Pentecost 11: Honour, Shame and Vengeance

Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8
Romans 12.9-21
Matthew 16.21-28

For anyone who has been betrayed or disappointed, whether by another or by the circumstances of life, the words from the prophet Jeremiah will resonate: “O LORD, you know; remember me and visit me, and bring retribution for me on my persecutors.” (Jeremiah 15:15a) Equally, we can all of us relate to the urgent cry of the psalmist: “O LORD God of vengeance…show yourself [and] give the arrogant their just deserts.” (Psalm 94:1-3) The desire for vengeance, for retribution, is powerful, so powerful that we must concede it comes from more than simply our wanting a “fair shake”. Rather, vengeance goes well beyond a desire for justice. Unlike justice, vengeance lacks a sense of reasonable proportionality and what we desire in vengeance is not redress, but retribution. And humiliation is at the core of the dynamic of vengeance. It calls for the demeaning and the humiliation of our enemies in turn, because the trespass done to us makes us to feel not merely injured or misunderstood, but humiliated ourselves. Our desire for vengeance comes from feeling that our self worth and dignity have somehow been diminished in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Our desire for vengeance is rooted in our sense of shame.

The world of the ancient near-east, the world the Bible was what sociologists term an “honour/shame culture”. Within such a culture the dynamics of humiliation and vengeance have a significance unknown to most of us today. In an honour/shame culture one’s social standing and even identity is bound up in the way one is is perceived, respected (or feared) and treated by others, the honour one is accorded. As such, honour is everything and shame or humiliation are to be avoided at all costs. If you shame me, you haven’t just slighted me, you have diminished me in the eyes of the group and that means you have diminished my personhood. If I do not seek vengeance, then I accept the diminishment; I accept that I am shameless. Alternatively, if I cannot avenge myself, then someone in my family, a member of my tribe, must do so for me in order not only that my honour be restored but their honour as well, the honour of my immediate group. The religious corollary of all this is that if I cannot avenge my dishonour, then God must and God must do it speedily and for all to see. God must work in the same way that we would if we could, or would our nearest kin if we had them.

For the thoughtful, the honour/shame system begs some serious questions and challenges: “From whence comes my sense of identity?” “How do I handle humiliation?” “How do I define vengeance?” “How do I define justice?” “How do I differentiate between the two?” For the religiously-minded, the question of God and God’s relationship to the dynamics of humiliation, vengeance and justice often are central, after all isn’t God supposed to be on the side of the brutalised and diminished, on the side of the humiliated and abused? Isn’t my god supposed to by on my side and take up my cause? For Christians, all this is informed by the disturbing – but not often highlighted – fact that we honour, indeed that we recognise as God, one who is humiliated, abused and ultimately shamefully executed as a common criminal, a religious agitator and social misfit. This recognition has signified a fundamental shift in social and personal relations, a shift which can be traced almost exclusively to Christianity and its insights into the nature of God.

Look for a moment at the Gospel. Jesus tells his friends about the humiliation which is to come – his suffering at the hands of the authorities and his execution. Peter immediately rebukes him. “God forbid it” (Matthew 6:22), he says. How can God allow Jesus, and by extension his friends, to lose face in this way? Jesus responds by telling Peter that he is setting his “mind not on divine things but on human things”. (Matthew 6:23) Jesus suggests that perhaps the dynamics of the honour/shame system have little to do with God and the divine economy, that perhaps there are worse things than being humiliated in the eyes of society; that perhaps we have a core identity which is not so fluid or fragile, as to be diminished simply by the whims and actions of others no matter how wounding or shaming those actions may be to our ego, and that perhaps that is rather any act of vengeance on our part which truly diminishes who we are. And so, he calls his followers to deny themselves, deny that constructed social self caught up in the honour/shame system, in a system which necessitates and demands retribution, humiliation and violence simply to keep that self intact. Accept your cross, accept that life is difficult and that living well or being good will not exempt you from suffering, pain or even humiliation at the hands of others and of circumstances. Yet know this, no one can diminish your personhood because your identity is not at the whim either of others or of circumstances. Our identity is found in God, in being created in God’s image and being redeemed by God’s love.

