September 7—Discipline and the Disciple

"If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” –Matthew 13:15-20

When I was in college, several friends of mine went to a large and very popular church near campus. I remember hearing a story once about how their church had used this passage to handle an incidence of adultery within the congregation. The church leaders attempted to talk with the man in private, and when he refused to give up his affair, they brought him before the entire church one Sunday and publicly cast him out of the congregation. There’s no doubt that they took this passage seriously.

I remember feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing at the time. Certainly I’ve never been okay with adultery, and kicking people out of the community for sin is found in scripture—in addition to this passage, there is the common refrain found in Deuteronomy, “ So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 19:19, etc.), and Paul’s rhetoric on the contaminating effects of sin in 1 Corinthians 5. At the same time there seemed something rather harsh to me in simply throwing the man out of the church. Granted, I didn’t know this situation from the inside, and perhaps pastorally, such strong consequences were necessary for the person to acknowledge his own behavior. But I wondered how likely it was that this man would ever begin to address the broken relationship and hurt that his actions had caused if he were summarily cut off from his faith community. If the lines of dialogue were closed, how would the offender ever grow? How would the offended ever heal?

When I looked again at today’s lectionary passage in Matthew, a passage upon which many such protocols are based, I realized that Jesus’ rules for church discipline aren’t about punishment or rejection. Nor are they meant to preserve unity in the church at the cost of disagreement or diversity. Rather, they are all about relationships within the community. Notice how, in verse 15, the question is posed as “If another member of the church sins against you…” (italics mine). Now, those two little words set the tone for the entire passage. If they are not there, then the passage can be taken to address generic activities that contradict the church’s moral or ethical code. In some ancient sources, these words are indeed missing from the passage, suggesting such a general interpretation.

But if the two words are part of verse 15, as other ancient sources attest, then the entire passage becomes all about holding my Christian sibling accountable when her actions have broken our relationship. For in this the Apostle Paul is right—“a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough” (1 Cor. 5:6), and the bitterness and anger that results from an open wound between two people eventually poisons the whole community. So in this interpretation, Jesus’ plan sets up a way for the community to address broken relationships so that justice and reconciliation can take place. For when the community comes alongside one who has been wronged, confronts the breach, and calls for justice, it is not about enforcing uniformity of doctrine or belief. It is about being a disciple of Jesus—for just as Jesus came to heal humanity’s relationship with the Creator, members of his church are called to heal relationships with one another. And that healing cannot take place if we don’t address our brokenness with honesty and authenticity.

Yet what if someone refuses to acknowledge his wrong and try to mend fences? Is that the point at which we cast him out? In the past, when I’ve read the words, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (v. 17), I assumed that this was meant as a rejection of the offender. But as New Testament professor Mark Allan Powell points out in his commentary on Matthew, Jesus is saying quite the opposite—Gentiles and tax collectors were the outsiders of the Jewish community, to be sure, but they were also some of the people Jesus most persistently reached out to during his ministry. Treating someone as a Gentile and tax collector is not a call to cut off the wrong-doer, but a call to deeper and more persistent engagement with that person. For ultimately, the goal is unity—a reconciling unity, in which Christ himself is present among us (v. 20). And that requires not uniformity of opinion, but uniformity of loving, grace-filled care toward one another.

Our business as a church, then, is not about casting out and cutting off. But at the same time, it isn’t about discreetly overlooking the broken relationships within our community—from the petty fights and painful betrayals buzzing within local congregations to our failure as a Christian faith community to love and serve all humanity. Reconciliation cannot happen without justice, just as justice is empty without healing and reconciliation. And in Jesus’ discipline for the church, he gives us a practical, everyday starting point for practicing both.

Kelsey

PS-- The image above is of the Zaccheus story, one of the most famous stories of Jesus reaching out to a tax collector to bring him to discipleship.

August 31—Turning Toward the Burning Bush

Passages: Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

Have you ever planned and eagerly anticipated a vacation or a visit from friends, only to be disappointed by the results? Perhaps you’re more pragmatic than I am, and have never felt that way, but I have certainly experienced this sensation many times. I set up all sorts of expectations for what something will be like, and then the experience of it loses all joy when it differs from those expectations. In contrast, some of the times I have most enjoyed in my life were the moments I never expected anything from—a simple bike ride down the Minuteman Trail, Swedish meatballs at Ikea, talking with my grandfather at the kitchen table. The moments in which I loosen the controlling stranglehold I attempt to keep on my life, perhaps, provide just enough room for the Divine Mystery to enter in.

