Motion Verbs (Luke 9:51-62)

      We’re well into Ordinary Time, which is anything but ordinary, actually . . . it’s the time when the lectionary readings turn to discipleship, how we should behave in the world, both as a church, as the body of Christ, and individually.  It’s kind of what this time of year’s all about, and let me tell you it can be as painful for me as for anybody else, when I compare my life, to the Christian ideal . . . today’s passage is a case in point, it’s a turning point in Luke’s story, when Jesus turns to Jerusalem.  Biblical scholars recognize this as the beginning of Luke’s central section, but we know it as the journey to Jerusalem, and we alsoknow what happens when he gets there . . . and so did the original audience for the Gospel, the folks Luke wrote the gospel for, some fifty years after Jesus’ death . . . the people in Luke’s church knew what happened at Jerusalem, so the first sentence of our passage is freighted with meaning, with pathos,because before he was “taken up” into heaven on that cloud, he was nailed to a cross.

      And this foreshadowing sets a mood for this whole section— it reminds us right off the bat that whatever we sayabout livingthe Christian life is in the framework of Christ’sdeath, and further, everything we’re toldabout Christian living, all we’re asked to do and give up, pales next to what Jesus did. . . we’re told that he “set his face” to go to Jerusalem . . . he set his faceto go there.  He is resigned to going, no matter what is fated to happen at journey’s end, he’s determined. . . Luke repeats the phrase, it’s so important.  And those Gospel-fall-guy Samaritans wouldn’t receive him precisely becauseof this, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.

      And so this introduction to Jesus’ final journey is packed full of significance . . . we’re meant to feel its finality, its fate, its inevitability . . .  Jesus set his face toward his destiny, which was the cross.   And all of a sudden, we’re blinded by a flurry of motion verbs, verbs of movement, that are conspicuous in our English translation, but reallystand out in the Greek . . .there are five different verbs of motion – going, going out, coming down, entering, following  – used fifteen different times.  Going, going, going, going, going.  It reminds me of somebody who just can’t sit still before the start of a trip . . . I myself have been know to be a little – how shall we say it? – impatient at that time.  Well, maybe that’s too genteel a word, perhaps obnoxious better.  You ready?  Come on . . . you can do that in the car.  We’ve gotta go, get down the road, if we don’t go, if we don’t leave, we’ll just never get out of here . . . aren’t you ready yet?  Why didn’t you do that before now?  What have you been doing all morning?  Let’s just go . . . and my long-suffering family has put up with it all these years, though it’s a wonder they haven’t done something totally un-Christian and thrown me off an overpass . . .

      And our passage is all about that, all about going, going, going, it’s all about the motion, the journey.  It’s about the Christian life as going,as following,as doing, only unlike my fruitless, fitful, manic-ness, our passage is about motion as ministry,movement as the mission of God.  It tells us what kind is appropriate, and what kind . . . isn’t. They’re negative examples, like on that BBC show what not to wear, only here it’s what not to do in the mission of God.  Jesus sends out messengers to prepare his way –does thatremind you of something? – and they enter a Samaritan town.  And we know all about those Samaritans, don’twe?  They’re like the poor cousins of righteous, God-fearing Israelites, but it’s really another kind of foreshadowing . . . Jesus will carry the Gospel to the entire world, even the hated Samaritans . . . but not yet . . . now he is rejected – like he will be at journey’s end . . .

      And James and John are mortally offended by the slight, they’re hungering for vengeance, itching for a fight.  “Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”  Huh? huh?  Do you?  Doyou?  They remind me of comic-book henchmen, saying to their mob boss “Can I hit ‘em? Huh?  Can I boss, can I?” But unlike the mob boss, who always gives them permission in the end, Jesus just looks at them and rebukes them . . . and this word rebuke is the same word Luke uses to describe Jesus commanding the demons of Capernaum and the wind and the raging waves  . . . it’s a word of power, of directive so this has the force of a commandment: Jesus commands them not to call down fire on the Samaritans.

      It’s important for us to see the pattern here.  He’s rejected, like he will be at Jerusalem, and he refuses vengeance, like he will at Jerusalem.  So the first thing “not to do” is “Don’t exact retribution.  Don’t seek vengeance.  Don’t use violenceto punish the Samaritans.”  Talk about your radical notion . . . it’s human natureto want to get back at someone who’s done us wrong, it’s the way of the world. Individuals do it, cities do it, governmentsdo it.  A large chunk of our foreign policy is based on the notion of deterrence – other nations are deterred from attacking us – theoretically, at least – for fear of what we might do in return.  As Teddy Roosevelt was supposed to have said, speak softly and carry a big stick.  Only here, Jesus commands James and John to put downthe stick, to notbe punitive, to notuse violence.  And it’s a policy Jesus will stick to his entire life, even in the face of certain death. He who could call legions of angels down to protect him, who could call down his ownfire from heaven, thank you very much, did not once use violence – or the threat of it – as a means to achieve his ends.

      And James and John – it’s curious, isn’t it, that it’s the same two who, over in Mark, ask to be first in heaven – James and John, after several years of running around Palestine with Jesus, still don’t get what he’s about.  They still don’t get that he’s about anything butbringing fire and brimstone down on some hapless Samaritan, no matter howmuch they dissed him.

      Well. The rest of the passage is framed by yet another motion verb – follow – only this time it has more than one connotation, it means more than just trailing around physically over the countryside.  When that first someone—notice Luke doesn’t say who, the teaching is about us all—when he or she says “I will follow you wherever you go” she’s saying both physicallyand philosophically, as in I will accompany you to Jerusalem and beyond, and I will be your disciple.  And does Jesus say “Thank you very much?” or “I’m very grateful for your support?”  No.  He comes out with a warning: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  In other words, if you follow me,it’s not gonna be to some comfy motel, or a nice room with a view of lake Cuomo, it’s gonna be tough and you’re not going to have any refuge, any shelter.  Jesus is truth in advertising personified: there’s nothing about the Christian life that’s comfy or cushy, he’s not like some of these televangelists who preach prosperity doctrine, who say if you just commit to Jesus, it’ll be returned, a hundred-fold, and you’ll have victory, victory, I tell you . . . and this is a consistent witness of Jesus and his followers, from Peter to James to Paul, right through the New Testament.  The Christian life might be fire insurance in heaven,but it sure ain’t here on earth.

      So the first things we’re should understand is that (a) it isn’t going to be any blooming bed of roses and (b) we’re not supposed to pretend that it is.  And now to one more motion verb—Jesus gives a command: “Follow me.” Followme. There isn’t a lot of room for wiggle, is there?  Pretty cut and dried, but the other tries to find some, anyway: “Lord,” she says, “Let me first go and bury my father.”  Now this seems perfectly reasonable, especially by our standards, where we’ve been taught to place the biological family above every thing else.  The person wants to go take care of family business, and what’s wrong with that?  Honor thy father and thy mother, for St. Peter’s sake.

      But Jesus isn’t having any of it: “Let the dead bury their own dead;” he says. Ouch!  Not very pastoral, is it?  You can’t have a week off to mourn, or even a day: “As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Loyalty to Jesus comes before any other loyalty, even loyalty to the idol of family.  But this shouldn’t surprise any of us, should it?  After all, there’s that seminal story in all three synoptic gospels – and by seminal, I mean “one we try to ignore” – where Jesus refuses to seehis family, saying that “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Contrary to what we’re taught in this culture, we’re not to worship our biological family, we’re not to use our family obligations to avoid the mission of God, to skip our responsibilities of discipleship.  Loyalty to Christ trumps loyalty to family any day of the week.