If there is a possibility of diminishment it lies not in what others can do to us, but in what we can do to others. It lies in our seeking and executing vengeance. Ironically, it is our own desire to humiliate another which ultimately disfigures the very core of who we are. For this reason Paul advises his fellow Christians in Rome: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them….Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all….Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:14, 17, 21) Do not let the actions of another rob you of your own self-determination. Do not allow the actions of another to determine or condition your reaction, because when you do then you lose the moral high ground, you lose your self in the worst way possible. We each of us must choose a stance for dealing with and encountering the world, both its joys and its difficulties, and in a disciplined way discern that we are not simply at the whims of others, of their perceptions and actions. We do not need to get caught up in the cycle of hatred, vengeance and humiliation. Like Jesus on the cross, we can choose to bring it to an end with ourselves. Moreover, we can cease to project onto God our need for vengeance. While we can accept that God may vindicate our trials and difficulties, we do not need to have God avenge them; and while we may recognise that God and his Church honour those who are faithful, we do not need to have those we consider faithless to be humiliated or shamed. As Christians we can desire and work for justice, but we can never legitimately desire or execute vengeance. We should not seek it even from God.

Pentecost 10: Rest and Renewal

Isaiah 51.1-16
Psalm 138
Romans 12.1-8
Matthew 16.13-20

In the 1940’s a lion escaped from a circus in Brooklyn in New York City. The keepers located him next morning, but, strangely enough, he had only gone several blocks, stopping at an abandoned house with a thirty-foot strand of fence in front of it. There was the lion, pacing back and forth behind that fence, continuing the same monotonous yet comfortable habit of lateral movement into which he had been born in the circus cage, free and yet not entirely free after all. For whenever he would reach a corner, at one end of the fence, he would simply reverse his direction. He had a new freedom, but because he could not think in a new way, he was as encaged as ever. There is something in this story resonant with the discussion between Jesus and his friends recorded for us in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus had given over a lot time and employed various means to share with people the Good News. He had shared with them the importance of love, compassion, kindness, the secondary nature of rules and regulations over and against human needs. As we reflected last week, he had shared with them his own insight that the God of Israel was bigger than the people of Israel, and that his mission was for all people — the Jew as well as the foreigner. Jesus had offered them a vision of freedom as children of God which was in many ways new and refreshing. Yet when he asked his friends “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (Matthew 16.13), they responded, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” (Matthew 16.14) The people were still thinking only in terms of the inherited tradition, the past. Something new had been offered, but no renewal of the mind had come about, therefore the new that had been offered could not be completely taken in. And lest we think this situation particular to the Jews of Jesus’ day, I would ask you to remember the many times in the Church’s own history when she has behaved in the very same way. New technology, medical advancements, as well as developments in the understanding of human nature have throughout history been met with hostility by the Church, simply because they were understood solely in light of the past, with only a very few of her members encountering them with a renewed mind and spirit. Think of Galileo, for example, who was made by the Church to either recant his “heresy” that the earth revolved around the sun or to face a fiery death at the stake. Like that escaped lion we have so often allowed ourselves to pace back and forth in a seeming cage, because we have been unwilling to think in new ways and simply turn the corner.

Today’s scriptures seem to beg the question, “Where and how am I renewed?’ At another level we can ask ourselves, “How do I personally encounter and assimilate new information?” Do we give ourselves time to think, read, reflect and contemplate the new possibilities which life and the world offer us; or do we, out of habit, simplistically reference the new with old and thereby rarely see the new for all that it may bring us? Do we take so little time to reflect on the new, and because it may appear similar to the old, simply treat it as the old, not unlike that escaped lion pacing back and forth in front of a fence, see it all the time as a cage? We live in a world which constantly is offering us new insights into human life and the human condition — much more so than ever in our history, a world which is constantly challenging “the way we have always done things”, and if we are to live in the world seriously we must take what the world gives us seriously. This doesn’t mean we have to uncritically accept all that comes our way, neither that our past should not inform our present, but it does mean that we must set time aside to think, read and reflect so that the decisions we make and the outlooks we adopt are informed and considered. That takes time, specific time; it takes pausing and not just carrying on with things as usual. Finding ourselves in the middle of August it is not a bad idea to think about taking time, making time to rest.

