement becomes operative as God gives us precisely what we want. At the beginning of the sermon I mentioned that the Hebrew word translated “corrupt” in our English bible literally means “destroyed.” I mentioned too that what God’s judgement consigns to destruction is already self-destroyed. People bent on violence plainly want destruction. With our lips we all say we don’t want destruction, if only because no one in his right mind wants destruction. But that’s just the point — we who are made in the image of God, are now bent on violence, and have saddened God to the point that he can’t grieve more — we aren’t in our right mind. And therefore regardless of what we say with our lips, as violent people we want destruction, since violence always ends in destruction. God’s judgement is simply God consigning to destruction what is already self-destroyed in any case.

 

III: — Yet there is Noah. Three things are said about Noah: he was righteous, he was blameless, and he walked with God. “Blameless” means “single-minded,” what Jesus will later call “pure in heart.” “Blameless” describes Noah’s relation to God; “righteous” describes Noah’s relation to his neighbours; “walked with God” means Noah knew God intimately and endeavoured to obey him consistently. Noah and his family, together with the animals, are brought through the flood. The waters recede; total destruction is averted. The rainbow is painted into the sky. And God himself speaks: “Never again shall there be a flood over all the earth; never again shall violence go all the way down to utter destruction; never again shall the human heart, foaming with violence, precipitate total destruction.” This is God’s promise. In the bible it is called a covenant. God makes this promise to Noah, yet makes it for the sake of the entire creation everywhere. The covenant is made with Noah alone, yet the whole creation is blessed on account of it. Which is to say, the covenant is made with Noah alone, and the whole creation is blessed on account of him.

Plainly Noah is one person who represents many. The principle of one representing the many is common throughout scripture. God makes a covenant with Abraham, and through this one man all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. God makes a covenant with David, and through David all Israel is to be blessed. God makes a covenant with Noah, and the covenant is this: God has promised never to allow his creation to collapse all the way down to that self-destruction it is bent on and deserves. To be sure, when our story speaks of the flood, it speaks of God’s consigning the creation to destruction, albeit the destruction it perversely wills for itself. Yet the story concludes with God’s promise that in fact he will preserve his perverse creation however violent it might be. This promise is the gospel of Noah’s Ark.

Because God keeps the promises he makes he tells Noah to raise up children. Does it make sense to bring children into a world whose violence devours them? William Sloane Coffin jr., 17 years the chaplain at Yale University and more recently the senior minister at Riverside Church, New York City; Coffin was a liaison officer between the United States Armed Forces and Russian forces during World War II. Assigned to the Russian front, he saw scenes there that I shall not attempt to describe. After the war he received several European pastors who had pastored-on throughout the worst years of the war. One pastor said quietly, slowly, movingly, “During the worst of the fighting the front moved back and forth through my town eight times. And after the front had passed through my town, each time I spent days doing little more than bury children.”

Is it reasonable to ask Noah to raise up children in a world where children are rendered helpless victims? The fact that God will not allow his creation to sink all the way down to irretrievable self-destruction doesn’t mean that the human heart is any less lethal. After the last war the Jewish people asked themselves a terrible question: “In view of the holocaust-horror (one and a half million children burnt alive), are the Jewish people morally obliged not to have children?” Nevertheless, world-wide Jewry decided it would continue to beget and bear children, and decided this for many reasons, not the least of which was that it trusted the promise. God will never consign his creation to the fullest, uttermost destructive consequences of its self-willed violence. For the Jewish people, God’s promise, and their faith in the promise, meant more than any calculation.

Have you ever asked yourself why the world doesn’t become utterly uninhabitable as each generation adds its evil to that of the preceding generation? Why doesn’t evil accumulate, like a snowball rolling downhill, until the accumulated evil is so vast that human existence becomes impossible? Our story tells us why. God has made a covenant: he has promised that he will never abandon his creation to that total self-destruction which violent-hearted people always tend to produce.

The implications for us are obvious. If God isn’t going to abandon the world, then neither should we. If no frustration can deflect God’s commitment to the world, then no frustration should deflect ours. If God can endure seemingly-endless setbacks, so must we. The bottom line is this: we shall never be in the situation where we are seeking an end to violence and God is not. We shall never find ourselves spending ourselves on behalf of a world that God gave up on a long time ago. Our struggle can never be hopeless. God has made a promise; he will ever keep his promise. This is good news, gospel, the gospel of Noah’s Ark.

 

IV: — There is one more point for us to consider. When Noah emerges from the ark he offers up an animal in sacrifice to God. Part of the sacrifice is eaten. Up to this point in the unfolding biblical story men and women have been vegetarians. Now they are permitted to become meat-eaters. Their eating meat at meals is God’s concession to their violence: human beings kill and eat their first cousins, the animals.

But their eating meat is more than this. In Israel of old every occasion of eating meat was more than a means of satisfying hunger; it was also an act of worship. Meat — a dead animal eaten at the dinner table — was as much an act of worship as was the animal sacrificed in the temple on the Sabbath. In fact, said our Israelite foreparents, every time a family ate meat at home it was pointing to the lamb slain in the temple.

 

You and I eat meat. According to our foreparents in faith whenever we eat meat we are pointing to a lamb slain. We are not pointing to any lamb, but to the lamb, the Lamb of God; we are pointing to him who bears in himself the sin and suffering and sorrow of our violent world. In a few minutes you and I are going to go home to our Sunday dinner and eat meat of some sort. When we do this we shall be pointing to our Lord Jesus Christ, the lamb of God slain, who has been offered up on our behalf and who ever invites us to feed on him.

As we feed on him a new heart and a new spirit will become ours. A new heart and a new spirit means that we have pleaded with God to do in us whatever it takes to remove from us humankind’s characteristic violence.

 

Noah’s Ark isn’t just a story for children. It is very much a story for adults. It’s a story, a parable like the parables of Jesus. It’s about our deep-seated violence, about God’s grief, about God’s judgement. It’s also about God’s promise — he will never abandon his world, and therefore neither must we. Finally, it’s about God’s provision — he has offered up his Son as surely as Noah offered up a sacrifice — wherein you and I may find ourselves with a new heart and a new spirit. For then, like Noah, we too shall be “blameless and righteous”, those who live to bear witness to the “shalom” of God, the peace of God, that kingdom which can never be shaken and whose fullest manifestation we pray for every day.

Victor Shepherd                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                

January 2005

 

 

Genesis 8:22

2 Kings 6:24-31

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

John 6:27-35

In the course of a food shortage in Hong Kong, decades ago, a British executive of the Bank of Hong found a British soldier staring at him.  The bank executive had come upon a half-rotten orange in the gutter and was about to eat it when the soldier hollered that the food was crawling with maggots and would certainly make him ill.  The man became hysterical, shrieking and crying.  Can’t you imagine the spectacle: a man in grey-striped formal trousers, black vest and suit jacket, bowler hat and umbrella — plainly someone from the highest echelon of Britain’s highest class – this man blubbering hysterically because he wasn’t allowed to eat his vermin-ridden garbage?

   Hunger doesn’t merely make the tummy ache.  Hunger doesn’t merely produce diseases and deformities born of protein or vitamin deficiencies.  Hunger also bewitches the mind.  Hungry people start thinking about doing, and actually do, what they would otherwise never imagine themselves doing.  Hunger exposes civilisation as no more than skin deep.  When an airliner crashed in the Andes Mountains in South America several years ago it was learned that the survivors had survived by eating the remains of fellow-passengers who had already died.  Immediately the tabloids featured headlines on cannibalism, while more thoughtful magazines probed ethical issues raised by this turn of affairs.  Hunger bewitches.

