This Week's Sermon: "A Tree Grows in My Bedroom"

Genesis 21:22-34

 At that time Abimelech, and Phicol commander of his forces, said to Abraham, “God is with you in everything that you do. 23 So give me your word under God that you won’t cheat me, my children, or my descendants. Just as I have treated you fairly, so you must treat me and the land in which you are an immigrant.” 24 Abraham said, “I give you my word.” 25 Then Abraham complained to Abimelech about a well that Abimelech’s servants had seized. 26 Abimelech said, “I don’t know who has done this, and you didn’t tell me. I didn’t even hear about it until today.” 27 Abraham took flocks and cattle, gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them drew up a treaty.[c] 28 Abraham set aside, by themselves, seven female lambs from the flock. 29 So Abimelech said to Abraham, “What are these seven lambs you’ve set apart?” 30 Abraham said, “These seven lambs that you take from me will attest that I dug this well.” 31 Therefore, the name of that place is Beer-sheba[d] because there they gave each other their word. 32 After they drew up a treaty at Beer-sheba, Abimelech, and Phicol commander of his forces, returned to the land of the Philistines. 33 Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba, and he worshipped there in the name of the Lord, El Olam. 34 Abraham lived as an immigrant in the Philistines’ land for a long time. (Common English Bible)

“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week One

I began last week’s sermon that tied off our series on the judges with a history lesson from the mid-1800s. Today, as we start a brand-new sermon series, let’s begin with an even deeper history lesson.

When I say “the Sahara” to you, you probably automatically think “the desert.” (Or, alternatively, if you’re a real jazz geek, an album by Russ Freeman and the Rippingtons.)

Yet it was not always so, even just a few thousand years before the story of Abraham that we read about today. Because the earth is capable of wobbling in its orbit, the area of the Sahara desert vacillates between desert and grassland across 23,000-year cycles. I learned this week that we are about 7,000 years into the current desert cycle, leaving another 16,000 years of desert on tap before the region might shift into a grassland again. My understanding is that these orbital wobbles affect the entire world, not just the Sahara region, so this is simply the particular effect it has on the Sahara.

Such scientific understanding has, for me, never taken away from God’s creative abilities. Quite the contrary, it adds to my belief in God, and my wonder that God was able to create a world—and the vast universe beyond it—so complex and marvelous to behold. God created a world for us that takes the long game, even as we are only ever really focused on the short-term, like a desert that to us will only ever be a desert.

But looking at the longer, bigger thread is an imperative for us, and not just because God so created the world thusly. God also created us thusly, and sometimes, like the desert, it takes many, many years for us to change from a desert that has been scorched time and again into something that has become lifegiving. That, I think, is true for us as people, but also true for us as a church.

This is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

This, then, is an excerpt from her first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom:”

Something grew in the room beside my bed and bookshelves. It was a tree—a spiritual tree but still vivid to me. The gnarled, twisting roots burrowed deep into the rug and the foundation, and they kept plunging, through the earth’s crust and into the mantle. I could feel the branches hunched with the weary exhaustion of carrying the weight of the world for so many years, while the hardy trunk looked as if it had stood up to the most bullying hurricanes.

If I could get a good look at its vivisection, I had no doubt that the rings would prove its ancient history. But I had no desire to cut it down. Instead, I imagined plucking a great piece of fruit from its drooping limb and biting into it. It would be bursting with intense hybrid flavors, a genetic splicing of an apple tree with horseradish…

As I chewed on that fruit, it wasn’t as if the peace lulled me into complacency and made me want to stay in the house. Instead, it gave me a connection with God and strength to leave when I could.

The tree that Carol conjures up for us in these pages is a tree so wizened and sturdy that it, like God, like the deserts and grasslands that God has created, is fully capable of playing the long game. The fruit it offers is a peace that comes from such longevity, much as we may try to resist it ourselves with each new quick fix for whatever we are told ails our lives. And yet, what God offers to us is eternal. We know this from what Abraham’s own story in Genesis 21 offers us.

Abraham’s own life is one of playing the long game as well—he and Sarah are advanced in years and remain faithful despite a lack of children even though the desire to have them is clearly there, in an era where a lack of children wasn't cause only for emotional heartache, but potential economic ruin in the absence of our modern-day safety net for our elders in the form of Social Security and Medicare.

Yet Abraham remains faithful; he has traversed the continent for God, he has bargained with God, and he will even horrifically attempt to sacrifice his son for God.

Here in Genesis 21, Abraham strikes a treaty with the Philistines on the basis of their mutual respect that comes from the regard for immigrants that illumines throughout the Scriptures (and which we would do well to remember in the wake of this past week’s decision by the White House to rescind DACA). Abraham, having made these treaties, plants a tamarisk tree where the treaty was made—Beersheba—and he worships there, Genesis says, in the name of El Olam, the Lord.

Or, more precisely in the Hebrew, the Eternal Lord or the Eternal God. It is one of many titles, names and epithets assigned to God in the Hebrew Bible, but it is a fittingly appropriate one here.

And tamarisk trees, they live for decades. This one was clearly meant to outlive Abraham himself.

In a manner, this harkens to Martin Luther’s own (potentially apocryphal) pronouncement that if he heard that the world would end tomorrow, he would plant a tree. It is a tribute to creation’s existence long before us, and to its endurance in spite of the use and abuse we continually inflict upon it.

So I think of the Eagle Creek fire that has set our beautiful Columbia Gorge on fire, and the carelessness with which the fire was started, and the consequences it has had for our home and for the millions of our neighbors who have had to see and inhale the smoke and ash for days, and I remember that God is still bigger than our mistakes, even if we are unfeeling in committing them.