This phenomenon seems to also hold true even in some of the major courses my life has taken. The internship that eventually set me down this crazy divinity school path? Started as a mock job interview project for a college class. My first encounter with the person who would become my life partner? A rather unremarkable introduction at the Kentucky State Fair. I expend considerable energy attempting to chart my life course, but in retrospect, the significant moments often come when I’m not looking for them at all.

If we consider Moses’ story a prototype for God’s call, then perhaps God is usually found where we least expect it. In our lectionary passage today, Moses is really minding his own business when God encounters him. You could say that Moses has already tried to make his stand for justice and failed—in Exodus 2:11-15, we are told that Moses kills an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews. The result? Moses’ authority as a leader of the Hebrews is explicitly rejected in 2:14, and he has to skip town.

So when God encounters Moses, he has prudently chosen to lie low in the wilderness more or less indefinitely. Alienated from both his Hebrew tribe and his adopted Egyptian family, stripped, like the Joseph of a few weeks ago, of the power and privilege of his royal upbringing, Moses is truly “an alien residing in a foreign land” (2:22) at the beginning of chapter 3. The opening verse tells us that Moses “led his flock beyond the wilderness” (v. 1), suggesting that metaphorically, if not literally, Moses is lost and adrift at this stage in his life.

That’s when Moses comes upon God—or more accurately, God reveals God’s self to Moses. Upon seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed, Moses remarks that he must turn aside to see the strange sight. Now, I still don’t think Moses quite gets the significance of what he is seeing here. His tone is one of awed curiosity, like the tone you get when you go to Yellowstone National Park and see your first wildlife up close: “Would you look at that, kids?! That’s a real, live buffalo crossing the road!”

But then God speaks from the bush, and Moses finally gets it. Like Joseph before, like Samuel and Isaiah afterward, Moses responds to God’s call with the words, “Here I am.” Before he even knows what might be asked of him, Moses has already presented himself before God for the task ahead. It is paradigmatic of the life of faith, really. If you’re in a tradition that practices infant baptism, then other people signed you up for Christian faith. But even if you came to faith later in your life, of your own accord, you probably had no real notion of what the Christian life would entail. You responded to God’s call with your own “here I am,” just as clueless as Moses to what God might actually tell you to do. God surprised us, and continues to surprise us, just as that burning bush came unexpectedly upon Moses in the wilderness.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably wished for God to give you a burning bush experience that will tell you what to do. We all want to stop stumbling our way along, being confronted with ambiguous forks in the road where we’re not sure what to do next. And yes, it is true in this passage that God tells Moses exactly what the Holy One is going to do and how God expects Moses to be a primary player in it. So are we doing something wrong if our call isn’t always that clear cut?

I don’t think so. Think of it this way—how many times would Moses have led his flocks through that same wilderness, far from home? Perhaps he had wandered past Horeb before, wondering whether the God of his ancestors was merely a myth, asking why this fabled God did not do something to end the Israelite oppression. Yet as passage clearly points out later in verses 13-15, our attempts to control the wild, mysterious divine presence are futile. Just as God will not be named, will not be put into our boxes and conformed to our labels, God will not spit out answers to the challenges of life like a magic eight ball.

Rather, like Moses, we can only be open to the unexpected and receptive to the call as it comes. Because we don’t know when we will catch sight of that burning bush out of the corner of our eye.

August 24-- Greater Than the Chaos

Passages: Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

If it had not been the LORD who was on our side--let Israel now say-- if it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters. Blessed be the LORD, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth. –Psalm 124

I thought my husband and I were the last two people on earth who had not seen the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Well apparently I was wrong, because when we went to see it last weekend at the IMAX theater, we were joined by 498 other eager fans. I must admit that it is worth it to see the film on IMAX—when Batman takes a head dive off some tall building, your stomach feels like you’ve jumped off with him. And yes, the film was as good as rumor has it.