   Reflect for a minute on a story from the life of the prophet Elisha.  Syria’s army besieged the Israelite people, and these people were soon hungry.  And hungrier.  Desperate.  So desperately hungry that 80 shekels of silver (80 shekels would normally buy you 40 roasting rams or 90 bushels of grain); so desperately hungry that people were now paying 80 shekels for the head of a dead donkey.  A dead donkey’s head?  Hungry people will eat anything.  If you had only 5 shekels you could purchase half a pint of bird-droppings.  (There’s food in bird-droppings, you know; if you poke around in bird-droppings you’ll eventually find a few seeds.)   If you had no shekels what did you do?  Two Israelite women knew what to do.  “Let’s make a deal”, one said to the other; “today we’ll boil your infant son and eat him; tomorrow we’ll do the same with my son.”  One mother boiled her son and shared him with her friend.  Next day the second woman said she couldn’t.  The king was called in to settle the matter.  The king exploded and swore he would kill the prophet Elisha.

   Kill Elisha?  What did the prophet have to do with this horrible turn of events?  Nothing at all.  Then why go after him?  Hunger makes even rulers irrational, doesn’t it?  Hunger twists people’s minds until a pretzel looks like a straightedge.

   Hunger is terrible.  How terrible Jeremiah knew when he wrote, his mind reeling, “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children….” (Lamentations 4:10)

I: — Today is thanksgiving Sunday.  Today we customarily thank God for food.  The people in our world who don’t have food, millions upon millions of them; for what do they thank God?  After all, God has promised to supply food.  He who is our creator would be a mocker if he created us only to turn his back on us.  (Human beings who turn their back on their children are sent to jail, aren’t they?)  God maintains that he’s not only creator; he’s also provider and sustainer.  Now I believe that he is.  But then, I’m not hungry.

   Still, I am persuaded that God is as good as his word.  He does provide for us creatures whom he’s fashioned in his own image.  He does keep the promise he makes: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest…shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)  I’m persuaded it’s entirely correct to thank God for food, and thank him as often as we eat it.  In the words of a common Eucharist liturgy, God does care for all that he makes.

   And yet even with God caring as much as he can care, a great many people are hungry.  Scores of thousands starve to death every day.  Far more are permanently damaged in mind and body on account of their hunger.

   On the one hand, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about food since God feeds his people as surely as God feeds the birds of the air.  On the other hand, the apostle Paul tells believers that not even famine can separate them from God’s love vouchsafed to them in Christ Jesus their Lord.  Clearly Paul knows that God feeds (as promised) yet famine occurs, and famine kills.  Famine kills even as God continues to feed.  Famine kills even as God’s love remains uncontradicted.

   Yet every day someone tells me that the fact of widespread hunger throughout the world does contradict God’s love.  Then where are we with respect to God? Where is God with respect to us?

II: — It’s plain to me that God has been slandered; perhaps slandered unknowingly (in other words, the people who have faulted him in the face of the world’s hunger have done so thinking they were telling the truth about him), but slandered none the less.  “He doesn’t care”, they have said, or “He doesn’t care enough.”  Today I wish to vindicate God’s name.  I wish to show that the appalling hunger in the world at this moment can’t be blamed on a deficient supply of food.  In clearing God’s name of the calumny that attends it I’m going to explode several myths.

MYTH #1  People are hungry because food is scarce.  In truth, food isn’t scarce.  There’s enough food in the world at this moment to feed adequately every man, woman and child.  Think of grain-production alone.  There’s enough grain grown right now to provide everyone with sufficient protein and with 3000 calories per day.  (Most of us need only 2300 per day.)  The 3000 grain-calories per person per day produced right now doesn’t include many other foods that aren’t grains, foods like beans, root crops, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grass-fed meat.

  What’s more, sufficient food is produced right now even in those countries where millions are hungry.  Even in its worst years of famine, for instance, India has produced so much food as to be a net exporter of food.  (India has been a net exporter of food every year since 1870.)   In India, while millions go hungry, soldiers patrol the government’s six million tons of stockpiled food — which food, of course, now nourishes rats.  In Mexico, where at least 80% of the children in rural areas are undernourished, livestock destined for export are fed more grain than Mexico’s entire rural population.  There’s no shortage of food.

MYTH #2 — Hunger in any one country is the result of overpopulation in that country.  If this were the case, we should expect the worst hunger in those countries where there are the most people per food-producing acre.  But it’s not so.  India has only half the population density per cultivated acre that China has.  Yet the Chinese eat while millions in India do not.  China has eliminated visible hunger in the last 50 years.

  There’s dreadful hunger in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Yet these countries have scant population per cultivated acre.  In Africa, south of the Sahel, where some of the worst hunger continues, there are fewer people per cultivated acre than there are in the USA or in Russia; there are six to eight times fewer people in Africa south of the Sahel per cultivated acre than there are in China.

   Please note that I’ve spoken of “cultivated acre.”  We must be sure to understand that less than 50% of the world’s land that could grow food is now growing food.  (It’s plain to everyone, by even this point in the sermon, that the real barriers to alleviating hunger aren’t physical but rather political and economic.)

MYTH #3 — In order to eliminate hunger our top priority must be to grow more food.  Already you’re aware that the world is awash in food right now.  The real problems concerning feeding hungry people lie elsewhere.  For instance, land-ownership is concentrated in too few hands.  A recent United Nations survey of 83 countries disclosed that 3% of the world’s landlords control 80% of the land.  In most countries only 5% to 20% of all food-producers have access to institutionalised credit, such as banks.  The rest, the other 80% to 95%, have to get their credit from virtual loan sharks who charge up to 200% on farm loans.

   What’s more, new agricultural technology benefits only those who already possess land and credit.  It’s been documented irrefutably that strategies which simply aim at having more food produced have dreadful consequences.  Here’s what happens.  New agricultural technology (for instance, hybrid seeds that produce bigger crops from less fertiliser) attracts investors whose primary interest is investment, not food-production; i.e., new agricultural technology attracts investors who see agriculture simply as a good investment.  Moneylenders, city-based speculators and foreign corporations rush to get in on the good investment.  The new money swells the demand for land.  The price of land skyrockets.  Tenants and sharecroppers are then squeezed off the land.  These folk can’t feed themselves and now go hungry.  What about the crops that the new technology has made possible and that speculators now produce in record quantities?  These crops are luxury items (carnations, for instance, to adorn dining room tables); these luxury items are purchased by consumers in the western world and the northern hemisphere.  In other words, new agricultural technology reduces food production.

   We’ve all heard of the Green Revolution, a breakthrough in agricultural technology that promised to generate oceans of foodstuffs for the world’s hungry.  The Green Revolution was born in northwest Mexico.  Overnight the average farm size jumped from 200 acres to more than 2000.  And overnight three-quarters of the rural workforce was squeezed off the land — now with nothing to eat.  The Green Revolution found rural people hungrier than ever.

   Any attempt at remedying hunger simply through greater agricultural sophistication renders people hungrier than ever.

MYTH # 4 — The increase in population (and therefore the need for greater food production) requires the use of chemicals that are environmentally dangerous.  In fact very little pesticide or fungicide or insecticide is spread on farmland.  I know, when we hear of the tonnage of these assorted “‘cides” it sounds colossal.  For instance, the USA alone spreads 1.2 billion pounds of pesticide every year.  One-third of this, however, is used on golf courses, lawns and public parks.  Very little farmland is treated with these chemical substances.  In fact, in the USA only 5% of cropland and pastureland is treated with insecticides; only 15% with weedkillers; only one-half of 1% with fungicides.  Over half of all the insecticide used in the USA isn’t used on food crops at all.  (Most of it is used on cotton, and even then, most of the land that grows cotton isn’t treated.)

    Greater demand for food doesn’t issue in overwhelming chemical pollution.

