Jesus' Family Values (Luke 9:51 - 62)

It's that silly season again, that happens every four years or so, and this time it’s somewhat sillier than usual, with two apparent candidates with the highest negatives—whatever that means—in the history of candidates, I guess.  And the national race has overshadowed the local races, the ones that often have “family values” prominently displayed.  You know . . . when one of the candidates tries to set him (or her) self up as the protector of family values, whereas the scum he (or she) is running against is a heathen socialist (or fascist, depending on the candidates political proclivities), and if that other person is elected, there will be—lo!—wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by which Armageddon will surely ensue.

Of course, human nature being what it is, and power breeding—among other things—a certain hubris, some rather sad and/or humorous stories have resulted over the years.  One of my favorites concerns one Kirk Fordice, governor of the great state of Mississippi when Pam, the kids and I lived there.  Kirk was a businessman from Vicksburg, over on the River, and he ran on a platform of “a businessman knows how to get stuff done” and, Mississippi being the buckle of the Bible Belt, “Christian Family Values.”  One day, not long after he was reelected, he was heading South from Memphis down I-55 when he flipped the Mississippi State motor-pool SUV he was driving into the ditch.  Of course, the State Patrolmen escorting him immediately called for an ambulance, and they life-flighted him down to Jackson where he was hospitalized for several weeks, recovering.

Now, the press asked why he'd been to Memphis, and why it wasn't listed on his official travel schedule, as if it were any business of theirs, the nosy parkers.  After some sniffing around, and some blabbing by Mississippi State troopers (shades of one William Jefferson Clinton), it came out that he'd been visiting a woman named Ann Creson who, as Pat Fordice, the woman with whom the governor had celebrated 44 years of connubial, family-valued bliss could attest, was most definitely not his wife.

From there, it descended to music-hall comedy: shortly after he was released from the hospital, Fordice stood on the state-house steps and said he and Pat would soon be getting a divorce.  Shortly after that, Pat stood on the governor’s mansion steps and said it was news to her, and that it would take a regiment of rebel soldiers to pry her out of there.  So the governor moved into a hotel, where he refused to resign, despite the fact that after campaigning at least in part on “Christian family values,” he was caught using state vehicles and personnel—i.e., tax-payer’s money—to conduct an extramarital affair.

Now, there are many lessons one could draw from this tale—which I swear is all true.   We could go with the ever-popular “power corrupts” motif, because it surely does.  We could go with “the governor protests too much, methinks,” which isn't in the Bible, but should be.  One of my favorites is related to last week's lesson on representing Jesus to the world: be careful how loudly you advertise your faith, and what aspects of it you choose to emphasize.  Ol’ Kirk proclaiming what a Christian family man he was didn't do Christianity any good in the end.  Maybe that's why Jesus hated hypocrisy as much as he did.

But what I want to talk about is the common misconception that so-called Christian family values are in any way “Christian.”  And before you call a special meeting of the Session, let me say that I think it's good to care for our families.  It's bad to cheat on your spouse, to abandon your kids, to rear them without love, compassion or understanding.  It's just that like a lot of things, such as like paying our taxes (giving unto Caesar doesn't mean quite what we've all been taught), neither Jesus nor the Hebrew Scriptures have a lot to say about it.

In fact, they seem to be a great witness to what we might call today anti-family values. Take the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, et al., had multiple wives, and women and children were distinctly property, part of a man’s wealth.  Remember Abraham whiling away the heat of the day in front of the tent, while Sarah sweated over the feast inside?  Or letting her become the Pharaoh’s wife–twice!—to save his own miserable skin?  What about Jacob receiving not one but two wives as pay for his labor, or the Psalmist’s words, comparing his children to weapons, arrows in the bow of an archer?  Ah, those were the days . . .

And then there's the New Testament: the author of Ephesians telling wives to obey their husbands, construing the family unit to be like a mini-Empire, with the husband/emperor at the top, to reassure the Romans that they were just like them, not subversive at all, no siree, not us.  And then, of course, there was Paul and his thorn, who recommended against marriage, against forming a family unit at all.

Finally, we come to Jesus, who had something to say about divorce—hint, he were agin’ it—but little good to say about one’s biological family.  Didn't he say “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household?”  And that “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me?”  And wasn't it Jesus who, when his mother and brothers came to see him refused to meet with them, saying that those who do the will of God are his mother and brothers?  Oy vey . . . A family man he was not.

