Year B, Lectionary 17 (July 29, 2012)

·         2 Kings 4:42-44

·         Psalm 145:10-18 (16)

·         Ephesians 3:14-21

·         John 6:1-21

I like it when the lectionary guys do something obvious like that. Comparing Jesus to Elisha! Because they did the same miracles!

Actually, you should read all that stuff about Elijah and Elisha, because yeah, they did do all the same miracles as Jesus. Plus some way cooler ones. From which we can draw two conclusions.

Option A: the guys who wrote the gospels made up Jesus's miracles to show he was just like Elijah and Elisha. That's not at all unlikely, considering that just about everything in the New Testament is written with an agenda.

Option B: Jesus really did the miracles, but since it was all done before, the miracles aren't what makes Jesus special.

Then again, maybe both. The evangelists made up the miracles, because miracles weren't important to Jesus's mission.

Or not.

One way or the other, the miracles aren't important. Miracles are what we want from God. But God doesn't really care what we want from him. Read the Bible, it's all right there. God already did the following for us: everything. He expects us to manage a little bit on our own and stop aggravating with whining. Specifically, "do not put the Lord your God to the test." Also, I did an Excel spreadsheet, and it turns out that belly-aching is the third most common cause of the Lord's anger, after "worshipping the Baals" and "being a stumbling-block".

Seriously. Forget about the miracles. Jesus isn't gonna do any miracles for you. Quite possibly, Jesus never did any miracles. That's not what Jesus was on about. Jesus told you: help others.

That's all I'm gonna say about it this time. Stop asking for loot and miracles, serve others.

Praise be to God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Year B, Lectionary 16 (July 22, 2012)

·         Jeremiah 23:1-6

·         Psalm 23 (1)

·         Ephesians 2:11-22

·         Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

There is something interesting about this passage in Mark, or more accurately these two passages that the lectionary committee chose to juxtapose. Much more interesting than the fancy miracle stories, if you ask me.

Here's the thing: Jesus got tired. Both he and the disciples would get tired of looking after the sheep. They kept trying to get away so they could have a rest, and the crowds kept following them. They didn't get a chance to eat or sleep. One time when they were in Capernaum, and people couldn't even get in the door because of the crowd, they climbed up on the roof, hauled up a paralytic on a stretcher, and lowered him back into the house. People clung to Jesus's garments. They followed him along the road yelling "Son of David, have mercy on me!" They sent people to drag him to this house and that house to cure so and so. Everywhere Jesus go, people follow him. Not because they care about him, but because they want something from him.

You have to realise that this will happen if you are a Christian. If you're doing what Christ told you to do, if you're being Christ-like, then people will follow you around giving you no peace because they want you to do things for them. And unlike Christ, you can't do miracles. But you have to take care of them. That's what Jesus told us to do and showed us through his life.

As a Christian, when someone asks for help, you should be willing to help. Even if they don't ask you directly. Maybe they ask generally, "can somebody do X or Y?" Maybe they didn't ask anybody, but you can see that they need it. Suppose you see a person in a wheelchair who is struggling to get through a door. This person needs help. You're a Christian. Go help.

Suppose you see someone who has fallen. This person needs help. You're a Christian. Go help.

Someone needs first aid? You go help.

Someone needs food? You go help.

Someone needs respite from their special needs child? You go help.

You're a Christian. That's really what being a Christian means. Someone needs help, you go help. Not because you want to or it's no trouble at all or you're a decent person. You go help because you are Christ's own and Christ says for you to help. And for once I'm not gonna go through all the proof-texting and show you where Christ said to care for others. You know just as well as I do that's what Jesus said. You can worry over whether to ostracise gays or what magic formula gets God to do everything you want or everything Paul said, but that's not important. Jesus said, help people. So go help people.

Now of course you have excuses. Lots of reasons why you can't possibly go help whoever. You have an injury and can't help the person in the wheelchair. You need your money more than the homeless alcoholic does. Your time is important. It's not your kids and it's not your fault they have special needs. You pay your taxes, the government can take care of it with your money.