Relying on God’s own endurance, rather than our own, is one small part in first acknowledging the spiritual wounds we inflict as well as healing from the spiritual wounds inflicted upon us. As we walk through this sermon series, we will be discussing together in more specific terms what that looks like, but as is so often the case for my series, especially ones that last for several weeks or more, this first one is about getting the rest of them up off the ground and flying on their own power.

What fundamentally underlies this series—and, I think, Carol’s book—is a faith in God as eternal, and eternally enduring. God suffers with us, but God also endures with us, and even beyond us.

Put a different way: our wounds are God’s wounds, but God is also capable of healing and transcending woundedness in ways that beget resurrection, including that of Jesus Christ…and not in a manner described by the quick-fix premise of prosperity theology or commercialism, that promises a new you in 30 days, or 60 days, while working from home and buying into your friend’s multi-level marketing scheme. No, there are far too many faithful, loving people who have been beat up by life for those promises to be even remotely true. But those promises are small. God is not.

That may come as small comfort—or even, initially at least, as no comfort at all—in the face of so many wounds we see and experience in the here and now: not only those wildfires that have wreaked havoc and destruction upon our sacred earth, but also those wounds we see in our community every day: addiction, homelessness, poverty—wounds that we could do more to heal on both individual and systemic levels, and that we have not done so only adds to the pain suffered and experienced.

But if today’s science-slash-history lesson about the Sahara is any indication, God is still fully capable of putting a lush grassland where previously a desert existed. And wherever the deserts are located in your soul, God remains capable of adding life to them. I have no doubt that in the wake of the destruction of Irma and Jose that God, through us, will be able to add life where life was lost; part of the reason I know is because I am beginning to see those stories trickle out of Texas after Harvey.

Yet it still hurts immensely in the here and now. Lives and homes and livelihoods are lost while we as people steadfastly refuse to acknowledge our collective culpability in those losses, even as we demand such culpability and accountability for the Eagle Creek fire.

The fires in the Columbia Gorge this week wounded us, many of us deeply. But take a moment and see if, in those flames, you can also comprehend the sheer pain and hurt of those for whom religion has been like a wildfire—with no water with which to salve the burn.

Do that, and the trees and wildlife may not come back right away—but, like the tamarisk tree of Abraham, the hope that they represent something far bigger and far greater will remain intact.

That hope alone will not fix everything—or even necessarily anything, at least not right away.

But for now, it is a start. A good start.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

September 10, 2017

Original image credit: Shutterstock

This Week's Sermon: "The Final Judge: Samuel"

1 Samuel 8:1-9

 Now when Samuel got old, he appointed his sons to serve as Israel’s judges. 2 The name of his oldest son was Joel; the name of the second was Abijah. They served as judges in Beer-sheba. 3 But Samuel’s sons didn’t follow in his footsteps. They tried to turn a profit, they accepted bribes, and they perverted justice. 4 So all the Israelite elders got together and went to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “Listen. You are old now, and your sons don’t follow in your footsteps. So appoint us a king to judge us like all the other nations have.” 6 It seemed very bad to Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us,” so he prayed to the Lord. 7 The Lord answered Samuel, “Comply with the people’s request—everything they ask of you—because they haven’t rejected you. No, they’ve rejected me as king over them. 8 They are doing to you only what they’ve been doing to me from the day I brought them out of Egypt to this very minute, abandoning me and worshipping other gods. 9 So comply with their request, but give them a clear warning, telling them how the king will rule over them.” (Common English Bible) 

“Heroes, not Kings: The Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Nine

Today, to end our nine-week summer sermon series on the Judges, a brief history lesson. Especially given our government’s inexplicable ambivalence to accepting Mexico’s formal offer of assistance in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, it seems relevant.

During the 19^th century, the meddling by foreign countries into Mexico’s affairs was not limited to just the United States during the Mexican-American War (and in the previous decade to assert its interests in Texas’s war of independence). France continually attempted to insert itself into the Mexican sphere of sovereignty, even going so far in the spring of 1864, while the United States was consumed with the Civil War, to overthrow the democratically-minded government of Mexico under Benito Juarez and replace it with a monarchy.

Juarez—today a national hero in Mexico who has a state holiday in his honor—was aging into his fifties, and France had a mind to replace him with Maximilian I, a European who, to them, looked the part of a proper emperor: he was young, cultured, militaristic, Caucasian...all the things you imagine an old-timey empire might want in an old-timey emperor.

Except he wasn’t Mexican. He was Austrian. And independent countries tend not to take too well to having their government taken out back and replaced with a younger, less democratic version, no matter the optics of that young ruler. Maximilian lasted a scant three years on the throne in Mexico before he was deposed, court martialed, and executed.
The replacing of Juarez with Maximilian is reminiscent in many ways of Israel’s replacing of the judge—their last judge—Samuel with their first king, Saul. Samuel wasn’t getting any younger, and he was replaced by a far younger specimen who may have looked the part, but was ultimately disastrous for the country he was appointed to lead. And that archetype of a story continues to act as a cautionary tale, all the way up to nineteenth century Mexico and to the present.

This is the final installment of a sermon series for the season of summer, and it has reflected in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts in my preaching. We had just spent two full months in the New Testament for Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.

The term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.

But “judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings. Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”

We began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak. We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah, and then, for three full weeks, Samson. We now arrive at the final judge of Israel, Samuel, and in order to do that, we actually skip ahead from the book of Judges itself to the next book in the canon: 1 Samuel.

Samuel is put into a tough spot in 1 Samuel 8, because despite his own honorable service as a judge of Israel, the people—remember, the Israelites are often seen by the writers of the Hebrew Bible as a finicky, fairweather bunch—demand a king. As the author of 1 Samuel (who is not the judge himself) conveys, Samuel’s own sons are of ill repute and can no longer be expected to follow in his venerable footsteps without disaster befalling the country, so Samuel will eventually go out and find Saul, anoint him, and present him as the king of Israel.

