First off, please let me apologize to subscribers and regular readers of “The Bible Guy,” as well as to all visitors, for my long absence: I injured the rotator cuff in my right shoulder, and the precise angle of my arm when I sat down at the computer was excruciating!  However, I am now at last recovered, and able once more to write.  So it is my intention to resume my usual bimonthly posts.  Thank you for your patience!

Well, here we are.  Again.  Tuesday’s election reminded me once more that I am in a minority–not only among our national population, just over 50% (72,793,677) of whom voted for Mr. Trump, but especially among my fellow Christians:

Exit poll data from CNN and other news outlets reported that 72% of white Protestants and 61% of white Catholics said they voted for Trump. Among white voters, 81% of those identified as born-again or evangelical supported Trump, up from 76% in 2020 and similar to the 80% of support Trump received in 2016.  . . . But Trump also won the Christian vote overall: 58% of all Catholics voted for him and 63% of Protestants, according to the early exit polls. 

I hope that few of those Christian voters actually espouse Mr. Trump’s violent rhetoric toward immigrants and transgender persons even if they are concerned about immigration, and regard trans people as immoral.  But those Christians for Mr. Trump need to understand the legitimate concerns that rhetoric poses for those communities–and indeed, given his threats against his political adversaries, even for an old white guy like me.  Friends, I have been surprised and disappointed by elections before this (Reagan’s election in 1980, George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and re-election in 2004, Trump’s 2016 victory), but this is the first time in my life that an election has made me fear for my own safety, and the safety of those I love.  I pray that our society is strong and stable enough to resist the turn toward fascism and autocracy that prevailed in Orban’s Hungary, or Putin’s Russia (two other “strong men,” both of whom are admired by Trump and by many of his supporters).

In these difficult days, I have been remembering a couple of old hymns that I grew up singing.  One is a hymn of creation: “This Is My Father’s World,” written by Maltbie Davenport Babcock, and published after his death, in 1901.  In the version I learned, the third verse is particularly apt to our present circumstance:

Among the peoples surrounding ancient Israel, it was common to imagine creation as a primordial battle between the creator god and the dragon in the sea: a monster of uncreated chaos.  By defeating the dragon, the creator imposed order upon chaos, bringing into being an ordered, meaningful world.

God’s victory and rule over chaotic water is affirmed in our Bible as well.  For example, Psalm 46:1-3 [2-4] affirms:

God is our refuge and strength,
    a help always near in times of great trouble.
That’s why we won’t be afraid when the world falls apart,
    when the mountains crumble into the center of the sea,
     when its waters roar and rage,
    when the mountains shake because of its surging waves.

But other biblical texts deny that chaos ever was truly overcome.  The battle against chaos continues, and only at the end of the age will the dragon be defeated. So, Isaiah 24—27 describes our present age as a time of uncertainty and struggle.  Only with the end of this world and the dawn of the next will the Divine Warrior finally prevail over the dragon:

On that day, the LORD will take a great sword, harsh and mighty, and will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the writhing serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea (Isa 27:1).

Similarly, in Daniel 7, the prophet’s vision of the future begins with “the four winds of heaven churning the great sea” (Dan 7:2). The nations that had oppressed Israel in times past, and the terrible, final oppressor who is coming, are described as “beasts” that “emerged from the sea” (Dan 7:3). Little wonder that in the new heaven and new earth of John’s vision, “the sea was no more” (Rev 21:1)!

Our hymn recognizes the seemingly overwhelming power of wrong, yet nonetheless asserts God’s rulership: “This is my Father’s world,” after all.  As the hymn says, “the battle is not done”!  The Divine Warrior still opposes chaos, oppression, and cruelty; we are called to do so as well, confident that while we may not see the consummation, “God is the ruler yet,” and will prevail. 

The second hymn much on my mind today was a favorite of my dear friend and colleague in United Methodist ministry Bruce Merritt, may light perpetual shine upon him: “Come Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing,” written in 1758 by Robert Robinson.   It is not often sung today, largely because of its (to many) enigmatic second verse:

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

“Ebenezer” is a biblical place name mentioned in 1 Samuel 4:1 and 5:1, although not explained until 1 Samuel 7:12:

As any beginning Hebrew student knows, ‘eben is Hebrew for “stone,” and ‘ezer means “help”–so, “Ebenezer” means “stone of help.”  Ebenezer is a standing stone, erected to memorialize God’s deliverance of Israel from its enemies, the Philistines.  In about half of its citations, ‘ezer is used as it is here, for God’s help in threatening times (see Exod 18:4; Deut 33:7, 29; Pss 20:2[3]; 70:5[6]; 121:1-2; 124:8; 146:5).

God has brought us this far, friends.  God has come after us in the person of Jesus God’s son, to demonstrate God’s determination to keep coming after us and to stand by us to the end, no matter what.  “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God”–or,  as Paul wrote, “God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).  The cross is the proof of God’s abiding, unfailing, invincible love for us.  Therefore we have hope, even in the midst of hopelessness.  So let us raise our Ebenezer, right here, right now, and declare that, secure in God’s love and promise, we will stand up for those on the margins, as Christ has stood up for us.

In Pennsylvania where I live, we have been inundated by political ads on television.  I have been horrified by how many of them feature white people railing about “illegals” pouring unchecked over our borders, committing crimes, getting government handouts, and stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.  The sorry climax of this blatantly racist display was the former president, on a national stage, voicing a baseless slur about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH stealing and eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors.  Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, firmly rejects this slur and praises the immigrants for their positive influence on the community:

“Let me tell you what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal,” the governor said. “They came to Springfield to work.”

But in an interview on CNN, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance freely acknowledged that he had supported this internet rumor, knowing it was likely false, to make a point:

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So: does the Bible have anything to say about immigrants and immigration?  In fact, it does: indeed, quite a lot!  To begin, consider this passage:

“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien [Hebrew ger], for you were aliens [Hebrew gerim] in the land of Egypt.  You shall not abuse any widow or orphan.  If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans” (Exod 22:21-24 NRSVue).

We know of course who the widow and the orphan are. We can understand why, in the clan-based economy of ancient Israel, a special command might be needed to ensure their just treatment: a women without a husband to ensure her access to property, or a child without a parent’s protection, could well fall through the cracks.  However, who is the ger (“resident alien” in the NRSVue)?

To find the best contemporary translation for ger, it may help to consider how this word is used in our Old Testament. The ger is a person of foreign birth, living within the borders of Israel but without land or legal status. That is why the ger is so often listed together with the widow and the orphan: like widows and orphans, the gerim are vulnerable: they have no one to look out for their rights. This is why a special command is needed to ensure their just treatment, and why generosity to the ger is a consistent biblical principle.

So, who is the ger in our own time and context? The NRSV “resident alien” is accurate, but bookish and stodgy; far more vigorous, and no less accurate, is the Common English Bible rendering “immigrant”—particularly if we include those sometimes vilified as “illegal immigrants,” and those we call “refugees.”

As the political rhetoric of this campaign has made tragically apparent, the gerim are perhaps more vulnerable and at risk now than ever before—making the passages of Scripture referring to them more relevant than ever before. As Exodus 22:21-24 demonstrates, the ultimate guarantor of rights for the ger in Scripture is the LORD, who assures us, “If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword”—which should, to say the least, give us pause.

