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Scripture Sunday: A Rich Feast

3/31/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

Isaiah 25:6-9 (CEB)
6 On this mountain,
the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples
a rich feast, a feast of choice wines,
​
of select foods rich in flavor,         
of choice wines well refined.

7  He will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is veiling all peoples,     
the shroud enshrouding all nations.

8  He will swallow up death forever.
The Lord God will wipe tears from every face;     
he will remove his people’s disgrace from off the whole earth,
        
for the
Lord has spoken.

9  They will say on that day, “Look! This is our God,
for whom we have waited--     
and he has saved us!

This is the Lord, for whom we have waited;     
let’s be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”

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Chapters 13-27 of Isaiah are a sort of mini-apocalypse concerning the nations, with a theological emphasis on the universal worship of Yahweh. Isaiah’s mini-apocalypse is interrupted with a stunning feast here in chapter 25 though, where we see that Yahweh’s universality as the Creator of the whole earth also takes on an intimate particularity: on this mountain God will prepare a feast, on this mountain God will swallow death, on that day the people will rejoice in this Lord. God is neither aloof nor distanced from his creation, but wrapped up in the many layers of it, cozily familiar with the stuff of the land. The Lord of “heavenly forces” displays her divinity as the one who dedicates time to cook a fabulous and savory meal for all peoples; it’s an endearing image to think of God as the host who goes back into the wine cellar, deliberating and choosing the best aged and refined wine for our sheer delight. ​
God is neither aloof nor distanced from his creation, but wrapped up in the many layers of it, cozily familiar with the stuff of the land. 
We are hearing this passage on Easter Sunday as we celebrate the resurrected Lord. The obvious Christological reading of Isaiah will emphasize Jesus as the one who “swallows up death forever.” The power of the passage, which overcomes violence and death-dealing forces, should not be overlooked in favor of more sentimental images; however, it is vital to pay attention to the passage as a whole, seeing that the Lord who swallows up death, who wipes away our tears, is not a Lord that abandons the Earth in the process. Resurrection is no escape from materiality, but the opposite, infusing materiality with new life. Salvation, as the Israelites rightly proclaimed, is a rich feast that honors and celebrates creatures and creation alike; it removes “disgrace from off the whole Earth”; it whispers come, taste and see that the Lord is good. Resurrection and salvation are too often reduced to the absence of death or punishment, dismissing the inseparable call to freshness, liberation, and restoration to communal wholeness that infuses creation with shalom.
Jesus was often accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because the practices and images of feasting were so central to understanding the Kingdom of God. Norman Wirzba in his book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating reminds us that the evidence of the early church was communities that regularly ate together and “in their eating they tried to bear witness to Christ’s way of dwelling on earth.” The Church today is not known for its sustainable food practices, for its radical hospitality towards people and the land. We too often celebrate Easter as a commemoration of what Christ did in the past, but the only way to truly “rejoice,” as evidenced by Isaiah and the early Church, is by reinstituting Christ’s way of being: in this moment, with these people, with this land. The feasting images that pervade Scripture challenge us this Easter to discover our rootedness in this Earth as we celebrate the risen Christ, to question our relationships to the food systems we are grossly alienated from, and to consider who it is we honor at our tables. To quote Wirzba again, “Thoughtful eating reminds us that there is no human fellowship without a table, no table without a kitchen, no kitchen without a garden, no garden without viable ecosystems, no ecosystems without the forces productive of life, and no life without its source in God.”
Jesus was often accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because the practices and images of feasting were so central to understanding the Kingdom of God.
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As we sing our songs about overcoming, ask “O death where is your sting?”, and proclaim Christ’s resurrection as our own, may we be empowered to hold fiercely to Isaiah’s image, knowing we are not saved from something, but for something: a rich feast.  It is in our feasting that we learn to receive God’s sweet aroma, trying to wrap ourselves around such exquisite flavors previously hidden from us. Our task is to actively partake, sharing the newfound beauty we discover by attending to the world in ways that nurture and feed all of life on this Earth. Christ lives indeed, and we meet him in our preparations for such holy, rich feasts.
Books:

Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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Scripture Sunday: Remembering the Palms

3/24/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

John 12:12-16 (NRSV)
12 The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. 13 So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord-- the King of Israel!" 14 Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: 15 "Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!" 16 His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

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John’s passage describing the events we will celebrate this coming Palm Sunday initially appears wanting for the purposes of creation justice. Especially in comparison to Mark’s version, which was covered in last week’s episode of the Green Lectionary Podcast, where we are given details that paint a dense picture of provision and illuminate a little ecosystem of reciprocity and mutuality between humans and creation. For example, as the episode pointed out, we see humans giving their cloaks, willing to sacrifice as co-contributors with the trees who give their branches. For Mark, there is this groundedness that is so important and exposes the intimate humanness of Jesus. For John, there is a different priority at play. The book not only takes a more philosophical perspective of the Christ of the cosmos, but the author centers the theme of belief and unbelief. Its sheer brevity, a mere 4 verses in comparison to Mark’s 11, contains two references to Jewish scripture: Psalm 118 and Zechariah 9, underscoring Jesus’ divinity with haste and clarity. Although we are “missing” some information here, and the people awkwardly begin praising before Jesus rides the donkey, John’s reference to Zechariah in 12:15 provides a richness into the kind of King coming that Mark likewise lacks. John invites us to wonder if we understand this mystery before us, if we are properly remembering the Messiah who rides the young donkey and not a war horse. ​
The reference in John 12:15 is to Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Verse 10 continues, “I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the warhorses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.” Righteousness and victory are re-defined in terms of humility, graciousness, and nonviolence from sea to sea. The rulers who force their will onto creation and use it as a means to demonstrate their power, exceeding their limits, are taken away. The battle bow, an instrument that kills and separates life, is broken and replaced with a strange image of peace: of a human sharing in the ordinary life of a young creature who is newly learning what it means to carry another, a stranger. It is a striking image of kingship and true power that prompts a further question in Zechariah 9:17,” What is his goodness, and what is his beauty? Grain will make his young men flourish; so too wine his young women.” Goodness and beauty are tied to the flourishing of all creation together. It makes me think of the Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14: “because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the destruction of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.”
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​Hearing Zechariah as the backdrop for this passage illustrates a crucial point, one made by Rowan Williams in his essay on Mother Maria Skobtsova, for reading the gospel according to John and celebrating Palm Sunday: that encountering God in history may not be reducible to material reality, but it is literally nothing without it.* Our identity has an inseparable and unchosen connectedness to the rest of the Earth; the world is not some evil or a field for us to exercise our virtues, it is no backdrop for our “religious duties.” As we remember the colt Jesus rode into Jerusalem on and the palm trees grabbed to meet him, we see that honoring creation is “not in fact an extra chore on top of the main work of communing with God. It is itself the stuff of communion with God.” The disciples, who did not understand what was happening at the time but continued to bear in mind the life of Jesus, provide a call for us as the season of Lent closes: we must actively remember the kind of King we follow and dispel the myth that humanity is alienated from its material environment, that we can relate to God without it. Sin, as Williams defines it, is willed isolation, “and this isolation as a solitary desiring subject is what most erodes our reality.”
We must actively remember the kind of King we follow and dispel the myth that humanity is alienated from its material environment, that we can relate to God without it. Sin, as Williams defines it, is willed isolation
John’s concern with belief remains extremely relevant– we must ask ourselves and our churches if and how we will welcome this kind of generous and bow-breaking existence into our worlds marked by environmental abuse and exploitation. As the donkey lifted one dusty hoof after another, and as the palm branches designated a path along the soft earth, may we contemplate our web of relations among all living things and move with such generative forces, forward.
Notes:

* Maria Skobtsova was a pioneer in the French resistance of WWII, working with refugees and destitutes, and courageously defending Jews. She was executed, taking the place of another woman, at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1945. Her martyrdom is widely recognized and she was canonized as a saint in the Orthodox Church in 2004.

​Books:


Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021).

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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Scripture Sunday: A Willing Spirit

3/17/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

Psalm 51:1-12 (NRSV)
​1
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. 5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. 6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Psalm 51 is the striking and well-known opening to the Davidic Psalter of Psalms 51-72. The first time I read the psalm online it lacked the superscription, which is typically considered “added” material anyway; however, the superscription endows the psalm with a concreteness and vigor I find necessary and compelling: “To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” The tradents “Davidized” this psalm by identifying the prayer with the narrative found in 2 Samuel 11-12, where David murders Uriah and commits adultery, to say the very least, with Bathsheba. In my Old Testament class, we would joke that David was trying to see how many of the ten commandments he could break at one time, but it was truly difficult to wrestle with the depravity and sexual violence of Israel’s treasured King. On the surface it often seemed that Israel was obsessed with David, deeming him a “man after God’s own heart.” Yet, as my professor, Dr. Strawn, would point out, other translations like the CEB designate David as “a man of God’s own choosing,” and it would be more accurate to say that Israel is less intrigued with David as they are with God’s faithfulness to David despite David’s well-documented flaws and committed atrocities. Indeed, David’s sin is “ever before” him (v.3). Unlike our culture of denial and cover-up though, David confesses and asks for God’s judgment, which is a bold request and one we are too hesitant to pray. As the rest of the historical books reveal, God answers and David suffers the consequences of his actions with the death of his firstborn son and Absalom, and it will be the very child conceived with Bathsheba, Solomon, who is given what David is denied: building the temple, receiving wisdom, ushering in a peaceful reign.
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As easy as it is to condemn David, when hearing this psalm in the context of the Anthropocene and climate sin, I too can cry, “I know my transgressions,” and “have done evil in your sight.” In the 2 Samuel narrative, the Hebrew emphasizes how David “takes” what he wants just as we take and take from the Earth. The desire for truth in our inward being is a desire we therefore must echo and be unafraid to cultivate, owning up to and facing the exploitative, death-dealing ways we have treated the Earth, the violence we have committed against it like David against Bathsheba. We can be unafraid to confess because we face a God whose judgment is not aimed at further destruction, but is a rescue and saving help. The sin David describes is a filth that pollutes his living space, clothing, and even inner being; the sin feels heavy and inescapable. If we look at plastics, for example, we can likewise find them all around, even inside us. How can we escape this sin? From where is our help to come? ​
An escalating trio of Yahweh’s characteristics is employed and alludes to the “mercy formula” in Exodus 34:6 as David petitions Yahweh to show what he knows to be inherent to the deity: “mercy,” “steadfast love,” and “compassion.” The effects of God’s mercy are what combat the multiform dimensions of sin entangled in our reality, not so that we can return to our state before sin, but so that we might be made a new creation. There is no going back for us in the Anthropocene, and there was no going back for David. However, with responsibility and ownership comes the potential for new life, a way forward with an abiding, transformed core that does not forget the past but can better live into the future. ​
There is no going back for us in the Anthropocene, and there was no going back for David. However, with responsibility and ownership comes the potential for new life
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Ambivalence is revealed in this psalm as the temptation that stands between us and enduring healing. Just as David acknowledges and conflates his sins against neighbor as sins against God, so too our sins against creation are one with sins against our Creator. The literary concentric structure of v.3-11 “blot out,” “wash me,” “cleanse me,” “that I may be clean,” “wash me,” “blot out,” is a sequence our lives should be shaped by, urgently, eagerly seeking change that enables renewal and rebirth in our homes and communities. We have no promise of an easy way out, and if we continue to look at David’s example, the road in front of us is surely as difficult and grief-stricken. Yet, God promises God’s presence and a sustaining and willing spirit for each of us, which we will need to combat the climate crisis and begin binding the wounds of ourselves and the world around us. Somehow our lament, self-surrender, and the reorientation of our desires toward truth and holiness that wills life for all creation is met with the divine embrace of a God whose love and faithfulness ever exceeds our own. Praise be. ​
Works Cited:
Zenger, Erich, Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, and Linda M. Maloney. “Psalm 51.” In Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100, edited by Klaus Baltzer, 11–25. 1517 Media, 2005. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvb6v84t.9.