Samuel does all this at God’s behest, who basically tells the aging judge, “It’s okay, just give them what they want. Give them a king.” But that can only be read as a very painful acquiescence for God to give, per commentary on this passage from Hebrew Bible scholar James Kugel: “He (Samuel) was thus already an old man when the people approached Samuel with a request: “Give us a king to rule over us!” (1 Sam. 8:6). Up until then, the Bible says, God had been their only king, and this request was thus a tacit throwing off of God’s direct authority. As God says to Samuel, “They are rejecting me as their king” (1 Sam. 8:7).

It is impossible, then, to see Israel’s rejection of Samuel as *only* a rejection of Samuel. It is a rejection of God as well.

There are moments when rejection—or acceptance—of a person represents to a group, or a church, or a nation, rejection or acceptance not only of the person but of who or what they represent. Samuel represents God. To reject him in so public a fashion is to reject God in so public a fashion.

That line of reasoning gets used and abused by cult leaders and fundamentalists—that to reject them is automatically to reject God—and I will never, ever go so far as to say the same about myself. What ought to be a clear appeal to God’s authority often gets abused in human hands, and this particular logic is no exception.

Heeding it in this case, though, is clearly in hindsight what Israel is expected to have done. Samuel has led Israel faithfully and well, leading the nation against the Philistines when the latter had stolen the Ark of the Covenant—an act so demoralizing that the high priest, Eli, died of shock at the news—and recovering the Ark and returning it to its rightful home.

Saul, by contrast, will not lead Israel so successfully against the Philistines, as 1 Samuel as a book concludes with Israel’s army being routed by the Philistines, Saul’s three oldest sons dying in the battle, and Saul himself committing suicide to avoid capture.

So this is a case not of Samuel as cult leader or fundamentalist pulpit-thumper, but of Samuel as still the best option to lead this array of tribes.

But he gets shoved out for the younger, shinier model. And sometimes, that’s okay—says the pastor who was called here when he was a whopping twenty-five years old. Indeed, I’m writing a book on how the younger Christians need more space to wiggle their way into the church because so many doors have been shut in our faces up to this point.

Newer and shinier can mean better—but not necessarily or inherently. Age and experience can and should count for a great deal in the world. And Samuel represents not the newest of gods but the oldest, the one true God from whom all of us exist and take our shape. The God who is eternal. The God who is timeless. The God who see us in all our fickleness and pettiness and nickel-and-dime stinginess and sees a far bigger world for us than we could ever possibly dream of.

I think that is partially what makes the stories of the judges so challenging—their limitedness. Their good work results in peace for a generation or two, and then Israel falls right back into the warmongering ways of the Ba’als and other false gods. The effect of their rule only goes so far, and would have been even more limited if we had not the blessing to be able to learn of their lives and works today.

That may be, sadly, the lasting legacy of the judges of Israel, good though they began as—especially Othniel, Barak, and Deborah. That good rulers sometimes only get you so far when replaced with husks of their once and former selves.

It is an enduring lesson for churches, not just nations: who we choose to lead us matters, to God but also to our futures. And as we go into the very beginning of year seven together, y’all are still very much stuck with me! And now, six years in, my presence ought to not simply represent the future to you, but the presence and part of the rich tapestry of FCC's past as well.

But there is great reason to be hopeful. There has always been great reason to be hopeful. Because we are fully capable of honoring our rich history while walking with courage into our future. Not everyone is so fortunate—including the now-cast aside Samuel.

So let us continue that walk together, in the shadow and embrace of God, who calls us forward each new day.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington 
September 3, 2017

An Announcement of the Greatest Kind

I haven't been writing much here on the blog for the past several months beyond my sermons and newsletter columns, for which I beg your forgiveness but I'd like to think that I have a good reason: I've been working on a book manuscript that has officially been picked up for publication by Church Publishing, Inc., the publishing arm of the Episcopalian Church.

The book, tentatively entitled Oregon Trail Theology: The Frontier Millennial Christians Face, and How We're Ready, is a series of stories, suggestions, and examinations of current research about the spirituality of my generation, the millennials (yes, we of the avocado toasts, fidget spinners, and perpetual existential angst), and how that spirituality is in many ways a direct reaction to how the church has behaved towards us and our sensibilities, for both good and bad.

The title comes from the moniker of older millennials, and very young Gen X-ers, as the "Oregon Trail Generation" from that popular computer game that we spent all of our elementary school years playing, and that game serves as an overarching metaphor for the book itself. Over 60% of the manuscript has already been written, largely in hours shoehorned in on days off, vacation days, and my sabbatical, and I really do think it contains some of my best writing to date already.

Oregon Trail Theology is currently due out for September 2018, but well before that, you will begin to see some changes to my own site--changes that have been in the making for some time simply because this site turns six(!) today and was already in need of a bit of a refresh. Additionally, once the book is available for pre-order, links for you to reserve yourself a copy will go up here and on pages on Facebook and Twitter.

This isn't the only project that I have got up my sleeve--I still have my Doctor of Ministry study that was recently approved by both my thesis committee and the university, and that I hope to put in the field soon. But for now, I'm ridiculously excited to be working on this particular one as well, and I'm very grateful to Church Publishing for taking the chance on a pastor and writer's debut book.

TL, DR version: I'm writing a book that I'm very passionate about. It'll be published next September, not long after I (hopefully) also complete my doctoral thesis and degree. I'll be accomplishing a lot in 2018, and I am determined to make that year my annus mirabilis.

