Desert Scribblings

August 31, 2008 - Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Exodus 3:1-15 - link to the NRSV text

NOTE: Sorry about the delay to Thursday afternoon, it's been a weird week.  A little shorter, more reflective post this week.  Blessings and peace!

“Here I am.”

Oh, how dangerous those words are!  I’ve been thinking about these words, about what it means to respond.  There are a lot of preachers here in the south of the United States that love altar calls, and there is often an assumption that if someone has experienced God then, well, of course they’re going to respond!

And for those of us in the church, for those of us who are clergy or lay leaders, boy do we wish more people would respond in faith.  We watch time after time, opportunity after opportunity to growth in faith or step out in service or to turn from destructive and hurtful behavior and attitudes and watch as people just keep on going as if everything is fine.  And so we get frustrated, we get desperate, and even sometimes we get discouraged.

But in the church, we must also remember this: responding to God’s call is not something to be taken lightly.  Here I am.  Dangerous, frightening words; words that lead us forward in new, uncertain directions.  Words that may even send us back into the clutches of Pharaoh, into the places that we most fear.  Responding to God’s call leads us into fearful places where we do not necessarily know what might happen.

That day, when Moses sees the bush and hears God’s call, the phrase slips from his lips almost as if it was second nature, a single word in Hebrew: hinneni.  Here I am.  And Moses didn’t know the world he was about to step into.  And I wonder if Moses didn’t stop and think maybe he should watch what he says just a little bit more.

The danger is heightened later in the story when Moses begins trying to weasel his way out of God’s command for him to go down to Egypt: “Well, what if I get down there and they ask me, ‘What god sent you again?’ what do I tell them?  What’s your name?”  In the ancient Near East, to know and use a god’s name was to invoke its power.  Thus Moses is asking, “What do I call you so that I can use you to help?”

God’s answer, however, is one that may very well have been frightening when uttered.  “I am that I am.”  Or maybe better translated, “I will be what I will be.”  In other words, this God is not a god to be controlled, contained, invoked on a whim but a boundless God, one who will be whatever and will do whatever that God desires.  I will be what I will be.

And yet, this is the call that people over the centuries have heard call and have given the answer, “Here I am,” and gone to places and done things that they and the world probably never could have imagined on their own.  It is this God, untamable, uncontrollable, sending us places that we never would walk if it was strictly up to us, that is calling and commanding.

Moses, weak, stuttering, uncertain Moses that wouldn’t go down to Egypt without someone to hold his hand…Moses goes.  And in going, Moses is transformed.  For the promise that Moses heard that day from the bush was one that would sustain him.  It was a promise that this dangerous, uncertain God who calls us to dangerous, uncertain things does not abandon us to them.  The same promise that was in the covenant to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whom God recalls to Moses is the God that again promises, “I will be with you” (Exo 3:12).

Here I am.  Dangerous, frightening words yet words that offer hope.  For if weak, stuttering Moses, who had been fleeing from a murder rap, well if he could be God’s instrument of redemption and deliverance, then maybe, just maybe I can be as well.  Thanks be to God.

Shalom,
Geoff

August 24, 2008 – Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Exodus 1:8-2:10

“But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys lives” (Exodus 1:17).

It’s presidential campaign season here in the United States, and an emerging theme between Barack Obama and John McCain seems to be patriotism.  Words have started flying back and forth; there have been attacks from McCain’s camp about Obama’s patriotism, and Obama has recently called on McCain to acknowledge that he is a patriot.

What is getting buried in all the debate about patriotism is the fact that, underneath all of the talk and rhetoric, there seems to be somewhat of a difference of opinion about what patriotism is.  For some, patriotism is blind faith in the flag and the government that flies it.  To question the decisions or the actions of the president or the government…well, you’re being unpatriotic.

Except that form of patriotism, which more accurately could be described as naïve nationalism, is not true to our own history.  If the leaders of the American colonies had thought that way, they never would have protested against King George and his taxation policies and would not have eventually sought independence.  The ability to protest the actions of the government was so important to the founders of this country, they made sure that right was upheld by including it in the Bill of Rights in the form of the freedom of assembly and the freedom to petition.

Or in the paraphrased words of comedian Lewis Black: “I love my country.  In what other country in the world can I get away with saying this stuff?”

Maybe true loyalty to one’s country is holding that country to a higher standard than what it is doing.  Maybe true patriotism is holding one’s country to the high standards that is demanded of the powerful.  Maybe true love for our country demands that we, as people of faith, stand up before our country and declaring to it what the kingdom of God calls for this world to be.

In the generations that span the time between the Joseph narrative at the end of Genesis and the Moses narrative in Exodus, the political landscape of Egypt had shifted.  The descendents of Jacob’s sons and their households thrive in Egypt, so much so that “the land was filled with them” (Exo 1:7).  Their power, their status, their social standing had grown.