Nonetheless, I found the movie to be rather disturbing. The Dark Knight intensely probes the darkness of the human soul, in which the best of men are twisted to evil and doing the right thing means ostracism and loss. Its villains are not the cartoon stock characters of the Adam West Batman days, but dark men who understand and exploit how precariously all human endeavors teeter on the brink of chaos. This is Batman for the post-9/11 world.

And as one who came to maturity in that world, I intuitively understood the randomness and chaos that the Joker and Two-Face represented. I watched news of the Oklahoma City bombings from my middle school library when I was supposed to be doing math problems. I remember participating in intruder drills my senior year of high school after the Columbine High School shootings. And I watched the Twin Towers fall on a television screen in my college dorm lounge. The Dark Knight bothered me because, unlike Jack Nicholson’s clown-like Joker or Tommy Lee Jones’ garishly purple-suited Two-Face, these villains seemed all too close to the chaotic, random evil that inhabits the world I know.

Yet if I think we’re the first generation to be faced with evil we don’t understand and can’t predict, then I haven’t read my Bible very well. Our lectionary Psalm this week uses highly symbolic language to express the same sense of chaos and uncertainty that I saw in The Dark Knight. Here the enemy is a “flood,” “torrent” (v. 4), and “raging waters” (v. 5), who would have “swallowed us up alive” (v. 3) and “swept us away” (v. 4). These labels evoke for the imagination the cosmic waters described in the Genesis creation story (Gen. 1:2), the same waters to which God brings order and light.

Here, too, God brings light and deliverance to those threatened by the chaos. The Psalm, despite its evocative depiction of the larger forces which threaten Israel, ultimately does not sound a note of despair but sings of hope. For the God of the Psalm is greater than the flood, greater than the raging waters, greater than the chaos that pervades the situation. God has provided an escape from the snare, deliverance for the people.

I must confess that I don’t care for the escapist language of this Psalm—I don’t think that God works like the Caped Crusader, sweeping in to rescue us from danger at the last possible second. Nor do I think that God’s being “on our side” (v. 1) means that the Divine Presence will choose between the hot girlfriend or the noble district attorney. What I do think this Psalm attempts to evoke, however, is the final word God has over the forces that threaten to overwhelm us. Death cannot destroy us; the enemy will not engulf us. God, who ultimately sides with all humanity, promises to be present even in the most chaotic, terrifying places and times. And the light God brings cannot be extinguished, even when we fear that the floods have washed it out.

To be able to function in this world—where so often our fears snuff out our love, where our desire for security swallows our zeal for justice—we must be rooted in the knowledge that the God “who made heaven and earth” (v. 8) still works for the well-being of all humankind. And grounded in that good news, we, too, are called to work for the same purposes. For even as the floods seem poised to overwhelm us, God will not abandon us to the chaos.

August 17-- Two for One Fun

Passages: Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:(10-20), 21-28

Last week, we looked at the early part of the Joseph story, in which the selfish and privileged boy, through a terrible reversal of his fortunes, begins his journey toward leadership. I told you that we would finish the story this week, and we will. But I also saw that this week is the Canaanite woman story in Matthew. You may not be familiar with it, but I think it is one of the most fascinating little stories in the gospels. So rather than chose between them, I’m going to do two shorter reflections on each. Sorry it is so long!

The Big Revelation

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Come closer to me." And they came closer. He said, "I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. 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. –Matthew 45: 4-9

If you’re familiar with the Joseph story, you’re aware that we’ve jumped over quite a bit of action since last week’s lectionary passage. After being sold into Egypt last week, the coat that symbolized all his power and privilege stripped from him, Joseph experiences a variety of ups and downs. He is put in charge of his master Potiphar’s house, only to be unjustly accused and sent to prison. Even after interpreting the dream of some officials in Pharaoh’s court, he remains forgotten. Yet his life changes again when Joseph is called upon to interpret a dream for Pharaoh. He becomes the de facto ruler of Egypt as a result, and through his grain rationing program the country has enough food to face seven years of famine… and profitably sell their excess to their less-prepared neighbors.

Now this is how Joseph’s brothers reenter the picture. After several dramatic scenes, today’s lectionary passage recounts the climactic moment in which Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. As one commentary I read points out, this is a story in which sorrow unexpectedly, impossibly turns to joy—even Joseph’s invitation for his father to “come down to me” and share in the bounty of Egypt (v. 9) echoes Jacob’s lament from last week that “I shall go down to Sheol [the underworld] to my son, mourning” (37:25). In the Joseph story, the impossible becomes possible.

