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‘B’ // Lent 5 // 3-29-09 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scriptures Jeremiah 31:31-34 Hebrews 5:5-10 John 12:20-33
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Dedicated to Daniel Bahls and Carolyn Dekker
on the occasion of the Reaffirmation of their Baptismal Covenants
as new members of Northside Presbyterian Church
I can hear him now. I can see him now.
I can hear the resounding frets and I can see the rhythmic feet of the folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens opening the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Opening it with an overwhelmingly powerful rendition of the African-American spiritual our choir once sang not too many years ago: “Motherless Child”.
Its refrain runs like this: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. A long, long way from my home.”
How easy it is to feel this way – to feel this sense of Lenten exile – from the frantic and frenetic world about us.
How easy it is – ironically enough – to feel this sense of exile when we read and hear texts such as the selection from the Letter to the Hebrews today.
To our lector, Rich: What a stinker I gave you to read today! That was the type of text that makes me glad that I – and we – are called to follow the Christ who is Lord as revealed in our Holy Scriptures, rather than worship the Scriptures as our Lord.
No fathering or mothering images to warm our souls by in Hebrews today! For these six verses present in microcosm what we largely encounter in the entire first half of that lengthy letter: a coldly calculated, carefully constructed, systematically theological treatise on the mechanics of atonement.
And – as with cold, careful, systematic treatises on just about anything – we encounter here in Hebrews the looming shadow of a punishing Father somewhere “out there” – an external force to whom we owe a sort of dissociative allegiance. And by the word “dissociative”, I’m referring to the psychological descriptive of human consciousness splitting into separate parts – as if we were watching ourselves being ritually dissected by a God who demands our suffering obedience.
For truly: Are we really willing and able to believe – as the writer of this strongly implies in the words before us today – that God was capable of saving Jesus from death, but chose not to do so? For truly: Are we willing and able to believe that Jesus had to “learn obedience through suffering (spread out arms in sign of the cross), and being made perfect” in that way “became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey (him)?”
Friends: For centuries, this is the type of biblical passage that has lent theological heft to the most abusive forms of atonement theology – from the most maudlin of our Puritan forebears to Mel Gibson today. It has given and continues to give credence to the belief that Jesus had to die for our sins on that cross – not that it was inevitable through his voluntary suffering (which it probably was), but that it was absolutely and involuntarily necessary. Which more than implies the notion of a sadistic, capricious God the Father, controlling and coercing a masochistic, automaton Christ the Son. A Jesus who is not just willing to suffer, but who must suffer – that we may win God’s favor by obeying (read, suffering) likewise.
To be fair, this Hebrews passage has its redemptive moments. It affirms that Jesus can empathize with us, because he really and truly suffered as we do. It also affirms that his suffering was, indeed, heard by God.1
And yet, the unfortunate fact remains that this passage has contributed its fair biblical share in casting a pall over our comforting mother and gracious father images of God. For rarely has the difference between predestined suffering and the gospel of God’s unconditional, voluntary grace been cast in such stark contrast.
A contrast that continues to haunt our connectional church to this day – in matters as prophetically pressing as our ordination standards. For as we stand on the cusp of the most narrow defeat yet to expunge our nefarious “fidelity in marriage and chastity in singleness” constitutional standard for ordained officers: Let’s take quick stock of our different understandings in the denomination on atonement. Is it a voluntary inevitability? Or is it – as some would have us believe – an involuntary, God-ordained necessity?
Let us take quick stock, by listening to an old, old story told to us by our Presbyterian friend Chris Glaser, the only out lesbian or gay member of the original Presbyterian Task Force to Study Homosexuality over 30 years ago. It’s an old, old story, because it took place in a singular confrontation during that task force’s two years of public hearings between 1976 and 1978.