Deuteronomy continually calls upon the people Israel to remember who they are, and who God is. Indeed, those two calls are inextricably intertwined: Israel is the people who were made a people by the Lord who delivered them from bondage.  Consider Deuteronomy 10:14-19:

Clearly, the Lord owns the sky, the highest heavens, the earth, and everything in it.  But the Lord adored your ancestors, loving them and choosing the descendants that followed them—you!—from all other people. That’s how things still stand now.  So circumcise your hearts and stop being so stubborn, because the Lord your God is the God of all gods and Lord of all lords, the great, mighty, and awesome God who doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t take bribes.  He enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing.  That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt.

Israel has direct and personal knowledge of what it means to say that God “doesn’t play favorites,” because if had God shown partiality for the wisest, the strongest, the most prosperous– the best–then God would never have chosen this rag-tag band of slaves and outlaws as God’s own! Likewise, Israel knows personally that the Lord  “loves immigrants [Hebrew ger], giving them food and clothing,” because, as God reminds them, “you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.” Indeed, in most of the biblical passages regarding the ger, God gives Israel this reminder (see, for example, Exod 22:21; Lev 19:34).

With the exception of our Native American brothers and sisters, all of us are here because our ancestors came here from somewhere else. Some, like the famous Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, came fleeing religious persecution. Some, like my Scottish-Irish forebears, came because of hardship and political oppression at home. Some of us came here in chains. As Americans, a nation of immigrants, it behooves us, too, to remember who we are. Those of us who claim the name Christian need also to remember whose we are, and what it means to be the people of the God who “enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants.”

There is no specific word in biblical Hebrew for hospitality.  But in Greek, the word is philoxenia—that is, love for the stranger!  This word appears twice in the New Testament. In Romans 12:13, Paul commands his audience, “Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.”  Hebrews 13:2 deliberately alludes to the story of Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18—19: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” I hear this passage in my head in the KJV: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

In his sermon on Romans 12:13, the great early Christian preacher St. John Chrysostom (347-407 CE) praised Abraham (Genesis 18:1-5) and Lot (Genesis 19:1-3) as examples of radical hospitality:

Thus did Lot, thus Abraham. For he spent the whole day upon it, waiting for this goodly prey, and when he saw it, leaped upon it, and ran to meet them, and worshipped upon the ground, and said, “My Lord, if now I have found favor in Thy sight, pass not away from Thy servant.” [Gen 18:3] Not as we do, if we happen to see a stranger or a poor man, knitting our brows, and not deigning even to speak to them. And if after thousands of entreaties we are softened, and bid the servant give them a trifle, we think we have quite done our duty. But he did not so, but assumed the fashion of a suppliant and a servant, though he did not know who he was going to take under his roof. . . . as did Abraham also, whom beside his largeness and ready mind it is just especially to admire, on this ground, that when he had no knowledge who they were that had come, yet he so acted. Do not thou then be curious either: since for Christ thou dost receive him. And if thou art always so scrupulous, many a time wilt thou pass by a man of esteem, and lose thy reward from him.      . . . Do not then busy thyself with men’s lives and doings. For this is the very extreme of niggardliness, for one loaf to be exact about a man’s entire life. For if this person be a murderer, if a robber, or what not, does he therefore seem to thee not to deserve a loaf and a few pence? And yet thy Master causeth even the sun to rise upon him! And dost thou judge him unworthy of food even for a day? (Homilies on Romans 21).

Jesus was certainly not silent on this issue!  In Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; and Luke 10:25-28, Jesus declares that the whole of God’s law hangs on two essential prescriptions: love for God, and love for neighbor. Jesus’ first commandment comes from Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” His second commandment comes from Leviticus 19:18: “You must not take revenge nor hold a grudge against any of your people; instead, you must love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.”

Some interpreters have proposed that this was an in-house commandment: “your neighbor” means “your fellow Israelite”–in our  context, other Christians, or perhaps other native-born Americans.  But Leviticus 19:33-34 demonstrates that this is far too narrow a reading:

When immigrants live in your land with you, you must not cheat them.  Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.

Here, love is commanded toward “the immigrant who lives with you” (the Hebrew term, once more, is ger) in the same language used in 19:18 for the neighbor: “you shall love them as yourself.” In fact this passage says, the ger “must be treated as if they were one of your citizens.”

We may not like this commandment—particularly if we are persuaded that immigrants and refugees pose a threat to us: either economically, by taking our jobs and resources, or more fundamentally, through crime or terrorism. We could perhaps say that these words of Scripture address the community of faith, not the nation, and that national policy needs to be mindful of the security of our borders.

But for the church and for the individual Christian, there is no passing this particular buck. We cannot even use the tired “Old Testament laws don’t apply to us” excuse, because Jesus has made it eminently clear that this particular law does apply to us—second only to the command to love God. Certainly, unemployment, crime, and terrorism are real concerns (although we may legitimately ask if there is any evidence connecting those concerns to immigrants or refugees).  But whether we like it or not, if we want to be followers of the Christ, we are commanded to love our neighbors—including immigrants and refugees—as we love ourselves.

AFTERWORD:

The General Council on Religion and Race of the United Methodist Church has condemned “the harmful and unfounded accusations have been made against Haitian migrants in Ohio,” and called for us “to stand against racism and xenophobia in all its forms.”

So too, the Board of Church and Society has quite specifically called out Mr, Trump and Mr. Vance:

King Omri (876-869 BCE) was a major player in the history of ancient Palestine.  He forged an alliance with the Phoenician king Ethbaal of Tyre, sealing the deal by the marriage of his son Ahab to Ethbaal’s daughter Jezebel, bringing the wealth of the Phoenician sea trade into his kingdom.

Dissatisfied with his backwater capital at Tirzah, Omri built the city of Samaria, which archaeological investigation reveals to have been both beautiful and well-fortified.  Indeed, in many passages, “Samaria” becomes a way of referring to the northern kingdom, as “Judah” is used for the southern.  The Samarian ivories, over 12,000 finely carved decorative items, confirm both the wealth of Omri’s kingdom, and the beauty of his capital: a showplace of the ancient world.

Outside of the Hebrew Bible, Omri is mentioned on the Moabite Mesha Stele (ca. 84o BCE), which calls the kingdom of Israel “the house of Omri.”  The image at the head of this blog is from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE), depicting King Jehu of Israel (843-815 BCE) doing obeisance before the Assyrian monarch; he is identified in the inscription as Jehu of bit-Homri:  “the house of Omri.”  Indeed, for generations after Omri’s death, Assyrian texts continued to refer to the northern kingdom of Israel as mat bit-Homri; the land of the house of Omri.

Yet, in the history of Israel in Samuel-Kings, Omri gets only six verses:

In the thirty-first year of Judah’s King Asa, Omri became king of Israel. He ruled for twelve years, six of which were in Tirzah. He bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two kikkars of silver. He fortified the hill and named the town that he built there after Shemer, the previous owner of the hill of Samaria. Omri did evil in the Lord’s eyes, more evil than anyone who preceded him. He walked in all the ways and sins of Jeroboam, Nebat’s son, because he caused Israel to sin. They angered Israel’s God, the Lord, with their worthless idols. The rest of Omri’s deeds and his powerful acts, aren’t they written in the official records of Israel’s kings? Omri lay down with his ancestors and was buried in Samaria. His son Ahab succeeded him as king (1 Kings 16:23-28).

What does this tell us?  Clearly, Samuel-Kings is not an objective history of ancient Palestine—but then, it never pretends to be. This is a confessional statement, an affirmation of the meaning of Israel’s history in terms of the covenant theology found in Deuteronomy. By those standards, Omri, who lived and ruled in violation of that covenant, was just another wrong turn on Israel’s journey. Ultimately, he doesn’t matter.

It is all too easy for us, confident in our self-importance, to see ourselves as the main characters in the world’s drama: and of course, nothing bad can happen to the main characters. Thinking ourselves invulnerable, invincible, we misunderstand the world and our place in it.