Moreover, our characters have been transformed from selfish jerks into servant leaders. Judah, who sold Joseph for a tidy little profit in 37:26-27, offers himself in the place of Benjamin in 44:18-34. And Joseph, who openly bragged about his power over his brothers in the beginning of the story, now sees his power in a quite different light. Through his identification with the lowest rungs of society, he finally understands that God has given him power not for his own glorification, but “to preserve for you a remnant on earth” (v. 7). Much of Genesis, you may remember, has been about chosen people. Here, in Joseph’s final statement, it becomes clear why Joseph is chosen—so that God might feed the people of Egypt, and Canaan, and the whole world.

Could Joseph have been this kind of leader without the struggles of the past? I don’t think so. Joseph needed not only to see powerlessness, but to lose his own pretentious power in order to become the kind of leader who could give and forgive. For the experience of gaining and losing power freed him from its seductive grip—after being stripped of everything, after losing his life to his brothers and to his master, he could later act for justice without fear of loss.

As people of faith, we are a called people. That doesn’t always mean a life of prosperity and plentitude—if we listen to the biblical witness, being called by God usually means being stripped of all worldly pretensions and power. But as the Joseph story points out, it is this process of letting go that allows us to truly hear God’s call in the midst of our cluttered , self-important lives. If you take this seriously, it is kind of frightening. Yet in the kindom of God, only this path frees us to truly make a difference.

The Long-Lost, Never-Preached Story of the Canaanite Woman

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. –Matthew 15:21-28

A couple of years ago, our Massachusetts Bible Society Lenten Bible study class studied the Markan version of this passage (Mark 7:24-31). I remember Don Wells telling me that no one in class would be familiar with it. Much to my surprise, he was right. It’s one of the Bible’s troubling texts, and Jesus is the key player in it.

Why do we avoid this passage? Mainly because the Jesus we like to preach about, the Jesus that loves the child and the outcast, the Jesus of abundance, is not the Jesus we see here. Rather, we see a Jesus who calls a woman and her sick child “dogs,” a Jesus who comes off as narrowly ethnocentric. Those of us who have heard this story generally take it one of two ways—either Jesus is simply testing the woman’s faith (the preferred interpretation, in my experience), or Jesus is wrong and the woman changes his mind about the matter.

At the heart of these two interpretations is the larger issue of Jesus and perfection. Was Jesus perfect? For those who embrace the “testing theory” of this story, the answer to that question is really at stake in their reading. For if Jesus wasn’t testing this woman, that means he really did change his mind—he didn’t already know the full scope of his mission. It means, in the words of theologian Sabine Van Den Eynde, that Jesus “shows in his ensuing deeds a change in his own attitude.” And the notion of Jesus changing or evolving over his human life seems unpalatable to most of us. It means he is not perfect.

But what is perfection, anyway? Why would we have a problem with a Jesus who learns and grows through his ministry from the people to whom he ministers? What are the consequences if we believe that being perfect means never changing our minds when we receive new insight or information? Can we ever grow into servant leadership (see Joseph above) if we believe that perfection and change are mutually exclusive, that we can't learn from outcast, female foreigners like the Canaanite woman?

If we say that Jesus did learn from the Canaanite woman, the only person in Matthew’s gospel to whom he attributes great faith (v. 28), then we suggest that perfection is not a pre-packaged little instruction manual that we must follow precisely in order to be saved. That, as we know, is the kind of legalism Jesus critiqued in his ministry. Rather, perhaps Jesus’ ‘perfection’ is an openness to growth, to learning, and to honest encounter with the other. Perhaps by learning from the Canaanite woman, Jesus redefines what it means to be perfect. Rather than being supra-human, Jesus’ path of perfection leads us to fuller, richer humanity—the humanity which God truly intends for creation.

August 10-- True Leadership

Passages: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

Of all the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures—some inspiring, some troubling, some just plain bizarre (Lot and his daughters, anyone?)— the Joseph story ranks up there as one of my all-time favorites. One reason for this stems from the fact that my little sister sang in our high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat… which means I saw the musical six times in two weeks. Although I am therefore forever cursed to read the story with a chorus line singing, “Go, go, go Jo!” in my head, it also means that I know the story pretty well.

