Tough Crowd (John 6:51-58)

    Last week, we dipped our big toe into the “Bread of Life” discourse from John, and this week we’re going to dive right in and paddle around a little bit, and Alert Readers will have noticed that the lectionary passages from last week and this week and the next – by which time we might all be sick of bread – that the lectionary passages overlap.  Last week’s passage ended up with verse 51, and this week’s passage begins with verse 51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Our passage ends with verse 58, but next week’s includes that verse and the two preceding it as well.  And although it’s partially a strategy of the very modern creators of our lectionary to remind us from week to week what this long passage is all about, it also reflects in an important way the structure of the speech itself, both in what must have been its original form, but especially in the way the John has edited and structured it.  Jesus restates the same basic premise again and again – I am the bread of life, I am the bread of life – but also adding to it, refining it as he rolls along through the speech.  And each time he adds something new, John pauses for a little crowd-reaction shot . . . Thus we get I am the bread of life, come down from heaven, and then the crowd grumbles, saying how can he be from heaven, we know where he lives, we know his mom and dad, we played stick-ball with him back in the day, shot some hoops out in the driveway, how can he say he’s from heaven?

     Well, Jesus does a little explanation – although as usual in John he doesn’t directly answer their questions – and then restates his thesis, adding oh, by the way, this bread I told you about, the bread you’ve gotta eat to get eternal life?  Well, it’s my flesh . . . and immediately John cuts to the crowd who’re saying “Holy guacamole, how can this man” – note the this man, to emphasize his mortality, and maybe diss him a little bit – “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And they’re disputing among themselves which, by all accounts, is a polite euphemism for what they’re actually doing, the Greek translated here as disputing has violent overtones, as in they’re duking it out, as in his statements have cause a violent reaction – more about that next week – and then we’re back to Jesus, back to the speech, and another one of his elliptical answers . . .

     But before we look at those words, let’s look at the crowd, shall we?  John has carefully presented Jesus’ speech so that the crowd plays an integral part in the proceedings, so they’re a character in our drama, so maybe we ought to think about who they are and what part they play . . . the crowd that Jesus is addressing is the same crowd that got fed in John’s version of the feeding of the five-thousand . . . remember?  A little boy with five loaves and two fish saves the day, and that same crowd is so impressed that it tries to take Jesus by force and make him king . . . seems more like a mob to me . . . and then, you’ll recall, the disciples set out in a boat without him, and he walks across the water to catch up, and that same crowd, that was fed the miraculous bread, the same crowd that tried to force him to be king, piles into boats and comes after him, wanting to know how he got there . . . and the bread discourse begins in fundamental misunderstanding, about the nature of Jesus’ mission, and more pointedly, about the nature of belief . . . the crowd thinks it followed him because of the signs they saw, but Jesus knows it was because of the bread they ate . . . but the crowd keeps on asking for a sign, and Jesus explains no, it’s the bread, which of course is from God, it’s God who is the author of your belief, not because you have seen signs . . .

      No one can come to me unless drawn by God . . . it has nothing to do with your volition, like you saw a sign or something and were convinced, it’s not something you can reason about, it has to do with God . . . this is the work of God that you believe in the one God sent . . . and so this crowd is the same one who were fed the miraculous bread, who misunderstood the nature of his mission so much they tried to use violence to make him king, who misunderstood the nature of belief so much they thought it was because of signs, of flashing lights and showy miracles . . .

     But who are the people in the crowd?  Well, we know there are insiders – people like the twelve, who consider themselves in the inner circle – but there are also more casual followers, shepherd-on-the-street types, inquirers, seekers, drawn to what they had heard, and whom they’d heard it from . . . and there are also undoubtedly some local religious authorities, perhaps some local synagogue officials and the like.

     In other words, the crowd listening to Jesus’ speech is a lot like . . . us.  Some of us are devout, some of us consider ourselves insiders, like the twelve . . . others of us aren’t so sure, we’re seekers who, though certainly Christian, have our doubts about some of the things Jesus is saying, some of the stuff he’s asking us to do . . . and there certainly are some religious authorities here as well, some of us professional Christians whose charge it is to hold interpret the law and prophets and gospel just so . . . so, when we read this discourse, when we read this speech, perhaps we shouldn’t read it so much from above, so much from the standpoint of somebody who knows the score, but from below, as if we Christians were the crowd . . .

