12 Pentecost, August 22, 2004

Good morning, fellow theologians.

I address you all as theologians because it is my theory that to be called to be a practicing Christian one is also called to be a theologian. All of us, laity and clergy alike. Theology is, after all, the academic title for the practice of God-talk, the practice of discussing God and discussing what God is saying to the world.

As an example of what I am talking about, this morning, in this sermon, I am asking you to listen as I engage the assigned lectionary scriptures and, I hope, demonstrate a way in which you too can "do theology".

And what a mixed bag of scripture we have to work with this morning. I would be less than honest if I did not admit that I find these particular lessons to be very difficult. Both difficult in their content and difficult in their combination. But, here goes…….

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble," says the psalmist. "Therefore we will not fear."

"I have heard a decree of destruction from the Lord God of hosts upon the whole land," says the prophet Isaiah.

"Come now and look upon the works of the Lord…It is he who makes war to cease in all the world, he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire," continues the psalmist.

"There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out," says Jesus of Nazareth.

First and foremost, of course, to hear these lessons, just scriptural snippets, or course, but juxtaposed as they are, can serve as a reminder that the God of the Bible is not a one dimensional entity – is not a Johnny one-note. The God of the old and New Testament is described as both creative and destructive, both judgmental and accepting, both loving and vindictive, both comforting and terrible. While treating God as not only existent, but also as actor, the Bible heaps metaphor upon metaphor, characteristic upon characteristic, deed upon deed.

But what particular messages and images do we hear today? Ah, for us theologians, that is the question, isn’t it?How we begin to make sense out of the lessons for this Sunday morning can teach us to make sense of other, often contradictory, enigmatic messages contained throughout the scriptures.

Before we start, let us agree on one theological principle: when we read or hear these lessons and try to tease out the meaning we must do so from within the context of our own time and place. We experience these lessons with the eyes and ears of 21^st Century Californians.

But the Book of Isaiah was written approximately 2700 years ago, the Psalms date from before the reign of King David, 3000 years ago, ago, and Letter to the Letter to the Hebrews was written around 1934 years ago, and the Gospel of Luke was written 1900 years ago.So, by any measure, all this scripture was written in times very far and very different from ours. So our search for meaning must also include some attempt to uncover the context of the period of time when the texts were written, as well as keeping in mind the present contextual time.

The Prophet Isaiah writes what has been called a judgment oracle, during a rebellion in Judah led by King Hezekiah in 701 BCE. Coincidentally, we hear these words in 2004 during a time that our country is fighting a war in Iraq.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, a Jewish Christian, is writing within the framework of Second Temple Judaism and during the period either right before or right after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. This was a hugely catastrophic event for the Jewish people that fed into a stream of writing that anticipated the end of time – or, more hopefully, the beginning of a new time.

Coincidentally, we hear these words just three years after the catastrophic event of the destruction of the Twin Towers and the advent of a new era when people here in the United States and people throughout the world are living in dread fear of future terrorist attacks.

The Gospel of Luke writes of Jesus talking of the heavy demands of discipleship and the pain that will be felt by those whose unbelief will exclude them from entry into the kingdom of God. In contrast, we hear these words at a time when the Kingdom of God has moved far, far out of center stage, and has been replaced by, among other things, the Kingdom of Wealth.

We live in a world consumed and obsessed by money and what money can buy. Those with money live like Kings and Queens – or how they are told Kings and Queens should live. Those without money often live mired in pain and envy and hatred of the wealthy, and often in perpetual grief of exclusion from the Kingdom of Wealth.

Psalm 46, the oldest of our scripture readings, is believed by scholars to be one of the "songs of Zion, celebrating God’s ultimate victory over the nations." Luther was inspired to write the hymn "A Mighty Fortress is our God" by the first line of this psalm: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." The psalm writes of the belief of the people of Israel that God will be with them even though "the nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter."

Coincidentally, we hear these words at a time when the leaders of our country tell us that victory is assured because God is on our side in our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time these same leaders remind us that we have much to fear from attack bys terrorist enemies. We are to be comforted by the promise of God’s favorable judgment on the United States of America while we are constantly reminded to live in fear of hidden enemies here at home.