Twenty-three years ago today, our sense of national invulnerability was shattered in a single morning, as three airplanes, loaded with passengers and fuel, were directed by sad, wicked, deluded men into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Another plane, intended to crash into either the Capitol or the White House, was forced down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania by its heroic passengers and crew – saving the lives of others at the cost of their own.

In the wake of this attack, our national confidence was shaken; our naivete was lost.  But unfortunately, it was all too easy for us to learn the wrong lessons.  At the time, in a sermon I preached at Woodlake UMC, where I was serving as an interim pastor, and at a public gathering in the Ashland, VA town square, I said

Sisters and brothers, God forbid that the horrific assault that our nation suffered on Tuesday should cause us to forget who we are!  We are a nation founded upon fundamental human rights and freedom for all people, affirming the essential dignity of every woman and man.  If this assault makes us forget that, then the terrorists will have won.  They will have destroyed, not just stone and mortar and steel and flesh, but the dream that makes us who we are. . . .  Friends, the people who committed this atrocity may have been Arabs, but the Arab people did not do this.  Those who brought this horror to us may have called themselves Muslims, but Islam did not do this.  In the difficult days ahead, should the call that justice be brought to the criminals who perpetrated this act transform itself into a cry of vengeance against a race or religion, we must recognize that prejudice for the evil that it is, repudiate it, and root it out of our midst.

Sadly, our national response did not avoid violence and racism–either abroad  or at home.  Our ill-considered “War on Terror,” involving the shameful torture of prisoners, culminated in a withdrawal from Afghanistan reminiscent of the last days of the Vietnam War, leaving the Taliban in control.  Indeed, apart from the execution of the chief 9/11 planner Osama bin Laden, it is difficult to see much at all that was accomplished, wasting the international outpouring of good will responding to that initial terrorist assault.

At home, the attacks “triggered a wave of hate crimes against individuals and institutions perceived to be Arab or Muslim.”  Indeed, one major political party has apparently gone all in on anti-immigrant hatred and xenophobia. Mr. Trump and his running mate JD Vance have repeated on the national stage an unfounded and ludicrous slur against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”  Local officials in Springfield have found no evidence, either credible reports or specific claims, of pets being harmed by Haitian residents.  But when fact-checked at the presidential debate, Mr. Trump’s response was that it must be true because he had seen it on television!

Friends, if we think that we can somehow get back our naive sense of confidence and invulnerability by attacking outsiders, or by abandoning our democracy, sacrificing our freedoms so that we can make ourselves safe once more, we have learned the wrong lesson. On the other hand, if we think that nothing we do matters, if we succumb to fear and despair, then again we have learned the wrong lesson.

Perhaps the real lesson of 9/11 is also the lesson of Omri. History is neither in the hands of the Omris nor the Osamas. The future is shaped, neither by leaders great in the world’s eyes, nor by nihilists bent on the world’s destruction.

History is in the hands of our God, who sees history differently than we do: after all, by the standards of Christian Scripture, the greatest event in human history was the execution of an accused insurrectionist by Roman soldiers on a hill outside Jerusalem.  Whatever may come, we may confidently entrust our future into the hands of the God who raised Jesus from the dead. As the apostle Paul boldly confessed,

Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “We are being put to death all day long for your sake.  We are treated like sheep for slaughter” [Psalm 44:22].

But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us.  I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created (Romans 8:35-39). 

Rejecting both hatred and despair, friends, let us resolve to live in hope.

AFTERWORD:

The painting of Christ on the cross above is Jewish artist Marc Chagal’s “White Crucifixion.”   Facsimiles of the Mesha Stele and (I believe) the Black Obelisk are part of the collection in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s Kelso Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology (temporarily closed for public tours).

Close readers of Genesis have long noted two different ways of identifying the Creator in its opening two chapters, evident even in English translation. In Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a, the creator is called “God.”  Back of this in Hebrew is the word ‘elohim, a plural noun sometimes meaning “gods” (see, for example, Gen 6:2; Exod 12:12; Ps 86:8). But as Hebrew can use the plural to indicate greatness or majesty, ‘elohim is commonly used in Scripture as shorthand for “God of gods” or “God above all gods” (for example, Deut 10:17; Jer 10:10; Pss 80:3; 84:7), and so properly translated “God.”

In Genesis 2:4b-25, ‘elohim is combined with another term in the expression “LORD God” (most English translations follow the King James Version [KJV] and place LORD in all capitals here). Back of “LORD” in the Hebrew is a Name: the personal name of God, which can be rendered from Hebrew into English characters as Yhwh.

In Jewish tradition the Name of God is revered (see Exod 20:7//Deut 5:11). So, when you come to the Name while reading the text aloud, the Name is not pronounced: instead, you say ‘adonai, that is, “my Lord”—hence, the translator’s convention of representing Yhwh as LORD, in all capitals.

Indeed, to help the reader, the Masoretes (the Jewish scribes who preserved and transmitted the text of the Hebrew Bible used in the synagogue, called the Masoretic Text, or MT; the Christian Old Testament is based on this text) began presenting the Name as a deliberately unpronounceable combination of the consonants Y-h-w-h and the vowels of ‘adonai.

Continental scholars transliterated the Name as Jhvh, leading to the designation “J” for the narrative material in the Pentateuch (and Genesis particularly) that prefers to use the Name, and to the term “Jehovah,” a Western Christian attempt to pronounce the unpronounceable Name.  The King James translators used “Jehovah” seven times, in places where the context clearly demands a name: see Genesis 22:14; Exodus 6:3; 17:15; Judges 6:24; Psalm 83:18, and Isaiah 12:2; 26:4 in the KJV.

We should remember, by the way, that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses is a comparatively recent innovation, compared to the text itself.  Usually, chapter and verse divisions follow natural patterns and themes in the text–but not always!  So, the chapter break at Genesis 2:1 actually comes before the end of the first creation account.  The first three verses of Genesis 2 read naturally as a continuation of the first chapter: indeed, their description of the Seventh Day is the culmination of that account, which describes creation as spanning the first week of time.

We could conclude from this chapter break that the Sabbath comes after creation is finished (see Exod 20:11).  The Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the first five books of the Bible used by the Samaritans), the Greek Septuagint, and the Syriac all say that God completed God’s work on the sixth day, a reading that the CEB and the recent NRSVue alike follow (see also Exod 20:11; 31:17; 2 Esdras 6:38-59).  The versions, influenced in particular by the Exodus passages, are making an understandable decision: after all, how can God be said to finish God’s work on God’s day of rest?

But the Hebrew MT reads wayyikal ‘elohim bayom hashibi’i mela’kto [“God completed God’s work on the seventh day”].  The old NRSV, like the RSV and KJV, stayed with the MT here.  I am persuaded that that is the better course.  The priestly writers in this unit pursue a sabbatical logic.  In Genesis 1:1–2:4a, each day is numbered, from One through Seven (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31; 2:2-3). Indeed, rather than using the word “Sabbath,” Gen 2:1-3 speaks only of Day Seven, to preserve that numbering sequence.  In this context, then, the seventh day is the day of completion, the climax of creation.  The NRSV had it right.  For the priests who wrote Genesis 2:1-3, Sabbath was part of the very structure of reality, woven into the warp and woof of the cosmos.

Similarly, even a casual reader will recognize that a change occurs in the middle of Genesis 2:4.  The first half of this verse looks back to Genesis 1:1—2:3, recapitulating Gen 1:1–note the verb “create” and the phrase “the heavens and the earth” in both places.  The first creation account in Scripture, then, is not Genesis 1, but Genesis 1:1–2:4a.

