Exodus – Peculiar Faith

The Devil’s a Liar!

The first Sunday in Lent always features Jesus in the wilderness tempted by Satan. Reading this familiar story again this year (Luke 4:1-13), it strikes me that those iconic temptations all spring from the ongoing and stubborn desire for certainty and security.

Imagine having the capacity to create food whenever you’re hungry, or to control the world’s wealth (all of it), or never to worry about physical harm ever again—to be certain of the capacity for even just one of those, let alone all three, would surely provide a sense of safety if not absolute security.

Personally, the chaos of our present world makes that desire for “certainty and security” sound pretty good. And that ancient story offers a timely invitation to consider exactly what I’m most tempted to do when the stakes are high in my life and when the consequences of my choices are potentially severe.

But this story is not merely about resisting temptation (as I have almost always taken it to mean), as if the point is to follow the lead of Jesus in exercising heroic willpower. The indigenous translation of this story we use during Lent at All Saints’ Parish refers to Satan in this story as the “evil trickster”—he’s a liar, in other words, the Great Deceiver, and he cannot make good on his promises; no one can. No one can give us perfect certainty or guaranteed security about anything—these are not possible for human life.

So much time and energy, even anguish, not to mention money, is devoted to obtaining these very things, these things we long for but cannot have—not because we’re unworthy of them or haven’t yet said the prayers properly, but because these things are not even compatible with being authentically human.

We cannot be perfectly certain and absolutely secure and still be human.

Living a genuinely human life is an ongoing journey of liberation, a theme all three of the biblical texts from the Lenten lectionary yesterday articulate directly and powerfully. In this case, being set free especially from all the stuff—material goods or a wealth of control—all the stuff we’re constantly told will keep us safe but actually keeps us afraid, always worried about scarcity, always terrified of loss.

Luke seems especially keen to help us travel this “freedom road,” and returns often to the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt as a favorite image. Jesus prepares for ministry just as Moses did—with forty days in the wilderness, exactly where the ancient Israelites wandered for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.

Even the particular temptations in Luke’s story harken back to that iconic moment. Almost immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are hungry in that wilderness because they have no bread. It’s from that very story in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes to fend off the devil—not just once, but for each of the three temptations.

by the Spirit into the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Let’s also recall that the Spirit anoints Luke’s Jesus to let the oppressed go free, and as we heard last week, the transfigured Jesus is joined by none other than Moses, who discusses with Jesus his upcoming “departure,” which Luke calls his “exodus.”

Liberation from captivity and the freedom to flourish—this is the good road Luke invites us to travel our entire lives, urging us especially to let go of whatever we think will give us “certainty and security” along that road; these are not our provisions for the journey, no matter how often we’re told to pack them.

Always lingering in the background of Gospel texts is of course the Roman Empire. Regardless of whether it’s the first-century version of today’s Global Capitalism, imperial systems tempt us to acquire and accumulate more stuff, and always with the promise that still more stuff will finally make us safe—and that is an outright lie.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun and social justice advocate writes about the severe consequences of giving in to this imperial temptation. She describes what’s at stake in terms that are especially appropriate for this Women’s History Month.

“It is precisely women’s experience of God,” she writes, “that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the Creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion,” she says “does not know God the Spirit.”

Imperial religion has given us instead God the rule-maker, God the judge, and God the monarch in control of everything—and not just coincidentally, those are the roles men most often aspire to occupy and to use religion to advance their cause. That kind of religion, Chittister says, “has consumed Western spirituality and shriveled its heart.”

Luke’s Jesus shows us how to expand our hearts by letting go of imperial promises—those promises are in fact lies, and they keep us enslaved to a system in which there is never enough stuff, never enough money, never enough power; it’s a system that holds us captive to the demand for certainty and security—and it’s killing us while it kills the planet.

Indigenous peoples around the world, including in the Americas, have known these dynamics for a very long time. We must let go to live, and this is precisely why the First Nations Version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

The best Lenten disciplines really have nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or whatever else your indulgence of choice might be. Giving up treats for Lent will not keep us on the good road toward life, as if the point of our faith is self-denial for its own sake.

