When the Morning Stars Sang Together

Between the parsonage in which I grew up and the church where my dad was the pastor there was a yard, perhaps fifty feet wide and the length of the church. It was big enough to have a few shade trees that made it hard to grow grass underneath. The fact that my brothers and I considered it a ball field helped neither the grass nor the integrity of the church windows. It was surrounded by concrete and asphalt and houses with little strips of lawn that could be mowed in a few minutes. For me it was an oasis, my first enduring encounter with the natural world. I learned the name of every tree and valiantly grew puny radishes in their shade. The sunniest spot, just outside our back door, was reserved for my mother’s tomato plants.

My first awareness of God as Creator came from spending hours outside in that yard, just as my first language about God came from my father’s mouth in the church next door. I’m not sure that I saw much difference between them; words and experience added up to the same thing. Or perhaps not. There was always something beyond those words, something inexpressible. I saw it in the way my dad sometimes could not speak about what he felt so deeply. I saw it when the sun shone through the sycamore leaves, way up where the bark was fresh and white.

Now I live where I’m surrounded by the created world. From our house I can see deer standing at the edge of the woods a half mile away. I can watch the sun come up on the horizon precisely when it is supposed to. Prairie flowers go through their progression from daisy fleabane to wild parsnip to sunflower to goldenrod. Meadowlarks and bluebirds sit on the power line. I am as far from being in a big city as I can get.

And yet I am no more in the midst of creation than when I was playing ball under that big sycamore, hoping I wouldn’t foul the ball into a window. Instead of puny radishes I grow bright geraniums. I no longer have to know the name of every weed (although I do). The One who created all this still sustains me, still provides moments of inexpressible joy when the bluebird sings or the setting sun glows on the distant woods. It is then that I give thanks for creation, for the privilege of having been born into this beautiful world. It is then that I know why the morning stars sang together and the heavenly beings shouted for joy when God created the world. It is truly a gift of grace. May this glory of the Lord endure forever, and may the Lord always rejoice in all his works.

[Pentecost 4: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41; and Psalm 104:32 for the last sentence.]

Things Are Not As They Seem

Things are not as they seem. That’s the message we get from all three of Sunday’s lessons. What appears to be the case on the surface really isn’t; it’s the meaning inside, the hidden meaning, that counts.

The first reading describes how the prophet Samuel found the one destined to become a legendary king of Israel. The beginning is not very auspicious. Afraid of the jealousy of the current King Saul, Samuel has to use subterfuge when visiting Bethlehem to look for the new king. (Already things are not what they seem to be.) Samuel knew that the chosen one will be a son of Jesse. The eldest, Eliab, must have been tall and good-looking, for Samuel immediately thought, “Here he is!” But God chastised his quick judgment based on appearance. “The Lord does not see as mortals see,” God reminded Samuel, “they look on outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” So Samuel worked his way through seven sons, without success. Finally Jesse had to call the youngest from tending the sheep. Only after that one is anointed as the next king is his name revealed: David. He was not only handsome; God knew he had a good heart.

The Apostle Paul, too, knew that things are not as they seem. “We walk by faith, not by sight,” he wrote. We hope for what we cannot see. The new life in Jesus Christ is hidden, not so apparent to outsiders. Paul even echoed Samuel when he spoke of “those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.” Yet he emphatically stated that because of Jesus Christ, everything has changed even though it may not look that way. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Sunday’s parable told by Jesus really emphasizes that things are not as they seem. He used the example of a tiny mustard seed which no one would expect to grow almost ten feet tall. It’s a bit of a stretch to talk about birds nesting in its branches (Matthew and Luke stretched it even further, calling the mustard a tree), but the point is made – what started out really small became really big, bigger than anyone could have predicted by looking at the size of the seed. As we would say, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

What are we to draw from these readings? The story about David is obvious: don’t judge people by their outward appearance. We know that, but we don’t practice it very well. We judge people by how they are dressed and whether they’re showered and shaved. We make false judgments based on appearance all the time. Sometimes that judgment is quite unjust. In many places, including the town where I work, a black man is much more likely to be stopped by police than a white man, especially at night, simply because he is black.