Ok, you're thinking "well I don't use that excuse, I'm a Christian, I help others."

But you have other excuses. Some perfectly reasonable theory that explains why you don't have to do anything about it, but you could pray about it and Jesus will fix it. Or Saint Anthony. Oh wait, that's papist superstition.

You know why Saint Anthony is a saint?

Neither do I, but I bet you it's got something to do with... he helped a bunch of people. Either that or he was martyred. Or maybe he showed leadership or erudition. But you haven't been martyred, and you've probably not achieved any spectacular feats of leadership or erudition. And yet you're supposed to be a saint too, so for you, it leaves helping a bunch of people.

Going back to our Gospel reading, I want to get to the main excuse you probably have, which is that you think you're doing enough. But you're not.

You donate to charity, you abstain from gambling, you mention the Lord frequently, you pray at great length and possibly in tongues. You're a great Christian. You're doing everything you possibly can to serve Christ.

Are you serious?

Look at the Gospel reading. They're tired. They're all tired. They get away to rest, though even in pre-motor-vehicles times, even getting away is tiring. And when they get [SQG] "away", there is the crowd again! Wanting things! They help the crowd and try to get away in another direction, and they find another crowd!

That's how much work you should be doing for Christ. In our modern daily life, crowds aren't gonna follow you, but needy people are going to be constantly phoning, texting, coming by, stopping you on the street, asking for favours. At first they'll ask politely, for something that's really necessary and they really can't do themselves. The more you do it, the more they'll ask for. They'll take you completely for granted and use you for everything. Once you're very tired and all your disposable income has been spent on the needy, you're gonna think now you've done quite enough. More than enough. Those ungrateful wretches don't deserve all your effort anyway.

And?

Those ungrateful wretches didn't treat Jesus with any respect either, you know. Oh yeah, they called him "teacher", but that just shows you ass-kissing is not a recent technology. But other than that? Did they respect his time? Did they respect his space? Did anyone have his back when he needed it?

No.

So don't expect it either. Go help. When you're tired, drained, worn out, and pissed off with all the ungrateful wretches, take a rest. You have that luxury, which Jesus didn't. And then, go back and help some more. You need a certain amount of self-care as a Christian. Although, if you look at Jesus, or the Apostles, or Mother Theresa, it's really hard to tell where the self-care was. But you probably need more self-care than that, even though you're a saint too. So yeah, take a break, rest, regroup.

Then go back and help.

You're a saint. That means Jesus is counting on you to help. Not just a little bit on Sunday if it's convenient, but until you're worn out by it. That's what he showed us. That's what he expects you to do. Go do it.

Year B, Lectionary 12 (June 24, 2012)

·         Job 38:1-11

·         Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32 (29)

·         2 Corinthians 6:1-13

·         Mark 4:35-41

It's too bad that there is only so much time for reading in the service, because it would really be worthwhile to read not just Job 38:1-11, but God's entire speech to Job, which is chapters 38 through 41. And then Job answered the Lord:

"I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'

Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

'Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you declare to me.'

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;

Therefore I recant,
and change my mind about humanity.

(Job 42:1-6) And after Job has said this, the Lord is pleased with him, chews out his annoying friends, and restores his fortunes.

On second thought, maybe you'd have to read the whole book. In fact, you'd have to read it several times, because it's rather intricate. Luckily other people have read it and summarised it for us, so I'll summarise the summaries for you.

Once upon a time, there was Job, a righteous man. He had seven sons, three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, and very many servants. And he was very righteous. So one day, the being called [SQG] "Satan", that is, the Accuser, tells God "yeah, Job is righteous, but he's only righteous because everything always goes his way. I bet you if I make his life suck, he'll stop being righteous." And God takes the bet.

So the Accuser kills all Job's children, has enemies kill or steal his livestock, and sends him loathsome sores. Job goes to sit on the ash heap, scraping his sore with a broken piece of pottery, and cries, but does not curse God.

