Jeremiah 31:31-34
Perhaps anyone who has had experience with divorce and a hopeful remarriage gains intuitive purchase into this reading.
Jeremiah pulls upon our memories of broken relationship. That feeling of a covenant gone wrong--infidelity, either of the sexual variety or of the far more common and pernicious varieties, tearing through promises made. Rending people back into disparate elements. Divorce is primarily about paperwork, even in Jeremiah's time, which serves as poor sacrament for what is lost in the end of a relationship, even when divorce was obviously the best solution for everyone involved. All the dreams of that relationship not killed so much as orphaned, left sitting alone outside. Never forgotten, but not visited anymore, languishing away in memory and dream nursing homes, longing for a kind of health that simply cannot be again.
And against that divorce backdrop, a flash of inspiration and light. The promise of something new, something grand--a better relationship. One where love will not always have to be checked on, schooled, managed, disciplined. Intuitive love and dedication, tattooed in our center. The meeting of a new person, exactly when we thought we had become unlovable. That 'teenage feeling,' but not only the chemical thrill of another person's presence, but also the promise that the feeling might be mutual. New dreams--but even more than new dreams, this new covenant offers to redeem our old dreams out of rehab, to show that they were not so much impossible as deferred.
That is some slice of the powerful emotional chemistry of Jeremiah in the reading for today. It simultaneously acknowledges the painful tragedy of separation with the low-rumbling pleasure of hope. Not denying one in favor of the other, but moving through death into resurrection.
As we watch the many dialogues of our age--sexuality, health care, impending economic disaster, the health of the planet--everyone tells us a different resurrection story, a different story about dissolved covenants and now renewed promises. Folks in support of gay rights speak of years death, and call upon now to be a time of a new covenant based on dedication rather than sexual orientation. Folks opposed to same sex unions or rights describe this time as one of death, hoping for a renewing of the covenant through constitutional amendments. In every one of those issues above--and for many others--people all tell their version of the argument, making it sound like a movement from death to resurrection.
All that to say: I wonder if we've all grown tired of the death/resurrection story. It seems, well normal. Commonplace. Jeremiah--and then Easter--ask us to plum some of the deepest parts of humanity, pushing toward God. But resurrection looks, in sense, pretty banal these days. Resurrect the economy! A new covenant of healthcare! 3 days in the tomb, and our planet shall rise again in carbon balance!
But what if we've grown bored, not of the deeper meaning and meat, but of the story?
How do we celebrate Easter in a world full of easters?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Idol worship! Finally!
Numbers 21:4-9
So the Old Testament lesson this week is pretty weird. All the people of Israel are continuing in their fantastic habit of bitching and moaning--"murmuring" is of course the preferred theological term--and they're doing it without cause. Complaining with cause seems to go fine--the Psalms offer plenty of examples of that. However, when there's no cause, I can quite clearly here God sounding much like Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own in the line we used on small children at summer camp: There's no crying in baseball! They complain, in the same breath, that they don't get any food anymore, and that the food sucks. We are all, in our hearts, 8 years old.
So God decides to punish them. Earlier in Numbers, there's a story much like this one--as brief and with as few explanations. There, the people on the edge of the camp just start burning up. Fairly impressive, that.
But here, God sends snakes. I can't help but think that, somehow, calling them poisonous snakes is not the fairest translation of the Hebrew. The word in Hebrew is 'Seraphim', which, as you may know from that lovely hymn with all the heavenly orders or the tabernacle in Isaiah, is also a word for flaming heavenly beings.
The people then repent--probably the flaming snake-beings speed that along. And so God has Moses build a giant bronze snake, stick it on a pole, and if people look up at it, they'll live.
So it's a weird story.
Quasi-idolatrous, supernatural, and entirely unexplained. And, even stranger, it's the very image that comes to mind when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in the gospels lesson for the day, John 3:14, when Jesus is looking for an analogy to his crucifixion. Can you imagine? A story so common to Jesus that it sprang immediately to his mind, yet a story so unusual that many people I've spoken to this week have never heard it. If you'll pardon the mixing of internet and church lingo, RCL FTW for using new lessons!
