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The Obedient Son (Phil. 2:1-13;Matt.21:23-32)

"Mommy, I want to go to the cross" were the first words out of her mouth when we arrived at Grandma's late one evening. A lighted cross sat high up on a hill overlooking the lake. Four-year-old Sarah was drawn by the beauty of its lights as they reflected on the lake and by her Sunday school knowledge that it stood for something special about the love of Jesus. She was far too young to understand the meaning or gory details of any crucifixion -- much less the implications of the crucifixion of Jesus. She knew nothing of the debates over how Christ's death is an atonement for sin, or about charges that the cross represents "divine child abuse." In childlike faith, she wanted to go to the cross.

The stories in Matthew 21 center on controversies that occur days before Jesus goes to the cross. They draw our attention to issues of authority and obedience. Jesus is confronted by the chief priests and elders who want to know by what authority he has been doing "these things." We assume "these things" to be the events recorded earlier in this chapter: the entry into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the temple and now his teaching in the temple. In good rabbinic style, Jesus answers their question by posing a question. His question involves their understanding of the authority of John the Baptist. If they answer that John the Baptist was divinely inspired, then they open themselves to the charge of ignoring God's will and of being unrepentant. If they say that John's authority was from human beings, then they risk offending the crowd that believed John was a prophet. Either way, they are condemned. And so they plead ignorance.

Jesus then tells a parable about two sons which offers an interpretation of the previous confrontation. The first son tells his father that he will not go and work in the vineyard, but then changes his mind and goes to work. The second son tells his father that he will work in the vineyard, but doesn't. "Who has been obedient to the father?" Jesus asks the chief priests and elders.

It is clear to all who have "ears to hear" that the disobedient son represents the chief priests and elders. It is small wonder that on Friday of that same week they took counsel against Jesus to put him to death. And on the night before, in the Garden of Gethsemane, this somewhat reluctant son had to decide whether to be obedient to his Father's will. Matthew records that three times he had prayed: 'Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." Yet, like the son in the parable who hesitated at first and in the end did as his father had asked, Jesus affirms three times: "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." It is this response of radical obedience that takes Jesus to the cross.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul tells them to go to the cross. He wants the church members there to pattern their lives on Christ. As they struggle with divisions within the church and hostilities from outside the community, Paul encourages them to have the "same mind.. . that was in Christ Jesus."

The cross of Christ is the centerpiece of this letter, in its disclosure about the true character of Jesus (radica1 obedience, humility, self-giving love) and also in its shaping of the early Christian community. As Wayne Meeks has argued, "This letter's most comprehensive purpose is the shaping of a Christian phronesis, a practical moral reasoning that is 'conformed to Christ's death' in hope of his resurrection." Paul quotes the "Christ-hymn" in Philippians 2:6-11 to describe how they night have the "same mind. . . that was in Christ Jesus." Being so conformed, they will then be able to fulfill his hope for them that they may "walk in a manner worthy of the gospel."

The hymn in verses 6-11 is one of the earliest known professions of faith of the first Christians. It is the story of salvation in Christ in three parts: self-emptying (incarnation), obedience (death on a cross) and exaltation (resurrection and ascension). Through the incarnation, Jesus willingly takes on human form and limitations, freely embracing humanity in body, mind and spirit. Through his humble obedience, Jesus serves as a counter-example to those in the garden who, for their own selfish gain, "grasp" at likeness to God. In his "self-emptying" Jesus does not see equality with God as something to be used for his own advantage, but as an offering for others. It results in radical obedience and service to others, even suffering and death on a cross.

In the exaltation (vv. 9-11), God vindicates the self-denying service to others embodied in Christ's death. The one who came as servant is now proclaimed "lord" of all. Christ's authority to be called "lord" comes not only from his exaltation by God through the resurrection and ascension but through his self-emptying obedience. He who did not "grasp" at likeness to God is, because of his obedience, given the title "Lord" -- the first known proclamation of faith among gentile Christians.

Therefore, Paul suggests that incorporation into the body of Christ demands humility and obedience of the type demonstrated by Jesus. Only in this way will his followers have the "mind" of Christ. This humility is not humiliation; nor is the obedience blind. Rather, they are expressions of faith and trust in the gracious and loving character of God. Such faith and trust, Jesus' parable suggests, are found more often among the "tax collectors and prostitutes" who hear the good news and believe than among the self-righteous guardians of religious order. In "fear and trembling" we hear these words of judgment spoken in the shadow of the cross.

Forgiven and Forgiving (Matt. 18:21-35)

Each time the invitation to the table was offered, he was offered he sat silently in the pew. Other would excuse themselves as they passed in front of him, but he never moved. When I visited him at his home, I cautiously broached the subject. "I can't do it," he answered. "1 can't come to the table. You see, in Vietnam I killed a man. I don't think God could ever forgive me for that."

As we sat in my office tears welled up in her eyes. "I hate him. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I hate my own son-in-law. I hate what he's done to my daughter and now what it's doing to my grandchildren. You may have noticed, Pastor, that I get up halfway through the service and leave. I feel like such a hypocrite, harboring these feelings while trying to worship God.] just can't do it anymore."

Both of these persons had been Christians all their lives. Yet unresolved issues involving forgiveness were jeopardizing their relationship with the church. What both of them recognized is that there is an important connection between their struggle with forgiveness and their faith; what they failed to see is that the practice of their faith should be central in resolving the issues of forgiveness with which they struggled. They were allowing their inability to forgive -- or be forgiven -- to cut them off from fellowship in the body of Christ, the very community that should be helping them work through and resolve these difficult issues.

Matthew 18 asks: "How do we keep the church community together when forgiveness needs to happen right under our own roof? How should the Christian community deal with sin that lurks so closely at the door? What is expected of us as we learn how to be Christians?"

Simon Peter comes to Jesus with this kind of question. Imagine how he must have felt. He knows what people are like, how easy it is to hold a grudge, to become bitter, to offer forgiveness once, twice, maybe up to three times as Jewish tradition permits. Wanting to be generous, Peter proudly steps forward to answer his own question. "As many as seven times?" he asks. He was willing to go the extra mile -- and then some.

But Jesus has something different in mind. Whether you read his answer to Peter as "77 times" or "70 times seven," the point is the same. Jesus answers Peter by telling him not to assume that you can count how many times you offer forgiveness and then be done with it. Forgiveness must become a practice -- a commitment -- that is to be sustained and renewed each day throughout our lives. It is not a single action, feeling or thought. Forgiveness must become an embodied way of life in an ever-deepening friendship with God and with others. Peter asks how generous he should be, yet he is still asking about limits. He's thinking quantitatively while Jesus answers qualitatively -- with the offer of limitless forgiveness. This is what God is like.

