Calling a Different World Into Being
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
Consider these compelling words of David Jasper, long-running British biblical scholar and literary critic:
As Susan Handelman has remarked of the rabbinic view, “The Torah is not an artifact of nature, a product of the universe; the universe, on the contrary, is the product of the Torah.” In short, texts create worlds (Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology (2023) 118.
The generalizing sentence for Jasper is an affirmation concerning the generative force of texts. This is not a new insight, but Jasper’s sentence invites our reflection on it. His other sentence brings the generalizing sentence close to home: Torah produces a world! It is a world governed by a generous, gracious God. It is a world of human freedom and responsibility. It is a world shaped to respond to the creator God in glad praise and in derivative generativity. It is a world on its way to faithfulness and fruitfulness. The faithful--first Jews, and then Christians and Muslims--propose to live in that world of glad, grateful obedience.
But then I thought more broadly about competing texts that create competing worlds, and just how there are words and texts that create a world of fear.
It is a world of scarcity. This is a wide-spread world among us, as standard economic work claims its responsibility for the management of scarce resources in the world. The world is dominated by the fear of running out and not having enough.
It is a world of hostility, for scarcity makes us all competitors for the same scarce goods, and competitors readily and easily become adversaries and enemies, thus a world of “each against all.”
It is a world of quid pro quo revenge, of paying back in kind (or more!) for every affront, every infringement upon one’s self and one’s well-being: no quarter asked or expected, no quarter given.
Sooner or later, it becomes a world of violence in which we claim freedom to defend our turf and our possessions against all others who are best seen as threats. (“Stand your ground!”)
This world—of fear, scarcity, hostility, revenge, and violence—is consequently an exhausting world in which to live. One must be alert and on guard against every infringement and threat to one’s “holdings.”
In the midst of this world of fear sits the church. Much too often the church imitates and performs the world of fearful scarcity. Much too often the church accepts the tacit assumptions of that world of fear. All too frequently the church softens or mutes its claims to the contrary, sobered by “reality” to mute the claim that “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations,” a story of “peace and light,” peace to override our pernicious arms races, light to counter the darkness of our fear.
We may imagine, with some clarity, how it is that the church meets. We always meet in the presence of that world of fear. When we come to the meeting of the church, we bring some of that fear with us, because it occupies our very being. When the church is brave and faithful, however, it does not give in to or accommodate our fear that we carry with us. Rather it acknowledges that fear and invites us to an alternative world of hope. The Bible is a script for living, without accommodation, in a world of hope. That hope is articulated at the outset in the imperative to father Abraham and mother Sarah, “Go,” go to a new land (Genesis 12:1-2). The Bible is testimony to the travel to that land of promise, with the honest recognition that the great roster of the faithful were always “desiring a better country” (Hebrews 11:16), but that they “did not receive what was promised” (11:39). The Bible is a narrative of being on the way to a land of promise that is kept out before us. And we are left to decide how to live out that hope in a world of fear. Thus the congregation meets to reaffirm its hope, to consider what disciplines and expectations are possible and necessary in order to accent hope that contradicts fear.
So imagine the congregation, knowingly and intentionally, countering the world of fear. That world of hope is one of God’s abundance that refuses the fearful scarcity of that old world. In his wise, urgent book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy (2024), Jim Wallis follows Heather McGhee in these words:
The zero-sum world view [is] at the heart of racism, the idea that something good for my ingroup must not benefit the outgroup. That is, efforts made to advance the social standing of Black people must not happen at white people’s expense, a perspective perfectly illustrated by the knee-jerk, infantile reaction of those who respond to the assertion of “Black lives matter” with “What about white lives?” (198).
As “zero-sum” pertains to our racism, so it pervades every fearful ideology operative among us, those of class, nation, and gender as well. Abundance is a primary marker of the will and intent of the creator God. God’s capacity for abundance is made stunningly evident in the manna narrative of Exodus 16, wherein the creator God, in an environment of acute scarcity, overwhelms Israel with bread that is beyond its control or comprehension, along with ample water and meat:
They asked, and he brought quails,
and gave them food from heaven in abundance.
He opened the rock, and water gushed out;
It flowed through the desert like a river (Psalm 105:40-41).
The narrative makes no effort to explain this “wonder bread.” It only attests to its remarkable abundance that transforms a desert into a place of viability. The abundance of manna, moreover, is replicated in the “feeding miracles” of Jesus in Mark 6:30-44 and 8:1-10. Again the narrator voices no “explanation” for the abundance of bread but only attests that when Jesus is present, abundance prevails. With Jesus, as with Moses, the gift of bread amounts to a staggering surplus. When the congregation meets, it meets to contradict and defy the claim of scarcity that pervades our society. There is enough; there is more than enough; good gifts continue to be given that outrun our expectation or our explanation. The world is God’s good creation; God presides over it in ways that defy and refute our parsimony. The congregation meets to affirm that claim, and to act out that claim in its life of generosity.