MYTH #5 — In order to help the hungry we should improve our foreign aid programs.  The truth is, increased foreign aid will do very little to alleviate hunger.  The question we must always ask concerning foreign aid is this: when the government of a western nation sends financial aid to a hungry country, into whose hands does the money find its way?  The money falls into the hands of that tiny number of people who exercise social and political control.  This tiny number benefits; few others do.  In Guatemala, for instance, virtually all the money sent as foreign aid merely enriches still more the handful of largest landholders.

   

What happens overseas is much like what I’ve seen in Canada.  When I was a pastor in New Brunswick and lived closer to corruption than I do in Ontario, the federal government of Canada launched its “LIP” programme.  (“L.I.P.”: local initiative project.)  Ottawa was handing out millions to small communities in order to help the poorest people in them survive.  My village received an LIP grant.  The grant amounted to thousands of dollars ($200,000 in today’s money.)  In my village four men worked five days per week for twenty weeks, building a small vault in the local cemetery.  The vault was so small it would hold only two caskets.  These four men laid one concrete block per day each.  (Think of it: four men each laying one concrete block per day for twenty weeks.)  Who were the men who pocketed the money?  Were they the poorest in the village whom the programme was meant to help?  Of course not.  Poor people aren’t “connected”; poor people don’t have access to the levers of influence and favours.  But well-to-do people have such access.  In my village it was the sons of the richest, those with connections, who siphoned off the government “goodies.”

   Next year our village received another LIP grant, this time to put a washroom (worth $75,000 in today’s money) in a small building that was used four hours per week.  Same story.  Third year, third grant.  But not one needy person was ever hired for any of these projects.

   Increased foreign aid won’t feed hungry people.  But it will build highways and bridges, thereby making land a better investment.  Land that is now a better investment attracts investment speculators who then use the land for purposes unrelated to food production.

   Historically, it was different in England and America.  In England political changes ended the landholding arrangement of feudalism and gave people access to land, at the same time that additional political changes gave common people protection against the powerful, the wealthy and the state.  In the USA a constitution (it had to be secured by force of arms) guaranteed the people freedom from the oppressions that had ground down common people in Europe for centuries, which oppressions America would fend off at any cost.  The oppressions fended off in the English and American revolutions are the oppressions we see in developing countries today.  Political change, not foreign aid, is what feeds people in the long run.

With respect to the short run I want to say a word here about mission support from the local church.  It’s important.  When the late Dr. Allen Knight, an agricultural missionary who spent years in what was then Angola, spoke to my congregation in Mississauga about the “Seeds for Africa” programme, the congregation supported him without hesitation.  We knew we could trust him.  The money we gave for seeds purchased seeds; money given for well-drilling actually drilled wells.  People were fed.  When my friend Dr. Peter Webster was performing surgery in Africa and schooling villages in preventive medicine, any monies he received from friends and congregations were used for their designated purpose, used for that purpose only, and used immediately.  We must never diminish our support for trustworthy Christian workers who are doing front-line work among needy people.

Have you heard enough this morning to convince you that God doesn’t merit the slander that is customarily heaped on him?  God is defamed repeatedly on the grounds that he doesn’t keep the promises he makes; he doesn’t care for all that he has made; day and night and seedtime occur without interruption to be sure, but the harvest doesn’t — say those who tell us that God lies.

   I trust you are persuaded that the presence among us of hungry people, together with the bodily and mental distortions that hunger produces, can’t be blamed on God.  He is as good as his word; he does care for all that he has made.  And for this reason he is to be praised.

III: — God is to be praised even more, for not only has he provided bread, he’s provided the bread of life.  No one lives by bread alone.  Without bread we humans disappear; without the bread of life we humans remain fixed — fixed in what?  Fixed in our perverse rebellion against God, fixed in our deadly defiance of him, fixed in our frustration and futility, which frustration and futility we can either rage against or surrender to but in any case can’t remedy.  Still, the Creator of us all doesn’t give up on us.

   Because God won’t give up on us he’s forever pressing the bread of life into our hands.  The bread of life isn’t made anew each day, but it’s offered anew each day.  “I am the bread of life”, says Jesus, “whoever comes to me will never hunger again.” (John 6:35)  The bread of life became available to us when provision was made for us in the cross.  Now it’s offered afresh as often as our Lord steals upon anyone anywhere and says, “Why don’t you stop running past my outstretched arms?”

   No one lives without bread; no one lives most profoundly by bread alone.  Only the bread of life can restore men and women made in the image of God to the favour of God.  Only the bread of life can relieve us of the consequences of our rebellion against God by releasing us from the rebellion itself.  Only the bread of life can reconcile us where we are estranged, thaw us where we are frozen and sensitise us where we are unresponsive.

   In his 2^nd letter to the congregation in Corinth Paul is glad to acknowledge that God provides seed and bread.  Unquestionably he’s grateful for seed and bread.  Yet his ecstatic exclamation, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” plainly pertains to him and only to him who is the bread of life, Christ Jesus our Lord.  Then the bread of life we must seize or seize afresh today.

   

The church has only one mission: to offer Jesus Christ to any and all, near and far.  For in offering him, the one through whom and for whom all things have been made (John 1:3,10), we shall remind detractors that God has kept his promise to provide seedtime and harvest; and in offering him, the bread of life, we shall recall rebels to their rightful ruler, to their Father, as it turns out, from whom they henceforth receive eternal life.Victor Shepherd   October 2014

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 Genesis 17:1-8; 15-22

      Psalm 47        Hebrews 11:8-12        Luke 1:67-80

 

Whenever we bring out our family photo albums and look at our ancestors – great-grandfather, grandmother, father, and then finally ourselves – it’s easy to see a family resemblance. Our ancestor’s jaw or hairline or nose is evident generation after generation.

More important than the biological family that we were born into and whose traits we’ve inherited, however, is the family of God. The family and household of God, scripture reminds us, consists of those whom the truth and reality of God has startled and stimulated. The family and household of God consists of those whom God’s presence and persistence has roused from spiritual slumber and who have found themselves jabbed awake or won over or wooed into loving the One who comes upon different people in different ways but always to the end of rendering us his children.

To be sure the nature of the response varies from person to person. Some are taking their first, tentative steps in faith, fending off detractors who tell them that faith is no more than unconscious fantasy and love for their Lord no more than disguised love for themselves. Others have lived close to him for years and want only to move closer to him. No matter. All alike belong to the family of faith, and all share a family resemblance with their foreparent in faith.

Foreparent? Yes. Everywhere in scripture, newer testament and older testament alike, Abraham is deemed the ancestor of God’s people. Abraham is acknowledged the prototype of the believing person, the model for all believers in all eras and in all circumstances. Abraham is the ancestor whose spiritual “genes”, as it were, are found in all whom the gospel captivates.

 

I: — What is the first family resemblance that is traceable from Abraham to you and me? The first is that we live by God’s promise. Abraham’s story begins with his obedience to God’s command: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Abraham is invited and summoned to step out from his comfortable familiarities and step towards a new land, step into a new future. What land? We don’t know its name. It’s spoken of only as “the land of promise.” Abraham is invited and summoned to move out into a future that appears radically uncertain and therefore radically insecure.

Then is Abraham merely naïve? Is he simply foolish, even stupid? Not at all, for Abraham isn’t stepping into a vacuous future; he isn’t stepping into a cosmic hole or into cosmic treachery. He’s stepping into a future that appears uncertain and insecure from a human perspective, to be sure; yet this future is already filled with the God whose faithfulness and goodness Abraham knows he can trust. At this point Abraham begins to live by the promise. But of course living by promise makes sense only if the promise is going to be kept. Then to live by promise is to live trusting the promise-keeping God. Abraham steps out confident that God will unfailingly keep the promises he has made to Abraham. Only the promise-keeping God can we trust, and only the promise-keeping God should we trust.

It has always been the conviction of the Church that the promise God made to Abraham concerning land – “Go to the land that I will show you” – is fulfilled in the kingdom of God . The promise of land made to Abraham doesn’t entail real estate; the promise is fulfilled in the kingdom of God .

