Whoa. Get a Bible. First read the text. These studies merely intend to help illuminate the text. We do not want to approach spiritual insight like a fast-food restaurant. We are not trying to rip off ideas for sermons (are we?). We come as the starving.
And it is really true, after all: We are all starved for the Word of God, in a world that pummels us with words. We thirst for a transformative, insightful word in a salt-sea of information. The lectionary guides are not the text. They merely attempt to serve the text. Holy Spirit, illuminate your Word. Save us from words (even from these study guides).
If you can, call together a group of friends or kindred searchers to work through these texts in community. Pouring over the Bible with others can unleash what Michel Foucault calls an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges." It helps us to hear what we have been ordered not to hear, or to discount. It permits the text to be untamed, de-domesticated, dangerous, subversive of all our complacencies.
August 2: The Lie of Violence
2 Kings 13:14-20a; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21
Texts like this 2 Kings passage are an embarrassment. Where do we find the gospel in a narrative premised on the discredited notion of holy war, and chock-full of magical hocus-pocus to boot?
Violence is easily the most often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible. This violence is in part the residue of false ideas about God carried over from the general human past. It is also, however, the beginning of a process of raising the problem of violence to consciousness, so that these projections on God can be withdrawn. For in scripture, for the first time in all of human history, God begins to be seen as identified with the victims of violence. But these occasional critiques of domination in the Hebrew Bible continue to alternate with texts that call on Israel to exterminate its enemies now or in the last days.
The problem of violence could not have been discovered in a nonviolent society. It had to be gestated at the very heart of violence, in the most war-ravaged corridor on the globe, by a repeatedly subjugated people unable to seize and wield power for any length of time. The violence of scripture, so embarrassing to us today, became the means by which sacred violence was revealed for what it is: A lie perpetrated against victims in the name of a God who, through violence, was actually working to expose violence for what it is and to reveal the divine nature as nonviolent.
How do we continue to perpetuate that lie today?
August 9: The Serving Master
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-19; Luke 12:32-40
We can scarcely take this Jesus in. He seems to have been dead serious about the coming of God's domination-free order. And central to all domination are economic inequality and ranking.
Nothing sends terror through the bones of the American middle class more quickly than the injunction, Sell your possessions. We equivocate. We rationalize. We explain. And we do nothing but heap on guilt. Jesus is not trying to make us feel bad; he reminds us that it is all divine gift, not effort on our part: "Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom."
The early Christians and others right up to the present have tried living this way. The rest of us find ourselves unable to get off the dime, partly because this advice cannot be lived out except in a strong and supportive community. If we stopped trying to figure out what is the bare minimum of discipleship required of us, and thought of it as a present God wants to give us, how might we respond in terms of our possessions?
The next paragraph is a sleeper. We expect the usual apocalyptic advice to stay awake and be ready, like the Hebrews in Egypt the night of passover (Exodus 12:11). We are totally unprepared for what the master does on his arrival: He makes the servants recline, as at a formal banquet, girds himself, and serves them a meal himself. Jesus is overturning the whole edifice of social stratification and ranking. No master ever acted thus! But how to move this beyond a gesture (like the annual ritual humiliation of a king, which does nothing to diminish his power), to actual structural change?
Here the apocalyptic warning is appropriate. The collapse of communism and the failure of the churches means escalating poverty for the many, concentrated wealth for the few. Literal thieves are coming. But something else is coming: the Human Being ("Son of Man"). Will we be awake? Or are we the thieves? If the Human Being were alive in us, how might we begin expressing God's domination-free order in our daily lives?
August 16: Baptism by Fire
Jeremiah 20:7-13; Hebrews 12:1-2, 12-17; Luke 12:49-56
Jesus casts fire on the Earth: He has come to set the domination system ablaze, to inaugurate conflagration, and the approach to Jerusalem only intensifies the conflict. This is the baptism in fire that John preached, and only as we let ourselves be set afire can our chaff be burned away. But why is it so deep in the psyche and in society that bringers of fire must pay (Prometheus)?
Everyone knows we have to face the fire, even unbelievers; the psyche hurls this at us in dreams and dreaded visions of apocalyptic inferno. The attempt to postpone the encounter by conjuring up the fires of purgatory or hell in an afterlife is only a dodge. Fire is cast upon the Earth.
Jerusalem could no more face what Jesus brought than we. It is far easier to destroy the messenger of our darkness than to face it in ourselves and our social system. Jesus understands so deeply their longing for God; to what other people could this have come? Who else has known such passion for God?
That is the poignant horror of the renewed religiosity in the United States--it is so unconscious, so light-sided, such a flight from pain and darkness, so unaware of personal and national violence. Such religious messianism bears within itself the seeds of terrible destructiveness. We want restored prosperity, we want to be number one, and we don't care how we get it or want to know the means employed.
Jesus is dealing with this same huge, collective, inert, vindictive mass of embedded selfishness in society. He comes, not as a mediator, but as a stone of stumbling, a creator of dissension. The family itself, that most fundamental unit of domination and male supremacy, gender traps and hierarchy, is itself under assault by Jesus (Mark 3:31-35).
