God of the Testaments III: “If God is on your side, then who’s on mine?”: Blessings revisited.
Tim Schmucker
Genesis 12.1-7; Exodus 15.1-3, 20-21; Deuteronomy 28.1-2, 7-10
Isaiah 2.2-3; Matthew 5.43-45; Acts 10.34-36
Before I start this sermon, I want to say something to the youth. You should know that you instigated this sermon. A dynamic conversation you had in your Sunday school class numerous weeks ago with Lori is what sparked this sermon in me. So I want to thank you for the impetus, and also invite you to listen to my take. So Derek and Quinton, Silvie and Sarita, Bridgit and Cheyenne, Jerrem and Isaac, Madeleine and Magdalene, Clay and Timoni – are you up to listening? I’d really like to hear what you think afterwards.
“So Tim, I need to tell you why I want nothing to do with your Judeo-Christian god.” We were heading west on the 401, to Leamington — Point Pelee, to be exact. My traveling companions were long-time friends from Toronto. One was a Quebecoise who grew up in Quebec Catholicism and came of age in the silent revolution, and the other a humanist who had read and observed a fair bit about the American religious right. Both were deeply moral and ethical guys who self-identified as agnostic or atheist. In Leamington, we were going to be biking with a gang of Mennonites from Ohio, and I had been briefing my Torontonian friends about the influence of American evangelicalism on Mennonites in the USA, and what to expect during the weekend. They listened carefully, and then Sean told me why he wanted nothing to do with a Judeo-Christian god: “It’s all about the whole blessings business, and the way you see yourselves as “god’s chosen people.” That’s all out-dated ideas that have been responsible for loads of violence over the last thousands of years.
Or as Kitchener singer-songwriter, Danny Michel, sang a few years ago: “If God’s on your side, then who’s on mine?” My friend Sean even said it more bluntly: “your God is a tribal god.” (By tribal god he meant the god of a group or tribe of people, who favours them and is god only for them.)
Does Sean have a point? He certainly raised for me the question of how we understand scripture that seems to prove his argument? This was one of the reasons the preaching team developed this preaching series on “God of the Testaments.” And so, how do I answer Sean? How would you? Perhaps our answers are as important for us as they are for him, for those answers shapes our understanding of God, faith and the Bible. And to simply say, we know God best through Jesus, while perhaps true and helpful, doesn’t deal with the many Biblical passages that appear to support Sean’s point.
So, to explore those issues, we need to embark on a rapid romp through the Bible. But first I want to state at the outset some assumptions I have about our beloved Bible and how we understand her messages for us today. These are foundational for how I interpret the Bible.
- 1. I think we need to grapple with the extent to which specific historical peoples and their cultures shaped scripture. Scripture is saturated with their issues, struggles and realities, some of which we may share today, others that are completely foreign.
- 2. In addition, when we read the Bible, we take our own culture with our issues, struggles and realities to scripture when we read it. We in 21st century urban Ontario read the Bible through very different lenses compared to people of ancient times, and also compared to others today – rural Colombia for example. Our understandings of scriptures’ messages are deeply shaped by our lenses.
- 3. The influence of culture directly shapes one’s understanding of God. The Israelites didn’t start with a fully formed concept of God, nor did they understand God the way we do today. Even our understanding and experience of God isn’t exactly the same as a generation ago. Sure, there is much continuity, but both subtly and drastically, some understandings are honed and shifted.
So it all began with Abram at the very beginning of the story of God’s people in Genesis. Yahweh (translated in most English Bibles as “the Lord”) calls Abram to leave his country and his folk and go to a new land. There, Yahweh promises to make of him a great nation: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Five chapters later in Genesis, there is another version. In chapter 17, El-Shaddai, that is “God of the Mountain,” choses Abram and makes a covenant with him. El Shaddai promises to Abram they he will become a great nation, and that God will give him all the land of Canaan. So, God chose Abram and called him into special status, promising him land and that he’d be the father of a great nation.
Special status. Chosenness. That’s what greatly bothered Sean. That “God” would choose Abram, now called Abraham, above all others. And then the Lord made a covenant – that is, a sacred agreement stating “I’ll do this if you do that – with his chosen people, a covenant that demanded mutual exclusivity. Then, centuries later, when God’s chosen people had been enslaved in Egypt, Yahweh heard their groaning and remembered his covenant with them and thus liberated them, leading them to the Promised Land. Three months after their escape from slavery, they arrived at Mount Sinai where Yahweh reintroduced himself to his people, saying: “you’ve seen what I’ve done for you. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.” Later as they were about to enter the promised land, this special status was re-affirmed; in Deuteronomy chapter 7, they were instructed to NOT mix with the inhabitants of the Promised Land; rather, destroy their gods, “for the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” Later, the covenant and its blessings needed to be renewed frequently over time.
