Divine Gifts
M6
Gen. 17:1-7, 15-6
Ps 22:22-30
Rom. 4:13-25
Mk. 8:31-8
“Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” Mark 1
Once there was a young shoemaker so down on his luck that he only had enough leather to make one pair of shoes. By the time he finished cutting the leather, it was time for him to go to bed. He left the pieces on his workbench planning to sew them into shoes the next day. In the night two naked elves come and build the shoes. The shoemaker is astonished by what he discovers. He has never seen such perfectly stitched shoes.
The first customer who enters his shop recognizes the amazing workmanship and buys the shoes with so much money that the shoemaker is able to get enough leather to build two pairs of shoes. Again he cuts the leather and goes to bed. In the morning he finds two absolutely perfect pairs. The shoes sell for such a high price that he is able to buy enough leather for four pairs of shoes. Over time the shoemaker attains tremendous success.
Before Christmas, he and his wife start wondering who is making these extraordinary shoes. So they leave a candle burning in the shop and hide while the elves do their work. The next day his wife says, “there must be some way for us to thank these little men who have made us so rich. They look cold. I’m going to sew them warm clothes. Why don’t you make them some little shoes?”
When the clothes are finished the shoemaker and his wife leave out the small suits and shoes, and hide themselves again. The elves are delighted to find the clothes. They put them on and sing, “Looking cool and smooth, we’re out the door / We will not build shoes anymore!” They dance a jig around the room and leave forever. But by this time the shoemaker has learned this fine craftsmanship himself and continues to prosper.
I want to give this story a little more time to sink in before I come back to it. This week Heidi and I were working in the kitchen when a song by Marvin Gaye came on the radio. I said, “Do you remember when we used to listen to that album?” and we shared a moment of awkward silence.
Thirteen years ago after visiting our families in the West over Christmas, we returned to our Boston apartment in zero degree weather. The first thing I noticed as the cab cruised up to our apartment was the black ash in the high snowdrifts. A man was boarding up our place with sheets of plywood. “Heidi we’re going to be okay, but we may still need the cab,” I said. That night our home had burned. The water that put out the fire had frozen as it ran down our walls and all of our rugs were under three inches of dirty ice. Pretty much everything we owned was destroyed, all Heidi’s clothes, my books and our Marvin Gaye album.
Not too long after this I served a church in which a third of the parish lost everything in the Oakland Fire. These kinds of catastrophes remind us that what we are to ourselves is fluid. Things do not just belong to you, to a certain extent they are you. Memory isn’t something that just happens in your head. Many of the memories that define our identity are embedded in objects like photographs, art, a particular church pew, even your spouse’s favorite coffee mug or a collection of record albums. Anyone who has lost someone they love realizes this. Physical objects extend our memory, they give us the power to listen or speak to distant selves.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) in Nicomachean Ethics tried to describe what freedom means to human beings. He starts with a definition of individual happiness. He points out that this depends on the well-being of others. Not only does this make suffering unavoidable it implies that in some sense our self includes others, that it is distributed beyond our body in this way too. Who we are does not just depend on individuals it also depends on groups of people: republicans, Giants fans, Americans, Roman Catholics, Vietnamese immigrants, Los Altans and Rotarians.
If the self includes our things, other people and our sense of group identity, what we are will always be a deeply spiritual question for us. In today’s gospel Peter isn’t thinking of this when he confronts Jesus. What Peter believes he is makes Jesus’ teaching completely unsettling for him.
It is a mistake to project our own political identities back on ancient peoples. What we mean by Jewish today is not exactly how Peter understood himself. As a person suffering under the Roman occupation he grew up in a society which prayed for a great ethnic, political and religious leader called the Messiah. The Messiah would lead his people in military campaigns that would atone for their all of their humiliations.
This picture of a Messiah is so powerful that we still have it with us today. My son Micah found a Christian fundamentalist comic book at Christ Church about “the Lion of Judah.” This heavily muscled Jesus wears a knight’s armor and rides a huge black stallion. He protects people from evil by the exercise of overwhelming force. Our “shock and awe” images of Christ as the King invariably refer back to this sort of picture.
But when Peter evokes this tempting image of great force on our side, Jesus rebukes him. Jesus redefines what we mean by Messiah and this changes who we are. If God does not just destroy our enemies but suffers for us, this changes everything. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8).