Longview, Washington

August 31, 2017

This Week's Sermon: "The Nazirite, Samson: Part III"

Judges 16:23-31

The rulers of the Philistines gathered together to make a great sacrifice to their god Dagon and to hold a celebration. They cheered, “Our god has handed us Samson our enemy!” 24 When the people saw him, they praised their god, for they said, “Our god has handed us our enemy, the very one who devastated our land and killed so many of our people.” 25 At the height of the celebration,they said, “Call for Samson so he can perform for us!” So they called Samson from the prison, and he performed in front of them. Then they had him stand between the pillars.

26 Samson said to the young man who led him by the hand, “Put me where I can feel the pillars that hold up the temple, so I can lean on them.” 27 Now the temple was filled with men and women. All the rulers of the Philistines were there, and about three thousand more men and women were on the roof watching as Samson performed. 28 Then Samson called out to the Lord, “Lord God, please remember me! Make me strong just this once more, God, so I can have revenge on the Philistines, just one act of revenge for my two eyes.”

29 Samson grabbed the two central pillars that held up the temple. He leaned against one with his right hand and the other with his left. 30 And Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” He strained with all his might, and the temple collapsed on the rulers and all the people who were in it. So it turned out that he killed more people in his death than he did during his life. 31 His brothers and his father’s entire household traveled down, carried him back up, and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of his father Manoah. He had led Israel for twenty years. (Common English Bible)

“Heroes, not Kings: The Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Eight

One of the two men is blind.

The other man has both of his arms amputated.

In rural China, where means for them to make a living are few, they have found a way forward together.

They plant trees.

Thousands of them, in fact.

The man with no arms, Jia Wenqi, guides the man with no sight, Jia Haixia. The man with no sight, in turn, is able to plant the trees and collect their cuttings, and, as the BBC conveys, these two men have made a colossal difference not just to each other, but to the entire village in which they live:

So far they estimate they have planted ten thousand healthy trees, and three thousand more which have died. While the work may not be fast, the three-hectare site is now covered with trees and attracts nesting birds.

When they began working together on the project, other villagers were cynical, Haixia explains. “They didn’t believe what we were doing was possible,” he says, “the whole riverbank had been bare for years and there were hardly any trees.” But after a few years the trees grew, the area became greener, and the villagers changed their attitude, choosing now to assist the two men.

“They help us to fix our tools, water the trees, and trim the weeds,” Haixia says. “They even brought us saplings to plant.”

For Haixia, recent news from doctors means his blindness could soon be reversed. He is currently on the waiting list for a donor, having been told he is a suitable candidate for a cornea transplant.

But if he does regain his vision, he is adamant he’ll carry on planting trees with Wenqi. “It doesn’t matter if my eyesight comes back or not, I’m going to continue my work until my last breath,” he says.

In a tradition—Protestantism—that traces back to a German monk who once said, “If the world were going to end tomorrow, I would plant a tree,” it is very much worth considering whether we would still foster a future, no matter how abled or not we may feel. A lack of working eyes or arms has ceased to be an impediment for two remarkable men, but many of us without such concerns for ableness would still not sign up for sowing and planting the fruits that they have sown and planted.

For Samson, here at the end of Judges 16 held prisoner and blinded, he sees no such future. Which is itself a form of blindness. Can we see where Samson cannot—not just physically, but spiritually?

This is a (no longer altogether very) new sermon series for the season of summer, and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.

The term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.

But “judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings. Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”

We began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak. We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah, and we now come to our final week of three on the most well-known judge of all, and whose story the book of Judges goes into the greatest detail with by far: Samson.

Over the past two weeks, we read through the entirety of Judges 15 together, about the cycle after cycle of grievances and hurt feelings that ends up with a number of people—including Samson’s wife and father-in-law, plus a thousand Philistines—dead, prompting the lesson last week of putting down the jawbone that Samson used to kill those thousand Philistines.

But Samson, as we said last week, lives by the jawbone and dies by the jawbone. He lives violently, and here in Judges 16, he dies violently. Having been betrayed by Delilah, who had been bribed by the Philistines to render Samson vulnerable by cutting off the locks of hair which held his strength, Samson was captured and blinded by the Philistines, who now lead him out as a part of a religious celebration. Samson, though, collapses the entire complex, killing more people in one fell swoop with his death, the author of Judges says, than he did over the course of his entire life as a warrior.

Samson does this—collapsing the building upon the assembled people by pushing down its pillars—he says, in order to take revenge upon the Philistines for blinding him. It continues to fit Samson’s pattern in which he only is really interested in fighting not on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of himself: to avenge wrongs done to him personally, not wrongs done to Israel as a nation.

But blinding carried a particular weight as a punishment in the ancient Near East. Then, it was believed that light was generated inwardly and exited out of the body through the eyes, that the eyes were basically lamps for the body. Which of course sounds silly to us today given what we know about biology, but poetically, it should not sound so silly to us when we talk about, say, the eyes being the window into one’s soul.

So Samson has been robbed of that light, of that window into the divine. Yet one outward sign of divinity remains for him: his hair has slowly begun to grow back, giving him just enough strength to fell the pillars and end his own life along with the lives of thousands of others.

It is not a hopeful story. But truthfully, very little about Samson’s story has been hopeful. It is up to us to supply that hope, just as it is often up to us to do so outside of hearing the Scriptures as well.

Samson is reaping what his life has sown—as we said last week, he lives by the jawbone, and here he dies by the jawbone. It is not a hopeful biography, much as his destruction of thousands of Philistines would have given the Israelites who were there, or who later heard these stories, hope. But Samson’s story is incapable of something bigger than that precisely because throughout his story, he has always been incapable of, or unwilling to, embrace something bigger than himself.