And now we come to our passage, wherein he chastises some would-be followers for being just a little too family-values oriented.  Well, he doesn't chastise the first one, he just tells it like it is.  Jesus and his followers are going down the road and the man comes up to him and gushes: “I will follow you wherever you go.”  And you can almost see the stars in his eyes, it must have looked like such a romantic way of life, out on the highways and by-ways, doing the work of the Lord.  But Jesus bursts that bubble, thank you very much: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Humanity has nowhere to lay his head.”  It's a hard life, traveling around with this Son of Human beings, you don't have any nest or hole or place to lay your head, you don't have any home.  And it's important to note that this is the set up, this is the lesson Jesus wants to get across: you follow Jesus, you—as the song goes--ain't got a home.

And what Jesus tells the next two would-be followers elaborates on the no-home motif: if you don't have a home, you can’t very well look after your family, now can you?  He tells another guy “follow me,” and the guy says “first let me bury my father,” and Jesus comes back with “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”  You're alive, he's saying, not dead.  Your ministry is to the living, just as mine is.  Elsewhere, he makes a similar point when he says “God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.”

Let the dead deal with the dead, Jesus’ mission is to the living . . . And then another promises to follow Jesus, just as soon as he says bye to his family.  But Jesus uses that as another teachable moment, warning him that “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  In the ancient Middle East, plows were fairly light affairs, and if you looked around, they would go off course, the animal pulling it would respond to the change in pressure on the reins, and the lines would be crooked.  Kingdom-living requires concentration, single-minded focus . . . A heart split in two, focused on more than one thing, will not get the job done, will make for crooked Kingdom furrows.

And here I need to pause for truth in advertising, and acknowledge a subtext here . . . And that subtext is one Elijah the Tishbite, greatest of the Israelite prophets.  You'll recall that some folks thought Jesus was Elijah reborn, and also that Elijah himself appeared, along with Moses, at the transfiguration which, not coincidentally, is just a few passages before ours.  And in that mountaintop tableau, Moses and Elijah disappear, leaving Jesus alone, replacing them and surpassing them.  And here, James and John, the disciples who went up on that mountaintop, along with Peter, want Jesus to act like Elijah, who called down fire on some hapless soldiers.  But Jesus rebukes them, that’s not the way he does business.

By the same token, Jesus forbids the man to go back to say goodbye to his family—or at least he strongly discourages it—something that Elijah specifically allowed.  And so we have a picture of Jesus, considered greater than Elijah, and does this greater-than-ness consist of (a) being merciful to those who oppose him, of not seeking vengeance and (b) being much more single-minded about the mission of God?  Certainly, the Desert Fathers and Mothers felt that way . . . this passage, along with the sending of the seventy which, again not coincidentally, comes right after this one, was viewed as a call to emulate Jesus and his isolated, nomadic ways.  They took this to mean they were to follow Jesus and give up family and have no place to lay their heads, and they headed for the desert.

But you know . . . times change.  They do.  And as the Apostolic era wore on, and segued into the patristic age—the age of the church fathers —Christianity became established in cities and towns and a different kind of ministry was needed.  Oh, there was still call for semi-crazed evangelist church planters with fire in their bellies, who could tell it like it is, the unvarnished truth, and then like Paul get out of Dodge.  But as house churches grew into permanent, dedicated gathering places, a need for continued, local nurturing in the faith arose.  One could preach the gospel, could do God’s work, without leaving hearth and home.  One could have one’s gospel and eat at home, too.

So.  Is this passage hopelessly historically-conditioned?  Are we all supposed to ignore Jesus’ admonitions about dead burying their own and looking back from the plow?  Lord, I hope not!  Our ministry is to the living, not to the dead, and once we have set out to do a task or a ministry, we need to focus on it, give it all we've got.  But like everything, there is a balance to be had, a Middle Way between the extremes of Desert-Father dedication and just showing up on Sunday morning to “be fed.”  We are called to spread the Gospel, after all.

Jesus said that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but his followers don't have a place to lay their heads, but now that we do have holes and nests, does it mean anything for us?  Well . . . Consider the parallels.  Although we are more settled, the folks we’re called to serve are by definition “on the road,” they're outside our doors, in the community.  And while we might not be called to become nomadic evangelists, erecting our tents in vacant lots, living off the kindnesses of strangers, we have to go out into the community, we have to become turned outward, looking outward to do it.  God calls us to be nurtured not just for nurturing sake, but for the road, for our tasks of carrying the Gospel in thought, word and deed.  Everything we do should be pointed towards that.  Amen.