The kingdom-promises of God are manifold.

[i] Here’s one. “Whoever comes to me I never turn away.” This is the promise of ready welcome, of free forgiveness, of a Father’s eagerness to embrace any and all who are fed up with living in the “far country” and want only to go home where they belong. This promise guarantees that any penitent who looks homeward is going to find arms of mercy that seize her even as her sin is forgiven and forgotten forever.

[ii] Another promise. “Whoever gives to one of these little ones a cup of cold water…will not lose his reward.” This is God’s guarantee that the work we undertake in the name and Spirit of our Lord for the sake of his people; our work in this regard will unfailingly be fruitful even if we don’t see the fruit. The work we undertake for God’s people he will invariably use to enhance others and to increase our own faith and enlarge our opportunity for service.

[iii] Another promise. “The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” “Will keep”? The Greek word phulassein means “will garrison (it’s a military metaphor), will safeguard” our life in Christ and our identity in Christ regardless of what howls down upon us. As often as we are assaulted in life Christ’s grip on us will always be stronger than our grip on him, with the result that we are garrisoned within that “fort” which Jesus Christ unfailingly is for his people.

[iv] Another promise, as profound as it is simple: “I will never fail you or forsake you.” It is simple, isn’t it. At the same time, what could be more profound? After all, don’t other people fail us as surely as we fail them? Worse still, don’t we fail ourselves? And as for forsaking, don’t others forsake us as surely as we forsake ourselves? All of us have said and done what left others looking at us sideways, muttering to themselves, “And I thought I knew who he was.” All of us have said and done too what left us shocked at ourselves, saying to ourselves, “I always thought I knew who I was.” What else is this but to be self-failed and self-forsaken? In the midst of all such distress, whether inner or outer, there continues to sound forth that throbbing, bass note of our lives, “I will never fail you or forsake you.” This throbbing, bass note determines the rhythm of our lives; it’s the downbeat of our lives; it’s the first beat in the bar, the predominant beat, as we step ahead as people of promise: “I will never fail you or forsake you.” He who raised his son from the dead is never going to abandon you and me to that deadliness by which we are otherwise victimized, even self-victimized.

[v] Concerning the congregation here in Schomberg there are two promises taken together that move me over and over: Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” and “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed…nothing is impossible to you.” David Bloomer has told me several times of the days when the worshipping congregation here was down to four or five people. They sat at the front of the church and the minister, wanting to be less formal amidst so few people, pulled up a chair before them and simply related to them in a conversational tone what he had meant to preach that day. I am moved at the promise-clinging faith of people like David and Betty and a couple others who didn’t give up, didn’t turn angry or bitter, didn’t do anything except trust that with God a promise made is a promise kept. It is because of their Abrahamic confidence that there’s a congregation here today.

Living by promise is always an adventure. It’s as much an adventure in 2004 as it was for Abraham. For like him, you and I don’t know what life is going to bring before us. We don’t know which people, what events, what kind of challenges or assaults or griefs or opportunities are going to appear from nowhere, loom before us and linger with us. We can’t anticipate them.

Myself, I noticed years ago that virtually all of the disastrous downturns that I feared might happen to me didn’t happen. In other words, my anticipation of negativities was groundless. On the other hand, the assaults that clobbered me (one of which at least brought me as close to being admitted to hospital as I’ll ever come without being admitted) I couldn’t anticipate in any case. We tend to fear what turns out not to happen, and we can’t anticipate what does happen. Then we are left having to live by the promises of God.

   Promises, plural. Yes, the promises of God are manifold. Nonetheless, said John Wesley, all the promises of God recounted in scripture are gathered up in one, overarching, grand promise. There is one grand promise that comprehends them all: it’s the promise of shalom, salvation. The promise of shalom, salvation, is the promise that on the day of our Lord’s appearing we are going to be found fully restored, every last defacement of God’s image in us remedied, every last disfigurement addressed, every last sin-wrought flaw healed. We are going to be found restored. The book of Hebrews says it succinctly: “There is a Sabbath rest (restoration: in the wake of the Fall “rest” is restoration) promised the people of God.”

Knowing that this grand promise is going to be kept, like Abraham of old we step forward in life knowing that whatever else the adventure brings, it always brings with it the unfailing goodness of the promise-keeping God. He will not fail us or forsake us.

 

II: — While we are thinking of family resemblances on Christian Family Sunday we should realistically admit that there are some family resemblances we wish weren’t there. There is an unsightliness here or there, a blemish, even an ugliness, which appears from generation to generation. We wish it weren’t so, but it is.

As much can be said about Abraham’s life under God and about ours too. Abraham is journeying with his wife into foreign territory. The king of this foreign country, a fierce fellow, starts eyeing Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Abraham sees that this king has lecherous designs on Sarah.   Abraham, frightened now to the point of near-panic, thinks to himself, “This man is going to rape Sarah. If he thinks she’s my wife, he’ll kill me in order to have her. But if he thinks she’s only my sister, he’ll rape her in any case but spare me.” In that dreadful moment of screwed-up thinking that is as understandable as it is inexcusable Abraham blurts, “She’s my sister; she’s only my sister.” Truth to tell, Abraham did this twice. He lied to save his skin.

Are you and I any different? In a moment of intense pressure haven’t we falsified ourselves, falsified someone else, exaggerated, lied or simply fallen silent because in our cowardice we panicked before the consequences of telling the truth? When was the last time we were dead wrong before our children but wouldn’t admit it because the loss of face would have been too humiliating? Haven’t we given silent, tacit consent to malicious gossip, wickedly untrue, because we didn’t have courage enough to stand up for the person our silence victimized, and didn’t have courage enough to contradict the crowd we wanted to include us? Haven’t we all behaved in a manner that could never be squared with a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, and immediately pleaded any number of “reasons” that will never extenuate us?

Abraham lied to spare himself even as he exposed his wife to sexual molestation. This can only be a hideous, grotesque disfigurement in our spiritual forefather. Yet we must admit that it is part of the family resemblance, since the same cowardly abandonment is found in us.

God’s people are those whom scripture speaks of as his “peculiar treasure.” Unquestionably we are God’s peculiar treasure. And yet the treasure is tarnished. We shouldn’t be cavalier about this. At the same time, neither should we be paralysed by it. You see, because God has promised that there will always be more mercy in him than there is sin in us, we shouldn’t write ourselves or others out of the household and family of God just because the treasure is tarnished. Tarnished treasure is still treasure. What matters finally isn’t that our discipleship is perfect; what matters is that we aspire after consistency. John Calvin was fond of saying that what mattered finally was aspiration not achievement.

In a moment of panic Peter says, “Jesus? Never heard of the man.” Once? Three times. Still, eventually Peter is the acknowledged leader of the church in Jerusalem . Everyone knows what happened yet no one is writing him off.

Mark accompanied the apostle Paul on a missionary journey. Mark was only nineteen years old. He became homesick and returned home. Paul, of course, was disappointed. More than disappointed, he pronounced Mark unfit for apostolic work and refused to have Mark accompany him on his next missionary journey. Barnabas, on the other hand, Barnabas thought Paul to be wrong with his “one strike and you’re out” approach. Barnabas thought Mark should be given another opportunity. And so Barnabas took on Mark as missionary companion. Eventually Mark gave us the gospel that bears his name. Barnabas proved himself right in the episode with Mark, Paul wrong. Paul must have known he was wrong, for he subsequently wrote, “I’m not perfect…but I press on.”

In our Abrahamic venture what matters is that we press on.   What counts is our aspiration. We aspire to be worthy of our Lord Jesus Christ who has called us. And as God continued to use Abraham despite Abraham’s treachery, God’s promise is that he will continue to use us. Martin Luther said it so well: God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. God will ever use us despite the disfigurement we can’t hide.