Because we have been abundantly forgiven by God, we are able to forgive others in turn. There is a direct connection between forgiving others and being forgiven. Therefore, in the Lord's Prayer we pray "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

The parable of the unforgiving servant, which follows the exchange between Peter and Jesus, focuses on those who are willing to receive God's forgiveness but are unwilling to offer it to others. The servant has been forgiven a huge debt and yet is unwilling to forgive even a small debt owed to him. Such unwillingness shows, though, that he really is not able to receive God's forgiveness. For truly to receive forgiveness is to recognize how extravagant God's gracious forgiving love is and, in response, to offer it to others.

Yet if we are honest, there are times when we find ourselves behaving like that unforgiving servant. We are pleased with the idea of a forgiving God, but not if it would require us to change our lives. Forgiveness becomes something we claim but fail to proclaim in our living. We too often sound like George Eliot's description in Adam Bede: "We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves."

Yet it is difficult to be forgiven and forgiving people. It takes time and involves struggle. Sister Helen Prejean, in her book Dead Man Walking, tells the story of Lloyd LeBlanc, a Roman Catholic layman, whose son was murdered. When he arrived in the field with the sheriff's deputies to identify his son, LeBlanc immediately knelt by his boy's body and prayed the Lord's Prayer. When he came to the words: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," he realized the depth of the commitment he was making. "Whoever did this, I must forgive them," he later told Prejean. Though it has been difficult not to be overcome by bitterness and feelings of revenge that well up from time to time, LeBlanc said that each day, for the rest of his life, forgiveness must be prayed for and struggled for and won.

Christian communities are sustained by people who know what it means to discover the miracle of God's forgiveness, and who are thus committed to a way of life as forgiven and forgiving people. We do not abandon others, and refuse to be abandoned ourselves. We cannot rest content with conflict or division or even with "conflict management"; we aim for the more difficult and more rewarding practice of forgiveness and reconciliation. As we live in communities shaped by these practices, we will experience anew what it means to be forgiven -- and forgiving. Perhaps then, when the invitation is offered, all of us will come to the table joyfully.

Equus: Human Conflicts and the Trinity

Peter Shaffer’s play Equus has been savagely attacked by drama critics and psychoanalysts alike. Said one analyst: “I felt I had been had.” Yet Equus has now held the stage for almost four years. Having survived even the vicissitudes of translation, it continues to fill houses in several European capitals. Its appeal must emanate from something other than superb acting and imaginative direction. What is the secret of its durability? The play compels audiences to ask the ultimate meaning of life.

Projections into the Ultimate

Mere entertainment leaves an insipid taste unless it surreptitiously leads us into questioning the purpose of existence. That, of course, is usually the business of religion. Whenever the conventional churches fail in their mission to communicate the holy and to respond to grace, the search for the ultimate meaning of life becomes the province of secular culture, especially of the theater. Playwrights know, deep within themselves, that modern audiences are starved for transcendence.

The plot of Equus was suggested to Shaffer by an actual fait-divers which occurred some years ago on the outskirts of a small English town. A 17-year-old lad who worked weekends as a stable groom seized a metal spike one night and blinded six horses. In the play, Shaffer has renamed the boy Alan Strang and has placed him most of the time on stage center, acting out his dreams and his memories.

Instead of sending the, delinquent youth to a reform school, a tough but compassionate magistrate, Hesther Salomon, commits him to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital and convinces her friend, Dr. Martin Dysart, to take the boy as a mental patient. The entire play takes place in Dr. Dysart’s consultation room. At the same time, the set simulates a boxing ring, which in turn becomes the boy’s home, a stable or even the local cinema. When they are not participating in the action, actors sit around the stage on tiers of benches, together with part of the audience, and form a Greek chorus.

Even the horses are brought on stage, in the guise of silent men. Surrealistically dressed in brown leotards, these actors wear the steel outlines of horses’ heads; their heavy hooves occasionally stress the action with arrhythmic thumping in the obscurity.

Because this format centers attention on the psychiatrist’s office, critics have generally assumed that the play is a satire on psychoanalysis, with Dr. Dysart as its hero or its victim. But the protagonist is not Dr. Dysart, not the adolescent youth, not the magistrate, not the boy’s parents, but -- as the title of the play indicates -- Equus. Equus is not really a horse, however -- neither the boy’s favorite mount called Nugget nor the horsiness of horsehood. Equus is the image of God.

More specifically, Equus is the image of the particular god whom everyone conceives in his or her own unconscious and unfulfilled fantasy. Equus is a polymorphic symbol of the projections into the ultimate which are respectively favored by Frank Strang, Dora Strang, the youth and of course the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart. From the initial scene, we are alerted to a theological overtone. Alone in his consultation room, Dr. Dysart ponders the case:

I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do. I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth. Nudging through the metal some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could that he? . . . You see, I’m wearing that horse’s head myself. That’s the feeling. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there.

As the action unfolds, it becomes clear that the playwright’s purpose is found in this last phrase: “straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being.” The language is that of equitation; but the thought is ontological, and the imagery echoes the Kierkegaardian leap of faith.

False Gods

Three areas of human conflict are seen in interplay throughout the two acts of the drama, but they may be separated for analysis. First, the parental conflicts: Frank Strang, the boy’s father, is a 20th century English equivalent of Monsieur Homais in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s 19th century French pharmacist views religion as the enemy of health, culture and civilization -- and so does Mr. Strang. The kind of religion against which they rebel, however, represents a caricature of Christianity that is common enough -- whether it be Roman Catholic or Protestant -- in the provincial towns of any country. Mr. Strang misses the biblical mystery of a God who suffers for Israel and for humankind. He does not mind admitting ponderously that he is an atheist and that the Bible is responsible for his son’s aberrant behavior. He says to the psychiatrist:

A boy spends night after night having this stuff read into him: an innocent man tortured to death  -- thorns driven into his head -- nails into his hands  -- a spear jammed through his ribs. . . . Bloody religion -- it’s our only real problem in this house.

A puritanical streak compensates for Mr. Strang’s loss of transcendence. But despite the high ideals he preaches, he goes out alone in the evening to watch pornographic movies. His god is a moralism he is unable to incarnate. Religion is for him a source of conflict -- within himself, between him and his wife, and between him and his son.

The mother’s god is likewise false, for her obsessive piety makes her judgmentally harsh and fails to produce harmony in her existence. When the crisis comes, Dora Strang is vindictive toward both her husband and her son. In a scene of unexpected violence, she slaps the youth in his hospital room because she cannot endure his silent stare, and the nurse expels her. Thereupon, she pours abuse upon the psychiatrist, maintaining that her little Alan was a good boy until “the Devil came.” She rebukes Dr. Dysart: “If you knew God, Doctor, you would know about the Devil. . . .” Unable to share guilt with her husband, baffled by her son’s criminal behavior, she finds refuge in that old trick of religionists: accusing the devil.

A Metaphysical Search

Second, there are the adolescent conflicts. Alan is clearly suffering from a deep-seated neurosis which manifests itself in typical symptoms: divided self-hood, alienated selfhood and emasculated selfhood. Any adolescent, to be sure, may be the prey of the first two ailments. In modern times, when many doubt their sexual identity, the third is not uncommon. The demands of theatricality call for dramatic hyperbole and the exacerbation of each of these traits.