So, what do we do this story? Usually, I think, we ignore it, like we try to ignore most of Numbers. And in the gospel, everyone acts as though the gravity of the story pulled the meaning toward verse 16 simply because it matches what people want to be Jesus' thesis statement. Looking at the Jesus/Nicodemus dialogue as a whole, it's probably not a thesis statement for that section or the whole.
That snake on a pole, by the way, turns up again in the Old Testament, somewhere in one of the Kings. Hezekiah, that great cleanser of Temple worship, finds it in the Temple. Apparently people have given it a name and started worshiping it--entirely unsurprising, in a way, and so Hezekiah tears it down and burns it.
So, does this commend idol worship to us? Probably not. After all, God does the healing--the people simply must have faith enough to look up at the snake. But it might, in a roundabout way, show something interesting.
The snake-on-a-pole (sounds like a fried treat you'd order at the fair for a small child) starts out as an icon, a window into the divine forgiveness and (literal) life that comes from God. Then, it becomes an idol, so much so that Hezekiah has not a worry in the world about getting rid of a thing that Moses himself made. The people confuse a window for a painting, a hole for a stop sign, an icon for an idol, a symbol for what points beyond it. The snake-on-a-pole is supposed to serve as a convenient meditation and prayer aid, and soon it starts receiving prayers.
If Jesus is asking us to see his own crucifixion in a similar light, perhaps we should also consider the ways that we turn that event into an idol. Certainly, we keep crosses everywhere, sometimes with dying Jesuses on them and sometimes not. We expect them to ward off vampires, scare the ghosts that go bump in the night--we build them into the architecture of most interior doors, as though a cross itself is protection. You know, just in case.
But our idolatry of crucifixion goes far deeper. We begin to revel in the pain, not share in the suffering that it symbolizes. It is the difference between the Ignatian exercises and Mel Gibson's Passion. The difference is in many ways a subtle one, lost to one who glosses over the similarities. But the two processes are enormously different--Ignatius inviting us to look through a window, where Gibson invites us to self-satisfaction at our own awe and disgust.
So, our friend the bronze serpent certainly suggests that one theme--the many ways that we turn Christ into an idol.
So the Old Testament lesson this week is pretty weird. All the people of Israel are continuing in their fantastic habit of bitching and moaning--"murmuring" is of course the preferred theological term--and they're doing it without cause. Complaining with cause seems to go fine--the Psalms offer plenty of examples of that. However, when there's no cause, I can quite clearly here God sounding much like Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own in the line we used on small children at summer camp: There's no crying in baseball! They complain, in the same breath, that they don't get any food anymore, and that the food sucks. We are all, in our hearts, 8 years old.
So God decides to punish them. Earlier in Numbers, there's a story much like this one--as brief and with as few explanations. There, the people on the edge of the camp just start burning up. Fairly impressive, that.
But here, God sends snakes. I can't help but think that, somehow, calling them poisonous snakes is not the fairest translation of the Hebrew. The word in Hebrew is 'Seraphim', which, as you may know from that lovely hymn with all the heavenly orders or the tabernacle in Isaiah, is also a word for flaming heavenly beings.
The people then repent--probably the flaming snake-beings speed that along. And so God has Moses build a giant bronze snake, stick it on a pole, and if people look up at it, they'll live.
So it's a weird story.
Quasi-idolatrous, supernatural, and entirely unexplained. And, even stranger, it's the very image that comes to mind when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in the gospels lesson for the day, John 3:14, when Jesus is looking for an analogy to his crucifixion. Can you imagine? A story so common to Jesus that it sprang immediately to his mind, yet a story so unusual that many people I've spoken to this week have never heard it. If you'll pardon the mixing of internet and church lingo, RCL FTW for using new lessons!
So, what do we do this story? Usually, I think, we ignore it, like we try to ignore most of Numbers. And in the gospel, everyone acts as though the gravity of the story pulled the meaning toward verse 16 simply because it matches what people want to be Jesus' thesis statement. Looking at the Jesus/Nicodemus dialogue as a whole, it's probably not a thesis statement for that section or the whole.