There is nothing that indicates the Israelites were anything other than loyal subjects to Pharaoh.  Joseph had been Pharaoh’s right hand, and his family probably had some favored status due to Joseph’s position.  They were most likely well-settled, productive, fully integrated members of Egyptian society.

Something had shifted, however.  The text says that, “a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exo 1:8).  The memory of the Israelite contribution to the country’s success and well being had faded, and the new Pharaoh was able toe exploit that to advance his own agenda.  Pharaoh thus begins a systematic enslavement and oppression of the Israelites, even to the point of ordering the newborn Israelite males killed.

This is where Shiphrah and Puah enter the story.  They’re described as Hebrew midwives, and when Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew midwives to carry out the genocidal plan to kill the Hebrew male children, Shiphrah and Puah refuse to go along.  The text tells us that they “feared God,” and one could infer from this statement that they feared God more than they feared Pharaoh and his possible retribution.

We don’t like to think about “fearing” God; it’s language that has fallen out of favor with many mainline Christians in the West.  But as I mentioned in my blog on the Wrestling Jacob story, there is something dangerous about encountering God.  Secondly, fear in this sense is not the same fear that one feels from the Pharaohs of the world; instead, it is a healthy respect for their power and authority.  Alternately yr’ “to fear” can be translated as “to tremble for” or “to honor” when God is the object, and that this verb can mean to awesome or terrible in the niphal stem (see HALOT  432-33).

These midwives knew that Pharaoh’s actions were evil, and they would play no part in it.  They knew the character of the God they served as Israelites, and they “feared” or honored that God’s ways more than they feared the wrath of Pharaoh.

That kind of fear is one that we in the church need more of, the kind of “fear” or respect and honor of God’s kingdom and authority that drives us to stop and stand in the way of injustice.  As we vow in The United Methodist Church whenever someone is baptized or joins the church:

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? (The United Methodist Book of Worship, Baptismal Covenant I, 88).

We don’t always live up this call very well, and I confess that I’m far from perfect in doing so myself.  But when I stood up at my confirmation almost fifteen years ago, I answered yes to this very question.  I answered yes, saying that I would be a bulwark in the storm of life, putting myself in the way of evil as it attempts to batter this hurt and broken world even more than it already has been.  At it’s most basic it is a giving of ourselves without concern for cost and with fear of reprisal, knowing that we are doing God’s work in the world.

The Hebrew midwives are great examples of faithful loyalty to their true kingdom, God’s kingdom, the kingdom and reign to which all kingdoms and reigns should be upheld.  I love this country, and I know that my country has done great things with its power and influence in the past.  But I also know that this country is composed of human beings who often struggle to do the right things with what we have.

And so I hope I, and that all of us, will continue to hold this country up to a higher standard, to look at the actions of the Pharaohs, the rulers and authorities of this world, and with God’s help and grace strive for the ways of God’s kingdom first and foremost.  And it is in this sense that I can honestly pray those words that are quickly becoming cliché, that God might bless America.

Shalom,
Geoff

August 17, 2008 - Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Genesis 45:1-15 - link to the NRSV text

"I am Joseph."

With those three words, everything that the sons of Jacob thought was true was overturned, and the moment the reader has been anticipating since chapter 42 has come: Joseph is revealed to his brothers as alive and well and as the Egyptian official they had been dealing with in trying to procure grain for their family.

The dream they had tried to squash, that one day they would bow to Joseph, was revealed has having come to pass.  But more than just a revelation of Joseph being alive and having great power, Joseph's revelation to the brothers is also a divine revelation.  The statement "I am Joseph" harkens back to the revelations of God to the covenantal revelations of the generations before:

"I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess" (Genesis 15:7).
"I am the God of your father Abraham; do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham's sake" (Genesis 26:24).
And the LORD stood beside [Jacob] and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring" (Genesis 28:13).

There is no direct revelation of the covenant in the Joseph cycle, at least not to Joseph.  Nowhere does God appear to Joseph and definitely declare that he was the person through whom the promise would continue.  God instead had been working behind the scenes and on the down low, working through and among human plans and manipulations. 

And maybe Joseph doesn't need the direct revelation, because Joseph seems to get it instinctively in a way that his precursors didn't.

"God sent me before you to preserve life" (45:5).
"God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors" (45:7).
"So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt" (45:8).

Instead, Joseph is the agent of revelation to the brothers.  "I am Joseph.  God sent me before you to be the bearer of the promise in order that we all might live." We don't know how Joseph felt about his brothers' betrayal all those years ago while he was shuffled around and sold and taken off to prison.  But at some point during his rise from lowly slave to Pharaoh's right hand, Joseph has come to terms with his brothers' evil actions and has extended them forgiveness and compassion.