Job's friends come to comfort him. First they sit with him for a week while he cries, which is pretty decent of them. Finally after seven days, Job stops crying and curses the day of his birth. So his friend Eliphaz gives him a long speech to the effect that "well, you did mostly good, but you must have been doing seriously wrong, or else you wouldn't be in this bind." Job starts answering Eliphaz, saying "no, I didn't do anything", and then he addresses God directly. And I like this prayer of Job's:

"Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
that you set a guard over me?

When I say, 'My bed will comfort me,
my couch will ease my complaint,'

then you scare me with dreams
and terrify me with visions,

so that I would choose strangling
and death rather than this body.

I loathe my life; I would not live forever.
Let me alone, for my days are a breath.

What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them,

visit them every morning,
test them every moment?

Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle?

If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?
Why have I become a burden to you?

Why do you not pardon my transgression
and take away my iniquity?

For now I shall lie in the earth;
you will seek me, but I shall not be."

(Job 7:12-21) In a sense that's a wonderful prayer for us Christians to look at, because Christ is the very answer to this lament of Job's. Christ is God's sign that he pardons our transgressions and takes away our iniquity, and that when we lie in the earth, still God will know us.

After this, Job's friend Bildad gives him another long speech about how surely he must have done all kinds of evil, and then Zophar says much the same, and Job continues to say, no, I'm innocent, but how can I defend myself before God? So this argument between Job and his friends goes on for 34 chapters, and in all this Job talks to God quite a lot. Finally God answers him out of the whirlwind, starting with our first reading and on through the four chapters.

And what God has to say to Job is more or less that "you know what, I don't watch you all the time, I have things to do other than worry about you. I'm busy watching my Creation doing what it does, because it's cool. It's not always about you." Now that may seem somewhat like an evasion of Job's question, but it's not. Job asked "why do you keep watching me so you can persecute me for my sins?" God answers "I don't watch you particularly much and I don't persecute you for your sins. Life just happens."

So the parallel with our Gospel reading is interesting. The disciples are freaking out because there is a storm at sea and Yeshua is sleeping right through it. So they wake him up and say "do you not care that we are perishing?" Well, not really. First of all they weren't actually perishing, they were catastrophising. But no, Yeshua isn't obsessing over what's happening to them. And then once he's awake, he says to the waves, "peace! Be still!" and so it is. And the disciples say "who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" That sentence is like an echo of what God said to Job:

Who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb? –

when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,

and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,

and said, "Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped"?

(Job 38:8-11) If you don't read all of Job, or if you don't read Job at all and take just these little bits of the Gospel where Yeshua uses the power of God's word to do [SQG] "miracles", then you get the impression that you can harass God whenever you've got troubles and he'll fix it miraculously for you. But if you read the two texts together, that's not what you hear. Yeshua isn't saying "please, feel free to wake me up every time you've got issues, I'll take care of it for you." No, what Yeshua says is "if you had faith, you'd leave me alone and deal with it yourselves." Why? Because we should know by now what God explained to Job. That Creation is his and runs to his delight, and if that doesn't always suit us, well, so what? It's not always about us.

Praise be to God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Year B, Lectionary 11 (June 17, 2012)

·         Ezekiel 17:22-24

·         Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15 (12)

·         2 Corinthians 5:6-17

·         Mark 4:26-34

Let me tell you something about mustard. There are many varieties of mustard; some of them are domesticated and eaten by us, others are wild. The wild ones are called "wildflowers" when they're in the woods, and "weeds" when they're in my garden.

Now my garden is on a concrete balcony on the seventh floor. I have a bird feeder, but no birds ever come there. In the winter I put out dog food for the ravens; in the summer, I don't. I don't even get a lot of insects. And I certainly do not use my gardening tools anywhere else. So I have to ask, how in the world would a weed get into my garden? But it did. Specifically, a type of black mustard has gotten into my garden. I don't know if it's carried on the wind, or stuck to insects, or on the dog's fur, or on my clothes, but it got in somehow.

The first year that I had black mustard in my garden, I didn't know what it was, so I left it alone to see if it would turn into something pretty.

