God, Standing in the Doorway: Sermon on 1 and 2 Samuel

Scripture can be read here...

We have a Bible Study most Monday nights, 5:00 every Monday except the second Monday of the month, when we have a different Bible Study, affectionately known around here as LOPW, “Loosely Organized” Presbyterian Women. It’s a study which people feel free to drop in and out of, depending upon the busyness and chaos of life, but we dependably have anywhere between six and twelve folks, sometimes more. Over the past four and a half years, this Most Mondays Bible Study has read through, word by word, at least eight books of the bible, by my count, plus several “thematic” studies, such as last spring’s investigation of New Testament resurrection stories. This summer we had some heavy going, for a while, with the book of Judges. It’s a bloody tome, but one that, this year, yielded a really wonderful insight. It is this: how women are presented in scripture is often a bellwether for how the people of God are doing. In fact, women often function as the canaries in the coal mine of the story of God’s people: when things are going well for women, it means that God’s people are living faithfully into the covenant between God and humanity. When things are not going well… it is a sign of just the opposite. Unfaithfulness abounds.

Following the episode of the golden calf, we have fully three more books of the bible—Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—detailing both the wilderness sojourn of God’s people, Israel, and their final arrival at Canaan, the Land of Promise. Moses never enters the Land of Promise—in fact, no one from that original generation who left Egypt does, and that seems to be by God’s design. In the course of the forty years of the wilderness wanderings, God’s people have been tried and tested, and cleansed and purged of the kind of recalcitrance and general whining we see among the people immediately after their escape. They are ready to enter Canaan a new and rejuvenated people.

The book of Joshua tells the story of the conquest of Canaan. It is a military history, largely, and it contains accounts of battles and clever deceptions, and, always, the power of God being the source of any victory. At the end of Joshua, one has the impression that the land has been won, that’s that, and all will be well.

Then we have the book of Judges, which, many scholars believe, tells the very same story as Joshua… only in much grimmer and more disturbing detail, and with much more ambiguous outcomes. By the time Judges begins, Israel is a loose confederation of twelve tribes, mostly named after the sons of Jacob. They have leaders called judges whose work involves arbitrating and deciding disputes, as contemporary judges do, but also military leadership and prophetic insight. Judges are all anointed by God as leaders.

Here’s where the ‘canary in the coal mine’ theory comes in. At the beginning of Judges, we meet a woman who is a judge: Deborah. However, as the story of each judge is told, the unfaithfulness of the people, and their willingness to follow after other gods is revealed. Time and again they find themselves in hot water, attacked by Canaanite tribes, and in danger of losing the land. Then another judge is anointed, and for a time, they do better, but each episode results in a downward spiral of disobedience and unfaithfulness worse than the last. By the end of the book of Judges, we read stories of a judge, Jephthah, because of his own faithlessness, ends up offering his own daughter as a human sacrifice. And the last prolonged story in Judges takes us into the genre of the horror film, and women are the victims. The status of the people’s faithfulness to God is reflected by how well or abominably women are treated.

But there is hope for God’s people, because after Judges comes the book of Ruth, whose heroine is a Moabite woman who, despite coming from another ethnic and religious background, serves the God of Israel and is faithful to her Israelite mother-in-law. At the end of her story we learn that she will be great grandmother to King David.

At last, we turn to Hannah. This story, at the very beginning of 1 Samuel, is probably intended to alert us to what an extraordinary person Samuel will be: that is almost always the purpose of stories of women who are said to be unable to bear children in scripture. This story will give us a clue that Samuel’s work will be crucial: the work of creating a godly monarchy from that loose and unruly confederation of tribes. All that is true. But the piece of this passage that calls to me today isn’t about the astounding accomplishments of the great prophet, who, after all, barely makes an appearance. Instead, I believe that it is in the domestic details of this woman’s life, and how she plays her part in the story of God’s people, that most of us will be able to encounter this sacred story and see in it some reflection of our own. The story of Hannah steers us into dark and pain-filled waters. It invites us to wonder together, how do we cope when the world we inhabit seeks to define us, at times, against our will? How do we live with our experiences of disappointment and emptiness? Where do we perceive God’s action in all this?

When we meet Hannah, her symptom is her identity. She “has no children,” in contrast with her husband’s other wife Peninnah, who has children in abundance. It’s hard to overstate the catastrophe, the sheer scandal that infertility is understood to be in biblical literature. Fertility is always seen as a product of divine favor, and infertility, predictably, of divine judgment. Hannah is suffering as a result of her status: her rival taunts her, she weeps. Hannah has the love of her husband, but she is too miserable to eat the double portion of food he gives her. But the story has a happy ending. After petitioning God in the temple, and having an intriguing conversation with the priest Eli, Hannah conceives and gives birth to her son Samuel. Symptom removed.

This seems to be a fairly straightforward tale: emptiness/ prayer/ fullness. Problem/ prayer/ solution. But let’s not skip too merrily to the ending. Thanksgiving for this longed-for son will come soon enough.  There has to be a caveat here: We get into serious trouble when we ask specific passages of scripture to function as blanket statements to be applied to every situation. To look to this story as an exhaustive treatment of issues around fertility risks robbing the story of its power for people whose outcomes are different from Hannah’s, opposite, even. To say, simply, “Pray and God will give you what you ask for,” risks making this text irrelevant to the many, many people who have had other experiences.

So, remembering that this story of a woman is probably intended to serve the story of her exceptional son, and remembering, too, that the beauty of scripture is that these stories so often take us into unexpected realms… Let’s talk about, not outcomes, but processes. Let’s talk about prayer.

For me the turning point of Hannah’s story begins the moment Hannah gets up from the dinner table and heads to the temple to pray. I believe this for two reasons. For one thing, Hannah is being real. She is bitter. She is bargaining. She appears to require sobering up,  her emotional state is so out of control. She is baring all before God and man, and her appearance in the temple is a clear demonstration that she is through with trying to go it alone. She reaches out, she reaches up, and she is heard.

