“Generosity over scarcity, brokenness in the face of denial, and hope in the place of despair.”
Care for Creation Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary
by Dennis Ormseth
Readings for Sunday June 5-11, Year C (2013, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025)
1 Kings 17:17–24
Psalm 30
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17
The continuity of this Sunday’s gospel with the reading for last Sunday serves to underscore the significance of the affirmations regarding divine authority of Jesus and the healing of creation we presented in last week’s comment. To reiterate: The purpose of these stories of healing and resuscitation is to manifest the presence of God in Jesus, a presence which brings healing not only for the centurion’s servant and the widow’s son, but to the community. “Here self-interest, care for others and “faith” merge in an alliance that transcends barriers of culture and power and promotes the common good of all parties.” Jesus’ resuscitation of the widow of Nain’s son amplifies the recognition of divine authority and leads directly to the acclamation of Jesus as “great prophet” and the glorification of God by all the people. And while the lessons and the psalm for last Sunday provided a basis for developing the significance of these events for the whole community of creation, this Sunday’s lessons and psalm extend and deepen their significance for addressing the current ecological crisis.
It is important to note that in these two encounters, Jesus demonstrates divine power over death. The centurion’s servant was said to be “ill and close to death” (Luke 7:2). The widow’s “only son” was already dead and was being carried out on a bier. As David Tiede observes, the raising of the widow’s son is “one of three Lukan stories of the resuscitation of a dead person (see also 8:40-42, 49-56, Jairus’ daughter; Acts 9;36-43, Tabitha),” which “indicate the evangelist’s conviction that these resuscitations are displays of the authority and power of the kingdom [of God] over death itself (see 12:5).” Moreover, comparison with our first lesson in this regard shows that Jesus’ authority over death is even greater than that of Elijah: he raises ‘the dead by his word alone,” which ‘outdoes Elijah’s or Elisha’s stretching themselves out on the corpse” (David Tiede, Luke. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988; pp. 151-52). The God we encounter in Jesus is the God who creates by speaking all things into being.
It is precisely this authority over death of the Creator that explains the appointment of Psalm 30 for this Sunday’s worship. God’s presence in Jesus is thereby acknowledged as the power by which the psalmist is not only shielded from foes (v. 1) and healed (v. 2), but “restored . . . to life from among those gone down to the Pit” (v. 3).” The psalmist has cried out in deep anguish:
“What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
O Lord be my helper!” (Psalm 30:9-10.)
The psalmist here represents homo laudans, “the praising human” we discussed in our comment on the readings for the Day of Pentecost, whose vocation according to Psalm 104 is the unceasing praise of the Creator. Like Psalm 104, Psalm 30 significantly shades its praise of God by recognition that “a dark cloud looms on the horizon.” Accordingly, his rescue can “turn mourning into dancing;” Yahweh has “taken off [his] sackcloth and clothed [him] with joy, so that [his] soul may praise God and not be silent.”
Walter Brueggemann interprets the significance of these verses in terms of their address to Yahweh. . . in the life-denying fissure of exile-death-impotence-chaos, to which Yahweh’s partners seem inevitably to come. This affirmation may be one of the distinctive surprises of Yahweh as given in Israel’s testimony. To the extent that the fissure is an outcome of Yahweh’s rejecting rage, or to the extent that it is a result of Yahweh’s loss of power in the face of the counterpower of death, we might expect that a loss to nullity is irreversible. Thus, “when you’re dead, you’re dead,” “when you’re in exile, you’re in exile.”
But the “unsolicited testimony “of Israel moves through and beyond this. . . irreversibility in two stunning affirmations. First, Yahweh is inclined toward and attentive to those in the nullity. Yahweh can be reached, summoned, and remobilized for the sake of life. Beyond Yahweh’s harsh sovereignty, Yahweh has a soft underside to which appeal can be made. Israel (and we) are regularly astonished that working in tension with Yahweh’s self-regard is Yahweh’s readiness to be engaged with and exposed for the sake of the partner (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997; p. 557).