      Finally, one moreunidentified person comes up to Jesus and says “I’ll follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to the folks.”  And this certainly sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  It couldn’t take toolong to do that, could it?  But Jesus answers in an elliptical – but clearly negative – way: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” And Luke’s readers would have understood this as a reference to Elijah, who allowedElisha to go back and kiss mom and dad – see, Jesus says, it’s harder to follow me that to follow Elijah,and you knowwhat a stickler hewas.  But wait, there’s more!  What happens when you look back while you’re plowing, while you’re walking along behind a mule or a horse?  The plowing gets messed up, doesn’t it?  The way becomes crooked, not straight, and we knowhow God loves a straight path.  You can’t look back in regret, you can’t have ties to the mundane when you’re doing the work of the Lord, or the way will no longer be straight.

      And again I say: Ouch!  This is harsh stuff.  Surely Jesus couldn’t have meant all this literally . . . there’s gotta be some metaphorical kinds of things going on here.  Service to Christ comes before service to family?  Proclaiming the word comes before putting food on the table? Maybe Jesus is just testing them, maybe he sees into their hearts that they’re not ready.  Maybe the father of the second guy isn’t dead, and won’t be for years . . . but none of that is even hintedat in the passage . . . just the opposite, in fact: all signs point to its being meant literally. When you look at the first part – the foreshadowing of the crucifixion and the renunciation of violence – and put it together with the last, it gives a coherent picture: Jesus was on his way to die for us,he set his face to Jerusalem, set his facetoward it, and it’s clear that the same kind of single-mindedness is required of the disciples as well.  Jesus gave the most precious possession for us, his own life, and we are required to return the compliment.

      I was talking to somebody from the board of pensions one time, and she complained that the rate of planned giving, the rate of bequests to the church, has fallen drastically, people just leave it to their families instead, and I shrugged and said: Well, what do you expect?  They’ve internalized the lesson the Christian church teaches, the lesson societyhas taught – for whatever reason – and we’ve acquiesced to the notion that biological family is all important.  There arefamily values on display here, it’s just that they’re not the values of Ozzie and Harriet – or even Ozzie Osbourne.  They’re Jesus’ family values, they’re Kingdom family values, not the values of the world.

      And I’m tempted to leave it at that, to let this uncompromising word stand alone, to let us all cogitate on it, chew on it, maybe get mad at it . . . after all, that’s what Jesus did.  He told the story and got out of the way, moved on down the road to another stop on the journey.  But though we don’t have time to unpack all its amazing ramifications, I’ll throw in a couple of few words.  Two, in fact: Christian community. “My mother and my brothers,” Christ said “are those who hear the word of God and do it.”  Just as he radically redefined society – the last shall be first, and the first shall be last – Jesus radically reimagined family.  In the Kingdom of God, our family extends to all Christians everywhere, and at any time.  We might not feel it all the time, we might not feela familial closeness in our individual congregations, but it’s true:  India, Africa, Kuala-Lampur.  Egypt, Iraq, Latin America.  We areone in Christ, sisters and brothers, heirs according to the promise of God.  Amen.

Children of Abraham (Galatians 3:23-29)

This is an extremely well-known passage … and of course what’s best knownabout it is the soaring affirmation of equality in Christ: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  This single verse does two things: it goes against the notion—I might even say gives lie to it—practiced by so many of our fellow Christians, that there are somehow classes of Christians less equal, less able to fulfill leadership roles in the church . . . in this line, Paul covers all the categories in ancient culture by which folks are classified.  Greek versus Jew signifies foreigners, outsiders versus insiders … slave or free was another huge dividing line, all peoples were classified as either owned or not owned . . . and of course male and female, and note that Paul uses the Genesis formulation of “and” instead of “or” to emphasize that as it says in Genesis one male and female, both, are created in the imago dei, the image of God.

Of course today, most of the church hasn’t gotten this yet, most obviously in the case of women . . . fully 80% of the world’s Christians are Roman Catholic, who do not ordain women, and the great majority of others are evangelicals, and most of themdon’t do it either. But—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—these churches are, as Paul would put it, stuck in categories of the world, conforming to the model of the flesh, rather than that of Spirit, rather than that of Christ.  There is no longer male and female, those categories have disappeared, for all are one in Christ, and in his body the church.

The second thing this one verse does is to debunk the notion—popular among certain folks—that Paul of Tarsus, writer of over a quarter of the New Testament, was a raging sexist.  Sorry, but I’ll be equally blunt here: it doesn’t wash.  In the letters that we are sure he actually wrote—seven out of the thirteen attributed to him—he is anything but sexist, with only one passage in 1 Corinthians that can be construed that way, and most Pauline scholars think that a later author inserted that part.

That’s not to say that Paul was a full-fledged, 21^st-Century feminist: he was a man of his time, after all.  But his writings and practices—see Priscilla, whom he considered an equal in the faith—were radical for the time.  But they’ve been used historically—like so much of the Bible—to keep women out of leadership roles both within the church and outside of it.  And none of that is Paul’s fault.

For our purposes, it should be noted that this one verse tends to overshadow the rest of the passage, which is remarkable in its depth.  Within the letter itself, it is part of an argument about the nature of the law—the Torah, to be exact—and how it relates to faith in Christ Jesus.  As we saw a couple of weeks ago, the Galatians were being proselytized by a group of Christians that evidently—we don’t know for sure, all we have are the clues in the letter—who taught that Christians must first obey the Torah —i.e., be practicing Jews—before they are admitted into the Christian faith.  In other words, they must practice the dietary laws, for instance, and be circumcised.

This didn’t sit well with Paul, and so he wrote this letter to protest the teachings of these “false teachers,” as he called them, and to convince the Galatians of the righteousness of his position.  And this passage sits smack in the middle: he has first argued that it was by faith, not works, that Abraham became father of the promise, that he was “blessed,” as Genesis says, “to be a blessing.”  And through Christ—a offspring of Abraham—we are alsoheirs according to that promise.

But—and this is where our passage begins—if the law is no longer necessary, why was it instituted in the first place?  Why did God hand those ten commandments down to Moses—some time after Abraham, Paul might add—if Christ would nullify them?  It was added because of our transgressions, to keep us in line until “faith came,” until Jesus Christ came upon the scene.  For Paul—and for John Calvin, for instance, who made this one of his “uses of the law”—it was there as a guide for us, as a yard-stick by which to measure our behavior.

But more than that: “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law . . . the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came.”  This is more than just our using it as a yardstick, more than a passive measuring tape.  It’s as if the Torah were both the regulation and enforcer, both the civic code and the judicial system—police, prosecutor, judge and jury—all rolled into one.  Paul uses the Greek word paedagogos, which we translate here as “disciplinarian,” to get at what he considers the law to be.  In upper-crust Greco-Roman society—that is, among people who could afford one—a paedagogoswas the hired guardian of a minor:  a teacher, disciplinarian and protector, all rolled into one.  But when minors came of age, they were no longer under their thumb, under their guardianship.  So the term “now that faith has come”—synonymous with now the Christ has come—can be viewed a s coming into adulthood, coming of age.  “The lawwas our disciplinarian, our paedagogos,until Christ came.”  As he says over in First Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”

We were children before Christ, minors subject to the law . . . but it’s important to note that Paul is not talking about an individual conversion experience, here, as in we were children before we became a Christian . . . Paul does not say “before we accepted Christ” or “after Christ came into our hearts,” he says “after Christ came,” as in “into the world.”  He is talking about Christ’s physical coming, his crucifixion, and that mysterious, miraculous thing we call the resurrection.  We were imprisoned and guarded under the law, we were minor children under the paedagogos,the disciplinarian, before the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And now … we aren’t.