That snake on a pole, by the way, turns up again in the Old Testament, somewhere in one of the Kings. Hezekiah, that great cleanser of Temple worship, finds it in the Temple. Apparently people have given it a name and started worshiping it--entirely unsurprising, in a way, and so Hezekiah tears it down and burns it.
So, does this commend idol worship to us? Probably not. After all, God does the healing--the people simply must have faith enough to look up at the snake. But it might, in a roundabout way, show something interesting.
The snake-on-a-pole (sounds like a fried treat you'd order at the fair for a small child) starts out as an icon, a window into the divine forgiveness and (literal) life that comes from God. Then, it becomes an idol, so much so that Hezekiah has not a worry in the world about getting rid of a thing that Moses himself made. The people confuse a window for a painting, a hole for a stop sign, an icon for an idol, a symbol for what points beyond it. The snake-on-a-pole is supposed to serve as a convenient meditation and prayer aid, and soon it starts receiving prayers.
If Jesus is asking us to see his own crucifixion in a similar light, perhaps we should also consider the ways that we turn that event into an idol. Certainly, we keep crosses everywhere, sometimes with dying Jesuses on them and sometimes not. We expect them to ward off vampires, scare the ghosts that go bump in the night--we build them into the architecture of most interior doors, as though a cross itself is protection. You know, just in case.
But our idolatry of crucifixion goes far deeper. We begin to revel in the pain, not share in the suffering that it symbolizes. It is the difference between the Ignatian exercises and Mel Gibson's Passion. The difference is in many ways a subtle one, lost to one who glosses over the similarities. But the two processes are enormously different--Ignatius inviting us to look through a window, where Gibson invites us to self-satisfaction at our own awe and disgust.
So, our friend the bronze serpent certainly suggests that one theme--the many ways that we turn Christ into an idol.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Lent is a time for self-examination . . .
Exodus 20
I was talking to a group of folks yesterday about the relevance of Old Testament notions of communal sin for the current economic crisis. Someone specifically referenced the reading this week in Exodus, this business about holding the 3rd and 4th generation accountable for the sins of the forebears. People, in American and elsewhere, are paying--with jobs or taxes or lost investments or lost money--for the sins of a few. As proud individualists, I think we have the tendency to say 'that's not fair!' both to this passage in Exodus and to this part of the economic crisis. So, in that conversation I was having yesterday, I thought they were probably right. I have long thought that this section of Exodus is descriptive, not proscriptive. It's not that God sees a sin, and then jumps out and boxes someone's ears for misbehaving (proscriptive). It's more like that this is simply the way the world works, and God is letting us know (descriptive). If parents sin, the cost of that sin will extend beyond themselves.
To someone with much experience of addiction, this is not a surprise. It's not fair that children and spouses of addicts pay a heavy cost for sins they did not commit, but they do. They have greater emotional burdens to unlearn, genes to overcome, ingrained habits to consider, practices to erase--and none of it is their fault. Perhaps, if we were willing to engage with it, our long fought (and almost totally ignored) battle with addiction would have taught us more about the looming economic difficulties. Perhaps addiction and money are related in all kinds of ways, ways that could have helped us. Or could still help us. (I am reminded of an acquaintance who once argued quite fervently to me that Anonymous in AA was a mixed blessing. At the same time it freed people to seek help without even greater shame than they already felt, it also prevents the wider public from knowing just how many people struggled with addiction--a number that would likely astound the world.)
But while I think this is all true, it struck me in my conversation yesterday that this was all 'old hat' for me, stuff I knew pretty well. I find myself wondering instead: why do we worry about the fairness of sins that affects 3 or 4 generations away, but we neglect the strange blessings that extends for thousands of generations? If I have gained some of my bad habits, or self-esteem, or socio-economic status from people beyond my control, why don't I wonder at the tiny gifts my ancestors, thousands of generations back, have given to me?