The death of Samson, though, by no means represented the death of the ways of Samson. Indeed, those ways of vengeance and tit-for-tat escalations of violence have been as enduring as anything has ever been since the days of Samson over 3,000 years ago. Samson dies this way, I genuinely believe, because he feels that he cannot possibly redeem himself any other way—even though, as we noted just a few minutes ago, his hair had begun to grow back, meaning God’s presence in his life had never fully gone. Yet this is the only fate Samson can imagine for himself and his enemies.

If there can be any hope, then, from Samson’s demise, let it come from the fact that being blinded and robbed of your sight and your light ought not end in so dramatically painful a fashion. Instead of bringing down everything about you, listen to the story of Jia Hiaxia, and plant something and build something up instead.

Preferably with someone else. Goodness, much like its opposite number, misery, can often use the company.

Even if you feel spiritually nearsighted, farsighted, or altogether blind, where can you still help to plant a tree in the spiritual life of someone else, instead of tearing that life down pillar by pillar?

And where can you act to help that tree of righteousness grow?

Such work may not be anywhere near as dramatic as the blaze of glory in which Samson exits life. But sometimes, what God calls for is not the dramatic—it’s the steadfast, and the faithful, and the good.

May you have divine vision enough to see that truth abound in your own life, as God has made it known to you.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 27, 2017

Original photo: NPR

This Week's Sermon: "The Nazirite: Samson, Part II"

Judges 15:12-20

Then the people of Judah said to him, “We’ve come down to take you prisoner so we can turn you over to the Philistines.” Samson responded to them, “Just promise that you won’t attack me yourselves.” 13 “We won’t,” they said to him. “We’ll only take you prisoner so we can turn you over to them. We won’t kill you.” Then they tied him up with two new ropes, and brought him up from the rock.

14 When Samson arrived at Lehi, the Philistines met him and came out shouting. The Lord’s spirit rushed over him, the ropes on his arms became like burned-up linen, and the ties melted right off his hands. 15 He found a donkey’s fresh jawbone, picked it up, and used it to attack one thousand men. 16 Samson said, “With a donkey’s jawbone, stacks on stacks! With a donkey’s jawbone, I’ve killed one thousand men.” 17 When he finished speaking, he tossed away the jawbone. So that place became known as Ramath-lehi.

18 Now Samson was very thirsty, so he called out to the Lord, “You are the one who allowed this great victory to be accomplished by your servant’s hands. Am I now going to die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” 19 So God split open the hollow rock in Lehi, and water flowed out of it. When Samson drank, his energy returned and he was recharged. Thus that place is still called by the name En-hakkore in Lehi today. 20 Samson led Israel for twenty years during the time of the Philistines. (Common English Bible)

“Heroes, not Kings: The Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Seven

As a student associate pastor in seminary, trying to absorb as much as I could, I could see my senior pastor as he strode on the chancel, jawbone in hand. He was showing us what it was, explaining the different parts of it, and then telling us that it belonged to a donkey—the same species of donkey whose jawbone Samson picks up in this passage of Judges 15 and ends the lives of one thousand Philistines.

Russ recounted his mental image of the story, of the violent nature of Samson himself and the qualms he felt personally at the notion that such a slaughter should be so celebrated by us today, in a world as fraught with violence now as it was in those days.

Then he turned and placed the jawbone down on a side table upon the chancel, and implored each of us, in our own lives, to quite simply *put the jawbone down.* To put down the endless cycle of vindictiveness and vengeance we talked about together last week that the jawbone represents, to put down violence and the vehemence with which it is being committed in this story.

And when we respond to Charlottesville, with the candlelight vigils at the University of Virginia and the memorial service in which Heather Heyer’s mother committed Heather’s soul to right action and her father preached forgiveness, and in its wake we immediately see carnage reminiscent of Charlottesville in Barcelona, as we did in Manchester and in Nice and in Paris, we would do well to heed the call of Russ in that sermon seven or eight years ago: Put. Down. The. Jawbone.

This is a (no longer altogether very) new sermon series for the season of summer, and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.

The term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.

But “judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings. Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”

We began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak. We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah, and we now come to our second week of three on the most well-known judge of all, and whose story the book of Judges goes into the greatest detail with by far: Samson.

Last week was the first of three weeks that we are spending on Samson, and we read about his reaction when he went to go see the woman he believed was his wife, who he had just married, only to find out that her father had given her in marriage to his best man (talk about a Bible story readymade for a Jerry Springer episode). This leads to cycle after cycle of grievances and hurt feelings that ends up with a number of people—including Samson’s wife and father-in-law—dead.

This cycle of grievances comes to a rolling boil now in the second half of Judges 15, as the Philistines have functionally declared war on Israel—deploying a war party to make camp and march upon the Israelites, and in case there is any ambiguity as to what their purpose is when they charge in shouting in verse 14, consider the notes from the late Bible scholar Robert Boling on Judges in the HarperCollins study Bible: “The Philistines are shouting (Hebrew, “yelling a war cry”) in triumph and jubilation.”

They’re yelling a triumphant war cry, intent on neutralizing forever the threat that Samson poses to their military hegemony in this small region of the Levant. Instead, they, too, end up dead. One thousand of them, according to the text.

In another time, maybe we would have read this story and felt the same sort of triumphalism the author clearly feels, that the Philistines may have initially felt before they were slain, and which Samson likely feels himself once he has appealed to God and slaked his thirst. And I realize that sort of triumphalism was surely part of the original intent at least for some of the author’s original audience, if not for the anonymous author of Judges personally as well.

But that cannot be the sort of triumphalism that we celebrate as a church that worships this God. And so we too must put down the jawbone that represents this sort of triumphant victory of violence over yet more violence.

Put a different way: we follow the way of the empty tomb, not the way of the jawbone.

Yet neither have we entirely put the jawbone down, or else we would have set ourselves free from that endlessly vindictive cycle of violence that we talked about last week, and that we see escalated in the text here this week.