And why not?  Because in Christ Jesus we are all children of God through faith.  That very faith that has come with Christ—as if it were not here before—provides the conduit by which we are children of God.  Notice that this faith was not here before Christ,and that  linguistically, at least, Paul goes so far as to equate the two. So this faith, through which we are made children of God, it is not something we have innate within us, it is not some inborn ability we have, it is totally external to us … it is in fact a gift every bit as much as is salvation, a species of grace every bit as much as much as anything else we receive from God.

 Paul continues with a startling statement: all of us who have been baptized into Christ Have put on Christ, have clothed ourselves with him.  Here is the second great metaphor of our passage.  And though it seems a bit . . . weird to us, the phrase “to clothe oneself” in someone or, in an alternate translation, “to put on” someone, was used a fair amount by ancient Greek writers.  The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, writes of folks having “put on or clothed themselves with Tarquin" and the Assyrian rhetorician Lucian speaks of himself "having put on Pythagoras."  Other Greek writers speak of putting on Plato, Socrates, and etc., and they mean to take on the characteristics of that person, to emulate them, to use them as a model.  And so for Paul, to clothe ourselves in Christ means to model ourselves after him, to use him as a standard of behavior, to be like Christ.

This metaphor is such a powerful one that first and second-century Christians soon adopted its symbolism in their own baptismal rites . . . the baptismal candidate would meditate and keep vigil all night, and then walk into one of the shallow baptismal fonts of the day . . . they would be clothed in normal street garb and after the priest had poured the water over their heads, they would be briefly hidden from view, only to emerge in dazzling white . . . thus they were clothed in Christ, no longer in the raiment’s of the world, the raiment’s of the flesh, as Paul might have put it, but in the clothing of the Spirit. They had “put on Christ” right before their witness’ eyes.

Paul uses similar language in other places, but perhaps no more strikingly than over in Philippians, in the passage we often say as an affirmation of faith.  There, he describes Christ as “emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, and being born in human likeness.”  Of course, he is speaking of the incarnation, here, or his understanding of it . . . and in that incarnation, Christ emptied himself, he put on humanity so fully, clothed himself with humankind so completely, that there was nothing left of his divinity, nothing left of his god-ness.  Christ clothed himself in us so completely that he becameone of us, fully and without holding back.

And as for us, clothing ourselves is an apt metaphor . . . for if we clothe ourselves, we do not become, but we do indeed imitate . . . we do take on some of the qualities of Christ . . . for Paul, putting on Christ is to become like him, to in a sense, thinklike him, at least in a limited way.  As much as it became a cliché, as much as I got sick and tired of hearing it constantly and trivially, the phrase “what would Jesus do” was an attempt to grapple with part of this.  Many Christians go through life not really giving this much thought or, worse, assuming that whatever their country or culture does, or whatever seems right to them, is what Christ would do.  In this way, they become clothed in the world, wrapped in the flag of whatever state they give allegiance to, like those sports fans that celebrate by wrapping themselves up in their team colors.

But as Christians, we are to wrap ourselves in Christ, not the world, we are to model ourselves after Christ and his life and actions on earth.  And Paul couples this with our baptisms, and it’s very apt, for it is at our baptisms that we are given the wherewithal to do so. For it is at baptism that the Spirit of God, that Christ himself promised us, is bestowed upon us, the spirit of truth and comfort and, lest we forget, power.  At our baptisms, that spirit descends upon us like it did upon Christ, at hisbaptism on the River Jordan, and we are given the power and strength to go against culture, to go against the world, and clothe ourselves in our Redeemer.  Amen.

Women’s Work (Luke 7:36-8:3)

So, a Pharisee invites Jesus to supper, and I can almost hear the boos and hisses now . . . Pharisees are the fall-guys for an awful lot of stories in the New Testament, stories that pit them against Jesus, who invariably comes out on top.  Because of this, many of us have been conditioned to think very poorly of them, and some of us—no one here, I’m sure—some of us hold Christians up as the opposite of Pharisees, and even get a little self-righteous about it, as in “Thank God we’re not like the Pharisees, who thought one could workone’s way to heaven . . . all they thought about were rules, rules, rules, gotta follow to the rules.  Thank God that we’re not saved by rules, but by the grace of God in Jesus Christ!”

 But those who demonize Pharisees—again, I’m surenobody here!—those who demonize Pharisees probably don’t really realize who they were . . . they were super-Jews, the most devout of the Jews, the Jews that everybody wanted to be like.  Remember Aunt Tilly, about whom you marveled, saying “I wish Ihad as much faith as Aunt Tilly?”  That was what the Pharisees were like.  Further, it wasn’t that they were stuck on following the rulesso much as they were worried about purity,that is, whether you were clean or not, whether you were in or whether you were out.

That’s the problem with the woman in this passage: she is hamartalos, which commonly is translated as sinner,as in somebody who sins, somebody who does something bad.  Actually, the word hamartalos is a technical term for one who is ritually unclean, and therefore unwelcome in the practice of Judaism, unwelcome in the synagogues and in the temple.  She has done something that has made her that way, or done failed to do something, but Luke doesn’t tell us what it was.  Over the years since, leering biblical scholars and churchmen have assumed that she was a prostitute, but there is not a shred of evidence in or out of the text that this was true . . . funny how we jump to that conclusion, isn’t it?  Especially when it’s a woman . . .

So we think we know who this woman is, this hamartalos,but it’s important to consider that this is the same word used for Peter just a couple of chapters back, when Jesus calls him into service as a disciple . . . remember?  Luke says that “ . . . when Simon Peter saw [the large catch of fish], he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner,’” I am hamartalos.  Luke doesn’t tell us what Peter has done to become unclean any more than he tells us what the woman at the dinner party has done. Peter goes on to be the model disciple, both in terms of virtues and frailties, and is the hamartalos-woman at the Pharisee’s dinner party anothersuch model, another such signof God’s amazing love and regard for the peopleof God?

But the Pharisee doesn’t see any of this, he doesn’t see the woman as who she really is.  Oh, to him she’s an sign, all right, but it isn’t of God’s love . . . to him she’s unclean, outside the pale, and thus, in a way, invisible.  And it was verboten to associate with an unclean person, with hamartalos, much less touch one, as Jesus was doing.  If you touched something or someone that was unclean, that unclean-ness was passed on to you, and you would have to purify yourself before you were fit to associate with decentpeople, AKA good, ritually clean Jews.  And here Jesus was, allowing this, this . . .sinnerto touch him, and did the man have no shame?  Did he set outto flout his host’s hospitality?  He’d invited Jesus—which he didn’t have to, you know, he was not exactly on the Pharisitic A-list—and what does he do?  He throws it back in his face, embarrassing him and causing all manner of discomfort to his guests.

And the unwanted visitor isn’t just hamartalos,she’s a woman.  And she was brazenly touching the teacher, rubbing her hair all over him, anointing his feetwith oil that it would’ve set the Pharisee back a year’s wages to afford.  Women didn’t get that familiar with males they didn’t know, or who didn’t know her,which he most certainly did not,cause if he did, he would knowshe was unclean, and he surelywouldn’t have let her touch him like that . . . and this guy is supposed to be a prophet?  Hah!