As a salesman in a small store, Alan is bored. At home he refuses to read books, in revolt against a paternal tyranny which forbids television in the house. Frank Strang is, as Dr. Dysart notes, “an old-type Socialist,” “relentlessly self-improving.” He sententiously declares that the little screen is “absolutely fatal mentally, if you receive my meaning.” He censures the youth for his refusal to read:

You are the son of a printer, and never opening a book! If all the world was like you, I’d be out of a job, if you receive my meaning!

To work weekends as a groom is for Alan more than an opportunity of escaping the conflicts of home. On the surface, it serves to satisfy his love of horses. In depth, it assuages his religious cravings. Since an adolescent love for horses is often related to the awakening of sexuality, it is possible as several critics have inferred -- that the midnight horseback rides, which the boy enjoys alone and naked on Saturday nights, produce in him a wild form of orgasmic satisfaction. To say merely this, however, is to hit only half the truth.

Yes, one might say that, at one level, the boy carries on a love affair with a horse. “With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces. The animal digs its sweaty brow into his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour -- like a necking couple.” But, as Dr. Dysart is quick to discern, this emotional involvement, with its sexual overtones, goes far beyond pubescent sensuality. The psychiatrist asks, “What desire could that be?” The bits of confessional introspection which he elicits from his patient show that the search is metaphysical. The boy is looking for a mystical union with infinity. When he was a child, his mother had him memorize from the Book of Job the poem about the horse:

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed

     his neck with thunder? . . .

He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and

     rage . . .

He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha [Job 39:19-

     25].

 

The boy’s mother had also read to him from the Apocalypse of St. John the vision of the white horse, “Faithful and True,” which gallops through the world with eyes “as a flame of fire” (Rev. 19:11-12). These and other images became associated in his infant psyche with the picture of Jesus -- not the healer who forgives sinners, but the divine judge, a relentless nemesis.

In his early years, Alan had briefly delighted in a wondrous horseback ride on a beach, but his father had abruptly curtailed that thrilling canter as too dangerous. At a later date, Mr. Strang had torn down from his son’s bedroom wall a lurid chromo representing Jesus on the way to Golgotha. Eventually, the empty spot was filled with the picture of a horse. All these images feed Alan’s resentment against his father’s despotic behavior and his mother’s pietism. Thus, he blurts out a series of non sequiturs in free association:

The White Horse in Revelations. ‘He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True. His eyes were as flames of fire.’. . . No one ever says to cowboys ‘Receive my meaning’! They wouldn’t dare. Or ‘God’ all the time. [mimicking his mother] ‘God sees you, Alan. God’s got eyes everywhere  -- .’

The ambivalence of the youth toward the person of Jesus appears when he unwittingly identifies Equus with Christ. The stable is his “Temple,” his “Holy of Holies.” He calls Equus “a mean bugger” but adds, “Ride -- or fall. That’s Straw Law.” Dr. Dysart inquires, “Straw Law?” The boy explains: “He was born in the straw, and this is his law.” He recites a parody of the biblical “begats” which ends with the phrase “Behold -- I give you Equus, my only begotten son!” He keeps in reserve a lump of sugar to give his favorite horse “for his Last Supper.” The psychiatrist misses the reference and asks, “Last for what?” The boy’s only answer is the snort from the poem of Job, “Ha. Ha.” Thereupon he shrieks, “Take my sins. Eat them for my sake . . . He always does.” Unaware, Alan has emended the Agnus Dei into Equus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis!

Midnight Ride

Like a medieval mystic who tries to lose himself within Christ, the youth rides Equus at midnight. The scene which ends act one is the most dramatic and revealing of the play. On stage center, Alan rides on the shoulders of an actor who personifies the horse. The boxing ring of the consultation room begins to revolve upon itself, becoming a carousel which turns faster and faster on the darkened stage while a fierce spotlight falls vertically upon horse and rider galloping right on the axis mundi. The boy exclaims, soon out of breath:

 

The King rides out on Equus, mightiest of horses. . . .His neck comes out of my body. It lifts in the dark. Equus, my Godslave! . . . Now the King commands you. Tonight, we ride against them all.

[He whips Nugget]

And Equus the Mighty rose against all!

His enemies scatter, his enemies fall! . . .

My mane, stiff in the wind!

My flanks! My hooves!

Mane on my legs, on my flanks, like whips!

Raw!

Raw

I’m raw! Raw!

Feel me on you! On you! On you! On you!

I want to be in you!

I want to BE you forever and ever!  --

Equns, I love you!

Now! --

Bear me away!

Make us One Person!

     [He rides Equus frantically.]

One Person! One Person! One Person! One Person!

[He rises up on the horse’s back, and calls like a trumpet.]

Ha-Ha! .. . Ha-HA! ... Ha-HA!

[The trumpet turns to great cries.]

HA-HA! HA-HA! HA-HA! HA-HAH! HA!

HA. . . HAAAAA!

[He twists like a flame. Silence . . . Slowly, the boy drops off th

     horse’s back . .]

AMEN!

[Blackout.]

 

The midnight ride is a sacramental means of identification with a Christ who tramples his enemies. Several fantasms which haunt the boy’s mind are blended in skillful gradation: hostilities, self-punishment, erotic desire and religious needs. The prepositional phrase “on you” becomes “in you” and leads to direct transference: “I want to BE you forever and ever . . . Amen.” The boy wants to transcend both himself and time. The repeated phrase “One Person” accentuates the search for ontological security. The play is a quest for being.

Alan’s transfiguration imitates the swoon of Teresa in Bernini’s statute of sublimated love. The. youth seeks to rediscover his alienated self. His girl friend, Jill, takes him to an X-rated film. In the theater, he sees his own father and is seen by him. The simultaneity of this double shame is unbearable. Caught by paternal authority, he discovers that this authority is pure sham. Jill tenderly seeks to comfort him. She leads him back to the stable where she hopes he will make love to her. As they both undress, they reveal only their helplessness and their destitution. The nude scene is not, as in some other plays of our decade, a gesture of conformity to current fad. It is intrinsic to the plot, for Alan and Jill expose themselves spiritually more than physically. Their innocence is poignantly made manifest.

The boy is impotent. His shame at having found out that his father is a “phony” now compounds itself with the still deeper shame of this psychological ‘emasculation.’ Indeed, the failure of his maleness is due not only to his filial trauma but also to the belief that he is being watched by Equus, the all-seeing Eye of a moralistic Deity. Alan throws the girl out. To relieve his guilt, he seizes a metal spike and blinds the horses. The sadomasochistic act covers his need to obliterate his judge and to crucify his Christ.

The Threshold of Faith

Third, there are the professional conflicts. Martin Dysart may be a well-known psychiatrist, but he suffers, like the youth he is trying to cure, from a divided selfhood, an alienated selfhood and an emasculated selfhood. He is rent asunder by his long-unfulfilled desire to be an archaeologist in Greece. His wife is a completely unromantic Scottish dentist, and he is both sterile and impotent.