When Pigs Fly (Luke 8:26 - 39)

     Jerry was an ad man.  A darned good one, if he did say so himself, which he often did.  To be a darned good ad man—which, don't you know, Jerry was—you had to have a lot of smarts, a lot of ego and, most of all, a lot of self-confidence.  You had to know that the campaign you pitched to your boss’s toothpaste client was the best darn toothpaste campaign there ever was, guaranteed to sell more toothpaste than any other campaign in the history of toothpaste ads and make the client oodles of money, and heap praise and adulation—not to mention a big fat raise—upon whoever thought it up.

Jerry had self-confidence to spare.  Until, that is, he didn't.  Until one day Dan—who was the head of the agency everybody called “Big Dan”—invited him into his office and introduced him to a brand new, wet behind the ears and very young associate. “Jerry,” Dan said, “Meet Sebastian.”  The two men shook hands.  Draping an arm over the older man’s shoulder, he said to Sebastian: “This is Jerry Sommers, the man behind the Kooky Kola Care Bear ads.”  Jerry smiled modestly—the Kooky Kola Care Bear ads had sold more Kooky Kola that year than ever before—or since—not to mention what it did for Care Bears.  The TV spots, especially, were clever, funny, and so sweet it made your teeth hurt—kind of like Kooky Kola itself—and they’d won five industry awards and made everybody a bundle of  money.

But the newcomer didn't seem impressed at all; he just stared at Jerry with dead-fish eyes and said “Wow.”  Big Dan didn't seem to notice: “Sebastian here was top of his class at Harvard, and I managed to scoop him up before anybody else.  I'd like you to show him around, show him the ropes.  Who knows?  Maybe some of that old Sommers magic will rub off.”  Sebastian smirked and said “I can hardly wait.”  Big Dan laughed uproariously—was it too uproarious? Jerry thought—and ushered them out of his office.

No sooner were they through the door and into the cubicle farm inhabited by lesser mortals, than Sebastian turned on Jerry and hissed “stay away from me, old man . . . I’ll find my own way around.”  And he stalked off on the direction of his new office, which was nice, but of course not as nice as Jerry’s corner abode.  And after that, every time they encountered one another, the new guy would smile cordially,  but it never reached his eyes, which continued to look to Jerry like the blank, saucer eyes of a Mako Shark.

Jerry started to avoid the new guy.  When he saw Sebastian rounding a corner in the hall, he turned the other way.  When he heard him in Big Dan’s office, he would abandon any plans he might have had to talk with his boss, even if it was urgent.  When he saw him walking around the perimeter of the cubicle farm with his personal secretary—he gotten one awful fast, in Jerry’s estimation—he'd duck into the middle and pretend to consult a startled office worker.

Thus was born his fear, and as a way to handle it, avoidance wasn't bad.  But what Jerry didn't realize was that fear grows on you, it branches out into other things, metastasizes like a particularly insidious cancer.  He began to fear that the agency was going to terminate him and he'd be penniless.  He began to fear that the agency was going down the tubes and he’d be penniless.  His subway commute became tortuous: instead of enjoying the ride, maybe reading the Times or a good book, he'd glance furtively around, jumping at every sound, convinced that he was going to be mugged, robbed at gunpoint, or something worse.

He stopped going outside his condo, sending out instead for whatever he needed, and his personal hygiene began to slip, just a little, but people at office began to notice, that and his increasingly erratic behavior.  But it wasn't until Big Dan found him cowering in the men’s room, squatting on a toilet with the stall-door closed, that it came to a head.  “Jerry,” his Dan said, “we have to talk.”

And so Jerry lost his job, and though he looked for another, word spreads fast in the advertising industry, and he was damaged goods.  Truth to be told, he didn't try very hard . . . his fear of rejection was overwhelming.  And so began his inevitable slide:  he couldn't afford the payments on his condo, so he moved into something he could manage, which wasn't much in that city.  He held down a series of increasingly menial jobs—his fear kept driving him to quit, or got him fired, and it wasn't long before he reached the end of his rope, and he was on the street.

And I don't know if the man Jesus met in the tombs had a similar downfall, but it was certain that he was as full of demons as Jerry.  Whether they were psychological, like Jerry’s, or real live, flapping-around, pitchfork-carrying devils didn't really matter: they made him unclean, unfit for ancient society just like Jerry was unfit for modern society.  Though the man from Gerasa was a gentile, he was still outcast, living in the tombs among the dead.  So too was Jerry:  his demons drove him first into the agency bathroom and then onto the streets, homeless, outcast, unclean. Once in awhile, somebody would drop some money into the crumpled hat deployed hopefully in front of  him,  but most folks would wrinkle their noses and cross the street at the sight of him.

