Wednesday 17 June 2015

Hagar: Turning the Story Inside Out (Gen 16:1-16)



(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on May 31, 2015)

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Introduction

Good morning! I’m honored to have been invited to share in worship with you today. Thank you. I’m also delighted to be back home: home in Richmond, home with my family, home here at Gayton Road. And I’m excited to have the opportunity to tell you just a sliver of the story of my last few years in Sheffield, England.

As many of you will know, I went to Sheffield for a PhD in Biblical Studies. I went to study the stories of Genesis, the stories about a very special family that grew into the people of Israel.

But reading stories is a dicey business. Because the more we read a story, the less we can keep our own story straight. The story on the page becomes less and less distinguishable from the story of our lives. (Which, I think, is both the beauty and the danger of our relationship with the Bible.) As I read and reread the stories of Genesis, I found myself asking, “Am I reading an ancient story or my own story? Am I interpreting these stories, or are they interpreting me?”

A Bit of Holy Gossip: Hagar’s Story

One of the stories I read was the story of Hagar, who was Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant. It’s an incredibly rich story. You can find it in its traditional translation in Genesis 16. But today, I’m going to tell it like I would in a conversation, like a piece of holy gossip:

"Sarah wanted a child. So that she would be, as she put it, 'built up.' Complete. A respectable woman. She claimed bitterly that God had made it impossible for her to have a child. So she devised a plan. Surrogate motherhood. She suggested to Abraham that he have a child with her Egyptian servant Hagar, and then she could claim the child as hers. Abraham agreed. Soon Hagar was pregnant. But instead of feeling 'built up,' Sarah felt the opposite. She realized that actually she had become less and less in the eyes of her servant, Hagar. So Sarah tried to put Hagar back down in her place. She even became a bit violent with her. So Hagar ran away. Away into the wilderness. Away into the threat of death.

"But it wasn’t death that found her in the wilderness. It was a messenger of God. And the messenger did something that neither Abraham nor Sarah ever had. He called her by name, 'Hagar'—which means 'the outsider,' or, we might say, 'wayfaring stranger.' He talked to her. Told her that she should name her son, “Ishmael,” which means “God hears”—because God had heard her when Sarah had hurt her. And Hagar, overwhelmed with this divine attention, named God. The only character in the Bible to do so. She named him, 'El Roi,' which means 'the God Who Sees Me.'"

Hagar Turns Israel Inside Out

The spotlight of our story opens on Sarah. But it’s Hagar who steals the show. And that’s incredible, considering who she is. Hagar is an outsider. She could not be more different than the family she served. She is their opposite ethnically, socially, emotionally. She’s Egyptian, they’re Hebrew. She’s a servant, they’re her masters. She’s away from family, they are family.

But if we look closer, we begin to see that she is opposite them the way our reflection is opposite us in the mirror. Who does God call by name? To whom does God promise innumerable children? Abraham, yes. But also Hagar. And whose dramatic story features an exodus from slavery and divine salvation in the wilderness? Israel’s, of course. But also Hagar’s.

Hagar may be an Egyptian servant of Abraham and Sarah, but in her experience she is just as much an insider as they are. This truth is told beautifully and simply by two names, and if you remember nothing else from today’s story, remember these two names: Hagar and her soon-to-be son, Ishmael. Ishmael means “God hears.” And Hagar means “the outsider.” The story of Hagar, then, is plainly and profoundly this: God hears the outsider. God hears the cries of the Egyptian and the Ishmaelite kicking in her womb. If you’re ancient Israelite, that’s no different than saying, God hears the foreigner, the enemy.

So the story of Hagar turned the story of Israel inside out. Whenever the ancient Israelites might have been tempted to think they had privileged access to divine encounter, to divine truth, the story of Hagar reminded them otherwise: God hears the outsider. God goes searching in the wilderness for the outsider and calls the outsider by name. God promises life to the outsider.

Hagar Turns My Story Inside Out

And if we listen to the story, if we welcome it to our own world, then we might hear a similar message.

If God lives not just within the story of the religious insiders Sarah and Abraham but also outside it, then that means God escapes any of the boundaries we might set up. God is contained in scripture, yes. But not by scripture. God is contained in the church, yes. But not by the church. Whatever story we tell of God, it will be turned inside out by the God who hears and cares for the outsider.

And it’s precisely here the story of Hagar becomes my story, where it grabs hold of my story and turns it inside out. In my three and half years at Sheffield, I spent the majority of my time with international housemates and friends. One friend remarked that if the police saw the contacts on my cell phone, they’d have mistaken me for someone in cahoots with some transglobal mafia: Itzel, Buyoung, Katka, Vlad…. Many of my friends would have identified themselves not as Christians but as atheists or agnostics.

Now as the story of Hagar began to saturate my mind and heart, it became less and less a distant tale and more and more a reality in my own life, for I saw that while my housemates and friends were “outsiders” in a religious sense, we shared the same kinds of life experiences, the same kinds of existential questions: the same joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, anxieties and desires. If my friends were opposite me, they were only opposite as a reflection is in the mirror.

God Is a Name

Earlier I said that the truth of the Hagar story is told beautifully in two names: Ishmael and Hagar. Well, there’s one more. Hagar gives God a new name, the only biblical character to do so. El Roi. The God Who Sees Me. Hagar encounters the same divine reality that Abraham and Sarah do, but she uses different words to express it. She calls God by a different name. But she refers to the same living truth. The God who hears the cries and prayers of Abraham and Sarah also hears the cry and prayer of her heart. The God of Israel is also her God.

And all of this got me to thinking. Maybe God is just a name for a reality that everyone experiences—no matter how far inside or outside the doors of church. Maybe God is translatable, and my friends and housemates just use different names. Different words to express the same reality, the same experience.

Before I left Sheffield, I spoke about this with two good friends who are agnostic or atheist. I asked them, “What guides you?” Their response, obviously, was not “God.” But listen closely, listen to what is living and breathing and walking within their words, and…well, perhaps they are just speaking other names for what you and I would name “God.”

My friend Vlad answered that “community” guides him. He drew the beautiful analogy that life is like a canvas. He spoke about the friendships he had found in Sheffield, and said, “With you guys, I found a slice of canvas and my brush strokes intermingled with yours and I felt truly free to paint.” It was one of those time, he said, one of those “rare flickers in the darkness,” where he could make out the beauty of life, where he could “grow.”

My friend Daniela answered simply this: “I feel guided by my love for others. I know it sounds strange but love is what guide me in life, in everything I do.”

What I call God, my friends call something else. But listen to what is simmering within their words, to what is living within their words. Listen to what their words are pointing to. What is “God,” if not a name we give to the great empty canvas[1] that contains all of creation and quietly invites us to see that it is good, very good—indeed, beckons us to paint that goodness and beauty?[2] What is “God,” if not a name we give to the divine depth we sense in others, in the strangers who make themselves a part of our life and bless it, intermingling their brush strokes with ours and inspiring us to paint even more beautifully? (Is it not their spirit of selflessness and self-giving that animates what we call “the body of Christ”?) What is “God,” if not a name we give to the “rare flickers in the darkness,” to that lamp that lights our path just enough for us to keep walking, just enough for us to grow? What is “God,” if not Love? What is “God,” if not the call to selflessly love others, a call without “why” that ruptures our self-centeredness, that overthrows our simple economies of reciprocated affection?

The Kingdom of God Turns Every Story Inside Out

I don’t mean to say all this to suggest that we all believe the same thing, or that our faith in Jesus Christ should be watered down to bland expressions that the universe can agree on. I do say it, though, because I believe that God lives in the lives of outsiders, calling on them as he calls on us, and that outsiders call on God just as we do. Prayer is not the exclusive privilege of preachers, pastors, popes, pious people. Prayer is the heart speaking, crying out from the depths of a personal experience that no-one can know completely. Hagar the outsider prayed, whether or not she would have named it as such. The cries of her heart reached the heart of God. And even though she called God by a different name than did Abraham and Sarah, she too heard the call of God in her life, the promise of God for more life.

The story of Hagar, I believe, is ultimately a story of the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that “obeys the law of reversals in virtue of which whatever is first is last, whatever is out is in, whatever is lost is saved.”[3] Just like the story of Hagar, the Kingdom of God turns all of our stories inside out. The outsider is in. And for a moment, we see the outsider reflected in ourselves.

When we thank God for a moment of grace, others may thank their lucky stars. But the same salvation that visits us in the wilderness visits them. The same spirit that haunts and hallows our hearts with sighs too deep for words stirs in their hearts too. Whoever or whatever we thank for the moments of grace in our lives, whether we call water in the desert luck or God, we’re all in this together. We all experience something beyond us, within us, something we cannot quite put words to, something that captivates us and promises us life and keeps us searching for goodness and hoping for resurrection and newness, something that infuses us with the breath of life even as it takes our breath away in wonder and awe.

