Moses bobs down the Nile, starting the fantastic journey that is both his own and his people's. Jesus sits on a boat on the Sea of Galilee and teaches the people about the kingdom. Paul writes to the church in Rome, explaining his understanding of the gospel with passionate and analytical fervor.
Our scriptures are a blend of poetry and prose, family stories and formal history, lessons to live by and words that simply evoke the raucous delight in God's presence.
When pieces of all this are arranged together as the lectionary reading for a given Sunday, they both maintain their original identity and form a whole new story.
God's Word is living but not fragile.
Search out history, learn what you can about what the Word meant at a given place and time, to a certain people.
But also see what happens as the diverse words meet in your heart.
July 4: A Move Toward Deliverance
Exodus 1:6-14, 22-2:10, Romans 7:14-25a, Matthew 11:25-30, Psalm 124
As the book of Exodus begins, a people find themselves oppressed--turned against by neighbors, enslaved, sentenced to heavy labor. Some of the people's midwives don't fight the power directly, but they bravely trick it (1:15-22). Then, as the people will retell the story over the generations, God makes a move toward deliverance.
But it is just a basket on a river. It drifts, spins on a current, catches on some reeds, bobbles as the infant inside squirms. The baby's older sister reluctantly holds back, tries to will the basket to safety with attentive eyes. Pause, hold your breath, feel the tension, the quiet, the uncertainty of the moment. A people's hope, the movement of the Creator, is floating, egg-shell fragile, downstream.
There will be much more to come for this people: murder, cowardly escapes, ecstatic dancing on the shores of the Red Sea, petty dissension, the paradigm of mountaintop experiences, the bloody conquering of other peoples, meeting and running from God, all the gore and joy humanity can fall into. But it all starts in vulnerable, drifting suspense.
For those of us in the United States, it is good to remember such delicate beginnings today, Independence Day, in the middle of noisy picnics and parades, fireworks and flag-waving, patriotism and family reunions. Our history also includes courageous and frightened parents, helpless infants, brothers and sisters doing all they can, struggling for freedom long after "independence" was declared (but then in God's defining, independence and freedom don't seem to be the same anyway). They lived and live on plantations, reservations, and in tenements, in mining towns, sharecroppers' shacks, trailer parks, and by produce fields. They are as much a part of who we are as fighting men and landed gentry with noble words. Stand by the river and remember.
July 11: The Wild Harvest of God
Exodus 2:11-22, Romans 8:9-17, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Psalm 69:6-15
The idea of a new order, the promise of a messiah who would lead the people out of Roman oppression and into a glorious future--the coming of the kingdom of God--was not news to many sitting on the shore as Jesus taught. But interpretations varied as to how this kingdom would come and what it would truly be like.
There were probably people in the crowd wanting concrete details about this kingdom. At least enough to get a sense of their place in it, what its hours would be--something from Jesus that would function like those little arrows on shopping mall directory maps: "You are here."
But parables aren't words that map out kingdoms or worlds. They are, in theologian Terrence W. Tilley's phrase, stories that upset worlds. Parables don't set out to destroy or debunk worlds, nor create new ones, but to flip upside-down the place where the hearer is at. Tilley writes, "Parables work to reveal the unexpected, subvert the normal, cast out certainty to make room for hope, and thus provoke various responses. They are dangerous stories."
That all said, the parable of the sower seems straightforward enough. A person, some seed, some ground, some birds, some thorns--nothing out of the ordinary. The spiritual meaning of the parable that Jesus offers his disciples sounds almost predictable. (Or did I just punch out one too many paper doll figures of the sower in Vacation Bible School?)
But then again...Do you notice something disturbing in the carelessness with which the sower drops her seed all over the place, without attention to where it falls? (For farmers, seed is precious, paid for, not tossed lightly; and the soil is cleared of rocks and thorns, worked and weeded before planting.) Does this mean that we have no choice over whether our hearts are bird feeders, rock gardens, or plowed and manured plots? What is this fruit we might bear--and are we at all prepared for the wild harvest of God?
Those who have ears, let them hear. But don't ever think you've heard it all.
July 18: God's Discerning Fire
Exodus 3:1-12, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, Psalm 103:1-13
Moses' upbringing in the Egyptian court was far behind him. While he considered himself to be a stranger in the foreign land of Midian (Exodus 2:22), he was settled there, establishing his own family, tending his father-in-law's flocks. He was humbly minding his own business and that of his family. Another day, another grazing plot.
Then everything goes topsy-turvy. The dirt and scrub under his feet is holy ground. Fire burns but doesn't destroy. God tells Moses that he is not a shepherd (despite all evidence to the contrary), but the deliverer of his people from oppression in Egypt. Moses asks, nervously it seems, "Who am I to do such a thing?" God doesn't respond with a list of Moses' qualifications, just a reassurance, "But I will be with you." That is to be enough.
God's call is dangerous and unexpected business, surely for the one called, but for the rest of the community of faith as well. Ones other than Moses have claimed to have heard God's voice, but were actually suffering delusions. Others have falsely claimed a divine call to manipulate believers, enhance political power, or gain wealth.
But attempts to codify and domesticate God's call to avoid its misappropriation miss the point. The Voice that can flame up anywhere has too often been presumed to live within the limits of human bias: Are you male? From a "respectable" family? Do you promise not to agitate or rile up folks? Okay then, you can claim the call.
We need not to be afraid to discern and name, humbly, crackpots and despots who misuse the name of God. But we also need not to be afraid to listen, humbly and with open hearts, to all our holy stories, ancient and new. The servant of the Lord is most always the unexpected one.
Whatever other meaning the parable of the weeds in the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30) may carry, it is a reminder that sorting and discarding one another is not a power that is ours.
July 25: Treasure and Sacrifice
Exodus 3:13-20, Romans 8:26-30, Matthew 13:44-52, Psalm 105:1-11
These verses from Matthew are the final parables in Jesus' Sea of Galilee teaching session on the kingdom. No one parable sums up the kingdom; each is like a different facet on a cut jewel.
Still I realize that my mind searches for the big picture. I have questions--big questions I'm not sure I'd want to understand if I could: What does final judgment mean? Can you make a mistake about what righteousness means and find out in the end that you're a bad fish when you thought you were good? What does the parable of the hidden treasure call us to give up for the kingdom (if anything): Material goods? Emotional ties? Religious beliefs or political ideologies that have become idols to us?
There are smaller questions, too. Why, upon finding the treasure hidden in a field, didn't the man just dig it up and take it home? Was it necessary to give up all that he already had? What is it like to feel such joy that you do something rash and don't turn back? Can you live on joy?
There is an argument for letting go of the questions, for letting Jesus' parables sink in slow, like a soaking rain, not to try to sort out the individual drops. Just wait to see what grows, instead of analyzing every word and striving for a total explanation. Frederick Buechner writes, "With parables and jokes both, if you've got to have it explained, don't bother."
Maybe we are called to do both at different times--probing and meditating, chewing Jesus' words up and swallowing them whole. As we continue to seek the kingdom, we will be like the householder, finding treasures new and old.
Julie Polter is associate editor of Sojourners.
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