8th Sunday after Pentecost, August 3 2014
Genesis 32.22-31, Romans 9.1-5, Matthew 14.13-21
Auditoire de Calvin, Geneva, Switzerland
Let me tell you a story. In fact, since I’m feeling generous, let me tell you three.
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In May 1963, Mary Lusk (as she then was) stood at the bar of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland to present her petition asking the assembly to test what she believed was her call to ministry.
It’s hard to remember now, but half a century ago, our church did not ordain women as either ministers or elders.
And the assembly wasn’t about to change quickly. It took it three years to agree that women might be ordained as elders and a further two years to agree that they might be ordained as ministers.
Mary Levison (as she had by then become) tells her story in a book called Wrestling with the Church – a title inspired by our Old Testament reading this morning.
“‘I will not let you go unless you bless me,’ cried Jacob, as he wrestled with the Unknown at the brook Jabbok,” she writes.
“I have sometimes felt rather like that. My life has been lived in the grip of the Church, from which I have not felt able to free myself – either by giving it all up or by going elsewhere. I have there stayed and wrestled and prayed and wept, until the Church of my fathers and mothers has given me her blessing, accepted my calling and sent me forth.”
She adds, in words that may remind us of more recent debates on ordination, that “… the Church at any particular time or place may be obtuse, legalistic, slow; sometimes inhospitable and hurtful; often seeming to care more for tradition than for signs of the Holy Spirit.”
“That is nonetheless where I belong,” she concludes, “and I have to be myself and fulfil my calling within this Church… I do believe that the Holy Spirit has been at work… over these last decades, opening up channels of ministry that were hitherto blocked; doing something to restore to the Church the wholeness and health without which the gospel loses all credibility.”
*
“Jacob’s life story,” says Avraham Burg, “is a long, tortuous process of learning the uses and limits of power… He was utterly blind to the strength that comes from restraining oneself…”
Burg, the subject of my second story, is an interesting and complex figure. He emerged on the public stage as a result of Israel’s war in Lebanon in 1982, became a Peace Now activist, entered the Knesset – the parliament of Israel – in 1988 and a decade later became speaker of the Knesset. The son of Holocaust survivors, in 2009 he wrote a controversial best-seller called The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes, in which, essentially, he asked his fellow-Jews in Israel to grow up – to learn to trust themselves, their neighbours and the world around them.
But Burg is a religious Jew, deeply versed in classic texts. In Tel Aviv airport, on my way back from a trip to Jerusalem over Pentecost, I found a book called Very Near to You: Human Readings of the Torah, in which he meditates on the weekly portions of the first five books of the Bible that are read in synagogues everywhere.
His approach is dialectical. As the foreword says, “Burg does not only use Torah to challenge contemporary values, he uses contemporary values to challenge Torah, all the while revering that with which he argues.”
He is, you might say, wrestling with scripture.
“That night,” he says, “Jacob was transformed from a disciple of power…”
“…there, that night, he learned that there are things that can’t be solved by force, by more force or even by mustering every ounce of strength… The force he was accustomed to wielding had turned from an asset into a burden…”
He found a new identity that could not be articulated in the old words, and so his name was changed from Jacob to Israel.
And then, while his Israeli readers are thinking about that, Burg draws the moral:
“In the last few generations we have learned what Jacob means and what is wrong with it, but we haven’t yet come to understand fully the meaning of Israel, and the concept of power and restraint that is Israelism. But that deserves a portion of its own, and it’s not told in the Torah.”
*
My third story is about Brant Rosen, an American rabbi who serves a Reconstructionist congregation in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago.
In 2006 Rosen launched a blog called Shalom Rav (in English, Abundant Peace), with a strong focus on social justice. Two years later, he hit the “send” key for a blog post that he believed could well pitch him out of his pulpit.
In his youth, Rosen was a liberal Zionist:
“My Jewish identity has been profoundly informed by the classic Zionist narrative: the story of a small underdog nation forging a national and cultural rebirth out of the ashes of its near-destruction. The redemptive nature of this narrative has at times assumed a quasi-sacred status for me, as it has for many American Jews of my generation and older…”
The trouble was, this story kept rubbing up against awkward realities. Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006 began to shake the foundations. But it was Operation Cast Lead – Israel’s last ground war in Gaza, in 2008/9 – that brought the whole building crashing down in ruins.
“The news today out of Israel and Gaza makes me just sick to my stomach,” he wrote on his blog:
“We good liberal Jews are ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass… What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza… has brought neither safety nor security to the people of Israel and it has wrought nothing but misery and tragedy upon the people of Gaza.”
“There, I’ve said it. Now what do I do?”
What he did was to embark on a very public journey, neatly captured in the title of a compilation of his posts he published in 2012: Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity. Remarkably, his congregation didn’t fire him. Instead, they found ways to talk, even when they disagreed with him, just as those commenting on his blog posts did. At the end of the book, he reprints an article from the Chicago Jewish News with the splendid headline Hell freezes over, Cubs win World Series, Jews find ways to disagree agreeably.
The Chicago Cubs, for those of you not from Illinois, are the local baseball team, who haven’t won the World Series since 1908.
*
Why do I like these three people – Mary, and Avraham, and Brant? Why do their stories resonate with me so much I want to share them with you?
It’s partly because ever since I was a teenager I too have wrestled with an imperfect church and an even more imperfect world.
But it’s also because in the course of half a century, I have made the same discovery they did, and Jacob did on that dark night by the Jabbok: where I thought I was wrestling, really it was God wrestling with me, changing me for good.
God is very near to us in Scripture, as we wrestle with the word.
God is nearer still in Christ, described by Matthew at the beginning of his Gospel as Immanuel – God with us.
And Christ is very near to us this morning, as we take bread and wine only to find that it is really he who celebrates the sacrament.
In sharing bread with us, Christ makes us his companions: that’s what “companion” means.
“Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.”
That is what Christ does with us this morning. He invites us to share our bread, to make the others – especially the poor and downtrodden – our companions on the journey to the Father, sisters and brothers in building a more human, more just, and less violent society. He takes us for a moment out of the world to make us whole and then sends us straight back to that broken world to make it whole too.
Sources
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Avraham Burg, Very Near to You: Human Readings of the Torah (Jerusalem & Springfield, NJ: Gefen, 2012)
Gustavo Gutiérrez, Sharing the Word through the Liturgical Year (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997)
Mary Levison, Wrestling with the Church: One Woman’s Experience (London: Arthur James, 1992)
Brant Rosen, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity (Charlottesville, VA: Just World, 2012)
Menachem Wecker, “Brant Rosen, suburban Chicago rabbi, doubles as firebrand critic of Israel: Evanston congregation stands by Jewish Voice for Peace leader”, The Jewish Daily Forward, November 29, 2013