We’re all, in one way or another, wayfaring strangers.[4] And so the message of Hagar, the message of the Kingdom of God, is not to be caught up in the specific names we say and the specific identities that we claim, but in the lives that we live and the love that we share and the work that we do. The message of Hagar, the message of the Kingdom of God, is to listen for God going by other names. Some of our brothers and sisters outside the church may simply say “Love” or “Reality” or “Universe,” but listen to what’s being said within those words. And be willing to work alongside them, to serve God, even if under a different name. Remember that God hears them just as God hears you. That God visits them in the wilderness of their lives just as God visits you in yours. That God promises them the same life God promises you. In time and in honesty, you may find yourself sharing your own story, a story that traces the grace and goodness and beauty and truth of life to a particular human named Jesus, who was born laughing and crying as a child into our world and loved it all up to his death, a human whose life was marked by the powerless power of forgiveness and the promise of resurrection and new life. But until you share that story—and after you share that story—listen closely to what others around you are saying. Listen for God going by other names, and don’t be afraid to intermingle your brush strokes with those who speak differently. The good news of Hagar, the good news of the Kingdom, is the good news that God is always already on the outside. And if we’re looking to welcome God into our lives, well…outside might be the best place to begin.



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[1] The image of God as the great empty canvas on which creation is painted finds inspiration in Rubem Alves, Transparencies in Eternity (Miami: Convivium Press, 2010), ebook loc. 162, which imagines God as “a great, huge Emptiness that encompasses the whole beauty of the universe,” an idea Alves expands on with specific images: “If the glass were not empty, we wouldn’t drink water from it. If the mouth were not empty, we wouldn’t eat fruit with it. If the womb were not empty, life wouldn’t grow in it.”


[2] The idea of humanity as a collective of painters who participate in creation, who make the world good, very good, derives from Gen 1:26, in which God affirms humanity as little creators, as creatures resembling the image and likeness of the Creator God. Rabbinic Judaism developed this idea into tikkun olam, “the healing of the world,” which refers to humanity’s shared responsibility in God’s creation, in completing or perfecting creation.


[3] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), ebook loc. 309.


[4] Just as Hagar is “the outsider,” so are the ancestral family and Israel, whose experience of faith is constituted by “sojourning” (“outsidering”) in lands not their own. Hebrews 11:13-14 reiterates that inherent within faith is an element of outsiderness. “All these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.” In other words, none of us have ever “made it.” Religious and non-religious alike, we live—if we live at all—by faith.

Being Led into the Kingdom (Luke 18:15-17)


(Homily for the University of Sheffield Chaplaincy's Ecumenical Communion on Jan 21, 2015)

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Children Are Not in the Way—They Are the Way

A little girl is walking home with her father. He is preoccupied with his cell phone. She is wide-eyed and enthralled by the world around her. She picks a handful of wildflowers, and one-by-one she bestows them as gifts. First to a friendly dog who crosses her path. Then to a still bird on the sidewalk whose life has expired. Next to a homeless man reclining on a park bench. Her father walks ahead all this time.[1] To the daughter, the world around her is a mystery that calls for her attention, calls for her blessing. To the father, the world around is a hindrance. The dog, the fallen bird, the homeless man, they are distractions. The father—and perhaps we ourselves can identify with him sometimes—the father has already worked out what’s what, what’s important. He has divided the world up into what he wants and what he doesn’t want, what will help him get what he wants and what will not, things that matter and things that don’t. So it’s not that he doesn’t care at all about dogs, or fallen birds, or homeless people. It’s just that they are ultimately diversions. They get in the way of what matters.

The disciples in today’s passage bear a striking resemblance to the father. You can imagine the scene. A crowd has gathered around to hear Jesus teach. But several parents insist on bringing their infants and young children to Jesus. So you’ve got all the…lovely sounds and smells associated with small children. Crying. Screaming. Maybe diapers that need changing. And so the disciples direct a few long, hard stares at the parents and then begin to mutter disapprovingly. “These little kids are a distraction. How can Jesus teach with them around?” It’s not that the disciples are anti-children. It’s just that, for them, children don’t matter as much as Jesus matters. The little kids are getting in the way.

But funnily enough, to Jesus, it’s the disciples who are getting in the way. He speaks up, “Let the little children come to me, and don’t stop them; for it is to ones such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs” (18:15-16). In other words, Jesus says to the disciples, “You guys could learn a thing or two from these little kids. They aren’t getting in the way. They are the way.”

The Kingdom of God, according to Jesus, belongs to people like little children. Little children show us a thing or two about life in the Kingdom.

Others to Whom the Kingdom Has Been “Abandoned”?

