Saturday Night Theologian
10 August 2008

1 Kings 19:9-18

I've been struggling for the past several weeks with employment issues. I believe that God led me to this job, but now I'm being told that finances at the institution might not allow me to stay. I'm not worried about finding another job of some kind, which will undoubtedly be a better paying job, but I really like my job and don't want to leave. Maybe it's because, in some ways at least, I don't like change. Maybe it's because I hate job hunting, trying to sell myself and my abilities to some stranger who has no particular reason to think I'm any better than any of the other applicants. Maybe it's just because I like what I'm doing, I think I'm good at it, and it bothers me that those above me in the food chain seem to have no qualms about letting me go, even if it's supposedly for financial reasons. Maybe Elijah felt sort of the same way. He was good at his job, the top prophet in the land of Israel. He had accomplished great things, and he stood head and shoulders above the other prophets. Yet all his accomplishments, all his rhetoric, all his ability was for naught, for a person in power felt threatened. When Elijah realized that Jezebel was after him, he ran for the wilderness, and he ended up on Mount Horeb. It's not fair, you might say. Maybe not, but that's sometimes the way life is. And in the midst of it, God is still there. We sometimes think too highly of ourselves and our abilities. When we do, we need to learn the lesson that Elijah did. It turns out that others were just as dedicated, just as important as he was. This was the lesson Elijah learned that day: You are not alone, and you are not indispensable.

Psalm 85:8-13 (first published 13 July 2003)

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, 
It's a land that's fair and bright, 
The handouts grow on bushes 
And you sleep out every night. 
The boxcars all are empty 
And the sun shines every day 
I'm bound to go 
Where there ain't no snow 
Where the sleet don't fall 
And the winds don't blow 
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
With the possible exception of arms dealers, everyone in the world shares a common view of an ideal world. It is a peaceful world, a world where justice prevails, people are kind to one another, and no one is in need. Following a plea to God for mercy, this psalm contains an embedded prophetic message, perhaps delivered by a priest or other leader in a public act of worship. God has been faithful in the past, and the prophetic voice assures the people that God's faithfulness will carry into the future as well. The psalm describes a land characterized by peace, covenant faithfulness, truth, and justice. Peace (Heb. shalom) is a word that means much more than the absence of war. It comes from a root that means to be complete or whole, and it envisions a situation in which everyone experiences fulfillment rather than need. Covenant faithfulness (Heb. ḥesed) can also be translated as "love," "kindness," or even "mercy" (it's the same word used in the repeated chorus of Psalm 136, "his mercy endures forever"). It carries with it the idea of a binding relationship, such as that between members of a family or between God and God's people. The Hebrew word for truth (Heb. ʼemet) is related to the word "amen" that people today still use in prayer, and it comes from a verb meaning to confirm or support. The concepts of faithfulness, firmness, and fidelity are bound up in the idea of truth. Finally, the word justice (Heb. tsedek) is a word that connotes both a proper outward relationship between one individual and others (justice) and a proper inward relationship between oneself and God (righteousness). All too often this word is translated by the English word "righteousness," and modern readers get the mistaken impression that its meaning is restricted to one's inner relationship with God. A contextual reading of the Psalms (and other books) will disabuse one of that notion. The world the psalmist describes is one in which people live in community with one another, respecting and loving each other. It is not a utopia, where no one is sick and no one dies, but it is a place where those who are hurting can find comfort and healing, where everyone is born with an equal chance to succeed, and those who lead are trustworthy. Any wrongs are quickly corrected, and no one lacks the basic necessities of life, including food, clothing, shelter, access to medical care, and freedom to believe and express oneself. Though the world we live in does not match very closely the ideals of the psalmist, there are pockets of peace and faithfulness in various places. The church should be such a place. The ideal church should be welcoming, affirming, loving, giving, and caring. It should be a place of forgiveness and peace, where everyone has a place and can contribute according his or her gifts and abilities. Whereas the church may not be able to meet all the requirements of the ideal environment (e.g., few churches offer health care--but why not?), the nation should step in to provide a safe and just environment in which both citizens and resident aliens can flourish and prosper. If nations will learn to work together in a spirit of trust and goodwill, rather than a spirit of apprehension and exploitation, perhaps even the world itself can approach the ideal laid out by the psalmist. However, until the church becomes such a place for everyone who would venture through her doors, how will the world ever be transformed?

Romans 10:5-15 (first published 7 August 2005)