One day, Jerry was sitting on the sidewalk against the side of a flop house, eyes downcast, when a pair of shoes hove into his line of vision and stopped.  They weren't the shiny black shoes of the police, nor were they tasseled loafers like he used to wear. They were tattered New Balance running shoes, topped by the frayed cuffs of a pair of faded jeans.  Jerry allowed his eyes to slowly look up, past the Grateful Dead tee-shirt and beaded necklace into the face of a man about his age.

“Hey, friend!” said the man, smiling.  “You ok?”  Jerry looked at him incredulously?  “Do I look ok?” he said.  The man threw back his head and laughed, full-throated, uninhibited, as if he weren't standing in front of a homeless guy on a boiling July day.  “I guess not,” he said.  “My name’s Cory.  What’s yours?”  Jerry looked at the man and some sliver of Sunday School learning came to him: “My name’s Legion,” he said, and once again Cory threw back his head and laughed.  “Lots of demons, huh?  Well, Legion, how long’s it been since you’ve eaten?” “A while,” Jerry admitted. “How’d you like a hot meal?” Cory asked.  Jerry peered up at him, suddenly suspicious.  “You’re not some kind of Jesus-y person are you?”  Cory’s smile broadened.  “Some kind,” he said.  “But you don't have to do anything you don't want.  There’s no sermons, no hymns, no preaching.  Absolutely no strings—you can bail out at any time. C’mon . . . It's just around the corner . . .”

Legion nodded warily and began to gather up his few possessions, shaking his head and shrinking away when Cory offered to carry them.  As promised, it wasn't far, and as they entered a modest living space—tattered couch, matching chair and a couple of end tables—a wonderful smell assaulted his nostrils.  How long had it been since he'd eaten?  Cory gestured to the dinette set with cracked vinyl chairs and said “won't be a minute” and disappeared into the kitchen.

The meal was simple but delicious, and afterward Cory stretched and said “coffee?”  But Legion’s fear and paranoia—held in abatement while he ate—had returned full force, and he was already fidgeting glancing at the door.  “Uhh . . . I've gotta go . . . “. And true to his word, Cory smiled and got up to see him out—no singing, no preaching, no strings.    As they passed through the living space, he saw a well-worn Bible on the end table.

At the door, Cory told him: “You want dinner tomorrow night, stop by.”  And as Jerry mumbled something noncommittal, but fears chittered and whispered “Now we know his game . . . he’s going to lull us into complacency with good food then rob us blind.  Or worse, try to convert us.”  And he didn't go back the next evening, or the next, but on the third evening his hunger got the best of him, and when he knocked on the door, Cory greeted him like an old friend.  And that evening, Jerry stayed for coffee, and there were again no strings, and though he didn't come the next night, he did come the night after that, and soon it was every evening, and Cory and he became good friends, and their discussions were wide-ranging and almost never involved religion.

Gradually, Jerry regained his trust and equanimity. His fears began to plague him less and less.  Cory invited him to volunteer for the shelter he directed, but he never got the feeling that Cory’s friendship—or fine dinners—depended on him doing so.  Cory introduced him to contemplative meditation, which allowed him eventually to detach himself from his fears and come to realize that they were not him.  It wasn't overnight, and it took some doing, but Jerry was able to rejoin the human race.  And he often thought that if all churches offered genuine spiritual transformation, instead of arguing perennially who was in and who as out, who could be married and who couldn't, and how many angels could dance on the head of a theological pin, he would have joined one a long time ago.

By any standard, the demon-infested man from Gerasa was unclean.  His countrymen tried to keep him locked up, tried to keep clothes on his back and food in his belly, but his demons drove him time and again into the wilds.  What it took to heal him was an encounter with Jesus . . . Not some theoretical knowledge that Jesus is with you, as important as that is, but a real, experiential encounter.  At the heart of the story of the man from Gerasa, stripped of all its symbolic trappings—yes, the pigs were unclean too; yes the man’s name was Legion, as in Roman—stripped of all its symbolic finery, the story is at heart about an personal encounter with Jesus.

Jerry’s story is too.  It's a story of a personal encounter with Christ in the form of his interaction with Cory.  I don't mean to imply that Cory was Jesus come again, but that he was the face of Jesus for the hurting man.  Like every one of us, Cory represents Jesus to the world, and what we do, how we interact with others determines how they view the risen Lord.

