The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9), July 7, 2024

Is anyone else just tired? I’m actually over a month late in submitting these commentaries to the good folks at Process and Faith, and the reason to which I keep returning is “I’m so tired.”

There’s no need to rehearse a litany of reasons for my tired state. Day-to-day activities and larger societal, ecological, and geopolitical concerns bear down on each of us to varying degrees. I found myself turning to the lectionary texts for this month over and over, and I wanted them to be different each time. I wanted some passage of lament or a pastoral psalm. I did not want what, at first glance, are some rather challenging texts from all directions.

Perhaps you, process-relational preacher, are also finding difficulty in discerning the God who is the God of all creation and the God of the oppressed in a psalm that praises a citadel and the deity of its eternal defense. Perhaps you’ve read one too many interpretations of this 2 Corinthians passage that compel abuse victims to stay with their abuser, to be content in their weakness and calamities for the sake of Christ. Perhaps you had a contentious committee meeting recently, and you feel like whatever you might say from that pulpit could quickly turn into a repeat of Jesus’s rejection by the people of his hometown.

Though the precise definition or etymology of the word is unknown, I call you from the hecticness of these perhaps and to the word that ends Psalm 48:8: selah.

Of the possible definitions for the term, I find “stop and listen” to be most helpful at this time.

Stop.

Listen.

Become aware of many different influences on you in this emerging moment; influences from your past, from our shared pasts, from God’s zesty lures into beauty and goodness, from your hopes for your life and your people’s lives.

This might be a perfect season to refuse to simplify or reduce the complexities of the lectionary into a single narrative. When the church journeys together in our Christian education, the process-relational preacher can use seasons like this one to help us practice attentiveness to complexity and discern God’s calls into abounding, loving, beautifying life together amid the multifarious influences of our lives. That could mean homilies that look more like brief vignettes or multiple moments of proclamation scattered through the service. It could mean an open-ended question and time for writing at the “end” of the sermon. It could mean being transparent with

the congregation about your homiletic craft: why you choose what you choose or why you don’t talk about what you don’t talk about.

So, let us briefly look at each of the four texts unto themselves with some process-relational questions and concerns, letting their diversity be present in our inquiry.

In what may be the understatement of understatements, the establishment of the Davidic monarchy is significant. Reading this short passage with process-relational concerns in mind,r a few things stand out.

David’s relationship to the people is, first, a kinship of bone and flesh. David’s rule is supposed to be from among the people because he is their kin. God calls David to be a shepherd of God’s people as their ruler. The people, David included, remain the people of God.

God casts visions before the people as a people. They—God and the people—are to live together in a covenant that recognizes a functional ruler as a shepherd from within rather than some demigod, Übermensch, or Chief Executive Officer from above.

How can this passage speak to our temptations to rule our churches? our communities? our country?

~~~

With the psalmist, ponder the steadfast love of God (Psalm 48: 9).

I have not experienced a militant God to be one of steadfast love nor have I experienced the flight of kings who were besieging a citadel built in God’s name.

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

The seemingly archaic architectural references jar my reading of the psalm. I’ve never lived in a walled city, and castles can only defend against an invading army in video games.

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

How many more passages of scripture do we need to read aloud that uphold visions of human violence that we’ve outgrown?

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

But. Have we outgrown the violence? Have we evolved past the need for citadels? Is dedicating a rampart to God a theologically misinformed and superstitious thing of yore?

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

Have we become the kings who are assembled against the people? Are concerns about defense nonsense only when we own and deploy technologies that penetrate any conceivable battlement? Is praising God for being a sure defense only superstitious to those who have built and benefited from societies of domination, who have not faced the seriously oppressive weight of dehumanization and ecological degradation?

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

Does God’s victory advance a conquesting might, or does God’s victory defend the oppressed?

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

Where are we in this psalm? Where are we as a church? as a theological academy? as a process-relational theological tradition?

Ponder the steadfast love of God.

Process-relational theology positions Christians well to participate in struggles for liberation and flourishing in our world. We can recognize how God calls each of us into solidarity with one another, co-creating loving justice for the life of the world. Life together in Christ challenges readings of this psalm that focus on the militancy or, more suspiciously, on the discomfort many have because such language feels “impolite” or “improper” in a (so-called) more advanced world. Co-creative solidarity in the life of the God of the oppressed, however, highlights God’s preferential option for and defense of those against whom kings (capitalist CEOs, petrochemical lobbyists, a transnational military-industrial complex, and multi-corporate Plantationocene agribusiness) are assembled.

When we, with the psalmist and their community, ponder the steadfast love of God, we can recognize how God calls us into and empowers us for loving justice. We can recognize how God journeys with us in and as Love, defending the oppressed forever.

~~~

This text can be challenging from a number of directions, so let’s name some at the top:

– “Be content with your weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ” has been an instruction to victims of abuse that ignores the powers of patriarchy, whiteness, and cis-heterosexism that sanction the abusive violence.

– “For power is made perfect in weakness” has been used to suggest that God desires a person’s pain for the selfish reason of displaying more divine power than God would have displayed had the person not been as weakened.

– “On my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses” has been set as an example to people whose empowerment, strength, and flourishing is a threat to cultures of domination that depend on systems of oppression

A process-relational reading of this text can help us construct alternatives to these misreadings, alternatives that participate in the Gospel.