The showdown occurred between two task force members: an evangelical theologian from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA – a man by the name of Don Williams – and a progressive theologian from the seminary our own Jenny Howard now attends: Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary – a man by the name of George Edwards. As Glaser puts it, both of these Presbyterians were “going for the jugular – of the issue or of each other, we couldn’t be sure which.” The immediate point of reference for this story: The most oft-cited passage in all of Scripture by those who believe homosexuality is sinful:
(Unpacking) Paul’s letter to the Romans, Edwards commented, “Paul says here that ‘God gave them up to dishonorable passions’. Is this, then, Paul’s theology? Of course not! God never gave anybody up! What kind of theology would that be? Paul is here using a rhetorical device to get his legalistic reader all worked up in self-righteous frenzy before he hist him over the head with his own inadequacy and dependency on God’s grace.” Then Edwards, sensing the crux of the difference between those on the task force who would ultimately favor acceptance of gays and those who would oppose it, attacked with righteous anger: “I know your God, Don Williams. Your God will not be satiated, his anger will not be alleviated, until he has drunk every drop of blood falling from poor, puny Jesus on the cross! Your God is a vengeful God, full of wrath! But I tell you, God is a God of mercy and compassion; he is the one on that cross sacrificed to bloodthirsty concepts of God like yours!”
Glaser comments,
I believed this was no longer Edwards speaking, but the Holy Spirit. An amazed and troubled silence followed in the room, just as other miraculous interventions of the Spirit reported in scripture brought amazement and fear. The gospel of grace had been proclaimed. But it did have its cutting edge. The sword Jesus brought cut both ways, with one edge defending the oppressed and the other defeating the self-righteous.2
Friends: When I hear our misguided sisters and brothers describe the atonement in terms of compensation versus representation – God compensating for our sins by committing the ultimate “necessary” act of child abuse, versus coming in our very flesh to represent what God’s longsuffering love truly looks like in the face of such compensatory injustice – I find my mind wandering back to Richie Havens at Woodstock: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child … a long way from my home.”
Until, in pondering the words from Jeremiah and John’s gospel today, I feel once again the warm embrace of my mother-God who gathers her brood beneath her wings – and I hear once again the footsteps of my all-gracious father running to welcome this prodigal home.
Words such as these: From Jeremiah: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts … for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and” – get this, guilt-ridden Calvinists! – “remember their sin no more.” God loves us so much, God doesn’t remember what we’ve done!
Talk about a new birth of freedom! “I will … remember their sin no more.” Not that we might involuntarily suffer the more, on the one hand – or ignore suffering altogether, on the other. But to have the law written on our hearts … what a powerful way of symbolizing God’s justice and love bound together: freely providing prophetic witness (the law) inscribed on our seat of mercy!
To cite two phrases of our congregation’s purpose statement: This is the joy in doing justice and the liberality of love to which you testify, Carolyn and Daniel, in renewing your baptismal covenant as new members of this congregation today. For like most of our guests who walk through those doors, you have come to us as the Greeks came to Jesus’ first church, his disciples, today, saying – in so many words – “We wish to see Jesus.” And you have lingered with us long enough to know – to really, really know – that not only have you seen Jesus out-and-about here, but you have witnessed him here – in the words he uses in John’s gospel today – “draw(ing) all people to myself.”
For that’s why we call this gathering the body of Christ – the apostle Paul’s favorite metaphor for the church. We do our best to draw all people to Christ’s self.
And drawing all people to Christ’s self is a graceful road – though not a cheaply graceful road. For, as we are reminded in John’s gospel coda today, Jesus uses these words “to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”
Not because he had to. Not because his Father foreordained him to do so. Not because without pain there would be no gain.
But because when God’s voluntary, longsuffering love meets the world’s involuntary injustice, the body of Christ will inevitably be called to die a thousand deaths that the kingdom of God may come – at last. “On earth, as it is in heaven.”
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child … a long, long, way from my home.”
Thanks be that our God – the Mother and Father of us all – does not coerce each of us into a life of suffering, but draws us as one into this particular body of her longsuffering offspring.
This body of the living Christ. Where we need not suffer alone, anymore.
Carolyn … Daniel: You are today drawn into that body. You are today so loved.
Welcome home!
1 Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Charles B. Cousar, James Newsome, and Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching, Year B: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), p. 236.
2Chris Glaser, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church (Lousville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), p. 164.
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