In today’s lessons, people who are trying to serve God engage in intense struggles with the world. First is Moses, called by God from the burning bush that is not consumed to lead the Hebrew people out of bondage in Egypt (Exodus 3:1-15, NRSV).
Moses struggles throughout this story with his fears. First he fears God and hides his face. Then he fears Pharaoh. After all, he is in the wilderness precisely because he is a fugitive from Pharaoh’s justice, having slain an Egyptian who had been beating a Hebrew slave.
Moses struggles throughout this story with his fears. First he fears God and hides his face. Then he fears Pharaoh. After all, he is in the wilderness precisely because he is a fugitive from Pharaoh’s justice, having slain an Egyptian who had been beating a Hebrew slave.
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| Moses and the Burning Bush |
When God reassures him on that point, Moses struggles further with his fears, this time in relationship to the Isrealites themselves. He needs a credential, and God provides it: Say that “I AM,” the God of your ancestors, has sent you.
This is a “good news, bad news” story. The good news, or "gospel" message, is that the Lord God has seen the affliction of God's people and has come to deliver them from slavery and oppression. The bad news, for Moses, is that responding to the good news requires him to go way out of his comfort zone.
The story from Matthew’s Gospel (16: 21-28, NRSV) is a prediction of the suffering and death of Jesus. We know, of course, that it was written well after those events had taken place. Thus the vantage point is post-resurrection and the writer believes that Jesus’ death and resurrection had been necessary to his salvation, just as we believe today they were necessary to our salvation.
In that light, Peter seems rather clueless, if not an outright obstacle to what Jesus needed to accomplish. At the same time, who among us, not yet comprehending God’s plan for our salvation, would not have acted as Peter did? Would we not also have said, No, Lord, that can’t be. That you should suffer so is unacceptable.
Jesus rebukes Peter sharply. Wasn’t it just last Sunday and a couple of chapters ago that he was saying to Peter, You are the rock on which I will build my church? Yet today he says to Peter, Get thee behind me Satan.
The sharpness of Jesus’ rebuke suggests two things: First, he did have a clue to what was coming, and, second, he was struggling with that awareness. How could he go through with such a horrendous reality if his own closest friends and followers were going to try to talk him out of it? Indeed, were not prepared to go through it with him?
In other words, the story both suggests what God was to accomplish with that cruel death—namely our ultimate deliverance from death—even as it makes clear that the price of deliverance is affliction and suffering. If any want to become my followers, Jesus says, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
In today’s Epistle, the Apostle Paul provides guidelines for how we should live in response to the gospel proclaimed by these stories (Romans 12:9-21). And just as Jesus’ statement suggest, Paul’s guidelines reveal that it will be a struggle and it will take us out of our comfort zone.
Much has been made over the centuries of the supposed conflict between a good, omnipotent God and the persistence of evil in the world. Underlying that debate is the notion that it’s God’s responsibility to fix evil in the world.
But Paul makes it perfectly clear that countering evil is our job, and in the passage from Romans just read, Paul focuses on how we are to counter evil. He provides us with an impressive list, the bottom line being quite simple and succinct: We are to overcome evil with good.
Our human tendency is to think that we must overcome evil with much more aggressive strategies than those listed here. I suppose that is, at least in part, because we fear evil and when we are afraid, a peaceful counter to the threat is about the last thing that occurs to us. We want to “fight fire with fire.” We believe that “the best defense is a good offense,” and so forth.
But that is hardly what Paul commands and that is precisely why his instructions take us out of our comfort zone. We are to hate evil but respond to it with love and nobility and leave vengeance to God.
One of the strategies Paul suggests for countering evil in this familiar passage strikes me today in a way it never has before. It comes about a third of the way in: Bless those who persecute you, Paul says, bless and do not curse them.
Wow. What a thought. And it strikes me today because I just finished reading a book that I think I mentioned to you a few weeks ago. The book is An Altar in the World by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.
The book is about how to draw closer to God through the demands, struggles and pleasures of everyday life. Spirituality is not just for formal worship experiences, Taylor argues. Rather, we can turn many aspects of our daily life into spiritual practices.
She begins with a chapter called “The Practice of Waking Up to God,” followed by chapters called “The Practice of Paying Attention,” “The Practice of Getting Lost,” and more. The last chapter of the book is “The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings.”
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| Bar Mitzvah Blessing |
Now we Episcopalians are very big on blessing things, but we have rules about who can bless what and when. Bishops must always bless churches, communion vessels and those who are being ordained deacon or priest. Priests can bless many things: bread, wine, marriages, babies just baptized, houses, vestments, jewelry, and all of us at the end of every worship service.
But as Taylor notes, that leaves lots and lots of things that all of us can bless: Our food before we eat. Our children when putting them to bed at night. A perfect stranger who happens to sneeze in a public place.
Blessing is everyone’s job and surely the world would be a better place if we all spent more time pronouncing blessings and less blaming, criticizing and cursing!
Like Paul, Taylor says we need especially to bless that which at first repels us or seems unworthy of blessing: the fat man spilling into your space from the airplane seat next to you, the sullen cashier, the neighbor who has already put the wrong political sign in his front yard, even the mosquito intent on supper at your expense. God made these beings, Taylor says, they share in God’s…holiness, whether or not they meet your minimum requirements for a blessing. And to bless is to recognize that holiness. It is to defer judgment, and to see God in every aspect of life.
And watch what happens inside when you do this. The recipient of the blessing might never know or notice. Transformation of the blessee is not required, but the heart and mind of the pronouncer of blessings will be changed.
Let us pray: Blessed are you, Lord of the Universe, and blessed is your creation now and forever,
AMEN.
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