Presbyterian writer (and quite possibly the funniest woman in the world) Anne Lamott says this about prayer:

[Prayer is] about being in a gentle but structured relationship with a higher power and one’s own self and the truth, and getting the work done. You close your eyes, breathe, and say, “hi.” The reason ‘help’ is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you’re in despair, you’re teachable.[i]

Hannah is in despair. She has nothing to lose. And so she prays.

The other reason I believe this is a turning point for Hannah is that her action puts her in contact with the priest Eli. Eli is someone whose life has been spent right where he is at this moment—waiting on the Lord, quite literally, in the doorway. Doorways are tremendously potent symbols in the bible. A doorway is what is known as “liminal space,” a place of being between, neither in one place nor the other. Eli is at his post in this in-between space, which is precisely the place where one waits for God. In this waiting place we experience openness—openness to God, openness to others, openness to a new plan, a new state of being. Hannah too is in liminal space. She is neither here nor there, neither maiden nor mother nor crone. Hannah’s Twilight Zone intersects with Eli’s. A new view is offered. A new possibility is made clear.

For me the grace in this story comes at the point of contact—contact with God and contact with another human being. Is the story of Hannah simply a story of divine intervention? On one level, sure—it is one of many biblical stories in which the hand of God is nakedly at work in the birth of an exceptional person. But I don’t think it’s in the realm of the miraculous that we connect with Hannah’s story. Instead, I think we connect through our own experiences: experiences of pain or disappointment or frustrated hope; experiences of reaching out to God in prayer and to those around us in sharing our burdens; experiences of God showing us a way where formerly there was no way; experiences of God staying present with us, in all our bitter ranting, when, in the final analysis, there is no way. Are these miracles? I am not sure. Is reaching out a miracle? Is openness a miracle? Is standing in a doorway, expecting God to show up, a miracle? Is giving thanks—for the hoped-for, expected, the dreaded and everything in between—a miracle?

We stand in the doorway, waiting for God, and God always shows up. God shows up offering more than the desired answer. God offers faithful, abiding presence, in the midst of our joys and sorrows, our triumphs and disappointments, even in our liminal spaces, when we are not quite lost, and not quite found. If Hannah is a bellwether for the people of God, if she tells us how things are going, the outlook is good, but not because Hannah gets what she longs for. The outlook is good because of God is with her, and with us, in struggle, and in joy, and in everything between. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[i] Anne Lamott, Author of Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers, in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly. Help, Thanks, Wow will be published in November, 2012.

Lessons in Human Frailty: A Sermon on Genesis 32:1-14

The scripture can be found here...

Couldn't find out where this image originated. Looks old though.

I did a little crowd-sourcing this week, by which I mean, I asked other people for help. “Let’s make a list,” I said. “Golden calves we have known and loved. Go!” And these are the things offered by the good people of Facebook.

“Our own preferred political candidates.” “Keeping up with the Joneses.” “Our children.” “The Protestant work ethic.” “Our obsession with the Kardashians, the idolatry of the superficial.” “Celebrities.”

“Vanity.” “Wanting to look or be perfect.” “Thinking we have to be like Martha Stewart.” “Being considered really good at my job.”

“My phone.” “Text messaging.” “My sewing machine.”

“A certain number on the scale.” “Acceptance.” “Money.” “My 401K or 403 B, retirement accounts.”  “Shoes.” “The latest glossy promise of a magazine! Lose 20 lbs by Memorial Day! Unclutter your home! 15 pages of Chocolate Decadence!” “Books!” “Fabric.”

“The church building, complete with the Advent wreath someone's Great Aunt Millie gave!” “The Church building as you say goodbye.”

“A particular church program; a set of hymns, music or liturgy; other people's opinions.”

If you hadn’t heard my introduction, I’m guessing it might not be the easiest thing to tie all these disparate things together. But what my friends were saying was this: These are the things that get in the way. They get in the way of our being the people we want to be in our lives.

In our passage from Exodus this morning, we hear a story that, in many ways, is about almost getting it right. The people, whom God rescued from slavery in last week’s passage, have been wandering in the wilderness for some time now, about four months, and they have endured… well, life in the wilderness without a dependable supply of food and water, for one thing. Division in the ranks. Grumbling.

But they have also been the recipients of a covenant, which is to say, an agreement, every bit as mysterious and awe-inspiring as the one given to Abraham and Sarah way back near the beginning of the story.

In chapter 19, after the crisis of food has been managed by the sending of bread from heaven, and the crisis of water has been dealt with by bringing forth of water from a rock, God says the following to Moses:

“Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites” (Exodus 19:3b-6).

And the people, gathered together and offered this arrangement, say, Yes! “Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.” And then Moses brings the people to Mount Sinai, in the midst of a pretty spectacular display of thunder and lightning and thick smoke, and Moses receives the covenant from God.

Now, the covenant consists of the Ten Commandments, followed by God’s commentary, and interpretation, and instructions on worship and creating an appropriate worship space. And then an invitation from God to Moses for what comes as close to a face-to-face meeting as you could get with God at that point. In Exodus 24, Moses disappears into the cloud on Mount Sinai, to receive more instructions in a more intimate setting. He disappears for forty days and forty nights.

It’s this last part that ends up being the cause of a lot of anxiety. Now, in addition to the other hardships of wilderness wandering, the people have to cope with life without their designated leader. Our passage finds them as they have decided how to cope with this situation. They gather around Moses’ brother, Aaron, and make their demand:

“Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him” (Exodus 32:1b).

A translation issue comes up in this sentence. There are several different words used for “God” and “Lord” in the Old Testament. One of them is elohim. Interestingly, elohim is a plural word, and sometimes it is translated “gods,” and sometimes “God,” based on contextual clues. So, the people might very well have been saying, “Make God for us,” in other words, “Make this invisible God visible to us!” And here is what I mean by coming so close, and yet missing the mark. They almost have it right. God has been giving instructions for creating a worship space, and that will include taking an offering. A far-flung colleague in ministry put it this way: “They took their offerings to the Lord and instead of building a house for God, they worshipped the offerings themselves.”

So close.