I couldn't help but think of this in the wake of the terrible events of last Sunday morning.  As the evidence mounts that the murder of 49 women and men was a hate crime at least as much as a terrorist one, many Christians refuse to acknowledge the fact.  Worse, though dutifully reporting that churches opened their doors to grievers, the media also gave pastors Roger Jimenez of Sacramento and Steve Anderson air play, showing videos of their vile and hateful rants against members of the LGBTQ communities.  Guess what stories stick in the mind more?  Meanwhile, the entire congregation of an orthodox Jewish synagogue up and invade a gay bar, hugging and consoling and grieving with its patrons over the tragedy.  And this was in Washington D.C., far from Orlando.  Funny that it took Jewish folk to represent Christ so vividly.

Sisters and brothers, Jesus came to the man with demons and healed him with no strings attached.  He didn't require that he join the church, he didn't do it so church numbers would grow, as so many of our churches today do.  In fact, Luke says, he commanded the unclean spirit to leave him before the man even spoke.  A lot of times, we agonize over how best to represent Jesus to the world, but it's really very simple: just look at Jesus.  It's what Cory did.  Amen.

The Tale of the Troublesome Guest (Luke 7:26 - 8:3)

Simon was an important man, a Pharisee, who gave the best, most lavish dinners in town.  He was always inviting the latest celebrity, the most au courant, talked-about personages around.  Wasn't it he, Simon the Pharisee, who’d been the first one in all Palestine to snag last year's Jerusalem Idol for one of his little . . . parties?  And when one of the Herods—or even one of their little toadies or hangers-on— came to town, wasn't his one of the first places they checked for a good, dinner party?  One where they could see—and be seen by—the creamiest of the crop, just the right people who could advance their interests just the right amount?  Of course it was . . .

And so when this Jesus fellow came into town, with a huge retinue of men and women (Simon had heard it even included the wife of one of Herod’s top advisors), he sent his people to negotiate with Jesus’ people for him to attend.  And when they returned, and told him he’d come, he was overjoyed, for Jesus was the hottest ticket in town: such a powerful prophet that he could heal a man at 30 paces, or so it was said.  It was even whispered that he was the prophet Elijah reborn, come back from wherever deceased men of God went when they died.  It was such a delicious rumor that Simon almost forgot that he had planted it himself, to build up his guest and, by extension, himself.

So the whole town was whispering about Jesus, and his appearance at Simon’s party, even those who weren't invited, and it was rumored that as entertainment, Jesus was going to heal a leper, although some said he was only going to turn old Judge Hezekiah into a toad.  And as the hour grew near, and preparations reached a fever pitch, Simon the Pharisee was practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation of all the honor that would accrue because of the dinner party and its honored guest.

Things started to go wrong from the very beginning.  First of all, Jesus arrived alone, for pity’s sake, when he'd been explicitly told he could bring a retinue of—not more than two—personal servants to stand behind him at the table.  Again, it was a matter of honor: if his guest had servants, it raised him up in stature which, in turn, raised up his host, Simon the Pharisee.  What was wrong with this guy, anyway?  Didn't he pay attention to the social niceties?  Maybe—and this was a foreign thought to Simon—the man didn't have any slaves.

Next—insult upon insult—the man took a seat almost at the end of the table, about as far away from from him as he could.  Didn't his people inform Jesus’ people that he was to be the guest of honor?  And when he invited Jesus up to take his rightful place at the host’s right hand, the man looked at him and smiled, and said “when you are invited to supper, don't grab the best place, so that when you are invited up to a higher place, all the more honor will accrue.”  Simon just stared at him, agape: how dare he give social-climbing advice to the master?

But the worst was yet to come: it was about half-way through the meal, and Simon was just beginning to think the evening could be salvaged, when a woman appeared, out of nowhere, right beside his guest of honor.  And it wasn’t just any woman, but that woman, the sinner, the unclean one, whose misdeed was so heinous that it had rendered her permanently unclean, permanently a sinner.  The whole town knew it, too, knew that she was an unclean woman, and  Simon was just sure that instead of marveling once again at his power and popularity, everyone was laughing at him already, knowing that all his plans had been ruined.

But the woman just appeared there, in the middle of his dinner party . . . how had she gotten in?  Was she a djinn, an evil spirit sent to torment him?  Was she the unquiet ghost of someone he had wronged . . . Nobody had seen her enter, how or even approach the table.  How had she eluded his retainers at the door?  Maybe she was an apparition, maybe she was visible only to him.  To test the theory, he closed his eyes: hopefully, she'd be gone when he opened them again.