Is the increased conflict in our society over abortion, the environment, gender roles, and violence a kairos sign (verse 56)? Why have we distorted Jesus' message into one of conflict-free peaceableness? How have we structured our churches to prevent the kind of conflict needed if we are to face the darkness? How might we organize into cadres of fire-throwers who declare the demise of domination?
August 23: The Door to Life
Jeremiah 28:1-9; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:22-30
That's the way it always is: Jesus has his face set like flint toward Jerusalem, where he expects almost certain death, and some jerk wants to debate universal salvation ("Will only a few be saved?"). Jesus, as usual, answers not the question as asked, but the question behind the question. It is not abstract or future, but now: Have you entered by the narrow door that leads to life? Leave the rest to God.
Or worse: Perhaps the questioner believes he is one of the blessed few. Jesus relieves him of his presumptions. Perhaps you will be one of those excluded when Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets eat in the reign of God. Perhaps there will be hosts of "outsiders" there--the last people you ever wanted to share eternity with. The church quickly turned this into anti-Jewish polemic, seating Gentiles and evicting the Jews. But the spirit is the same as John the Baptist's: "Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'" (Luke 3:8).
Worse yet: When the owner of the house has locked the door, and some of us are left standing outside (Will you be in their number? Will I?), no amount of familiarity or persuasion will get us in. When the kairos comes and we let it pass, the consequences may be irreversible. When acid rain is not aggressively attacked, whole forests (like the Black Forest in Germany) may die. The door is shut. When we violate marital relationships and the hurting becomes unbearable, marriages dissolve, children suffer, families break up. The door is shut.
Are there doors shutting on me personally right now? Are there doors shutting on all of us? What kairos confronts us right now, and what am I going to do about it?
August 30: A New Kind of Banquet
Ezekiel 18:1-9, 25-29; Hebrews 13:1-8; Luke 14:1, 7-14
Is this tongue in cheek? Go to a banquet and take the lowest place. I've tried it, and they left me there. He must be talking to people with more standing. Is this just a way to get yourself exalted? Hardly. The Symposiarch, or president of the banquet, was assigned the task of figuring out the pecking order of the guests. One's honor and prestige rode on where one was seated. To deliberately flout the pecking order is to negate it altogether.
Jesus also counsels not inviting friends, brothers, relatives, or rich neighbors, but rather a very different quartet made up of the poor, crippled, lame, and blind. Is he just being perverse? Hardly. If he is seriously intent on overthrowing the domination system, then such hierarchies must go. They shame the less prosperous and desirable, and exclude altogether whole classes of people.
Worship leader Marilyn McDonald had a 13-person group do this exercise: "You have been invited by a host who really cares for you. Eyes shut, you stand at the door to the banquet. You know that there are seats of honor at the right, seats of less honor to the left. The host is occupied elsewhere. Find the chair that seems to suit you."
All four men went to the right, seven women went to the left, one woman to the middle, only one to the right. And these were professionally trained women! The power of patriarchy is incredible. Studies show that 80 percent of conversational interruptions are men interrupting women. Our hierarchies are still intact, and deeply internalized. How do you catch yourself still demanding status? In what situations do you find yourself pulling rank? Needing to be noticed? Who are the poor, maimed, lame and blind whom you excluded from notice, inclusion, and concern?
September 6: The Cost of Discipleship
Ezekiel 33:1-11; Philemon 1:1-20; Luke 14:25-33
If catastrophe faces a people, a nation, a species, and the sentinels fail to warn those under their care, the blood of the people will be required at the hand of the sentinel. Perhaps the people will not listen; then their blood will be upon their own heads.
We live in such a time. Global warming, ozone depletion, overpopulation, massive starvation, air and water pollution, topsoil erosion, the death of the coral reefs and oceans, extermination of species, the continued threat of nuclear radiation from leaks, dumping, and accidents: Catastrophes threaten us on every hand. Our politicians are all but worthless; our president lacks conviction, vision, or concern. At a time when every human resource should be trained on surmounting these crises, torpor reigns.
And for good reason. Americans have a lot to lose from a more just and sustainable order. We are now slowly waking from a sleep of several thousand years to the realization that Jesus' most stringent commands are not calls to a superhuman piety, but the foundation of human survival. We are told to count the cost of discipleship before we make the plunge, because what God now requires of us is not halfway measures and limp compromise, but responses equal to the urgency of our gathering catastrophes.
To take up our own crosses means breaking free of the socialization that keeps us complicit with a profligate and ecologically unsustainable system. Consumerism, possessions, hoarding, the fascination of ever-new technologies--all these seduce us from living simply so that others may simply live. "None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions" (Luke 14:33). Does Jesus really mean this? Is it even possible?
This is more than we can hear. Yet it is gospel: good news. It offers hope of survival. The cost is painful. But we will pay it voluntarily, now, or involuntarily, later. We still, barely, have a choice.