And if you look at our 2012 list of Golden Calves, in a lot of ways, I think you will see that the things that get in the way of our being the people we want to be are a lot like that. Things that seem designed to serve the purpose of connecting—to God, to one another, even to ourselves—they become barriers to that exact longed-for connection. On our list you will see things like cell phones and texting that are supposed to keep us connected to those we love—only they end up becoming distractions that actually alienate us from one another. You will see things that are about taking care of one another—like retirement funds and college funds, even sewing machines—but which end up stealing energy and focus from our real relationships instead of enhancing them. You will see things that are about taking care of our precious, God-given bodies—miracles of creation!—but which, instead, end up making us so full of self-criticism and contempt that we become alienated from ourselves. You will even see things (many of them, shared by other pastors, in other churches) that seem to be all about our worship of God—our beautiful church buildings and the hymns we love and the programs we treasure—which, in the cruelest twist of all, become, not pathways to God, but ends in themselves, to be preserved at all costs, even the cost of division and despair.

We come so close. And we miss the mark. We forget. But, thanks be to God, we have opportunities to remember again.

The Lord’s Supper is one of those opportunities. Each time we gather around this communion table, we remember, together. We remind one another. We remind ourselves. That the Lord our God hates slavery, whether in ancient Egypt or modern day USA. That God, our great, ever-creating God, continues to create us to be free—yes, even free from our cell phones and online addictions—and to live within the blessedness of covenant community, with real (not virtual) people.  That God, in Jesus, came to be with us—that celebrations and festivities around a table are good, provided we don’t forget who is the Founder of the feast.

So today, I ask us to look at our own particular Golden Calves, those attachments, that get in the way of real relationship, real worship, real communion with God and with one another. I ask us to wonder together how we can let go of the things that distract and divide, and embrace, instead, one another. I ask us to pray together for the honesty of heart to know how best to serve together the one who seeks to serve us at this table. Thanks be to God. Amen.

It's the Friday Five: Artsy Friday!

It's art, art, art in my life today, because I'm on the organizing committee for an all-women's art show that opens tonight! This means life has been about hanging paintings, arranging sculptures and assemblages, and doing everything we can to make sure we show off the women's work to its best advantage.

Something that has struck me in particular this year is the idea of art as a venue to give voice to the voiceless. But that's certainly not its only function. We have angry art, as political protest. We have joyful art, art that conveys the sheer buzz of being alive. We have spiritual art, reveling in the sacredness of the body or the earth. And just about every year, we have some form or another of "biblical" art, representing or commenting on something in scripture. (Above, the Levite's concubine from Judges, also known as Big Woman, by Elisabeth Lain Schell).

If you like, you can play the Friday Five, reflect with me upon art and the role it plays in your life.

1. Do you have a favorite piece of art in your home? Was it made by you or someone you love? Was it a gift or something you decided to purchase?

I have a lot of art in my home, but probably my very favorite is a gorgeous print of Ruth and Naomi by Chinese artist He Qi. It is a very treasured gift from a very dear person.

2. What do you think of the the art in your place of worship? Does it enhance the worship experience? Would you add to it, take away from it, or otherwise change it?

The church I serve is both simple and ornate... it treads that very fine line! I think my favorite thing about it might be the nave/ the roof, which is in that very traditional configuration of the bottom of a ship. It never fails to lift my soul when I look up at it.

3. What public art have you loved-- or hated?

One of my very favorite pieces of public art is this bull, repainted from the black (in which he decorated a now closed steakhouse), to this beautiful, fanciful nature lover, Blossom the Black Angus. My good friend achieved the transformation, and I just adore it.

4. What piece of art (famous, infamous, personal, or very, very well known masterpiece) speaks to your soul?

This Annunciation... can't find the name of the artist, though. Help?

5. When is the last time you created something beautiful, just for you?

I keep saying I'll do this, and finally, I've begun (slowly) to work on afghan with the colors that really speak to me, for my bedroom.

How about you? Is art a big part of your life today?

From Slavery to Freedom: Miriam's Story! Exodus 12:1-13, 13:1-8

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From time to time the Spirit moves me to create Midrash, ususally in the form of imagining the voice of one of the characters in a story. This week that led me to write this.

Scripture can be found here...

Listen! You can hear the shouts of joy, the laughing, the tambourines shaking in time with the dancing… you can hear the jubilant sounds of the celebration: we are free! We are free! After four hundred years of slavery in Mizrayim, Egypt, the narrow place, we have been born into a new freedom, and a new world, and a new life! And we have been dancing.

But if you listen hard, you can also hear the sounds of weeping. Our freedom came at a cost, and we will never forget that. For you to understand, for us to understand what has happened, we must go back to the beginning.

Our ancestor Joseph brought our people to Egypt—there were only seventy of us then, seventy!—He brought us to Egypt to save us from the famine. He saved our people, brought his family together again, and for a time, we lived in peace and prosperity. And the promise of El Shaddai, God Almighty, to our ancestors Sarah and Abraham were fulfilled: we were fruitful, and we multiplied, and we became numerous and exceedingly strong!

But a new Pharaoh came into power, a Pharaoh who did not know our ancestor Joseph. And in Egypt, the Pharaoh is regarded as a god—he regards himself as a god, with the power of life and death over his land. This so-called ‘god’ feared a strong tribe of immigrants, so he made us his slaves, and set us to work. We built his greatest cities! We built Rameses! We built Pithom! And the work the Pharaoh inflicted on us only made us stronger. And we grew more numerous, not less. And Pharaoh afflicted us with even more work, even more cruel taskmasters. He tried to extinguish us, as if we were vermin crawling over his land, he tried to stamp us out. But we were not vermin. We were people, hard-working people of God, only seeking peace and safety.

Then this so-called ‘god’ Pharaoh decided to do directly what he couldn’t do through slavery: he decided to kill us. He instructed our midwives to kill all the sons born to our women—every male baby, he said, kill it. When it is born, kill it.

