Who Sits At Your Table?

YOU, FAITHFUL CHURCH workers, have survived the demands of Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, and I’m willing to wager you are tired. By this time in the liturgical cycle, I’m usually exhausted and my spiritual (and sometimes physical) walk includes a pronounced limp. Vocational and social demands have taken their toll, not to mention the profound collective trauma we have all been through. Two years ago this summer, the waves of direct action in response to the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd left many of us particularly drained. And the shootings have not stopped. We have all done and been through so much.

Throughout the New Testament, the text refers to faith using the Greek word pistis. That word can also translate as faithfulness, a dogged determination that refuses to acquiesce or let anyone stifle it. It’s the same faith exercised by the woman with the flow of blood and shown in the litany of ancestors in Hebrews 11. It is more than sentimental, and sometimes is best exercised by simply being still and remembering who God is.

Our scriptures this month encourage us to exercise and examine our faith so that we keep going forward, even if we must stop and reset ourselves. Whether our posture is active or passive, our faith is still called into action because the world needs our witness.

August 7

Bless This Home

AS A THIRD-CULTURE kid (who grew up in places outside my parents’ homeland), I have a different relationship with the concept of “home” than most people I know. Because we moved around so much, I don’t have any current connections to the places I was raised. Because I’ve often not had the benefit of family nearby, “home” has always been about creating community wherever I’ve found myself.

The writer of Hebrews raised Abraham as an example to encourage the faithful to hold onto God’s promises and trust in God’s character. He left his home and everything he knew for a divine promise that was not immediately realized. When he became impatient with the fact that he had not yet become a father as promised, God assured him that as numerous as the stars are in the sky, “so shall your descendants be.” That was enough, apparently, to strengthen Abraham’s faith, and he was called “righteous” for it.

In our gospel text, Jesus reminds his hearers that our treasure is where the heart is, but that is not a passive notion. We can choose where to place our hearts and make our investments. If I put a lot of money into a car, I’m likely to keep the oil changed, tires rotated, and interiors detailed. If I put my treasure into the poor, I’m going to care that they are attended to and their voices heard. I’m going to care about systemic inequality that keeps people in poverty. I’m going to invest my time not only in ensuring that my neighbors have their immediate needs met but also in dismantling those systems that keep people chronically poor. Whatever I invest in is where I’ve elected to “live,” so I had best choose wisely!

Abraham was invested in staying with God because he had left much behind to follow God’s call. What have we left behind? What are we prepared to leave behind?

August 14

Shake the Fear Out

WHEN I READ texts such as Isaiah 5 that pronounce God’s disappointment and judgment, I reflect on what causes humanity to move so far from God’s intentions for us. My guess is that fear is at the root of it. When called toward a higher standard of living with each other, fear of what we may lose often keeps us from doing so. When called to speak truth to unjust power, fear of how that power might be wielded against us may stop us before we get started. Examples of the immobilizing effects of fear are numerous in scripture, and our lived experiences offer even more.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus reminds his hearers that his message is naturally divisive and, if heeded, will revolutionize every aspect of our lives. As we have seen before, such extensive change can generate fear. But fear doesn’t have to drain us of all agency. The writer of Hebrews speaks to a Jewish Christian community that was likely shut out of synagogue life because of their belief in Jesus as Messiah, while persecuted by a Roman Empire that was not fond of either Jews or Christians. Because of the threats around them, this community was considering leaving the faith. They were reminded, however, of the faith and steadfastness of their forebears who faced similar threats. It was by faith that their ancestors escaped slavery in Egypt. Faith saved Rahab, Gideon, Samuel, David, and others. It is hard to imagine that fear wasn’t present with them all.

Reflecting on his activism, Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” We too must find ways through fear, even when we cannot dispel it.

August 21

A Messy Faith

IN HER BOOK Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott riffed on Paul Tillich: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” She added, “Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.” We may arrive at certainty by empirical evidence or pure stubbornness, but our need for certainty is often at odds with our call to have and exercise faith. Faith dies when there are no longer questions we must ask of God or ourselves. It is through our questions that we grope for (and eventually find) God. Jeremiah’s call story shows a young man who is certain that God could not be calling him—a young, inexperienced person—to be the mouthpiece of God to the land of Judah. Most people might have agreed. God, however, did not.

In Luke 13, Jesus takes to task the synagogue leader over his doctrinal certainty about the Sabbath, a certainty that would rather have a woman remain injured and quiet than whole and praising aloud about her healing. Even the writer of Hebrews seeks to manage the reader’s expectations, acknowledging the signs and wonders that were already familiar to the community but inviting them to embrace new ones and to not rebuff the message simply because it is not as familiar. The one warning from heaven carries even more gravitas than the one warning from Earth (see Hebrews 12:25).

August 28

Where is the Lord?

THIS DAY WILL mark the 59th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In his iconic speech that day, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded America of its unfortunate failure to stand where the Lord stands. King said that, when it comes to people of color, the United States had defaulted on a “promissory note” that “guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Today we have an opportunity to discern if we have gotten any closer to being on God’s side.

In the gospel, again we meet Jesus on the Sabbath. This time he is at a Sabbath dinner where he is watched closely by those in attendance. He notices how they took for themselves the seats of honor at the dinner table. He gave them an opportunity to consider their actions. If they are socially correct, are they also morally so? Are they up to the standard God sets? It’s perfectly acceptable to have a dinner party for friends, but wouldn’t God want us instead to have a dinner party for the poor and vulnerable disabled?

When Jeremiah was called to the prophetic ministry, the Lord’s indictment of Israel was that the people had stopped asking “Where is the Lord?” They instead had chosen other gods and other standards. They had forsaken the living water and dug for themselves cracked cisterns that held no water. They had neglected the things that truly give life. All of this could have been avoided had they been in the practice of asking themselves “Where is the Lord?”

Where stands the Lord? As the South African church’s Belhar Confession states, the Lord stands “against injustice and with the wronged.” A people who fail to engage in serious and regular self-examination run the risk of losing proximity to the Divine.