As we ask ourselves “where and how am I renewed?” we also begin to discern how, if ever, we set time aside to reflect. When do we allow ourselves rest in order to gather and reasonably consider new information which the world and our experiences offer us. If we do not set that kind of time apart, if we run from task to task without seriously engaging with the new things that come our way, if we do not give ourselves the opportunities to seek out information, to think and study, then our alternative is only ever to see the new within the construct of the old, or force it into our past experiences and knowledge. We all need the kind of rest which allows us to think in new ways, to think, as they say, outside the box, to use our gifts of creativity and imagination. It is the rest of consideration and reflection, the rest of renewal. It is the kind of rest which, because we are relaxed, allows us to make connections between the issues of our lives — connections which we would not see under the normal pressures of day to day existence. In our fast-paced world we have to make a lot of decisions and assimilate a lot of information, to do that well, to do that effectively and beneficially requires resting time to think and process. The rest of renewal keeps us from the glib answer, the knee-jerk response, the unconsidered and unimaginative reaction. It safeguards us from the rote resolution conditioned solely by old precedence, and opens us up to new possibilities, to the creative response engendered by a refreshed vision, even a renewed spirit.

In the letter to his fellow Christians at Rome Paul writes: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12.2) And I suppose that it could not have been said better. The renewing of our minds is the work of transformation, transformation of spirit, mind, body. We can be conformed to the this world (by this Paul means the accustomed and customary way of doing and seeing things, understanding even the Good News of Jesus along those lines) or we can use our minds restfully, carefully and imaginatively to discern the new things and possibilities offered to us in the day to day; we can use our minds to discern the new ways in which God may be working. How do we do this? Let’s start with reading. Not just reading what we have to read for work or material which only further reinforces a our already ascertained world view, but novels, poetry, unconventional biographies, anything which allows you to open up to different ways of understanding or making connections. Good cinema, theatre and art help us to do the same. Well considered they can lead us to catch a glimpse of how others have interpreted their encounter with the world and their lives within it. It is one of the reasons I am so proud of our film club, and wish it were more widely advertised. Time spent in nature or gardening, in any activity that calls for a quieting of soul or which gives to us a sense of perspective of the world and our genuine place in it, these too can be places of renewal and reminder. Regular prayer and meditation also are essential, enabling us to engage at a deep level with ourselves and God, and thereby less fearfully with the world. But, all this takes time and a specific commitment to making time. Yet, if we are serious about the spiritual journey, about the life journey, it is more than worthwhile.

I think it was Eckhart Tolle who wrote that 80% of our thinking is useless repition, our minds playing over and over what we already know, or think we know. It is for this reason we all need places and spaces of renewal to grow and develop, to live lives of balanced integrity, to see things from new perspectives. We need them in order to become more fully the people God is calling us to be. Our dignity as human beings, our dignity as a people made in the image of God, demands it, because if we do not make that kind of time to reflect and contemplate, to invite renewal we may just find ourselves like that lion pacing back and forth in front of a fence, trapped by a facile interpretation of reality, trapped by our simple knowledge of the past with no vision for the present or the future.

Pentecost 9: A Church of Dirty Foreigners and Uppity Women

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15:10-28

I am told there was a time the Church of the Saviour was the meeting place for the “great and the good” of Hanford, its pews filled Sunday by Sunday by the worthiest of civic worthies. And through its doors passed so many who looked to the Episcopal Church as the religious badge signifying they had “arrived”, socially, politically, economically. This is not to paint a dim picture of Hanford or of the Episcopal Church in Hanford. The situation here was hardly atypical of that in the Episcopal Church more generally – although it may have lasted longer in small towns like Hanford. The Episcopal Church was conservative, wealthy and white, and being or becoming an Episcopalian, or even being in the company of Episcopalians was a feather in anyone’s cap. If you know the film Driving Miss Daisy, there is a sure hint of that world. The Werthans are Jews, and one evening Daisy Werthan’s son is visiting his mother, but keen to get back home saying that his wife “Florene’ll be havin’ a fit if I don’t get home on time tonight.” His mother responds sarcastically, “Y’all must have plans tonight”. “Goin’ to the Andersons’ for a dinner party”, he says. She quickly observes, “This is her idea of heaven on earth, isn’t?...Socializin’ with Episcopalians!” An invitation to the Episcopal home of the Andersons was for Florene, and no doubt her other friends, a sign she had somehow “arrived”, was part of the inner circle.