But our midwives—their names were Shiphrah and Puah, may their names ever be blessed—they knew the difference between the Pharaoh so-called ‘god’ and the Lord God Almighty. And they did not kill the babies. And when Pharaoh asked why the Hebrew people continued to thrive, they told him “These Hebrew women are so strong—they give birth before we even arrive, and are out in the field again, and their boy babies hidden away safe. We cannot find them.”

Realizing the midwives would not do his murder for him, the Pharaoh told all his people: “Kill them. Throw the Hebrew boys into the Nile.”

And so the Pharaoh-god and his people together became angels of death for the Hebrew people. Untold numbers of our sons were killed. But even greater untold numbers were smuggled to safety. One of those surviving sons of Israel was my brother, Moshe, Moses. And untold numbers of the Egyptians helped us to survive. One of those Egyptians was the Pharaoh’s very own daughter.

My brother, Moses, grew to manhood in the Pharaoh’s own household, a hated vermin Israelite right under his nose. And the first attempt of Moses to stand for justice terrified him. He saved a Hebrew slave from being killed, and in the process killed the man who had been beating the slave. And so Moses ran—far away, into the desert.

But El Shaddai, God of the Mountains, the Lord God Almighty, is able to see us and find us wherever we are… God searches out our paths and our ways, our lying down and our rising up and our hiding and our revealing ourselves. And so God flamed and burned before my brother in the wilderness, and the Lord God spoke to my brother:

“…the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”  (Exodus 3:7-8a, 9-10)

And my brother, a fugitive living in fear, turned and set his face again for Egypt, and confronted the Pharaoh.

When El Shaddai, the Lord God Almighty, spoke to our ancestors Abraham and Sarah he promised us children, and land, and blessing. This is our God: a God of life! The Pharaoh-god of the Egyptians promised his people no such things. And as our God demonstrated his power—by afflicting the people and land of Egypt with plague after plague—the true character of Pharaoh–god became known. He was a leader who was willing to let the land and the people suffer so that he could stay in power. He was a leader who was unwilling to do what his people needed him to do. He was a leader who used his power for death.

My brother went to the Pharaoh. Over and over again he went to the little Pharaoh-god, and said, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go.’” And again and again, little Pharaoh-god said, “Who is the Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.”

And so the Lord God Almighty showed Pharaoh: with the plague of blood that turned the Nile red and the plague of frogs that turned the streets green with slime; with the plague of lice and the plague of flies; with the plagues of pestilence and boils and hail and locusts and deep, deep, terrifying darkness, the Lord God Almighty showed the Pharaoh who he was, and showed his power. And the Pharaoh, the little Pharaoh-god said no, and then yes, and then no again, until finally, finally, the plague to end all the plagues came upon the land and the people of Egypt.

We obeyed the command of the Lord: on the tenth of the month we took a beautiful year-old lamb, an animal without a single blemish. We kept it until the fourteenth of the month, when my brother, along with every other head of an Israelite household, slaughtered it at twilight, just as the lamps were being kindled in the houses. Each man took the blood from the slaughtered lamb and painted the doorposts and lintels with it, while the rich smell of the roasting meat began to curl throughout the settlement. And then, dressed as though we were ready for travel, we ate the lamb… we ate every bit of it that we could, we ate until we thought we could never bear to taste lamb again, and we ate it with delight and with dread, because we knew what was coming. Word had spread among our people, whispered with wide eyes from woman to woman, and from man to man, and from child to child: the angel of death was coming again, but this time, he was coming for first-born sons of the Egyptians.

The night was tense and silent after our sumptuous feast. We lay on our beds awake, watchful, wondering whether it would all prove to be a dream when we rose in the morning. Just after midnight, the commotion began. Shouting, and then screaming, and then moaning—a dreadful sound, so loud it hurt the ears, and so pain-wracked it pierced the heart. And we, safe in our blood-marked homes, we wept in silence. We wept for the beloved dead of our Egyptian neighbors; and we wept for our own beloved dead, the Hebrew sons of our ancestors, drowned so long ago. And we wept, too, with relief that our days as slaves had come to an end. We knew that this was our last night of slavery and our first morning of freedom.

And even though at last he let us go, the little god Pharaoh still couldn’t bring himself to accept defeat, not even at the hand of El Shaddai. And so he sent his armies in pursuit of us, and brought upon his head the deaths of still thousands more. But we… we were safe on another shore, with another land ahead of us, and God’s promises still in our hearts.

And now we have come to the celebration.  Listen! We have been dancing! You can hear the shouts of joy, the laughing, the tambourines shaking… you can hear the jubilant sounds of celebration: we are free! We are free! After four hundred years of slavery, we have been born into a new freedom, and a new world, and a new life!

And if you listen hard, you can hear the echoes of weeping. Our freedom came at a cost, and we will never forget that. And each year when we remember how our Mighty God, brought us out of Egypt, we will know that our joy is not as sweet as it would have been, in light of that terrible cost. But we know this too: our God promised life and freedom, and our God’s promises are sure. And no false god, no power-hungry leader willing to sacrifice his own people, can hope to match the majesty and real power of the one who is Lord, of day and of night, of heaven and earth, of life and of death. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Playing Favorites: A Sermon About Joseph (Genesis 37:3-8, 26-34; 50:15-21) -50)

The scripture can be found here...

Let’s begin by talking about jealousy. And when I say “jealousy,” I’m not speaking of a passing sense of wishing you had what another person has… a great house, or pair of shoes, or even, a relationship. I’m talking about the kind of deep-seated resentment that stays with you, perching on your shoulder like a malevolent pet, or burrowing into your gut, crowding out all other feelings. Jealousy, as in the feeling that you have a rival, and while that rival has success, or advantage, or superiority, or love, you can never have enough.

And jealousy is the force that tips over the first domino in the story of Joseph. We are in a great transition moment in the story of God’s people: that moment when they move into Egypt. This sets the stage for what is surely one of the key stories of scripture. And for us to be in Joseph’s story now we have sped past countless other remarkable stories. I commend them all to you, but especially those of Jacob, the scoundrel. Joseph’s father Jacob, whose name is eventually changed to “Israel,” the one from whom God’s people take their name. I particularly commend to you the stories of Jacob’s particular biblical model of marriage: First, his marriage to Leah, by the trickery of his father-in-law, and then his marriage to her sister Rachel, his first and true love. In addition to these two wives, Jacob takes as wives the two slave women, Bilhah and Zilpah. By these four women Jacob has twelve sons and a daughter.