The urge to work in Greece conceals a deeper longing. Dysart looks unconsciously for a mystical union with infinity. He dreams that he officiates at some barbarous rite of child sacrifice in the time of Homer. He admits aloud that he is “tops at being a chief priest” but that his life is empty. As he daily conducts his examination of the young patient, he becomes more and more introspective. He feels that Equus judges him also: “‘Account for me,’ says staring Equus. ‘First account for Me.’ . . .”

The successful practitioner in the art of therapy has heard the old advice, “Physician, heal thyself!” He is not far removed from the psalmist who cried, “Examine me, O Lord, and know my inner mind!” He stands close to the Apostle Paul’s awareness of “being known of God.” He knocks at the door of Hebraeo-Christian faith when he envies the boy’s ability “to worship, to know a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life.”

Dysart approaches the threshold of the Hebraeo-Christian faith when he discerns that in order “to go through life and call it yours -- your life  -- you first have to get your own pain. Pain that’s unique to you.” He does not cross that threshold, however, because his craving for liberation from himself is not empowered by an ability to distinguish between a quest for infinity and the surrender to human finitude in the serene and subtly mellowing company of an infinite God. He does not enter the Hebraeo-Christian mystery of sufficient grace, because he mistakenly thinks that psychological normality kills the faculty to worship. To that extent, some critics of Shaffer’s play have correctly charged that Dysart confuses normality with dullness. Shaffer’s psychiatrist errs abysmally when he justifies pathology for the sake of ecstasy.

The basic flaw of Equus results from the playwright’s flirtation with the intrinsic demands of Judaism and Christianity. The play is a study of the starvation for transcendence, but Shaffer does not wish to say how to cure this hunger. He has succeeded in exhibiting the vacuum or the perversity of human existence when it lacks a dynamic trust in God, but he has failed to show the kind of trust in the kind of God that can deliver us from the enslavement of self. Theological ambiguity, however, should be the privilege of an artist.

The merit of the play comes from its intellectual emotion. Though the psychoanalyst violates therapeutic rules, the play has apparently the power to catch us off-guard and to irritate all sorts of people -- including psychoanalysts. Professional religionists cannot claim immunity either. As we sit engrossed by the unraveling of self-awareness in both physician and patient, we discover that we, too, long for what Bergson called le dépassement de soi, “the going beyond oneself.” This is quite different from “the aggrandizing of the self.”

Narcissism appears to be the psychoanalytical ailment of our time. Tom Wolfe calls the ‘70s “the “Me decade.” Many theological students and not a few of their theological mentors, Jewish and Christian, Roman Catholic and Protestant, appear to reduce “theology” from the art of the knowledge of God to the pseudo-scientific evaluation of feeling. Some of us are wallowing in an orgy of neo-Romantic subjectivism. Equus, like Oedipus blinded, opens our eyes to the religious autoeroticism of our age.

Dramatic Masks of Divinity

Shaffer’s play may render another service. It alerts us to the danger of misunderstanding the doctrine of the Trinity. Such a misunderstanding is easy, for the language of the church fathers who formulated this doctrine was different from ours, and it defies simple interpretation. This is not the place for a disquisition on the Trinity. One might only suggest that Equus prompts us to look again at the mystery of Christian faith through the analogy of parental, filial and professional conflicts.

God the Father is not the symbol of paternal tyranny, as feminist theologians have sometimes claimed, or as post-Schleiermacher Protestant idealism -- paradoxically followed by Freud and Jung  -- has maintained. These erroneous views of God abusively separate the New Testament from the Old Testament and misinterpret both. God the Father maternally provides and nurses, judges and forgives.

God the Son is not an androgynous youth, fuzzily playing at the extension of consciousness, or a Marxist rebel, compounding injustice in the name of justice.

God the Spirit does not overwhelm with emotional intoxication -- although visionary trance and speaking in tongues may have their place in situations of exceptional extremity. The Spirit is the Comforter -- that is to say, the Fortifier of communal bonds and the Authenticator of knowledge.

Trinitarian terminology may bewilder many, but the word persona originally meant “the mask” worn by actors in a Greek tragedy. The three dramatic masks of divinity stand for overlapping moments in the history of our faith. They do not refer to persons in the modern sense of the word, nor do they allude to specialized aspects of particular functions of the Godhead. All facets of divine activity are reflected in all three persons of the Trinity. They are dynamically intermingled. They may not be separated, as they are in the parental, adolescent and professional characters of Shaffer’s play.

God the Father is also the Mother, suffering in agony the compassions of the womb (in Hebrew, rechem), as the word mercy implies (in Hebrew, rachmim). Jesus is the human mirror of divinity, because he combines in his life weakness and strength, justice and love, self-denial and self-affirmation, for the sake of promoting a corporate and yet open form of society. God the Son represents the whole of humanity, for he explodes all forms of racial, legal and ritual exclusivism, whether it be Jewish or anti-Jewish racism, Roman or Anglo-Catholic sacramental smugness, or Protestant moralism and sectarian perfectionism. Jesus is the Son because he breaks barriers and reconciles conflicts. The Holy Spirit -- in Hebrew, a feminine word  -- stands both for the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles of existence which balance one another and maintain an equilibrium of harmony and a tolerance of opposites. God the Spirit creates ecstasy reined in by order, heroism tempered by rationality, solitary raptures which are never far removed from the responsibility of communal living.

The parental, adolescent and professional conflicts exhibited by Peter Shaffer’s Equus need not be disruptive. They can be fed into a crucible of growth. Contradictions may not be eradicated from the human situation, but they can be put to constructive work.

Shaffer has placed the action of Equus within the frame of two soliloquies. Dimly aware of the divine pathos which moves at the core of trinitarian faith, Dysart asks in the prelude:

Is it possible, at certain moments we cannot image, a horse can add its sufferings together -- the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life -- and turn them into grief?

In the postlude, the same Dysart continues to think aloud:

And now for me it never stops: that voice of Equus out of the cave -- ‘Why Me? . . Why Me? . . .Account for Me! ... All right -- I surrender! I say it . . . In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place -- yet I do ultimate things.. . . There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

 

Participation in divine freedom entails sharing in divine agony.

Perhaps the magistrate, Hesther Salomon, provides a genuine model of Hebraeo-Christian sanity. She is as tenacious as the law of thermodynamics, as crusty as barley bread, as thorny as a cactus of Canaan -- an inflexible English judge on the bench. But she radiates love, and she is in the play the only bearer of grace -- a grace that is efficient, and therefore suffices.

Apostle at my Door (Is. 58:1-12; I Cor. 2:1-16;Ps. 112:1-10; Matt. 5:13-20.)

You are salt to the world. And if salt becomes tasteless, how is its saltiness to be restored? It is good for nothing but to be thrown away and trodden underfoot.