But we all know that those days are over for the Episcopal Church. Some time in the 60’s or 70’s of the last century she experienced a profound conversion in which a more radical understanding of the Gospel was discerned; an understanding grounded in some of the more challenging Scriptural passages from the prophets particularly, but more importantly in a rediscovery of the ministry of Jesus himself. The Episcopal Church became somehow particularly attentive to and critical of the social, political, economic and even ecclesiastical forces that pushed people to the margins. She became critically able to draw parallels between the tribal and class solidarity which in the ancient world of the Scriptures created groups of people considered beyond the pale and how those same dynamics continued in the present and in the Church’s life itself.

It may be rather difficult for us to really understand the strict social and religious lines of divisions in ancient societies. Yet, what usually distinguishes Judaism and its daughter religion, Christianity, is their commitment to breaking down those sorts of divisions as well as their commitment to the de-privatistion not only of religion, but of God God’s self. If you recall, in the ancient world one’s god was one’s private possession, the possession of one’s tribe or nation. Other gods existed, but you hoped that yours was more powerful, capable of overpowering the gods of other peoples and therefore able to grant you and your fellows security and success. Judaism, and most particulalry the prophets, dared to suggest that perhaps the God of the Jews was the God of all peoples, and that tribal identity had nothing to do with one’s relationship to God, and by extension to others. And so the author of Second Isaiah dares to write: “And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD…will be accepted…for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” (Isaiah 56:6, 7) God cannot be the private possession of Judaism, nor of anyone. God is God, the God of all creation and there is no other; and if there is no other than certainly this God must be God of the Jew and of the foreigner alike.

Of course, the temptation to possess God is a powerful one, and with enough religious and social power the appearance of possessing and controlling the divine is easily achievable. Jesus’ generation had listened no better to the prophetic vision than had previous ones; or our own for that matter. Religion had a become a way to feel superior, virtuous and pure. So when a foreign Canaanite – and a woman at that – approached Jesus in the crowd imploring he heal her daughter, his reponse was the enculturated one: “I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) and then he insulted her in her foreign origin – “dog” is a term of abuse regularly leveled at foreigners: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Matthew 15:26) It is not easy for Christians to see Jesus in this unfavourable light, but it does highlight the power of group or tribal identity, that even Jesus bought into it, at least initially. The woman out of bravery or shere desperation challenges Jesus, challenges his vision of God and of God’s kingdom. Perhaps Jesus recalled the words of the prophet or perhaps he remembered his own outcast status, but not only does he include both the mother and daughter in God’s world of salvation and redemption, but he commends the mother’s faith: “Woman, great is your faith.”

Immediately, after this incident (although not included in today’s gospel passage), the writer of Matthew relates how were brought to Jesus “the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others…and he cured them.” (Matthew 16:30) For curing one should read “including”. Social and religious convention dictated that like foreigners, those “damaged” or in any way disabled were also not part of the plan. God was the God of the able, not the broken and that indeed their very brokenness – whether physical or emotional – signalled their impurity, their alienation from the divine. For this reason in the gospels the question of sin is never far from the issue of illness deformity. Jesus’ parable in which a great party is hosted and none of the invited guests come highlights the same reality. Being turned down by those invited the host commands the servants, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.” (Luke 14:21b, 23b) One can see how the circle continually widened, and the early Church became the place for the broken, the damaged, the dirty foreigner and the “uppity” woman.

How far we have come from that early Church of the broken, the damaged, the misfit and misfitting. One of the aspects of the Episcopal Church that makes me most proud is how her conversion of spirit and direction has played out specifically with regard to those our world today considers damged or broken, those whom many churches consider beyond the pale of Christian life and Christian society, and hence beyond the reach of God’s love. I love how our Episcopal Church, like that host in the parable, has gone out into the streets and lanes of life and specfically welcomed those the world has made poor, whom society has labelled as moral cripples, those whose vision is compromised by the labels placed on them by others, those who have been so abused and demoralised by the powers that be they cannot even hardly walk with any dignity at all. The Church has broken down the walls and divisions, the theological cliques and spiritual huddles and said – “Come, you too are welcome. You are included. The message of salvation is for you too.” This has cost the Episcopal Church much, and for that reason makes her welcoming inclusion so much the more meaningful.