Why start with jealousy? Let us count the ways.

The first line of our passage tells part of the story: “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children… and he had made him a long robe with sleeves” (Genesis 37:3). Imagine being a son of poor Leah, the woman Jacob was tricked into marrying. Imagine being a son of one of the slave women, used as surrogates and tangled up in the rivalry between the two sisters. Joseph is none of these. He’s a son of Jacob’s old age. And he’s the first born of Rachel, the love of Jacob’s life, the favored wife. And that favoritism, now passed from mother to son, is openly displayed. Jacob, whose early career included some time in the kitchen, continues to show his domestic abilities by crafting an unusual and somewhat royal garment for his favorite son, a coat with long sleeves. If you’re wondering where we get the “coat of many colors,” this is what happens sometimes with bible translations. In the era of the King James translation, as today, coats with long sleeves were common, so to translate it literally would have left the reader puzzled. “What’s so special about a coat with long sleeves?” So the team of translators decided that a coat “of many colors,” would convey the coat’s uniqueness, and the extravagance of Israel’s gift to his youngest. Jacob was playing favorites. And when Josephs’s brothers saw that coat, they hated him for it.

But that is not the only way in which Joseph provoked his brothers. Those dreams! Joseph has this incredibly annoying habit of sharing dreams with his brothers, dreams whose general theme is that Joseph is in charge and everyone else must bow to him. The dreams are pretty telling. In one sense, they betray a sort of cluelessness that we might just chalk up to his youth—he’s seventeen, and a culture of bragging isn’t exactly unheard of among teenage boys. In another sense, they show an arrogance, maybe even a meanness of spirit that is kind of breathtaking. Even his father gives him the verbal equivalent of a smack to the head after one of these episodes. Just who does he think he is? His brothers hate him, we are told. They cannot speak peaceably to him.  Jealousy, burrowing into the gut, crowding out even the ability to speak a word in peace.

But none of this—not the favoritism, not the arrogance, not the hate, not the soul-consuming jealousy—nothing can justify what happens next.  In a scene we didn’t read this morning, the brothers first discuss whether or not to kill Joseph. The plan is to return the beautiful coat to their father covered in blood, pinning the death on a wild animal. Reuben, the oldest and the child of the unloved wife Leah, has an attack of conscience, and persuades the rest of them not to kill Joseph, but to simply throw him in a pit. (His plan is to spirit Joseph back to their father at a later time.) They agree. They strip the clueless kid of his beautiful robe, throw him into a pit with no water to drink, and sit down to lunch.

When Reuben is gone, the brothers see a band of traders passing by. Judah, the youngest of Leah and Jacob’s sons, says, hey. We can kill two birds with one stone here: get rid of the dreamer and get ourselves some cash at the same time. When Reuben returns and learns that Joseph has been sold into slavery, he goes wild with grief and horror, tearing his clothes, trying to imagine what on earth they will tell their father.

They decide to go with the wild animal story. Jacob is presented with the exquisite garment he made for his favorite son, smeared with blood. He is told the boy is dead. In response, he tears his own clothes, and puts on sackcloth (the traditional garment of mourning), and weeps for many days.

And the brothers? Even though most of the remainder of Genesis focuses, not on them, but on Joseph, it’s good for us to imagine just how things go for them from this point on. The brothers have done, if not the unthinkable, then something approaching that. What they have done to Joseph, it is fair to say, will haunt them.

As for Joseph?  His path is one of peaks and valleys—literally, as well as figuratively. From his high position as daddy’s favorite he is cast down into an actual pit, and sold as a slave. But he ends up in the household of Potiphar, a captain of the Pharaoh’s guard, where he is given a chance to shine. “The Lord is with him,” we are told—which is interesting, because we never heard that God was with Joseph when he was being coddled by his father at home. And for all his arrogance, for all his teenage bravado, qualities begin to emerge in him we might not have imagined. The Lord is with him, and Joseph turns out to be a man of talent and character. He rises to another peak in the house of Potiphar, only to fall again after he spurns the advances of Potiphar’s wife. Once again in the valley, Joseph finds himself in prison.

But even in prison Joseph manages to land on his feet. The head jailer entrusts him with care of the other inmates, and Joseph rises to the top of the heap there as well. And suddenly an opportunity to truly distinguish himself arises: Someone has a dream.

Did you ever meet someone, and upon first meeting them, you had, well, not the greatest impression of them? In fact, you didn’t really like them at all? But then, you met them again… under other circumstances. And you felt that maybe, just maybe, you had misjudged them. I bring all this up because this is not the first time dreams have played a major role in Joseph’s story. And that first time, everyone—Jacob his father, all his other brothers, and, yes, we, the readers, thought. Hey. This guy is kind of a creep. He’s annoying. Of course people want to throw him into pits and worse. If he were in high school in Lima, Ohio, he’d be getting Slushies in the face on a regular basis.

But when Joseph is in prison interpreting dreams, we learn some key information. When it comes to dreams, Joseph is a veritable Carl Jung. His knowledge and intuition are stunning. He has a gift. And we begin to wonder… might those other dreams of Joseph’s have meant something after all?

It’s dreams that finally bring Joseph out of the pits and to the heights of power. When the Pharaoh, the Egyptian king, hears about Joseph’s impressive abilities of interpretation, he brings him out of jail and into the royal court to interpret a dream of his own. Joseph correctly tells Pharaoh that his dreams are warning him of a time of famine for which they will have to prepare. Three guesses who Pharaoh puts in charge of the preparations! By the end of this episode, and forever after in this story, there is no one in Egypt, save the Pharaoh himself, more powerful than Joseph.

