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March 26, 2006
Ann-Mary MacLeod
Illuminating: the Walls in our Way
I admit that I have been somewhat resistant to
John’s theme this Lent. My personal focus is not on walls but on semi-permeable
membranes. I have been experiencing God subtly lately, not so much as light, but
as fluid. Not so much as a force for shining clarity in my life, but as love,
seeping in, softening me up. Today’s readings, though, demand two things of me,
of us: to look at God’s awesome and illuminating power and to see the way of
walls.
In the Hebrew Lesson we meet a barely literate
God. Now by that I don’t mean that God had only begun to read and write. Quite
frankly I’m sure God uses a much more powerful system than our technology of the
alphabet for communicating. What I mean is that people of the book of Numbers
were just beginning to be an alphabetic people, to have a written language.
These folks were still oral, and all oral cultures rely on the beauty of images
for their abstractions.
This Old Testament text is also one of my
favorites (how many times will you hear me say that, each time about a different
text?) because the reports of the people seem so accurate, they are reported to
be real human beings. I love their grumble about the quality of the desert
food, don’t you? No real food, no water, just detestable, miserable manna! The
God reported in Numbers reminds me of a she bear ready to be done with her
mother role, sick to death with the grumbling of her adolescent cubs. So what
does God do? Send snakes to bite the people, poisonous ones at that! The
people try a different tactic. They go to Moses and beg him to pray on their
behalf. He does and is told by the Lord to make a graven image. Boy, things
change when Moses is given the Ten Commandments, but the thing that I’m
impressed with about God is God’s interactions with us are always at the level
of development appropriate to us.
Of course I’m struck by the fact that the record
of God rests on the ability of the people recording it, so of course God evolves
as we, God’s people do. It seems to me that God, as a being, is defined by
relationship. So as we mature in our ability as individuals, and as a people to
relate, it seems that God shifts and grows, too.
Walls help with this; they illuminate
relationships. There’s a lot of talk in modern and pop psychology about
boundaries. Anyone growing up in a boundary-less home knows there is something
to this talk. I found the following statistics on the web page for the National
Center for Victims of Crime:
One of the nation’s leading researchers
on child sexual abuse, David Finkelhor, estimates that 1,000,000
Americans are victims of father-daughter incest, and 16,000 new cases
occur annually (Finkelhor, 1983). However, Finkelhor’s statistics may be
significantly low because they are based primarily on accounts of white,
middle-class women and may not adequately represent low-income and
minority women (Matsakis, 1991).
I have heard estimates as low as 10%, and as
high as 25%, for the rate of incest overall. There are, of course, many other
forms of incest. If we chose the conservative side and numbered off today, 1 in
10, or someone in about every other pew on each side of the sanctuary could tell
a story of this sin of not observing boundaries. Our cultural solution to
broken boundaries is litigation. Not terribly helpful to the four year old
being molested by her drunken uncle, is it? No!
God tells the early people in the book of
Numbers, tells them through Moses, who both brings their prayers and receives
their answers, to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole and that anyone
bitten can look at this snake and be cured. Notice another feature of oral
cultures, community. Literacy is an amazing technology. We don’t have to
remember much anymore, it can be found in a book. The accumulation of knowledge
at our disposal, especially in the era of electronic connectivity, is awesome.
It has allowed advances of wondrous and terrible kinds and it has aided greatly
in increasing self-sufficiency, today we can even pray for ourselves. Oral
cultures rely on the repeated telling of stories, the memorization of important
knowledge and its details, and on an audience to listen to it. They also rely
on powerful images.
We are led through scripture today from the
horrible food of the desert to the Psalms where God is reported as satisfying
the thirst and filling the hungry with good things. Of giving God’s people a
city, with walls of all sorts, to settle in. Walls that keep in, walls that
keep out, walls that illuminate the edges of God’s people.
We are led forward, past the amazing life of
Jesus to the Epistle. It reflects on a life of sin and instructs us on our
other choices. We are reminded of the danger of remaining stagnant, staying in
one place too long without moving, without air, without permeability. Life gets
evil in places fueled by fear.
I had the opportunity to be with some extended
family last weekend. It was all about love, all about walls, all about
semi-permeable membranes. The occasion was a momentous one for my youngest
daughter, a one-woman show of her jewelry. But the date coincided with the 3rd
anniversary of my nephew’s death. I had stood on the edge of one of my walls
feeling an awful lot like humpty dumpty, and put myself out there by asking his
mother, sister and young widow to join us on this joyous occasion knowing
full-well we could also be a vessel for their still very deep pain.
We all play many roles in our families and one
that falls under my mother skirt is that I’m a hostess, a Jewish mother really,
trying to model my behavior after God’s, offering good things to eat and drink.
I’m always encouraging people to eat. “Mange, mange”, I insist. So I told my
daughter to leave the refreshments up to me. I kept it simple, only carrying
one spring form pan and set of measuring cups in my suitcase and only making one
dessert. I almost certainly should have gone to the bakery. The first clue was
when I locked myself out of my daughters’ house with everything useful inside,
my cell phone, phone book, car keys, jacket, etc, inside. Only one thing I
could think of to do and that was walk back to our hotel. Believe it or not I
enjoyed the walk. For that half hour there was no rain and the tide was in and
the bay in Olympia was lovely. I found myself teetering on another wall as I had
to ask my ex-husband (yes, he was there, too) to drive me back to the house. So
I got back and continued my preparation eyeing the clock and thinking there was
no way the dessert would be solid by the 5pm opening but somehow insisting on
pressing on. Since I hadn’t brought my mixer, I was using their only kitchen
power tool, a Cuisinart. I put the whipping cream in the bowl, turned it on,
washed a couple dishes and came back to a lovely ball of butter! So now there
was the trip down the street to get more whipping cream. Oh, and I’d let the
family cat out when I locked myself out and he hadn’t come home, a point of some
concern as he isn’t usually left out all day and it was quickly becoming all
day.
I learned long ago to treat days like this as a
comedy of errors. Unfortunately that attitude irritates some of the rest of my
family members. So I, feeling somewhat relieved that I had gotten this dessert
complete, went back to the hotel to spend the last free half hour of the day
with my family only to be met with a nasty, venomous bite. Now I’d love to tell
you that I smiled, gave the person a hug and the rest of the day went swimmingly
but, alas, I didn’t respond that way. Without any thought whatsoever, following
the ways of the world, I met the bite with one just as poisonous. But thank God
there is a God that loves me and gives me courage. The killing words just out
of my mouth, I forced myself to take a deep breath.
I remember a friend telling me once that she
loved the old version of the “Lord’s Prayer”, the one we say here at First,
because of the words “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us.” She likes this version because so much of sin is crossing other’s
boundaries, of not respecting the walls of our loved ones. My nasty words had
gone right through someone I dearly love as hers had done me earlier. So I
stopped and teetered yet again on the edge of one of my walls. I said, “You
were just really nasty to me, what’s up?” The words came back “You were nasty
to me, too.” I was beginning to feel like a couple four year olds but I kept a
steady “God help me” prayer going and said, “You’re right, I returned the
nasty-ness, but that isn’t my concern so much as what is behind it”. A torrent
of tears and fear was behind it. I could live most of my life without a plan
but that isn’t the case for my first-born sibling and I had gone off to do my
will without any consideration of her needs. She nailed me, but not to a cross
without redemption. No, like the words we just read, in the middle of my doing
what I wanted to do, God embraced me with great love, and held my sibling in
safety, so that we could rebuild a comfort zone. God illuminated the snake
bites we’d each made in each other’s precious skin, and with loving kindness God
helped us exchange meaningful words, hug and heal.
The Epistle tells us of a God that is rarely
angry anymore. A God that even when angry still treats us with love and with
mercy. I am reminded of another Old Testament scripture from Micah in which we
are told that God’s mercy is so great that our sins, when given to God, are
extinguished like a coal dropped in the sea. It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it?
Imagine taking a chunk of charcoal from your pre-gas barbeque and dropping it
into the ocean. I can hear the split second sizzle as the fire of my misdeeds
is extinguished, and then, all that cool cleansing water of forgiveness.
An interesting thing happens with Jesus.
Between the time of the scripture from Numbers that we hear today and the birth
of Jesus, the Hebrews become a literate people. No, not everyone was literate.
It was a rare woman, for instance, that was, and many men weren’t either, but
the rule makers and the rule enforcers were literate. They are also people that
Jesus singles out for their sinfulness, the scribes and the elders. And Jesus
asks that his work be spoken, told, not written and read. He doesn’t make or
condone images but he does teach with story, metaphor, and aphorisms.
Jesus, this morning teaches with a story that
remembers the snake lifted up in the desert. He also makes reference to
something that probably no-one hearing the story that day could have imagined,
that Jesus would be put up on a stick, a cross, and held for all of us to see,
held so that we could be healed. Of course, we could skip ahead to our
wonder-filled day on which Jesus is lifted up in another way, in which the light
shines so brightly, it changes the course of history. But that day is not the
day of our focus here, yet, in the middle of Lent. Today, if we are going to
look ahead at all, we have to look at Jesus crucified.
Both the bronze snake on the pole in Numbers and
Jesus on the cross serve as an axis mundi, a connection between heaven and earth
for God’s people. In one African religion, that belonging to the Fon, a
trickster plays a central divine role. These words that describe Legba, the
trickster, sound a great deal like my God, especially my God made human:
He is the master …, the juggler of
language and experience, for he finds in all biological, social, and
metaphysical walls, doorways into a larger universe. He neither destroys
the structures of life nor stoically accepts them, but inwardly enlarges
them by the gleeful disclosure of their further possibilities. Robert
Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa
Our religion is not rich in glee until Easter
but, nonetheless, God does find the doorways and leads us to what’s best for us
without destruction or resignation.
Let me go back and try to weave together the
loose ends I have left hanging. I left us with the statistic about incest. I
left us with litigation being a poor answer to a pre-literate child’s experience
of abuse. I left us traversing from image to story, from snakes on a pole to
Jesus. And that is where I will leave us. With Jesus, crucified. With a God
so filled with love and mercy that God gave us the beloved creation of Son to
die for our sins, to bring us forgiveness. I don’t decry that we live in a
system of written laws; they are useful. I rejoice, too, though, that we live
in a life still rich in story, still filled with life-changing symbols. Story
heals. All of us have been wounded in some way, some terribly, through the sins
of disrespecting boundaries. Telling stories and being heard is a powerful tool
toward healing. I’d say that’s what the four year old needs, to be heard, as
soon as possible. It’s what we all need, that and the image of mercy, to see
the Light of God in Jesus raised up on a pole. I urge us all in the days to
come, the hours after this service, not to look down at the snakes waiting to
bite our ankles. They are most certainly everywhere. Instead I urge us to look
up, to turn our eyes on Jesus, to see God’s great love for us and to let through
our walls God's great mercy.
Amen.
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