 

III: — All of which brings us to the last family resemblance we are going to discuss today. Abraham is called out of the city of Haran . Haran is Toronto , Montreal , Newmarket , Aurora , King. Abraham and his family are called away from this. They are to distinguish themselves from that city which doesn’t know Abraham’s God and behaves as not knowing Abraham’s God. Abraham and his people are to have a different outlook, different convictions, different commitments. God’s people are always and everywhere different simply for being God’s people. We are therefore to think and do differently. We must distance ourselves from the outlook, convictions and commitments of those who aren’t Abraham’s descendants.

Yet Abraham doesn’t shun the city in principle. Instead, having distinguished himself from the city, having distanced himself from it as it were, he intercedes for the city; he pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah . This twofold movement, withdrawal from our city for the sake of commitment to our city with its people and problems and perverseness; this twofold movement is a pronounced family resemblance of the household of God. As the people of God we are called to an orientation different from that of our society so that we can exercise a ministry of intercession for the sake of our society.

Judicious balance is required here. Lack of balance results in two polarized positions. One segment of Christendom wants to repudiate utterly the society around it. These people speak of the need to keep oneself “unspotted from the world.” They uphold a religious isolationism that seeks to preserve the church by segregating the church from a society which they describe as godless. Such isolationism renders the people of God irrelevant.

The other pole in Christendom is determined to be “with it.” No isolationism for them. No self-distancing from the world at all. They identify with the world uncritically. While they are quick to tell us they love the world just because God loves the world, they fail to understand that they and God don’t love the world in exactly the same sense. God loves it to redeem it. They love it to ape it. Such uncritical aping renders the people of God useless.

The truth is, Abraham is neither irrelevant nor useless. Abraham stands back from his society precisely in order to be able stand with it. Abraham refuses to identify himself with the society in order to be free to intercede for the society. We who are possessed of Abraham’s faith must grasp what is to be done here and why: we who are citizens of the kingdom of God first are never citizens of that kingdom only; we remain citizens as well of a realm to which God has appointed us just because he has appointed himself to it, for indeed “The earth” – the whole earth – “is the Lord’s,” says the psalmist.

In order to exercise a ministry of intercession for our society we have to have a mind informed by the mind of Christ. As Paul puts it, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God remake you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed.” (Rom. 12:1) Christians are mandated to be aware of what enhances human existence and what is degrading; what enhances community life and what destroys it. We have to be aware of what is important and what is indifferent. Some people will agree with us; many will not. No matter. When Abraham set out he was a minority; when he interceded for Sodom he was a minority. All that matters is that we discern the truth of God and do it.

At all times we must return to the balance of the twofold movement: God’s people can be helpful in a society only if they are first holy – distinct in some sense. (The root meaning of “holy” is “different.”) Conversely, we are genuinely holy only if we intend to be helpful (God’s holiness, remember, always aims at helping us.)

Some of the people who are most committed to a holy intervention in the world may be people whom we think initially to be world-denying. Thomas Merton, instance. Thomas Merton was a Roman Catholic Trappist monk in rural Kentucky . Yet when members of the churches in the USA were involved in voter registration drives for Afro-Americans; when Christians gave leadership in the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations, it was Thomas Merton whose writings and conversations and wisdom informed these leaders and infused them, even as Merton wrote and spoke from within a monastery. Merton not only informed and infused; he reminded Christians relentlessly that unless they were immersed in Jesus Christ they would soon have nothing to say or do or be concerning the society around them.

Long before Merton, long before me, Abraham knew.

-Abraham knew about the society he would neither fawn or nor forsake.

-Abraham knew as well that the treachery of his own heart didn’t disqualify him as God’s servant.

-Above all, Abraham knew what it is to live in the land of promise, knowing that no uncertainty or insecurity outweighs the substance and truth of the God who unfailingly keeps the promises he makes.

Abraham’s is the family resemblance we want to recall and glory in on this day, Christian Family Sunday.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

May 2004

 

Genesis 32:22-32

 

One of my friends, a pipe-smoker, found himself sitting in a meeting beside a fellow who was also a pipe-smoker. My friend told the other man where pipe tobacco could be purchased in Toronto for 75 cents a tin less than anywhere else. But this tobacco shop isn’t easy to find. And so my friend described in complicated detail how one gets to this shop, buried as it is among the back streets and alleys of innermost inner Toronto – all for the sake of 75 cents. When the meeting concluded my friend learned he’d been talking to Charles Bronfman, one time owner of Seagram’s Distilleries, owner of the Montreal Expos Baseball Club, owner of the Montreal Canadiens Hockey Club, owner of so very much more that he, Bronfman, has forgotten just how much more.

All of us have had an experience like this. We’ve all encountered someone whose identity we weren’t aware of, and came to be embarrassed by what we had said to the person we didn’t recognize. Or perhaps we weren’t embarrassed following such an encounter; perhaps we were amused or even delighted as we discovered that the woman who had sat at the lunch table with us was the Lieutenant Governor or the vice president of the Royal Bank.

 

I: — Today we are looking at a story, three thousand years old, that speaks of a man wrestling all night with someone whose identity he learned only in the morning. Jacob wrestles during the night. He is locked in a desperate struggle. In the night’s thickest darkness he thinks he’s contending with another man. In the bright light of the new day he learns who his “antagonist” was: it was God himself. It’s only at the end of the life-and-death encounter, only when Jacob has struggled, hung on, fought through, that he learns the identity of the one he’s contended with throughout a night he had thought was never going to end.

At some point in our lives all of us have dark nights. At some point all of us struggle with something that resists us, thwarts us, threatens to overwhelm us. From a human perspective it appears to be a struggle with a purely human situation or a merely human opponent. In the bright light of a new day, however, we learn that through it all we were contending with nothing less, no one other, than God himself.

You see, because God is present to all of life, every situation in life, every encounter in life, every struggle in life, every engagement, anywhere in life, is also an engagement with God ultimately. From a human perspective it appears to be no more than a purely human struggle, terrible as this often is. Yet since God abandons no one, since God forsakes nobody, any struggle anywhere in life is ultimately a struggle with God.

Let me say right now that because our Lord Jesus Christ was profoundly forsaken by his Father on Good Friday in Gethsemane and on Calvary for our sakes; because our Lord Jesus Christ was profoundly God-forsaken for our sakes, there is no human being, anywhere in the world, who is God-forsaken now or ever will be.

This is not to say that there’s no one who doesn’t feel God-forsaken. At some point we all feel God-forsaken, even as in truth we never are.

Neither is this to say everyone has come to faith, is going to come to faith, or wants to come to faith. I am not pretending that because God forsakes no one therefore everyone is now a secret believer. Still, the fact that some have not yet recognized God and acknowledged him; the fact that some have never heard of him; the fact that some have heard of him but choose to ignore him; none of this means that he is now ignoring them. God ever remains that “Other” with whom all men and women are involved at all times, whether they are aware of it or not. What appears to be only a human situation, however difficult, is also, always, an encounter with God.

What are some of these situations? Disappointment, depression, despair, bereavement; temptation to revenge, temptation to bitterness, temptation to that peculiar form of insanity wherein we know that sin is sin, know that a terrible price is attached to committing it, yet perversely want to commit it anyway. In all of these situations we can simply lie down and quit, overwhelmed; or we can wrestle and keep on wrestling until daybreak.