This season invites us instead to identify whatever it is that prevents us from thriving, and then to let it go, for good. Whatever still holds us captive as a community—longstanding resentments, perhaps, or entrenched bigotries, or inherited assumptions, or the economics of privilege—whatever holds us back from flourishing, now is the time to let it go.

The lectionary also gave us a beautiful passage from Deuteronomy yesterday (26:1-11), which sits right at the heart of the Torah, the law delivered by Moses. The great Christian mistake is to suppose the Torah is all about keeping rules; it’s not.

Remember, Moses says to the people, remember you were slaves in Egypt. God set you free, and now you must live as free people.

It’s high time we notice carefully what that passage indicates so clearly is the essence of living as God’s free people: it means living with a grateful generosity and welcoming the stranger.

Let that be our good road this Lenten season—for life.

“Consider the Lilies (Christ in the Wilderness Series),” Stanley Spencer

Practicing the Politics of Sabbath

Yesterday we launched more fully into “ordinary time”—this long green season after Pentecost designed to order our lives in the Spirit—and we did so with a commandment: “Observe the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Deuteronomy 5:12).

Not exactly a compelling launch, I have to say. And I should also note how easily I just ignore that particular commandment, as if it doesn’t really matter. I am also frequently perplexed by its prominence in biblical stories, including the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use Sabbath observance as an occasion to describe the ministry of Jesus.

In what we heard from the lectionary yesterday (Mark 2:23-3:6), Mark puts the Sabbath right up front in his account of the Gospel, in the second chapter, where the tensions between Jesus and the religious establishment are already running high. Mark’s first chapter includes no fewer than four mentions of Jesus confronting demonic forces.

So there’s a power struggle emerging early on in Mark—not, we should quickly note, between Jesus and Judaism (the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is always lurking around texts like these). No, the struggle is between the full flourishing of human life, on the one hand, and all the various forces hell-bent on destroying human life on the other.

Mark makes that power struggle explicit by framing it with a healing story—a moment when someone is brought back into thriving on the Sabbath. Mark also declares Jesus “Lord of the Sabbath”— the very essence of divine lordship, in other words, is cultivating abundance and healthy vitality.

But again, why use Sabbath observance to make this point?

The passage from Deuteronomy suggests an answer by relating the law directly to the Exodus from Egypt; the God who liberated God’s people from slavery is the God who commands Sabbath rest.

The Israelites, no longer trapped in a system that determines their worth based solely on what they produce, must now learn how to live as free people—a freedom in which they enjoy inherent value, regardless of what they produce.

One commentator makes this point quite nicely: after God’s people are taken out of slavery, Sabbath rest “takes the slavery out of the people.” And not just the Israelites alone, but all the people and even all other animals—old, young, rich, poor, citizen, foreigner, resident alien, stranger and outsider, oxen, donkeys, every herd of livestock, all of them creatures of the same God for whom the Sabbath was made!

Modern Western people certainly do not think of ourselves as “enslaved.” Yet how many of us nonetheless base our value on productivity? Along with the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index, labor productivity is one of the primary factors in judging the health of the U.S. economy.

In today’s economic system—no less than the system of slavery in ancient Egypt—the value of a human life is measured by how much it produces. This system in turn measures the value of Earth based on the material resources we can extract from it.

All of us, and Earth herself, need the Sabbath, and to adopt it as a spiritual discipline with social, economic, and political consequences. Jesus, not merely a teacher of Sabbath discipline but actually “Lord of the Sabbath,” liberates us from any system that would shackle our dignity or denigrate our inherent worth. This matters today, and rather urgently.

In this first week of LGBTQ pride month, I’ve been reflecting on more than forty years of being out as a gay man. Think about what the world was like in the early 1980s; that’s when I came out. Now, more than forty years later, still to this day, whenever I enter a new social situation of any kind, I always assess the risk of being out, and whether it’s worth it. Even where I currently live, supposedly an “LGBT resort town,” it doesn’t always feel safe to be out.

LGBT people need a Sabbath rest from that anxiety, and gay men really need to remember that most of the animosity toward us is actually rooted in misogyny, a deeply embedded cultural distrust and denigration of all things feminine, of women.

