Melchizadek and Abraham

Pentecost 22 – Come, the New Jerusalem – October 20, 2024

Come, the New Jerusalem

Melchizadek and AbrahamSo what about Melchizedek?  If you’re a reader of scripture, or if you’ve ever been to the ordination of a priest, or if just hang around the church, or the synagogue, or the mosque at all, you’ve heard the phrase, you are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.  This is not a small thing to say.  It’s inspirational — aspirational — and worth unpacking now, in these days, as we prepare to participate in our own governance and elect new local and national leaders.  In Chapter 14 of Genesis, we read about Melchizedek, who was the King of Salem and a priest of God, embodying both kingly and priestly functions.  In Chapter 14 of Genesis, Melchizedek brings out bread and wine before blessing Abraham.  Jesus was a rabbi — a learned Jew who would have known this scripture well.  There’s good reason to think that Jesus may have been remembering the bread, the wine, and Melchizedek’s blessing as he taught the disciples at the last supper to bless, break, and share bread and wine to memorialize and bring forth the blessed body — community — of Jesus in us.

King and great high priest Melchizedek’s realm — Salem — which means peace and righteousness, is early Jerusalem.  The jeru part of the name Jerusalem means city — city of peace.  You hear the word Salem — peace or righteousness — in the Hebrew word shalom, and in the kindred Arabic word salaam.  Peace, shalom, salaam.  For an example we all know, think of Salem, Massachusetts.  So Melchizedek is both the king and the great high priest of peace and righteousness, which is why he shows up in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews this morning, because the Apostle Paul, also a learned Jew, would have seen Melchizedek as prefiguring Jesus, Prince of Peace.  This is big stuff.  What could it look like in our times, for a leader to have both governing authority and spiritual and moral leadership as a part of their holy undertaking — almost like an oath of office?  I don’t know, but I think church is exactly the right place to dream and pray about leadership that is compassionate AND can build and maintain a sensible, just, and viable economy.

Healthy Doubt

Heather Cox RichardsonI’ve been reading historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American over the past several months.  Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College, so she’s local — raised in Maine, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and received her BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard.   She’s written a world-class list of books and articles and articles,  and describes herself as a Lincoln Republican, with no affiliation with any political party.  Many of her nightly newsletters delve deep into an area of history I never knew I needed to know more about until she unfolds their layers and complexity, with direct quotations from the Melchizedeks of our own American history.

Earlier this month, Richardson wrote of the role of life and experience in Benjamin Franklin’s evolution of perspective from a royalist to — 15 years later — draftsman and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, which some might call a 180.  Franklin attended King George III’s coronation, writing that he expected the young monarch’s reign to be “happy and glorious.”  Fifteen years later, he was urging his Continental Congress colleagues to see things in a new way, as he had done, and to — as he put it poetically and politically — doubt a little of their infallibility and open their minds to new possibilities.  Here’s what Ben Franklin wrote, and Richardson quoted in her newsletter:

I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them, he wrote.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

Humility

Benjamin FranklinThere’s humility in these words.  A healthy doubt, as Benjamin Franklin put it, of his own infallibility.  It’s like God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind, when Job’s friends have tried to convince him that their own narrow experience and perspective is evidence of how the world always works.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone

when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

Of course Job, and we listening in now, have to admit that we have no earthly idea.  And this is exactly how James and John, the sons of Zebedee, mess up in Mark’s gospel this morning, asking Jesus to make them an earthly Trinity with him — one on his left side and one on his right — totally missing the point of everything Jesus has been telling them in these difficult readings from Mark over the past weeks.  Humility keeps us flexible, curious, and hopeful, always ready to learn something new or change our minds.

Relationship Creates Empathy

So back to Melchizedek, the righteous leader who was both king and high priest, who brought out the bread and wine before he blessed Abraham, our ancestor in the faith.  We start building our community of peace and righteousness here at home, right next to us in the pews, gathering around shared bread and wine.  Belonging builds our capacity to listen in love and curiosity to others whose lives are different from ours, creating relationship.  Relationship creates empathy — the mutual care and concern that builds community, and shows us each how we matter and how we can be of saving help to each other.  And here’s the big secret:  when we pitch in to help each other, it is our own lives that are transformed.

I know we can do this.  I’ve seen it before right here here with my own eyes.  I will speak of this carefully and briefly, because I know those of us who were here yesterday to celebrate Janet Nobis’s daughter, Liz’s, life are still too tender, and too awed by God’s overwhelming power among us, to look straight into God’s light and hope for too long.  We can’t.  We’d just melt, or dissolve into a flood of wordless tears.  Our church was filled with people who loved and hoped and dreamed for this community — more than 315, by our count.  We can do this.  We can build this.  We can be this city of peace and righteousness.  I know you remember poet William Blake’s words, often remembered in hope and dreams with our hymn, Jerusalem, which we remember from the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire and from Queen Elizabeth’s memorial observances.  Think of it as we close in a more recent restatement, Carly Simon’s powerful anthem from the 1989 movie Working Girl, Let the River Run.  Hear this in your heart as we dream and pray now:

            Let the river run

            Let all the dreamers wake the nation

            Come, the New Jerusalem.  Amen  

 

Carly Simon – Let the River Run