I guess I have to blame it all on Robert Duvall. The Apostle had jus come out on video and I watched it late one evening. Duvall's portrayal of the scoundrel/saint giving his whole salt self to a calling from God had me questioning the somewhat comfortable nature of my pastoral ministry So when a stranger showed up on the doorstep of the parsonage two days later, announcing meekly that he was here on a mission from God, my guard was down. "Come on in, would you like some coffee?" I mumbled in as noncommittal way as I could manage.

Daniel explained that he had bicycled from his home in Alabama. He said that God, through a series of dreams and visions and experiences had told him to ride north with a message for the nation. I looked out at the flowers in front of the church, now desiccated stalks, felled by the first hard frost. "Are you sure God isn't thinking about sending you back south? You're about as far north as you can get and stay in the country. It's going to be getting cold," I said.

Over coffee, Daniel said that Go had told him to share a message for "folks to love each other" because "Jesus Christ died for their sins be cause of his love for us." Under my black coffee, I tasted salt -- sharp an invigorating. Part of me was bemused by this scene -- the rural pastor having coffee with the would-be bicycle prophet. Part of me was unexpectedly jealous -- why does my relationship with God feel so much more ambiguous and elusive than Daniel's? Part of me wondered if this encounter wasn't precisely the way God planned to shore up our tenuous relationship. Maybe I just had to be open to God's ironic movement of the moment. Or maybe Robert Duvall had just made me gullible.

As Daniel continued describing some of his dreams and messages, I waited to hear the visions of damnation and lakes of fire that I expected from modern traveling prophets. But they never came up. His was a simple story of a simple man for whom the love of Jesus had defeated the demons of alcohol and, I hazarded to guess, mental illness. His demeanor was completely disarming. When he asked if he could speak the next Sunday at the worship service, my mouth said yes before my more cautious judgment could protest.

Daniel got up from the table, headed to the door and said simply "Pray for me" by way of good-bye. As he rode away, my worries both for and about this man came crashing down on me. Where is he staying? Will he be warm and dry? Is he dangerous? I thought of Sunday's service and the unknown liturgical variable he brought. "Shout aloud without restraint; lift up your voice like a trumpet. Declare to the people their transgression. ." Isaiah sounds safely charity chained to the lectern, but a real prophet on the loose is a terrible thing to contemplate.

When Sunday came Daniel shyly stood up during the prayers of the people and quietly spoke. I thought of Paul on his first preaching trip to Corinth: "When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling."

After worship that day, the Sunday schools of our churches hosted their annual picnic to kick off the fall programs. In the midst of sack races and accordion-led hymns, Daniel's presence added a nervous nove1ty to the event. People reached out to him with heaps of potluck and practical advice. They listened attentively, their eyes glancing to the side only when his stories, seemed to skirt the fuzzy line between revelation and hallucination. Almost to a person, they replied, "Are you sure God isn't telling you to head back south before it gets cold?" Whenever they offered, he made it clear he didn't want any money or a place to stay. "I feel closer to God under the stars."

Daniel stopped by the parsonage almost every day over the next two weeks. He seemed to find some calm in telling and retelling his story, like someone who rubs a worrystone. He continually asked us to pray for him. Spiritual stuff. He asked about my interpretation of his visions. I asked him if he wanted polypropylene underwear and a small camp stove for warding off the morning frost.

I wanted to be a useful part of his quest or mission or whatever it was. But I didn't want to get sucked in too deep. I played it safe. I waded into his world up to my ankles and proceeded to offer him stuff. I was unwilling to engage him where he wanted me to -- in the language of visions and dreams and conversing directly with the divine presence. Daniel's first words to me each morning were, "Did you pray on what we talked about yesterday?" And my first words to him were, "Did you stay warm enough last night?" Both of us were frustrated that we couldn't meet in the same place. Why, Jesus, do you have to show up in someone so different from me?

Daniel, in a place filled with demons, had heard the voice of the Lord offer him something better: Be salt. Be light. The offer came with costs. He would ride, he would be poor, he would be homeless, he would be seen as less than fully sane. But he said yes anyway. Fully, unreservedly, Daniel was willing to give all of himself to be salt and light. I hope in my place and circumstance and time, I will do the same.

The Fine Print of Commitment (Ps. 69:ll;l8-20; Jer. 20:7-13; Rom. 6:1b-11, Matt. 10:24-39)

When I was baptized at the age of 11, I had no idea what the risks of believing n Jesus Christ would be. As the first in my family to become a communicant member of my church, this was a big step for me. I was embarrassed that I had not been baptized as an infant, and yet there was something powerful about making a profession of faith on my own. My joy and pride at taking this momentous step were short-lived, however. When I got home I quickly got caught up in the usual family interactions. Try though I did, I could not keep "turning the other cheek." When family members pushed my buttons I was quick with old retorts.

And now they had me! I began to get messages from parents and siblings that "good Christians don't do that!" and "Jesus wouldn't want you to behave that way." In desperation, I would respond, "Who are you to say -- you haven't even joined the church yet!" But the taunts hurt and frustrated, and I sought refuge in the church, my new family.

Later, as I went on to be ordained and serve in pastorates, I was faithful in teaching youth and especially confirmands the risks of faith, and the possibilities of facing ridicule or wen death for their faith. I loved to cite examples of early Christian martyrs and stories from missionaries about those who suffered for their faith. I told them about a man who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish Family. When he fell in love with the daughter of a Methodist minister and became a Christian, his family said "Shiva," mourned his "death," and never had contact with him again. Grandparents, cousins, his whole extended family, were lost to this man. That was the price he paid for becoming a Christian. That wasn't a real death, my confirmands would say. I would agree, but tell them that for that man, it felt like a death. But the youth always assumed that they would never have to face those kinds of threats, because in America we didn't live in a world where there were many non-Christians.

Early in the season of Pentecost, the church remembers the biblical texts that tell about the cost of discipleship, and the profound concept of dying and rising with Jesus Christ. Psalm 69 is a song of lament, in which the psalmist prays for deliverance from persecution and taunts--even from family members and friends. In desperation the psalmist cries, draw near to me, redeem me, set me free because of my enemies (Ps. 69:18). Likewise , the Old Testament includes Jeremiah's sixth lament, in which he rails at God for "enticing" him into proclaiming God's message and then allows him to be mocked and shamed. But when Jeremiah considers not doing God's prophetic work, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones." When his tormentors urge Jeremiah to denounce God and look for him to stumble so they can get their revenge, the prophet proclaims, "But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail." And the concluding hymn of praise suggests that Jeremiah has been delivered "from the hands of evildoers."