Many people ask me what my vision is for our parish. More and more I feel that I would like to see our parish further incarnate the reality of God’s love and invitation to the broken and damaged, the misfits. When so many churches find themselves obsessed with truth and certainty, I would like to be the Church that says, “Your doubts are welcome here. We don’t know either, but perhaps together we can find something of an answer”. Where so many churches brandish a simplistic understanding of family and family “values”, I would like to be the Church that says there are many wonderful ways of being a family and here in the household of God all are valued, accepted and affirmed, all recognised as sacred. When so many churches walk around as if they possessed God, I want to be the Church that says and really believes, “We can’t possess or own God, God owns us and that means we will always live out of the reality that God is already with us and with everyone.” When so many churches want to continue living by purity laws in order to feel superior, I want a Church of “dirty outsiders”, of the broken and damaged, of those who are far too aware of their imperfections; a Church that invites others who just do not quite fit in. I think we should be that place, that Church, in Hanford. I think we should want to be it. I think we are already becoming it, going some way to fulfilling that vision of Jesus and the prophets in which divisions come down and a new society is created in which all people are gathered together – foreigner, stranger and neighbor alike.

Pentecost 8: Silence, Darkness and Presence

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

Two aspects of life – constant realities to our ancestors of just one hundred years ago – are virtually unknown to us today, namely sheer silence and utter darkness. What passes for quiet or dark in the modern world would be piercing and brilliant to those of earlier generations. And particularly those of us who grew up or lived in truly urban areas, we forget how accustomed we are to the backdrop of sound and light – which are, in fact considered to be hallmarks and indicators of modern living, of modern civilisation. Indeed, we find that for many people the absence of both or either makes them to feel inordinately and inexplicably uncomfortable, frightened even. When was the last time you sat in a dark room, and listened to the sheer sound of silence? Or sat silently with a friend for a length of time? How long before it became rather unnerving? How long before the thought “I must get up and do something, I must think of and say something” won out over the posture of simple presence? Undoubtedly, both silence and darkness carry with them uncomfortable resonances of fear and of the unknown; most certainly they carry with them resonances of death – “dark and silent as the grave” the saying goes. And certainly very practical reasons may abound for the steady eradication of darkness and silence from our modern world, but the therapist in me cannot help but consider it – in part – as indicative of an increasing human need to avoid naked presence to ourselves, to one another and to God; the human need to be in control.

For those of us uncomfortable with the dark, uncomfortable with silence it may be disconcerting to come across the observation that in the Judaeo-Christian tradition it is in both silence and darkness that God and God’s purposes are continually revealed. Clearly this is true in Elijah’s encounter with God on Mount Horeb. The very human expectation of God revealing God’s self in obvious power – wind, earthquakes, fire – is almost ridiculed in the narrative with the re-current trope “but the LORD was not in…” the wind or the earthquake or the fire, as each case may be. It is rather when Elijah can bring himself to hear the sound of sheer silence, that any revelation of God can be made. It is only when he can trust the silence and make himself present by stepping out of the cave, stepping out from himself, hat he can understand who God really is in this situation and what God is saying. Job similarly recounts “Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, 
dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake….A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice: “Can mortals be righteous before God?
 Can human beings be pure before their Maker? (Job 4:13-14, 16b-17). In the Gospel of Luke we see how it is only after he has been made mute that Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, can come to understand God’s real purposes.

Few of us like being driven into the silence, but it is only in the silence – the sheer silence – that we can really hear both ourselves and God. Ironically, also it is in the dark that we can ever really see. Despite the image of light in the Tradition, the great events of salvation history seem to happen in the dark – the parting the Red Sea and the salvation of the Hebrew children, the nativity, the crucifixion, which even while taking place in the middle of the day is an event shrouded in mysterious darkness, and Christ’s vindication over death happens from within the darkness of the tomb, hidden from human sight; and each of these events carry with them a fearful and dangerous element. It was in the darkness of night and the semi-darkness of early morning, with its attendant fears – after all, when we find ourselves in the dark and fearful even the revelations of God my seem deceptive and untrustworthy – yes, it is in that darkness that Peter is called to trust, that he is called to come to Jesus over the water. And even though he falters, even though he sinks, this encounter in the darkness of the early morning and amidst the darkness of his doubt is instrumental in bringing the others to faith: “And those in the boat worshipped [Jesus] saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’ ” (Matthew 14:33) Darkness can rob of us the ability to see, both physically and intellectually, and yet may open us up to understand what we thought to be impossible or make us to give up the control which seems too easily grasped in the light.