Jacob wrestled during the night. Darkness is a rich biblical symbol suggesting turbulence, threat, loneliness, and fear. As Jacob wrestles he cries to his opponent, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

In my work as pastor I see much human distress, and see many people attempting to cope with that distress. Some give up. Others say, “I’ll never quit. I have to see this situation through to some resolution. I can’t let it go until something in this struggle has been wrested to my good. I have to prevail until my prevailing finds me a different person.”
A few years ago I sat at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with a man who was struggling desperately to recover his sobriety. He had had a “slip” and had been on a terrible drunk. He was now coming off it, and he was frightened. He was afraid of going into the “DTs”, the delirium tremens, wherein the suffering alcoholic has nightmares that are beyond any nightmare that any of us can imagine. As many of you are aware, alcoholic persons are overtaken by the “DTs” not when they are drunk but when they are becoming sober. Therefore there is one, unfailing way to avoid the horror: get drunk again. But of course to do this is to give up; it’s to walk away from the struggle and forfeit the blessing awaiting us on the other side of the struggle. This man wasn’t going to give up. He was going to struggle. He sat beside me, shaking like a leaf, perspiration pouring down his face, frightened, sick, but determined to see it all through to the end, because he knew deep down that at the end there really was blessing: sobriety. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was certainly an authentic sight: a man determined to wrestle through a night that might be longer than he thought and darker than he imagined, in the midst of which he cried out, in effect, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

Recently I spoke with an ex-convict who had been “on the street,” as he put it (i.e., out of jail) for eighteen months. He had been a “paper hanger” – a writer of rubber cheques, worthless cheques. He had been “on the street” several times over in the past few years, but had been able to stay on the street only for a week or two before he succumbed to temptation yet again and wrote another bad cheque. Then it was back to jail. He had repeated this pattern for twenty years. Now he was on the street once more. Eighteen months of freedom was more than he had had in two decades.  He could never be described theologically sophisticated. Nevertheless every morning, he told me, he cried to someone, somewhere, to keep him on the street for one more day; just one more day. He was going to wrestle through each night until daybreak.

I’ve never been tempted to “hang paper.” But we’ve all been tempted by something else, in some other direction. And hasn’t the temptation been so awful, so visceral, that our stomach turned and our knees shook? And wasn’t the struggle so very intense just because the outcome was so crucial for us? At the time we thought it was only a human struggle, only a struggle we were having with ourselves. Unbeknown to us it was more than that; it was a struggle that involved the living God.

No one makes light of bereavement. I don’t doubt that it’s dreadful. The more we loved and were loved by the one we’ve lost the more deeply our bereavement bites. C.S. Lewis, professor of English Literature and Christian thinker, married in his fifties. He was wondrously happy. He felt his “ship had come in.” Within three years, however, he went from husband to widower. Upon the death of Joy Davidman, his wife, he spelled out his anguish in a little book, A Grief Observed. He begins the book, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness….I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.” He adds, “I was happy before I ever met my wife. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources;’ I shan’t do so badly….Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘common sense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.” (I speak carefully here, carefully and reticently, since my wife hasn’t died – yet.) We’ve all seen bereaved people give up. We’ve all seen bereaved people quit, go under, and wait for the undertaker to close the lid a second time. And we’ve also seen bereaved people wrestle agonisingly through a long, dark night of turbulence, loneliness and fear. They keep on wrestling. Come daybreak, they want – and are going to receive – that blessing they’ve refused to forfeit.

You may have noticed a distinction in the situations I’ve described: while our society doesn’t fault someone for being bereaved, it does fault someone for being fraudulent or alcoholic. But all such social distinctions have no bearing whatever on the struggle in which people find themselves. What difference does it make whether they landed in the turbulence through their fault, someone else’s fault, or no one’s fault? One of the features of Jacob’s struggle had to do with the fact that he had cheated his brother Esau. When he finds himself wracked Jacob fears that maybe Esau has caught up to him and is going to retaliate; Jacob fears he’s struggling for his life, and all of this on account of his own wrongdoing. But whether we struggle on account of our own wrongdoing or not is beside the point. All that matters is that we don’t give up just because at the end of it all there is going to be blessing for us.

Struggles are legion: the struggle against habitual negative thinking; the struggle against a besetting temptation which, from a rational standpoint, is silly and yet continues to mesmerize us until we are tempted to keep on staring at it like a rabbit staring at a snake, then to find that it’s got us; the struggle against mind-bending disappointment more painful than a punch in the mouth; the struggle against disillusionment that threatens to curdle our spirit and shrivel our heart for the rest of our life.

In all of this there is turbulence, loneliness and fear. In all of this it appears we’re engaged in a difficult human situation only, contending with a human reality only. Yet because God is the environment in which all of life unfolds, ultimately we wrestle with him.

 

II: — In the old, old story of Jacob the dawn comes at last. Light is a biblical symbol for order and wholeness. As light – order and wholeness – overtakes Jacob, he is asked his name.

Now to us modern folk someone’s name is merely a means of labelling that person. To say that my name is Victor doesn’t mean I’m victorious in any sense. My name is simply a label that keeps me from being confused with Bill or Tom or Jerry.

For Israelite people, however, “name” meant “nature.” Someone’s name was her chief characteristic. If an Israelite were named “Victor” it was because he was victorious, or he wouldn’t have that name.

The name “Jacob” means cheater. Jacob is asked his name (he had earlier cheated his brother Esau) and he replies, “Cheater; that’s my name; that’s who I am.” From a human perspective a person is what she does. She cheats? Then she’s a cheater. Name and nature are one.

This, of course, is how we regard other people but never how we regard ourselves. If someone lies to us once, just once, we say he’s a liar. But if we lie, and lie more than once, we never identify ourselves privately or announce ourselves publicly as a liar. Anyone else who boasts is a boaster; anyone else who commits adultery is an adulterer. The truth is, what we predicate of other people must be predicated of us as well. As surely as we insist other people name themselves by what they do, we name ourselves by what we do.

Then what’s your name, and what’s mine? It all depends on what we do. How would others speak of us? Cheater, liar, manipulator, exploiter, complainer, worrier, weeper, whiner, tantrum-thrower?

“Not fair,” you say; “there’s more to me than that.” But we never make this concession to other people. “Still not fair,” you say, “because we are being ‘named’ precisely where we are struggling most valiantly.” Correct. The sarcastic person who is struggling with all his might to rid himself of his deep-dyed sarcasm is still labelled, and labelled contemptuously, “acid-tongue.” The bereaved person who is struggling is still labelled, and labelled contemptuously, “blubberer.”

Despite the apparent unfairness of it all there remains something positive, health-promoting, about it. When Jacob admits his name, “cheater,” he then – and only then – receives the blessing. The blessing is a new name. He is no longer named “Jacob” but rather “ Israel .” New name means new nature, new principal characteristic. New name means new nature, new identity, new future. We know what “Jacob” [Ja-kob] means: cheater. And “ Israel ?” “ Israel ” [Yisra-el] means “he who contends with God.” The alcoholic who says, with painful honesty, “yes, I am an alcoholic: that’s who I am” – this person is on the threshold of the blessing: contented sobriety. Any person who honestly, painfully (honesty is always painful) admits her name: liar, luster, habitual negative thinker, fault-finder, adulterer – any such person is on the threshold of a new name, a new nature, a new identity, a new future.

It all happens for Jacob at dawn, after the struggle through the long, dark night. It happens at dawn, when light brings order to his life and wholeness as well.

 

III: — Naming and renaming are crucial throughout scripture. Jesus says to Simon, “‘Simon’? That’s no name for you. From now on I’m going to call you Petros, Peter, the rock. Rocky. That’s it. ‘Rocky’.” New name, new nature, new identity, new future.

We reply, “But Peter didn’t appear rock-like for quite a while. After Jesus had named him “Rocky” didn’t he deny the Master, three times over? Wasn’t he among the disciples who abandoned the Master at his most agonising hour?” Then why does Jesus call him “Peter, The Rock, Rocky”? Because our Lord knows that when someone is given a new name he conforms himself to that name. He becomes what, who, he’s been named.

We all know how this operates at the purely psychological level. If you keep telling a child he’s stupid he’ll believe himself to be stupid and act stupidly. If you keep telling a child she’s superior she’ll believe herself superior and act like the snob she is. People conform themselves to the name wherewith they are named.

