[Reign of Christ] tithing to rejoicing

Each year set aside a tithe of all that you produce from the land. This tithe of your grain, your new wine and your oil, as well as the firstborn of your herds and flocks, you are to eat in the presence of God, at the site that God will choose as a dwelling place for the holy Name, so that you may learn to revere God for all times. But when God blesses you, if the place that is chosen as a dwelling place for God's Name is too far away and the journey is too great for you to carry your tithe there, them you may turn it into money, and bring the money safely to the place that God has chosen. There you may spend the money on cattle, or sheep, or wine, or strong drink, or anything else your soul desires, and there present your offering with joy, both you and your household, in the presence of God.

Deuteronomy 14:22-26 (The Inclusive Bible, alt.)

***

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the God of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.

Malachi 3:10 (NRSV, alt.)

We wrapped up this year's stewardship season with these texts from the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures).

These are such texts of celebration, aren't they?

In her sermon on Sunday, Molly quipped: "get drunk in church, with the offering money?"

In her sermon, Molly put these ideas about feasting in our own context -- we don't order delivery for Coffee Hour and pay with the morning's offering, but it is the gifts (both monetary and non, both edible and non) of those gathered that make it what it is.

I really like this idea that we are called to rejoice and feast in what we are offering to God -- I firmly believe that God loves us and wants us to be happy (though of course God sometimes wants a deep-abiding joy for us, which may not be reached without some struggle, while we're tempted to prefer the easy fleeting happiness).

I don't believe in "prosperity gospel" -- the idea that if God is pleased with you, God will bless you with an abundance of all the worldly things you would like to be blessed with -- but I'm not sure that Malachi is overstating the case (see my previous parenthetical about God's joy versus the world's happiness). Our stewardship verse this year is "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21), and I think that the reorientation of our heart (or the intensifying of our heart's trajectory) can have a transforming effect on our whole selves. Molly said in her sermon on Sunday that it was easy to see what was in it for her, to see the fruits returned to her on the Coffee Hour table, but that after a time she was fed just by seeing others fed -- and I think this kind of slant on prosperity gospel, to be rewarded by others benefiting from your giving, is perhaps part of God's promise to us in Malachi.

My Inclusive Bible notes on the word "storehouse" in the Malachi: "This was the Temple warehouse, where grain, oil, and wine were stored so that poor people would have a supply of food, which operated rather like our modern food pantries for the homeless." God is clear throughout the Tanakh (and in the New Testament as well) that we are to care for those less fortunate. Frederick Buechner wrote, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet" -- we are not called to a condescending giving to "those less fortunate" but rather to fitting our talents and treasures and gifts and passions with the needs of those around us that all may be enriched. Being part of a church community provides us with many opportunities to do this for and with people we know intimately or peripherally (or a little bit of each) -- e.g., providing food for the families of the many new babies that have arrived this year, opening up a space for folks to (learn to) knit together -- and also to connect to the broader community -- e.g., cooking for the homeless once a month.

Of verse 23 of the Deuteronomy ("This tithe ... you are to eat in the presence of God ..."), Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary says, "How will consuming the tithe in Jerusalem teach us to revere God? [...] Another commentator suggests that we attain a sense of reverence not through an intellectual process but by experiencing God's grace in our lives." We are an embodied people. I'm disinclined to entirely dismiss the intellectual process even as a path to reverence, but it is certainly true that many of the ways we come to know God are in very embodied ways. The act of tithing itself may not be a spiritual experience (though for some it is), but breaking bread together we can move deeper into relationship with friends and strangers, and "to love another person is to see the face of God."

On verse 24's "because the place ... is far from you" (JPS translation), Etz Hayim says: "Malkom [place] is also one of the names of God -- the site of all reality. Thus the verse can mean, 'should the distance seem too great for you because God is far from your heart.' "

I'm intrigued by this idea of it seeming like a great distance between oneself and the place of worship and feasting because God feels far from one's heart. Is this ever true for you, Beloved? Has it ever felt like a struggle to bring yourself and your gifts to this place (or to any place) because it feels like God is not in that place, or because it feels like God is not with you?

Of Malachi's "the windows of heaven," my Interlinear says "crevices-of the heavens," and I enjoy this idea of God opening up the heavens so fully even into the nooks and crannies. Are there ways that giving more fully to a community has opened up God's abundance for you?

Or perhaps there are other things these texts brought up for you.

You're invited to continue the conversation in the comments. (As always, you're welcome to comment anonymously/pseudonymously if you prefer.)

[Pentecost+26] Rooftop People (nothing but net)

One day, while Jesus was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting near by (they had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem); and the power of God was with Jesus to heal.

Just then some people came, carrying a paralyzed person on a pallet. They were trying to bring this person in to set before Jesus; but finding no way to do so because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let the person down through the tiles into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus.

Seeing their faith, Jesus said, "Friend, your sins are forgiven you."

Then the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, "Who is this who is speaking blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

Perceiving their questionings, Jesus answered them, "Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Stand up and walk'? But so that you may know that the Child of Humanity has authority on earth to forgive sins" -- Jesus said to the one who was paralyzed -- "I say to you, stand up and take your bed mat and go to your home."