And maybe it’s not just children who could show us a thing or two about the Kingdom. A couple months ago, I was reading John Steinbeck’s novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, in which the main character, Ethan, has surrendered his life to the pursuit of money. He has his misgivings, but ultimately he agrees with the worldly consensus of what’s what, of what matters. For Ethan and the world, money is the measure of a good life. It explains the way the world works: it explains power, it explains success, it explains happiness. And so Ethan pursues it at all costs. But in the midst of his pursuit, he pauses to reflect. And for a short moment, he realizes something. He realizes that we live our lives according to what matters to us, according to what we can measure or explain (which is usually money, or power, or reputation). And consequently we’re blind to what we cannot measure or explain; we’re blind to everything that doesn’t matter to us. “I guess,” he says, “we’re all, or most of us, the [keepers] of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn’t explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn’t explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics.”[2]

Jesus singled out children in today’s gospel reading, but I wonder if Ethan’s reflection might not suggest others to whom the Kingdom of God belongs. Could it be that “a great part of the world”—indeed, the Kingdom of God—has been “abandoned” to the people whom Ethan calls “[the] insane…, fools, and mystics”? The least of our world. The distractions of our world. The people who think differently, who do not follow our way of thinking about the world and what matters. The people who are less in touch with our habits and our miseries and perhaps more in touch with their hearts and the mystery of life, with the spiritual realities embodied in daily life, like hope and love and forgiveness. Could it be that, along with children, they are not in the way but rather are the way itself? That they show us a thing or two about life in the Kingdom of God?

Being Led into the Kingdom

Henri Nouwen would answer these questions with a hearty “Yes.” Nouwen was a respected intellectual, often found lecturing in hallowed Ivy League halls, until one day he left behind his academic pursuits and surrendered his life to living in community with the severely handicapped. He tells many stories about this drastic shift in life. Particularly poignant is the story of his relationship with Adam, a man who could not speak or move without assistance. Adam—who in this world’s eyes might be considered like a little child or a fool or even an insane person—Adam showed Nouwen a thing or two about the Kingdom of God. Nouwen explains, “[Adam became] a friend and a trustworthy companion, explaining to me by his very presence what I should have known all along: that what I most desire in life—love, friendship, community, and a deep sense of belonging—I was finding with him. His very gentle being was communicating with me in our moments together, and he began to educate me about love in a profoundly deep way.”[3]

When one of Nouwen’s friends came to visit—a minister, no less—he questioned Nouwen about his decision: “Henri, is this where you are spending your time? … Did you leave the university, where you were such an inspiration to so many people, to give your time and energy to Adam? … Surely you have better things to do with your time.”[4] But Nouwen saw that, while Adam could not interact as most people do, he was living in the Kingdom of God—indeed, that he was inviting Nouwen into the Kingdom. “Could Adam pray?” Nouwen asks. “Did he know who God is and what the Name of Jesus means? Did he understand the mystery of God among us? For a long time I thought about these questions. For a long time I was curious about how much of what I knew, Adam could know, and how much of what I understood, Adam could understand. But now I see that these were for me questions from ‘below,’ questions that reflected more my anxiety and uncertainty than God’s love. God’s questions, the questions that were from ‘above’ were, ‘Can you let Adam lead you into prayer? Can you believe that I am in deep communion with Adam and that his life is a prayer? Can you let Adam be a living prayer at your table? Can you see my face in the face of Adam?’”[5]

Adam, in other words, showed Nouwen how to receive the Kingdom. Like a child. Not with a mind calibrated to what matters and what doesn’t, not with hands that sought to earn or achieve the object of their desire, but with a heart open to the grace of God. Outside my house here in Sheffield, there’s a profound piece of graffiti that reads, “The best things in life aren’t things.” Whether or not Adam knew this doesn’t matter, because Adam lived it. Adam depended for his life on love and hope and forgiveness. And day after day, Nouwen was led by Adam into the Kingdom of God.

Can You Let the Least of These Lead You Into the Kingdom?

And for us? Perhaps the story of Nouwen and Adam—along with the story of Jesus and the children—offers a timely reminder in this new year, as we settle back into old patterns and routines of work and life, into a mindset of what matters and what does not matter. Perhaps it’s a reminder to look outside our presumptions and habits, to attend to the distractions and things that we think don’t matter—to what disrupts our lives, what is different, what is not normal. We’re reminded that more often than not, we are not the guides to the Kingdom of God, but rather the guests. And that more often than not we’re invited into the Kingdom by the people we least expect. We’re reminded to listen with Nouwen to the questions from above: Can you let others lead you into prayer? Can you let the least of these guide you into the Kingdom? Can you see my face in the faces you so often ignore or dismiss?

Yes, yes, may it be so. Amen.


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[1] This story is adapted from the children’s story Sidewalk Flowers. JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith, Sidewalk Flowers (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2015).


[2] John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (New York: Penguin, 2008), 70.


[3] Henri Nouwen, Adam: God’s Beloved (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis, 1997).


[4] Nouwen, Adam.


[5] Nouwen, Adam.