Conventional prayer notwithstanding, nor traditional images of a God resplendent in light, there are in the frightening experiences of both silence and darkness revelations of God’s nature and work which can be communicated in no other way. Perhaps this is true because of the posture in which both silence and darkness places us, that of sheer and naked presence; but with that nakedness comes also a disconcerting uncomfortableness from which we readily seek to flee. After all, who I am if I am not talking? Who am I if I can not see things clearly? I establish my persona with sound and I carve out by path and future in light, and that is certainly good and beneficial. Each one of us, after all, must make her or his own way in the world. However, the attendant and unspoken fears are that if I cease to speak I may just cease to exist, and if I cease to construct my life and plans in the “garish light of day”, I may well lose my command over both. As I hinted at the start, I have for a long time believed that the noisy world we have built and the seemingly endless idle chatter we create, as well as our obsession with light and almost unending need “to see it all” – both physically and intellectually – are indicative of a fear of death, the ultimate loss of control. And it is all about control. If I can paraphrase the words of Marilyn McEntyre from her book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies: “noise [and light insulate] us from the silence [and darkness] that [expose] us to encounters with self and God, and the voice of the Spirit that groans within us in ways that we may not control. To choose silence [and darkness] is to risk that encounter.” Another way of speaking about encounter is presence. To choose silence and darkness, then, is to risk presence – naked presence – before God and before each other.

Think for a moment what it would feel like to stand or sit before another – a friend, a partner, a child; to sit before them in silence and to sit with them in intellectual darkness, that is laying aside any preconceived notions or ideas about who they are, laying aside what we think we know, all that we project onto them. Imagine sitting before that person in absolute and naked presence. Funnily enough, the better we think we know the person, the more difficult the exercise becomes. It can become even frightening as we lay aside our controlling and well-practiced tools of encounter: our words and our light. How long do you think you could bear it: five minutes, ten minutes thirty minutes? As is with others, so it is with God. For so many even seasoned Christians, the posture of silence and darkness, the posture of naked presence, are fearfully frightening or completely unknown in their prayer or spiritual life, in their relationship with God. With their words and their glaring light, they carry God in their pocket. Their religion is sure, confident and above all controlled, according – not to God’s – but to their own will and purposes. So few of us even seasoned Christians step out of our comfortable and controlled cave into sheer silence and uncertainty; so few of us even seasoned Christians step out from the safety of our little boat and into that fearful and precarious darkness. So few of us even seasoned Christians step out at all, risk our dying to control, risk the encounter of naked presence.

Ultimately, if we cannot countenance silence, if we cannot bear darkness, the path to a genuine relationship with God becomes extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible. Our relationship with God can only ever be a relationship with our projections, our words and our thoughts, a mere exercise in control. Ironically, sound and light obscure our ability to see and hear. In a world of increasing sound and decreasing darkness, in a world where control and self-assertion are more and more prized and rewarded, this is perhaps one of the most important and appropriately counter-cultural posture religious persons have to offer the world. The posture of silence, the posture of darkness, the posture of naked presence.

Pentecost 7: Banquets, Kings and Kingdoms

Isaiah 55.1-5
Psalm 145.8-9, 15-22
Romans 9.1-5
Matthew 14.13-21

It it sometimes difficult to come to grips with the truly creative genius behind the composition of the Gospels; not least of which because of the nature of the lectionary. Too often because specific episodes in the life of Jesus are isolated and stand alone on a Sunday morning, awe can miss much of their intended impact and meaning. I often told my students on the Reader Training Course in Southwark diocese that in preparing their sermons it is not enough to look at the text itself, but what comes before it and what comes after. Today’s lectionary selection is an excellent example of this. Both the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures and that from the Gospels centre around the feeding of God’s people, indeed a banquet of abundance grounded in the spirit of divine hospitality and generosity: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”(Isaiah 55.1); “And [the multitude] ate and were filled…and those who ate were five thousand men, besides women and children.”(Matthew 14:20, 21)

But there is another banquet in this narrative; a banquet hidden from our eyes by the lectionary, and which sheds light on that impromptu banquet in a deserted place. Indeed a banquet, without which we can not fully comprehend the meaning of the feeding of the “five thousand men, besides women and children.” This other banquet does not take place in the wilderness, but in a royal palace. Its guests are not weary-worn travellers, but prominent and noble citizens of Judea. Its outcome is not life and refreshment, but death and betrayal. It is the banquet at which the daughter of King Herod’s wife asks of her step-father the head of John the Baptist and gets it. For the Matthean and Markan communities at least, these two stories must have had a joint siginificance, because both place Herod’s banquet directly before Jesus’.