Matthew's Gospel records Jesus' guidance about the cost of discipleship just after giving the mission to the Twelve. They will be received just as Jesus has been received, and in the hindsight of the crucifixion, these words must have had even greater meaning. "Have no fear" were Jesus' words to them as they went out into a hostile world. They must speak from the housetops what he has told them in private. Those who would harm or kill them will not be able to harm their souls. And God's loving care for every sparrow that falls will be even greater for each of them. Loyalty to Jesus Christ will not go unacknowledged by God in heaven. Then, Jesus speaks of the divisiveness that commitment to him will have in families -- setting parents and siblings against each other. But commitment to Jesus Christ must prevail even over family loyalties. To be worthy of Christ, one must be willing to lose one's life in order to find it. What one of us can ever be worthy?

It all goes back to our baptism, as Paul tells us in Romans 6, for if we have been baptized, we have been united in Christ in death and have been raised to newness of life in him. We who struggle with self-condemnation, as well as the taunts of persecutors -- we have moved on to something greater. We can get caught up in the old life, especially when we focus on the persecutions, torments and even personal demons that assail us, but in Jesus Christ we are freed from all that. Paul exhorts us to "consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus!" And we, as inheritors of he new life in Christ, are challenged daily to give up the things of this world hat hold us back in order to live the resurrected life.

We fail new believers and confirmands when we don't warn them of the perils of this faith in a living Lord. Only when we take seriously those consequences of our baptism -- only then -- are we worthy of the One who overcame all for our sakes.

Jesus Appears (Acts 2:14a,22-32;Ps.16;I Pet.1:3-9;John 20:19-31)

When I was in seminary, Doubting Thomas was my soul mate. Jesus kept "appearing " to my fellow students within the rich stories of the Christian tradition. But like Thomas, I never seemed to be there when Jesus arrived. Why? Because the absurdity of the resurrection rumor had sent me away. I could not see the mark on Jesus' hands or touch the wound in his side. So I moved down the street to the Unitarians. Their faith made sense, with its distant and daring God, its passionate witness for justice, its bold support for inclusive ministry. Yes, theirs was a doing faith, a touchable faith, an energetic faith. And I didn't have to sit around waiting for a dead God to reappear.

But then a strange thing happened. I found myself restless and filled with sadness. I missed Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, the first appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples is both intense and focused. The scene is set with realistic detail. It is the evening of the first day of the week, and the doors are locked. The anxious disciples are shut tightly inside. The suspicious world is shut tightly outside. The whole of creation is missing Jesus. Then, all of a sudden, he appears. Defying locked doors and locked hearts and locked vision, Jesus simply appears. A dead God is resurrected. A dead faith is re-created. A dead hope is born again.

I remember once seeing such locked-up hope. It was coffee hour, and a parishioner was fussing with the food table, hunched over and preoccupied despite the hubbub of voices swirling around her. It had been six months since her husband had died, and we had yet to touch base in an unhurried way. As soon as I approached, her eyes welled up with tears. She tried to smile and be brave, but the ragged edges of grief had ravaged her face. After a few moments, she looked around to see if anyone was nearby and then she began to whisper.

"I had a terrifying experience last week. You'll probably think I'm nuts, I but I have to tell someone. You know," she went on, "the nights are the worst. I hear noises in the house, and I can't get used to sleeping in bed alone. It must have been three o'clock in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself back to sleep, when all of a sudden it happened. Bob came back. He came back and crawled into bed with me. He didn't say a word. He just appeared--and then faded away. I felt immediate peace and warmth and hope, and now I don't feel so alone." Then, glancing up in pink but eager embarrassment, she asked, "You don't think I'm crazy, do you?"

No. I don't think she was or is crazy. Instead, she is blessed with a God who just appears--in dreams, in visions, in people, in words, in institutions. The truth of Easter is that all of humanity is blessed with a God who defies the locks of logic and grief and prejudice and fear, a God who blesses us and then sends us, fresh and filled with hope, back into a hopeless world.

In John's Gospel, Easter coincides with Pentecost. Jesus appears, breathes, sends and commissions -- all in one burst of holy energy. God's warm and palpable presence startles and unsettles and stirs up the disciples. And they are never the same. There is almost a sense that God is of control, spilling over with an emphatic affirmation of life, filling the world with both urgency and joy. In Luke's version of Pentecost, Peter captures the moment perfectly: This is Jesus whom God raised up, "having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power" (Acts 2:24).

The Christian faith is the only world religion that takes as its logo an emphatic symbol of death. And yet the central affirmation of Christianity is hopeful life. Jesus just keeps appearing -- again and again -- to unlock the barriers between faith and doubt, between life and death, between past and future, between fear and joy. Jesus keeps appearing, a dependable reminder of our dependable God.

It is a Jesus kind of joy that fuels the faith of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and shaped the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in its efforts to heal postapartheid South Africa. It is a Jesus kind of justice speaking truth in Jasper, Texas, resurrecting community out of the ashes of racial hatred. It is a Jesus kind of faith filling the Christian churches in Palestine, attempting to pour prophetic patience onto the troubled waters of the Middle East peace process. Wherever it seems as if death has demolished life, Jesus just appears, and fresh hope abounds.

I still admire the Unitarians. But I cannot escape the mark of my baptism. Jesus is an "imperishable, undefiled and unfading" inheritance (1 Pet. 1:4), a living hope that keeps appearing in the locked corners of this defiled world. Again and again Jesus comes to where we are, startling us and breathing on us and sending us to be embodied hope for others. Like Thomas, we can miss the moment if we are so intent on proving God or playing God or pushing God that we don't actually ponder the presence of God. We can gather in community, joined by our common fear and our common vulnerability. As the resurrected body of Christ in the world we can experience God, and then become together what we can never be alone.

The Good News of the gospel is clear. When we least expect him, and when we most need him, Jesus just appears. May it be so.

Holy Heartburn (Acts 2:14a,36-41;Ps.116:1-3,10-17;I Per.1:17-23;Lk. 24:13-35)

The texts for the third Sunday of Easter are not for the fainthearted. They are about pounding hearts, wounded hearts and burning hearts. And they invite us to encounter the living Christ in the heart of who we are. Kathleen Norris and others remind us that "to believe" is not a matter of the mind, but a matter of the heart. For what we "believe" is what we "give our heart to."

When we meet the disciples on the road to Emmaus, it is evening, and the spectacular glow of the day has begun to fade. Resurrection, at this point, is nothing more than a rumor, a curiosity, an idle tale. And yet when the disciples meet a stranger on the road, it is clear that the possibility of resurrection has intrigued them. They have been talking about it for hours, rehearsing the possibilities, arguing about the details, sparring with one another about the theological nuances of an empty tomb. Buried beneath their verbal skirmish, there seems to be a deep yearning and a holy hunger. Intimately intertwined with their skepticism is their hope -- and their need for God to be alive and present. But the baggage of their doubt impedes the fervor of their faith. And so they fail to recognize Jesus.