Paul and Jesus talk less about quick judgment and more about the kingdom of God. Both assert that the kingdom is already here. It grows whether we like it or not, whether we are part of it or not. For Paul, especially, it means that everything has changed in spite of the fact that everything looks the same. Yes, we still grow old and die. Yes, the rich still get richer and the poor get poorer. The paradox of Christian faith is our conviction that Jesus Christ has changed that reality. It is no longer the future. The reign of God has already broken in. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the promise of new creation for all.

And in the meantime? We can work with that new creation or against it. We can judge less by appearance and instead search for the face of Christ in everyone we encounter. We can strive for justice and peace among all people. We can walk by faith, not by sight. We can hope for what we cannot see, looking toward that day when we will know fully, even as we are fully known by God. That is the Christian hope, the hope that sustains us, that things are not as they seem.

[Pentecost 3: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34.]

They Don't Get It

One of the most consistent characteristics of people in the Bible is thick-headedness. They don’t get it. Again and again people misunderstand what God is trying to do, and repeatedly they have to be told that they’re on the wrong track. As a result, the Bible is full of questions – not pat answers to every problem, as some would have us believe.
 

I take heart in that. I think life is also full of questions, not answers, and I’m relieved when I see Bible people muddling about the same way that I sometimes do. It’s reassuring when they don’t get it. It’s true to life.

 I do admit that sometimes it’s not quite so evident that the biblical questions are the same as our questions. Take Sunday’s reading from the first book of Samuel, for example. After all the celebrations we’ve seen of Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, it’s rather odd to encounter a long rant from Samuel about how bad kings are. Even God appears to whine about his being rejected because the people want a king. Of course, Samuel wasn’t thinking about Queen Elizabeth. This was written after the reign of King Solomon, he of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines and thirty thousand laborers and twelve thousand horses. No wonder Samuel spent so much energy warning the people of Israel about what was to come! He knew that with all that wealth, God would fade into the background. We see that even today – motorboats and golf courses and a big deck with a swimming pool make us forget that everything, including life itself, is a gift from God.

 
Even the people around Jesus didn’t get it. In Sunday’s reading, the religious leaders accuse Jesus of being in league with the devil rather than God. Jesus’ family thinks he’s out of his mind. They’d like him to live a nice, stable life as the village carpenter, building houses and marrying someone with a better reputation than Mary Magdalene. Instead, Jesus is surrounded by low-life types and pays no attention to proper mealtimes. Worse yet, he rejects the whole kit and caboodle of relatives and claims that the low-lifes are his family.
 
The one person who really did seem to get it was Paul the Apostle, but even he was on the wrong track for the first part of his life. The chief problem with Paul is that when he finally did get it, he was so smart that nobody could understand what he was talking about.
 
So if the ones around Jesus didn’t get it, and we still don’t get it, where does that leave us? In the dark? I don’t think so. Just because we are full of questions doesn’t mean that there aren’t answers. It means that the answers aren’t simple. And the whole point of Jesus Christ coming to earth was to provide a light to shine in that darkness.
 
For some reason, even though we humans intrinsically know that the light of Christ is where joy and life and answers are, we still choose to walk toward the darkness and the obscurity it brings. We think that we will be better off with something other than God leading us, whether a king or wealth or anything else we can idolize. We have questions because we cannot see with God’s eyes and God’s understanding. We yearn for the answers that only God can provide, but paradoxically seek them from sources other than God.
 
That’s why we have the Bible. It’s a witness to the questioning, a witness to the continued attempts by God to draw us toward him. Yes, it is something that was written long ago about people who lived very different lives from us. Yet humanity has not changed that much. We still wander off; we still fail to seek the God who is seeking us. We still yearn for answers. We still spend our lives forgetting and relearning that our hearts will be restless until they rest in God.
 
And so we continue on the journey, sometimes walking away from God, sometimes walking toward him. A lot of the time we don’t get it. But then there are those moments of sheer grace when God penetrates our thick heads and light flows in. Those are the moments to live for. May we always be open to that grace and that light. May we continue to question and to be restless, until that day when we, too, can rest our hearts in God.
 

[Pentecost 3: 1 Samuel 8:4-20; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35.]