“Come, let us kill him.”  Not exactly what we expect of brothers.  Not exactly, perhaps, what we might expect of the Bible, a holy book.  Shouldn’t a holy book be filled with exemplary lives?   But this holy book is full of stories of the way people, even brothers, are consumed by hate and impelled to harm each other.

Come to me
All you who are weary ...
And I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you … 
And you will find rest in your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

These lovely words, so beautiful, (they) evoke the great sadness that pervades human life, the tears of being, the inevitability of loss and death, some of which comes to us through our body’s natural vulnerability to illness, accident and aging, but so much also we bring upon ourselves by our proneness to error, our inclination to aggression, our selfish impulses, our narrowness of vision.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …
God saw everything that he had made, 
And indeed, it was very good.

These opening words from the book of Genesis express two beliefs of our biblical faith: that God created the world, and that everything that exists in it is very good.  Our faith is full of beliefs.  These days, many of us find that we have given up on many of them --- some for very good reasons --- though perhaps we have given up on too many.

(And) they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him
(And) while they were stoning Stephen, he prayed,
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

This story of Stephen, is one of those stories which appears simple, and yet reveals the world in all its moral ambiguity, and reveals ourselves as incomplete, divided beings, torn between love and self-love, showing us to be sometimes lower than worms, other times almost as high as the angels. 

…  And Jesus cried out with a loud voice … 
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 
... and breathed his last.

“Dark, dark, dark, we all go into the dark.”  The words are T.S. Eliot’s, that great poet of the troubled soul.  What was he thinking?

God tells Abram to go, just go, leave your country, your home, your mom and dad, your brothers and sisters, your uncles, aunts, cousins, your way of life.   Just go, I’ll make of you a great nation, says the Lord, I’ll make your name great.  And sure enough, Abram does go.  The biblical text just says, “Abram went.”  Not a word about any inner struggle, no questions asked, no words of sadness or regret regarding such a parting from everything that Abram holds dear and is familiar with.  This silence on Abram’s part is not unfamiliar to us.

“Choose life.”  Thus says Joshua, Moses’ successor, the man who three thousand years ago led those escaped Hebrew slaves into the land of Canaan. And you and I find these words in the Book of Deuteronomy, a book written over twenty-five hundred years ago.  So these words, “choose life,” are old words, and yet they have such a topical ring to them, even a philosophical ring, for they lie at the heart of our still popular existential literature ---