Instead of focusing on the bitterness that could have arisen from old hurts, Joseph decided to move to a new place for he had seen his brothers' care for Benjamin, his full-blood brother.  The old family animosity that had characterized their past was no longer.  Both Joseph and the brothers had changed by the time they met each other again.

All things look different on the other side of grace.  Joseph had experienced God's presence over his years in Egypt and saw how God had worked in his circumstances, and thus Joseph was able to look beyond his brothers' actions to see a larger picture.  All the years of toil and trouble have come to this point, where grace and love can be extended and can heal over the wounds of the past.  Now, all Joseph wanted was his family to be reunited.

In some ways, it is a miraculous end to the Jacob narrative, whose family relationships had for so long been defined by conflict and trickery.  But now that family is at peace, and the dream of God for God's people has been upheld even in the midst of human efforts to derail it.  Joseph puts it well later in the book, a thought that Paul would later echo in his own writings: "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today" (Genesis 50:20; cf. Romans 8:28). 

At the center of the Joseph story is the dream, which is God's way of continuing the covenant promises laid out to the generations before.  The dream would still take time to come to fruition, and it would still have its bumps in the road (see Exodus through Joshua), but God is at work in the midst of it all.  And for this present world with so many broken dreams and shattered hopes, that is good news that we can find hope in.

Shalom,
Geoff

August 10, 2008 - Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 - link to the NRSV text

How does the saying go?  What goes around comes around?  In pastoral care terms, our text this morning is an example of family patterns being repeated by the later generation.  Jacob and Esau fought, Jacob and Laban fought, Rachel and Leah (and their handmaidens) fought.  And now that familial animosity has been passed down to the following generation, enflamed by Jacob’s preference for Joseph over and above his other brothers, a product of his union with Rachel who he preferred over Leah. 

And so the brothers first plot to kill their brother, then decide instead to sell him into slavery.  Why just kill Joseph when they can make a little money of him?  It would just be bad stewardship, right?

To be fair, Joseph really doesn’t help his own case.  In Genesis 37:5-11, Joseph recounts to his brothers a pair of dreams that symbolically communicated that his brothers would bow to him, and he tells them these dreams in a way that really doesn’t seem to blunt the impact.  It seems to the others that Joseph may be getting a little big for his britches.  Even his father Jacob rebukes him over the dreams.

This sets the stage for our reading the morning.  Jacob sends Joseph out to the fields where his brothers are, and when they see him coming they decide to end his ambitions then and there.  “Here comes this dreamer,” they say to each other.  “Come, let us kill him” (Gen 37:19-20).  Now, Joseph might believe his own press a little too much, but that’s not really an excuse to kill him.  But the decades of family conflict finally has gotten to what might have been an inevitable conclusion without a serious intervention: the murder of someone in the family.

The brothers want to kill the dream, to stop it from becoming a reality.  And by the end of the story the dream is over in the minds of the brothers and Jacob; the dreamer is dead, at least from their point of view.  But God’s dream, and though the text never says it explicitly the dream is God’s dream, isn’t over but in truth has only just begun.

As Walter Brueggemann insightly observes:

Though hidden in the form of a dream, silent and not at all visible, the listener will understand that the dream is the unsettling work of [the LORD] upon which everything depends.  Without the dream there would be no Joseph and no narrative.  From the perspective of the brothers, without the dream there would be no trouble or conflict.  For the father, without the dream there would be no grief or loss.  The dream sets its own course…And in the end, the dream prevails over the tensions of the family (Brueggemann, Genesis, 298-99).

The irony in all of this is the fact that the brother’s choice to turn on Joseph is the very thing that leads to the fulfillment of the dream.  Joseph’s trials and tribulations as he rises to power in Potiphar’s and then later Pharaoh’s household mold Joseph into the leader needed to assure the future of God’s people.  Joseph, whose name is related to the verb “to add” or “to increase,” increases the house of Pharaoh through his careful management of Egypt’s crops and thus is able to secure the future God’s dream for God’s people.

The brothers assumed the dream was about Joseph’s ambition and some kind of preferential treatment.  And can you blame them?  That’s how Jacob dealt with Joseph all the time, so they had no other frame of reference.  They assumed that the dreams of them bowing to Joseph was a continuation of Joseph’s status over and above them, when the truth is that Joseph’s elevation wasn’t one of oppression but one of providence.  God’s people needed to be cared for, and Joseph was tabbed as the person best able to pave the road forward.

And here is the gospel, the good news found in the Joseph cycle: the dream of God prevails over the plans of human beings.  Maybe not always in the forms God intended at first, and there may be long and trying times before it comes about, and it may come about in ways that we never expect, but the dream of God, God’s desire for the world and God’s people is still being achieved.  God is still at work in the lives of God’s people in order that the world might be restored.  We might unexpectedly find ourselves in Egypt along the way, but that’s all right.  God can work with that.

Shalom,
Geoff