Just as the Pharisee is thinking this, Jesus shows he knows what he’s thinking, anyway:  “Hey Simon,” he says, “I have something to say to you” and he tells him a short parable about two debtors, one who owed a moderate amount, and one that owed ten times that, but neither could pay the debt, so their creditor forgave the debt, and which one does Simon think will love him more?  That’s easy, thinks the Pharisee, and he says “I suppose the one for whom the greatest debt was forgiven.”  And Jesus says “you have judged correctly,” and then lays into him for his measly hospitality.

And do we detect a note of irony here, a note of disapproval of a guy who knows the value of a transaction—the one who has more debt cancelled “pays back” the creditor with more love in return—but doesn’t know about true hospitality and regard?  It reminds me of the old definition of a cynic as a person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing . . . is this a reflection of Jesus’ summation of the entire law with “Love thy neighbor as thyself?”

This short parable bears closer examination . . . our translation has it that the creditor cancelledthe debts of the debtors.  But the Greek verb hecharisato carries more weight than mere cancelling . . . it carries the connotation of generosity and great good will on the part of the one doing the cancelling.  And in fact, the cancelling of debts just because somebody couldn’t pay was every bit as rare in those days as it is today, perhaps even more so.   And finally, a noun derived from hecharisato—charis—is frequently translated in the New Testament as grace.  So, while the parable seems to explain the slavish devotion of the woman—she is forgiven a lot—it’s the fact that she is forgiven at all that is the real point.

The woman’s slavish love is not only a sign of God’slove, but it’s a sign of hergreat faith and willingness to serve Christ.  And notice that she serves him, she washes his feet and dries them with her hair, beforeJesus declares her forgiven.  Perhaps she has heard about divine pardon—after all, she comes prepared with the oil in its expensive alabaster jar—or perhaps not, but is truly her faith, her trust, and her willingness to serve Christ without strings attached, that saves her.

And the Pharisee?  Well the Pharisee is certainly not a sign of God’s love . . . he doesn’t even do the minimum in the way of hospitality that is required by ancient middle eastern customs.    “You gave me no water for my feet,” Jesus says, “but she has bathed my feet with her tears . . . You gave me no kiss, but . . . she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head . . . but she has anointed my feet . . .”  The Pharisee, presented with the same evidence as the hamartalos-woman, having heard perhaps the same words about the work of Jesus the Christ, finds the grace offensive and takes the woman’s presence as a scandalous imposition.

Now,  it would be easy to compare and contrast on the basis that of biological sex, and I think there’s some room for that—after all, there are often a lot more women in church than men—but it’s father’sday, so I won’t do that, and really, this is a story about two sinners, two hamartalos—one who realizes she is one, and one who doesn’t.  The unexpected guest knows full well what she is, that she has fallen short before God, and because of that, she is enormously grateful.  The Pharisee, on the other hand, doesn’t even know he needs forgiving, that his debts need cancelling: if he has been forgiven, he doesn’t know it, and really:  how can you live into that forgiveness, how can you live a life of joy, live a life of wonder and service, if you do not know you are free?

The Benedictines celebrate Compline, or night prayer, just before they go to bed . . . it’s the only one of seven daily hours that monastics can celebrate on their own if they choose.  It’s the most personal hour, where they are directed to examine their conscious to see where they have fallen short of God’s plan and will for them.  And that’s what our confession of sins is for as well . . . so that we can acknowledge—to ourselves as well as to God—that we have fallen short, that we are indeed, as the old hymn goes, standin’ in the need of prayer.

But the Benedictines do something else at Compline: they say the Song of Simeon.  “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace; your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all the people.”  They acknowledge that they haveseen God’s salvation during the previous day, that they have seen that they are forgiven, and that because of that, they can go to their rest in peace, in knowing that by the grace of God, they are free from the bondage of sin.

Sisters and brothers, when Christ said to the woman “Your sins are forgiven,” it was assurance to her—and a lesson to the Pharisee—that God had forgiven her sins . . . it is and was God who forgives sins, and the same thing is going on when the liturgist declares our sins are forgiven. And what is our response?  Is it joy, is it celebration, is it grateful service to Christ?  We have been redeemed, we have been set free, let us be glad of it and rejoice.  Amen.

Untouched By Human Hands (Galatians 1:11-24)

Remember back when we were kids, maybe the first or second or third grade, and they taught us how to write a letter?  We were taught how to begin it, then follow up with asking after the recipient’s health, and the help of her or his family.  “Dear Grandma, how are you?  I am fine . . . how is Grandpa?  I hope his goiter isn’t acting up . . .”  and there was an accepted form for a personal letter, and back in Paul’s Greco-Roman day there was a standard format for a Greco-Romanletter, and all of Paul’s letters follow it, to some extent, at least.  Greco-Roman letters generally begin with a Salutation—the dear Grandma part—and indeed, here in Galatians it’s found in verses 1 through 5, which we read last week. In it, he specifies who the letter is from—Paul an apostle and all members of God’s family with him—and to whom it is written—the churches in Galatia—and then he greets them: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from t he present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”  Notice that he basically sums up the gospel just in this opening greeting—Paul never couldpass up a preachable moment.

Now:  in a normal Greco-Roman letter, the next part would normally be the “thanksgiving,” where the letter writer expresses her or his appreciation for its recipients in the form of thanks to God.  Listen to the thanksgiving from 1 Corinthians:  “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Notice that here again, he can’t resist a sermon.

All this is to say that the parishioners in Galatia, sitting in church, listening to this letter from their beloved founder—the letters were always read aloud—as they sat there, they were expecting to hear a thanksgiving section, extolling their virtues—by the grace of God, of course—but instead they get: “I am astonishedthat you are so quickly deserting the one who called you”—that’s Paul—“in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel”  It’s as if a grandchild followed up the greeting to her grandmother with a whining complaint: “Dear Grandma, I am flabbergastedthat you didn’t give me a bicycle for my birthday . . .”  Grandma might faint dead away . . .

Of course, that is the effect that Paul is after, he wants to emphasize how upset he is, to impress upon them the gravity of the situation, as he sees it anyway, and the situation is this:  there is a group of Jewish Christians, perhaps from Jerusalem itself, which scholars call the Missionaries, visiting the churches in Galatia, the churches that he founded.  And they are preaching a version of the Gospel that Paul believes is false: namely, that you had to be a Jew and be circumcised and all that to be a Christian. And to Paul, this was nonsense, and worse, heresy, against the very foundation of Christianity, and as we spend some time in Galatians over the next month or so, we will come back to this question, which for Paul was a question of freedom in Christ, but for now it’s to set the stage for our passage, which seems prickly to say the least if not downright defensive.

And if it does, it’s probably because Paul feelsthat way, he feels under attack, and that at stake is nothing less than the Gospel and his standing as Apostle.  He tells them that the gospel that was proclaimed by him—gospel and the verb to proclaim come from the same root, so the Greek is something like “the proclamation that was proclaimed”—the proclamation that was proclaimed to him wasn’t of human origin, he didn’t get it hanging around the water cooler in Jerusalem with the boys, he didn’t read it in the paper or see it on Anderson Cooper, but it was a revelation from Jesus Christ.  And the Greek word rendered here as “revelation” is  apocaluptos, and maybe a more literal translation would serve better, as in “I received it through an apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” because it certainly created an upheaval in his life, an upending of his whole belief system, for he was a devout Jew, a Pharisee, by his own description “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age.” 

