Fourth Sunday, 1997 (#2)

One understands one’s whole reality

Before I begin what I plan to talk about, I would like to point out that there are very few Sundays,mercifully, when you hear texts from Scripture that are embarrassing, but today unfortunately is one. The passage is from Paul in Corinthians. It would be very interesting to know more about the biography of Paul; we know a lot about Paul, but what gave him his view of marriage is kind of up in the air. Some have suggested that he was married but very unhappily. That would go far in explaining the sour view that he expresses here. Another theory about why he keeps talking about married people being occupied with extra-religious issues whereas unmarried people are totally taken up with religious issues is that he was saying this ironically, and the upshot of what he is saying in this passage is that he keeps saying in the end that he wants everyone to be focused and peaceful. Whatever..., it is still slightly embarrassing and weird, and I think maybe it should have been bracketed.

What I would like to deal with has to do with the last two Sundays’ readings which in varying ways have to do with what we call vocation; not just vocation as we have trivialized it in the Church as becoming a priest or a nun, but the very basic religious idea of vocation in the sense that one understands one’s whole reality as called by God. Today another theme is present, especially in this passage from Deuteronomy which has to do with that. Maybe we should start by noticing the great German scholar of the Hebrew Bible that published a two volume thing called : A Theology of the New Testament, Eichrodt was his name, and his theory, which he supports pretty thoroughly and convincingly, is that there is a single structural line that ties the entire Hebrew Bible together, and that is the notion of promise. If you look at all the major issues in the Hebrew Bible, the Exodus story, the Creation story, the readings about the prophets, and the call of Abraham..., all of this stuff begins with the words, "I will:" "I will lead you out of the land of Egypt, I will make of you a great nation, I will take the burden off your shoulders..." Certainly, if you look at the New Testament, it is the same thing: you have the risen Jesus in John, Matthew and Luke, always saying, "I will send you the Spirit, I will not leave you orphaned, I will be with you to the end of time..." This promissory character of life as seen in the Scriptures pervades not just the Hebrew Bible but the New Testament as well. So, that’s what I want to talk about: life as promissory in its most basic structure...

I think there are problems with this because my understanding of the normal North American sense of the self runs something like this: "Well, here I am with all this potential, all these endowments, all these gifts, and if everybody would just get out of my way, they would all blossom, unfettered, and I would rise like a sky-rocket in solitary splendor, and I could bask along with everybody else in my own wonderfulness." Then everybody could just sit around and watch everybody’s own wonderfulness and have a good time. I mean, how much educational theory, how much psychotherapeutic stuff that goes on precisely looks at life in that highly individualistic and privatized way? If that’s true, then this notion that life is built on promise doesn’t look very convincing. But now I would like to suggest a couple of other things apart from religion.

I should first of all qualify "promising." Promise is not just of the sort where somebody says: "Well, I’ll send you the money tomorrow, the cheque is in the mail..." We’re not talking about that kind of promise, that kind of promise is small scale. I’m talking about somebody or some reality standing in my life that offers me the possibility of movement forward and what I’m getting at is that I don’t think there is any possibility of moving forward without this sense that life is a promise.

Look at little kids. It is self-evident that if little kids are not born in a world into which they are welcomed, which means that they are somehow convinced by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways that someone is going to be here tomorrow, "you have a tomorrow because I’m going to be here tomorrow," I put it to you that life is unlivable without that. If anybody has had to live, as I have, with people that grew up in a world that was utterly empty of such promises, you know that the character that develops out of that is sheer chaos, unstructured, undirected, and unshaped. I also think that each of us can look at those spaces in our lives, those chaotic spaces which everybody has, and if you try to determine the origin, the etiology, of that chaos, I really believe that it is the sense of absence of that type of promise that is the cause. I cannot move into the future unless someone is beckoning me into that future.

To take another example, I think the most fundamental truth about human life is that if we do not live by truth we do not live humanly. If we do not respond to what we see is true, then we do not live. In other words, the very acknowledgment that something is true is a promise of my humanity because if I don’t live in conformity with what I think is true, then where am I, what am I? I’m some kind of monstrous, misshapen reality, but I’m not really human and to the extent that we are not really human, I think we can put it down to the betrayal of the truth. If I look at our civilization I’m afraid I have a fairly dim view of it because I don’t think there has ever been another point in human history where so much untruth has held such power: "The big lie." Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan...the biggest leaders in the history of the human race did not have NBC or CNN; we sit and suck back hours and hours of that stuff in which truth is dispensable. Truth may have nothing to do with public relations, and we’re really into public relations.

Okay, so now we get the religious thing. To believe in the God that Jesus believed in is to believe that God makes promises to me. Even if you take the very name of God that you get in the Book of Exodus, you know Moses with the burning bush and Moses asks: "who will I say is going to send me..." Yahweh is the Hebrew word which is translated in a bunch of different ways including, "I am who I am." The great translator of the Hebrew Bible, the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, translated Yahweh into "I will be who I will be," or "I will be there when I will be there." In other words, what I am saying is that to believe in God is to believe that this reality is that great promise to me. And I will further suggest that without accepting that promising God, that promissory character of life, we may be saying: "well that person is a very promising student, they’re going to get a BA, an MA and a Ph.D., and then they’re going to go off and make a zillion dollars...," or: "Make a lot of money and you will..., have a good body and you will..., have a nice transcript and you will...," we have promises all over the ruddy place. But the promise of God is of a quite different nature, it is the promise that we will lead to being really human. And the only way we get to even understand what it is to be really human is to listen to these promises, "I will send you the Spirit, I will give you a land flowing with milk and honey...," and to look above all to that archetypal believer in the promises of God who is Jesus. What made Jesus? He believed in that God that would be there, even if it came to the point where he would say: "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Please note that the structure of that call is still based upon the reliance on the God who he believes will be there, even if he can’t figure out how and when.

So this stuff is really important. We, particularly in the Roman Church, want to say that everything is finished and everything is closed down and everything is tidy. It is not tidy, it is not tidy at all. Life is not tidy, whether you’re Vannah White listening to the promises that she listens to, or Jesus listening to the promises he listens to. Not only is it not tidy, but it is terribly troubled because if you look at the figures who believed in the God of promises, you will see that they are constantly in conflict with the world which is always making other promises. The world does make other promises: you do this and this will happen. Those are promises too. But the real promise is one that brings us into conflict with al kinds of other promises. If I look at myself, one of the things that makes me so mucked up is that I want to follow a whole bunch of contrary promises. There is a great metaphor: "wanting to be Bill Gates and Francis of Assissi simultaneously." "I want them both, I want it all," like the bumper sticker says. You can’t have it all, and the reason we are here is to seek further for this God who does promise us life.

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