Into the Wilderness (Matt 4:1-11)


(Homily for the University of Sheffield Chaplaincy's Ecumenical Communion on Feb 25, 2015)

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We are now in Lent. A season when we encounter and acknowledge our limits and our weaknesses, our shortcomings and our inadequacies, our utter dependence on factors outside our control. A season when we journey through the wilderness. Commonly we reflect on this time in the wilderness and consider it to be a time of purification, sanctification, spiritual epiphany, as a time of absence that will make even more brilliant the triumphant presence of God. It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves, to “know” in advance that all will be well. It’s easy to take shortcuts through the wilderness, to short-circuit the journey. And in this sense, it’s easy to shortchange ourselves. Because the wilderness journey isn’t an obstacle or test that we eventually pass, a challenge that we ultimately overcome, an experience we leave behind when Lent ends. The wilderness journey isn’t a point on the map of life. It is the point of life. Indeed, if today’s gospel story is any indication, Jesus does not promise to lead us out of the wilderness. If anything, he promises to lead us deeper into it. 

When I hear the story of Jesus in the wilderness, I can’t help hearing echoes of the “Grand Inquisitor”—a short story written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the “Grand Inquisitor,” Jesus visits Sevilla, Spain, at the height of the Inquisition. The cardinal—the Grand Inquisitor himself—recognizes Jesus and has him seized and imprisoned. He chastises Jesus for returning, for threatening the power of the Church. The cardinal explains to Jesus that the Church has seized God’s power—the power of love, the powerless power of the heart—and made it their own, a power of the hand, a concrete power by which they rule, by which they promise security and salvation for all their followers. And in a fascinating interpretation of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, the Grand Inquisitor declares that in the desert Jesus had the opportunity to claim and establish divine authority. By saying “yes” to the “temptations,” Jesus could have made things infinitely easier for humanity. What else does humanity want but a sure thing—security, certainty, an authority that answers all its questions. But Jesus says “no.” “No” to the bread-into-stone kind of power that would instantly satisfy our needs, “no” to miracles that would instantly dispel our anxieties, “no” to an authority that we would be powerless to resist. And by saying “no,” the Grand Inquisitor charges, Jesus leaves us with a terrifying freedom. Jesus leads us, essentially, into the wilderness with him. With questions about how we’ll make it through this day, let alone the next. With uncertainties about what’s right. With anxieties about everything that lies outside our control.

And Jesus’ response to the Grand Inquisitor’s charge? As Dostoevsky writes: “The [Grand Inquistor] longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He [Jesus] suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!' And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.”

In its own way, I think that the story of the “Grand Inquisitor” restages the story of Jesus in the wilderness and makes clear that, for Jesus, the wilderness is not a stage in life to be completed, but rather the stage of life itself. For just as in the biblical telling, Jesus does not offer any answers or solutions to the wilderness—to the difficulties, uncertainties, and anxieties of life. Rather he responds with love. With a kiss, a kiss that—as Dostoevsky puts it—“glows in the [Grand Inquisitor’s] heart.”

In the end, the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky says, “adheres to his idea.” He does not trust in God, in the freedom of God’s love, in the power of the heart rather than the power of the hand. He cannot accept that life is a wilderness. Indeed, where’s the gospel in that? How can the wilderness be good news?

Perhaps it’s because it is only in the wilderness that we really encounter God’s love. A love that draws us out of ourselves, a love that believes all things, inviting us, enticing us into the newness of life. Only in the wilderness, only where we must admit that we don’t have it all quite figured only, only where we are not enslaved by the comforts and familiarities of our own world, only where we must let go of any power we have claimed and instead allow our hearts to be claimed by a powerless power—only here do we really encounter God’s Love—whether in the small things like a stranger’s smile or a neighbor’s cry for help, or in the big things like a risky commitment or a family’s forgiveness. Far from endangering life, the wilderness is what enables life. It is the space of transformation and growth. It is the space where we cannot depend simply on what we know or what we like or what we control but must instead entrust ourselves to God’s love.

This Lent, Jesus will not lead us out of the wilderness. If anything, he will lead us further into it. But we should not despair, for it is here in the wilderness that God’s love glows within our hearts, aglow like a pillar of fire, leading us ever onward into the promise of new life.

A Lenten Catastrophe (Mark 11:15-19)


(Homily for the University of Sheffield Chaplaincy's Ecumenical Communion on Mar 11, 2015)

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If I had had the chance to consult with the author of the gospel of Mark before he sent his final manuscript in for publication…I probably would have asked him to reconsider today’s gospel text.  Was he sure that Jesus had demonstrated so aggressively against the moneychangers in the Temple?  Was this the same Jesus who told us to love one another?  The same Jesus who, according to Matthew and Luke, told us even to love our enemies?  I wouldn’t want to deny Jesus feelings of righteous indignation and perhaps a few choice words—but he did actually overturn the moneychangers’ tables and drive them out?  Isn’t that a bit too much?