     Let’s try it . . . let’s imagine we are the crowd.  John said that they disputed among themselves, fought among themselves, saying “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And certainly, we can feature that . . . we’ve fought for two millennia over just what it means to eat Christ’s body . . .  and Jesus says “Truly I say to you:  “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  And we say . . . yechhh!  This is even worse than before, now he’s talking about us drinking his blood like so many middle-class vampires . . . our nice, clean Calvinistic theology – something about being lifted into the presence of the risen Christ – seems a lot more . . . tidy than this . . . this is messy and dirty and not-at-all Reformed.  This business about eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood is just about as hard to take for this 21^st Century crowd as it was for the first century one . . .

     And as if to shock us even more, as if to point up the messiness, the untidiness of it all even further, Jesus switches verbs on us . . . before, he was using a polite verb for eat, the standard one for people sitting down for a meal, but now he switches to one that’s much more harsh, much more earthy, even though our English translation is still simply “eat,” it has the connotation of chew or gnaw or chomp . . . “Those who gnaw, who chew on my flesh and who drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up . . . for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink, and we get that, we get that they are true in the deepest sense, true not only in the sense of “really . . . no kidding,” but true as in most real, bringing sustenance at the deepest level of our body . . . unlike the bread of the world, unlike all the things that claim to feed us, Christ’s flesh and blood are true food and drink . . .

     We are bombarded today with all manner of advertisements, all manner of promises to make our life easier, to meet our deepest needs . . . everything from television to personal computers to fast food . . . car commercials show happy shiny people riding in their SUVs, all with model good looks and killer hair-do’s . . . toothpaste ads show gleaming-mouthed young adults cavorting, and the message is clear – these things will solve your problems, they’ll get you the woman or man of your dreams, you’ll have 2.4 wonderful kids and a country home, and all your needs will be met . . . but we know, listening to Christ in the hot Galilee sun, that only his flesh is the true bread, only his blood is the true drink, and only they can bring true fulfillment.

     As a matter of fact, when we eat Christ’s flesh and drink Christ’s blood, we abide in him and he in us . . . and the concept of abiding or “dwelling-in” is important in John’s Gospel . . . in another metaphor, Jesus likens this relationship to a grape-vine . . . I am the true vine, he says, just as his flesh is the true flesh, and just as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.  This abiding is a close, intimate relationship, a nourishing relationship . . . without it, we cannot produce fruit, either in our lives or the lives of others.

     Last week we explored some of the Eucharistic implications of all this, some of the Lord’s Supper connotations, but that can’t be the whole story, it can’t be the only context, because if it were just about the physical act of Eucharist, which we practice once a month in this sanctuary, then that would raise troubling questions, not least of which is the nature of salvation, the requirements for it . . . is belief necessary, as Jesus himself emphasized earlier in this speech, and which he said comes from God, or is it necessary only to take the Eucharist, as this passage would imply?  In fact, both are intertwined, inseparable in this passage – see Jesus and the fourth evangelist’s overlapping of theme and content – and inseparable in Reformed theology . . . belief is indeed required for salvation – which, remember, is here and now according to John as well as in the future – belief is necessary, but, as Christ said, that is the work of God . . . and the communion with Christ that is at the heart of the Eucharist – that mystic, sweet communion, as the hymn says – provides grace, sustenance, and nourishment for the abiding-in Christ – and Christ abiding-in us – that is the reality of salvation in the Gospel of John.

     The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, was incarnate among us, walked and talked and lived among us . . . it says so in John’s sweeping, beautiful prologue, and so we should relate every mention of flesh in his Gospel to that first mention of flesh, and so if we ingest his flesh, if we take it into ourselves so that it becomes our flesh, we take in the Word of God, we incorporate him so that he abides in us, and we in him, wholly analogous to those ancient prophets – God has put God’s word into our mouths no less than he did Jeremiah when he touched his lips, or Ezekiel, when God fed him the Temple scroll, bite by tasty bite . . . they internalized the Word so they could proclaim it, just as we have done to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . .

      Brothers and sisters, we come to God, like that crowd came to Jesus on the mountain, hungry and thirsty for something authentic, something real . . . and like that first century crowd, we at times misunderstand our own salvation, we do not get the very nature of our belief . . . we want signs, a king who does flashy things for his subjects, a Christ of the glitter and glitz . . . but instead of flash we get flesh, the flesh and blood of the incarnation, that mysterious emptying out of God-hood from our God . . . the world gives shallowness and superficiality, things that stay awhile then evaporate like the morning dew . . . Christ gives true food and true drink, and we who have partaken of him, we who have eaten that flesh and drank that blood will never, never hunger and thirst, but have eternal life.  Amen.