He was devout, and as an expression of that devotion, he was actively trying to destroy this upstart religion called “the way.” And so though he might not have reallybeen knocked off his donkey like Luke claimed, his conversion had a lot of the apocalyptic about it:  going from persecutor in chief to church planter extraordinaire and though he never renounced Judaism that we know of, he argued vehemently that Christianity stood alone, and was available to Gentiles like you and like me.

But God called him from before he was born—the Greek is literally “from the womb”—and revealed—and once again, it’s apocalypted—and apocalypted God’s son to him, to preach among the Gentiles, he didn’t get anybody’s permission, he didn’t confer with anyone up in Jerusalem—although he did later visit Peter (whom he calls Cephas) and James, Jesus’ brother—and what he is trying to emphasize here is that his apocalypse is directly from God, he didn’t pass go, he didn’t collect $200, he didn’t set out to become a believer, God came to him,God converted him,God chose himbefore he was born, and Paul didn’t have a thingto say about it.

About a decade ago, Campus Crusade for Christ initiated a marketing campaign built around the simple slogan  “I found it.”  They had flyers printed up with “I found it,” bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with “I found it,” and scribbled “I found it” all over campus chalkboards. Of course, it being Campus Crusade for Christ, the “it” they found was Jesus Christ, and aside from the problematic use of the neutral pronoun—Christ is an it?—and the reduction of the entire Gospel to just one word, the more insidious thing is that it assumes that it is in our power to “find,” that it is somehow in our control whether or not we do. As the episode with Paul shows us, we don’t find God, God finds us.  The hymn doesn’t say “I once was lost but now I found it,” it says I once was lost but now am found.  The lyric is in the passive tense—am found—just as is Paul’s story.  Paul no more reveals the gospel to himself any more than we findit ourselves.

What’s even moreproblematic, though, is when we think we can determine whether or not somebody elsefinds Christ does.  In Gold Beach, Oregon, the site of my first church, the ministerial association was peopled largely with pastors of a more traditional bent, and I remember one meeting where they were beating their breasts over the condition of the town, which they considered largely “lost,” and “unsaved.”  If they’d just work harder, redouble their evangelical efforts, they could change things, win the whole town over for Christ.  And the only other mainline pastor in town, the Lutheran Pastor Tim, said “Wait a minute . . . isn’t it God that saves people?”  and they had to admit that he had a point . . .

It isn’t anything we do that saves somebody any more than anything we do to save ourselves.  Just as God set Paul apart before he was born and called him by God’s grace, so God does to us. As biblical scholar Heidi Hustad Armstrong puts it, “all conversion stories begin with God’s decisive action. God always takes the initiative.”

The notion that people somehow won’t “be saved” if we don’t work thathard enough is a form of idolatry, with ourselves as the idol. We, the created, put ourselves in the place of our creator and that is never a good idea.  It can lead to arrogance, it can lead to dominance, it can lead to war . . . if it is up to us to save people, doesn’t it put ourselves over even our God?

In our passage, Paul insists that he didn’t get his version of the gospel from anyone other than God: “I did not confer with any human being,” he says, “nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me.”  He sounds impassioned, almost pleading:“In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” And though we can’t be sure, it may have been that he was being accused by the Missionaries of spouting a version of the gospel he got second-hand from the realapostles in Jerusalem.  Whatever the case, it’s easy to get the impression that it is alldefensiveness, all an attempt to set himself apart from others.  But as Armstrong puts it, he’s not saying “Look at how great Iam” but “Look at how great Godis, how great the Gospelis.”  It’s no wonder that he gets upset, so upset that that he just dives into his complaint, without observing the niceties of 1^st-Century correspondence.  For him, the thought that you have to do something to earn God’s grace—become a Jew, get circumcised—flies in the face of the God’s saving power, it negates the very heart of the whole thing.

Paul doesn’t tell us about his life to build himself up, he tells us about it to build the Gospel up.  He tells us about his conversion from a church hater and baiter—with no help from anybody else, untouched by human hands—to emphasize the primacy and astonishingly radical nature of grace.   Two-thousand years before John Newton, Paul would certainly have agreed with another line from Newton’s great song:  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.  Amen.

Wisdom Be a Lady (Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31)

In the ancient near east, in Palestine and Assyria and Babylon, a species of literature became popular in the centuries before Christ.  Called "Wisdom Literature," it centered around . . . wisdom.  Now that's a broad term, and it covers a lot of territory, but wisdom literature centered around how to live right, to live in harmony with your community and, importantly, with your god.  Greek wisdom literature tended toward the philosophical, with high-minded discussions of the virtues and ideals.  Hebrews, being of a practical bent, tended to produce sensible, down-to-earth wisdom literature.  And most of the surviving Hebrew wisdom literature is in the Hebrew scriptures, which we Christians call the Old Testament.  For the record, they are: Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach and, of course, the book we just read from, Proverbs. Two of these books, Wisdom and Sirach, are part of what we Protestants call the Apocrypha, and some folks include Lamentations and Psalms.  The former of which I tend to include myself, but the latter, not so much.

So . . . most of us know Proverbs from the classic proverbial form: Doing W will lead to X, but doing Y will lead to Z.  Here’s an example, from the tenth chapter, the fifth verse: “A child who gathers in summer is prudent, but a child who sleeps in harvest brings shame.” This was, of course, appropriate to a time long ago and a place far away, before the advent of child labor laws . . . but you get the picture: it’s practical advice that leads, presumably, to peace, prosperity and rightness with the Lord.

But there are also sections that speak more generally, more theologically, if you will, and our passage this morning is one of them . . . it’s appointed in the lectionary for Trinity Sunday, which is today, and I guess a good question is . . .  why? It doesn’t speak of the Holy Spirit, in Hebrew the ruach elohim, the Spirit of God, nor does it speak of the Son of God, who will not be born for centuries yet . . . it speaks of a woman, in less politically correct times called Lady Wisdom.

Now, this isn’t the firsttime Proverbs has spoken of a woman, and to understand Woman Wisdom, we have to look at the chapter just before this, where a very different woman is discussed.  The narrator calls herthe “loose woman,” and “the adulteress, with her smooth words.” And the narrator advises that a man call wisdom his sister, to keep from falling into the snares of the loose woman, and it gets downright explicit, describing a hapless male that falls into her clutches: “a young man without sense,” we’re told, just walking along the street near her corner, minding his own business in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness.  And the loose woman comes toward him, decked out like a prostitute, wily of heart.  She is loud and wayward; her feet do not stay at home . . . at every corner she lies in wait. She seizes him and kisses him, and with impudent face she says to him: ‘. . . I have decked my couch with coverings, colored spreads of Egyptian linen;  I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.  Come, let us take our fill of love until morning . . . For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey.’”  And the young man—whose only crime is to have little sense, while the woman, notice is pure-D evil—the young man follows her, going like an ox to the slaughter, or maybe like a stag to the trap until an arrow pierces his entrails—hey, I’m just quoting scripture, here—and the narrator tells his audience not to let their hearts turn aside to her ways, for ”Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death.”

Contrast that to Woman Wisdom, who is described in our passage as standing in the gates, in a place usually reserved for (very male) judges, the wise men who decided disputes amongst the people, and it’s a place of honor not normally associated with women, and from that position—again from a part we did not read—she gives gentle advice: “learn prudence” she says, unlike the young man of the last passage, and hear her because—unlike the loose woman—she will speak noblethings, and from herlips will come what is right, because wickedness—like that spoken by the adulteress—is abomination to her lips.