Something new begins in the second half of that verse.  Note first the inversion of “heaven” and “earth” in the MT of Gen 2:4b (CEB has “earth and sky”). The Aramaic Targum agrees with the Hebrew here, but in the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac, and the Samaritan Pentateuch the order is the same as in Gen 1:1 and 2:4a. Still, it makes better sense that those versions would have altered the order for consistency than that the MT would have changed it. The different order in the MT is so striking that it must be original, emphasizing the beginning of a new narrative:

On the day the LORD God made earth and sky—before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the LORD God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land, though a stream rose from the earth and watered all of the fertile land—the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life (Gen 2:4b-7).

For the first time in the Bible, God is addressed by God’s Name! However, the Name occurs here in the curious combined expression Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”), found 20 times in Gen 2—3, but rare elsewhere.

Readers of the English Bible need to be aware that “LORD God,” “Lord GOD,” and “LORD GOD” translate three different Hebrew expressions! The NRSV and many other translations follow the KJV and render the common Hebrew expression ‘adonai Yhwh (“my lord Yhwh”) as “Lord GOD,” to avoid “lord LORD” (for example, Gen 15:2; Exod 9:30; Deut 3:24; the LXX sometimes does render this title as kurie kurie [“lord Lord”]).

In Isa 12:2 and 26:4, NRSV and RSV have LORD GOD for the Hebrew Yah Yhwh.  Yah is a shortened form of the Name, often found in names like “Jeremiah” as well as in the expression “Hallelujah” in the Psalms (64 times). In both Isaiah passages, KJV reads “Lord JEHOVAH,” while in Isa 12:2 NRSVue has simply “LORD.”

While “LORD God” (Yhwh ‘elohim) predominates in Gen 2—3 (the only exception is the conversation between the woman and the snake in Gen 3:1b-5, where ‘elohim is used), it is elsewhere found only in a very few, late-dated texts: specifically, in Chronicles (1 Chr 17:16-17; 22:1, 19 [Yhwh with ha’elohim]; 28:20; 29:1; 2 Chr 1:9; 6:41-42 [a citation of Ps 132:8-10, which lacks this expression]; 26:18; 32:16), in Psalm 84:11; and in Jonah 4:6. The two apparent exceptions only prove the rule, as in both Exodus 9:30 and 2 Samuel 7:25, there are questions about the text.  In Exod 9:30, most LXX manuscripts read simply kurios (“Lord”), while in 2 Sam 7:25, the LXX and several Hebrew manuscripts suggest that ‘adonai Yhwh is the better reading.

Most likely, the unusual references to the Divine as Yhwh ‘elohim (“LORD God”) in Gen 2:4b—3:24 are the work of an editor, or perhaps of the Priestly writers themselves, integrating the second creation account with the first, and so guiding the reader toward an integrated, canonical reading of these opening chapters of Genesis.  Even so, the use of ‘elohim (“God”) in the first and Yhwh (“the LORD”) in the second is an important clue that there are two distinct traditions concerning creation in these chapters.

But these traditions need only be seen in conflict if we believe it necessary to read them as fact statements, rather than as truth statements. The canon itself models such a reading repeatedly. In the Pentateuch, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with their separate and distinctive views of Israel’s identity and its duties before God, appear side by side—and of course, the Christian New Testament begins with four unique and distinctive tellings of Jesus’ story. Reading canonically, we can embrace the implications of each tradition, while still permitting each its autonomy.

For example: in Gen 1:1—2:4a, God calls everything into being, including time and space. While one could say that God creates light on the first day, the text avows, “God named the light Day and the darkness Night” (Gen 1:5). It is more accurate, then, to say that by creating light, God creates the first day, and so every day thereafter: time itself begins here. Similarly, when on Day Two God inserts the solid bowl of the heavens into the roiling waters of chaos, dividing them into the waters above and below (Gen 1:6-8), suddenly space has come into being: there is now up and down, back and forth, right and left. As their creator, ‘elohim stands outside of both space and time.

In Genesis 1, to use the theological language of Karl Barth, God is “‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above;’” there is an “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man” (“The Humanity of God,” trans. John Newton Thomas, in The Humanity of God [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], 42)—that is, ‘elohim is transcendent.

But in Gen 2:4b-25, the LORD God formed (Hebrew yatsar, the term for what potters do!) ‘adam “from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils” (Gen 2:7); a very intimate, personal, indeed human-like view of the Divine.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, that we are shaped by the LORD’s hands “expresses. . . the bodily nearness of the Creator to the creature, that it is really he who makes me—man—with his own hands; his concern, his thought for me, his design for me, his nearness to me” (Creation and Fall, trans. John C. Fletcher [orig. Schöpfung und Fall, Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937], in Creation and Temptation [London: SCM Press, 1966], 45). In theological shorthand, the LORD is immanent.

Clearly, believers want and need to affirm both: God is transcendent and God is immanent. If all we had was the first account of creation, we could well think of God as distant, abstract, and uninvolved. If all we had was the narrative in Gen 2, we could well lose the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the Divine. But Genesis 1 and 2 together present God as transcendent and immanent. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Since the assassination attempt against candidate Donald Trump which left one innocent rally attender dead and wounded two others, calls for national unity have come from across the political spectrum.  Unfortunately, on closer examination, many of these are really calls for uniformity: if you would just think and act like us, then our national divisions would be healed!

Biblical ideas of unity, on the other hand, always involve unity in diversity.  Typical is Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ:

If the whole body were an eye, what would happen to the hearing? And if the whole body were an ear, what would happen to the sense of smell? But as it is, God has placed each one of the parts in the body just like he wanted. If all were one and the same body part, what would happen to the body? But as it is, there are many parts but one body. So the eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” or in turn, the head can’t say to the feet, “I don’t need you” (1 Corinthians 12:17-21).

But the best indication of God’s rejection of uniformity is Genesis 11:1-9.  True, traditional readings of the Tower of Babel story see it rather as a warning against unchecked ambition. By this reading, the sin of Babel is the tower, with which they sought to reach the heavens on their own. It was to halt this prideful ambition that God cursed them by confusing their languages, stopping the construction and forcing them to divide into language groups and scatter.

But as Theodore Hiebert has observed, that traditional reading misses the reason the text itself gives for their building: not so as to reach the heavens, but because “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4; Theodore Hiebert, “The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World’s Cultures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 [2007]: 29-58). Sure enough, when God decides to act, God says nothing about the tower, or pride—or indeed, about punishment. God acts because the people are about to succeed in their goal of remaining “one people” with “one language,” so that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Having circumvented God’s will in this, what else might they do?

This is neither a story condemning the sin of unchecked ambition, nor an account of divine punishment for that sin.   It is about God stepping in to ensure difference and diversity, just as humans are about to succeed in enforcing sameness.

Why does God do this? Perhaps because, as Argentinian Methodist theologian José Míguez Bonino wrote,

God’s intention is a diverse humanity that can find its unity not in the domination of one city, one tower, or one language but in the “blessing for all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3)” (José Míguez Bonino, “Genesis 11:1-9: A Latin American Perspective,” in Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible, ed. Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999], 15-16).

God loves diversity.

In 1956, Rev. W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—at that time the largest Baptist church in the world—was invited to address the General Assembly of the South Carolina legislature on the subject of racial segregation. In his cringingly self-revealing remarks, Criswell condemned “scantling good-for-nothing fellows who are trying to upset all the things that we love as good old Southern people and good old Southern Baptists.”

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision. . . to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. . . Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends (Cited in Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016], 167).