Well.

Starting from a seed so small I've never even seen one, the black mustard can grow two feet tall and as thick as my thumb within six weeks. And this is north of 60°, remember, where the sun isn't that strong. Oh yeah, and my garden is in part shade. So imagine how ginormous this creature would get in a sunny spot in Israel. Then, and here is what gets me, the mustard puts out the tiniest, most ridiculous puny unspectacular flowers. They're maybe 2 mm, tops. That's about 1/16th of an inch. That explains why the seeds are so minuscule, then.

Now that I know, of course, I pull the black mustard seedlings as soon as I spot them. And I'm a pretty fastidious person, so I keep a pretty sharp eye on my weeds, if I do say so myself. Yet, I keep finding mustard in bloom in my garden. How can it get from zero to flower within me noticing it? I don't know. Maybe it's just that the leaves are similarly-shaped to some of my actual flowers, and I just don't look closely enough.

So the Kingdom of God is like that. You can't even see the seed. You certainly don't see it coming. Maybe it comes on the wind, or on a raven's feet. It comes unnoticed, on the wings of something completely mundane. And then it grows. And you don't even see it grow, even though it's shooting up like a weed before your very eyes. You're looking right at it at least twice a day, and you don't even notice it. Until one day, it flowers, and then you're like "whoa, where did that come from?" And by the time you try to weed it out, it's probably put out its seeds for the next generation already. There is no getting rid of it. It's not just the immensity of it that's interesting, it's the way it has of sneaking up on you from nothing at all.

So then what? What do we do once we find the Kingdom of God growing in these unlikely places?

Conveniently, the author of Mark juxtaposed the mustard seed and the man with the sickle. And I love the man with the sickle. Sows his seeds, goes about his business. And then suddenly, he leaps into action with his sickle, because the time has come. Frankly, I love anyone who will leap into action instead of sitting on his hands hemming and hawing. I can't stand slackers.

Of course this parable came up in a Bible study I was at, and I tried to say that obviously Jesus is telling us to act, not sit down and pray and wait for him to take care of everything. As always, nobody's buying that. Nope, Jesus does not expect us to do anything, all we gotta do is make shopping lists and say "we ask this in Jesus's name amen" and poof, Jesus is gonna take care of everything.

Yeah, well, that's nice, but that's not what he said about the guy with the sickle. It clearly says right here in the book: "when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come." And of course Jesus also told us, as I always like to quote, "keep awake, for you do not know when the time will come."

Jesus expects us to be ready, and nowhere does it say that we have to be ready to sit down and do nothing. Oh, pardon me, sit down and pray and wait for someone else to solve our problems. I think Jesus made it very clear, in this parable and at other times, that he expects us to act. So how do we know when, and how do we know how?

I think, when you look at the Gospels, it seems like Jesus expected us to know exactly what we're looking for. Whenever someone asks him, he says something a lot like "it's self-evident." He never really tells you what, exactly, "it" is. You're supposed to know it. So it's got to be something that is gonna be really obvious when you see it. You don't know what you're waiting for, but all of sudden you will see it and you'll know immediately that this is it, this is what you've been waiting for. And whatever it is, we already know that it calls for decisive action.

So what is the Kingdom of God? I think you should be seeing it for yourself. It's very obvious. It's right in front of your eyes. It's any moment when you know without having to think about it that God expects you to act. Not sit down and pray, act. Whenever you see an opportunity to do something for the Lord, you've seen the Kingdom of God. Corollary: if you're not seeing any opportunities to do something for the Lord, you're not awake. You're not keeping watch.

If you're not finding opportunities to serve the Lord, if you're not seeing them all around you, and if you're not leaping into action without hesitation, I think you might want to rethink your approach. Because you may be saved by grace through faith, but if you can't see the Kingdom of God when it's right before your eyes, do you really have faith? Did you actually hear what Jesus said? Or are you just talking a lot of talk?

Keep awake, therefore, and be ready to get to work when you see the Kingdom of God before you.

