Presence

Giving and Receiving God

Sider, Villegas

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621890232
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As God's eternal life flows through us, we learn to let go of our pretensions of control and rest into the new life offered in Jesus Christ. This book is an invitation for you to become nonresistant to this movement of God's love for you and the world. Through a variety of sermons and meditations, Sider and Villegas bear witness to a grace that disarms our guardedness and makes room for us to fall into the love of God. Preaching becomes a dispossessive practice, as each person is invited to give and receive God's transforming power. The proclamation of the gospel, Villegas and Sider say, should display the priesthood of all believers. Thus, the call to preach belongs to the whole congregation and its conversation rather than to the lone preacher and her (or his) sermon. Presence: Giving and Receiving God draws on the Mennonite tradition of the Zeugnis (conversation) to explore how the preached Word echoes through all of our voices.

Hope

Lament and Repent

Isaiah 11:1–10; Matthew 3:1–12

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

~ Isaiah 11:1

As soon as Katie and I moved into our house, I began to make some
changes to the front yard. I became obsessed. I started to tear out all the plants the previous owners had planted or let overgrow. First I took out all the ivy. It was everywhere, even breaking its way into the crawl space below the house. It had to go. Once I had taken all of it out, I looked at the front yard and I still wasn’t satisfied. There were three holly bushes that had turned into trees, very ugly trees. Katie didn’t mind them so much, but I hated them. After much persistence she let me cut them down. I borrowed Bradley King’s chainsaw. I woke up Monday morning, took the chainsaw out front, and got to work on those holly trees. I soon found out that this was a strange thing to do. I guess it’s unusual to walk your dog down the street and see a crazed neighbor wandering around in the front yard with a chainsaw. But the worried looks from dog walkers didn’t stop me. With only mangled stumps left from the holly trees, I got a load of compost and a load of mulch from the dump and filled in the area where the holly trees used to be. The space was now reclaimed for my own gardening. The holly was gone.

Or so I thought. The two smaller trees were done for; they couldn’t survive the chainsaw trauma. But the other one wasn’t so small. The tree was gone, but it left a large stump and an extensive root system. In late spring I discovered some strange shoots poking out from the middle of my newly planted verbena. What were they? It took me a week or so to figure it out. Sure enough, they were shoots from the submerged holly stump and roots. They came up everywhere. Almost everyday I found a new one. Even after such devastation something survived. Under all of the compost and mulch, life started to fight back.

This is also the story of Israel. It’s the story the prophet Isaiah knows well, the story of God’s people who suffer destruction at the hands of foreign armies. Babylon moves into the neighborhood with many armies and levels the southern kingdom of Israel, also called Judah. Just as I took a chainsaw to that large holly tree, so did Babylon use their armies to cut down the people of Judah. Nothing remained, only a stump—the humiliated remains of a people laid low to the ground. But Isaiah says that Israel resembles my holly stump: even though it’s cut down and buried, there will be a shoot, a sprout, a sign of hope. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isa 11:1). When every reason for hope seems lost, Isaiah tells us to wait and watch and hope—something is coming, something is stirring in the earth.

When John the Baptist comes on the scene many years later, the people of Israel have been waiting a long time for this shoot of Jesse—another David, another king—to restore Israel to its splendor among the nations. John appears in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt 3:10), and the crowds flock to him. The people of Jerusalem leave the courts of the temple and go out into the wildernesses to be baptized. John becomes a threat to the religious establishment in Jerusalem. He’s a figure on the margins who gathers crowds from Jerusalem and challenges the authority of the elite, the Pharisees and Sadducees. As one New Testament scholar puts it, John is a “counter-clerical prophet” (Wright, 161).

When I read about John the Baptist, I am drawn to him and frightened by him at the same time. For John, the advent of the Messiah means devastation and collapse. Advent means everything will be crushed, demolished, cut down. For John, the coming of the Messiah looks like me, running around my front yard with a chainsaw, chopping down trees. He says as much in Matthew’s Gospel, “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matt 3:10). John goes on to talk about what the Messiah will do when he comes: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (v. 12).

The season of Advent is a time for new beginnings, but this new life shoots out from piles of debris. The chainsaw comes first. Advent is a time for cleansing, for repentance, for lament. As Jay Forth said in his sermon last week, Advent is a season of hospitality—a season that teaches us how to receive the Messiah. And John tells us that we extend hospitality to the Messiah—we prepare for Advent—through repentance.

A few weeks ago Katie and I went to a talk by Chris and Phileena Heuertz. They lead an organization called Word Made Flesh. Phileena and Chris have teams throughout the world who locate themselves among the poorest of the poor; they live among the crushed and abused, and make friends. Through these friendships they learn what it means to serve Jesus in those places. At their talk, Chris and Phileena told lots of stories, stories about their friends—about AIDS-infected children who live in orphanages, about little boys and girls who’ve been sold into prostitution, and about mothers and fathers who have absolutely no way to provide bread or rice for their families. As they told stories about their friends, I sat in a cushy chair in a big, fancy church in Durham. The worlds Phileena and Chris described grated against the middle-class world in which I lived and moved and had my being. I thought to myself: How can anyone, how can this couple, see and feel so much and not go crazy? I kept on expecting them to overturn tables as Jesus did, or knock down pillars as Samson did. How can they sit there and tolerate me and my half-hearted world?

Finally, a woman asked a question and I hoped for some resolution: “What would you like us to tell our churches to do, what can we do, how can we reach out and make a difference?” As she spoke I thought to myself: Yes, that’s exactly what I want to know, that’s what I need to know; I can’t go on with all of these stories in my head without knowing that I’m doing something positive. I need someone to tell me my penance so I can get rid of the guilt that comes with my privileged life.

