More Personal

Jeremiah 1:4-10

I don't want to be self-centered or egotistical, but at the same time, isn't it an honest encounter with scripture to sometimes have the feeling it is speaking directly to you?

Recently, I accepted an administrative role in my church of increased responsibility - the most responsibility I've had in my life to this point. And I can't shake the sense that I am in so many ways not up to the task. (I'm not a complete boob, of course, and there are things I bring to the role that are advantageous. But still....) I am so young, so inexperienced.

I want to say with Jeremiah: "I am just a boy!" I don't know how to speak, what to say, how to administer such a large jurisdiction, how to guide ministers many years my senior, how to grow your church.

But God doesn't let me get away with that kind of thinking. God says to me: you will go to whom I send you. You will speak what I command you. Don't be afraid. I have appointed you (and this is the first scary part) over nations and over kingdoms, (this is the second scary part) to pluck up and pull down... to build and plant.

The job is mine, but the work is God's. In some ways, I am freed even as I assume greater responsibility. I feel the weight, but God doesn't let me get a big head about myself and let me go on thinking that I'm bearing the weight, or that the weight is my burden. I am engaged in a work that is greater than myself, and if I'm honest about that, then there's less reason to be scared.

Yes, I am just a human being. But I am not less than that. My inability or youth or inexperience is no excuse - God's job qualifications more than make up for my inadequacies, and there is work to be done.

Work to be done.

To Act Rightly

Luke 13:10-17

Of course, my first instinct is to get hung up on the supernatural healing in the story. My scientific, postmodern mind protests and stops me from reading further. But something keeps my mind open, and I continue the story.

For the writer of Luke, and for his audience(s), the miraculous healing was not the point of the story. The Bible is chock full of miracles and healings, and there was no shortage of wonder-workers in Jesus' day. The point of the story is the protest put up by the leader of the synagogue... and Jesus' response to him.

The leader is bound by the laws, and he resists Jesus doing a good deed on the Sabbath merely because it is a deed, an act, on the day of rest. Several times in Luke and the other Gospels, Jesus has this same confrontation: religious authorities use Jesus' acting on the Sabbath as proof of his infidelity to the Law of Moses, and therefore to God. And over and over again, Jesus says in different ways that the law is meant to serve us, not we it. Here specifically, Jesus points out their own willful violations of the Sabbath stricture for small things - unyoking their ox, leading it to water. These are small acts of mercy extended to a poor, suffering creature - a gesture entirely befitting the spirit of the Sabbath: a day of rest for everyone and everything. Jesus points out these small and righteous violations of the law and asks why this poor woman deserves any less than their oxen.

The thing is, this passage is immediately followed by the parable of the mustard seed, which describes the Reign of God as starting small and growing into something large and obtrusive. Is Luke framing the narrative here? Are we to see in the pious leaders' mercy toward their animals a seed of the Kingdom? Are we to see these small acts leading to greater ones - acts that like a mustard bush will grow unruly and interfere with life the way we wanted it (orderly rows of manageable crops, for instance)? And when birds nest in its branches, is Jesus saying that these acts of disturbing mercy and compassion will lead to new priorities, unforeseen beauty, unexpected values?

Justice and mercy will be inconvenient, and the leaders will want us to curb our enthusiasm for God's Love, saying "limit what good you do." But Jesus doesn't argue with them, but points out how they themselves are already righteously disobeying the stricture, and asking them to expand their righteousness, their mercy, their love, their worship of God, to include even more people.

We have within us the seeds of the Kingdom. We just need to set ourselves free to let them grow. Free from expectations, from cultural mores, from ideas about appropriateness and what's "in." We have to be guided by love and compassion. And we may find ourselves breaking some rules in order to heal justly.

A Lovesong

Isaiah 5:1-7

Anyone who walks away from reading the Bible with less than a conviction for social justice, peace and mercy, hasn't read enough.

That's how I feel coming off this week's lectionary scripture from Isaiah.

Isaiah paints us a picture - an object lesson, if you will - in the voice of God. God has great hopes and plants a vineyard on a hill of fertile soil. The vintner removes all the stones, plants the finest vines, and is so confident of the glorious harvest to come the gardener builds ("hews") a wine press. This is truly a love song.

But the love turns sour.

The vines do not yield choice grapes, but wild grapes - unsuitable for cultivation and useless for good wine-making. At any rate, they aren't what the Vintner was hoping and working for. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Isaiah expresses God's disappointment as the destruction of wrathful vengeance, as a clearing-away of the garden, as the Gardener's abandonment of the garden to the threats of the wild.

But the threat of imminent doom stands only to emphasize the source of God's disappointment: God expects fairness among the people, and finds only injustice (NRSV: "bloodshed"); expects righteousness, but finds only cries of distress. The people's failure to live a zionic lifestyle, to live in right relationship with each other, to treat each other and foreigners with compassion and fairness. Injustice is the real plague of the vineyard! And it is already bearing its fruit - useless to God.

From a rhetorical point of view, this poem is amazing. It was likely written at the time of the annual wine harvest, when such songs were common entertainment and praise in the streets. Isaiah plays on this. Typically, women would be primarily responsible for singing during the wine harvest, singing love-songs where they themselves are the vineyard and their lover is the vintner, their fruit children. Hearing a grizzled man singing this must have been a sight. (Perhaps the crowd might have listened to hear the story an old man's tryst in younger days, or the sexual imagination of a supposed man of God.)

The song's replay of working the fertile soil, clearing and planting the vineyard, would all have been heard as references to love-making. But at the end of verse two, Isaiah turns the tables, and declares the fruit unsuitable. The term "wild grapes" is literally "noxious fruit."

Even the wordplay in the final stanza would have impressed listeners: Isaiah poetically juxtaposes justice (Heb: mishpat) with bloodshed (mishpakh), righteousness (tsedaqah) with a cry of distress (tse'aqah).

Beautifully composed, the wine-harvest festival poem shows a genius of marketing - taking the occasion of the day, even a successful harvest (presumably a sign of God's favor and pleasure), and artistically turning it on its head to highlight the shortfall of the people in their (true) worship of God: social justice.

This is a love song that we need to sing again.