Rev. Criswell could just as well have spoken for the First Church of Babel. The denizens of that place built their city and their tower to ensure that they would stay together in homogeneous uniformity: “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).

We sometimes refer to the confusion of the world’s languages and the scattering of humanity as the “curse of Babel”—but being “scattered abroad” was exactly what God intended for humanity! The real curse of Babel is staying where we are comfortable and unchallenged, in “my church,” “my school,” with “my friends.” Babel itself, in its safe, comfortable, stultifying sameness, is the curse.

The people of Babel wanted to stay all together, and all the same. But God willed differently. The Babel story itself gives no indication of whether or not the people realized that their desires ran counter to God’s. But the old priestly traditions in Genesis state this plainly. The priestly accounts of creation and flood alike declare that humanity was to “fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). As the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 concretely describes, this meant not only being geographically scattered, but ethnically and culturally diverse.

By staying together and squelching difference, the people of Babel—whether knowingly or not—were standing in the way of the diversity of expression that is God’s intent for human beings. So too our own attempts to impose homogeneity on our communities run counter to God’s will.

Jacqueline Lapsley recalls being with Theodore Hiebert at a conference of Reformed theologians and Bible scholars in South Africa. There, he advanced the reading of the tower of Babel story we have advocated in this post: that this story demonstrates God’s love of cultural diversity. But when they heard this, South African scholars present were horrified! It seems that this very text, and a reading very like Hiebert’s, had been “one of the central biblical foundations for apartheid. On the pro-apartheid reading, Gen 11 teaches that God does not want different cultural and linguistic groups to live together” (Jacqueline Lapsley, “‘Am I Able to Say Just Anything?’: Learning Faithful Exegesis from Balaam,” Interpretation 60 [2006]: 23).

Does this invalidate Hiebert’s reading of this passage? I don’t believe it does—although it certainly points up a problem with how we do biblical interpretation (also called “exegesis,” from Greek words meaning “draw out”)!

Lapsley warns against readings of Scripture that “serve our own selfish interests,” or that fail to consider “God’s larger story.” In the end, she proposes,

Exegesis requires certain learned skills—how to attend to the historical, social, and literary facets of the text—but it also requires a disciplined imagination and something even more important—faith that God’s word has power to speak to and for us, and especially faith that it speaks to and for those who are far removed from the prosperity we enjoy (Lapsley, “Learning Faithful Exegesis,” 30).

Reading Scripture prayerfully, guided by God’s Spirit, with disciplined imaginations, we can make wise choices about how to apply the Bible to our own contexts. When we do this, we can readily see that affirming the God-given goodness of our differences leads, not to apartheid, but to learning to live together in love.

The account of Pentecost in Acts 2 clearly draws on the Babel story. Jesus’ followers were waiting together in Jerusalem as he had commanded them, praying in an upper room, when “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:4). Boiling out of that room and into the streets, they met Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman world, who had come to Jerusalem for Pentecost. These visitors discovered, to their astonishment, that they could understand Jesus’ Galilean followers perfectly: “‘in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’” (Acts 2:11).

Please notice that this passage does not say that the people all started speaking the same language—that their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness was denied or undone. The Spirit does not return them to “one language and the same words” (Gen 11:1). Instead, each group hears God’s praise in its own language.

In Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” she relates her first encounter with her first college roommate, in America:

She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. . . . My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

We should not be surprised that the members of the Pentecost crowd all hear the Gospel in their own languages. The entire Bible models for us how to escape the danger of the single story.  Scripture rarely gives us a single story about anything!  At the beginning of our Bible, we find two different accounts of the creation of the world (one in Genesis 1:1—2:4a, and another in Genesis 2:4b-25).   Our New Testament opens with four gospels, presenting four quite different accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Scripture itself calls for us to listen with open ears and open hearts for the truth told, not as a single story, but as a chorus of voices.  Sometimes those voices are in harmony, sometimes they are in dissonance, but always they are lifted in praise to the God who remembers all our stories, the comedies and tragedies alike, and catches them up together in love, forgiveness, and grace.  Racial, cultural, and gender diversity is not a problem to be overcome, but a gift of God, to be celebrated and embraced.

This Sunday, I am honored to be teaching in the congregation served by my former student and current colleague in ministry, Jay Freyer: Beulah Presbyterian Church.  So all day long, “Beulah” has been on my mind, and I’ve been humming and singing old gospel hymns from my youth:

O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
As on thy highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me,
And view the shining glory shore,
My Heav’n, my home forevermore!

I’m living on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky;
I’m drinking at the fountain that never shall run dry;
O yes! I’m feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply,
For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.

So, what is Beulah Land?  Where does this name come from?  In the King James version, Isaiah 62:4 reads,

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken;
neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate:
but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah,
and thy land Beulah:
for the Lord delighteth in thee,
and thy land shall be married.

This passage comes from a section of the book (Isaiah 56–66) often called Third Isaiah, dating from soon after the return from Babylonian exile.  By 587 BCE, the armies of Babylon had taken out all of Judah’s fortified cities, including Jerusalem.  They deported large chunks of the populace, including the king, and destroyed the temple.  So even after Babylon itself had fallen and the exiles came back, they found Judah devastated.

But the LORD promises to be with these returnees. Indeed, as often happens to brides on their wedding day, the LORD declares that Judah will be given a new name:

You shall no more be termed Forsaken [Hebrew Azuba],
    and your land shall no more be termed Desolate [Hebrew Shemamah],
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her [Hebrew Hephzibah]
    and your land Married [Hebrew Beulah],
for the LORD delights in you,
    and your land shall be married (Isa 62:4, NRSVue).

If Judah, now named Hephzibah and Beulah, is the bride, who is the groom?  The very next verse declares,

For as a young man marries a young woman,
    so shall your builder marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
    so shall your God rejoice over you (Isa 62:5 NRSVue).

God will be to restored Judah, not as a king to his vassals, or a mistress to her slaves, but as a husband to a wife! The day of Judah’s restoration will be Judah’s wedding day!

In this metaphor, as my last blog discussed, God’s people are understood to be married to their LORD.  No wonder “Beulah”–married–became shorthand in Christian hymnody for the blessedness of the Christian life, and the promise of God’s eternity.  Indeed, the traditional United Methodist marriage service opens with these words:

Dearly beloved,
we are gathered together here in the sight of God,
and in the presence of these witnesses,
to join together this man and this woman 
in holy matrimony,
which is an honorable estate, instituted of God,
and signifying unto us
the mystical union that exists between Christ and his Church;
which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified
with his presence in Cana of Galilee.

A wedding, it seems, is not just about this particular couple! The gathered congregation is reminded of their marriage, too: of the “mystical union that exists between Christ and his church.”

It is no accident that, in Hebrew, the words for city, land, and world are all feminine in gender. Indeed, although nouns in English lack gender, we too speak of “Mother Nature,” of our native language as our “mother tongue,” and of our high school or college as our “alma mater” (Latin for “bountiful mother”).

Back of this grammatical pattern is the ancient image of a city or a nation as a woman, the mother of its inhabitants.  It is an easy step from that image to the notion of the city or nation as the bride of its god—as in Isaiah 62.

But of course, as all husbands and wives surely know, the wedding is not the marriage!  After all, the LORD and Judah had been “married” before.  The prophet Jeremiah wrote,

Go and proclaim to the people of Jerusalem,
The LORD proclaims:
I remember your first love,
    your devotion as a young bride,
    how you followed me in the wilderness,
    in an unplanted land.
 Israel was devoted to the LORD,
    the early produce of the harvest.
Whoever ate from it became guilty;
    disaster overtook them,
        declares the LORD (Jer 2:2-3 CEB)

Indeed, the prophets treat this idea negatively most of the time, using unfaithfulness to marriage vows as a metaphor for false worship–idolatry becomes adultery (for example, Hosea 2:2–14; Jeremiah 3:1–10; Ezekiel 16:8-22).