Phileena was about to say something in response, and I slid to the edge of my seat. But, instead of words, she gave us tears and sobs. She cried for about thirty to forty-five seconds, which felt like an eternity. She just cried, and all of us sat there in silence, fidgeting in our seats, uncomfortably watching her or finding a spot on the ground to stare at. Finally, between tears and sobs she said two words, only two words: “Repent and lament.” Repent and lament! That’s all she had to say? Her words took me by surprise. I was baffled. I guess I’m used to the television commercials for humanitarian aid organizations that bombard me with pictures of suffering so that when the phone number or Web site flashes at the bottom of the screen, I will be ready to pay my penance. These agencies try to tap into my conscience and compel me to give them money and make a difference. But Phileena refused those tactics. That’s not what she gave me—and I’m almost mad at her for it. She gave me something much more difficult. Her cries chopped down my prideful thoughts of quick and easy solutions—like a donation to ease my conscience. Nobody passed a plate so I could empty my pockets and empty my head from all of the stories. Instead, in the debris of our messianic solutions, she planted the words that lead to life, that lead to humility, that lead to John the Baptist in the wilderness: “Repent and lament,” Phileena said. Those words did not map out the solution for which I had hoped. Phileena’s cries marked a beginning. Her modest words silenced my ready-made answers and provoked new questions. For what must I repent? And what loss, whose death, should I lament? How can lamentation and repentance connect me with strangers across an ocean and across the street?

Those are the questions of our season of Advent, the questions that extend hospitality to the Messiah, the questions that prepare us for the coming of the Lord. John the Baptist says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” And Matthew adds, “This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord’” (Matt 3:3). But what exactly are we preparing for? Why did Phileena tell me to prepare for hope through repentance and lamentation? Why leave our lives behind and venture into the wilderness to repent and wash in the Jordan? Well, because we’ve heard the promises of a coming kingdom, a coming Messiah, and we want to be members of that humble people of God who are laid waste, chopped down, cut to the ground, in order to make room for the shoot of Jesse to break through the darkness, to break through our lives, and to make us a people fit for the Messiah. That’s Advent hospitality. Lamentation and repentance are how we make way for the coming of the Lord.

Now, what exactly are we preparing for? What will the Messiah bring? Isaiah tells us. His vision exposes the shadows of our world and invites us to receive a different one, the world of the Messiah, the kingdom of heaven come to earth:

with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. . . . The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. . . . They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord. . . . On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious. (Isa 11:3–10)

Gone Missing

Job 23:1–9, 16–17; Psalm 22:1–15

Job is a righteous man, a pious man, a master of spirituality. And he enjoys all the pleasures of life: wealth, family, sons and daughters. But all of these gifts are taken suddenly from him and he is left in misery. Job’s friends come along and try to help him make sense of the calamities. They try out their theories about evil and offer Job the comfort of an explanation for his suffering. They offer theories of sin and punishment. The friends try to fit Job into their well-crafted theologies—ideas about the way God uses evil to punish a sinful creation. Yet with every explanation Job’s misery gets louder and louder. The words of his friends bring no comfort; they only prod Job’s festering wounds, thus increasing the pain. At one point Job says to his friends: “I have heard many things like these; miserable comforters are you all! Will your long-winded speeches never end? What ails you that you keep on arguing?” (Job 16:1–2). And again, “How long will you torment me and crush me with words?” (19:2).

In our lectionary reading for today, we find Job in his darkest moment—a darkness that comes in spite of his friends and their miserable attempts at comfort. The world is dark for Job because God seems absent; God seems to have forsaken him: “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him” (23:8–9). As a cloud of darkness settles over his life, Job can’t find God. In the midst of so much suffering and misery, God doesn’t seem to be around.

I am reminded of something Nick Plummer said a couple weeks ago in response to Fred Bahnson’s sermon on Esther. Fred noted how the name of God is surprisingly absent in the book of Esther. God isn’t an obvious actor in that story. Then Nick commented about how this is the way we experience God many times, perhaps all the time. God seems to be absent. And this is exactly what we hear from Job. God has gone missing. Job can only see darkness, empty and silent darkness. He struggles to feel God’s presence, yet finds nothing: “God is not there. . . . I do not find him. . . . I do not see him. . . . I catch no glimpse of him” (vv. 8–9). Not even a glimpse, a sliver of light to give him hope. No flash of lightning to illumine a path of healing. Instead, darkness . . . stillness . . . silence . . .

Well, not exactly silence. The darkness echoes with Job’s desperate and bitter cries: “Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face” (v. 17). In this passage where God is nowhere to be found and darkness settles over the face of the earth, Job’s bitter cries are all we can hear. And in our world where God seems to have gone missing. Job is our only guide. His cries still echo through the voices of misery and suffering all around us.

The way of Jesus takes us into the darkness of those who experience abandonment, because Jesus himself is among those who, like Job, intimately know the empty silence of God. From the cross he remembers the desperate words of the Psalmist: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent” (Ps 22:1–2). Those are the last words of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. As he gasps a last breath on the cross, Jesus prays the first verse from Psalm 22:

At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33–34)

This is Jesus in his darkest moment. God seems to have gone missing at the point when Jesus needs God the most. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But like Job, Jesus will not be silenced by the darkness. He cries out to God the same sort of question Job asks: Why has God disappeared?

The temptation is to add a little light, a little hope, at the end in order to make those haunting voices go away—Job’s bitter cries, and Jesus’ cry of abandonment. That’s apparently what some scribes did to Mark’s story. If you flip to the last page of Mark’s Gospel (chapter 16), you’ll see what I mean. The original story ends without Jesus’ resurrected appearance. Women go t...