From these comparisons, it would seem that there is nothing new in the sweep of history. There has always been strife and bloodshed. There have always been false gods and worship of earthly possessions. There has always been belief that God is on our side, no matter what side we are on.

Now, another prism within which we practice theology is our own personal angle of vision. For instance, I am a self-admitted "Big Picture, Broad Brush" type of person.

I instinctively search for the overarching ideas, the underlying themes, the unifying principles. No wonder I struggle so to play bridge – a game seemingly made for people who look more at the particular and the different, rather than at the universal or the pattern.

So, to look at our lessons today from my Big Picture perspective, the one overarching theme I can discern is that each one of the lessons contains writing that is an example of what is called "apocalyptic eschatology."

Apocalyptic Eschatology is a literary form that was much in vogue in ancient times and particularly in the period surrounding the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. This kind of writing is concerned with revelation – mainly received from heavenly personages – of the end of time.

One could also say that this kind of writing consists of theological predictions of how God will behave when the world ends. Or, if you prefer a more positive outlook, of how God will behave when the world as we know it ends and a new world begins. Apocalyptic Eschatology is literature predicting an end of one age and the beginning of a new one. Hence the imagery of the "destruction from the Lord upon the whole land"; "The weeping and gnashing of teeth"; "the last will be first and the first last."

And, as we are being theologians this morning, we bring to the lessons yet another perspective: our heritage as Episcopalians, as heirs of the Anglican Tradition. We bring to scripture those other two legs of our cultural stool: reason, and tradition.

Now, as a practicing theologian, I have every right to voice an opinion and I think that the people who chose these particular lessons and grouped them together to be the Lectionary on the 12 Sunday of Pentecost in Year C has not done us any favors.

Taken together, or separately, I find these lessons to be unpleasant, conflicting, and confusing. Not that I reject the idea that God’s actions can be described as harsh and violent, more that in these lessons I can’t find any unifying message upon which to base an analysis. For instance, God is described as harshly destructive, a consuming fire, a power that excludes and throws out.

But we know that we as Anglicans, as Episcopalians, have a tradition of looking at God’s work in the world from an incarnational perspective. We believe that God so loved the world that God suffered both birth and death along with us; that God so loved the world that God came and dwelt among us.

Along with Saint Paul, we are "convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come…will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord."

So when Luke reports Jesus as saying that "many will try to enter and will not be able," as a theologian I can say that I do not think Jesus actually said it. I think that Luke was writing in his own time and place to fellow Gentile Christian Jews, encouraging them to be steadfast in their embrace of their new Christian beliefs in the face of opposition from more traditional Jews.

I cannot believe that the Jesus who lived and breathed inclusion, who went to great lengths to demonstrate the sinfulness of excluding anyone from any table, I cannot believe that that Jesus would describe the Kingdom of God as excluding any, much less many.

So, whatever point Luke was trying to make, it could not have been about the Kingdom of God., because it conflicts with what our tradition and reason tells us about the Kingdom, as described elsewhere throughout scripture.

I do believe, however, that Jesus would make the point that in the Kingdom of God some will be last who were first, and some first who were last. And that is the Good News I have been able to discern through our theological exercise this morning.

The Good News is that the social order of this world is not the order in God’s Kingdom. Everything in the Kingdom could well be a reversal, or at the very least grossly different from the order of rank in our world. In fact, there may be no order at all in the Kingdom of God.

Those of great wealth and power in this world could be reduced to waiting at the end of the line. Those who experience powerlessness and oppression in this world could become the favored guests who not only head the line but get the most prestigious seats at the heavenly banquet.

However, make no mistake, God’s love is unconditional, and so no one will be excluded, no matter how long they may have to wait.

Now that you have heard me tease out part of the meaning and part of the Good News in these lessons this morning, I hope that, if you haven’t already, that you will develop a taste for the discipline of theology. Re member that not everything written in scripture has an equal weight of meaning or truth, and that our Anglican tradition requires that we must always engage our reason and experience when we enter into a dialogue with the bible, or any other text about God.

We are so fortunate here at St. James to worship in an atmosphere where we are all encouraged to practice our call to be theologians, and where study and questioning is not only encouraged but celebrated.

And for this we say, Thanks be to God!