A good marriage doesn’t just happen. It takes work for any marriage to work: attention to the other’s interests, needs, and concerns.  But, without love, no amount of work will be enough, and with love, the work often does not feel like work at all!

God calls us Hephzibah and Beulah, friends. We are God’s delight, cherished and beloved.  When we forget that, Jesus, as at the wedding in Cana, stands to ready to remind us—to once more turn the tepid, bland, insipid water of our religion into the rich red wine of true devotion.

AFTERWORD:

Beulah Presbyterian Church has quite a distinguished history!  From their web site:

In 2014, Beulah Presbyterian Church in Churchill marked its 230th anniversary of being a place of Christian worship. It has a long history, deeply intertwined with the early settlement of English-speaking people in the area. Worship has continued there since a gathering of soldiers led by British Brig. Gen. John Forbes who defeated the French at Fort Duquesne in 1758.

The Presbytery officially recognized the church in 1784 and the church– originally called Bullock Pens for the soldiers’ cattle yard there, later called Pitt Township Presbyterian Church — was named Beulah in 1804.

After meeting in two earlier log structures (one a simple cabin, the second a cross-shaped building), worshippers built the first brick church in 1837, and that building still stands at Beulah Road and McCrady Road.

The cemetery holds the graves of veterans from Gen. Forbes’ troops, as well as men who fought in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I and World War II. Grave markers for men, women and children carry names now found on area streets and landmarks: Johnston, McCrea, Lindberg, MacFarlane, Kelly.

Early members of the church, believed to be one of the first Christian churches west of the Alleghenies, later founded other Presbyterian churches in the region: East Liberty (1828), Crossroads (1836), Hebron (1849), Wilkinsburg (1866), Turtle Creek (1878), Forest Hills (1904).

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is an extraordinarily odd love poem!  Indeed, until the last two lines, we may well think that he is insulting rather than praising his (unnamed) mistress.  With those final lines declaring his love, and his beloved’s rarity, Shakespeare’s point becomes clear.  He is lampooning the hackneyed conventions of romantic poetry in his day, declaring them incapable of expressing true love, rather than idealized infatuation.  Metaphors, taken literally, become nonsense: hence, “false compare.”

Rather like Sonnet 130, the Song of Songs (often called the Song of Solomon) seems to us a very odd love song–but in this case, it is the metaphors themselves that are obscure.  For example: in our time, and in our Western culture, it seems very strange to compare a woman’s eyes to doves, or her hair to a flock of goats (Song 4:1)!  Yet make no mistake:  the Song of Songs is intensely erotic love poetry–just the erotic poetry of a different time and culture than ours.  But even so, its passion and intimacy come through across the years.

Certainly, the Song is a very dear text to me personally, and to my beloved wife Wendy.  At our wedding, our old friend Mike McKay read Song 2:10-13 from the RSV, which is still a favorite passage:

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away;
for lo, the winter is past,
    the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
    the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
    is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
    and the vines are in blossom;
    they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
    and come away.

Inside my wedding ring, Wendy had engraved Song of Songs 5:16: “This is my beloved and this is my friend.”

As we might expect, its frank content makes the Song controversial even now (another old friend, my seminary roommate Matt Blanzy, proposed that the Song was included in the Bible so that the book would sell!).  Indeed, when the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was coming together in the first century, many questioned whether the Song should be included.  Did this book indeed “defile the hands”–that is, is it a sacred text, not to be touched or handled casually?  But Rabbi Akiba said,  “Let no one in Israel claim that the Song of Songs does not defile the hands!”

For the whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies (Mishnah Yadayim 3.5).

The reason for this very high view of the Song was the way that this poetry was read–not as a celebration of human love, but as an allegory for divine love:

The loving relationship of Songs of Songs was reinterpreted as a metaphor for the ardent love between God and Israel, on display most dramatically during the holiday that recalls the Exodus from Egypt. Some Jews also read Song of Songs every Friday night, as a kind of renewal of the vows between God and Israel. As Rabbi Akiva passionately argued, it has become a permanent part of the Jewish canon.

Similarly, early Christians read the Song as an allegory for the love between Christ and his bride, the church (see Ephesians 5:22-33; Revelation 19:6-9; 21:9-27).  Accordingly, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 82 sermons on the Song!

Without doubt, this is a potent image, capturing something of the intensity and passion of our worship and devotion to the Lord, and of the deep, committed love of Jesus for us, love which led him to the cross.  Note, though, that in the Song, the relationship between the Lover and the Beloved is not only mutual, but equal.  This is clearly not true to our relationship with the Divine, where the initiative and authority are all God’s.  However, we also must not conclude from the marriage metaphor that God is male.

Nor should we misread Scripture and claim for human husbands something like Divine authority over human wives!  While some readers have understood Ephesians 5:22-33 to stipulate the proper roles of husband and wife (“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands. . . Husbands, love your wives,” Eph 5:22, 25 KJV), the author of Ephesians, following prophetic precedent (for example, Hosea 2:16-18; Jeremiah 2:1-2), is using marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between the community of faith and its Lord. This writer’s citation of Genesis 2:24 (see Ephesians 5:31) is explicitly metaphorical, as the old NRSV made quite evident: “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church” (compare Eph 5:32 NRSVue).

Shakespeare’s poetic critique of “false compare” should remind all of us, but particularly theologians and students of Scripture, not to confuse a metaphor with the reality to which it points.  We are compelled to metaphor, for God is God, and not an object in the world.  But whatever image of God we have in our heads, God is not that. 

Our language is limited, particularly when we strive to speak of God. Can we pay close attention to what we say, understanding the power of words to wound and to heal? Can we strive in our talk about God to be faithful to the God revealed to us in Christ Jesus, who calls us, not to dominate one another, but to lives of love and service?

Sunday is Father’s Day.  As a father myself, I appreciate the recognition, and also the tolerance this day represents—because, let’s face it, us Dads aren’t the easiest folks to get along with. In particular we (and, I freely confess, I specifically) are notorious for telling bad–I mean, REALLY bad–jokes, which we are convinced are hysterically funny. There are entire web sites devoted to Dad jokes—including my personal favorite, “Pittsburgh Dad.”

Christian author Frederick Buechner called the parables of Jesus “jokes about God.”

I believe that the comedy of them is not just a device for making the truth that they contain go down easy but that the truth that they contain can itself be thought of as comic (Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977], 66).

This observation is particularly apt for the Gospel for this Sunday, which includes Jesus’ famous parable of the mustard seed:

“What’s a good image for God’s kingdom? What parable can I use to explain it?  Consider a mustard seed. When scattered on the ground, it’s the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; but when it’s planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all vegetable plants. It produces such large branches that the birds in the sky are able to nest in its shade.”

To understand this parable, we need to know a few things about mustard—apart from its famously and familiarly small seeds!  First, the mustard plant was a weed in Palestine: it as though Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is like a dandelion,” or “a thistle,” or “multifloral rose.”

Second, while mustard can get pretty big (just over two feet high), in no way is it “the greatest of all shrubs,” nor does it put “forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:32 NRSVue).