The way out of that cycle, though, is still in this same text, though, albeit hidden in a throwaway verse towards the end: God cracks open rock for water to flow through.

It is an outward image of what God is inwardly capable of within each of us: the softening of our hearts to let the living water that Jesus preached of to, say, the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 to likewise flow through into our lives. There is a hollowness in that rock that today’s text speaks of, yet the living water of God rushes through it, just as it rushes through the ministry of Jesus to the Samaritan woman at the well who beseeched Him for just some of this living water of God’s.

In Samson’s case, the water from the rock was not quite enough. It washed away his thirst, and perhaps the physical (though not spiritual) blood from his hands, but his was one of the hearts that needed to be softened and broken through like that rock at En-Hakkore. And lamentably, that did not happen.

It can happen, however, for each of us.

Indeed, in another year of domestic and international terror, I would say that it must happen.

It is imperative that it happen.

And I believe that humanity will not survive in any meaningful spiritual sense if it does not happen.

So humanity must put down the jawbone. Put down the jawbone on the grand, macrocosmic scale, between nations and continents, but also, put down the jawbone on the smaller, microcosmic scale, between individuals, between people…like us.

In the wake of Charlottesville and Barcelona, and now this weekend in Florida with the report of two police officers shot and killed in the line of duty, reportedly by a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder--just as the murders of the five Dallas PD officers last year were likewise committed by a veteran with PTSD--this is not an ask for a kinder, more polite world from the Church of Be Nice and Chew With Your Mouth Closed. This is a radical ask from a radical Savior who taught His disciples on the last night of His life that one who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

Samson lives and dies, to put it in the context of Judges, rather than Matthew, by the jawbone.

But it should not be how we live and die.

So put down your jawbone when confronted with people different from you. Put down your jawbone when presented with someone who asks you to walk a mile in their shoes instead of presuming that your shoes fit them just fine. Put down your jawbone when given reason to tighten your grip upon it instead.

May the ground around us and our churches be littered, then, with dropped jawbones.

And may God see those jawbones and pierce our hearts at long last with living water like the rocks of En-Hakkore.

Put down the jawbone. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 20, 2017

Original image source: NPR

This Week's Sermon: "The Nazirite: Samson, Part I"

Judges 15:1-11

Later on, at the time of the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, bringing along a young goat. He said, “Let me go into my wife’s bedroom.” But her father wouldn’t allow him to go in. 2 Her father said, “I was so sure that you had completely rejected her that I gave her in marriage to one of your companions. Don’t you think her younger sister is even better? Let her be your wife instead.” 3 Samson replied, “No one can blame me now for being ready to bring down trouble on the Philistines!”

4 Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5 He lit the torches and released the foxes into the Philistines’ grain fields. So he burned the stacked grain, standing grain, vineyards, and olive orchards. 6 The Philistines inquired, “Who did this?” So it was reported, “Samson the Timnite’s son-in-law did it, because his father-in-law gave his wife in marriage to one of his companions.” So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father to death. 7 Samson then responded to them, “If this is how you act, then I won’t stop until I get revenge on you!” 8 He struck them hard, taking their legs right out from under them. Then he traveled down and stayed in a cave in the rock at Etam.

9 The Philistines marched up, made camp in Judah, and released their forces on Lehi. 10 The people of Judah asked, “Why have you marched up against us?” “We’ve marched up to take Samson prisoner,” they replied, “and to do to him just what he did to us.” 11 So three thousand people from Judah traveled down to the cave in the rock at Etam and said to Samson, “Don’t you realize that the Philistines rule over us? What have you done to us?” But he told them, “I did to them just what they did to me.” (Common English Bible)

“Heroes, not Kings: The Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Six

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was a watershed moment for human rights, across the entire ledger of populations. As a result of the war’s territorial exchanges, 700,000 Palestinians were suddenly made homeless. 700,000 Jews were likewise expelled from Arab countries. Ownership of the land gained and lost in that war has, in the case of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, still not been conclusively resolved.

Taking part in that war on the side of Israel was an elite unit of commandos, one of whom was a soldier named Uri Avnery, who had previously served in the pro-Israel militia Irgun, which had been founded in the wake of disappointment with the primary Israeli paramilitary group, Haganah, following the riots of 1929. Avnery took his experience in Irgun with him to the 1948 war, in which he was wounded twice in action, and after the war, editorialized in Israeli media that Israel should wage a pre-emptive war with Egypt and assist in overthrowing the monarchy of Jordan.

Yet something happened within this hardened soldier over the following decades, as he emerged as a voice not for more war, but for peace between Israel and Palestine, campaigning assiduously and at great cost to himself for a two-state solution that achieved both security for Israel and sovereignty for Palestine. To this day, he heads up the Gush Shalom peace organization that he founded in 1993, and writes and organizes extensively in support of both Israel’s existence and a Palestinian state.

And the commandos that Avnery served among in the Arab-Israeli War? They were known as the Shu’alei Shimshon—“Samson’s Foxes.” Except instead of the ones Samson tied torches to, this one from modern times seeks the preservation of the land for humanity and for peace rather than war. And in the wake of the carnage that the neo-Nazis of our neighborhoods wrought in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend, a lesson on how to cut free our own fire-bearing foxes is sorely needed.

This is a (no longer altogether that) new sermon series for the season of summer, and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.

The term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.

But “judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings. Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”

We began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak. We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah, and we now come to perhaps the most well-known judge of all, and whose story the book of Judges goes into the greatest detail with: Samson.

Samson is the closest thing the Bible has to a Hercules, an almost demigod of a hero whose strength is of divine provenance and whose deeds make him a folk hero among mere mortals like ourselves—an angel appears to his parents in Judges 13 to tell them of the son they shall bear who shall be imbued by the Lord with extraordinary strength as long as his hair is never shorn. Except that Samson, while a brutally effective fighter and an uncommonly fearsome adversary, really had very few other redeemable qualities as a person or as a judge, which he still did for twenty years.