Jesus criticizes what we think of as our life, as our self. We are often wrong in what we think is most authentically ours or us. Jesus points out this truth by saying that we actually lose our life when we try most fervently to protect it. In many respects this already seems obvious to us.
This summer my friend Mark was out at night in the North Beach district of San Francisco when he ran into Jay, another old friend. At first Mark barely recognized Jay. He had a beard and his hair was tangled. You could see Jay’s toes sticking out of his shoes and his clothes looked old and worn. Mark has always been one of my most generous friends and he immediately invited him to stay at his house for a few days. Jay smelled terrible and Mark’s girlfriend didn’t like having a homeless heroin addict in her apartment. Jay grew up in a town just like Los Altos but somewhere along the line he had lost himself.
We all know so many examples of people who are losing their lives in order to gain something else. Because we are here in Silicon Valley we especially see people who have given themselves over completely to a business idea or a new technology. This culture affects every aspect of our life here from the way we raise children to city planning. John Calvin (1509-1564) wrote about this in a different way saying that the human mind is a “factory of idols” (Inst.). As creatures made to worship we persist in venerating the wrong things.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes about what he calls the “consumerization” of the church. He asserts that too often these days the church merely assimilates the worldly values of our culture into its doctrines and practices. He worries that we treat faith as merely a matter of “personal style.” To address this, he believes Christians need to keep God’s eventual judgment at the center of their faith. Although fundamentalists talk about salvation as a matter of simply believing in Jesus (in the way that they do), Williams reminds us that in the Bible Jesus tells stories about judgment based not on our system of belief but on our actions in helping people who are in need. This is how God separates the sheep from the goats.
I too believe in the judgment of God, but for me this is not something that only happens in a distant future. Jesus overthrows the idea of a messiah as world dictator and the one whose primary relation to us has mostly to do with judgment. What is far more central to Christianity is our experience of life and faith as a gift. God gives us life and Christ gives us a life that transcends fear. The problem is that both of these can be difficult for us to receive.
Because we live in an age dominated by the global economy we do not understand gifts very well and this makes it harder for us to love God. Twentieth century anthropologists who study societies in history and around the globe identify certain characteristics of gift exchange that differentiates it from barter or trade.
By now most people know where the term “Indian giver” comes from. Imagine it is 1638 and an Englishman is visiting the lodge of a Pequot Indian. The host shares a pipe of tobacco to make his guest feel welcome and then offers him the pipe that it has been smoked in. This peace pipe has circulated among the Pequots for generations. The Englishman recognizes its value puts it on his mantelpiece to save as a family heirloom.
Later, a different group of Pequots visit the Englishman’s house and he is surprised by their expectation that they will smoke together and that he will give them the pipe. They are angry that he is taking something out of circulation, something that should be shared. He is hurt to realize that some gifts aren’t privately owned in the way he imagined and come with certain expectations.
According to anthropologists, what makes given objects and sold products different is that we do not get a gift through our own efforts. Gifts also create communities and relationships. Gifts that are removed from circulation cease to be gifts. It is in exactly this sense that I understand Jesus who says, “For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Our life and the salvation we find in Jesus cease to exist when we stop giving it away.
A very strange thing happened to me last night. After being too busy to write a sermon all week I left an outline on my desk. When I woke up, I discovered a whole sermon carefully typed into my computer. Those naked men started it with the familiar story of the “Shoemaker and the Elves.” This parable has been used many times to describe the experience of creating art.
A mentor takes time to pass on the skill of composing music or drawing or ceramic tile work. At first the learner is in no position to repay anyone. It takes time to receive the gift. Eventually, although the student’s art is influenced by the master, it becomes individual and unique. Then for this gift to have value it must be practiced and passed on.
I don’t mean to equate God with a naked elf but I believe that Christianity is like this. It is learning to receive a gift by beginning to give ourselves. It is saving the one thing that is truly ours by giving it away. So we give not out of fear that God will judge us but because we are made in the image of a God who pours himself into the world and gives himself away.
_________________
This version is heavily based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 48.
Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.
This work originated in Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift which I cannot find on my shelves right now. For this summary see Ibid., xiv.