Sure, I'm judgmental, snobby, and self-centered. But I'm also compassionate. Why am I compassionate? Perhaps because my parents were--or perhaps because my pre-school teachers were--or perhaps because my first friends were. But why were they? Perhaps their parents were. Where in my human family did that compassion begin? Where did someone, sitting in front of a hearth on a cold night, say: I feel bad for my neighbors who have no hearth. Perhaps I could share.
Lent with its self-examination is too often a practice in the genealogy of badness. We sift through those thoughts, words, and deeds, done and undone, and try to map them out--"where did this come from? Why do I have such a temper?" And so on. Fine--that can be helpful, and hopefully we all know something of the role of repentance in our lives of faith.
But perhaps Lent should also be a time for a genealogy of goodness. "How did I learn when to hug someone, and when to give them a handshake? Why do dogs always make me smile?" Surely we pay for the sins of others, but we also receive benefits from the gifts of others. If it seems unfair that we must pay for the sins of the community, is it unfair that we have all benefited from long-gone loves, receiving grace upon grace?
If Lent is to be a time of self-examination, it must be honest. And honesty means that it can never be only a list of things done wrong, commandments violated. It must also be a list of things done well--flowers bought, money given away, time shared. Not all that we receive in our common life is a cause for repentance.
I was talking to a group of folks yesterday about the relevance of Old Testament notions of communal sin for the current economic crisis. Someone specifically referenced the reading this week in Exodus, this business about holding the 3rd and 4th generation accountable for the sins of the forebears. People, in American and elsewhere, are paying--with jobs or taxes or lost investments or lost money--for the sins of a few. As proud individualists, I think we have the tendency to say 'that's not fair!' both to this passage in Exodus and to this part of the economic crisis. So, in that conversation I was having yesterday, I thought they were probably right. I have long thought that this section of Exodus is descriptive, not proscriptive. It's not that God sees a sin, and then jumps out and boxes someone's ears for misbehaving (proscriptive). It's more like that this is simply the way the world works, and God is letting us know (descriptive). If parents sin, the cost of that sin will extend beyond themselves.
To someone with much experience of addiction, this is not a surprise. It's not fair that children and spouses of addicts pay a heavy cost for sins they did not commit, but they do. They have greater emotional burdens to unlearn, genes to overcome, ingrained habits to consider, practices to erase--and none of it is their fault. Perhaps, if we were willing to engage with it, our long fought (and almost totally ignored) battle with addiction would have taught us more about the looming economic difficulties. Perhaps addiction and money are related in all kinds of ways, ways that could have helped us. Or could still help us. (I am reminded of an acquaintance who once argued quite fervently to me that Anonymous in AA was a mixed blessing. At the same time it freed people to seek help without even greater shame than they already felt, it also prevents the wider public from knowing just how many people struggled with addiction--a number that would likely astound the world.)
But while I think this is all true, it struck me in my conversation yesterday that this was all 'old hat' for me, stuff I knew pretty well. I find myself wondering instead: why do we worry about the fairness of sins that affects 3 or 4 generations away, but we neglect the strange blessings that extends for thousands of generations? If I have gained some of my bad habits, or self-esteem, or socio-economic status from people beyond my control, why don't I wonder at the tiny gifts my ancestors, thousands of generations back, have given to me?
Sure, I'm judgmental, snobby, and self-centered. But I'm also compassionate. Why am I compassionate? Perhaps because my parents were--or perhaps because my pre-school teachers were--or perhaps because my first friends were. But why were they? Perhaps their parents were. Where in my human family did that compassion begin? Where did someone, sitting in front of a hearth on a cold night, say: I feel bad for my neighbors who have no hearth. Perhaps I could share.
Lent with its self-examination is too often a practice in the genealogy of badness. We sift through those thoughts, words, and deeds, done and undone, and try to map them out--"where did this come from? Why do I have such a temper?" And so on. Fine--that can be helpful, and hopefully we all know something of the role of repentance in our lives of faith.