These two kings — and two kingdoms — are purposely set side by side, and the significance of that would not be lost on the original reader, hearer. In placing together these two narratives, the writers allude to strong cultural and religious symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures and of first-century Judaism: God’s feeding of the children of Israel with manna in the wilderness, and also the anticipated eschatological banquet promised after the apocalyitic cataclysm when God would end the old age (and all forms of distortion and evil) and establish the divine reign in its fullness; and perhaps much more simply is the contrast in these two narratives between slavery and exodus, between Egypt and the desert, between Pharoah and Moses. At same time the writers use these traditional and potent cultural and religious images to point to the future, a new way to be the people of God in the world. In hearing the story of the feeding of the multitude no Christian — whether two thousand years ago or today — could possibly be deaf to the resonance with still another meal, the meal we celebrate Sunday by Sunday: Jesus, “taking the five loaves and the two fish,…looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” (Matthew 14:19) So there is here still another hidden banquet, the banquet of the Eucharist. The banquet that for Christians is not only a foretaste of the eschatological banquet at the end of the age, but the very sign that the consummation of the age has already begun. And so, contrasting the banquet of King Herod in his palace and the banquet of the eternal King in a deserted place, the evangelists point to the banquet of another kingdom – the kingdom of God. We can thus begin to see how subtlely and how cleverly are crafted these narratives; and that as they invited the original readers and hearers to the resonances of the past and the vision of the future, it is the hope that they do so to us today.

For me, I suppose, there arise several questions from my encounter with these resonances, and while I claim to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God, I do wonder in which kingdom I spend most of my time,and while I share regularly in the banquet which is the foretaste of God’s ultimate victory, I do wonder sometimes where I eat most of my meals. The fact is that I spend a lot of time in the kingdom of Herod, and I think that if we are honest we all do. Perhaps, execution is not a regular part of our agendae, but that is the more overt accident of that kingdom. If you are like me, I find that I live in its more sublte aspects. I live in a kingdom in which I am served, much more that I serve; I eat at banquet in which I am the guest much more than I am the host; I live in a kingdom in which like Herod, I sometimes turn away from doing what I know to be right in order to save face or reputation; I eat at a banquet in which I am always acutely and selfishly aware of how little there is to go around, because I cannot fully trust a God who sends manna from heaven.

The contrast to all this is that banquet in a deserted place in which, like all of Jesus’ disciples we are all called into God’s own work of service and compassion. It is the banquet in which God is praised for the good things provided and then we are instructed to distribute them, to share them. It is the kingdom where we all of us sit down on the grass together close to the ground from which which were created, and regardless of social precedence and position. It is the banquet where no one goes away hungry and there is more than we could ever have asked for or imagined. It is the kingdom where we are called into personal responsibility for care-taking of the creation and for the well-being of the most vulnerable in our world.

And we do all this because of what happens here, in this place, within these walls We commit ourselves to live this way because we learn it at the table of the new creation, at the banquet of the kingdom. It is here that we practice the life of the kingdom in which the greatest is the servant of all, in which we all stand equal before each other and before God, in which everyone one is welcome and everyone included. The People of God — the Church — and the Eucharist are the places where we should be experiencing the prefiguring of God’s reign in order that we can go back out into the world and work within it towards the fullest revelation of God’s reign and God’s purposes. This banquet is the training ground for how to eat at the banquet of Herod, the banquet of the world; and not just how to eat at it, but how to transform it.

Yes, the fact may be that we live at Herod’s banquet with its jostling for position and regard, with its pomp and prestige, it surreptious and even deceitful dealings; but our calling is that banquet in a deserted place where we are invited to sit on the grass with out sisters and brothers, where we give thanks to God for the goodness of the earth and creation, and where God God’s self calls to us in welcome and generosity: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” (Isaiah 55:1, 2b) We also gather as the Lord’s people around the Lord’s table to learn how to behave at that second banquet, how to respond to that call, how to listen carefully to the Lord, how to eat what is good; how to be formed into a people who shall be a witness of God’s reign to all peoples, calling them by our lives and actions to its fullest revelation in order that “the kingdom of the world may become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah” (cf Revelation 11:15), the kingdom of justice, compassion, kindness, mercy and peace.