Meanwhile back in Canaan… the famine hits. And after many years, during which Joseph has been making his peaks-and-valleys climb to power, and the brothers have been living in guilt, in daily contact with their forever grief-stricken father, the men’s paths intersect again. The details of the story are less important than the big picture: the brothers come, with their proverbial hats in hand, to the land that has prepared well for the famine. And they have no idea whatsoever that the very Egyptian looking overlord who is dealing with them is the brother they sold away so long ago.

Joseph toys with them. Just a bit. Joseph manipulates his brothers so that they are made to twist in the wind with the guilt he can see they are still carrying. And so Joseph indulges his desire, for a time, to exact a kind of emotional revenge on his brothers. But in the end, in a scene that I dare you to read without weeping yourself, all is revealed. The brother whom they sold into slavery makes himself known. And he forgives them. “Do not be distressed,” he tells them. “[Do not be] angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Genesis 45:6).

And, in some storybooks, that would be the end of the story. But the bible is not just any book of stories. The bible, in many places, shows such depth of insight into the human psyche that reading it is like looking into a really good, really well-lit magnifying mirror. Ever look into one of those? And see, really see, all those things we manage most of the time not to notice? Reading the bible can be like that. The nature of the human being on full display, in all its glory and all its decay. Joseph forgives his brothers. But… they don’t feel forgiven. Oh, they relocate permanently to Egypt, which is a key moment in the Biblical narrative: How’ God’s Chosen People Get to Egypt. This is how. And there, in Egypt, all their cares are taken away, and they are well housed and well fed and the family of the very powerful and well-loved Joseph. But they carry with them the memory of what they did to their brother because their father played favorites with him. They carry it with them for years and years, and after Jacob’s death, many years later, they turn to one another in certainty that the other shoe Still. Might. Drop.

‘Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?”’ (Genesis 50:15). And all Joseph can do when the brothers, even now, even years later, come to him begging for mercy, is to weep. When he can speak again, he says, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.”

If the story of Jacob, the very flawed father of many children, and the story of Jacob’s children, including the arrogant and annoying Joseph, can tell us anything, it can surely tell us this: God works through the actions of flawed and broken people and actions. God worked through Jacob’s misguided favoritism, endowing Joseph with the sure conviction that he was all that and more, and sure enough, when the time was right, he was. God worked through the jealousy and anger of Joseph’s eleven brothers, making Joseph a stronger and better man in the process, and saw to it that this chosen family had a safe haven in time of famine. And God worked through Joseph, not only to provide food and shelter for his family, but also to provide the unexpected blessings of grace and reconciliation.

God uses flawed people, broken people. God uses us, even when we’re not at our best. God even uses us at our worst, though the outcomes of those moments can be hard to foresee… they may take years to play themselves out. Listen: I’m not saying God uses us like puppets, I’m not saying that God made those brothers do their dastardly deed. I do believe we have some measure of free will. But once the deed was done, even that was not beyond God’s power to somehow redeem, reclaim and repurpose. God uses us—in all our goodness and all our frailty—to bless the world. And God uses us—in all our beauty and all our brokenness—to convey God’s message of grace and forgiveness to one another. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Now What??? Sermon on Genesis 15:1-6

Scripture can be found here...

Have you ever heard of a BHAG? A BHAG is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It’s usually generated by a business, a kind of mission statement, if we want to translate it into church-language. BHAG’s are supposed to be just what they sound like—the kinds of goals set by companies when they want to challenge themselves to rise to unprecedented levels of greatness. Amazon Booksellers have the following BHAG: “Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” And Disney’s BHAG is this: “Be the best company in the world for all fields of family entertainment.” I think my favorite is Ford Motor Company’s: “Democratize the automobile.”

 

When an individual sets a BHAG, she sees a future for herself in which she accomplishes something she never imagined she could. I have a friend who, after losing a significant amount of weight with the help of diet and exercise, has set herself the goal of competing in a marathon next year.  For some of us a BHAG might be to get rid of our credit cards, or to pay them off in full every single month. For others, it might be to grow the perfect rose or orchid.

 

By embarking on the Narrative Lectionary this fall, we as a church have set ourselves an audacious goal: to read across the entire bible in the space of nine short months. In just thirty-seven Sundays plus Christmas Eve we will familiarize ourselves with the whole, big story of scripture. Not every book, mind you—there are sixty-six books in the Bible, so, as you can tell with the help of math, that won’t be possible. This starts to feel a little like what a seminary professor of mine used to call “roller-skating through the Louvre.” (“Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!”)

 

And we’ll be doing a little of that this morning, since we have skipped all the way from the very beginning, the creation stories, and are now, not even at the beginning of the Abraham and Sarah story, but already a few chapters in.

 

When we started our Monday evening bible study four and a half years ago, we took note: the first eleven chapters of Genesis are the history of the whole cosmos, and then, of the whole of humanity. These are the chapters that include the story of the first murder, one son of Adam and Eve killing another, Cain killing Abel. God says to Cain, “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Genesis 4:11). But God deals with the murderer Cain by protecting him—God doesn’t want him to be killed.

 

And these are the chapters that include the story of, not an angry God, but a God who “was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). That God decides to send devastating floods upon the earth, though he provides a way to survive for a faithful fragment of the human race, and of the animal kingdom as well. This is a troubling story, a story we tend to domesticate in our Sunday school so that it appears to be about a wonderful watery adventure for Noah and the animals. But it is a story of a God who has had it and, for a time, who seems to give up on his own creation.

 

But God changes his mind. This happens from time to time in scripture, so we shouldn’t be surprised or scandalized when it does. God relents, God repents. And instead of utterly destroying creation, God re-creates, and gives the sign of the rainbow to humans as a reminder of God’s new intention:

 

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood… I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth” (Genesis 9:11,13).

 

These are also the chapters that include the story of the tower of Babel, a story about human beings arrogant enough to believe they could literally get to heaven with enough brick and mortar, which turns into a “just-so” story. God thwarts the arrogant humans by creating different languages, so that they can’t understand one another to cooperate.