If this is true at the merely psychological level, how much farther-reaching it is at the spiritual level. Because of what has occurred to believers through our Lord’s cross and resurrection; because of the Holy Spirit who cements Jesus Christ into us and us into Christ; because of all this we have been given a new name: we are son or daughter of God; we are brother or sister to Jesus Christ our elder brother; we are friend to the Friend who sticks closer than a brother. To be sure, in most of this the reality may be largely unapparent – as unapparent as it was in Peter the day Jesus called him “Rocky.” But let’s remember: the day came when stumbling Peter; the day came when fumbling, faltering, falling down Peter was acclaimed the leader of the church in Jerusalem . The day came when Peter’s influence was so widespread and so telling that people laid their sick friends in the street in order that Peter’s shadow might fall on them.

The truth is, the day has been appointed for all of us when what we have been named in Christ Jesus our Lord will cease to be only apparent and will be made fully manifest.

The apostle Paul tells us that the new nature which has been given us is “being renewed every day.” New right now, as new as it can ever be, yet always being renewed? He means that the new name/nature God has given us as a title is beginning to characterize us and will continue to characterize us until the gap between name and nature is overcome, and title and fact are one.
Like Jacob of old you and are I contending somewhere in life today. It could be in any of the areas I have mentioned; more likely it is in scores more that I have not. This makes no difference.

What matters is this: we never give up the struggle; we never quit. We are going to continue wrestling through the night, however dark or lonely or fearsome, because the day does dawn. And with the dawn, light, our lives are blessed with order and wholeness.

The reason for all this, of course, is that regardless of where we are struggling in life, with what, ultimately we are contending with the God who contends with us in the sense that he first contends for us, contends for us effectually in Christ Jesus, just because he wants only to bless us.

In Jesus Christ he has given us a new name. One day the name we’ve been given, the nature we’ve been promised, will be ours in reality. And on that day the blessing we’ve long craved because long needed will be ours, and ours for evermore.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

 April 2004

Genesis 39:1-23

Imagine it is Thanksgiving Sunday. The choir is singing thanksgiving music. The sopranos are singing, “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.” A few bars later the basses come in singing, “Now thank we all our God.” At this point there are two themes or motifs running through the choir anthem at the same time. A few bars later still the altos and tenors begin singing something else. Now there are several themes or motifs wending their way through the one piece of music at the same time. In the hands of an able composer such music isn’t a giant discord that jars hearers; in the hands of an able composer such music is multi-textured and marvellously rich.

Life is like this. There are many different things going on in everybody’s life at the same time. This doesn’t mean that life is therefore distressingly complicated and hopelessly fragmented. On the contrary, it means that our lives are complex. The fact that they are complex means that they are multi-textured and can be marvellously rich.

Joseph, one of our ancestors in faith, lived a life, under God, that gathered up many different themes or motifs. Under God it all issued in a life that was not only rich for Joseph, but rich for everyone whose life touched his back then; and rich as well for every one of us whose life touches Joseph’s now. Today we are going to deepen our acquaintance with Joseph, for as we meet him afresh and find our lives and his coursing through each other, we shall become richer still.

I:: — Let’s look first at the theme of God’s steadfast love. It was Joseph’s conviction that God’s love is steadfast despite the seeming jumble of events that made up Joseph’s life and appeared to contradict it.

Events often seem to unfold around us the way “pick-up sticks” fall out and fall over each other as soon as the child opens her hand and releases the sticks. We’ve all played pick-up sticks. We’ve all watched the sticks fall out helter-skelter, with no apparent order, the sticks merely sticking out higgledy-piggledy everywhere. Life appears to unfold, “fall out”, just like this.

Think of the developments in Joseph’s life over which he has no control at all. His father favours him inasmuch as he is born when his father is old and his father thereafter dotes on him. His brothers resent him. His natural gifts (including his innate business smarts) cause others to envy him. Foreign traders come along when his treacherous brothers have thrown him into a pit and carry him off to Egypt. In Egypt he’s imprisoned. Famine scourges the people. All of this is beyond his control. He hasn’t asked for any of it, isn’t responsible for it, and can’t do anything about it. It just “falls out” the way pick-up sticks fall out.

How is Joseph to react? He could have reacted the way we’ve all seen people react (the way we may have reacted ourselves) as events jumble themselves around us.

– “I’ve been victimized!”, Joseph could have said, “by my family, no less!” Who hasn’t said it?

– “Life isn’t fair!” True! Life isn’t fair. Fairness happens to be an adjective we never get to use of life.

– “I’m powerless!” He is powerless when a nasty woman slanders him and has him jailed. A psychiatrist under whom I studied told the class that powerlessness is the greatest stress anyone can undergo in a stress-ridden life.

– “I’m forever having to `skate on thin ice.’ I’m forever caught in a welter of insecurities.” He could have reacted this way, since if he fails to please Pharaoh, Pharaoh will have his head. There are a thousand insecurities that keep all of us skating on thin ice all the time.

– “I’m not appreciated!” Joseph could have reacted in this manner too. After all, he does the butler an enormous favour which the butler then forgets. The truth is, none of us is appreciated the way we feel we should be, and likely none of us is appreciated the way we ought to be.

We can always react in any of these ways, as Joseph could have too. But shouting furiously while we pound our fist on the wall won’t help. Nevertheless, there is something that will help. We grasp what it is as we follow Joseph in his ups and down all the way down to prison where the text of scripture tells us, “The Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love.”

It is years after the most turbulent period of his life that the fact of God’s steadfast love is stamped on Joseph and he sees in retrospect that God’s love has been steadfast in all circumstances. The most turbulent period was the abuse Joseph suffered at the hands of his brothers; their mistreatment, after all, landed him in Egypt and precipitated everything that befell him thereafter. One day his brutal brothers find themselves (and their families) desperate during a famine. They go to Egypt in hope of acquiring food. Joseph identifies himself to his brothers. They think now they are never going to get food, since Joseph has a long memory; they think too that not only will they not get food, they’ll get vengeance. Joseph looks them in the eye and says, “When you fellows abused me and abandoned me years ago you were bent on evil, NOTHING BUT EVIL, weren’t you!” (Now the brothers think they won’t survive another ten minutes.) “Yet the evil you intended, God has turned to good — for I can give you food.”

It’s all true for us as well. Regardless of what befalls us accidentally; regardless of what evil others visit upon us deliberately; regardless of what happens whose nature — bane or blessing — we can’t assess in the moment of its happening; regardless of what it is, God takes it all up and does something with it, something good for us or others, something that can ultimately be only an expression of his steadfast love just because steadfast love is all he himself is ultimately.

Everyone knows that when the pick-up sticks fall out, they fall out in disarray. Everyone knows that there are periods in life bleak beyond telling and black beyond describing. Everyone knows there are developments in life that seem as pointless as they are pitiless. Nevertheless, what the brothers intended for evil — and was evil — God yet wrested for good. Just because Joseph knew what God’s steadfast love had done in the worst moments of his life, Joseph would know for the rest of his life what he could count on God’s steadfast love to do — even if Joseph didn’t see it at the moment.

We who know of that incarnation which postdated Joseph have even more startling evidence of God’s steadfast love: he whose Son was victimized uniquely vindicated that Son — and therein vindicated himself — as he raised his Son and displayed him as evidence of steadfast love.

II: — There is another theme or motif in Joseph’s pick-up stick life. The theme is the forgiveness we press upon those who mistreat us. When his brothers appeared cap-in-hand before him Joseph could have done two things: he could simply have let them starve, or he could have nodded to the Egyptian police and said, “You know what to do with them.” Joseph had his brothers in his gunsight — and he refused to pull the trigger.

