Biblical Authority in Babylon

Not everything that I encounter in my exploration of a text makes its way into a sermon, and this last week, one particular "remainder" stuck with me.  The passage was from Jeremiah, a prophetic word to the exiles in Babylon.  Live your lives, he said.  Be a blessing, particularly to those who have oppressed you.

Pray for the wellbeing of those who have oppressed and enslaved you, says he.  It's a word of fierce grace from a prophet best known for anger and lamentation, which is striking enough.

But what had struck me hard about this text was it's juxtaposition with the Psalm that I chose not to use in the responsive reading the Sunday before.  The lectionary had pitched out Psalm 137, which is just one of those passages that I can't use unless I've screwed up the courage to preach on it.

Particularly if you're having the congregation read it responsively.  When the folks in the pews choke out that last line about happily smashing children on a rock, you'd better have some interpretive sermonic magic planned right quick.

The juxtaposition of those two passages, just a week apart in my studies and meditations, was particularly striking because I had never considered the two together before.  And they're in radical and irreconcilable tension with one another.

One seethes rage and pain, and yearns for vengeance.

The other, speaking into exactly the same context, says: constrain your fury.  Do not desire vengeance.  Be the good.  Seek the good.

I personally have no problem here, mind you.  To the ears of my soul, Jeremiah is the one who speaks for God here.

The anger of the Psalm is the rage that burns in the hearts of those who are broken and oppressed.  It articulates that truth, and in that, the song of pain and loss has some validity.

But the "happiness" it hungers for in its final verse does nothing to bring healing.  The result of its yearning would only be more sorrow.

From my interpretive framework, Jeremiah's letter has clear authority over the Psalm, and the Psalm must yield to it.

But if you believe that both are equally and completely true, both the Word of God, perfect and right and with equal authority to govern our souls, you have a problem.

Breath and Blessing

It was one of those moments, peculiarly bright and unusually deep with the Spirit's light.  After a couple of years together, my DMin cohort wrapped up the last of our required coursework.  It's been a good group, comprised of pastors and lay leaders from a wild blend of spiritual backgrounds.

I've flitted about the periphery of the group, as I tend to do in most social settings, connecting here and there but remaining both a part and at a remove.  Something to do with being a foreign service brat, perhaps, but more likely just an aspect of my inward nature.

On that last day, as we closed, we shared a final crowd-sourced worship together, singing and praying in a vague ovoid that was the best circling-up we could manage.

At one point during that closing time, one of the pastors...a tatted-up Methodist Philadephia-Irish pit-brawler with a remarkably gracious and bright spirit...pulled a chair out to the center of the group.   To that chair, he invited the our one Episcopalian, she with her sharp precise liturgically correct mind wrapped about a kind heart.

Surgery was coming for her, and soon, for lungs that were struggling to function.

And so twenty pastors gathered, and laid on hands.   I placed mine on her back, behind her left lung, just above her diaphragm.  Then we prayed, together, out loud.   The holy-pit-brawler led it, but it was a swirl of languages and spiritual traditions, Spanish and Korean, English and that percussive nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh p-puh puhpuhpuh glossolalia that always reminds me of Chevy Chase putting in Caddyshack.

I prayed inwardly for a moment, and then took a deep breath and intoned a word.   Ruach, I said, letting it flow out of me as fully as I could.  I repeated it, not loudly, but with as much breath as I could, an overabundant outpouring of air.

Spirit, it means in Hebrew.  Breath, it means in Hebrew.  It felt like the right thing to speak.

I wasn't sure it was heard, as it blended out with the hum and crackle of a dozen other prayers.  But it was there, breathed out into the air as it sparkled with spoken hopes.

A funny thing, healing prayers.  They are peskily unreliable as direct interventions.  They are not magic.  But that does not mean they are without power.  What they do, without question, is affirm that around you there is a cloud of other beings who desire your wellness.  From the heart of their connectedness with the Source of Being, those beings speak that hope into you.  They manifest it.  They make it real.

They say, we know that it is possible that you might be made whole.  Here we are, affirming that we desire that this possibility be made manifest, that we might celebrate it.

Time To Forget

That evening, after walking from the city to Falls Church because our car was locked away in a building that had received an opportunistic bomb threat, we sat downstairs with our children.  We were physically tired, but that was nothing.  We were emotionally drained, taken down to nothing by the events of the day, still struggling to process the great black pillar of smoke against the perfect crystal sky.  The helicopters.  The fighters, roaring overhead, loaded for bear.  Being two drops in that river of humanity flowing from the city, trivial extras in some big budget disaster film.

The television ran clip after clip, of bodies falling and towers falling.  Then they replayed them.  And replayed them again.  Late in the evening, Dubya had come on, looking and speaking like someone had recently whacked him in the back of the head with a bat.  It was not reassuring.  Then back to towers falling, and people falling, and people talking anxiously.  And pictures of dark black smoke against a crystal blue sky.

Our three year old, curious as always, peppered me with questions while the one-year old goofed about.  What's happening, Daddy?  What's happening to those buildings, Daddy?  I tried to give him some gentle but not-lying answers, and then realized it was time to turn off the big pipe of endlessly cycling fear and horror that was pouring into our home.

I did, and as this was 2001, I put a tape into the VCR.  VeggieTales, as it happened.  The boys stilled to watch it, and I curled up on the sofa with my wife.  It could easily have been the night before.  There were no rumbles of bombardment, no panicked cries, no sounds of war.  Instead, there was Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato.  They were sharing gently mischievous lessons about kindness and compassion.  

When the time came for Silly Songs with Larry, it was the Song of the Cebu.  I found myself unable to stop smiling.  It was a place of grace, a place to set aside the fear for a moment and be safe with the little ones and my wife half-asleep on my shoulder.

We need those places if we are to heal.  Terror and fear and anxiety can't always be in the forefront of our minds, day after day, year after year.  The inability to move forward and to find islands of forgetting does bad things to our souls, makes us too hard or too weak.  Or both.

That is true for human beings.  It is also true for the hearts of nations.

Healing Ministry

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times flagged an interesting little provision in the Health Care reform bill that is currently trucking it's way through the meatgrinder of American politics. The bipartisan provision, which was inserted into the bill by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and Senator John Kerry, would prohibit insurers from discriminating against "religious or spiritual health care."

It's intended as a sop to the Church of Christ-Scientist, whose providers bill customers...er...the faithful...for healing prayer. But the bill is written in more general terms, and that means only one thing for my fellow pastors:

Mo money mo money mo money! If insurers are federally required to pay spiritual leaders for healing prayers and services, then there's nothing in the world to stop me...or any other pastor...from declaring that we have a reimburseable healing ministry.

Pastor needs a brand new Lexus! Or a Buick. The new Lacrosse CXS is really a rather lovely vehicle. It's got the blingtastic wheels and the warm buttery interior that every pastor needs to stay centered and shiny. Yeah, it's cache isn't quite there in the North America market, but we gotta start thinking about impressing the Chinese, for whom Buick is the bee's knees.

I'm wondering, though, what the appropriate insurance billing codes are. If you come by my office for a general prayer for health, I'm thinking Annual Checkup. That's gotta be, what, $125? Then there's managing the co-pay, which is kinda a pain in the butt. I'll need to get one of those card swipe thingummies and some new small business management software for my office computer.

Sigh. I really hope no-one tells Creflo A. Dollar about this one.

It's yet another one of those times when I almost wish government was run by VALIS.