Today's hymn: #798, Will You Come and Follow Me.

Year B, Lectionary 15 (July 15, 2012)

·         Amos 7:7-15

·         Psalm 85:8-13 (8)

·         Ephesians 1:3-14

·         Mark 6:14-29

This line in Amos is one of my favourite in the Hebrew part of the Bible: "I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by." (Amos 7:8)

Being a carpenter myself, I can tell you this about a plumb line: it is the only tool that is always true. A level, a square, a measuring tape, they all become warped if you mishandle them, but a plumb line can never go wrong. You hang it, it shows you exactly the way down. And there is something even more interesting about the plumb line. For the layman, it's a tool for plumbing walls or columns. In fact, that's why we call something [SQG] "plumb" when it's truly vertical. But for a trained carpenter, it's also a layout tool, that allows you to bring a mark down from where it's measured to where the construction will take place. We can use it to transfer the layout of a foundation to the bottom of an excavation. We can use it to locate the bottom of a column when we know where the superstructure will be.

So isn't that the most excellent metaphor for Christ? Compare Christ to the plumb line. Not only is he the only man who is entirely true to the Lord and incorruptible, but he is also the one who brings down the layout of God's plan to us, at the bottom of the excavation. He takes the lines of God's plan and draws them in the dirt for us, and then he begins to build the foundation. In stone, of course.

By the way, contrary to popular belief, carpenters do not work only in wood, neither today nor three thousand years ago. A carpenter does structural work, whether it's wood, concrete, stone, mud brick, metal, fiberglass, whether it's a house or a ship. So the man Yeshua, son of a carpenter, is a man who was building structures. The man Yeshua knew how to transfer a layout with a plumb line. He knew how to build a wall that's structurally sound. God didn't just pick anybody to do this job, he picked a carpenter. He picked someone who knew how to read a plan and realise it.

The first stone that Jesus picked is his best friend, Simon son of Jonah. Simon isn't much of a foundation; he's rash, unreliable, and not particularly loyal. Luckily, Jesus is also God, so he has the word that creates what it declares. Why did Jesus say "you are a rock, and on that rock I will built my church"? Well, on the one hand, we could speculate that he might not have said it at all, and that the author of Matthew wrote it in to support Peter against Paul in early church politics. But if we assume that Jesus really did say that, he didn't say it because Simon actually was a reliable person on whom to build an organisation, but because by saying it, Jesus can make it so.

Here is an interesting bit of history, by the way. If you look at the Basilica Cathedral of Saint Peter in Rome, you might say it's the epicentre of the church of Christ in the west. And if you look underneath, which of course archaeologists have done, there is an older, smaller church, and then an older one under that, and I don't know how many layers of old construction are under the modern church, but when you get through all of those, at the very bottom, there is a burial. A very simple burial, just a body covered with a plain cairn of tile, as I recall. That body was recovered and examined, and it's got nothing to do with anything. It was apparently a decoy for grave-robbers. But next to the cairn there is a retaining wall that was built to prevent erosion of the hill and therefore the graves on the hill. Oh yeah, because before there was a basilica there, the Vatican was a hill. And in the retaining wall, there was a hidden hole with bones in it. On the wall there was an ancient graffiti that said "Peter is here." And the bones were tested and they were a man between 65 and 70 years old, which is the age Peter is thought to have died. And there are no foot bones, as if the guy had his feet broken or cut off, say, to get him off a cross he might have been nailed to. And the bones have a purple dye stain on them, from being wrapped in purple and cloth-of-gold, not at death, but after the flesh had decayed away and only the bones remained. And the dirt on the bones showed it decayed in dirt, not in a cavity in a wall, and the dirt matched exactly the dirt under that decoy tile cairn.

So the conclusion of the Roman Catholic Church as of June 1968, is that these are the bones of Saint Peter, who was first buried in a pauper's grave, and then removed, wrapped in rich cloth, and re-buried in a hidden cavity in the wall where his bones would be safe. And when they dug up the bone yard in the third century or so, they left that wall and built the church over it, and then the next church, and the next church. So as far as we can tell, it seems that the physical church of Christ really was built, literally, on Peter.