Jesus’ audience would have included many peasants: field workers and sharecroppers.  Already, they would have been startled by Jesus’ picture of agriculture: “It’s as though someone scatters seed on the ground, then sleeps and wakes night and day. The seed sprouts and grows, but the farmer doesn’t know how” (Mark 4:26-27)—saying nothing about the hard work of cultivating, tending, and harvesting crops!  Jesus’ audience knew all about weeding, and about mustard, and so would have known that Jesus was talking nonsense!  So, what’s going on here?

Jesus is telling a joke!  And as Frederick Buechner wrote regarding tragedy and comedy, “The tragic is inevitable. The comic is unforeseeable” (Telling the Truth, 57).  It is that surprise that makes us laugh. The truth of God’s grace is astonishing, unexpected—comical!

When Jesus says “a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade,” he is alluding to the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday, from Ezekiel 17: 22–24. There, the prophet describes restored Israel after the exile growing from “a tender shoot” to “a mighty cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it and find shelter in the shade of its boughs” (17:23).

Ezekiel speaks of this as a miraculous surprise:

All the trees of the field shall know
    that I am the Lord.
I bring low the high tree;
    I make high the low tree;
I dry up the green tree
    and make the dry tree flourish.
I the Lord have spoken;
    I will accomplish it (Ezek 17:24 NRSVue)

Bible scholar Ronald Hals refers to Ezekiel’s portrayal of God as the “Great Reverser” (Ezekiel, Forms of Old Testament Literature 19 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989], 117).

The theme of the Great Reverse is familiar to any reader of Scripture. It figures prominently in the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55):

He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
    He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed (Luke 1:51-53).

Further, dramatic and unexpected reversal is a common theme in parables of Jesus such as the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), or the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

Both Jesus and Ezekiel emphasize that God’s grace is not restricted to the best and the brightest. Blessedly, unexpectedly, God welcomes the lost and the least. Even you. Even me. And in God’s kingdom, we exiles find not only a home, but a place where we can become more than we ever dreamed that we could be.

God invites us to participate in the transformation of the world—beginning with our own transformation into God’s own children. In the kingdom of God the Great Reverser, even weeds like us can grow up into mighty cedars, “and put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in our shade”!

AFTERWORD:

A happy Father’s Day to my own father, Bernard Tuell.

And thanks to my sons Sean, Anthony, and Mark, my daughter-in-law Alexis, and my beloved Wendy, who have made me a happy father!

Want to hear a good ghost story?  You can’t beat Ezekiel 37:1-14, the Hebrew Bible reading for Pentecost Sunday.  If you have never heard this one before, you are likely to wonder, “What is this doing in the Bible?”  It is a scene out of a horror movie, or a Stephen King novel.

First, the prophet is taken in a vision by the hand of the Lord to a valley: an abandoned battlefield, filled with dry, dusty, disjointed bones.

God asks Ezekiel, “Human one, can these bones live again?” (37:3).  The obvious answer is no—there is no life, and no possibility of life, in this place!  The bodies strewn across the valley are not only dead, they are long dead (37:2).  But since his call, Ezekiel has seen (see 1—3) and done (see 4—5; 12:1-20; 24:15-27; as well as 37:15-28) some very odd things in the Lord’s service.  So he answers, simply “Lord God, only you know” (37:3).

Now, God commands the prophet, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, Dry bones, hear the Lord’s word!” (37:4).  As Ezekiel delivers God’s promise of life to the dead bones, he hears “a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone” (37:7, NRSV).  He watches as, in accordance with the word he had proclaimed (37:5), the bones are joined by tendons and covered over with flesh.  Now, instead of a valley full of dry bones, the prophet is standing in a valley filled with corpses.

Again God speaks: “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, human one! Say to the breath, The Lord God proclaims: Come from the four winds, breath! Breathe into these dead bodies and let them live” (37:9).

Hebrew writers love puns.  A pun on the different meanings of the Hebrew word ruakh (“breath” in the 37:8-9) runs through this story.  First, this word can mean “breath:” so, to say that there was no ruakh in the bodies (37:8) simply means that they were not breathing.  Related to this meaning is the use of ruakh for “wind” (37:9).  In keeping with the invisible force of the wind and the life-giving power of the breath is a third meaning. Ruakh can be rendered as “spirit”—that is, the empowering, enlivening agency of people, and of God (more on that one shortly).   So, as Ezekiel prophesied to the wind (ruakh), breath (ruakh) entered the bodies, and “they came to life and stood on their feet, an extraordinarily large company” (37:10)–not, please note, this

but this:

What does this vision mean?  In 37:11-14, God explains.  The dry bones are Ezekiel’s community, the house of Israel: exiled, and in despair.  They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished. We are completely finished.” (37:11)–and they are right!  Jerusalem is destroyed, the king is in chains, the temple is gone, and the people are scattered, in hiding or in exile.

But, deliverance is promised–a resurrection for dead Israel.  The Lord declares, “I will put my breath [there’s that third meaning of ruakh–God’s spirit, God’s very life]  in you, and you will live. I will plant you on your fertile land, and you will know that I am the Lord. I’ve spoken, and I will do it. This is what the Lord says” (37:14).  Hope for the future, Ezekiel was convinced, would come from God and God alone, through the gift of God’s life-giving Spirit.

Another ghost story will also be told in churches around the world this Sunday.  Jesus had promised his followers, “Look, I’m sending to you what my Father promised, but you are to stay in the city until you have been furnished with heavenly power” (Lk 24:49).  So they had remained in Jerusalem; as our story begins, they have been there, waiting and praying, ever since Jesus’ resurrection.  It is now Pentecost, the Jewish festival held 50 days after Passover.

Suddenly, the room where they are praying is filled with wind and flame, and each person gathered in that room is filled with an overpowering urge to speak!  They pour out into the street, praising God, and discover to their astonishment and delight that everyone in that crowd, Pentecost pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem from across the Roman world, understands perfectly what they are saying: “we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” (Acts 2:11).

Ezekiel’s ghost story reminds us of our beginning–of how God created we humans from the ground, breathing life into us .

Luke’s ghost story, in Acts 2, also takes us back to Genesis–this time, to the tower of Babel.

Too often, preachers and teachers of Scripture (including me!) have described what happened on Pentecost as undoing the curse of Babel, as though cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity were problems to overcome.  But that is not at all what Luke says!  This passage does not say that, filled with the Spirit, the people all started speaking the same language—that all cultural and ethnic distinctiveness was denied or undone. The Spirit does not return them to “one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1). Instead, each group hears God’s praise in its own language.

In Ezekiel’s vision, God’s Spirit undoes the exile, bringing those who had thought themselves as good as dead back home.  On Pentecost, God’s Spirit undoes fear, mistrust, and division, enabling the church born on that day to experience unity in diversity.

Perhaps, like Ezekiel’s community, we have experienced abandonment and despair.  Certainly, the real curse of Babel– our fear and mistrust of difference–has stricken deeply into our community, even into our families, bringing division and confusion.  The solution, for us as for them, is God’s Spirit: the Holy Ghost!

That may be hard for us to hear.  Ghosts are scary, after all.  Why should we exchange the visible and tangible, the solid and certain, for the invisible, mysterious, unpredictable world of God’s spirit?  Quite simply, because we must.  We need God’s spirit because we do not have the answers we seek, and we cannot find them.  We need the gift of God’s spirit to empower and enliven us, to renew and reunite us.

My teacher W. Sibley Towner (may light perpetual shine upon him!) put it this way: “We need all the energy and effort we can muster to concentrate on the whisperings of the only ghost that matters, whose name is Holy.  This spirit who proceeds from God doesn’t rock in chairs or frighten dogs, but plants winsome words in the human heart that yield great fruit if the heart is supple and ready.”