On Sunday morning in contemporary America, modern disciples come straggling through the church door weighed down by cynicism, stress, pretense, power. They are sophisticated lawyers and skeptical scientists and shell-shocked journalists -- skilled practitioners in the seductions of the world, but nervous novices in the realm of the Spirit. They, like the first disciples, yearn for the living presence of God. But they are too preoccupied, suspicious, too busy to actually recognize God. In their objective world of fact and truth and matter and money, the church's world of mystery and meaning and risk and relationship seems silly. And so they are eager to discuss and debate the idea of God, but unprepared to experience or recognize the presence of God. They do not yet realize that it will only be through pounding hearts and burning hearts that they will come to believe -- that they will come to recognize Jesus.

Michael was a bright and engaging Jew, married to a church member, and a faithful participant in our Bible study classes. There was rarely a question he could not answer or a theological idea that he could not explain. His God lived vibrantly but tensely in his mind. When Michael and Carol became the parents of a baby girl, they had to decide whether to baptize her. After much soul-searching, Michael agreed that Leigh Ann would be baptized, and stood with his wife as she made the promises for their child.

Michael's hunger for scripture continued. In fact, his chewing upon the word became almost frenetic. I was not surprised when he finally came to see me. He was ready to be baptized. He was ready to follow the rabbi named Jesus. He was ready to believe. Why? Because in his intimate dance with scripture, in his intense study of the Gospels illumined by the Torah, Michael's heart had begun to burn within him -- and he had recognized the living God in the face of the risen Christ. In powerful ways, the Jesus described in the Bible had begun to get up off the pages and walk out into the world with him. Jesus had become Michael's traveling companion on the journey of his daily life.

The stranger on the road to Emmaus took the skepticism and the curiosity of the disciples and wove them into the fabric of scripture. The intersection of the "tradition" with the immediacy of his own flesh lit a fire in the hearts of those who traveled with him. Finally, it was in the intimacy of breaking bread that the eyes of the disciples were opened and they recognized the stranger. They recognized the presence of the resurrected God in their midst.

Such heartfelt faith is echoed in words from Acts. When Peter describes the agony and cruelty of Christ's death to the Pentecost crowd, the listeners are "cut to the heart." And in the crucible of shared suffering and guilt, they are reborn. They become believers. They become those who give their heart to the holy -- and the exuberance of the church is unleashed. Later, in the Epistle lesson, we learn that in the extended church of the Greek world, the tradition of the resurrected Lord continues to live, In joy and obedience the people "love one another deeply from the heart." Again and again in scripture, pounding hearts become burning hearts. And burning hearts become loving hearts. And so the heart of God continues to beat.

As a young man, Mahatma Gandhi studied in London. After. learning about Christianity, and after reading the Sermon on the Mount, he decided that Christianity was the most complete religion in the world. It was only later, when he lived with a Christian family in East India, that he changed his mind. In that household he discovered that the word rarely became flesh -- that the teaching of Jesus rarely became the reality of Jesus.

How "fleshy" is Jesus in our congregations? How persuasive is our teaching? How passionate is our preaching? How much do our hearts burn within us when the scriptures are opened to us? And how often do we recognize the stranger as the living Christ in our midst? These are the questions that emerge on the road to Emmaus. And the answers to these questions suggest both the promise and the power of Easter.

At Home in God (Acts 2:42-47;Ps.23;I Pet.2:l9-25;John l0:1-10)

When my children were small, the mommy in me always played tug-of-war with the minister in me. Often, while sitting in an evening meeting, I would dream of being home, curled up in bed, reading to my little ones. And reading to the little me in me.

Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny is a book for children of all ages. It is the story of a little bunny who dreams about running away from home, only to find "home" wherever he ends up. His mommy does not stop him from running away, but she does not leave him either. When he climbs a tree, the tree is in the shape of Mommy. When he travels the ocean, the wind is in the shape of Mommy. When he joins the circus, the trapeze artist is shaped like Mommy. Finally, Bunny gets the point. "Aw, shucks!" he says, "I might just as well stay home and be your little bunny." Which he does.

Whether we are bunnies or sheep or people, we cannot run away from sod. God is our home, and like the early ark of the Israelites, God travels with us wherever we go. The apostle Paul reminds us that "nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.. . neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation."

The Fourth Sunday in Easter offers us several images of God as home. God is both shepherd and host, pasture and valley, mansion and fortress, still water and open gate. Whatever the circumstances of our lives, God is with us -- in peace, in war, in hope, in fear, in life, in death, in joy, in suffering. When we are at home with God, even the most difficult days are infused with abundant life.

Twenty-five years ago, St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of them poor and black. As a chaplain intern I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair. One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being -- legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body. "Dear God," I thought, "what can I possibly say to this man?"

The answer came intuitively. The words of the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm suddenly welled up within me. As the familiar cadence filled that putrid room, the creature before me changed. He stopped shaking. He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me. In that moment, he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long-lost faith. When this child of the covenant died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.

In life and in death, we belong to God. In life and in death, we are at home in God. But the reverse is also true. God needs and wants to be at home in us. God needs and wants to abide in us.

Author Joyce Rupp recounts an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd boy named Alemayu. One night he was stranded on a frozen mountain, clothed only in a thin wrap. When he arrived back home, the villagers were amazed that he had survived so well. When asked to explain he said, "The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd's fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive." Hope is the home within us, the home where God lives, the home where God abides.

Rest, restoration and security are the promises of scripture. And they are promised even and especially in the midst of enmity and danger and death. But such blessed assurance comes with a price. We come to trust a dependable God only when we embrace a dependable discipline. In Acts we learn that the Pentecost church grew through devotion and discipline. Day by day the new converts spent time together in the temple. Day by lay they broke bread at home, and ate with glad and generous hearts. Day by day they praised God, sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds according to need. And day by day, God added to their number, and added abundantly to their already abundant life. Like any home, God needs care and attention and honor. But once we have restored and been restored at home we can then go forth to give care and attention and honor to the world.

In the spiritual world, none of us is ever homeless. Each day we wake up as residents in the homeland of God. In these words from her poem "Awakening," Gunilla Norris offers us a day- break prayer:

First thought -- as in "first light" -- let me be aware that I waken in You.

Before I even think that I am in my bed

let me think that I am in You.

Each hour wake me further to find You.

Let me relish in You, exult in You, play in You, be faithful in You.

Let me be wholly present to living the gift of time.

Sins and Sensibilities (Deut. 18:15-20, I Cor. 8:1-13, Mk. 1:21-28)

Where I grew up, everybody was pretty much just like me. It was a small, southern community, with a long history, deep roots and consistent Christian morality The only visible difference was our whiteness or our blackness. Ethically speaking, that's how we saw everything too: white or black, good or bad.

For example, in my household it was abundantly clear that consuming any alcoholic beverage in any amount was a sin for which there was no forgiveness. When I went away to college I noticed that others had vastly different views on the benefits of beer. When I drank a beer while out eating pizza with friends, the word got back home that I had "sinned." My mother and grandmother had a tearful handwringing session over the decline of my morality and feared for my future.