Blessings. From God. To be blessed means “to be favoured by God,” and thus blessings come from God. And that’s another core complaint of Sean’s: God blesses his own to the exclusion of others. Exclusion or worse. Could be a curse, the opposite of blessing. Curse your enemies! So blessings if you’re chosen, curses if you’re not. In liberating his people from slavery in Exodus, Yahweh is experienced as a warrior god who fights for his chosen people and defeats their enemies. It’s “we versus them.”
So back then in the Exodus, when the Lord parted the Red Sea and led his people through, he released t
he waters and the pursuing Egyptian army was destroyed. The people then rejoiced and sang. The song is recorded in Exodus chapter 15, and it is one of the oldest things recorded in the Bible. In technical terms, it predates the formation of many other stories in the Pentateuch. Doug (Jane) read it earlier: “Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: ‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my might. The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name.” Then it was Miriam’s turn, this time with tambourines and dancing, singing the same words. And we have the same theme throughout the Psalms: “Who is the King of glory? YHWH, strong and mighty; YHWH mighty in battle.” [Ps 24] And prayers for deliverance from enemies: “in your steadfast love cut off my enemies and destroy all my adversaries, for I am your servant” [Ps 143].
This is this type of passage that has led people to develop a we/them mentality, believing that God was only on their side. Leap forward a millennium and we have priests and popes blessing the Crusaders as they set out to slaughter Muslims and Jews to regain the Holy Land. Then another millennium leap to the 20th century and the language in the United States each time they embark on a war. For example, during World War II, a popular song declared, “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” More recently, the September 11 attacks produced a resurgence of “God Bless America” sentiment, especially seen in the ubiquitous bumper sticker: “God Bless our Troops.” A lighter example is American football celebrity Tim Tebow, who is known more for his kneeling in a prayer of thanks for God’s blessing after scoring a touchdown, than for his stellar quarterbacking.
Blessings, however, weren’t just for being in covenant with God, but rather they were for obedience to the covenant. Paraphrasing our reading this morning from Deuteronomy 28: Just obey me, the Lord your God, keeping all my commandments, and you’ll be the greatest of all nations on the earth. You’ll receive many blessings; just obey me. I, the Lord, will defeat any enemies who oppose you. I’ll defeat them utterly. You, however, will be blessed in everyway; especially with the land I am giving you. Just keep my commandments, and walk in my ways. All the peoples of this earth shall know you are mine, and they shall be afraid of you.
This is common Deuteronomic language. In another part, there’s an additional focus. See if you hear it: “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today; 28and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away to follow other gods that you have not known.
Other gods. Yes, there were many other gods, and Yahweh was very jealous in face of those other gods because the Lord demanded unwavering allegiance from his Chosen People. No two-timing allowed! Indeed, the very first commandment Moses brought down from the Mountain was “you shall have no other gods besides me.” If you ask why, that was stated immediately before: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” It’s like, hey, after all I’ve done for you, it’s inconceivable that you’d lust after other gods. But they did, of course – almost immediately; when Moses delayed coming down from the mountain where he was receiving the Ten Commandments, and many many times thereafter. This, even though the people were instructed to put to death anyone who called them to serve other gods, even if they were from their own family. Deut 13.1ff.
The Lord’s chosen people. A warrior God defeating his people’s enemies. Blessings and curses. How do we understand all this? And we must make sense of this, for if we don’t, we have no answer for Sean. Some Latin American and African theologies talk about God’s “preferential option for the poor”, meaning that Yahweh does take the side of the some people – not based on ethnicity or country, but rather based on being the underdog, the poor and oppressed. Yet, this begs the question. This answer only explains why or justifies God’s preferring some people over others. So the theological question remains. How do we answer my friend Sean?
