THE DEUTERONOMY PASSAGE that ushers in our Lenten pilgrimage underscores the sacred mandate to embrace foreign immigrants with generous hospitality. Instructions for the liturgy for harvest thanksgiving conclude: “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you” (26:11). Worshippers are required to certify in the assembly before God that they have participated in providing what the vulnerable in society need, not least refugees. “I have removed the sacred portion from the house, and I have given it to the Levites, the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows” (verse 13). Paul speaks of the Spirit of freedom removing the veil that blinds us to the core meaning of the sacred texts. In the current climate of xenophobia and incitements to make refugees into scapegoats, Christians are called to rip down the veil that prevents people from hearing this Word.
As for the intimate personal dimension or Lenten conversion, this might be the time to realize more profoundly that much of our own sinfulness and confusion arises from the harshness with which each one of us rejects and starves elements of our own inner “community of selves,” those parts of our humanity we try to disclaim and repress. It is the Spirit’s inner work of integration that teaches us to embrace those “selves of the self” we find ugly, pathetic, needy, or too passionate and creative for comfort. Our outer practice and inner practice of hospitality and inclusion belong together.
[ March 3 ]
Radiation Exposure
Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43a
“AND ALL OF US with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Epiphany season’s celebration of the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ concludes with the theme of transfiguration (metamorphosis is the Greek word). The appointed scriptures are the key for understanding the dynamic of Lent as we prepare to enter that season of renewal. Our transformation can never be accomplished by conforming to external imperatives, nor by the embracing of “values,” however lofty and demanding. Our moral transformation works through contemplation of the open heart of God exposed in the self-giving life of Christ, a kind of contemplation as “radiation therapy” in which our inner falsity is irradiated by the beams of God’s unbounded, costly love, lived out by Jesus through his “exodus” (Luke 9:31) into the cross.
Prayer is the perpetual treatment in which, little by little, we deepen our participation in the divine life of vulnerability, transparency, and truthfulness. “We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word” (2 Corinthians 4:2), but this is not the result of our own program of moral effort; it rises from “the Lord, the Spirit” doing the work of inner liberation in us while we are steadfastly fixing our gaze on Jesus.
[ March 10 ]
Exile and Vulnerability
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
“THE DEVIL CAN cite scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart. Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” Shakespeare no doubt conceived these lines for The Merchant of Venice from his deep musings on the biblical story of the Fall and the gospel accounts of the testing of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness. This week’s psalm is the very one that the devil quotes to Jesus to devoutly reassure him that God’s favor will immunize Jesus from failure and injury. God “will command his angels concerning you, to guard you” (Psalm 91:11). But this is a spell of delusion, and Jesus shakes it off. Taking refuge in God means entering into the heart of holy vulnerability: God’s track is away from immunity into solidarity with the broken and abandoned and leads to being “numbered with the transgressors.”
The Deuteronomy passage outlining the liturgy of thanksgiving for God’s bounty and favor in the Promised Land is shot through with warnings against specious piety. Gratitude for security and prosperity is indeed a “goodly apple,” but unless it is seamed with ever-refreshed memories of exile and vulnerability, its heart is rotten. Our spiritual ancestors were wanderers seeking asylum, and any purported thanksgiving festival is invalid unless it includes the refugees and “the aliens who reside among you” (26:11).
[ March 17 ]
Circling Hawk
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
PAUL TALKED IN depth to the imperial guards who supervised his incarceration in Rome, with the result that they became versed in the gospel. This expertise in translating the good news into terms gentiles could understand informs Paul’s use of current political terminology in his letter to converts in Philippi. Transposing Jesus’ original “reign of God” language, Paul talks of our civic rights and responsibilities as citizens of God’s own country: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there we are expecting a Savior” (3:20). We are citizens of God’s future realm of communion and peace.
In 1:27, Paul urges his friends to put that citizenship into practice, using the verb politeuein. This active citizenship is the opposite of living as an idiotes, a private individual, someone heedless of all social responsibilities and indifferent to the claims of community. Our lives as citizens in God’s future are intrinsically political and social, engaged in webs of relationship and networks of action.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus channels the sophia, the wisdom of God, in agonized frustration over the nation’s refusal to take refuge in God rather than rickety political arrangements like Herod’s corrupt regime. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jesus said (13:34). His final attempt to gather the people into that trust is like the action of a mother bird who sees the hawk circling over her head. She forfeits her life to save the chicks, and Jesus readies himself to do the same.
[ March 24 ]
Blame Games
Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
RELIGION, ALAS, is a fertile field for the primal human urge to “connect the dots,” to find patterns in the random play of accident and coincidence. In this week’s gospel, Jesus pushes back at this habit by flatly denying the proposal that certain Galileans who were massacred by Herod in the temple “had it coming to them,” and against the notion that God was punishing for personal sins the 18 victims crushed in a collapsed building in the capital. These moralistic blame games are not only groundless, but they serve as a deflection from the bigger issue of national betrayal of God’s covenant. Jesus challenges his listeners to wake up to the danger of annihilation that threatened the entire nation because they were failing to receive the good news of God’s reign of peace. “Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did” (Luke13:5).
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses another fatal temptation in religion—making a certain spiritual identity into a false guarantee of impunity. Some members in the Corinth church apparently imagined that baptism was a license for continued sexual exploitation, presumably because merely physical actions couldn’t impinge in any way on the purity of the enlightened soul. Paul applies forceful lessons to the contrary through an imaginative exploration of calamities undergone by the generation who had been liberated in the Exodus but wouldn’t stay faithful.
[ March 31 ]
Prodigal Church?
Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
THE PARABLE OF the prodigal son (more accurately, the parable of the resentful elder brother) was Jesus’ mordant challenge to the orthodox who took deep offense at his practice of amnesty and inclusion. Jesus constituted his “little flock,” to whom it was God’s good pleasure to entrust the divine reign, from a motley crew of tax collectors, prostitutes, and others who were despicable in the eyes of decent folk. The parable’s resonance is inexhaustible. I am haunted by the way Robert Adolfs, a radical Dutch theologian and author of The Grave of God, used the image of the prodigal spending his years in a far country as a devastating image for the entire sweep of church history—from the conversion of Constantine to our day. The church’s alliance with regimes of power, its establishments, its consent to violence, its dependence on structures of privilege, constituted a devastating repudiation of the good news of nonviolent, self-giving divine love, for which the prodigal’s heartbreaking abandonment of his father and home is a poignant image. The father could not constrain his younger son, and for centuries a noncoercive God lets the church persist in its compromises until disillusionment finally sets in and the moment comes round for risking the painful journey home.
Perhaps the parable can speak to us now of the joy of God in welcoming back a chastened, humiliated Christian church, stripped of its obsolete cultural support systems, to enjoy again the original inheritance of the gospel of grace.
“Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.
Martin L. Smith, an Episcopal priest, is an author, preacher, and retreat leader. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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