Our Daily Bread (John 6:35, 41-51)

    There was a time, in a galaxy not so far away, when bread-machines were all the rage. They were on everyone’s Christmas list, and they still sell fairly well, I think . . . you can find whole web-sites devoted to bread-recipes and bread-machine recipes, and there are folks who swear by their bread machines, and others who think they’re sacrilegious . . . and bread is like that, it evokes strong feelings in a lot of people, strong sense-memories of wonderful times and meals, memories of going to grandma’s house and smelling the bread, of romantic times, a loaf of bread a jug of wine and thou . . . for me I think about simple breakfasts of cheese and marmalade and hot French bread served to Pam and I in a hotel near the Eiffel Tower . . . but in Jesus’ day, bread was a matter of life and death, and it’s in a way redundant when Jesus says “I am the bread of life” because bread is life in the ancient middle east . . . it’s kind of like saying “I am the life of life,” isn’t it?  Or maybe he means more like “I am the basis of life,” just as bread is the basis of life in the ancient middle east . . . or “I am the essential ingredient of life” . . . Of course, it doesn’t help that he qualifies the saying with another peculiar statement: “whoever comes to me will never be hungry” – and how is that like bread, if I eat bread for breakfast I’m getting a mite peckish long about lunchtime . . . and what about this “whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” stuff?  Since when did bread quench your thirst?

     Well, we can think of today’s reading as a meditation upon this saying, a meditation by way of explanation . . . exactly what does he mean when he says this?  In what way is Jesus the bread of life?  Well, the religious authorities – whom John rather pejoratively calls “the Jews” – when the religious authorities hear about this, they begin to complain – and another way to translate it might be “to mutter” – they began to mutter about it among themselves “Isn’t this Josephs’ boy, whose father and mother we all know?  I mean, we did business with his daddy, we were served Seder by his momma, how dare he say ‘I am the bread come down from heaven?’  Who does he think he is,  the Pope?”

     I ask you . . . what would you think if some local kid ran around saying “I am bread of life, sent down from heaven.”  Or to put it in more new-agey terms, “I’m Gaia, mother earth, source of all being . . . whoever comes to me shall never perish, but become one with my subterranean parents?”  I think we’d start edging toward the door, fingering our cell-phones, thinking “now just what was that number for the sanitarium . . .”  So I don’t think Jesus’ neighbors can necessarily be blamed for thinking “Oy vey . . . what do we have here . . . a nutzer?”

     Like them, we judge the truth or false-ness of a claim – I am bread of life, I am mother earth – by human categories, by what we’ve experienced, or by what we’ve been taught.  And since the enlightenment, since rational materialism has become the order of our day, it’s become nearly impossible to step outside the borders of the observable, of what has been shown scientifically, of what we “know to be true.”  How can this be?  We know that bodies can’t rise from the dead, we’ve never seen water turned to wine, it’s against the natural laws of the earth, and the best minds in our techno-scientific-consumer culture say that it couldn’t happen, therefore the miracle stories must be symbolic, some “primitive,” “superstitious” way of expressing the divinity of Christ, and because bodies don’t rise from the dead, the resurrection must have been some kind of transcendent epiphany in the disciple’s minds . . .

     Maybe that’s why Jesus doesn’t make some long, drawn out argument or explanation about how he can say that he is the bread of life, come down from heaven . . . he knew that in the closed world of his audience, in the belief-system that they were immersed in, there was no way to “argue” them into believing that he was the bread sent from heaven . . . only if they ceased their complaining, their muttering, their bandying back and forth of their really logical arguments about how this couldn’t be so, how that law – for them Torah, but for us maybe a law of physics – how this law or that theorem made it impossible, only if they ceased all that muttering and complaining would they be open to belief.

     And how do they come to that belief, what is the motive force?  Put another way, if they can’t come on their own, by listening to logic, how then do they come?  “No one,” Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me . . .”   It is God – whom Jesus calls Abba, Father – it is God who draws a person to the Son.  And further, it’s written in the prophets – Isaiah for one – that they shall all be taught by God.  In fact, everyone who has heard and learned from God will come to Christ.  And of course this opens up that old can of worms that separates us from the Baptists . . . New Testament scholar Charlie Cousar calls it the “mysterious paradox of believing.  On the one hand, invitations are given to which humans can respond.  On the other hand, those who respond are drawn by the divine power, for nothing else can produce faith.”[1]  As Jesus himself put it, right before our passage, belief is the “work of God.”[2]

     So it sort of wipes out – or at least it should wipe out – that feeling of superiority some Christians have, kind of like we’re God’s people and you’re not, because if it’s up to God, then it’s not up to us.  Our belief, our faith is God’s work, not ours . . . whatever holiness – in the original sense of set-apart-ness – whatever holiness we have comes from God, not us . . . and of course that wasn’t particularly good news for the religious authorities of the day, who gained power and influence in part because they were a people separate from everybody else . . . but if they shall all be taught by God – everybody, the Jews, the Samaritans, the Iraqi’s, everybody – if they are all taught by God, how can anyone claim special treatment?  The answer is, of course, they can’t . . . they couldn’t in Jesus’ day, any more than we can today.   