This anxiety of mine…it was probably shared by the moneychangers themselves, and it certainly was by the chief priests and scribes, who were none too pleased with what Jesus had done.  So, oddly enough, for once I find myself standing opposite Jesus, in the company of his opponents.  I, like them, am appalled.  Why, Jesus?  Was it really necessary to overturn those tables and chairs?  Was it really necessary to drive these guys out?  Why not a quiet word with them first, at least an attempt at reconciliation?

To hear Jesus’ response, I return to the story, this time listening a bit more closely.  Perhaps Jesus is overturning more than literal tables and chairs.  Perhaps there is a part of me that is left overturned as well….

The first strange, defamiliarizing echo I hear is precisely in this word “overturned.”  In the Greek, Jesus “katastrepsen” the tables.  That is, Jesus was a catastrophe [to the tables].  This word appears only here in Mark, which is striking, because it suggests that the only real catastrophe in Mark is Jesus.  And he is a catastrophe not to the objectionable world around him—not to the greedy tax collectors or the oppressive Romans.  He is a catastrophe to his own people, to the Temple, to the heart of his religion.

That’s not to say, however, that Jesus indiscriminately attacks religion.  On the contrary, Jesus does a bit of teaching after he’s done catastrophizing, and we hear that “the whole crowd”—presumably all the Temple-goers—were “spellbound by his teaching.”  Or more literally, they were driven out (e˙kplh/ssw, cf. “expel”) of their minds and hearts by what he said.  So while Jesus drives out (e˙kba¿llw) the settled moneychangers, he drives the rest of the crowd out of their minds, out of their hearts, with hope and desire for what he teaches.  And according to Mark, what he teaches is a bit of Isaiah, something about the Temple being “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Isa 56:7).  And if Jesus was teaching them from this passage in Isaiah, then it’s likely he also quoted the surrounding bits of Isaiah, in which God gathers in the foreigners, and the outcasts, and yet others (Isa 56:6-8), and in which Isaiah rails against the leaders of Israel “who have all turned to their own way, to their own gain” (56:11).  It’s not difficult to see, then, what’s going on.  Like a righteous whirlwind, Jesus storms against the powers that be in the Temple, the settled ones who are exploiting others for their own gain.  And then he proclaims God’s care for the outsiders—the foreigners, the outcasts, and still others.  No wonder the “whole crowd” is driven out of their hearts and minds with hope.  God loves them.  God says that they’re welcome, they’re accepted, even if the religious leaders who keep them on the outside say or imply otherwise.

Jesus strikes out at the settled, satisfied, and selfish, and leaves the crowd dumbstruck, hope-stricken.  He catastrophizes the center even as he captivates the margins, leaving them trembling with anticipation for what is to come.  He drives out the powers that be, but the nobodies—the populace on the periphery, the potential on the edges—he drives them out of their mind with hope and desire.

And with me?  Perhaps it’s just the same.  Was I offended that Jesus overturned a few tables and chairs?  Perhaps really I was offended that Jesus would dare upset the heart of his own people and faith, and that he would therefore dare upset my heart too.  Perhaps this Lent, perhaps even today, even this afternoon, Jesus would come storming into the temple of my heart and unsettle the self-satisfied center of me, that part of me which through its very profession of my hopes and dreams and faith is always subtly seeking my own gain, my own security. 

But even if that’s so, it’s only half the story.  Because as Jesus overthrows my center, he also overwhelms my outer limits with hope and desire. 

A simple, simple story to give this some flesh and bones.  It is a common story.  One we live out all the time. 

We lose something important to us.  A friend.  A place we call home.  A way of living.  And we grasp.  We grasp after what we’ve lost, clawing for its impossible return.  It’s painful.  Catastrophic even.  Our world is overturned.  And yet, in time, we find that other parts of ourselves are flourishing.  Our world is overwhelmed with new possibility.  New friendships.  New places to call home.  New ways of living.  We find, in fact, that whereas before we had settled into security, into our self-satisfied center, into a rhythm of selfishness, we are now again alive around the edges, sensitive and receptive and vulnerable to the world around us.  We are seeking—as the prayer says—not so much to be understood as to understand, not so much to be loved as to love.

And so I close now with this short prayer, a prayer that perhaps is already being realized in our lives this very day: Come, holy catastrophe.  Come into the temples of our hearts, where we are settled, satisfied, and yes, selfish.  And wreck us once more that we might be renewed, that we might hope anew for what you are yet to do in our world.  Amen.



Whose Word Do We Hear? (Luke 8:16-18)


(Homily for the University of Sheffield Chaplaincy's Ecumenical Communion on May 6, 2015)

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Words That Make Up Who We Are

I’ve heard it said that our body is knit together by words. Words that are intricately woven by others: family, friends, workmates, the media. The way we live—the way we wake up, prepare for the day, eat, interact with others, sleep —all of this tends to follow a script that has been written, spoken by others. That’s certainly been the case for my eating habits. As a child, I would be woken by my mom—“Uppy uppy, little puppy”—to eat a hearty early breakfast; I would hear my dad announce lunch around noon; and I would be called in from play to eat a filling dinner around 6 or so (I guess that would be “tea” in Yorkshire?). This is the script my body followed all my life. Until Sheffield. Until I began living with housemates from all over the world, housemates who would eat breakfast at 11 in the morning and dinner at 9 in the evening. Until one day, someone overturned my world with the simplest of questions: “Why not just eat when you’re hungry?”