And it’s important to see that here in Proverbs, we have a pattern that pervades a lot of literature, especially that written by men: a woman is either really, really good, perfect, really or she is really, really bad: wanton, scheming, with few redeeming values.  There’s no in between.   In the movies, there’s often the “good girl”—whom the hero, who’s a lot like the naïve man in proverbs when it comes to women—and the “bad girl,” who gets hold of the hero first, and twists him six ways to Sunday.  Finally, virtue wins, the bad woman gets hers, and the hero gets the woman who is virtuous, whose mouth utters truth and for whom wickedness is an abomination unto her lips.  A particularly clear version of this scheme is the Bond movie, where there is always exactly one “bad girl” and one “good girl,” and although Bond is virtuous, he is hardly naïve.

The thing is, here in Proverbs—as in the Bond flicks—the only one allowed to be human in the triangle is the man.  Bond is quite a complex character—no, really!—but the Bond women are types: good and evil.  In Proverbs, the man is not bright—he has no sense—but neither is he super-bad, like the loose woman, nor wondrously virtuous, like Lady Wisdom.  In fact, though Wisdom clearly speaks in Chapter 8, the first half is written for and is a warning tothe man: don’t be like that putz who was lured into a night of debauchery by the prostitute, listen instead to the one whose words are “better than jewels,” who is more wondrous than anything you can desire; who is, in other words, perfect.

Over the centuries, the Church has played into this dualistic fantasy very nicely, thank you very much:  Mary the mother of Jesus is so perfect, according to the Roman Catholic Church, that she remained a virgin throughout her life, and the Gospels must be mistaken, somehow, when they talk about his siblings, or they’re really cousins, or something . . . and because the church already had it’s perfect Woman Wisdom in Mary, it had to create a loose woman to be the epitome of all feminine evil, and so they slandered Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene, even though there is not a shred of evidence—within scripture or without—that she was a woman of ill repute.

And over the years, woman have struggled against this impossibly high standard, reinforced by literature, the fashion industry and most insidiously the church, cause if you’re not Mary the mother of Jesus, if you’re not Lady Wisdom in all her perfection, then you must be Mary Madalene or the loose woman of Proverbs, because there ain’t no in between, the patriarchy won’t allow it.

And reading Proverbs, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is just one more example of sexist literature—how come one of the extremes isn’t male, huh, huh?—except for one thing, and it’s found in the second part of our passage: an exquisite example of Hebrew prose in which Wisdom tells us who she is . . . “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.”  Hmmm . . . does this sound familiar?  She continues:  “When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.  Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth—when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil.”  And now it’s clear: Lady Wisdom is evoking the first chapter of Genesis, when the first thing that was there, beforehe created the heavens and the earth.  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”  What is around when God creates the heavens and earth?  The deep, the waters . . . and Lady Wisdom is present beforethat.

But that’s not all this should remind us of  . . . in the beginning, before earth she was there . . . and in the first Chapter of John, someone else  was there in the beginning.  Remember? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  Let’s see . . . in the beginning was the Word, and we know who that was, and in the beginning was also Lady Wisdom, and, of course, God . . .  and it’s getting kinda crowded, isn’t it?

And in fact, this is why this passage is appointed for us to read on Trinity Sunday, isn’t it?  Because through all the trappings of Pre-Christian literature, through all the male-dominated language, what shines through is the absolute complexity of God, the fact that God is bigger than anything our finite, gendered minds can think about it.  Of course, we’re not to take this literally, we’re not to believe that Wisdom is a Lady—any more than Luck—any more than we are to take the Adam and Eve story literally. And in fact, one of the hottest topics in biblical scholarship today is how to take this . . . is Wisdom intended to be a feminine aspect of God?  Does she represent a now-lost feminine, matriarchal view?  Is she a biblical remnant of a more fully-realized feminine portrayal of the divine?

One reason this is such a hot topic is that there is a lot of resistance from the more conservative scholarship contingent.   It was brought to a head around the turn of the millennium with the Presbyterian-sponsored “Reimagining Conference” which sought to broaden our ways of looking at and conceiving of God so that it is more inclusive, primarily of gender.  Now, nobody would argue that God is really an old white man, we all acknowledge—or we say we acknowledge—that God is neither male or female, black or white, etc, etc, etc . . . but maybe you remember the uproar when, rather than pray to father—as many of us were brought up to do—they prayed to mother. But what really got people going is when they addressed their prayers to Sophia.  And why did they do that?  Well,  what is SophiaGreek for?  You got it . . . Wisdom.

Sisters and Brothers, I have no idea what the absolute truth of the matter is, I have no idea whether Wisdom is a member of the Trinity, or a co-equal aspect of God . . . whether the “we” in Genesis points to God and Wisdom and Christ, or what.  All I know is that the author of Proverb struggled to put into words something that was far greater, far more transcendent, far more inclusivethan any of us can ever imagine.  As it says in Genesis, God created humankind, male and female God created them.   Lady Wisdom helps us affirm and celebrate that.  Amen.

Parthians, Elamites & Medes, Oh My! (Acts 2:1-13)

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place . . .” so begins the second chapter of Acts, and because we all have read the firstchapter of Acts—haven’t we?—we know who the “they” are.  They’re the apostles, recently augmented by one Matthias, chosen by lot to replace the, ahem, recently departed Judas.  Why, you might ask, was it so important to have twelve apostles?  After Judas left, couldn’t they have limped along with eleven, maybe inviting in a “guest apostle” or two when things got busy?  Well, there’s a symbolic reason if nothing else.  The number twelve is significant because as the first community of Christ, the first “church,” if you will, they represented the new Jerusalem and how many tribes of Israel were there?  Exactly . . . twelve.

Anyway, there they were, together in a house—traditionally the one with the “upper room,” though Luke doesn’t say so—they’re together in a house to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Pentecost.  Actually, Pentecost wasn’t what the Jewish people called it, in Hebrews it’s Shavuot,the Festival of Weeks, a major holiday celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments.  Pentecost is Greek for “fiftieth,” so named by Greeks because it came fifty days after Passover.  We Christians celebrate the coming of the Spirit—some call it the birthday of the Church—fifty days after Easter, so we retain the same name:  Pentecost, that is to say, fiftieth.

And suddenly, a sound like a rushing of wind filled the house . . . and it wasn’t some little breeze, it wasn’t a genteel zephyr, come to softly rustle their hair, it was a violent wind, it  was powerful . . . if you’ve ever been through a tornado, I expect you associate this with the proverbial freight train sound that everyone and their brother likens to such an event . . . I know Ido . . . I think of the time my son Michael and I were huddled in a bathroom with four snarling cats and the same number of dogs, and though it was a relatively small tornado, and it didn’t last long, it was loud and scary. Even though it didn’t sound much like a train to me . . .

To Luke, it was a sound likea violent wind, and notice the “like” part—it clearly wasn’ta violent wind, but it was like one, and I bet they were “sore afraid,” or to put it in modern terms, scared out of their gourds.  I know Iwould have been . . . but wait, there’s more!  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each apostolic head.   And once again, notice the hedging language . . . they were as offlames, likeflames, but clearly were not.  As we talked about last week, sometimes all we can do, when faced with the ineffable, is say what something is like . . . it’s why aliens in science fiction movies bear suspicious resemblances to humans or rocks or other animals.  Sci fi authors have just as much trouble imagining something outside the bounds of their experience as Luke did.