I think that we have to begin with Paul’s testimony of being caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was his heavenly experience or someone else’s, we do not know; God knows. I don’t think it actually matters if we know or not. Rather, Paul’s boasting after the event offers the process-relational preacher an opportunity to shape our witness as a proclaiming community.

For Paul, the purpose of the boasting seems to be the issue at hand. He could boast on behalf of the one who has been caught up into Paradise, bearing a witness that focuses the listener on the paradisiacal experience. Even so, he’ll refrain from a boastful witness so that no one may think better of him than what they experience in and from him. His own life and proclamation are to truthfully reveal and enact God’s desires for the world such that there is no need for him to boast at all.

How do you live into the life of God, preacher? How do you live into the life of your people? This pair may be the most basic questions for our discernment as Christians. Paul’s discussion of boasting in witness frames this discernment through a sacramental vision of storytelling, where we participate in God’s revealing and enacting love for the life of the world.

When we embrace the holy co-creativity of homiletic storytelling, we are given a chance to empower people and cast visions for their flourishing. When God, our sacramental conspirator, is the God of the oppressed, these chances become healing balms in crucified lives and prophetic utterances in the halls of power.

Next, consider the relation of weakness, grace, and power. Process-relational theology recognizes an intimate, organic co-creative relationship between God and creatures. God yearns for our flourishing and well-being as individuals and whole communities, luring and empowering our creative responses in the world to be more liberating and loving in each new moment. Though we are capable of fully incarnating and participating in God’s vision and Reign, we have histories that are full of examples of our weakness, our lack of power to do so.

Before turning to the suffering–insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities–that have resulted in a world that has not always lived fully into God’s Reign, think for a moment about grace. For

process-relational theology, grace is not some substance that fills a gap in our weakness or serves as some supernatural power-up like the mushroom in Mario.

Grace is the givenness of God as Love-in-action, becoming fresh in the world, saving the world, and luring the world into new and greater possibilities for love to be made actual in all of reality. Instead of a substance, some external thing that is given by the external actions of a detached other, grace is a descriptor of intersubjective relationships.

It is gracious that God responds to our weakness in a loving creativity that empowers us into a richer awareness of and more effective participation in God’s Reign in our next moments.

It is gracious that God’s noncoercive action in the world fosters the spacetime in which the church can faithfully proclaim its experiences of Christ through our sacramental participation in the Body.

For grace to be sufficient is for our interdependent relationality to emerge as the heart of the matter. In a world where increasing self-sufficiency appears to be a measure of greater success, it is gracious that God continues to call us as part of God’s creativity in love.

Even when we are at our weakest, God will neither coerce us nor abandon us.

God’s power, then, can only be perfected in loving us.

Finally, the suffering that has resulted in our lack of power to fully incarnate and participate in God’s vision and Reign is no fault of a Devil, nor is it the desire or fault of God. While litanies of evil and sin could be listed here, the process-relational preacher will do well to weave their homiletic craft through other aspects of the liturgy like prayers of confession.

When preaching on suffering in the context of this text, be aware of the statistics regarding abuse prevalence in our society and in your community. It is safe to say that you will have a survivor of abuse who is hearing your sermon, and you very well could have an abuser hearing it, too. Neither license further abuse nor depict God as an abuser or supporter of abuse.

Many different process-relational theologies offer resources for thinking about suffering and evil that address the academic questions of theodicy, and the experiences of people within and beyond your parish may challenge the tidy argumentation that these theologies set forth. Lean into the richness of your and your siblings’ experiences. Find contentment in the organismic grace of the en-Christed life together. Recognizing our weaknesses, experience how we, with God, graciously reveal and enact God’s desires for loving justice, zest, beauty, peace, and adventure.

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The gospel lesson makes my process-relational bones tingle because it feels like a great proof text for abandoning relationships when they get hard. We begin with Jesus’s difficult experience among his own kindred. We move through his instructions to travel lightly and leave places swiftly. We arrive at the resulting powerful ministry of the disciples, proclaiming repentance, casting out demons, and anointing the sick with curative results.

In short, our ministries may not always land well among our people.

As process preachers and congregations, we, thankfully, do not have to attempt the theological gymnastics that must surely be necessary for classical theists when the Incarnate God is told “no” directly to Jesus’s face. There’s little sense in trying to explain away how the people who would have been part of Jesus’s whole growing up are, seemingly all of a sudden, vexed by his wisdom and power. Instead, we must discern how Jesus integrates this experience into his own ministry and instructions for the disciples to embrace their vulnerability alike, preparing us for similar likelihoods.

How do you develop relationships for and habits of resilience while not abandoning the vulnerability of love? How do your people prepare their relationships to receive travelers in words and in bodies?

For process-minded preachers, the openness of the future and the influences of the past are significant theological facts for the discernment work that emerges from this gospel text. Our past is never wholly determinative of our present, for the future is nothing but possibilities; literally, the future is no-actual-thing. How we, with God, relate to our past in the present moment matters, it materializes a particular world in the here and now.

Jesus related to his experience of rejection by embracing vulnerability and instructing his disciples to do the same. This is a hard call, but we will never be sent out alone.

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.