Immediately the individual stood up before them, took up their mat, and went home, glorifying God. Amazement seized all of them, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, "We have seen strange things today."

Luke 5:17-26 (NRSV, alt.)

For some time, First Church Somerville had a group named from this story -- "Rooftop People," a place where people who work in caregiving professions (broadly defined -- social workers, teachers, massage therapists, etc.) or just do caregiving work in their lives could lay down their burdens in community.

Certainly this story is a familiar one to many -- and the obvious ways to find oneself in this story are as the friends or as the paralyzed person.

Martha Spong writes, "Sometimes I wish someone would do this for me, put me right in the middle of it with Jesus, put me right in front of his face and make it so he will look me in the eye and see me and fix what is wrong with me."

There is a boldness to this story -- the friends taking apart the roof of the house to get their friend to Jesus. (Do any of us identify with the owner of the house -- who may have developed very mixed feelings about letting Jesus in? Is there a message here about how openness and vulnerability can bring us more than we may have expected? I have a pin that says, "If I let Jesus into my heart, then everyone will want in.")

But there's a lot here that's left to the imagination. Were the friends acting largely out of desperation? Whose idea was this whole thing to begin with -- the friends or the individual on the mat?

In her sermon on Sunday, Molly preached on the idea of nets (riffing on Glennon Melton's Momastery blogpost) -- about the grasping and also about the release.

The friends had worked hard -- carrying their friend over who knows how long a distance, then up to the roof of a building, which they then took apart, and then down into the crowded room (did they have rope just lying about? were they worried about the bed hitting anyone on the way down?). We don't know how long this person had been paralyzed, so these friends may have been providing a net for a long time. But we can't do everything, and sometimes we need to let go. And it was after the friends had let go that the individual was healed.

Does this story provide any guidance for helping us balance the grasping and releasing elements of nets?

And what about Jesus' enigmatic opening: "Friend, your sins are forgiven you"? Elsewhere, Jesus is quite clear that God doesn't punish people for sin by sending infirmity upon them. Is there something here about the kinds of things we need to release before we can claim true healing? Jesus has also asked elsewhere, "Do you want to be healed?"

When I Googled "Do you want to be healed?" I was quickly informed that Jesus says this in a story from John 5. A lot of the results were commentaries or sermons on the story, and from one of them Google had pulled this excerpt: And honestly this has to be the most insensitive healing text in the Bible, because Jesus asks him the really harsh question: "do you want to be ... Intrigued, I clicked, and found it was a Nadia Bolz-Weber (Sarcastic Lutheran) sermon.

She writes:

This weekend at the retreat we kept a running list of overheard quotes from each other. [...]

But the one that struck me was when someone said "There's something satisfying about hating someone." To which someone replied "Yeah, there's definitely a pay off."

I can relate to that. When we seriously don't like someone we like to think that we hate them because they are awful horrible no good people – and that might be true. But if I'm totally honest, I have to admit that there also is a payoff to hating someone. Maybe I get to feel like a better person than them, or maybe then I don't then have to look at what I did wrong in our relationship, or maybe I then don't have to look at my own awful, horrible, no-goodness.

[...]

And if we are honest, there are payoffs, not just to hating people, but to so many things in life that hurt us.

I used to read Nadia's blog somewhat regularly (before she moved to Patheos, which doesn't play well with feed readers), and Nadia's church could probably never be my home church, but she speaks to my soul sometimes.

Beloved, what is it that speaks to you in this story?

Are there ways you are being called to offer a net to someone in need (or to ask for one for yourself)?

Are there things you are being called to release? Perhaps things you need to lay down in front of Jesus and let go of for your own healing and wholeness?

Or perhaps there are other things these texts brought up for you.

You're invited to continue the conversation in the comments. (As always, you're welcome to comment anonymously/pseudonymously if you prefer.)

[Pentecost+25] the Resurrected Christ still bearing the wounds of Crucifixion

While they were talking about this, Jesus stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you."

They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.

Jesus said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

And having said this, Jesus showed them the wounded hands and feet.

While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, Jesus said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?"

They gave Jesus a piece of broiled fish, and Jesus took it and ate in their presence.

Luke 24:36-43 (NRSV, alt.)

For this second Sunday in our three-part series on disability and mental illness, Jeff chose to preach on one of the resurrection stories in which Jesus shows off the wounds of crucifixion as proof that, "Yes, it's really me."

We might not think much about this -- so used are we to the similar "doubting Thomas" story from John's Gospel. The talk of touching the wounds is more oblique here, so we might focus instead on the embodied aspect of eating in this story. But this question of whether resurrected bodies will be wounded comes up a lot when we imagine what our own bodies (or those of others) will be like in the resurrection.

Most people's idea of Heaven is that everything will be "better" -- an eternally happy, perfected existence; my best friend and I joke about Heaven where the "clouds never frown" (from the 19th-century hymn "In Heaven Above").