By this point in the story, Samson has already attempted to marry once, largely on a whim—he sees a Philistine woman and asks his parents to procure her for him as his bride in the shortest series of The Bachelor ever. At the wedding, in order to make good on a bet that his groomsmen cheat to win, he kills thirty men at Ashkelon, takes their belongings, and gives them to his shady groomsmen. His nascent marriage ends in divorce, with his wife being given over to his best man in marriage. It’s stuff you otherwise can only find on the daytime talk shows, but it was what Samson fought for.

At every turn throughout his story, Samson does not fight for the sake of Israel, or for his neighbors, his tribe, or even his family, really.  He fights only for himself, to avenge wrongs done to him personally, and this tit-for-tat cycle of revenge is on full display here in Judges 15.

Samson hasn’t yet learned that his wife had been given away to his best man, so he shows up seeking her, and her father has to break the terribly awkward news to him, but then, because this was how women were viewed 3,000 years ago, offers Samson his other daughter instead because, hey, one is apparently as good as another, as though they were extension cords or bookends and not people.

That’s not good enough for Samson, so he takes three hundred foxes, sets torches to their tails, and lets loose the foxes to run through the fields of the Philistines, burning up the Philistines’ crops. In turn, the Philistines show up and kill Samson’s ex-wife and her father, and Samson beats them.

The response from the Philistines is to basically declare war—they “marched up, made camp, and released their forces,” according to verse 9. When asked by Israel why they were doing this, the Philistines simply said, basically, “we’re just returning the favor.”

And so the cycle of vengeance, of eye for eye and tooth for tooth, continues unabated. But as Mahatma Gandhi famously put it, an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind—a lesson we may well want to heed both abroad the saber rattling between the United States and North Korea continued to escalate this week, and at home, with the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Philistines are blinded by their hatred of Samson. Samson is blinded by his own rage at the Philistines. And around and around we go, until someone has at long last had enough, stands up, and says, “Stop.”

It does not even have to be on a scale so grand and great as that of a Gandhi, or a Mandela, or an Avnery. After all—Samson fought all his own fights for personal, rather than nationalistic, reasons.

But today, we must speak of nationalistic reasons. We must speak of why, in the face of violent white nationalism, we must let the foxes go free and untie the torches from their tails.

It is a simple instruction, but one for which we come up with any number of excuses and justifications when presented with it, that it’s not realistic or that revenge is the only option.

But it is still an option to untie the torches from the foxtails, and let those foxes go free, just as it is an option for us to lean upon the grace of God when we make such a decision as brave and courageous free the foxes and to trust in that grace that it was indeed right for us to do so.

It is an option that clergy, among other counter-protesters, chose this weekend in Charlottesville. With songs to drown out racist and homophobic chants, arms locked to demonstrate solidarity, and stoles around their necks to show them as slaves to the Christ who condemns the racism of white supremacy and neo-Nazism, they took to the streets and to the pews alike at the University of Virginia to express a message that love can indeed still stand up to hate, and even more than standing up to it, will emerge victorious over it and must emerge victorious over it.

That is a decision the church can choose to make—to broadcast that message of divine love conquering human hate, instead of the message of tribal resentment and violence that is set here in Judges 15, by our latter-day ilk in the “alt-right” movement, and, frankly, by previous incarnations of the church that lent its morally bankrupt blessing to all manner of displays of institutional racism.

Yet it is decisions such as this, of choosing the way of Jesus over the way of hatred, that can ultimately lead to peace—peace that lasts, peace that is enough, peace that can indeed set free the foxes of Samson, extinguish the fires of their torches, and at long last be liberated from the need to seek vengeance that seems to be the Israelite hero’s only moral code.

Peace without justice is not peace. But Samson’s moral code allows for no such justice, only revenge for perceived wrongs, no matter how ahistorical or revisionist they may be—not at all unlike the racist protesters in Charlottesville, who took their resentment for perceived slights and ended up killing someone with it, and injuring dozens more.

Samson’s moral code cannot be our moral code, not if we seek something bigger than what he sought. The Philistines’ moral code cannot be our moral code, not if we seek something bigger than what they sought as well. The alt-right’s moral code cannot be our moral code, not if we truly do seek something bigger than what they sought and truly do seek a true and lasting peace in our world.

I do not know if such a peace will come about tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. The fever of our fascist madness must break first, and we must be among the ones to break it.

But what a peace that will be to one day build. What a peace it is that we should strive to build, one heart, one soul, and one fearfully and wonderfully made image of God at time. Let that be our work.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 13, 2017

Original image courtesy of NPR

This Week's Sermon: "The Sacrifice: Jephthah's Daughter"

Judges 11:34-40 

When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh no, my daughter! You have brought me down and I am devastated. I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.” 36 “My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the Lord. Do to me just as you promised, now that the Lord has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. 37 But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.” 38 “You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. 39 After the two months, she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin. From this comes the Israelite tradition 40 that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite. (Common English Bible)

“The Sacrifice: Jephthah’s Daughter,” Judges 11:34-40

“Heroes, not Kings: The Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Five

I remember seeing the retired general standing behind the podium speaking to a packed audience at my undergraduate alma mater. I was sitting too far away to see him well aside from his shock of white hair and moustache, but his voice was still clear as he recounted to us the humanitarian horrors that he had witnessed—and fought to prevent—during the Rwandan Genocide of the mid-1990s, after we had said “never again” to the genocides of the Ottoman Empire and Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia but apparently still didn’t mean it when we said it.