The woman had lost her spouse a few years ago, and had no male relative to take her in, no husband’s brother for a levirate marriage, no father to go back to. So she was thrown onto the street, begging for a time, then finding an occupation that made her perpetually unclean.  And though Simon the Pharisee’s comment to Jesus implies that it was prostitution, there were any number of occupations that could do it.  Tanning, for instance: though it wasn't listed as formally unclean, anybody who worked in a tannery would be unclean a lot, since touching any dead body made someone unclean.

At any rate, the woman had heard somehow that Jesus was coming to dinner at Simon’s—his PR machine was so good that even she had gotten wind of it.  And such was her desperation, such was her loneliness, that she chose to do the unthinkable: she chose to crash the dinner party of one of the most powerful men in town. Being unclean made her an outsider, unable to partake of fellowship—table or otherwise—with members of her community, her religious family, and she was pariah, avoided, unclean.  How she missed the quiet, day to day rituals that marked Hebrew life.  How she longed for a simple touch, or a smile of recognition with other women she passed on the street.  Instead of the averted eyes, the crossing to the other side of the street when they realized who she was.

 So it was desperation that drove her to the house of Simon the Pharisee that night . . . She’d heard that this Jesus was a prophet, mighty in word and deed, that he could heal lepers, even . . . Surely,  she thought, he could do something for her.  So she waited until several guests—a judge and a famous dancer—were admitted, and she followed along, keeping her face averted, as if she were one of their servants.  And it worked!  The gaze of Simon’s door man slid right over her, as if she didn't exist, and she probably didn't, to him: she was a woman, after all . . .

And throughout the evening, as the prophet was invited to sit at the host’s right hand, as course after course were brought forth, the woman thought that at any moment someone would recognize her, someone would cry “Unclean!  Unclean!”  And she'd be thrown out and beaten or worse.  But no . . . she just stood behind the judge, and he thought she was one of Simon’s servants and they thought she was one of his, if they thought of her at all.  And everyone’s eyes kept sliding over and around her, as if she didn't exist . . .

Finally, after the appetizers had been served, she slid over so she was behind the guest of honor, and she stood behind him, at his feet, unbound her hair, and began to wipe his feet with her hair!  And now everyone saw her, and a gasp went up as the recognized her—unclean, unclean!—and at the intimate way in which she touched the great teacher.

And Simon the Pharisee heard the gasps and opened his eyes, and his worst fears were realized: unclean and a woman to boot, she was touching the great man, making him unclean, breaking so many Jewish taboos that his head spun.  And at the same time he thought “Ha! If he were a prophet he’d have known what kind of woman this was that was touching him—that she was unclean, a sinner.”

And just as he thought that, Jesus turned to him as if he’d read his mind, and his eyes bored into him.  “Simon,” he said, “I  have something to say to you.” And the Pharisee knew by the formality that it would be a lesson, so he addressed him formally?  “Teacher,” he said, “speak.” “A man had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” And Simon said “The one who was forgiven more,” and Jesus said “Right,” and looked at the woman “see this woman?  You gave me no water for my feet, yet she bathed them with her tears.  You gave me no kiss of greetings, yet she can’t stop kissing my feet.  I tell you: her sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love.  But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”  And he said to the woman: “your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

And everyone around the table gasped, as the woman strode from the room, head held high: “who does this man think he is, anyway?  Only God can forgive sins, through his anointed priests that is . . .”  And after that display of effrontery, all conversation was muted, all the badinage seemed forced, and they hurried through the meal as fast as they could, furtively glancing from time to time over at the honored guest.

And Simon the Pharisee’s little soirée was ruined, and though everyone was talking about it the next day, it was not in a good way.  Everyone kept saying “He forgave her sins.  He forgave her sins!”  Completely missing the whole point of Jesus’ teaching: the woman’s sins had been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love.  But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.

A well-known theologian of the last century—it might have been Rudolph Bultmann—said that Christianity is a religion of the kitchen help, and he might have been thinking of this passage when he said it.  If you go down the socio-economic scale, the fervency of—and time spent at—their religion surely increases.  Their worship opportunities tend to blossom, they spend more time in church, and they reach out more to their neighbors, too.  By contrast, middle-class congregations—by and large, you understand—tend to spend less weekly time in worship—most Presbyterians think that one whole hour a week is more than enough—they tend to throw money at a problem instead of getting out among the people they are serving, and etc.  The expression of their faith tends to be inward, not visible to their friends and neighbors, restricted to that hour or two on Sunday morning.

Those who have less—and I’m not talking just, or even primarily, about money—those who have less power over their lives , who feel less able to cope, tend to more grateful and empowered by a faith that gives them dignity, gives them peace (as Jesus told the woman at the dinner), gives them power over their lives.  Folks who already have some of those things . . . don’t.