And our ideas of what "better" means are culturally conditioned. It seems obvious to many people, for example, that no one will be in a wheelchair -- that everyone will have two legs which function perfectly well. But what does "functioning perfectly well" mean? I have never trained for a marathon; will I wake up in Heaven with the ability to run a marathon? Will I struggle through that run, or will it be effortless? (I imagine that many runners would assert that feeling the effort exerted in one's body is, up to a point at least, an integral part of the experience.) What will the limits on our Heavenly bodies be? Will we all teleport around the vastness that is Heaven?

In her book Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities, Deborah Beth Creamer proposes a "limits model" for understanding disability -- humans can't fly without assistance, and we don't frame that as a "disability" (nor do we refer to a passenger airplane as "assistive technology"), nor do we tend to frame a need for eyeglasses/contacts as a "disability" (ditto), but we do frame a need for a wheelchair as a "disability." So we may not expect to fly in Heaven (though maybe some of us do), or even think a lot about whether we'll still need glasses, but many of us may expect that no one will need a wheelchair or a guide dog or hearing aids. (By reminding us that we all have limits, Creamer's limits model points out the problematics of labeling specific points on the continuum of human experiences as inherently negative limits.)

Some would argue that the afterlife will be so radically different from this life that to speculate on these sorts of details is to miss the point -- and I don't necessarily think they're wrong. But I do think that what we imagine "an ideal world" (or "ideal bodies") to be is indicative of our values (and our assumptions) and is thus worth digging in to. What does it say that we imagine that people who in this life use wheelchairs (many of whom have never had use of their legs) will have their bodies radically altered in the afterlife rather than imagining that, for example, everything in Heaven will be accessible to a wheelchair user?

In his sermon, Jeff asked,

What would have happened if the disciples had said, "Show us your hands and your feet!" and there had been no holes there? I mean, it's not so unreasonable to imagine that they might NOT have been there. Going from dead to alive is some serious healing, so why not go from cut and punctured to whole again, as well?

What if Jesus' resurrection had also included a scar-free healing of all the wounds he carried with him in life? What if the disciple Thomas in the Gospel of John, who declared that he would not – that he could not – believe until he was able to touch the open wounds of Jesus had been unable to find any when Jesus invited him to inspect his body?

If Jesus' wounds had been healed up, disappeared, in the Resurrection, would the disciples have been able to believe that it was really Jesus?

Would the disappearing of the wounds diminish the magnitude of the Crucifixion? Is it important that we retain the marks of the experiences that have profoundly shaped us? Or does the work of healing sometimes mean we want to move on from those experiences, leaving all traces of them behind?

Does the wounded resurrected body have implications for what kinds of bodies (do not) need "fixing," or is it just a convenient device to "prove" to the astonished disciples that this really is the Jesus who was crucified?

What do you think, Beloved?

Are there other things this text brought up for you?

You're invited to continue the conversation in the comments. (As always, you're welcome to comment anonymously/pseudonymously if you prefer.)

[Pentecost+24] "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:21 (NRSV)

On Sunday, Molly reminded us that Jesus' familiar teaching is often misunderstood in reverse -- that we think it means that where our heart is, that's where we'll put our treasure; but that actually what Jesus' statement seems to say is that where we put our treasure, our heart will follow.

Do we believe that?

What do we think constitutes our "treasure"?

As we kick off stewardship season, we tend to think of money, but that certainly isn't the only way we can give to something. And I would argue that for those of us with economic privilege, money is perhaps the easiest thing we can give -- the thing least likely to have a significant impact on directing our hearts.

I didn't tithe this year (I pledged, but not ten percent), and I'm aware that I'm much more financially comfortable this year than I often am as a result -- but I also know from past experience that I can afford to tithe ten percent without hurting financially. Not that I'm saying your tithe is supposed to hurt -- but I can set up an auto-debit and then basically never think about the money I'm giving to the church for the rest of the year, and that doesn't seem a very effective way to direct my heart.

In her sermon on Sunday, Molly suggested that, "Your valuables are a scout, the canary in the coal mine, for your vulnerable heart." For me, what's more effective in that than giving money is giving of my time and investing in relationships. I might not be so sure at the beginning -- I have a lot of things I could be doing with my time, and people can so often be disappointing -- but often I find myself valuing what I've invested in ... and not just due to cognitive biases that lead me to justify investments I've already made, but because over time I come to recognize value in these things that wasn't immediately obvious to me at the beginning.

That said, there's an oft-quoted line: "Every dollar you spend . . . or don't spend . . . is a vote you cast for the world you want." How we spend our money certainly matters -- both because the people and organizations that do work that we value have bills to pay, and also because how we direct our money is connected to how we direct our hearts. The decisions we make are cumulative, and we often identify ourselves based on choices we've made.

If I'm reading my Interlinear correctly, this word translated "treasure" means approximately "placed into tomorrow." Which is a nice segue into stewardship season: What sort of tomorrow are we building?

What about you, Beloved?

Do you think it's true that your heart follows your treasure? What have you found to be the most effective kinds of treasure for effecting that trajectory?

Are there other things this text brought up for you?

You're invited to continue the conversation in the comments. (As always, you're welcome to comment anonymously/pseudonymously if you prefer.)