Gen. 17:1-7, 15-6
Ps 22:22-30
Rom. 4:13-25
Mk. 8:31-8
“Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” Mark 1
Once there was a young shoemaker so down on his luck that he only had enough leather to make one pair of shoes. By the time he finished cutting the leather, it was time for him to go to bed. He left the pieces on his workbench planning to sew them into shoes the next day. In the night two naked elves come and build the shoes. The shoemaker is astonished by what he discovers. He has never seen such perfectly stitched shoes.
The first customer who enters his shop recognizes the amazing workmanship and buys the shoes with so much money that the shoemaker is able to get enough leather to build two pairs of shoes. Again he cuts the leather and goes to bed. In the morning he finds two absolutely perfect pairs. The shoes sell for such a high price that he is able to buy enough leather for four pairs of shoes. Over time the shoemaker attains tremendous success.
Before Christmas, he and his wife start wondering who is making these extraordinary shoes. So they leave a candle burning in the shop and hide while the elves do their work. The next day his wife says, “there must be some way for us to thank these little men who have made us so rich. They look cold. I’m going to sew them warm clothes. Why don’t you make them some little shoes?”
When the clothes are finished the shoemaker and his wife leave out the small suits and shoes, and hide themselves again. The elves are delighted to find the clothes. They put them on and sing, “Looking cool and smooth, we’re out the door / We will not build shoes anymore!” They dance a jig around the room and leave forever. But by this time the shoemaker has learned this fine craftsmanship himself and continues to prosper.
I want to give this story a little more time to sink in before I come back to it. This week Heidi and I were working in the kitchen when a song by Marvin Gaye came on the radio. I said, “Do you remember when we used to listen to that album?” and we shared a moment of awkward silence.
Thirteen years ago after visiting our families in the West over Christmas, we returned to our Boston apartment in zero degree weather. The first thing I noticed as the cab cruised up to our apartment was the black ash in the high snowdrifts. A man was boarding up our place with sheets of plywood. “Heidi we’re going to be okay, but we may still need the cab,” I said. That night our home had burned. The water that put out the fire had frozen as it ran down our walls and all of our rugs were under three inches of dirty ice. Pretty much everything we owned was destroyed, all Heidi’s clothes, my books and our Marvin Gaye album.
Not too long after this I served a church in which a third of the parish lost everything in the Oakland Fire. These kinds of catastrophes remind us that what we are to ourselves is fluid. Things do not just belong to you, to a certain extent they are you. Memory isn’t something that just happens in your head. Many of the memories that define our identity are embedded in objects like photographs, art, a particular church pew, even your spouse’s favorite coffee mug or a collection of record albums. Anyone who has lost someone they love realizes this. Physical objects extend our memory, they give us the power to listen or speak to distant selves.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) in Nicomachean Ethics tried to describe what freedom means to human beings. He starts with a definition of individual happiness. He points out that this depends on the well-being of others. Not only does this make suffering unavoidable it implies that in some sense our self includes others, that it is distributed beyond our body in this way too. Who we are does not just depend on individuals it also depends on groups of people: republicans, Giants fans, Americans, Roman Catholics, Vietnamese immigrants, Los Altans and Rotarians.
If the self includes our things, other people and our sense of group identity, what we are will always be a deeply spiritual question for us. In today’s gospel Peter isn’t thinking of this when he confronts Jesus. What Peter believes he is makes Jesus’ teaching completely unsettling for him.
It is a mistake to project our own political identities back on ancient peoples. What we mean by Jewish today is not exactly how Peter understood himself. As a person suffering under the Roman occupation he grew up in a society which prayed for a great ethnic, political and religious leader called the Messiah. The Messiah would lead his people in military campaigns that would atone for their all of their humiliations.
This picture of a Messiah is so powerful that we still have it with us today. My son Micah found a Christian fundamentalist comic book at Christ Church about “the Lion of Judah.” This heavily muscled Jesus wears a knight’s armor and rides a huge black stallion. He protects people from evil by the exercise of overwhelming force. Our “shock and awe” images of Christ as the King invariably refer back to this sort of picture.
But when Peter evokes this tempting image of great force on our side, Jesus rebukes him. Jesus redefines what we mean by Messiah and this changes who we are. If God does not just destroy our enemies but suffers for us, this changes everything. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8).