But as for the real church of God, the spiritual one, it takes a lot more than one stone to build it. And we are all stones in God's church. If Jesus can make a rock out of unreliable Simon Bar-Jonah, he can make a rock out of any of us, for his sake. And he sets us in the wall that's built with the plumb line. Each one of us might be a stone, but it takes all of us to make up the walls that make up the church of God.

That's very important. I saw something on Facebook a while back that said "life is not about finding yourself, it's about discovering who God created you to be." Well, I think that's complete hogwash. Because the point of God is not about you. Yes, yes, God loves you. But that's not the point. The whole point of Jesus was that it's not about you. Why do you think he said "deny yourself, take up your cross, then come, follow me?" Deny yourself. That's the first step. Stop thinking it's all about you.

Jesus taught us two kinds of things: things about the Kingdom of Heaven, and things about how to live this life. And if you pay attention, all the things he taught about living this life are to forget ourselves. Give what we have to others. Forsake possessions. Forsake status and family and all our attachment to material desires. And then work, not for ourselves, but for the poor, and for the glory of God. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say you need to "discover who God created you to be." God created you to have free will and be anything you want to be; Jesus called you to forget what you want and work for him.

So when we look at this image of the plumb line, it should remind us that God's plan is a plan for all of us, not for each of us. The great design of God involves all of us working as one; one wall, set along the lines drawn down from God's plan, built with the plumb line of Christ who alone is always true. One wall, straight, plumb, solid. One church, standing as one to do the work of the Lord in the world. Wherever we are, whether in a large congregation or alone in the wilderness, we are no longer one individual, but an indivisible part of the church of God. Wherever we are, we do his work. Wherever we are, we follow the lines that Christ has drawn down for us. We are not individuals; we are stones in the wall built with the plumb line. Let us act like it.

The hymn for today is #576, We All Are One in Mission.

Year B, Lectionary 10 (June 10, 2012)

·         Genesis 3:8-15

·         Psalm 130 (7)

·         2 Corinthians 4:13 - 5:1

·         Mark 3:20-25

Ordinary time at last!

The first six months of the Church year are very busy. First we have Advent, Christmas, time after Christmas, Epiphany, then up to eight weeks of ordinary time, then Lent, Easter, time after Easter, Pentecost, and Holy Trinity. Now for the other half of the year, we have "ordinary time." Time when nothing in particular happens. I suppose this might seem like a bad thing in our over-stimulated society, but I like ordinary time. It's a good time to read, study, learn, and simply live with the Lord without all the commotion. It's like staying in instead of going out on Friday night. It's restful, and it's what our relationship with God and with the church is built on.

During Ordinary Time, the lectionary is set by the date, not by reference to any of the major festivals. So the Sunday that's between June 5 and 11 is always Lectionary 10, if after Holy Trinity. But because the date of Easter is variable, some of the early weeks of Ordinary Time don't happen every year. In fact, Lectionary 10 happens only 54% of years. And since the lectionary works on a three-year cycle, we only get Lectionary 10, Year B about once every six years; and then again there are two choices of lectionary in Ordinary Time: one series that complements the Gospel readings, and one semi-continuous reading of the Old Testament. If you alternate between the two series each time you go through the cycle, you might hear this exact lectionary once every twelve years. In churches that only use the semi-continuous readings, you'd never even hear it at all.

Why this long preface? Partly because I find the workings of the lectionary interesting, but maybe that's just me. But I'm also trying to draw your attention to the fact that our first reading for today is a text you're hardly ever going to hear in church. And that's really too bad, because what we see here is how God reacted the first time Adam disobeyed him. I think that's important.