So may it be for you and yours this day.  God bless you–and Happy Pentecost!

AFTERWORD:

The image at the head of this blog, “Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones,” is an anonymous and undated wood carving from St. Nicholas Church, Deptford Green, United Kingdom.  I found this image at Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55163 [retrieved May 13, 2024]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._Nicholas%27_Church,_Deptford_Green,_SE8_-_carved_panel_representing_Ezekiel_in_the_Valley_of_the_Dry_Bones_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1501992.jpg.

The photographs above of unburied bones and corpses come from the battlefields of the American Civil War: the first from Cold Harbor, in Virginia, the second from Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania.

I hate to make decisions! Ask anyone in my family, and they’ll tell you about daily scenes like this:

“Hey Dad!  What do you want for dinner?”

“Ummmm. . .”

“Steve, what would you like to do tonight?”

“I don’t know, honey.  What would you like to do?”

In our house, I am famous for presenting endless lists of options: “Okay, we could do A, B, or C, although if we do C, we’d need to decide between x and y. . .”

You get the picture.  Wendy is a saint.

Usually, my indecisiveness, while irritating, doesn’t matter that much: world peace doesn’t depend on whether we get takeout from Chipotle or Five Guys.  However, some decisions do matter.  Sometimes, a choice must be made, and a stand must be taken.  How do we do that?

In our New Testament, 1 John is all about Christian decision-making: discerning the truth among competing claims; listening for the Word within the words.  From its very first chapter, 1 John engages us with matters of discernment, beginning with how we can know whether or not we are true followers of Christ. Significantly, it is not through our confident conviction in our own righteousness:

If we claim, “We don’t have any sin,” we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.  But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from everything we’ve done wrong (1 Jn 1:8-9).

When I was a young believer, persuaded that I had failed at following Jesus and that there was therefore no hope for me, those verses were my lifeline!

Another question for discernment is the nature of the church: What is the true mark of the Christian community? For 1 John, the answer is a single word: LOVE!

“This is the message that you heard from the beginning: love each other” (1 Jn 3:11)

“Little children, let’s not love with words or speech but with action and truth” (1 Jn 3:18).

My favorite Bible passage is 1 John 4:7-8, a text which I believe to be the Golden Text of Scripture.  If you are looking for a succinct statement of what the Bible is all about, it is hard to beat this:

Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God.  The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 5:1-5 sums up the connection between love for one another and love for God:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born from God. Whoever loves someone who is a parent loves the child born to the parent.  This is how we know that we love the children of God: when we love God and keep God’s commandments.  This is the love of God: we keep God’s commandments. God’s commandments are not difficult,  because everyone who is born from God defeats the world. And this is the victory that has defeated the world: our faith.  Who defeats the world? Isn’t it the one who believes that Jesus is God’s Son?

Just as the proof of love for God is love for one another, so also love for God and obedience to God’s commandments means love for one another: the two are tightly and inseparably intertwined.

How are we to evaluate Christian preaching and testimony? Once more, 1 John answers with a single word: JESUS!  Does this testimony, this sermon, this soundbite proclaim Jesus?

This is how you know if a spirit comes from God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come as a human is from God,  and every spirit that doesn’t confess Jesus is not from God (1 Jn 4:2-3).

Here, it  seems, 1 John is drawing on the testimony of the Gospel of John, specifically on its Prologue:

In the beginning was the Word
    and the Word was with God
    and the Word was God. . . .

The Word became flesh
    and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory,
    glory like that of a father’s only son,
        full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14).

In similarly mystical, poetic language, 1 John 5:6-9 relates God’s testimony regarding the Son:

This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. Not by water only but by water and blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  The three are testifying— the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and the three are united in agreement.  If we receive human testimony, God’s testimony is greater, because this is what God testified: he has testified about his Son.

In Deuteronomy, a court case requires two or three witnesses (Deut 17:6, 19:15).  Just so, 1 John says, there are three witnesses that confirm Jesus as God’s son: the Spirit, the water, and the blood.  Once again, it seems likely that the author of 1 John is drawing here on the Fourth Gospel.  In John 3:5-6, Jesus tells Nicodemus

I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom.  Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.

So being “born of water” seems to refer to the waters of the womb, and to natural, physical birth.   The reference to the blood seems to be a reference back to 1 John 1:7:

But if we live in the light in the same way as he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin.

So, while the water witnesses to Jesus’ birth, the blood witnesses to his death on the cross.  The true testimony about Jesus, as we saw in 1 Jn 4:2-3, is a testimony to his humanity. The witness of the Spirit assumes Jesus’ divinity as Son of God, but apart from the incarnation, that truth is neither accessible nor relevant to us.

This is all very complicated and messy.  God calls us, in each circumstance, to do the loving thing–but what does that mean?  God’s testimony about Jesus is likewise messy, tied up inextricably with his, and our, humanity.  Isn’t there a shortcut to discernment–something that just tells us straightforwardly what to do and say and believe?

Some would claim that there is: the Bible as the Word of God is our infallible guide and rulebook. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Fox News’ Sean Hannity:

I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.”  That’s my worldview.

I am sure, friends, that Mr. Johnson was sincere.  But as it happens, the Scripture text we have been unpacking provides a ready critique of that claim.  In the King James Bible of 1611, 1 John 5:6-8 reads as follows:

This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.  For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.  And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

The explicit reference to the Trinity in the KJV (boldfaced in the paragraph above) does not appear in the NRSVue, the CEB, the NIV, or indeed in any modern English translation of 1 John.  That is not because of some conspiracy among Bible translators who do not believe in the Trinity!  Rather, that verse is not found in the oldest and best texts of this book; in fact, it does not appear in any Greek text of 1 John before the 14th century!

So, why does the KJV include it? King James’ 1611 translators were strongly influenced by Erasmus’ 1516 Textus receptus (“the received [and therefore presumably authoritative] text” of the Greek NT), and by the Latin Vulgate, where this verse does appear–but only in late (fourth century) Latin texts.  Simply put, this neat Trinitarian confession does not belong to 1 John, but rather reflects later Christian reflection on that text.  Modern translators are right to exclude it.

So, why am I telling you this?  It certainly is not to persuade you that the Bible is unreliable, or that it isn’t the Word of God!  Certainly, there was no deception involved on the part of the King James translators, or of Erasmus.  Most likely, a Christian scribe copying the Latin text of 1 John, prompted by the mention of three witnesses in 1 Jn 5:6-9, added a note in the margin referencing the Trinity, and a later scribe included that note in the text itself–prompting still later scribes to add this to their Greek texts too, as Erasmus did.

Still, the point is that we do not have a single, pristine, “original” text of any biblical book, New Testament or Old–so responsible Bible scholars encounter this sort of problem all the time.  Bible translators do not begin with how best and most faithfully to render the biblical languages into clear and understandable English. The prior question is which ancient version of a text to translate!  Addressing that question requires expert knowledge–and even experts may disagree.

In short, friends, the Bible is no short cut, setting us free from our task of interpretation and discernment.  The Bible, too, is messy and complicated. So being honest about how we read Scripture requires us to think hard and to pray hard on what exactly we do mean when we say that the Bible is word of God for people of God.

What if, instead of a rule book compelling our obedience, or a list of propositions requiring our assent, the Bible is an invitation into relationship with God, calling for our commitment?  What if the Bible is a love letter from God–an invitation to open conversations, rather than an authoritative stopper that closes them?  Then we will need to be guided in our reading as in our living by the principle of God’s love and by the example of Jesus, as we carefully and prayerfully listen for the Word among the words.