Romeo Dallaire, as a general in both the Canadian army and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, was deployed to facilitate peace between the warring Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, but when the Hutus began a genocide of the Tutsis, so much of his effort was dedicating to protecting the Tutsis from eradication, and it is estimated that his leadership and actions saved the lives of at least 30,000 people.

Dallaire’s life as a soldier and peacekeeper left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, and in 2000—the same year he retired from the military—he attempted suicide by drug overdose. He was left in a coma, but thankfully survived. Now, in addition to lecturing and serving in the Canadian government, he heads up efforts in Africa to end humanitarian abuses like the exploitation of children as soldiers—a sacrifice of our youth so blatantly morally bankrupt that it is to our eternal discredit that such practices continue, not just in Africa but also in Syria, as you may remember that we noted a couple of weeks ago in the sermon about Deborah.

Yet continue they do, and in truth, our tendency to sacrifice our children to the very worst versions of ourselves has long been a part of humanity’s story, including going all the way back over 3,100 years in history to the role of Jephthah as judge of Israel, and the fate of his tragic heroine daughter.

This is a new sermon series for the season of summer, and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.

The term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.

But “judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings. Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”

We began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak. Then we got to hear from one of the most complicated figures in the book of Judges—Gideon—and last week, we arrived at a judge who, unlike the first three, does not end up with any sort of good press from the Bible: Abimelech. We now come to a judge who, like his predecessors, is a successful military leader, but whose impetuousness with what matters most to him—his family—prevents him from being the true protagonist of this story: Jephthah.

The true protagonist, instead, is Jephthah’s daughter, who tragically acquiesces to being sacrificed to uphold his father’s bargain that he clearly thought would have involved an animal, not a human. Whether that sacrifice actually involved killing his daughter—like Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis—has been up for debate, even though Jephthah’s bargain earlier in the chapter pretty clearly specifies a burnt offering.

Some traditional Jewish sources say that Jephthah was giving his daughter over to a life of service to God, and so she wouldn’t have been able to have children or a husband. Additionally, Levitical law explicitly prohibits the practice of child sacrifice, which is referred to in Leviticus 20 as Molech worship, and is in fact, according to the book, a capital crime. It would not be an unreasonable interpretation, if Jephthah indeed offered his daughter as a burnt sacrifice, to conclude that Leviticus actually demands Jephthah’s own execution for it, so why Jephthah would risk that is unusual.

Regardless, Jephthah is, like his daughter, a tragic figure—he tears his clothes in grief when he realizes that it is she he has promised to sacrifice—but he is no hero here. He accepts no blame, no culpability. He binds her to her fate because he cannot take back a promise made to God.

Jephthah makes the critical, heartbreaking, and utterly bloodless mistake of seeing God purely as a legal figure, when, even so early in Scripture, God has been free with divine mercy. Cain was spared after murdering his brother Abel. Aaron and Miriam were spared after inciting a mutiny against Moses. And the Israelites themselves were (mostly) spared after persuading Aaron into fashioning for them that golden calf and then worshiping it.

Yet Jephthah does not even think to throw himself upon the mercy of God. It just does not occur to him in this story. His daughter may acquiesce and repeat his reasons back to him, but he does not frame this as though either he or she has any say in the matter.

And honestly, I’ve heard that sort of framing before from older generations to younger generations. I hear it all the time, sometimes in the form of manifestly unhelpful advice. “That’s not how the world works.” Okay, but isn’t the point of the church to change the world? “We haven’t ever done it this way.” Okay, that’s not a reason for not trying it a different way, though.

Can you see the inflexibility of Jephthah, faced with the prospect of not just admitting his mistake but interceding with God on behalf of his daughter, to try to save her from his own short-sightedness, in the inflexibility and even dismissiveness with which we sometimes treat one another?

The ways in which we sacrifice our younger generations are profound, and in stories like Jephthah’s, or like what General Dallaire saw in Africa—and is now trying to prevent in Africa—may seem extreme, but they are still prevalent. Even conservative estimates place the number of children trafficked within the United States at the hundreds of thousands, and if you don’t think it is a concern here in southwest Washington, I am here to tell you that it absolutely is.

These ways in which we fail our youth and sacrifice them to our own worst impulses are, at their core, a form of latter-day Molech worship.

Offering our future generations to Molech may have been banned in Scripture, but it didn’t keep Jephthah from believing that is somehow what God required of him, it hasn’t kept criminals and warlords from around the world believing in it either, and it hasn’t kept us from pushing away youth from our own doorstep when it has graced us with its presence. And so we, like Jephthah, end up sacrificing our young ones to Molech after convincing ourselves that we are doing so in the name of God.

When we do and say things to make the young families who visit us, even join us and long to become active in the mission of the church with us, feel unwanted, unwelcome, and uncomfortable, we too are saying, like Jephthah, that it is better to give up the next generation than to come to grips with our own impulses to focus on ourselves, as Jephthah does in focusing on the ill-advised bargain he struck.

Jephthah is not the moral example in this story.

His daughter is.

Or, at least, she is the closest there is to one.

Even though she, like many other female Biblical figures, is utterly nameless, her only identifier being her kinship with a man who would sacrifice her, she is the closest we have to a hero here.

Far better for us as Christians to embody the selflessness and vulnerability of the daughter whose name we do not even know than to embody the self-centeredness of Jephthah, who puts his own standing before God before that of his daughter.

And far better for us as the church to mourn what we may lose in that selflessness and vulnerability, than to try to push away others from that which was never entirely ours to begin with.

The body of Christ stands poised to move into the future. And our children are watching.

In what manner will we choose to rise to meet their gaze? And in what way will we determine to ensure that another person might experience God in the same manner that we too have experienced the mercy of God that Jephthah so desperately needs, but cannot bring himself to ask for?

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 6, 2017