Pentecost 17 - Year A

What do you put your heart into?  Is this a religious question, I hear you ask?  Well, it is when you accept we are a creedal people and creed means “what I put my heart, my trust, into.”   This is fresh in my mind because this is how the group preparing for confirmation is entering the exploration of the Baptismal Creed, the Apostle’s creed.  This creed, and the Nicene Creed we say each Sunday, are what the church, the people of God, put their hearts and trust in as the faith of the church.  “I believe…we believe….”

So, what do you put your heart and trust into?  What are the things that are the roadmaps for your life, that give you balance, stability and strength?

Each time I am part of a group sharing such deep things, the resulting focus is always about relationships as I ask: what gives me balance, stability and strength?  Last week (and the focus changes depending on where I am with my life) it was three things – my relationship with God; my marriage; and, thirdly, my inherent belief in the goodness of people.  These frameworks really lead to all the expressions and stories of my life.

And they are all about relationship, relationship, relationship.  There were some wonderful images shared in the group last week and they all came down to, bottom line…relationships.  That is, the thing, this dynamic, that happens between living beings, human and God.  These become and are the important things we CARRY in our lives and I am sure many of us do that carrying literally, and symbolically, as images with us – whether iPod or phone installed (I have Lizzie as a purple teletubie on my phone at present)  or tatty photos in our wallets, or family photos as screen savers on computers, even tattoos; we carry these pictures as important parts of the story of who we are in this life.

Now if Judaism had such a picture-carrier, to store just a few of their most important stories, I reckon you would find three images:

• that depict the beginning of the world, the creation story;

• that show a mountain with thousands of people waiting to encounter the divine, ie, the story of Mt Sinai and God’s revelation; and

• the mighty picture of thousands of people crossing the Red Sea into freedom, the story of the Exodus of the Hebrew people from slavery into freedom.

The Exodus is probably the most well-known story for Jewish people, and today we hear the beginning action of the actual Exodus.  It is the story of the first Passover, when God literally passed over the homes of the Hebrews to liberate them for the epic journey out of Egypt.  From this action, for Jews and Christians alike, much is known about God and what it is to be God’s people.  This story has become an icon of the liberating freedom found in being in relationship with God.  Importantly, it is freedom through redemptive action – God redeemed his people, saved them, for a promised, new life in a new land.  It is part of the story of salvation that we tell at every baptism.

The troubling part, of course, is that this redemptive action is told as works of divine violence.  The final plague brought down by God on the Egyptian people was to kill all first-born in a household – children, adults, animals.  God passed over the homes of those who had joined the redemptive story and who had marked their doorways with the blood of the sacrificial lamb.  And the divine violence continues with the story we hear next week in the drowning of the thousands of Egyptians who followed the Hebrew slaves to bring them back.  Moses parts the Red Sea for his people; and brings the waters down upon those who would bring them back. 

We do not, indeed we cannot, shy away from what is called the Myths of Redemptive Violence.  Right from the beginning, that is Genesis, the sources of those stories has been the violent world human beings are part of – in fact, the consequences that humans cause.  The context of one of the sources of the writing of Genesis was war - the Babylonian exiles saw themselves as the remnant saved through Noah and the flood.  They were the ones true to the one, true God, in a world searching for many types of Gods.

Now,  an interesting viewpoint is that military theology is about bringing order out of chaos.  God creates good order in the creation stories of Genesis; but it doesn’t last long.  The so-called “fall” begins the stories of violence in the world, beginning with Cain. 

This myth of creative violence has influenced life from that beginning.  We remain part of a world today of war and violence.  It is not necessarily seen as evil either; it is seen as part of the human condition.  We are all consciously or unconsciously shaped by this dark influence, from cartoon characters continually bashing each other, to George W Bush preaching from a church pulpit… “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

So if this is our story, is it also our belief framework?  We cannot deny the stories we are part of, but how do we work them into the creeds of our life? 

Here I want to introduce another very effective Hebrew traditional tool: Midrash.  Midrash comes from the Hebrew root that related to interpretation.  Midrash is the story about the story… it is about the layers of the story that are not necessarily part of the text in front of you.  It is like peering through a microscope to offer insights into what cannot be seen with the naked eye.  At the same time, other unknowns will surface because of this whole action of peering intently, from a different, deeper angle.  It is the meeting of mystery and discovery; of finding answers to some old questions and revealing new questions that call for new answers.  Just as a microscope is a vital tool in discovering truth in science,   Midrash is a potent tool in the spiritual process of also discovering truth.

The Midrash process really appeals to me. This is an ‘I’ statement, because of the recognition of layers and layers in any story, in any reality.  One could say blithely “it isn’t what it seems”, but that is usually the case.  The other interweaving function is that in the telling the story means you become involved with the story – you not only open the possibility of a new insight, you open the possibility, if not the risk, of gaining a new self-perspective.  That is, of learning something new about yourself in your reaction and response to the new truth discovered.  And that is what Midrash is; it is the stories that are part of the story, and the creation of the new story from that understanding.  For the Jewish people, Midrashim is as much part of the culture as the original text.

Here is our Christian Midrash for the Exodus.  It is the passion story.  In Christian theology, the Passover tradition gets read through the cross of Christ.  Jesus walks into Jerusalem at the Passover – he enters at the time of the great Liberation story.  He is crucified at Passover time.  Jesus keeps the feast; he does not deny or change the story he comes from.  But all through it the great redemptive act of God’s forgiveness is already working – the story of divine violence is retold as the image of divine love for all humanity. 

Jesus himself is not a layered story, he is not an interpretation of scripture.  He is not midrash.  He is Godself.  The gift he gives though is midrash; he gives us the insight in so many different ways into the truth of being in relationship with God.  Every time we hear scripture we hear again a new meaning, a new layer in our faith journey.  Jesus calls us into the new, radical and non-violent redemptive way of living that is his whole life.  Today in the Gospel he calls us into that world; a community that dialogues in God-talk, that resolves conflict through God-action. 

It is not enough to accept things are not what they seem.  Jesus Christ calls us into midrash with himself as our interpretator.  This is what we are to put our heart into, our trust – our relationship with Christ is our Creed for life.  Amen.