But perhaps Lent should also be a time for a genealogy of goodness. "How did I learn when to hug someone, and when to give them a handshake? Why do dogs always make me smile?" Surely we pay for the sins of others, but we also receive benefits from the gifts of others. If it seems unfair that we must pay for the sins of the community, is it unfair that we have all benefited from long-gone loves, receiving grace upon grace?
If Lent is to be a time of self-examination, it must be honest. And honesty means that it can never be only a list of things done wrong, commandments violated. It must also be a list of things done well--flowers bought, money given away, time shared. Not all that we receive in our common life is a cause for repentance.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
You reckon?
Romans 4:13-25
I'm going for brevity today. No bold promises, though. I bet I talk about abortion though. It's all over Romans this week.
So, Paul talks about this 'reckoned as righteousness' business. Do people actually use either of those words? 'Reckon'? They use that one in the southwest, as in: "It'll rain, I reckon." It has a more pecuniary background, though, usually meaning something to do with counting coins. Maybe too we yell at our sneaky siblings when they take our candy: "There will come a day of reckoning for this!" But probably not--that seems pretty dorky, even for me, and you, and all of us.
Or righteousness--how often do I use that word in conversation? I can't remember the last time. Probably when I used its adjective form back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was in and proclaimed with Michelangelo: Righteous, dude!
So, in short, part of me questions this translation--it uses words that are, even for a geek, a bit of a stretch. They're not all bad, I suppose, but we should all try to remember that English requires its own English translation. The money connotations help make the whole thing work in translation. If we exchanged 'trust' for 'faith', we might see the thesis of Paul's argument and exegesis of Genesis running like this:
Abraham's trust in God counted as right-living.
What a whacky thing. Imagine if I cheated on my taxes--oh, let's say by not paying a hundred thousand because of a personal driver. Everyone has that problem, right? Anyway. So, I don't pay my taxes. The IRS comes to me and says: you owe us money. And I say: but I trust in you, IRS. I'll show you--I'll give you a hug! And I've been paying my tax since then! And they say: 'ah, that's alright--next time, try to pay your taxes. Don't worry about it--in fact, you'll be receiving a huge refund this year in addition to your stimulus check.' "Faith reckoned as righteousness" is exactly that weird.
In other words, the trust that we place in God--which is the strength of that relationship--is what counts as right-living us, and for everyone, according to Paul. The strength of our relationship with God is not the same thing as right-living, but that relationship God is willing to reckon as right-living. Not the same, but God's willing to take it.
That's like saying that my wife is willing to give me the consequences for trusting her, in lieu of the consequences of having an affair. "Oh honey," she says, "Don't worry about it--do better next time. And we're still going on vacation to Italy. And I'll do the dishes."
Paul spends much of his air time in Scripture defending the weirdness of this proposition--the 'all is lawful discussion' in 1 Corinthians, for example, deals with the moral ramifications of this statement. So for now, I don't want to defend it--if you want a longer defense, Romans deals mostly with this idea. Instead, I want to say a few things about what it means.
Let's start somewhere mild for our anxiety levels. Consider a traditional Lenten theme--forgiveness. So often, we let 12 step groups and TV evangelists steal our best lines. They often talk about how God forgives us of anything--12 step groups then have a method for living into that forgiveness, and TV evangelists forgo methods to ask for money. But if we take Paul seriously, not only does God forgive us--no matter how truly self-centered or evil we've been--not only does God give this forgiveness, but also God is willing to count trust in God as right-living from that point onward. Wherever we are this Lent--sick of constant self-obsession, bored with our families, hating the way we look in the mirror, greedy for yet another few bucks to spend, God is willing to start counting us as righteous people if we're willing to start trust God rather than attempting to make ourselves the center of the universe's gravity. I would add this second thought along this line: we're quick to talk about God's forgiveness for rather dramatic sins, but what about the less dramatic ones?