But though we think about the fire—that’s why we wear red on Pentecost—what Luke calls the things that appear is “tongues,” like that squishy thing in our mouths, only these are divided, as in a snake’s.  And I have a lot more trouble picturing thatthan flames, which is probably why Luke described them this way . . . actually, it sounds kinda gross to me . . . were they, like, tongues that had been ripped out of someone’s mouth?  Were they coated with someone’s previous meal?  It’s probably good that we emphasize the flame-y part.

Except . . . that the divided tongues represent the divided nations, the people of which spoke different languages, different tongues. . . and of course, we know how thatcame about, don’t we?  Pam just read it . . . after the flood, all people of the world spoke the same language, and they decided they were going to build a tower, a tower that would reach up to heaven.  And God said “let us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech.”  And God scattered them over the face of the earth, and I don’t know about you, but this story sounds familiar . . . Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, so that they’ll know just as much as the Lord . . . the people of Shinar build a tower so they can reach heaven . . . God says of Adam “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” and casts them out of Eden . . . in the story Pam read, God worries that there will be nothing they cannot do, and says “let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech."  In both cases, the humans threaten to get too big for their britches, to become like God . . . the sin of Babel, and the garden, is the sin of hubris, of supreme pride and arrogance . . . trying to become great on their own.  Trying to erase the distinction between creator and created . . .  

And tongues divided by sin rest upon the heads of the twelve—who represent the New Israel—andthe Holy Spirit fills them and they begin to speakin those divided tongues themselves, they begin to speak in the Babel of that half-built tower—those divided  tongues wereupon them, after all—and because it’s Pentecost, there are people from all nations there, all the nations created when God scattered the people so long ago, and the thing is,the thing is,they each hear in their own language . . . Parthians, Medes and  Elamites . . . Mesopotamians, Judeans and Cappadocians . . . Phrygian, Pamphylians, Egyptians and Romans . . . each hear them in their own tongue, it is as if the curse of Babel, the sin of pride and idolatry that God had reacted to millennia before, has been erased, wiped out by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And though we remember and celebrate Pentecost for the coming of the Holy Spirit, I think it’s equally important that we consider what that Spirit did when it came . . . it’s not just a story of the coming of power, of empowerment of the nascent Church to do God’s work—although it certainly is that—it’s a story of redemption as well.  It’s a story that points to God’s continuing acts of redemption, and the role of the Spirit within them . . . the sin of Babel, the sin of the divided tongues, is the sin of Adam and the sin of Eve, a propensity of human beings to attempt to elevate themselves to the level and place of their creator.  The coming of the Spirit erases that, the nations can understand each other again, through the power of the Spirit of God.  And it’s a symbol of the unifying power of God, of erasing differences and God’s overwhelming love for everyone,as the bumper sticker says, no exceptions.

But not everybody thinks that’s a good thing, do they?  Luke says that while some are amazed and asks what it all means, others sneer saying “They are filled with new wine.”  And it’s easy to dismiss these people as sinners, as unbelievers, as somehow evil people, and yet . . . is that really the case?  Are they really all that different from a lot of people, who feel threatened by the different, by those who are not like them?

As the title of this sermon indicates, whenever I read this story I can’t help thinking of another one, about a girl from Kansas heading down a road of yellow bricks.  She’s with a couple of characters who couldn’t be more different from her—one made of tin and the other of straw—and as the forest gets darker and the road overgrown, and strange things chitter at them from the trees, they imagine the worst, chanting “Lions and tigers and Bears, Oh My!” . . . even though they haven’t seen one of those, even though none of them have ever seen one, they are afraid of what they do not know, afraid of the unknown.

And I imagine there is some of that in the reaction of the scoffers, a little “Parthians, Elamites and Medes, Oh My!” about them, a bit of “Phyrgians, Arabs and Jews, Oh No!” going on . . . it seems to be a human thing to be afraid of what we don’t understand, isn’t it? That’s why we call them “phobias,” from the Greek word for fear . . . we have Anglophobia, fear of the English, gerontophobia, fear of the aged, and homophobia, fear of gay people.  Our current obsession with Hispanics in this country is, in my opinion, a species of xenophobia, the fear or dislike of foreigners.

Now these would be harmless except for one thing: our fear turns to dislike which turns to hatred, and from there, it’s a short jump to demonization, a process the psychologist Carl Jung called “projection.”  Jung says we ascribe all the things inside of us that are socially unacceptable—things like greed, prejudice, dishonesty, laziness—onto those who are different from us.  Soon, we are blaming all our troubles on them, all the things that are wrong with our country, our society, our communities.  The German people—good Christians, a lot of them—became convinced that Jews were the source of all their problems.  The poor are often demonized—they’re lazy or stupid or licentious—and programs to help them are dragging our economy down.  And in a time of gridlock in congress and children being gunned down in schools, many are convinced that if we just got rid of “illegal aliens” everything would be ok.

Dorothy and friends feared the unknown, feared those lions and tigers and bears, but when they finally met a lion, they discovered that their fears were groundless, at least in the case of thatlion . . . once they spent some time with one, communicated with one, they found their fears to be groundless.  Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds understanding and peaceful coexistence.  And it all begins with communication.

Friends, the message of Pentecost is not just the coming of the Holy Spirit, the coming of power, but it’s also what that power entails . . . it’s not the power of domination, as some would have it, or the power to accumulate wealth and influence.  It’s the power to communicate, the power to understand.  It’s the power and ability to reconcile ourselves and others to the nations, to people who are, like us, creations of a loving God.  Amen.

Rocket Man (Acts 1:1-11)

      One of the most important things for us 21^st-Century types to understand is that the authors of the New Testament did not have the same world view we “moderns” do.  The ancients viewed heaven as having geographic reality just like earth; that is, they believed that heaven is a physical place that has a relationship to earth you could point to, and that relationship of course is “up.”  The abode of the gods was thought to be up above us, in the sky, and further, the Earth was thought to be an imperfect reflectionof this godly realm.  This of course is seen in Greek drama, where what happens in heaven is mirrored on earth but—for us imperfect mortals—often to tragic effect.  You can also see this in the New Testament . . . every Sunday we say: “Our father who art in heaven” – there’s heaven as a place – “Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re asking that things be done here on earth as they are done in heaven.  In fact, the whole notion of the Kingdom of God is shot through with this.  If God’s rule in heaven is just, if the poor are never hungry or oppressed, if the blind see and the lame walk in heaven,then the coming of the Kingdom of God is nothing less than making Earth – now an imperfectreflection – into a perfectreflection of heaven.
      One of the problems many of us moderns have – although surelynobody in this room – is an overweening arrogance about it all . . . we’re convinced that our world-view is superior, we call it an “enlightenment” world view, for Pete’s sake, as in, aren’t we enlightenedcompared to those primitives in the pre-modern era, primitives like Michaelangelo or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo Da Vinci or Plato or Martin Luther . . . and this arrogance filters down lo unto the very basics of our faith . . . my favorite Episcopalian Bishop, John Spong – who I seminary buddy of mine calls Spronnngggg!– has made a career out of it, a career out of ridiculing pre-modern beliefs . . . he’s written the same book over and over again, telling us that we’d better get rid of all these quaint beliefs like the virgin birth or the resurrection or the insert-your-miracle-here, and I suspect that this obsession tells us more about John Spong, and his embarrassment over his faith, than it does about that faith itself . . . 