When my grandmother was close to 90 and had come to live with my family, she told me one day, "You know, I don't know why people treat colored people different. They're just like plain folks." For someone born in a small Texas town in 1894, she had a pretty enlightened attitude. If "colored people" weren't actually "plain folks," at least they were like them. She recognized that the way white people treated blacks when she was a child, and the laws that discriminated against them (up until fairly recently), wasn't right. Overcoming prejudice is something that is hard to do, especially when it is ingrained from birth, but it is not impossible. When Paul said, "There is no distinction between Jew and Greek," he was making a radical statement. Most Jews of his day would have disagreed strongly. "We're the chosen people," they might have said. "We're special in God's eyes." Of course, the Greeks thought of themselves as superior to their neighbors as well. Those who spoke languages other than Greek they called barbarians, an onomatopoetic word that is based on the repeated monosyllable, "bar bar bar bar bar," which was how ancient Greeks thought other languages sounded. During the Rwandan massacre of 1992, Hutus on the radio urged their fellow Hutus to kill Tutsis, whom they said were nothing more than cockroaches. The examples of one group considering itself superior to another are innumerable--European Americans and Native Americans, European Australians and Native Australians, Germans and Jews, Russians and Jews, almost all Europeans and Roma (Gypsies), Greeks and Turks--and they are by no means limited to ethnic or nationalistic differences. The mutual animosity between many Christians and Muslims is nothing new, but it is particularly devastating today in the wake of terrorist attacks and wanton slaughter of civilians (on both sides). The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is largely religiously based. In India, Hindus and Muslims fight, and in Northern Ireland there is ongoing animosity between Catholics and Protestants, despite a subsiding of violence in recent years. Why do humans insist on seeing themselves and their social group as being better than others? When we think of ourselves as God's chosen people, does that necessarily mean that others are not also God's chosen people? Paul goes on to say, "The same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him." In other words, God doesn't care what your ethnic or socioeconomic or national or linguistic or religious background is. God accepts you as you are: black or white or mixed or otherwise, male or female, Jew or Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Sikh or atheist, rich or poor, gay or straight. God loves everyone. That's not to say that we can't all change our ways and our attitudes as we grow closer to God, but the point is that we all start from the same place in God's eyes. And if we're all equal before God, we should consider all others as equals in our own eyes as well.

Matthew 14:22-33 (first published 7 August 2005)

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, a special council is meeting in Rivendell at the home of Elrond, a powerful elf, to discuss how to defeat Sauron, the Dark Lord. The gathering includes a powerful wizard, wise elves, strong dwarves, brave men, and two small hobbits. They debate, and eventually dismiss, the ideas of hiding the Ring of Power or of attempting to wield it themselves. They finally conclude, reluctantly, that the only hope is to carry the One Ring back to the mountain where it was forged and to cast it into the fire that burns inside the mountain. But who will carry the ring? After much discussion, primarily concerning the possibility of wielding the One Ring or of countering the power of the Ring with other rings of lesser strength, the course ahead has not been determined, and no one has volunteered to do the impossible: take the ring back to Mordor, the land of Sauron, to cast it into the bowels of Mount Doom. As the group considers the matter silently, a small, timid voice is heard. It is Frodo, a middle-aged hobbit who has carried the Ring safely, through great personal peril, to Rivendell. "I will take the Ring," he says, "though I do not know the way." Frodo was not the logical person to bear the ring. He lacked the magical powers of the wizard, the wisdom of the elves, the strength of the dwarves, or the warrior skills of the men, yet he was the one who volunteered for the task, and ultimately he was the one who accomplished the task, though with help from many others. When we read the story of Jesus walking on the sea, it is not particularly surprising to us, because Christian theology calls Jesus the Son of God, a term that usually incorporates the idea of divinity. If Jesus is divine, what's the big deal about him walking on the water? What is surprising in the story is that Peter walks on the water, too, at least for a little while. Peter gets scared when he sees the wind and the waves around him, and he begins to sink. Jesus reaches out his hand and saves him, then he offers a mild rebuke: "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" It's true that Peter had only a little faith, but the fact of the matter is that his faith was sufficient to get him started in the right direction. While the other disciples were cowering in the boat, Peter went over the side into the deep. Peter may have begun to sink, but only after he took some steps on the surface of the water as though it were dry land. Peter was brash and boastful, hot-tempered and impulsive, but he was also a man who acted on his faith. Sure he made mistakes under his tutelage with Jesus. He publicly disagreed with Jesus when he began to speak of his impending doom in Jerusalem. He cut off a man's ear in the Garden of Gethsemane. He denied Jesus three times the night before he was crucified. But let's look at those stories again. When Peter argued with Jesus over his determination to go to Jerusalem, he clearly didn't grasp the necessity of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, but he understood better than the other disciples that Jesus had a great destiny. When Peter cut off the man's ear, he was acting rashly and against Jesus' wishes, but at least he was acting, while the other disciples stood around in fear. It's true that Peter denied Jesus three times, but he was only disciple who dared to enter the courtyard of the temple in order to see what would happen to Jesus. Yes, Peter was imperfect in many ways, but he was also a man of action. He was a person who always had faith, even if it was only a little faith, and he lived his life by acting on his faith. Sometimes he misunderstood God's will, but he never doubted that God had called him to Jesus' side, and he was always willing to act according to his best understanding of the situation. After the Day of Pentecost, Peter became one of the main leaders of the fledgling church. He still made mistakes, as we see in his conflict with Paul at Galatia (told from Paul's perspective, of course), but overall his ministry was a great success. Under the leadership of Peter and others, the gospel spread from Judea and Galilee to Samaria, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and further east and west in Peter's own lifetime. Ultimately Peter ended up in Rome, where he followed Jesus in martyrdom, after living a life that had many more successes than failures. May we all have a "little faith" like Peter's!