And second, let's talk about something more anxiety producing. I think this thesis, this trust in God being reckoned as right-living, is damned dangerous. Let me give an example. It would suggest that our cultural stances on abortion, whether we think it permissible but unfortunate or entirely illicit, are exactly wrong. Hauerwas (a perfectly delightful Christian ethicist), in his lovely little article on abortion--wish I had a link to it--, would be right. The question is not about moral legality--instead, we should trust God enough to welcome the stranger and foreigner. It's like we're being diagnosed as a sick patient. Rather than trust God, we would rather trust ourselves to mastering the truth about the personhood of dividing cells. We'd rather be masters than trusting, dependent.
If Paul's thesis is right, abortion is neither right nor wrong in itself--or more accurately, what matters to God when it concerns us is not the righteousness of a thing, which we're not good at, but our trusting of God. Whether abortion is part of righteous life is beside the point, according to Paul's thesis. It is only one possible indicator of whether we are trusting God. Individually, this makes making a choice about abortion no simpler--it seems entirely possible to me that someone might trust in God and have an abortion, and that for another person that trust and an abortion would be impossible to hold together.
But for all the rest of us, not facing this choice but trying to understand our society and its rules, Paul's thesis condemns us pretty soundly.
If Christ has called us to welcome the stranger as an example of our trust in God; if children are the truly perfect strangers; and if having children has become a thing that is easily feared in our society; then the sickness will never be solved by debating one way of alleviating the symptom (abortion). Abortion is not a moral problem--it's a symptom of our fearfulness of strangers, of someone who might make demands on me that I can't control. Instead, we must confront the sickness--we must face our shared complicity in a culture that ostracizes single parents (it's popular to lament their situation, but it's not popular to be one), so enmeshes sex in shame that people fear to speak of it, keeps a permanent lower class stripped of economic possibility and plain old hope, and ultimately, we must face a culture that is so afraid of the stranger that we'd rather either kill the stranger before they're born, or permanently punish the parents of the stranger by strapping them with obligations our society conspires to prevent them achieving. If Paul is right, and God reckons our trust in God as righteousness, then our debate about abortion, while well-intentioned, has missed the point. Abortion is a symptom of a wider problem, made worse when we deny the existence of any kind of corporate sin or responsibility. God has asked us to follow in trust, welcoming the stranger, caring for the widow and orphan, sharing what we have even when it looks like it's not enough. Funny how we'd rather still debate righteousness.
Our trust in God reckoned as right-living? Probably the most radical words in Scripture.
I'm going for brevity today. No bold promises, though. I bet I talk about abortion though. It's all over Romans this week.
So, Paul talks about this 'reckoned as righteousness' business. Do people actually use either of those words? 'Reckon'? They use that one in the southwest, as in: "It'll rain, I reckon." It has a more pecuniary background, though, usually meaning something to do with counting coins. Maybe too we yell at our sneaky siblings when they take our candy: "There will come a day of reckoning for this!" But probably not--that seems pretty dorky, even for me, and you, and all of us.
Or righteousness--how often do I use that word in conversation? I can't remember the last time. Probably when I used its adjective form back when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was in and proclaimed with Michelangelo: Righteous, dude!
So, in short, part of me questions this translation--it uses words that are, even for a geek, a bit of a stretch. They're not all bad, I suppose, but we should all try to remember that English requires its own English translation. The money connotations help make the whole thing work in translation. If we exchanged 'trust' for 'faith', we might see the thesis of Paul's argument and exegesis of Genesis running like this:
Abraham's trust in God counted as right-living.
What a whacky thing. Imagine if I cheated on my taxes--oh, let's say by not paying a hundred thousand because of a personal driver. Everyone has that problem, right? Anyway. So, I don't pay my taxes. The IRS comes to me and says: you owe us money. And I say: but I trust in you, IRS. I'll show you--I'll give you a hug! And I've been paying my tax since then! And they say: 'ah, that's alright--next time, try to pay your taxes. Don't worry about it--in fact, you'll be receiving a huge refund this year in addition to your stimulus check.' "Faith reckoned as righteousness" is exactly that weird.