When Jesus said “your faith has saved you; go in peace” our minds go immediately to what happens after you die.  We immediately—most of us, anyway—think he’s talking about what we call in big quotes “salvation.”  But I don't think that’s it at all, or at least not all of it.  He makes her clean, he saves her from the shame, he saves her from the humiliation, he saves her from powerlessness, from loneliness, from being outside the kingdom of God.

And does he not do that for us as well?  We who’ve rarely missed a meal, who have transportation and cell phones and HBO, don't we also have shame, haven't we also felt lonely, haven't we felt outside of the bounds of respectability, inadequate, even for just a little bit?  And hasn't Jesus done the same for each one of us that he did for the unclean woman?  Hasn't he given each one of us his unconditional love and forgiveness right here in this planet?  I think so.  Amen.

Revelation Days (Galatians 1:11 - 24)

      Personal revelation is out of favor in orthodox Christian circles—that’s orthodox with a little ‘o’, meaning mainstream.  We have a closed canon, a closed list of books of Scripture we consider to be authoritative, even though it’s a different list than most Christians have, and although we admit of the possibility of it, I don’t know of anybody in recent times whose personal visions or revelations have been incorporated into mainstream Christianity, with the possible exception of Joseph Smith, who was visited by Jesus and Elijah and Moses—as well as assorted apostles, over the years—in the New York woods.  And even though his religion is the only one that is uniquely American, as critic Harold Bloom has pointed out, and even though Latter Day Saint-ers vehemently argue that it is, in fact, a form of Christianity, Christians point to Smith’s “revelations” with derision and scorn, perhaps ending with the question “wonder what he was smoking?”

      Most latter-day personal revelations haven’t been nearly so successful.  They’ve resulted in—at best—small sects.  For example, in 1744 Emanuel Swedenborg had a vision in which the Lord opened his eyes, and from then on, he could freely visit heaven and hell, hob-nob with angels and demons, and do all kinds of other cool things.  The Swedenborgian church based on his writings still exists—my Oregon dentist was a Swedenborgian, much to his Lutheran-minister father’s disgust—but they’ve never been very big.  Contrast this to Christianity which—a strong argument can be made—is based as a religion on Paul’s revelation described in this passage.  Certainly, Christianity wouldn’t have the same shape if Paul hadn’t had that revelation, which Luke described as happening on the Damascus Road, although Paul himself never said so.  He just said—and we just read it—that the gospel is not from a human source, nor was he taught it, but that he received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.  And you know what the Greek word for revelation is, don’t you?  It’s apocalypse . . . Paul did not get the gospel from a human source, nor was taught it, but he received it through an apocalypse of Jesus Christ.

      And what an apocalypse that must have been . . . maybe Luke was right, maybe the Lord did knock him off his mule and blind him on that ol’ Damascus road . . . it surely must have taken a whole lot of shakin’ to move Paul who was by his own account an über-Jew, violently trying to destroy the church, persecuting it beyond measure . . . and though he may not have been using violence—the New American Standard translation’s “beyond measure” is another way of putting it—he paints a picture of a very dedicated defender of the tradition, advanced in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries.  And so it must have been something quite dramatic to make Paul mend his ways, something perhaps quite outside normal experience, whether he was knocked off his donkey or not . . .

      And there’s a reason he’s being so defensive about all of this, he was likely under attack by the shadowy false teachers he’s writing to warn the Galatians about, they might have been saying “Ol’ Paul, now, he’s not a real apostle, he didn’t come by his revelation, his apocalypse, first hand, he had some coaching, some teaching . . . lookit—those pillars of the church up there in Jerusalem, James and Peter and John, gave him these revelations, he doesn’t have direct apostolic authority, he didn’t get it directly from the Lord” and Paul is saying “No.  The proclamation, the version of the Gospel that I’m preaching came by direct revelation from our Lord Jesus Christ, even though I did go up to visit Cephas (also known as Peter) and James the brother of our Lord . . .”  And then he’s off to the races, detailing his travels to the regions of Syria and Cilicia, telling the Galatians—and us—that the Judean churches didn’t know him by sight, only hearing it said that the one who formerly was persecuting them is now preaching the faith, and that they glorified God because of him.