First of all, notice that God has to ask. "Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" Nowadays we say that God is all-seeing and all-knowing, but in the Old Testament, God actually asks people what they've been up to. God does not actually spend all his time watching you with a beady eye keeping track of what you're doing. Besides giving us free will, God also gave us privacy. And really, we wouldn't have one without the other. And what's interesting, too, is that God gives Adam a chance to say something. God knows immediately what's happened, as soon as Adam speaks, but he doesn't say "you ate from the tree"; he says "did you eat from the tree?" It's a detail, but I think it's an important detail, because once again, God gives Adam a choice. Adam could have said "dude, I don't know what you're talking and I resent the accusation." Adam could have said "as a matter of fact, I did." Adam could have said a lot of things. What he does is shift the blame. He doesn't say yes, he doesn't say no, he says "that woman you gave me did it" and then after that "yeah, I guess so did I, but it was all her fault."

So God turns to the woman, and the woman does the same thing "well, actually it was the snake; I just went along with him." And the snake doesn't have anyone to blame, so that's who takes the fall. The snake is the only one who actually gets cursed in all this. The reading stops at verse 15, but in the book it continues:

To the woman (God) said, "I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

And to the man he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it', cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.

Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever" – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:16-24)

So if you notice, God doesn't actually get mad. God doesn't get mad nearly as often as we pretend he does. It takes an awful lot to get God angry. And in this reading, it's not even a case of "I'm not mad, I'm disappointed." God hands out some consequences for everyone, which is pretty fair. No reason we shouldn't get a consequence when we screw up. So God gives out consequences, and then he fixes the mess. The man is uncomfortable about being naked, so God makes garments of skin. And then God kicks them out of the garden, not because he's angry, but because of the tree of life. If the man ate from the tree of life, then he'd live forever. And although some people seem to think that's the goal of life, we really can't live forever. We'd just waste it anyway, and we're miserable enough with the time we do have. We need to die. It's good for us. So God is not kicking Adam out of the garden out of anger, but to keep him safe from the tree of life.

What this tells us is really sad. It's not that God is angry and we're all going to Hell. God didn't even say that; somebody just made it up later. In fact it aggravates me immensely when people go on about how we're such horrible people, and we've sinned so horribly against God, and it's impossible that anyone would love us, let alone God, and we're gonna beat our breast and make a great show of accusing ourselves and pretending to repent and somehow that will make a difference. Honestly, I think that's complete nonsense. Granted we're all douchebags deep down, and many of us not too deep down either. But we're decent enough people that we can even love each other, so why pretend we believe God couldn't possibly love us? God is a better person than us; if we can love someone, all the more so can God. So no, it's not a miracle that God loves us. And no, we haven't sinned horribly against God. Yeah, so Adam ate from the tree, and then Israel worshipped false gods, and we haven't kept the Sabbaths and all the commandments. You think God is keeping track? God has things to do. God isn't keeping track of your sins unless you're doing something really egregious, like casting golden calves.

What really happened between Adam and God isn't that Adam made God angry. What happened, and it's a lot sadder, is that Adam lost God's trust. God didn't kick us out of the garden as punishment, he kicked us out because he couldn't trust us to leave the tree of life alone. And that's really, really sad.

But the good news is, God offered his trust to us again, through our Redeemer. Forgiveness of sins? Sure. But we always had that. Just look at the psalm:

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?

But there is forgiveness in you,
so that you may be revered.

(Psalm 130:3-4) This theme is all over the Old Testament. God's forgiveness is not new with Jesus Christ. It was already there all along, and Israel always knew it. But what God offered us is a new Covenant; a new deal between him and us. There is no deal without trust, so when God offers us a covenant, he's offering his trust back to us.

The question is, are you going to live up to God's trust this time?

Today's hymn: #608, Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling.

Zut alors...

K, I don't know how I managed it, but I totally started in the wrong place in the lectionary. I had June 10 marked as Lectionary 13 when in reality it's Lectionary 10. So the good news is, now I have sermons for the next two Sundays; the bad news is, I'm missing three weeks of sermons. Good thing I don't actually preach to a congregation... Anyway, if you're reading this (are you? no one ever comments) and you also go to church, you might find the whole thing confusing; if not, just keep calm and carry on.