Jesus criticizes what we think of as our life, as our self. We are often wrong in what we think is most authentically ours or us. Jesus points out this truth by saying that we actually lose our life when we try most fervently to protect it. In many respects this already seems obvious to us.
This summer my friend Mark was out at night in the North Beach district of San Francisco when he ran into Jay, another old friend. At first Mark barely recognized Jay. He had a beard and his hair was tangled. You could see Jay’s toes sticking out of his shoes and his clothes looked old and worn. Mark has always been one of my most generous friends and he immediately invited him to stay at his house for a few days. Jay smelled terrible and Mark’s girlfriend didn’t like having a homeless heroin addict in her apartment. Jay grew up in a town just like Los Altos but somewhere along the line he had lost himself.
We all know so many examples of people who are losing their lives in order to gain something else. Because we are here in Silicon Valley we especially see people who have given themselves over completely to a business idea or a new technology. This culture affects every aspect of our life here from the way we raise children to city planning. John Calvin (1509-1564) wrote about this in a different way saying that the human mind is a “factory of idols” (Inst.). As creatures made to worship we persist in venerating the wrong things.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes about what he calls the “consumerization” of the church. He asserts that too often these days the church merely assimilates the worldly values of our culture into its doctrines and practices. He worries that we treat faith as merely a matter of “personal style.” To address this, he believes Christians need to keep God’s eventual judgment at the center of their faith. Although fundamentalists talk about salvation as a matter of simply believing in Jesus (in the way that they do), Williams reminds us that in the Bible Jesus tells stories about judgment based not on our system of belief but on our actions in helping people who are in need. This is how God separates the sheep from the goats.
I too believe in the judgment of God, but for me this is not something that only happens in a distant future. Jesus overthrows the idea of a messiah as world dictator and the one whose primary relation to us has mostly to do with judgment. What is far more central to Christianity is our experience of life and faith as a gift. God gives us life and Christ gives us a life that transcends fear. The problem is that both of these can be difficult for us to receive.
Because we live in an age dominated by the global economy we do not understand gifts very well and this makes it harder for us to love God. Twentieth century anthropologists who study societies in history and around the globe identify certain characteristics of gift exchange that differentiates it from barter or trade.
By now most people know where the term “Indian giver” comes from. Imagine it is 1638 and an Englishman is visiting the lodge of a Pequot Indian. The host shares a pipe of tobacco to make his guest feel welcome and then offers him the pipe that it has been smoked in. This peace pipe has circulated among the Pequots for generations. The Englishman recognizes its value puts it on his mantelpiece to save as a family heirloom.
Later, a different group of Pequots visit the Englishman’s house and he is surprised by their expectation that they will smoke together and that he will give them the pipe. They are angry that he is taking something out of circulation, something that should be shared. He is hurt to realize that some gifts aren’t privately owned in the way he imagined and come with certain expectations.
According to anthropologists, what makes given objects and sold products different is that we do not get a gift through our own efforts. Gifts also create communities and relationships. Gifts that are removed from circulation cease to be gifts. It is in exactly this sense that I understand Jesus who says, “For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Our life and the salvation we find in Jesus cease to exist when we stop giving it away.
A very strange thing happened to me last night. After being too busy to write a sermon all week I left an outline on my desk. When I woke up, I discovered a whole sermon carefully typed into my computer. Those naked men started it with the familiar story of the “Shoemaker and the Elves.” This parable has been used many times to describe the experience of creating art.
A mentor takes time to pass on the skill of composing music or drawing or ceramic tile work. At first the learner is in no position to repay anyone. It takes time to receive the gift. Eventually, although the student’s art is influenced by the master, it becomes individual and unique. Then for this gift to have value it must be practiced and passed on.
I don’t mean to equate God with a naked elf but I believe that Christianity is like this. It is learning to receive a gift by beginning to give ourselves. It is saving the one thing that is truly ours by giving it away. So we give not out of fear that God will judge us but because we are made in the image of a God who pours himself into the world and gives himself away.
_________________
This version is heavily based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 48.
Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.
This work originated in Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift which I cannot find on my shelves right now. For this summary see Ibid., xiv.
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