First of all, some historical and anthropological evidence. The Biblical record presents God’s chosen people invading Canaan after being delivered out of slavery. Marilyn’s sermon last week dealt with one of the troubling texts from that conquest. Canaan was their Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. There they sought to establish themselves in the midst of tribal groupings of peoples, each devoted to the god of their own tribe. They thus characterized their conquest of the Promised Land in epic terms as a struggle between the Lord God of Israel and the tribal deities of their neighbours. However, there is little archaeological evidence that there actually had been any such invasion. Many scholars believe that the “invasion” was likely a slow infiltration or that they emerged from among the groups in Canaan. However God’s chosen people established themselves in the Promised Land, they totally believed that Yahweh the Lord their God had delivered them and handed their enemies over to them. They were victors because they were the Lord’s Chosen. Period. A bit of mythic hyperbole, perhaps. But that’s how they understood Yahweh God.
But then come their prophets, centuries after the “arrival” in the Promised Land. Due to the unfaithfulness of Yahweh’s Chosen People, the prophets started to shift their understanding of Yahweh, the Lord their God. And gradually, it became a huge paradigm shift for the Israelite people. Essentially, the prophets began to understand Yahweh as the Only God, the Lord of all peoples, of all nations. This was cemented with the incredulous loss of their Promised Land – the foundation of the Lord’s covenant and promise, and their subsequent exile. Let’s look at a few passages and their historic details.
In 742 BCE, a member of the royal family had a vision of Yahweh while in the Jerusalem Temple. Now, this was an anxious time for the people of Israel. Their king had died and his son was encouraging them to worship other gods along side Yahweh. In addition, the powerful Assyrian empire next door was looking hungrily at their lands. That royal family member was Isaiah, and he was quite disturbed with what was happening in his land: the threat of the Assyrian Empire along with the reduction of their faith in Yahweh to simply slaughtering and sacrificing animals in the temple. In his vision, Isaiah heard the Lord giving him a message for the “chosen people”: the Lord will lay waste to your land and cities until all is utterly desolate, and you will be sent far away. About Assyria, their powerful enemy, Yahweh said: “Ah Assyria, the rod of my anger – the club in their hands is my fury!!!!” [6.1-13; 10.5]
Assyria: this was what was chillingly new in Isaiah’s message. The god of Moses would have cast Assyria as the enemy. Now, the God of Isaiah saw Assyria as his instrument. It was not the Assyrian rulers who would drive the Israelites into exile and deva
state the country, but rather it is “Yahweh who drives his people out.” And this was a constant theme in the prophets. They understood God as becoming the lord and master of history, who had all the nations in his pocket.
And 137 years later, the prophet Jeremiah echoed Isaiah’s new understanding of Yahweh in 25.8f: “therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: because you have not obeyed my words, I am going to send for King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon who is my servant. I will bring [him] against this land and its inhabitants … I will utterly destroy them.” WOW! Yahweh was no longer understood as the tribal god of the Israelites, but Lord and Master of all nations, people and history.
In addition, according to many prophets, Yahweh was revolted by all the religious ceremonies the chosen people would do, supposedly to keep the covenant. The prophet Amos was representative when he proclaimed: “Thus says the Lord: I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
And while Amos attacked economic injustice, the prophet Hosea dwelt on the lack of an interior commitment to Yahweh, which comes before and must be much greater than exterior observance. So no longer would Yahweh the warrior god defeat all enemies of Israel, but rather The Lord of All was now using those enemies against Israel, to punish her for her unfaithfulness to the meaning of the covenant: justice and righteousness.
So the Chosen People were carried off into captivity, into exile. And what a traumatic paradigm shift that was. Not only was it their own Lord God who caused their exile, but their Promised Land, the foundation of the covenant and promise of Yahweh, was devastated and lost. Clearly, God was not who they understood God to be. Hey Sean, are we making any headway?
Then, in the Isaiah 2 passage that Elise read, we find the second focus of the prophets that is pointing us toward a response to Sean’s objections. While the passage is at the very beginning of Isaiah, it actually comes from a post exile time, that is after Isaiah, after the exile1. The exiled people are now back in the Promised Land. After the inconceivable destruction of their beloved and holy Jerusalem and their forced exile into Babylon [in 587 BC], they had finally returned, re-occupied their promised land, and rebuilt the temple, which was to be the centre of God’s peace and worship. But it hadn’t happened. The glory of Jerusalem had not been realised by the restoration and rebuilding of the temple. The bricks and mortar were there, but there had been no return to the glory days of Israel. First, they, the “Chosen People”, were still controlled by a foreign power – now Persia. Plus, there was much division and strife among them – some Israelite groups didn’t trust those rebuilding the temple, and had very different religious observances. And so, the compiler of the Isaiahs put their dream, their vision at the very beginning of the book, chap 2. And the vision is also in the book of the prophet Micah.