Every woman in nearly every part of the world today is very well familiar with this. Every single woman has experienced at least one moment, and likely more, of profound uneasiness and even fear in a public space just for being a woman; more than a few feel unsafe even at home.

Women need a Sabbath rest from that constant monitoring of their surroundings; it’s exhausting.

White gay men then need to remember (which I learned from my Black friends) one of the continuing mechanisms of white supremacy in the modern Western world: feminizing Black men—not only are they not white, they aren’t even manly.

Living not only in an LGBT resort town, but in a region that is 99.9% white, it’s painful to realize that my Black friends would not feel particularly comfortable visiting this lovely shoreline region. To be clear, I’m not actually worried that any of the people I know here would pose a physical threat to people of color. The point, rather, is that we live in a cultural system that trains us, all of us, not to trust those who are different from us.

We all need a Sabbath rest from these racial suspicions and ethnic divisions—they are tearing us apart.

And that’s the politics of the Sabbath we all need to practice. When we do, when we actually try to observe the Sabbath each week, we’re not just trying to follow a rule. We are rehearsing and preparing for the great Sabbath Day still to come.

In Christian traditions this is sometimes called the “Eighth Day,” not the first day of creation, as if we’re starting over with a blank slate, nor only the seventh day of temporary rest, but rather God’s own Sabbath Day, the very purpose for which God made the world to begin with.

That is the Great Day when no one is afraid; that day when everyone feels loved and safe; that day when no one has to be anxious for the future because it is God’s own Sabbath “without end,” as Augustine said many centuries ago.

We start to believe this, and we come to trust in it, and we find that Great Day shaping how we live and reordering our relationships and infusing our civic engagements with prophetic urgency when we practice Sabbath rest on a weekly basis.

That’s why God commanded it. That’s what it means to keep the Sabbath “holy.”

When we do this together, when we help each other practice Sabbath politics, we cultivate our shared hope for that great Eighth Day of Sabbath Joy still to come.

The Ten Commandments and Moral Injury in a Society of Wounded Souls

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived with us the last few years of her life when I was in grade school. I have many fond memories of those years, including how grandma helped me memorize the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the twenty-third psalm (each one, of course, in the stately cadences of the King James’ version of the Bible).

That’s a classic collection of texts, which later in life I found perplexing and even abrasive. I mean, a set of commandments (carved into stone, according to the ancient story) on the one hand, and on the other, poetic verses about God as a gentle shepherd leading me through both verdant pastures and scary valleys alike and eventually bringing me safely to God’s own home. ten_commandments

As a young adult, that collection of memorized texts came to symbolize the dissonance I associated with the religion of my youth, constantly extolling the glories of divine grace while at the same time monitoring our adherence to rules and regulations.

That contrast is at least part of the reason why an increasing number of people today identify as “spiritual but not religious.” For some good reasons, many people today associate religion with institutional bureaucracy and rule-making. Or more pointedly, keeping institutional rules for the sake of the institution itself.

I sympathize with that critique of religion, which I myself have made many times. So I’ve surprised myself in more recent years by adopting a slightly different posture toward religion and its rules, or what I would prefer to call “disciplines and practices.”

That’s a linguistic difference worth making on this third Sunday in Lent when many Christians heard once again the recitation of the “Ten Commandments” and when most Episcopalians heard an intriguing prayer to begin their worship this morning, a prayer that reads in part like this:

Keep us, Almighty God, both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul…

Notice how the desire to be kept bodily and defended from adversities in that prayer is paired, nearly intertwined with the desire to be kept inwardly, in our souls. Whatever that vital, animating essence of human life is that we call “soul,” apparently it can be damaged, as that prayer notes, by “evil thoughts.”

Any rule worthy of being kept, in other words, ought to help protect our souls from becoming wounded.

That sounds terribly abstract and old fashioned; but it’s actually quite concrete and contemporary. Witness the epidemic of post-traumatic stress among soldiers returning from combat, most recently from Iraq and Afghanistan. The stress may have nothing to do with being physically wounded; as some scholars and counselors are noting, these military personnel suffer from “moral injury,” or that which might assault and hurt the soul (see also the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University).

Or consider the psalm appointed for this Sunday in Lent, which begins by noting how the heavens declare the glory of God and how the skies show forth the Creator’s handiwork. In that very same psalm, the psalmist also glories in God’s law, which, declares the psalmist, revives the soul, just as God’s statutes rejoice the heart and should thus be more desired than even the finest gold!

I like to think this is why my grandmother helped me memorize the Ten Commandments—to treasure them more than material wealth and to protect my soul when it falls into danger.

I dare say, such danger lurks around nearly every corner these days, disguised as the ordinary routine of the modern world. Ana Levy-Lyons urges us to notice this with her recent book, No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments. A society perpetually enamored with freedom and liberty, she writes, cannot begin to fathom why commitments, communal support, and shared rules are so crucial for resisting the temptations of modern life.

The “temptations” she has in mind infuse a corporate-driven consumer culture in ways we scarcely recognize, streaming toward us endlessly in advertising, entertainment, and the digital monitors populating nearly every public and private space. We’re fooling ourselves, she notes, if we suppose we’re smarter than that vast cultural machine, able simply to say No to what is actually slowly killing us.

To reach “escape velocity,” as she puts it, we need some serious counterforce—exactly what the Ten Commandments in particular, and religion more generally, provide.

I can’t help but wonder whether John had something like this in mind with the temple in Jerusalem, an obvious and potent symbol of religion, its institutions and rules, its disciplines and practices. The story from John’s gospel for this Sunday is sometimes described as Jesus “cleansing” that temple, healing it, as it were, of its moral injury. The “soul” of that sacred place had been damaged, its worship and piety reduced to a mere mechanism of exchange, as if bartering and trading one item of value for another could ever reveal how deeply the Creator God delights in the Beloved Creation.

No, Jesus dramatically insists, the crude mechanisms of a marketplace do not revive the soul, do not rejoice the heart, do not come anywhere near the precious value of those religious disciplines that can clear the clutter and create space for the healing of our wounded souls.

Notice in this familiar story what is not so familiar about John’s version: how early it appears in his account of the gospel—the second chapter! Most Christians, I wager, usually think of Jesus overturning the money changers’ tables as a story that comes rather late in the gospel narrative, something like a culmination of the escalating tension between Jesus and the religious authorities of his day. But John puts this moment right up front, one of the very first stories he recounts in his account of the Gospel.

That is a prime story-telling location that every story-teller wants to leverage for the greatest narrative effect. So, why this story in this prime spot? Obviously, we can’t know with any certainty but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that John understood this story as one of the key components for framing the kind of account of the gospel he wanted to offer. This seems even more likely given what John has Jesus say about the Temple, or rather, how Jesus confused the religious leaders by talking about the temple of his body. This is, after all, the Gospel writer who declares in his opening verses that the Word of God became flesh.

This surely matters in a culture where far too many black and brown bodies are treated as disposable objects; in a culture flooded with #metoo hashtags, each one of them marking a moment of turning a woman’s body into a commodity to own and control; in a culture where a constitutional right to own guns takes precedence over the safety of our schools and the lives of our children.

If the language of “harming our souls” still seems just a bit too clunky, then let us speak instead of how many people today keep spiraling farther into alienation and loneliness (witness the British prime minister recently created a new governmental “minister of loneliness” to address this). Or we might pause to realize just how many turn to consumerist excess to medicate an epidemic of bodily shame, and when this fails, anti-depressants and opioids, or (which is often easier) purchasing and stockpiling assault weapons.

In such a world as this, religion and its disciplines have perhaps never been needed quite so desperately.

Or perhaps the world has never been quite so desperate to remember what it has mostly forgotten about religion: its purpose is the thriving and flourishing of life; and perhaps too many religious leaders themselves have forgotten this about religion.

Or as Jesus declares a bit later in John’s gospel, the point of all this is that we might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10).

That declaration from John’s Jesus can remind us how the ancient biblical writer introduced the Ten Commandments and the frame through which to read them and live them:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…(Exodus 20:1).

The rules worth keeping—the rules we simply must keep—are the ones that liberate and give life.