 

These are just a few of the stories in the chapters between last week and this. “Look at that, look at that!” And then we come to the end of chapter 11. Do any of you remember the beginning of the movie, “The Sound of Music”? It starts with a bird’s eye view of the Austrian Alps—snow capped mountains, breathtaking landscapes. Slowly we descend to the green slopes below. And then, the camera swoops in towards what is, at first a dot, which is gradually revealed to be a woman, and, once in close-up, she throws wide her arms and sings. This is what happens in chapter 12. The story swoops in on one man and one woman and their one family.

 

Here is the problem: God has created a universe, and a world and inhabitants of that world. And the human inhabitants have been created in God’s image. God has called all this creation “Good.” But God is still faced with the reality of brokenness in creation. Humans are prone to wander. Humans are prone to fail. Humans are prone to hurting one another and killing one another and trying to get to heaven on their own steam. And so, at this point, the story is faced with the real question: Now what?? How shall God respond to this problem?

 

The answer to “Now what???” is what happens at the end of Genesis 11.  God tries something new. God focuses in on one man and one woman and their one family. God enters a second covenant, this time, with Abraham and his family.

 

When we meet him, Abraham is seventy-five years old. His name is Abram; the change comes later. ‘Now the Lord says to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”’ (Genesis 12:1-3).

 

Abram and his family become God’s BHAG—God’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Humanity has not, so far, been able to perceive itself as a good and blessed part of God’s creation, ready to work in partnership with God. So God creates this partnership, and makes its specific. God enters into this covenant, a covenant promising three things: land, children, and blessing.

 

The promise of land is a complicated one. The claim on the land for God’s people is one that is reasserted and lost again and again throughout the Old Testament. The promise of being a blessing—“in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”—is one that, perhaps no one who lived these stories saw realized in their lifetime, though we know it is true today. As for the promise of children: we are told at the outset that the promise is doomed to failure. In keeping with the primitive understanding of biology and all things scientific in biblical times, the lack of offspring is inevitably blamed on the woman: Sarah is said to be “barren.”

 

And so we come to chapter 15. You can tell right away that something is amiss, because the very first words God speaks are words of reassurance. “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” You see, between chapter 11 and chapter 15, the promise of children has been put in serious peril. At one point Sarah has been taken into the harem of a king. At another point Abram has become enmeshed in a battle involving the hostage taking of his nephew and no fewer than nine kings.

 

Thus God’s words of reassurance. Abram responds, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” (Genesis 15:2). Abram is a practical man. He has selected one of his slaves to be his heir. He knows that God has promised him offspring, but… he’s willing to help the promise along, right? What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t the Lord help those who help themselves?

 

Well, no. That is not, in fact, a scriptural sentiment. There is no bible citation for that very American-sounding proverb. In fact, that quote is almost the exact opposite of what is going on here. What is going on here is grace, a one-way promise of blessing. Abram did nothing to earn it. Abram needs to do very little to keep it. And God is quick to correct his misguided attempt to hedge his bets.

 

No, God says. That man will not be your heir. Your very own flesh and blood will be your heir, just as I promised. And then… this happens sometimes, early in Genesis especially: the character of God is described much as any other character. God plays with mud. God walks in gardens. God blows a puff of breath into people. And now, God takes Abram outside, just as if that were the most normal thing in the world. A startling, very human-like God a very anthropomorphized God, pops up now and then in the bible. This is one of those moments.

 

God takes Abram outside. I like to imagine them lying down in a field, or maybe on a sand dune. There is absolutely no light pollution where they are. They look up, and the stars are so thick, it’s like the stars themselves form a blanket across the heavens. You and I will never see with our bare eyes the number of stars they see.

 

Look at that, God says. Will you just look at that. That is how many children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren… and so on and so on and so on… that is how many you will have. Beyond your ability to count.

 

And Abram, perhaps chastened, perhaps with his seventy-five-year-old, maybe at this point eighty-year-old eyes full of tears, nods. And he believes. And that makes both God and Abram feel better.

 

So, three things about this man, and about us. First: God’s promises can be a long-term proposition. This is a lesson Abram learns over and over again. This is a lesson we learn over and over again. Have any of you ever had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal—a goal like, say, losing a bunch of weight, or starting your own business, or starting a family—and you realized, one day, that it just wasn’t going to be as simple and straightforward as you had originally imagined? The promises of God are like that. They can be believed. But you will have time for stargazing while you wait for them.

 

And second: being a faithful man or woman, being a righteous one, does not mean silent acquiescence during your long wait. Sometimes being faithful means voicing our complaints to God in loud and clear tones. I learned this at a young age by means of a book in which a young girl began her prayers, “Are you there God?” In times of duress, in times of trial, in times of disappointment, and long-term waiting, when we are not sure any more just what God’s promises for us are, a shout out—a hearty “Are you there God?” may just be the most true, most profound, most holy and righteous and faithful prayer we can pray.

 

And third: we are blessed so that we will be a blessing. Blessing is not something we accrue, like coins in a piggy bank. Blessing is something that passes through us, like the air that fills our lungs and then becomes a part of the life cycle of plants, or the food that strengthens our bodies and then becomes energy for our living. We are not receptacles for blessing, we are conduits. We are vessels. The blessings are meant to flow through us and on to the rest of God’s beautiful and broken world.

 

The promise of children for Abram will come true, but it will take a long time. There will be more false starts, more attempts for the humans involved to take matters into their own hands, more time for the promise to be in jeopardy, and just more all-around bad behavior. And in his lifetime, Abram will see, not a sky full of children, just two, Isaac and Ishmael, whom tradition believes to be the fathers, respectively, of today’s Jews and Muslims. Abraham will end his days, perhaps, gazing at the stars in wonder and realizing: faith, trust  in the promise might just be enough.

 

And we, perhaps, can draw from his story the lessons of trusting in God, and of voicing our complaints in faithful relationship, and of being a blessing where we can. And, maybe, of the holy act of simply looking up and out at something infinite, mysterious, and beautiful. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Story Begins: A Sermon on Genesis 2:4b-7, 15-17, 3:1-8

The scripture can be found here...