Listen: “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains. All the nations shall stream to it. All peoples shall come say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, that the Lord may teach us the Lord’s ways, and that we may walk in the Lord’s paths’.”
So no longer is Yahweh, the Lord God, just a tribal god of the Israelites, showing complete preference for his chosen people. Rather Yahweh is seen as the Lord of “all the nations.” Think about that for a minute in terms of Sean’s challenge to us. This is huge! Lord of all nations! To be sure, the identity of being “a chosen people” didn’t just disappear. But there was a very new understanding of God, one that saw God as Lord of All.
And we see this in the New Testament also. While we still have “chosen people” language in the Gospel of John, and the letters to the early Christian communities by Paul and other writers, we also have clear evidence that the prophets’ radically changed understanding of the Lord God continued to permeate and develop. Jesus, for example, says in the Sermon on the Mount in a very dear passage to us Mennonites: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” This of course affirms the prophetic understanding that Yahweh is no longer seen as a warrior god. Yet Jesus continues, taking the prophetic assertion that the Lord is God of all people to a new level: God’s blessings are for ALL. Period. Not just for the “chosen” or the “believer”. Why love enemies? “For God makes God’s sun rise on the evil and on the good, and God sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”
The disciples, however, have to learn that through personal experience. After Jesus’ death, Peter has a vision, reported in Acts 10, where he is instructed to eat foods that Jews considered unclean. He refuses, saying that he has never eaten anything unclean. After the vision, messengers sent by Cornelius, a Gentile and a professional officer in the Roman military, ask Peter to accompany them, for Cornelius needs to speak with him. Peter understands the Spirit instructing him to go with them. So he does, and then upon arrival to the house of Cornelius in Caesarea two days later, Cornelius proceeds to tell Peter of his own vision from God to receive instruction from Peter. Then Peter responses with that epic line: “I [now] truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” The Lord God shows no partiality. No partiality replaces chosenness.
Later, the apostle Paul gets at this same theme from a different angle. On one of his missionary journeys, he’s in the Greek city of Athens. There he debates with some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. Then he stands in front of the Areopagus – air-e-o-pagus – and declares” Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. You even have an altar dedicated to “an unknown god.” “what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines, … [but] indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and our being’; as even some of your own poets have said: ‘For we too are his offspring.”
So in this romp through the Bible, we’ve come a long way from the God of Abram and Moses. We’ve seen how there’s been a progression or evolution of the Biblical people’s understanding of God. I also want to say that there are several other types of answers to Sean’s challenge that I won’t
accept. One is that the God of Jesus and the New Testament is a completely different god than the god of the Israelites. A second rejected answer is one that emphasises God’s omnipotence, that is God’s all-powerfulness. “God is God, and so God can do whatever he wants” is how it often is expressed. This doesn’t work for me. And the third type of answer that I reject is supersessionism which asserts that Christians are the new “chosen people”, that God’s covenant with Christians in Christ replaces the Old Testament covenant.
Rather, I believe that there’s been ongoing and evolving revelation about the nature of God. And not only in Biblical times. Just as the Israelites grew in their understanding of Yahweh, and reinterpreted scripture with the Hebrew prophets growing to understand Yahweh as Lord of all humanity, and just as Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus grew in their understanding of God and reinterpreted scripture, we also grow in our understanding of God and thus reinterpret scripture. So to the Kitchener singer song-writer who sang “if God’s on your side, then who’s on mine?” I want to respond: “the same God is also on your side, for our Lord God, the creator of all, whose essence is love, is on the side of all humanity.” All peoples are chosen. Or to use language from the early covenant, God’s “treasured possession” is all humanity. And through God, all humanity is blessed. All peoples are blessed. No exceptions, for “God shows no partiality”, to quote again Peter, and because “God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”, to quote Jesus.
So, my friend Sean. There’s my answer. The creating spirit of love we call God is of and for all humanity, and blesses all alike. And now you – especially the youth, what’s your answer? Not just for the Seans in your life, but for you and our faith?
Blessings then are gifts from God to all, for everyone. Raffi, the Canadian children singer song-writer expresses it best:
Just like the birds that keep on flying
Just like the wind that keeps on blowing
Just like the sun, these gifts are here for everyone
Just like the trees that keep on giving
just like the grass that keeps on growing
just like the sun, these gifts are here for everyone.
Amen!
1 Following Childs and Sweeney in dating this redactional / theological insertion into the beginning of Isaiah as post-building of Second Temple.