In other words, the trust that we place in God--which is the strength of that relationship--is what counts as right-living us, and for everyone, according to Paul. The strength of our relationship with God is not the same thing as right-living, but that relationship God is willing to reckon as right-living. Not the same, but God's willing to take it.
That's like saying that my wife is willing to give me the consequences for trusting her, in lieu of the consequences of having an affair. "Oh honey," she says, "Don't worry about it--do better next time. And we're still going on vacation to Italy. And I'll do the dishes."
Paul spends much of his air time in Scripture defending the weirdness of this proposition--the 'all is lawful discussion' in 1 Corinthians, for example, deals with the moral ramifications of this statement. So for now, I don't want to defend it--if you want a longer defense, Romans deals mostly with this idea. Instead, I want to say a few things about what it means.
Let's start somewhere mild for our anxiety levels. Consider a traditional Lenten theme--forgiveness. So often, we let 12 step groups and TV evangelists steal our best lines. They often talk about how God forgives us of anything--12 step groups then have a method for living into that forgiveness, and TV evangelists forgo methods to ask for money. But if we take Paul seriously, not only does God forgive us--no matter how truly self-centered or evil we've been--not only does God give this forgiveness, but also God is willing to count trust in God as right-living from that point onward. Wherever we are this Lent--sick of constant self-obsession, bored with our families, hating the way we look in the mirror, greedy for yet another few bucks to spend, God is willing to start counting us as righteous people if we're willing to start trust God rather than attempting to make ourselves the center of the universe's gravity. I would add this second thought along this line: we're quick to talk about God's forgiveness for rather dramatic sins, but what about the less dramatic ones?
And second, let's talk about something more anxiety producing. I think this thesis, this trust in God being reckoned as right-living, is damned dangerous. Let me give an example. It would suggest that our cultural stances on abortion, whether we think it permissible but unfortunate or entirely illicit, are exactly wrong. Hauerwas (a perfectly delightful Christian ethicist), in his lovely little article on abortion--wish I had a link to it--, would be right. The question is not about moral legality--instead, we should trust God enough to welcome the stranger and foreigner. It's like we're being diagnosed as a sick patient. Rather than trust God, we would rather trust ourselves to mastering the truth about the personhood of dividing cells. We'd rather be masters than trusting, dependent.
If Paul's thesis is right, abortion is neither right nor wrong in itself--or more accurately, what matters to God when it concerns us is not the righteousness of a thing, which we're not good at, but our trusting of God. Whether abortion is part of righteous life is beside the point, according to Paul's thesis. It is only one possible indicator of whether we are trusting God. Individually, this makes making a choice about abortion no simpler--it seems entirely possible to me that someone might trust in God and have an abortion, and that for another person that trust and an abortion would be impossible to hold together.
But for all the rest of us, not facing this choice but trying to understand our society and its rules, Paul's thesis condemns us pretty soundly.
If Christ has called us to welcome the stranger as an example of our trust in God; if children are the truly perfect strangers; and if having children has become a thing that is easily feared in our society; then the sickness will never be solved by debating one way of alleviating the symptom (abortion). Abortion is not a moral problem--it's a symptom of our fearfulness of strangers, of someone who might make demands on me that I can't control. Instead, we must confront the sickness--we must face our shared complicity in a culture that ostracizes single parents (it's popular to lament their situation, but it's not popular to be one), so enmeshes sex in shame that people fear to speak of it, keeps a permanent lower class stripped of economic possibility and plain old hope, and ultimately, we must face a culture that is so afraid of the stranger that we'd rather either kill the stranger before they're born, or permanently punish the parents of the stranger by strapping them with obligations our society conspires to prevent them achieving. If Paul is right, and God reckons our trust in God as righteousness, then our debate about abortion, while well-intentioned, has missed the point. Abortion is a symptom of a wider problem, made worse when we deny the existence of any kind of corporate sin or responsibility. God has asked us to follow in trust, welcoming the stranger, caring for the widow and orphan, sharing what we have even when it looks like it's not enough. Funny how we'd rather still debate righteousness.
Our trust in God reckoned as right-living? Probably the most radical words in Scripture.
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