More importantly, though, I’ve always liked the Joseph story because, as Madeleine L’Engle put it in Sold into Egypt, it “is the journey of a spoiled and selfish young man finally becoming, through betrayal, anger, abandonment, unfairness, and pain, a full and complex human being” (15). Joseph’s tale strikes me as a paradigmatic story of growing up and, through that process, growing into leadership. Many throughout history have been born into leadership, whether or not they actually made good leaders. Great leaders, on the other hand, are those shaped and molded by adversity, those who have experienced being the abandoned and dispossessed. Great leaders are the ones who, in spite of it all, ground their call in something wider and deeper than their circumstances. Ultimately, this is the story of Joseph.

The lectionary gives us two pieces of the Joseph narrative in the next two weeks, this section in chapter 37 and then the climax of the story in chapter 45. So I’m going to bear with the “Go, go, go Jo!” on auto-repeat in my head and stick with this story for a bit. For this week, we’ll look at Joseph in the beginning of his tale.

Chapter 37 signals a change in tone from much of the Abraham/Issac/Jacob sequence, which really focuses on Israel’s chosenness—God promises to make of the descendents of Abraham a great nation. With the beginning of the Joseph story, God’s overt presence recedes into the background. But the theme of being chosen is still there. This time the human parent, Jacob, chooses Joseph over his other eleven sons. Not, we find out, a good way to promote familial harmony.

The symbol of Joseph’s privilege is the infamous “coat of many colors” Jacob makes for Joseph, which is more accurately translated as a “a long robe with sleeves” (Gen. 37:3)—it doesn’t give nearly as much scope for the imagination, but in either case the point is that this robe wouldn’t make it easy for Joseph to get down and dirty tending flocks. It sends a clear message that Joseph, apparently through no merit of his own, has been born into power and privilege. He’s the ancient equivalent of a trust-fund baby, of a Paris Hilton.

Now if you, like me, find yourself filled with annoyance at the mention of Paris Hilton’s name, you might be able to tap into some of the animosity Joseph’s brothers felt toward him. For naïve Joseph used his power primarily to perpetuate his own privileged lifestyle. As verse 2 tells us, Joseph was a snitch. Worse, he was a snitch on the children of Bilhah and Zilpah—because their mothers were the slaves of Rachel and Leah respectively, they were Jacob’s least favored children (cf. Genesis 33:1-2, where Jacob places them on the front lines for an anticipated attack). Very easy targets, then, if you want to make yourself look good. Thus the first four verses of this chapter tell us some very important things about this young inheritor of privilege—he is chosen simply by birth, he has power over others, and he abuses that power to his own gain. It sounds like a template for any number of leaders throughout history, and for several in the corridors of power today.

But as the text later tells us, God has also chosen Joseph. In reading the lectionary passage again this time, I was struck by Joseph’s words to his father when told to go find his brothers: “Here I am” (v. 13). Joseph’s response echoes the words of the prophets when they were called by God, including Samuel (1 Samuel 3:2-10) and Isaiah (Isaiah 6:8). And indeed, this episode of being sent marks the beginning of Joseph’s call as a leader. Joseph accepts the task, without a clue of the difficulties that lie ahead.

Finally, we come to that climatic scene, in which Joseph’s world of privilege turns upside down. His brothers ambush him and throw him into a pit, eventually selling him to some slave-trading Ishmaelites. God seems to have intentionally called Joseph down a path on which he will be degraded and dehumanized, a path on which he will become the most vulnerable on the social ladder. Yet it is through this path of marginalization that Joseph ultimately blossoms into the leader of Egypt.

In our own world, privilege and power surround us. We were born into some of it—perhaps through the wealth of our parents, or the color of our skin, or the nationality stamped on our passport. But Joseph’s story seems to suggest that when God calls us, it often means the loss of some power we take for granted. When Joseph said, “Here I am,” the result was the loss of all the comfort, all the power, he had enjoyed throughout his life. We, too, by answering Christ’s call, risk losing the luxuries those around us claim that we need to be complete in life.

Yet as Christ says, in losing one life we find another (Matthew 16:25). And in losing everything, Joseph begins to follow his call as a leader for others.