The summer season is drawing to a close, but one of the greatest gifts of our travels and our visits, our reunions and our celebrations, is the opportunity we have to share stories with one another. Think of it: Friends gathered around a campfire, or perhaps a backyard fire pit. You and someone you love side by side on a beach or at an outdoor café. Family members normally scattered across the miles, all, for a brief moment, seated around the same table. And the stories begin to flow…

We tell one another the stories of the high points, the mountaintop experiences (sometimes, literally!). How we participated in a triathlon, or ran a 10-K for charity. How our child graduated with honors, or threw the Hail Mary pass that won the big game. How we finally grew the perfect heirloom tomato, or bowled a perfect 300 game, or became grandparents. How we overcame our fear of swimming or flying or being alone.

And we tell one another the other stories, too. Stories of the crisis at work, the loss of the job, our kid’s first fender-bender, our loved one in the hospital, in rehab, in the doldrums. We may even share the story of the one in prison, or going through a painful divorce, or an ugly custody battle. The stories aren’t always happy. Sometimes they’re hard. Sometimes they make us want to weep. But they’re our stories, and the stories of those we love, those we call family, community.

Stories delight and entertain us, and teach us. Stories remind us of who we are, and of the kind of world we live in. And stories bring us closer together.

This morning we begin a year-long project of immersing ourselves in the story and stories of scripture, in a way we have never done before—not as a congregation, anyway. We begin a time of reading through the bible in canonical order—that is, in the order the stories are set out for us. We will read highlights, the major episodes of scripture, and we do this for several very specific reasons. First, we do it in order to learn—to see scripture not as we often do, a collection of disparate stories, letters, songs and histories, but as one story, a Big Story, with a definite arc, a shape, and a theme—a story that starts one place, and ends in another. I’m going to tip my hand and tell you the theme right up front: The story of scripture is the story of God’s amazing love for us. It is a story worth learning! Second, we do it in order to be reminded of who we are. The stories of scripture are our stories, the stories of the people of God across time. These stories belong to us, they speak to us, and they include us. And finally, we do this, we read through the bible together, in order to recognize that we are all in this story, not simply as uniquely created individuals, but as a community, as God’s community. We do this to be reminded that the story of scripture is a story of belonging.

Our passage this morning begins in the second chapter of Genesis, the first book in the bible, and it is the bible’s second creation story. Those of you who were here last Sunday had the opportunity to read responsively the first creation story, the beautiful liturgy of the seven days of creation, the one in which God sees that the creation is very good. This second story focuses in on the creation of humanity. In this story, we are told, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). And so, the first thing the story of scripture tells us today, the first thing we learn, is that humans are intimately connected with the rest of creation, particularly the  earth. In fact, the Hebrew words are connected in a way you can hear immediately. The Hebrew word for human is ’adam and the word for earth is ’adamah. The ’adam was formed from the ’adamah. The earthling came from the earth, the human came from the humus.

We are connected to the earth, not separate from it. We and the earth together are part of God’s creation. So much so, in fact, that, the ’adam, the human, is told to “till and keep” the earth—Hebrew words that also mean “serve and protect.” Our responsibility towards the earth, given us by our Creator, is to serve and protect it. This is a far cry from our usual relationship with the earth. But this is, apparently, one of the things we were created to do: to participate with God in the work of Creation, by guarding it.

The next thing we learn in today’s story is that God puts limits on the human. God draws a line and says, “This far and no further.” The item in question is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. What’s amazing is that this prohibition is couched in terms of absolute abundance. “Any tree,” God says to the human. “Any tree, except this one.” And the reason seems to be a good one: If you eat of that tree, God tells the human, on that day you will die.

But we learn, in the same moment, practically, another truth about human nature: To know that something is off limits is often to know how very, very much we want it. This is a pretty universal human experience, but one that is highlighted by the conversation with the serpent, who points out something that ends up being true: “You will not die.”

We are used to thinking of the serpent in this story as an evil figure, even a figure we associate with Satan, the Tempter. But that is to miss out on a lot of the symbolism the serpent would have held for those who first gathered around a fire pit to hear this story. In the ancient world, especially this part of the ancient world, serpents were wisdom figures. In fact, the Hebrew word translated as “crafty” here, is translated as “prudent” elsewhere. The serpent is wise. It has some truth to offer. And one of the truths the serpent highlights is that same thing that every dieter knows, that is borne out in studies of three-year-olds who are told they can play with every toy except the one in the box: it is the truth of the desirability of the forbidden fruit.

The woman and the man, together, eat the fruit God has forbidden them from eating. Please notice—there is no seduction, there is no greater guilt on the part of either of them. And the serpent is right: they don’t die. Was it a test, one they failed? Was it God-as-overprotective-Parent, trying to keep the newly hatched children from learning all life’s difficulties too soon? I think all those layers are possible interpretations of the story, as is the traditional Jewish interpretation: this is a coming of age story. This is the story of the original humans learning a hard truth about themselves: the ability to discern good from evil does not equate to the ability to choose good over evil. Just because we know the right thing to do doesn’t always mean that we choose it. In the hot mess that is the human psyche it quite frequently means just the opposite.

The humans are ashamed—see how they try to cover up their nakedness, just as we so often try to cover up our own bad deeds, or even our uncomfortable deeds, or even the deeds of those we love who have somehow messed up—such a human impulse.

God the Creator does not destroy the disobedient humans. But in the part of the chapter that comes later, God gives them clothes to wear, and sends them off to another place to live, a place where they’ll be fine, though they will certainly have to work harder than they would have had to in the garden. Is the garden childhood? And the exodus from the garden adulthood? Hard to say. But know this: the Creator of the garden and of the humans does not abandon them. God does not wash the divine hands of these disobedient children. They still belong to God. They still belong to the earth they are called to serve, and they still belong to one another. God still tends to their needs. The God of the Old Testament is shown, in this first encounter with these disobedient children, to be a God of compassion and mercy, a God who is kind while being just. And that is the true beginning to the long and beautiful story of God’s relationship with us. God is a God of justice, compassion, kindness and mercy. We belong to God, and nothing can change that. Thanks be to God. Amen.