I decided to attend a school in the Northeast amongst the Yankees. During the orientation picnic, kegs of beer flowed, faculty and students drank together, and I wondered what kind of hellhole I had stumbled into. It seems laughable now, but it was a trauma to my piety, my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.

Our ancestors in the faith struggled with a different dilemma. The faith of first-century Christians in the Roman Empire was rooted in Christ, but their living was grounded in Caesar. In cities like Corinth the common marketplace sold meat for a family's evening meal just as markets do today. But in Corinth, the butcher was a priest in service to some Greek or Roman deity. All butchering had religious significance -- and the significance was not Christian. Early Christians had different theological views on what was ethical or permissible. Some thought it an insult to Christ to even purchase or consume meat roasted to tickle the nostrils of Zeus. Others said since Christians didn't believe in Zeus, the meat wasn't sacrificial, just nutritional. We can only imagine what first-century potluck dinners were like. Did they have meat-consuming" and "meat-refraining" tables? Did they consider one another's faith to be faulty? You bet!

Meat sacrificed to idols was a live issue in the church for decades and was very much on the mind of John as he wrote his Revelation to the seven churches. It seems that the church as a whole never published a social statement on this issue. Various communities dealt with it in their own context. The Corinthians consulted Paul about it, but in his letters to them he did not make a definitive judgement or take sides. Instead, he deferred to one of the great commandments: Love your neighbor as yourself. It's not about eating meat, Paul counseled; it is about loving others. If bringing a rump roast to the church dinner will singe the edges of your neighbor's faith, then bring a salad instead! One of the ways we love each other and practice hospitality is to respect the sensibilities of others.

I advise my young acolytes to wear "Sunday shoes" instead of athletic shoes when they are serving at the altar. It's not because I think God cares, but because I knew some people in the pews care very much. The sight of flashing soles going up to light the candles would so distract some that they would not be able to worship. We defer to one another to allow for a diversity of devotional styles.

This is a very Christian attitude, but it can easily lead us into temptation. In our local congregations and within our denominations we would be on shaky ground if we based every decision on whether or not sensibilities in the group would be insulted by our conclusions. If this had been Paul's counsel about all decisions, the church would not have survived long enough for us to ponder these questions. While I may counsel my acolytes to wear good shoes for the sake of their grandmother's piety, I would not counsel a new family of a different ethnicity not to worship with us because someone in the church might be offended.

We know that the gospel we preach is offensive to the world's sensibilities. The teachings of Jesus go against the grain as much today as they did when first uttered from the Savior's lips. The word we proclaim is multipurpose:it challenges us, comforts us, convicts us, consoles us.

In view of the missionary pastor he was, Paul's intention, I can only assume, was to keep the young struggling church focused on its mission of proclamation and service. How easy it is (Lord, don't we know!) to become sidetracked and divided over less vital issues: what we eat or drink, the color of the carpet for the sanctuary, who is to head the altar guild. We must be mature in Christ so that the little stuff doesn't defeat us. Know when to give in and when not to give up. Yes, that's easier said than done. But if we fail to stay on this task, our little lights risk extinction and Satan's plan to defeat the church issue by issue, little by little, congregation by congregation, will be one step closer to victory.

Some demons are harmless enough, but others must be cast out with all the authority the church can muster. Christians often disagree about which demons to exorcize and which to tolerate, which is why in this Epiphany time we continue to pray for the Light to dispel all darkness.

Who Is Like Thee? (Isaiah 40:21-31)

We humans know our language cannot communicate the greatness of the divine, but we try anyway. We love to use the prefix omni, which takes a common adjective and expands it to the size of the universe: omnifarious, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omni-loving, omni-merciful, omni-cool. The omni words are reserved for God and God alone.

The prophet Isaiah has an omni-tough assignment. He’s been called to proclaim hope in the midst of despair, to tell the exiles in Babylon that God is on the way to deliver them just when they have begun to seriously doubt it. In this great sermon, the preacher argues that the one who created the vast universe and all that is in it has the power to restore the Hebrews as a people. It is a tough sermon to preach, because in the midst of their captivity the people are wondering how their God can be omni-anything when they are so miserable. How can they be the chosen people and the demoralized people at the same time?

In a risky but effective homiletical strategy, Isaiah proclaims the greatness of the Lord in contrast to the insignificance of the people. Who are they to question God’s ways, God’s abilities? Earlier in this sermon he asks, "Whom does God consult for enlightenment? . . . Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales." Here is a metaphor of our smallness compared to our omni-eveiything God.

Today preachers can make the same point with new knowledge of the billions of galaxies beyond our own. The universe is beyond our comprehension, and we wonder how much we still have not discovered or experienced. We realize that we are the speck of inconsequential dust on the scales, as Isaiah described.

This prophet is a master at putting God and humankind in perspective. He asks wonderful rhetorical questions: To whom will you compare me? Who is my equal? When we’re posed such questions, we know the liturgically correct response, and yet the questions in our souls persist.

The truth is we compare God to ourselves. We measure divine actions against our own. We think we know what we would do, what we would enact or change if we were omni-everything.

Like Aladdin with a lamp we think we would make wonderful wishes. People would have all the riches they wanted. There would be an end to all strife and disease, and death would be banished from the earth. Do we not all wonder from time to time, from funeral to funeral, from war to war, why God does not fire up that omnipotence and straighten things out?

Such doubts haunt us constantly. We grieve the death of a 32-year-old mother from ovarian cancer and discover we have no explanations that make sense. We are convinced that if we had the power to control this situation we would produce a cure and a family able to live happily ever after. But we don’t have the power. We know who does, and in our grief we ask the ancient question, "Where is God?"

In another sermon, Isaiah reminded the people that their ways were not God’s ways, neither were their thoughts divine thoughts. It’s hard for us to believe that our measures of what is just, what is merciful and what is best are not in sync with the mind of God. They seem good to us. But we are not omni, Isaiah says. We have some perspective, but not the omni-perspective of God, who knows the movement of all history toward all futures, who knows our place among those billions of galaxies.

For all we know, our struggles with cancer are part of an evolutionary process within God’s billion-year scheme to create a posthuman being. We speak matter-of-factly about the evolutionary process behind us, noting that creatures climbed from the sea onto land, that gills became lungs.

But what did these creatures go through one by one over all those years as the Creator continued creating? Can we believe that God is still creating man and woman into something, we know not what?

When the calculations comparing our smallness with God’s greatness are finished, we can react to our position in the universe in several ways. We can slink away in despair and denial or we can crawl back into God’s big saving hands, Isaiah proclaimed, and the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus confirmed, that this God who knows all, creates all, controls all and plans all also loves all. God has no inconsequential creatures or untended corners of the universe. God tells us how precious we are in God’s sight.

The proclamation is always a shock because it’s not the way we operate. We who counsel each other to let the little things go, we who can only manage a limited number of details are amazed by God yet again. God has the whole world well in hand. I for one am happy to live inside a wrinkle of God’s palm, content to be a part of an ongoing creation process, amazed to be so loved and, most days, unafraid of what it all means.