Eat when I’m hungry. A logical idea. Except that I quickly discovered, this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Having always eaten according to the routine written into my body—one that, admittedly, served me very well—I was out of touch with my body itself. I couldn’t hear what my body, my stomach was saying to me. When the clock struck 6 in the evening, all I could hear was the echo of my Mom calling to my brother and me, “Boys! Dinner’s ready.” But what about my body itself? If I had shared a late lunch with my housemates just a few hours before, maybe it wasn’t hungry? Maybe it was saying a new word: “Dinner can wait.”

I imagine there are countless other examples, for me and for you, when the habits inscribed on our bodies speak more loudly than our bodies themselves. When we hear the words that were spoken in the past more clearly than any word being spoken in the present. And similarly, countless other instances when we hear the words we are familiar with more easily than another person’s actual words. When we somehow manage to transform another’s words into the words we’re expecting. Like in those debates where it’s clear that neither person is really listening to the other but rather merely reciting rehearsed lines and memorized quips past each other’s heads. We are indeed an entwined mass of words. Words that others have been woven into our bodies, words that we recite to ourselves to make sense of life. Words that make up who we are, how we think.

Whose Word Do We Hear?

And I think it is just this bodily tapestry of words that Jesus is addressing in our Gospel text today. At this point in Luke, he’s been talking a lot about the word of God. And here he says it’s like a lamp. It’s set out in plain view, meant to give light to everyone. The word of God, in other words, is obvious. Immediate. Right in front of our eyes. It’s not supposed to be hidden. It’s getting itself said out in the open, out in public, so that those who enter this world may see its light. As Jesus says in the parable preceding today’s text, the word of God is like seed sown generously, indiscriminately, over every sort of land. Sometimes the heart is like fertile ground and receives it. But other times the heart doesn’t because things like cares and riches and pleasures get in the way. Because our concerns—that entangled body of words that keeps us focused on ourselves—keep us from hearing a new word, God’s word.

So what’s to be done? How do we till the grounds of our heart, to make it fertile soil for the seed of God’s word? How do we allow a new word, God’s word, to be knitted into our body? Jesus’ answer is almost too simple: “Pay attention to how you listen.” Pay attention to whose word you’re hearing. Is it your own word, a word you’ve heard before? Or a new word—perhaps the word of God?

The Word of God:
Hearing It

And the word of God, remember, can be heard anywhere. It’s like a lamp set out in public, obvious, immediate, in seeing distance of us all. It inhabits all of life. If Jesus is to be believed, it lives in our own fleshly bodies, yours and mine, from the most prominent of us down to the very least of us.

So when we read the Bible…when we hear another person speak…when we listen to one another’s own honest experience: let’s pay attention. The word of God. It’s right there, right in front of us. It’s not hidden. It’s no secret. It’s as near to us as our very bodies, as near to us as the grumbling of our tummies, as near to us as the sighs and groanings too deep for words (Rom 8:26).

Shed all those old words that have been woven into your body, and listen for what’s right in front of you. The word of God lives somewhere in our laughter, our grimaces, our tears. Somewhere in our dimples and our furrowed brows. Somewhere in the questions we can’t answer with words.[1] Maybe we feel injustice and the silent word of God crying for a touch of peace and healing. Maybe we feel an inexplicable love for a stranger and the silent word of God pleading for compassion. Maybe we feel lost and the silent word of God drawing us toward a trusted companion. Maybe we feel forgiven and the silent word of God inviting us into new life. Maybe we feel sadness and the silent word of God affirming the goodness we so desire. Maybe we feel blessed and the silent word of God crying for us to bless others.

The Word of God:
Doing It

In the verses immediately following our text, Jesus says that any who hear the word of God and do it are his family, his kindred—we might even say, his body.

So whatever truth we feel in the slenderest fibers of our body, let’s be ready to respond. To do the word of God that we hear. To say goodbye to old words and to welcome new words—and a new world.


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[1] All of these examples, it seems to me, point to our experience of “the other in me.” I am reminded, for instance, of the narrator’s remark in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 6: “It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. … I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is more easily spent.” In other words, genuine laughter and tears, like genuine anger and joy, seem to come from a place deep inside us that is not completely us. They point to a mysterious connection with what is beyond us, with what might perhaps be a trace of God—indeed, I would imagine as much, considering the embodiedness of the divine in scripture.