      And of course this pre-modern guy Christ said something about how those who are ashamed of him and his words of them he’llbe ashamed, but aside from that, whenever I read this morning’s lesson I thinkof Spong, who singled this episode out in one of his books, deriding it as Christ lifting off like a rocket ship, isn’t that quaint, and I think it betrays a remarkable literalness about the modern mind-set, a remarkable lack of imagination . . . Luke’s audience would have had no trouble seeing this as symbolic, they would have had no trouble viewing it on more than one level . . . like biblical literalism itself, the obsession with debunking the miracles in Scripture is a purely modern affliction, a kind of literalism in itself.  Only what it takes literally is the Gospel of Science, the Book of Philosophical Materialism, which states—chapter one, verse one—that something isn’t real if we can’t touch or measure it  . . .

      Be that as it may, our passage is in fact shot through with symbolism, beginning with its first line . . . Luke addresses it to Theophilus, and though there has been speculation over the years about this person’s identity – Was he Luke’s patron?  Was he an elder of the church? – I like to think that Luke has written it to all of us, because after all, Theophilusis Greek for “God lover,” and we do all love God, don’t we? Even though the idea of God is itself a pre-enlightenment notion?

      But the inscription reminds us of something else, it reminds us that the book of Acts is not just a history, not just a record of the activities of the early church, although it is surely that . . . the book of Acts is a Theological document as well, it has a viewpoint, an agenda, if you will . . . this is a story not only forthe God-lovers, it’s aboutthe God-lovers as well, it wants to project a certain image of them, it wants make certain theological points.

      And one of the points it wants to make hereis the obvious one . . . Jesus Christ was lifted up into heaven . . . and note the passive construction, it said he was “lifted up” and that of course implies somebody doing the lifting . . . Jesus didn’t lift himselfup, he was lifted up, as the two men in white said he was taken up,and we all know by whom . . . and what aboutthose two men in white, anyway?  White symbolizes purity, it symbolizes holiness and righteousness . . . in his Gospel account of the transfiguration, Luke describes Jesus’ clothes as “dazzling white.”  And then again, at the tomb, the women find instead of Jesus two men in dazzling clothes . . . are these men in our passage the same guys?  In a way, they’re acting like kind of a Greek chorus, telling the disciples what’s going on, giving them needed information . . . kind of like angels . . . are they angels?  Angel means messenger in Greek . . . and they’re delivering a message, all right . . . and here’s the point: God took Jesus – now the risen Christ – God took Jesus up to heaven . . . and if we don’t get the point, it’s pounded into us: the last verse repeats the word heaven three times: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus who was taken into heaven, will return the same way you saw him go into heaven.”  Where has Jesus gone?  Into heaven,already . . . And of course, this gives us a clue as to his identity, doesn’t it?  The messengers are telling us that Jesus is the Son of God, returning to live in the home of his heavenlyparent.

       But even though Jesus has gone from them, even though his heavenly parent has reached down and scooped them up, the apostles are not left high and dry.  As Jesus says “John baptized with water, but you’ll be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."  And of course, that is what we celebrate not all that many days from nowat Pentecost . . . but the disciples, there at that last meeting with him, want to know what’s going to happen,  they want to know how it’s all going to go down, and so they ask the question they’d been asking from the beginning “is thisthe time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  Is it finally here?  And we knowwhat kingdom they’re talking about . . . it’s the Davidic kingdom, the kingdom of their once and future King . . .

      After all this time they stilldon’t get it, they stilldon’t understand what’s going on . . . it’s as if they’re thinking “ok, we got that crucifixion and resurrection stuff outa’ the way . . . now let’s get on with the real deal, the real agenda . . . let’s get that kingdom restored.  After all, you arethe Messiah, are you not?” But Jesus just patiently lays it on the line: it’s not for y’allto know the times or periods that God has set . . . sorry.  I don’t care howmany Y2Ks come and go or howmany charts John Hagee puts up on the wall, it’s not for you to know.  Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins can write a whole libraryon being left behind– and trust me, they will– but you’re not gonna figure it out. It’s just not for you to know.”

      And while they’re wondering who Tim LaHaye  is and what he was left behind from,he goes on:  But here’s what I willdo for you.   I’ll give you powerwhen the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you willbe my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and everywhere, to the ends of the earth. And this witnessing business is no small potatoes, no small deal . . . it takes power to witness, the power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the disciples at Pentecost.  And that makes sense, doesn’t it?  After all, the Greek for witness is “martyr,” and that title came to be associated with Christians whose witness included the ultimate act of self-giving, the giving up of their lives . . . those Christians took Christ at his wordwhen he said “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake will save it.” Their witness was a sign-post pointing to Christ’s ultimate act of self-giving, his death on a Roman cross.

      Of course, that kind of total witness, whether it involves giving up your physical existence on this planetor not, isn’t easy . . . and that’s what the power of the Holy Spirit is for, it’s to support Christians in this risky, difficult, downright-dangerousundertaking of being a witness to Christ. And this imbuing of individual people with the Holy Spirit’s power is something entirely new that God is doing with us Christians . . . the Hebrew scriptures – which we call the Old Testament – tell of the Spirit of God working in the world . . . Jesus himselftells Nicodemus that “the wind, the spirit,blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” and it’s stilllike that, the Spirit of God is still loose in the world, wild, unpredictable and free, but now – through the agency of Christ – we are able to wieldsome of that power . . . or at perhaps more accutately, that power can under gird our actions, it can support our witness to Christ.

      Early on in the movie The Apostle,the title character Sonny Dewey is doing some tag-team preaching . . . y’all don’t know about tag-team preaching?  Well, it’s when one of the evangelists is preachin’ and steppin’ and hollering about the Lord, and another comes up and pops him on the back or the arm, he comes up and tagshim and takes over, and it goes on like that sometimes for hours, and Sonny is tagged by this humongous preacher in a white suit who starts stepping across the stage yelling “I got the HolyGhost powah!  I got the HolyGhost powah!”  He’s happyabout it, it animateshim, it gives him joy. . . it gives him strengthto live in a world that’s not always sympathetic to three-hundred pound black men . . .

      And you know what?  We got the Holy Ghost powah as well . . .  we got that high-steppin’, blowin’ in the wind Spirit power to uphold us as we undertake the dangerous business of witnessing to Christ . . . what?  You say that you’ve never felt endangered by your witness for the Gospel?  You’ve never been afraid, you’ve never felt like you might be called upon to actually take upthat cross and follow Christ to the end? Ok, maybe not . . . I’ll buy that. There’s at least a veneer of religious tolerance in this country . . . and it’s not like we’re Muslimsor anything . . . but we’ve allfelt the ridicule as we bear witness in public, as we give credit to Christfor a good work – we always say we’re doing it in Christ’s name, don’t we? – or we bow our heads in a restaurant to give thanks . . . if we haven’t – and again I’m sure all of us in this room have – but if we haven’t, perhaps we ought to examine our witness to Christ . . . 

      Our whole reason for beingis to be his witnesses in Cincinnati, in all Ohio and Indiana and even to the ends of the earth . . . if we are not fulfilling this, if we’re not witnessing to Christ in everything we do, in thought word and deed, then what good are we to God?  After all, heaven is up there,not down here, and as that Greek angel chorus said “Why are we looking up into heaven?  Christ’s gonna come back here,back to earth.”  The action’s here on earth, the witness is here on this planet.  Fix not your hearts on heavenly things, brothers and sisters, but on our witness here on earth.  Heaven will take care of itself.  Amen.