First Sunday in Lent – March 5, 2017
Olivia Hamilton
My best friend is a Hebrew School teacher in
Brooklyn – one of the main responsibilities she has in this role is to prepare
middle-schoolers for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. As a performer and a poet, she
undertakes this endeavor with endless creativity, always coming up with new
ways to engage young people in the richness of the Jewish tradition, and to
help them locate their own unique place within it. The young people embroider
prayer shawls, they create raps and rhymes in order to learn Hebrew letters and
words, and they engage their Torah portions with awe and wonder, as if the text
were alive, always being encouraged to make connections between the world we
live in, and the world they encounter in these ancient stories.
There is one activity
that she does with her students that I have become really fond of –the prompt
is simple and goes as follows: the young people are instructed to identify ways
that God is depicted and imagined in the Hebrew Bible. For example, some
familiar images include God as a teacher, a father, a king or a ruler. In
Exodus, God is called a “man of war” and Moses calls God an unchanging rock.
The student’s attention is also drawn to more ambiguous terms that are used in
the Hebrew Bible to talk about God, such as the word makom, which literally means “the place.”
Rather than signifying a precise location, makom is a way of gesturing toward God’s
revelation in time and space, and how God manifests in particular communities
and is revealed in particular places. For instance, when Abraham is preparing
to sacrifice Isaac at Mount Moriah, makom is used to signify both the place
where God has instructed Abraham to go, but also God’s closeness to Abraham
there. As Jewish scholar Barbara Mann writes, makom, in this instance “indicates the biblical
topography – in this case the heights – as well as the presence… of divinity.” Makom is any place where we meet God
intimately in our lives, and in the Bible is variously depicted as a desert, a
mountaintop, a wilderness, a winding road – not places on a map, per se, but
times in our lives when we are disoriented and must pay close attention to
where God is leading us.
Next, the students
are asked to think about how each of these images of God help to shape our
understanding of ourselves – and by that I mean: if God is _____ than we are ______. So,
using some of the examples that I just named:
· if God is a judge, than we are people who have erred and are in need of
mercy.
· If God is a teacher, than we ought to listen, learn and observe.
Those analogies come
pretty easily – but what about if God is makom, the place? I encourage you to think
about this for a moment. (Silence).
As I think about it,
if God is the place, than perhaps we are pilgrims or
travelers, seeking rootedness, disoriented, but always wandering on the terrain
of God’s loving-kindness, whether we know it or not.
-------
On Wednesday when I
had ashes imposed on my forehead, I was thinking of this image as I heard the
words “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” If we are dust,
than it seems God is the place from which we came to which we are
always coming back to. I think of it as a blessing that our scriptures give us
so many images for who and what God is, and how what it means to be in
relationship to God. I am especially grateful that starting with the ashes on
our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, Lent is a season when we are reminded that
although our lives are fragile, God’s love for us is unfathomably strong, and
whether we are wandering through the temptations of the wilderness or walking
on the road to Jerusalem, following Jesus to the Cross, God is the solid ground
under our feet – the context in which our whole lives take place.
Today we hear the
story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness – the wilderness, I think, is makom: it is a place that represents
Jesus’ trusting relationship with God, and it is a potent reminder of human
vulnerability, on one hand, and divine strength on the other. In the
wilderness, Jesus is tempted by Satan, who desires to outsmart him and cause
him to disobey God. Jesus’ time in the wilderness is a test of sorts: how bad
are his hunger pangs that he would be tempted to turn a stone into a loaf of
bread in order to eat? How compelling is his desire for power that he would
follow Satan in order to have all of the kingdoms of the world handed over to
him?
There Jesus is,
famished and weak, vulnerable to temptation – a very human moment in the
narrative of his life. But he also trusts in the strength of God’s promise to
him, and knows that he will not be abandoned there. This temptation seems to
foreshadow what we know will happen on the Cross: the jeers and taunting and
humiliation that Jesus will endure, his body hanging in a posture of ultimate
weakness, nailed to a cross, tempted to believe that God has forsaken him, but
trusting in God’s strength nonetheless.
Human weakness and
the strength of God. These are the realities that we encounter and move between
in these forty days: we encounter our own weakness as we reflect on the ways
that we sometimes sin and miss the mark, so to speak, failing to treat our
neighbors as ourselves. We hold grudges, we don’t ask for help when we need it,
we judge others and the world through our limited perspectives, failing to see
how each person encounters God in a unique place, in a unique way. We encounter
our own vulnerability as we are reminded that life is fleeting, and that our
bodies will not last forever.
The poet Christian
Wiman grapples with this in his lyrical autobiography, My Bright Abyss, which was written shortly after he
was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He writes, about his own frailty, saying
-- “Herein lies the
great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of
Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other.
But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals… strength.”
What Wiman seems to be saying here is that in Christ, strength and
weakness are altogether bound up in one another, and more, that our own
weakness – our own tendency to give into temptations of power or ease or
material stability – is reconciled through Christ’s total trust in the strength
of God.
Thinking back to the concept of makom
– the place or places where
we encounter God – I want to leave you with a few questions to ponder today,
and throughout these next forty days:
In the terrain of your life, where are you feeling closeness (or
distance) from God?
Where is the
place where the wounds of
Christ are touching your wounds?
Where is the
place where God’s strength is
yearning to meet your human weakness?
I want to close in the words of our collect for
the day, which I think is so powerful as to bear repeating: “Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit
to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many
temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find
you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.” Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment