Author: Charlotte Vaughan Coyle

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus in Athens and said …

“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

from Acts 17

“When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed…” I’m not a bit surprised.

We’re talking Plato’s Greece here where his ideas had deeply influenced Paul’s hearers.

As a matter of fact, Plato’s ideas have influenced western civilization throughout these many centuries and have even shaped Christian theology.

“Resurrection” wasn’t a category in Platonic thought.

There were, of course, plenty of stories about the gods who would sometimes interfere with death and bring someone back from Hades. But those were only stories; children’s tales.

These tales were nothing to found a faith on. This was nothing to build a life on.

The voices of biblical woman are mostly muted, filtered through the voices of the male writers of the text. Even so, the women of Scripture speak to us with their own power – from the edges, from the underside of power and privilege.

The women of the Bible do not necessarily show us how women ought to behave; rather they tell us something about how women throughout history have acted within their time and place, from within their own particular circumstances. These women are not to be used as simplistic templates shaped by our own standards of acceptable or unacceptable behavior.

For the most part, the stories of Scripture reflect the patriarchal mores of first, the ancient Middle East and later the Roman Empire. And then, of course, woven throughout these secular influences are the religious convictions of the people of Israel.

The Israelites and the Church did (and do) not exist in a vacuum.

Expectations and pressures from the surrounding culture were as powerful forces then as they are still today and most of us are blind to the many ways our culture influences and even manipulates our religious beliefs and practice.

The work of Feminist scholarship is to critique and question Scripture and its patriarchal bias from a female perspective in light of the cultural realities of the time as well as the eternal ideals of justice and equity.

This hopeful ideals clearly have not yet come into being in our own human reality and it certainly does not exist in Scripture. It is only hinted at, only dreamed about in the stories of the women – our mothers -preserved for us in our Bible.

For our Living in The Story texts this week, let’s look at the lives of two fascinating Old Testament women: Hannah and Ruth.

The ancient Greeks thought of themselves as the only truly civilized people; anyone who was not Greek was considered to be “barbarian.”

The ancient Israelites called those who were not a part of their tribe “people of the nations,” “ethnos” i.e. “gentiles.”

Defining who is in and who is out has been happening for much of human history and our cultural stories have always included tales of people who are “other.” But a surprising number of those stories describe outsiders whose character and courage upended “insider” expectations.

• The good Samaritan.
• The hooker with a heart of gold.
• Wisdom from the mouth of babes.

I call Job a “faithful Gentile” because his story is not told within the context of the Abraham-Isaac-and-Jacob tradition. It is not understood within the circumstance of Moses and the Exodus and so he seems to have existed apart from the claimed lineage of Israel.

Job’s tale is its own, set outside of time: “There once was a man in the land of Uz …”

Not many stories are as powerful as the drama of Job.

A righteous man, blameless and upright, “no one like him on the earth.” And then his loves, his living, his life were all placed in jeopardy by an odd divine wager unleashing mountains of troubles, oceans of despair and miserable comforters. We hear blessing and cursing and eloquent searching. We listen to assertions of innocence and guilt. We recognize calls for judgment and justice.

Growing up, the conventional wisdom from my childhood praised the “patience of Job.”

But as I came to read the story for myself instead of just hearing it in Sunday School (a very important phase in the growing up process!), I realized Job didn’t sound at all “patient.”

Like some of the psalmists, Job doubts, complains, criticizes, argues, proclaims his righteousness and challenges God to a contest of integrity.

What a relief it was for me to discover that doubt is a crucial part of faith!

Some of us have had our cataracts removed and we still remember the amazement when the doctor removed the eye patch. It’s a sudden and startling reversal.

“I once was blind but now I see” – were the words that came to my mind at the time. It was as if “something like scales” had fallen from my eyes.

I love this story about Saul of Tarsus who becomes for us Paul the Apostle. I love the startling reversal, the U-turn in his life. I love the way the story is told, folding in so many other biblical images from so many other stories: the split open sky, visions into the heavens, a blinding light, the three days of darkness.

Three Days like Jonah in the belly of the whale. Three Days like Jesus in the tomb. Three Days of darkness that brought enlightenment.

Luke tells this story of Saul of Tarsus’ Damascus Road experience as yet another story of God’s unlikely, unexpected, unpredictable grace.

Gene Boring and Fred Craddock say:

The whole story is not about Saul’s successful quest for God, but about the grace of God that transforms a persecutor into a missionary.

Readers are called not to admire Saul, but to rejoice that they belong to a church whose mission is empowered and directed by such a God.

Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) 398.

Paul’s vision, Paul’s epiphany – this moment of coming to awareness; this “ah hah!” moment; this “now I get it” moment – is a resurrection story.

As we watched the powerful movie Lincoln, I was particularly moved by one scene where President Lincoln rides slowly through a still smoldering battlefield.

Everywhere he looks, the bodies of soldiers are tumbled together, a horrific grey and blue sculpture of death and destruction.

I wept.

It was just after the Civil War that the commemoration of Memorial Day began. Memorial Day was instituted because people wanted to remember the fallen soldiers from both the North and the South.

But this time of memorial also forces us to remember our warring madness and the horrible fact that in these years, 750,000 fellow Americans had killed one another.

This was also around the same time that Julia Ward Howe initiated a Mother’s Peace Day observance.

Too many mothers, too many grandmothers had lowered their bright, brave sons into graves. Too many mothers had wept in the night and still ached with each morning’s light.

“Enough is enough,” they said. Julia Howe’s call for peace is now our annual Mothers’ Day celebration but it began in 1870 as a way to remember the weeping of mothers and the waste of war.

On the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem, on the day before he carried his old rugged cross up the hillside, he wept. Not for himself, but for all those who turned their backs on the peace he offered and who instead – as people will do – turned to violence.