Pitching Kingdom Tents (1 John 2:15-17)


(Homily for the University of Sheffield Chaplaincy's Ecumenical Communion on Apr 15, 2015)

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Cosmos Is Not Creation

Over the last few years, as a result of my PhD, I’ve practically lived in the book of Genesis. More than once I’ve forgotten the names of my own housemates—but never have I come up short for the names of my other intimates: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Hagar, Dinah, and Tamar. All this to say, when I first read through today’s text, it left a bad taste in my mouth. “Do not love the world or the things in the world”? In Genesis, God creates this world. God affirms that it is very good. And so do I. I love so much in this world. A cup of coffee to greet the sunrise. The unexpected smile of a stranger. The laughter of friends. The way that a drizzly day draws out the depths of green across a Peak District vista.

“Do not love the world”? John—I thought—must be speaking about a different world than the one I know, a different world than the one God created in Genesis.

And as it turns out…he is. In the Greek, John is speaking about the cosmos. And in Greco-Roman thought, the cosmos is not the same as creation. Whereas creation is an unforeseeable play of plants and creatures and land and sea, a garden bursting with new life, the cosmos in Greco-Roman thought is more comparable to, say, a snowglobe. It is a fixed spatial reality, “closed, eternal, unchanging.”[1] And it’s governed by a cosmic law (the kind of law that says all the snowflakes will settle on the ground as soon as you stop shaking the globe and set it back on the table.) For this reason, Greco-Roman philosophers—most famously the Stoics—advised that the best course for life was to find your own place in the cosmos, to live within the natural order, to align your life with the way things are.

Conforming to the Cosmos

And quite often, we do just that. Like modern-day Stoics, we accommodate ourselves to the ways of this world, this cosmos. Which is to say, rather than dreaming of the kingdom of God and asking, “Why not?”, rather being transformed by a vision of a transformed world, we content ourselves with and conform ourselves to the present cosmos. We let the cosmos tell us what can and cannot happen, what’s possible and what’s impossible. We let the cosmos run the account books, balance the scales, pattern all of life according to its rule. We follow the cosmos in its love of power, money, and prestige: all the things that order our lives, that determine the way things are, the way things can be. We don’t welcome change to the cosmos itself, the present world and way of doing things; rather we uphold its rules, we play the game, and seek only to fix ourselves at the top.

In Charles Sheldon’s classic novel In His Steps, a “tramp” sensationally stumbles into a pristine church in the middle of a worship service and, in a few words, exposes just how closely that particular church is aligned not with Christ but with the cosmos, with, as John would have said, “the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches.” “It seems to me,” the homeless man says, “as if the people in the big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery.”[2] To paraphrase the homeless man: this church wants a God who is “softened, bathed, powdered,”[3] not a God who smells, who needs a home, who interrupts a worship service and asks for food.

The Coming of the Kingdom: New Life Means Letting Go

Only recently we celebrated Easter. Resurrection. Today’s scripture is a crucial reminder, though, that resurrection walks hand-in-hand with death, that the melody of new life is not complete without the harmony of letting go. Until we die to the present cosmos, to the way things are—which is to say, in John’s words, until we allow the present cosmos and its desires to “pass away”—we will not live into the new creation that springs from the kingdom of God.[4] Until we set down our own personal snowglobes, we will not fall in love with the newness and surprise and hidden beauty of God’s creation.

According to John, we are called not to satisfy ourselves with our own desires, hopes, and aspirations, not to build ourselves up as part of the present world, as pillared halls in the present city—but rather to pitch Kingdom tents, to live in the world and love it for all its life, all its goodness, but also to continually let go of it in the knowledge that our plans alone will get us nowhere beyond ourselves and the present world, to continually relinquish it in the hope that we might welcome the coming of a new world, the coming of the kingdom of God.

On that note, I close with a fragment of a poem by Mary Oliver that might also be our prayer:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.[5]

So that—we might humbly add—we can welcome God’s new creation. Amen.


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[1] John D. Caputo, Truth (London: Penguin, 2013), 98.


[2] Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps (London: The Big Nest, 2013), 14.


[3] Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), ebook loc. 323.


[4] Cf. Gal 6:14-15, which ties together this reflexive death of self-to-world and world-to-self with new creation.


[5] Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” in Risking Everything (ed. Roger Housden; New York: Harmony, 2003), 72.

Tuesday 16 June 2015

Word into World


“A word is heard and the body trembles.  But this trembling is only possibly if body and word are the same thing.”

- Rubem Alves

The gap between “word” and “world” is miniscule.  All it takes for one to become the other is one small vertical stroke.  Or one small heart that welcomes the word into the body, into the world.


So it is that the word which became flesh long ago still becomes flesh today.