September 13: Mighty Acts of God
Hosea 4:1-3, 5:15-6:6; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10; Psalm 77:11-20
I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord (Psalm 77:11), in a society that is blind to the acts of God even when they are paraded under its very nose. I will remember your wonders of old: not just when you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron through the sea, or in the resurrection of Jesus. Those wonders have become hackneyed, routine, church-calendared, pageant-weary, bleary with the unction of religiosity. So we needed a reminder that you are still God. And you gave it.
I will meditate on all your work, and muse upon your mighty deeds: How in 1989 alone you liberated 12 nations from despotism by means of nonviolent revolutions. Ten of these were communist nations, where everyone had said nonviolence could never work: Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Mongolia. Only in Romania was significant violence mixed with the nonviolence. The other two nations were Chile and Brazil.
Since then we have witnessed nonviolent revolts in China and Burma (where they were, for the time being, suppressed), Nepal, Madagascar, Togo, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Add to that the earlier nonviolent revolutions in India, Ghana, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Mexico. In this century, two-thirds of humanity--3,340,900,000 people--have seen your strong arm outstretched to bring justice to the nations, to put an end to war.
You are truly the God who works wonders; you have displayed your might among the peoples (Psalm 77:14).
Hey people, did you notice that God was doing all these things? Did you call it "God"? Or did you ascribe it solely to human agents? Where else is God acting and we are not seeing it? The time will come when God will seem absent, even unfavorably disposed to us (Psalm 77:1-10). How can we use our memories in such times to keep hope alive?
September 20: Apostasy from the Gospel
Hosea 11:1-11; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
In Hosea, God laments Israel's proclivity to sacrifice to the Baals and offer incense to idols. "My people are bent on turning away from me." Yet God cannot turn away from them. God's love trumps God's anger; mercy overwhelms wrath. But only after the consequences of apostasy have played themselves out.
We can watch apostasy being played out in the first epistle to Timothy. This is a text many avoid. First there is the supine acquiescence to the political order. Not that it is wrong to pray for those in high positions. We should be praying far more aggressively and persistently than we have been. But the reason Timothy gives for doing so is suspect: "that we might lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity." Our prayers are no longer mighty intercessions that aim to transform the powers that be, but meek petitions for safety and even prayers of thanksgiving for the benevolence of kings and magistrates.
As if that were not enough, we also avoid this text because of its attitude toward women. Gone here is the radicalism of Jesus, who in every encounter with a woman in all four gospels violated the mores of his time regarding women. Now all the talk is of reinserting them back into patriarchy. How do you feel about this text?
We cannot duck the issue. Here scripture violates itself. As in the case of slavery, scripture is not always faithful to the gospel. When it is not, the gospel can still be heard and proclaimed--by pointing out the truth. Those who were repatriarchalizing and domesticating the gospel have left their fingerprints all over the text. The gospel of Jesus exposes them as the apostates that they were. We do not do honor to Jesus by defending as inspired, texts of terror that dehumanize women and bring the church into docility before earthly authorities. God speaks through such texts nevertheless--to denounce them as apostate. Even then, these texts can bear witness to the Word of God, who is not a book, but a Being.
September 27: Lazarus at Our Gates
Joel 2:23-30; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
There once was a rich nation that consumed almost half the world's resources. Landed elites in the poor nations became rich by producing cash crops for export to this nation while their own people lacked adequate nutrition. Even in that rich nation, many were hungry and homeless, unemployed and ill. Yet the rich nation ignored them, or had them arrested. Because the rich nation really was not religious, but only pretended to be, it had no fear of divine punishment. And because it was so powerful politically and militarily, it was able to protect itself against revolts abroad and revolutions at home.
In short, this rich nation had nothing to fear from any quarter. Yet, inexplicably, it began to fall apart. The judgment it scoffed at in the future began to eat away at it like acid. In desperation its people began to arm themselves. Soon this rich land had the most heavily armed populace in the world. But still the acids continued to eat. They built walls to shut the emigrants and "inferior races" out. But still the acids continued to eat.
They called for the death penalty, for more prisons, for more arrests, for greater surveillance, for tougher sentencing. Their politicians got elected on platforms of resentment, fear, and greed. The people cried for the restoration of traditional values, not recognizing that these values had landed them in the soup they were now in. And still the corrosive acids continued to eat at the fabric of society.
It never occurred to them that salvation lay in solidarity with these poor within and outside their borders. Like the rich man in the parable, this rich nation could not understand that the gate outside which Lazarus perpetually lies is an opening, not a barrier. All he had to do is go out and connect with the poor, and seek a common destiny. All he had to do was recognize what lay before his very eyes.
This parable is not about an afterlife (on which we may be willing to take our chances). The poor are at our gate--now. The judgment is already ineluctably working. It is stark warning and desperate compassion: If we won't do what's right because it's right, will we at least do it out of fear?
Walter Wink was professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and the author of Transforming Bible Study (second edition, Abingdon Press, 1990) when this article appeared.
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