Never think that Joseph is a wimp. Wimps don’t forgive; wimps can’t forgive; wimps are too weak to do anything except find themselves victimized again. To forgive requires immense strength, ego-strength. To forgive means the injury that has wounded us we neither continue to absorb in ourselves helplessly nor boomerang back onto our assailant vindictively. The manifestly weak person can only invite further victimization. The seemingly strong person can only boomerang his assailant’s weapon back onto the assailant himself. It is precisely the strong person who can forgive.

A cruel way of ridding oneself of nuisance animal is to put ground glass in the animal’s food. As the animal eats, it swallows tiny fragments of sharp glass. The needle-sharp fragments perforate the animal’s digestive tract and the animal haemorrhages to death in terrible pain. Most people look upon the matter of forgiving assailants as no more than eating ground glass. Why swallow an indigestible substance that leaves us bleeding to death in terrible pain? People who think like this, of course, have it all wrong. It isn’t forgiving that amounts to swallowing ground glass; it’s resentment, it’s nursing a grudge, it’s plotting revenge, it’s biding one’s time, it’s fuelling hatred, it’s settling scores. This is the ground glass diet of those who mistake forgiveness for wimpiness.

Five hundred years after Joseph a prophet appeared, Jeremiah by name, who was mistreated much as Joseph had been. (Among other things, men with murderous hearts threw Jeremiah into a dry well hoping that they had heard the last of him.) Jeremiah survived, not in order to see whom he could pay back next — and thereby stuff himself with ground glass unknowingly; Jeremiah survived to write, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion.” (Jer. 3:22-23) To have as our portion that Lord whose faithfulness to us is great is to be steeped in his ceaseless mercies. Blessed by ceaseless mercies, how can we fail in turn to bestow them?

Forgiveness of injuries little and great is not only a sign of faith in God, it is a sign of wisdom in us.

III: — The rich complexity that was Joseph’s life discloses yet another theme: integrity. The wife of Joseph’s boss tried to seduce him. She tried not once but many times. Joseph was appalled. “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”, he retorted as Potiphar’s wife redoubled her adulterous efforts. Joseph didn’t yield.

Integrity is easy when there’s no temptation. Obedience is easy when there’s no seductive whisper. Obedience comes is difficult, however — and means worlds more — when temptation is relentless. Obedience is cheap when there’s no price to be paid for obeying. But after Joseph had cried “No!” to Potiphar’s wife she slandered him; now obedience was costly. In costly situations obedience is rendered to God and integrity is maintained in us only by grace and by grit.

In Egypt Joseph is a long way from home, a long way from anyone who knows him, a long way from prying eyes and wagging tongues which (let’s be honest) help to keep us upright. Joseph can yield to Potiphar’s wife without fear of being detected. Yet he doesn’t think about this for so much as a second. His instantaneous reaction is, “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”

We must be careful to note what Joseph’s instantaneous response was not. He didn’t blurt, “But I might get AIDS! or “You might become pregnant!” or “Your husband might kill me!” or even “I don’t find you attractive.” Any of these responses has nothing to do with obedience to the Holy One of Israel and integrity before him; any one of these responses is mere self-interest, as much self-interest as the self-indulgence of the fornicator (albeit somewhat more prudential.) No doubt at some point Joseph said to the Egyptian aristocrat, “But I’m an Israelite!”; and no doubt she replied, “Yes, but you aren’t in Israel now!” Joseph could only have said then, “Nevertheless, Israel is in me, however much I am exiled through having to live in Egypt!”

The business person on a business trip; the schoolteacher at that convention in Montreal; the bank employee counting bills by herself in a back office (after all, the chartered banks write off millions of dollars every year because of employee theft); the preacher sitting alone in his study (nobody knows whether he’s hard at work quarrying in the granite of scripture and theology or collecting his salary for reading Sports Illustrated and McClean’s magazine) — these are the situations where we can “get away from it” (at least at some level). Therefore these are situations where we must be so schooled in the school of Christ that our instantaneous reaction is, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” And then having said this from our heart, know with our head too that the matter isn’t over: there remains a price to be paid, as Joseph learned when his rejection of the seductress landed him in greater difficulty still.

Today, of course, a secular world and a secularized church can’t understand Joseph. Instead we are told, “Of course Joseph will yield: the Victorian era is over. Of course Joseph will yield: the sexual revolution has been with us since the pill. Of course Joseph will yield: he’s a young man beset with hormones. Of course, of course, of course….”

Joseph was simpler, profounder, godlier all at once. “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” Twelve hundred years after Joseph an apostle appeared, John by name, who wrote to Christian friends whom temptation was hammering. “Remember”, said John, “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

IV: — There is yet another theme, along with the other three, multiplying the richness of Joseph’s complex life: the theme of blessing. One of the most startling features of Joseph’s story is the fact that people whose lives intersect Joseph’s find themselves blessed, assisted, enhanced. To be around Joseph is to be graced and to find oneself enriched.

We all know that the opposite kind of person exists as well, the person whose mere presence is a dark cloud, a millstone, a wet blanket — and worse. Years ago I saw such a person depicted in the movie Becket. The wife of mediaeval England’s King Richard, a woman who has to be the world’s all-time nagger, is nagging him fiercely, relentlessly, as her custom is. In addition, her appearance is as off-putting as her tongue: her hair always looks to be combed by an egg-beater, her face resembles the compost pile, and her personality is as lively as a dialtone. Her ceaseless nagging finally pushes Richard over the edge; he turns on her and says, acid in every word, “You, woman, are a barren desert into which I was forced to wander.” Terrible but true. It was just the opposite with Joseph. He was an oasis in which others found themselves growing and their lives fruitful. People who gathered around Joseph found their spirits lifted and their faces brightened and their load lightened. Under God, Joseph himself prospered; through Joseph, others prospered.

God’s people are everywhere called to be salt and light and leaven. Salt forestalls putrefaction and brings out hidden flavour. Leaven (yeast) permeates dough and lightens it, obviating that indigestible lump which only gives people stomach ache. Light dispels mildew, the foul-smelling fungus that ruins anything kept in the dank. Salt, light and leaven aren’t dramatic items. As undramatic as they are, however, they are needed if others are to find their lives lightened and brightened and eased. Salt, light, leaven are scarcely noticed themselves; yet in even the smallest quantities their immediate influence is vast. Joseph was a good person to be around, for those who kept company with him found their lives bettered in every way.

V: — What was it about Joseph that gave rise to all of this? What was it about Joseph that rendered him a blessing? It was this: Joseph always knew who he was. Regardless of where he was, but especially when he was in Egypt, in all circumstances Joseph knew who he was. It’s crucial that we know who we are.

When I was admitted to The Writers’ Union a couple of years ago I was thrilled with this turn of events. I imagined myself meeting Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley and the whole host of literary luminaries. About this time I happened to be visiting a very wise man in the congregation one afternoon, and of course I managed to tell him to what august company I had been admitted. No doubt I appeared elated with this frippery, intoxicated even, but he didn’t leap to share my elation. Instead he stared at me for the longest time, face expressionless, and then said quietly, soberly, somewhat uneasily, “Victor, before you run off to The Writers’ Union, just be sure you know who you are.”

Who am I? Who tells me who I am? Who are you? And who tells you who you are? By faith in Jesus Christ I am a child of God. He makes me who I am; and having made he who I am, he — and he alone — tells me what he has made: child of God, not child of darkness or child of night of child of perdition.

Since, as the apostle Paul reminds us, Jesus Christ was known in essence ‘though not by name to patriarchs and prophets, Joseph knew the same Lord as I, knew himself born of the same Saviour as I, and found himself a beacon, a lighthouse, amidst a “crooked and perverse generation” (Phil. 2:15), as his descendant from Tarsus was to say 1200 years later.

It is by faith that we become children of God, and are therein made to be those whose lives, as complex as anyone’s, are also as rich and helpful as Joseph’s.

                                                                      Victor Shepherd        

June 1997