The world of hope is God’s world of hospitality that readily hosts us in our neediness. It is a powerful refutation of the old world of hostility that is everywhere around us. God’s particular practice of hospitality pertains to those much too often neglected or forgotten by dominant culture. In ancient Israel, the company of the excluded and the forgotten included widows who were with patriarchal advocacy, orphans who had no parental advocate, and sojourners who were characteristically outsiders, and the poor who were excluded from the resources of society. That roster is recurring in the ancient world and in our contemporary world as well: widows, orphans, sojourners, the poor!
In its lyric Israel can attest:
Father of orphans and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
God gives the desolate a home to live in;
he leads out the prisoners to prosperity (Psalm 68:5-6).
[The Lord their God] executes justice for the oppressed;
who gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
The Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers;
he upholds the orphan and the widow (Psalm 146:7-9).
Moses, moreover, can reiterate this doxology and then derive from it an ethical imperative for Israel:
For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribes, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:17-19).
The scale that sings of YHWH runs from “God of gods” to “orphan and widow,” in Christian tradition, is a figure to be reiterated in the affirmation of Christ whom we confess to be God embodied, the poor man from Nazareth who went about doing good. The church meets to affirm that we live in a world of God’s generative hospitality, a claim that in turn is a mandate to the church.
The church meets amid a fearful world that is busy with its quid pro quo reasoning, its propensity to “get even” and retaliate with vengeance of “an eye for an eye.” In the face of that common assumption and practice among us, the church meets to acknowledge and be grateful that God is one who does not keep score, but who rather forgives and invites to a new forgiven life. Thus the psalmist can recite the great catalog of God’s generous propensities:
…who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
who satisfies you with good as long as you live,
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s (Psalm 103:3-5).
Indeed the psalmist can aver,
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities (v. 10).
It cannot be unimportant that the first act in God’s portfolio is “forgiveness.” There are, to be sure, ample cases in scripture in which God is a quid pro quo score-keeper. But eventually that divine inclination is overwhelmed by the other impetus of God to welcome back to acceptance those who contradict the purposes of God. What Israel confesses in its doxologies Jesus attests in his parable of the lost sons. In the narrative, the father readily welcomes home his renegade son (Luke 15:22-24). The father does not retaliate or moralize. He welcomes in unrestrained gladness. The older brother is inclined toward quid pro quo reasoning and believes he is entitled to the father’s generosity (vv. 29-30). But the father overrides all such calculations and offers a lavish welcome home. Somewhere in a footnote, Hannah Arendt, the great Jewish critic, observed that the most radical claim in Christian tradition is not the resurrection of Jesus; it is forgiveness! It is forgiveness, and only forgiveness, that can break the vicious deathly cycle of retaliation and revenge. The God of the Gospel is one who breaks the lethal cycles in a move of astonishing generosity. The congregation meets in order to be on the receiving end of that astonishing generosity, and then resolves, yet again, to take that generosity of forgiveness as its own faithful way of being in the world.
The church meets amid a world of violence and the threat of violence. That violence is variously offered in aggravated rhetoric, in mean-spirited posturing, and in an over-armed international community. In the midst of that world the church meets to receive the peace-making ways of God and to embrace its own calling to peace-making. Thus we recite again then ancient imperative,
To beat our swords into plowshares and
our spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3).
We meet to consider how to convert our armed ways of being in the world into tools of agriculture, and so to sources of food for a hungry world. We know very well that violence can only produce more violence; that it will never lead to secure prosperous living for the entire creaturely community.
So imagine—a church of hope that gathers yet again to affirm the abundance, hospitality, forgiveness, and peace-making reality of God. Imagine further that we meet to embrace as our ethical commitment and practice to a way in the world marked exactly by
abundance that has no fear of scarcity;
hospitality that is not in any way seduced by hostility;
forgiveness that resists any notion of vengeance; and
peace-making that intends to override the force of violence.
The primary venue for such world-making in the church is its liturgy. Our singing, our praying, and our preaching are conducted on the basis of the claim that this is the real world that God has given us. That other world of fear, scarcity, hostility, vengeance, and violence, to the contrary, is a counterfeit world to which we give no credence.
It remains for the pastors of the church to be clear, uncompromising, and unambiguous that this is the real world that we are invited both to embrace and to perform. This means that the pastor must resist the real pressure to tone down the radicality of the claim in the interest of practicality. Liturgy is no proper venue for practicality, but is a zone of unfettered imagination that concerns our daily life in the world according to this claim.
That is why we sing hymns and that bespeak a different world, hymns that cannot be reduced
to so-called “praise hymns” that lack any narrative substance;
that is why we pray daring prayers of praise and thanks and need and complaint, refusing
the compromised silence of the world;
that is why we preach of God’s self-giving grace that is uncowed by our favorite monitoring
safeguards.
It is the work of liturgy, every time we meet, to construct yet again this counter-world. Participation in such a world-constructing enterprise is no place for cowards. Practice of such a world-constructing enterprise requires nerve and freedom, trust and humility. We have a most reliable text entrusted to us, a text that is counter to many of the dominant assumptions and practices of our society. This text requires our close attentiveness and our daring imagination. This combination of attentiveness and imagination makes possible a fresh exhibit of this world that leaves us emancipated and empowered to sustain our living in a societal context that so needs and so resists this good news.