      And it’s a very valuable passage from an autobiographical point of view, because it’s one of the only places we get his biography from him, not filtered through tradition and Luke’s memories thirty years later in Acts, but for sermonic materiél it would seem to be lacking, except for the fact that Paul infused everything he wrote with theological depth . . . in particular, when Paul speaks of his own experiences, it’s to illustrate some larger truth about the Gospel, and here it’s no exception.  He says he was advanced in Judaism, and that word “Judaism” is very rare in the Greek of the period, and it occurs nowhere else in the New Testament but here, so it carries a special connotation, as one that is immersed in the traditions, who is playing the game by the traditional rules, who is living a good life by the best standards of his people.

I'm reading a book at the moment called “Breakfast with Buddha,” about a guy named Otto who’s the ultimate, successful family man.  He’s got a well-paying job, two typical adolescent kids, and a strong, loving wife.  He is a decent man who goes to Cape Cod with his family a couple of weeks a year, does charity work on the side, is tolerant of others, and gives back to the community.  Like Paul, he lives by the rules of his day, in his case the middle-class rules upon which much of our commerce turns.

Problem is, there’s a nagging hole in his middle, a nagging emptiness he doesn't know how to fill.  He's a Christian, he believes in God and all that, but there's something . . . missing.  And I wonder if Paul felt like that, I wonder if he ever felt like there was more than just the rules, more than just leading a good life?  Otto feels that way, but doesn’t know what to do about it, until his sister—flaky purveyor of “alternate spirituality, of everything he derisively finds antithetical to the “responsible” life he's built—until his sister cons him into a cross-country trip with a robe-wearing, Buddhist-ish spiritual master named Volya Rinpoche—Volya being his given name, Rinpoche his title.  And as they drive from New York City to North Dakota, Otto undergoes a conversion, of sorts, but not from Christianity to Buddhism, or Hinduism, or whatever the Rinpoche is, but something else . . .

And as Paul receives his apocalypse, he isn't converted from one faith to another, from Judaism to Christianity either.  As far as we know, he continued to be a Pharisee until the end of his days.  But if it wasn't a conversion—at least in the sense of a full change-over, an abandonment of one way of believing in favor of another, what was it?

Well, we know he quit persecuting Christians, and he developed—or had revealed to him—the notion that we are saved by grace through faith Christ, but is that all?  Is it just a change in philosophy, a change in intellectual belief, a new set of conclusions?  Anybody who's tried to wade though Romans, for instance, know it is full of closely-reasoned, logical arguments.  Was his conversion no more than an assent to a new set of precepts?

There's a clue, I think, in his prose.  When he says “God was pleased to reveal his Son to me,” the whole subject of the sentence changes . . . before it was I violently persecuted, I was advanced in Judaism, I was zealous for the traditions, I, I, I.  Then, bam!  All of a sudden, it’s God—God set him apart before he was born, God called him through his grace, God was pleased to reveal . . . The shift in emphasis from Paul’s agency, Paul’s actions to those of God is striking.  Before the statement of revelation, it was all Paul; after, it is nothing but God.

In “Breakfast with Buddha,” Otto doesn't suddenly change his lifestyle—as far as we know he returns to his job in New York publishing and his house in the ‘burbs.  What has changed—just a little, it's not an apocalypse like for Paul—is his view of the world and his place in it.  He is no longer quite so much in the center, he doesn't feel the need to assert his own opinion, to constantly argue any more.  He’s learned to take life as it comes and to value things other than his own, contented life.  Although he still values that as well.  Like Paul, what he undergoes is not so much a conversion as a transformation.

Philosopher Ken Wilber studies the evolution of consciousness, among other things, and he views it as a series of transformative steps.  And he notes that at each of these steps, the characteristics of the former stage are not all done away with but are included at that higher stage.  He calls this principle “transcend and include,” and I think that's what's going on with the fictional Otto and, most certainly, the Apostle Paul.  Otto didn't quit being a Christian, didn't give up his comfortable life style, but he viewed it all very differently, from a very different place.  Paul went from self-centered I-I-I to a God-centered way of looking at the world.  He certainly didn't abandon his old ways, but transcended and included his Pharisitical leanings.  In fact, it can be argued that he could be as intolerant, at times, of challenges to his way of viewing the Gospel as he was to his way of viewing Judaism.

Whatever the case, Jesus had a metaphor for this transformation, didn't he?  He likened it to losing one’s life: “whoever loses their life for my sake shall save it.”  He’s speaking of a losing of self, a de-centering from one’s ego to a re-centering with God in the center.  It happens to Paul in a revelation, in an apocalypse, all of a sudden, but many times it is gradual, as we deepen in our life of prayer and meditation.  It all becomes less and less about “I” and more and more about the spirit and the kingdom, which is in each and every one of us.  Amen.