Tagged: vulnerability

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)

This text is used for the Lectionary Year A on June 18, 2017.

“When Faith Turns a Smirk into a Smile”
Laurens Vander Post, a South African explorer who lived among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, realized that they would only tell “their stories” to him after months of living in their midst. First, they had to trust him. For to them, their stories possessed the secrets of their soul. To tell their stories was to risk their lives. If an enemy came to possess their stories, they would be destroyed.

Like them, most of us are only willing to tell our personal stories to people we believe are trustworthy. We want people to laugh with us, not at us. We don’t want our stories to be distorted and spread around for others to trample upon. We are vulnerable as we share our stories.

The Bible is God’s storybook. God wants us to know His story. Not because He thought everyone would love Him because of the stories, though that was His hope. Not that He thought everyone would get it, though that was His aim. Not that He thought everyone would live better lives because of lessons learned from the stories, though that motivation moved Him. He had the stories written because they give witness to His glorious acts of salvation and that whosoever had “the eyes to see and the ears to hear” would personally trust God enough to step into the salvation being offered.

The Laughing Side of Faith
God is a promise maker and a promise keeper. Abram & Sarai were called out from the land of Ur as people of promise. Through them, God would reveal the Promise Land. Theirs is an intriguing story of how God can draw out extraordinary growth by stretching believers into extraordinary levels of courageous faith. Abram and Sarai became Abraham & Sarah (Genesis 16-17) by seeing the shortcomings of their current level of faith and being stirred by God into a new faith dimension.

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Matthew 28:16-20

This text is used for the Lectionary Year A on June 11, 2017.

Matthew 28:16-20 is a foundational text of Christianity, one of its most inspired statements, a summary of its faith, a mandate at the heart of its every ambition, and a profound picture of how the Christian life of mission participates in the Trinitarian life of God. Almost anyone who calls her/himself Christian will recognize it and will need to respond to it, and everyone who is not Christian falls under its purview. In these four short verses, Matthew’s Gospel anticipates the extraordinary reality of something that began as an oddball reinterpretation of a cultic religion at the dusty edge of a waning empire and became the most powerful religion and cultural force the world has ever known: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (NRSV).

It is also a principal warrant for some of the worst things associated with and attributed to Christianity. The long, sad, and continuing history of European colonization took place under the aegis of these words. It is a history that would see the decimation of whole nations of people, the ending of linguistic worlds, the evisceration of beautiful and beautifully harmonious ecologies, the cultivation of and enculturation into an economy of slavery based on body type, where human beings would be, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “thingified” in the name of Christion mission. Such practices (typically brutal, systematic, and unending) were part of what European and American Christians termed “a duty to propagate their religion among the heathens.” This duty especially when couched in the terms of Matthew 28 became the impetus to colonize, enslave, and forcibly educate. Recently, Pope Francis recognized this tendency, no doubt lamenting the church’s track record of doing the very thing Christians self-righteously attribute to others: “Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam… However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, regarding the same idea of conquest.”

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