Opening
Have you ever looked back at some event in your life and realized that God's hand had been with you all along? At the time you were certain that things were going bad, and you felt all alone and had no idea how to go forward?
Have you ever spent days or weeks or months or even years asking God to deliver you from something, only to discover that what had once looked like oppression was in fact the instrument of God's deliverance?
Have you ever been hit over the head by what's going on in your life and wondered what could God possibly make of all this? Then just asking the question, you understood what God was doing in your life?
Questions like that swirled around me in 2008. The previous year my family had hosted a young student for half a year of school so that she could attend Kamehameha school in Honolulu. It is one of the premier K-12 schools in Hawaii and is reserved for descendants of indigenous Hawaiians. It didn't work out well with other members of my family, and she had to return to her family on Maui at Christmas time.
Somehow I couldn't get the notion of hosting an exchange student out of my head. I had hosted a student from Brazil in 1988 and 89, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. So in 2008 I pursued it some more. I made an application to receive a student from Lebanon under a program that brought to the U.S. young people from Muslim countries, exposing them to the ways of the United States. In the summer of 2008 I drove to the airport and picked up Leen Al Yaman from Saida, Lebanon.
The last time I preached -- some weeks ago -- I talked a little bit about how there is a three-year cycle of lessons that we hear on Sunday morning. In the year 2008 we were reading the same Gospel passages we are hearing this year. The Sunday that year when today’s gospel was read was the first day that I took Leen Al Yaman to church. She was from the town of Saida -- in biblical times it was known as Sidon (of "Tyre and Sidon"). We have heard today about Jesus going away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. There he met a woman desperately seeking help for her daughter. She pleaded with Jesus to cure her, even at a great distance. One thing is especially interesting about this passage. Here is a woman who argues with Jesus and he decides that she's right. She didn’t back down when Jesus said no.
Whoa! That's not what we would have expected of Jesus. In a situation, and with a person that seemed totally unlikely, God acted decisively for healing and for good.
Now that morning in 2008, in my sermon, I made the claim that I heard God putting his stamp of approval on this young lady who had come to live with my family for a year. She was Muslim, and sometimes she had difficulty with our language and customs, but she was completely embraced by our faith community. She read the Quran that year for the first time in her life. She taught us about Middle Eastern cooking. She made a special dish for our regional community celebration of a Seder meal at Passover. There were about 150 in attendance that year. She danced a belly dance down the aisle of Saint Andrew's Cathedral, on the occasion of her and my daughter's graduation from the Priory school for girls.
God blessed her that year, and I first began to recognize it in that sermon on today's gospel.
It has become a conviction of mine, that God generally acts in our lives in ways that we least expect it. In my case it was a young lady, a Muslim, from the land of Tyre and Sidon.
I am grateful for Fr. Agostino's preaching last week as he spoke eloquently about Joseph the son of Jacob. A most unlikely person for God to make the lynchpin for the survival of God's chosen people. In a previous sermon I mentioned how I regard the Old Testament as an important part of our reading of the Bible. He said something that really caught my attention. "God always takes the initiative." He pointed to an important theme in the books of the Torah, namely providing an explanation for the origin of various names and customs that were a part of the life of Israel 3,000 years ago. I use the word Torah to refer to the 1st 5 books of the Bible -- the word torah has other meanings as well). The Joseph saga is, at least in part, intended to give an explanation for why it is that the people of Israel, at one point in their early history, emerged from Egypt, of all places.
Again and again the Bible catches us by surprise (remember how God works).
The hand of God is seen in the choosing of the people Israel. God was in charge through all the wandering, misfires, and exceptional happenings. Joseph is a dreamer. He dreams dreams and the world around him changes. As the Torah was being recited through the generations and then finally written down, the people remembered that they had come from Egypt. They told the story of Joseph to explain how they got to Egypt in the first place. God took them there.
As the people looked back, lo and behold, they could see God's hand at work. It was true for ancient Israel and it is true for us.
Experience with narrative Bible study
For nearly 30 years of my ministry, I was involved with a variety of groups that met weekly for a particular kind of Bible study called African Bible Study. I read somewhere that a similar method had developed at about the same time in Latin America. It is also basically the same practice that the church has used from ancient times, known as lectio divina. Somebody suggested it's more like Bible sharing than what we customarily call Bible study.
In any case, the method that I have used is basically a matter of reading a text from the bible three times. - The first time each person responds to the question: "What stands out in the passage?" - The second time each person responds to the question: "What is God telling me in this passage?" - And the third time, the question is: "What does God want me to do or change as a result of what God has spoken to me?"
Now I have participated in this method many hundreds of times. I used to say that every time one or more persons heard God speak. And indeed lives were changed, sometimes profoundly, sometimes just in ways that a person could get through the next few days with some kind of equanimity. I've stopped emphasizing that God spoke every time because I am very cautious about making universal statements. There are, after all, pretty much always exception, whenever we say something is always the case. But you get the point.
What is God telling us in scripture today?
One thing comes through for me. And that is that our experience and expectations of God are too small for the reality, the majesty, and the mystery of God.
Reading the Bible
One person wrote recently about reading the Bible:
[It] can be as gentle as a watercolor and as powerful as a thunderstorm. It can be taken literally or taken seriously but not always both. It's a library written over centuries, containing poetry and metaphor as well as history and biography, and without discernment, it makes little sense. It has to be, must be, read through the prism of empathy and the human condition.1
Even more to my point is a book I first read in the 1990's. I quickly accepted the author's argument that we Christians don't follow and put our trust in a big enough God.
The title of the book was, naturally enough, A Big Enough God. The God of the Bible is both majestic and personal. When we expect God to be so majestic as to be out of reach, we end up expecting a God too small to be significant. When we make God all about our very limited perspective in a universe of quasars and quarks, we end up awaiting a God too petty to be God.
"God is not careful, is not bound by the rules. God is careless, profligate even. The imagination of God is outrageous."
That just seems manifestly true to me. Otherwise God is not the God who created the universe and all that is. Consider this passage from Annie Dillard in another classic work titled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She describes God's creativity this way:
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold soil, lock up solar energy and give off oxygen. Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? ... But look what happens ... Look at practically anything — the coot’s feet, the mantis’ face, a banana, the human ear -- and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing. There is no-one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, ‘Now that one there is absolutely ridiculous and I won't have it.’ ... Is our taste so much better than the creator’s? The creator creates. Does he stoop, does he speak, does he save, succour, prevail? Maybe. But he creates. He creates everything and anything.”
Ending
When we listen attentively to what God is speaking to us -- you just never know what might happen. It's an amazing and a wondrous journey. And in the end we will be able to look back and recognize that God's hand has been in all of it.
Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of Jesus most holy life.
Amen.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/12/opinions/priest-conversion-lgbt-rights-coren/index.html↩