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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Scripture Sunday: Remember the Sabbath

3/3/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

Exodus 20:8-11 (NRSV)
8 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

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Physicality and spirituality are not so sharply divided in the Israelite world. Here, in one of the two versions of the Decalogue, the Israelites receive the command to “remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.” We come to see that holiness is not defined as a personal mode of piety, but realized by giving rest to all creatures and creation. As these wandering people are led away from the regime and economy of Pharaoh, they are learning what life with God is all about, unlearning their familiar systems that maximize profit, production, and time. It must have been incredibly startling and uncomfortable to hear the message to slow down after being defined, not as creatures endowed with dignity to be, as ends in themselves, but as subjects defined by labor output, a mere means. We hold onto the definitions and conceptions of ourselves and the world so tightly, even when it is self-destructive for us to do so, because we don’t know any better and lack the imaginative resources to grasp what they might otherwise be. It is why as Moses descends Mount Sinai, the Israelites begin to worship the golden calf, wanting back the “gods who can lead us,” the gods who oppressed them (Exodus 32:1). The golden calf event has often been equated to cheating on one’s spouse on the wedding night. Yahweh had just made a covenant with the Israelites out of deep love and established boundaries for refreshment (Exodus 31:17), but just as God utters a “yes and forever” the people turn back to the life they knew before they had their freedom, not knowing how to accept this way of life or what to make of it. It really is not a scene all that foreign to our contemporary moment in the Anthropocene: we too evade Yahweh so we might cling to our golden gods of rampant consumption, capitalism, and greed. We need the active resistance of remembering and keeping the Sabbath.
In the Sabbath command, God wants the people to become divine, to be like God by resting and beholding the beauty of creation in all its fullness. It is an invitation to mimic and embrace a rhythm of work, play, and rest, to be attuned to our interconnectedness with all things, respecting boundaries and honoring limits. It is not merely something we accomplish by mindlessly checking out and avoiding our daily tasks, not something to cross off on Sundays and ignore the rest of the week. Sabbath is a rest of liberation from oppressive systems so we might reorder our lives towards the surplus of God’s grace and mercy. It grounds us for the week as we move forward so we can better attend to the world with God's posture of delight and protection. Sabbath is the very way we heal relationships with God, ourselves, others, and the world, and our neglect of the Sabbath as a spiritual and economic practice is far more damaging than we realize. Our culture implores us to chase after unlimited growth, but the Sabbath calls us to find our place among creation, to simply be where our feet are. As Norman Wirzba says, “God is constantly working to make his love incarnate in bodies and places.” Sabbath gives us access to recognize this love incarnate in the world around us. If we can love the world, then we might use our creative energy to save it. ​
Our culture implores us to chase after unlimited growth, but the Sabbath calls us to find our place among creation
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This is what Jesus did– healing on the Sabbath was one of the radical choices that led to his crucifixion. Liberation is the embodiment of the Sabbath, which we see even before Jesus’ time in the culmination of Israel’s sabbatical year every seven years, which included complete rest for the land and reaping only what was necessary to feed one’s household (cf. Lev 25:1-6), and Jubilee every forty-nine years, which celebrated forgiveness and “liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants” (cf. Lev 25:10). Mutual care and abundance are distinctive markers of the Sabbath that critiqued Israel’s and now our own systems of scarcity and gross inequality. It is our responsibility to discern where we need to slow down and demonstrate self-restraint, and where we need to reach out and actively free others. In the climate crisis, this may look like giving up meat once a week or going out to shop at a local farmers market, it could be eliminating plastic usage or writing letters to local congressmen. The vital question is how are we reorienting and restoring our intertwined relationship with creation, the companion and sibling God has gifted us with. This is how we remember and keep God’s love, Sabbath is how we practice and embody holiness. It is the hope we have for ourselves, our neighbors, and creation.

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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