And secondly, “the mobilization of Yahweh in the season of nullity characteristically requires an act of initiative on the part of the abandoned partner.” This is what the voice of Psalm 30 is articulating. Breuggemann concludes:
Indeed, Israel’s faith is formed, generated, and articulated, precisely with reference to the fissure, which turns out to be the true place of life for Yahweh’s partner and the place wherein Yahweh’s true character is not only disclosed, but perhaps fully formed. The reality of nullity causes a profound renegotiation of Yahweh’s sovereignty vis-a-vis Yahweh’s pathos-filled fidelity.
Yahweh “is known in Israel to be a God willing and able to enact a radical newness . . . for each of Yahweh’s partners, a newness that the partners cannot work for themselves” (Brueggemann, p. 558).
[Lutheran hearers of the second lesson this Sunday, we may note parenthetically, may recognize this quality of radical newness in the Apostle Paul’s clear disassociation with the church in Jerusalem and his insistence that the gospel of Jesus Christ which liberated him from his former life of opposition was not “from a human source, nor was [he] taught it.” Brueggemann heightens the significance of this quality, furthermore, in noting that “because of this inexplicable, unanticipated newness is the same for all [Israel’s] partners, it is with good reason that H. H. Schmid has concluded that creatio ex nihilo, justification by faith, and resurrection of the dead are synonymous phrases.” These phrases, he insists, “are not isolated dogmatic themes. They are, rather, ways in which Yahweh’s characteristic propensities of generosity are made visible in different contexts with different partners (Brueggemann, p. 558).]
It is precisely with respect to this affirmation of radical newness, according to Brueggeman, that the biblical narrative contrasts sharply with the dominant metanarrative available within contemporary culture for those concerned with addressing the ecological crisis. “Insistence on the reality of brokenness,” Brueggemann insightfully suggests, “flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial. Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncriticized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources, brokenness can be avoided.” Within this narrative,
. . . there are no genuinely broken people. When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must, it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt. The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this. When denial is transposed into guilt—into personal failure—the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job’s friends defended “the system.”
The outcome for the isolated failure is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it. In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics—it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing, the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Agent who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility.
Like the psalmist who said in his prosperity “I shall never be moved,” (30:6), the foundational assumptions of our society cannot be challenged. Alternatively, “the drama of brokenness and restoration, which has Yahweh as its key agent, features generosity, candor in brokenness, and resilient hope, the markings of a viable life. The primary alternative now available to us features scarcity, denial, and despair, surely the ingredients of nihilism.” (Brueggemann, p. 562).
This analysis fits all too well with the inability of American society and, increasingly, global industrial society more generally to respond effectively to the multifaceted ecological crisis we face. Denial occurs, in this analysis, on three levels. First and fundamental, we refuse to entertain the possibility of a complete collapse of our relationship with nature, in terms of the destruction of biodiversity and global climate change and its damage to our agricultural systems. But secondly, amongst those who see the dangers, remedies of technological innovation and adaptation are usually considered sufficient to address the problem: strategies and resources, it is assumed, can be developed to forestall major disaster. And thirdly, the needed behavioral change is considered achievable on the basis of corporate self-interest and individual guilt in relationship to that interest; it seems important to assign fault to individuals who resist change, but our corporate complicity in alienation from creation is generally ignored. Change on a societal scale remains beyond our cultural and political reach. In this situation, a Christian congregation at worship in the presence of its risen Lord and placing itself under the authority and within the sacramentally enacted dynamic of his death and resurrection, offers the world the alternative that, in Brueggeman’s apt summary, “like ancient Israel, affirms generosity over scarcity, brokenness in the face of denial, and hope in the place of despair” (Brueggemann, p. 563)
Originally written by Dennis Ormseth in 2013.
dennisormseth@gmail.com