     But there is compensation . . . as a final elaboration on what it means that he is the bread of life, Jesus tells us about it . . . and we know he’s serious because he uses the formula “Very truly I tell you,” more familiar to us in the King James as “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, whoever believes – and here we have one of those pesky participles “believing” again – whoever is believing, whoever is in a state of belief – which is, remember, the work of God – whoever is in a state of belief has eternal life.  And put this way, we remember that the Johannine conception of eternal life is not just life after death, but those who are believing have it now, it’s something that can be enjoyed in the present . . . and Christ is the bread of that life, the bread, the nutrition, the foundation of that eternal life . . .

     Your ancestors – who, by the way, grumbled in the wilderness just like you’re doing – your ancestors ate manna?  That other bread that came down from heaven?  Well, they died.  This – and I can imagine he’s pointing to himself now – this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that you may eat of it and not die . . . and now we come to it, to the final, gasp-inducing point . . . how is Jesus like bread?  Because if you eat of him, you shall be sustained, you shall not die.  And to recapitulate and punctuate and accentuate it all he sums it up: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and – you heard correctly – the bread that I give for the life of the world – not just Jews or Samaritans or even Presbyterians, but the world – is my flesh.”

     And we can almost hear the Jewish crowd – including religious authorities and his own disciples – let out a collective Whoosh, because this was pretty heady stuff . . . if you eat of my flesh you will not perish, you will not die in the wilderness of your own sin, but you will have eternal life.  But not only was it pretty heady stuff, but it was pretty blasphemous stuff as well, and besides all that, just plain old, downright yechhy . . . eating his flesh, gnawing through bone and sinew and gristle and heart . . . it’s no wonder some folks called the first Christians “cannibals.”

     Of course, John’s readers had no trouble identifying this last line as Eucharistic, as having to do with the Lord’s Supper, with Communion . . . and neither do we, here on the other side of the resurrection, on the other side of that last supper . . . and of course the equation of bread and Christ’s flesh hints of the mortality to come, the death of the one we call Lord and master . . .

     And now we can see a final significance to the bread imagery in this passage, a final distinctive feature . . . not only does it refer to the heavenly origin of Christ, to the bread come down from heaven, but it alludes to the very earthly, very earth-y nature of his flesh, rent and torn on the cross.  In a sense, the world – human-kind, those captured in the thrall of sin and of evil – ate his flesh on Golgotha, just swallowed him right up there on the cross, but the result, paradoxically, is life for all . . .

     And every time we eat from his flesh, and drink from his blood we do it all over again, we reenact that original consumption there on the cross . . . I know that it’s not good Reformed theology, Calvin’s probably spinning in his grave right now to hear me say it, but there it is . . . when we eat the bread and drink the wine we are ingesting our guilt, we are incorporating it right into our corpuscles, into our molecules . . . the Eucharist is a kind of a confession, an acknowledgement of our part in crucifying Christ . . . we absorb it, own it, make it part of us.

     What’s that you say?  You don’t like all this Dostoevskian talk of guilt and consequences? You don’t believe in all this stuff about collective responsibility?  I wasn’t on Golgotha 2000 years ago, no one related to me was on Golgotha 2000 years ago, to sum it up, I wasn’t there when they crucified my Lord.  And that’s fair enough . . . let’s take collective guilt off the table, just for argument’s sake . . . but don’t we crucify him over and over again daily?  Don’t we kill him all over again when we deny his place in our lives?  When we relegate him to an hour or two on Sundays, and maybe a Wednesday-night supper?  When we shove him into our private lives, into the private sphere, and don’t allow him to influence how we live in public?  Don’t we crucify him when we make all our decisions – like the religious authorities – based on human categories, based on what’s expedient, instead of what’s right?  Seems that way to me . . .

     Only by eating our guilt, only by incorporating our falling short of what God has intended for us into us, so that we are as familiar with it as we are the little pinky on our left hand, will we be truly liberated.  Because it’s only through the full knowledge of our complicity in and bondage to the structures of evil that rule this world that we will know how to defeat them in our own lives and communities.  You gotta’ know something’s there before you can avoid it.

     And so, when we ingest the bread sent down from heaven, when we eat the flesh sent from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are eating knowledge.  Only unlike that golden-delicious apple, unlike the gossamer-flake wilderness manna, this knowledge is a saving knowledge.  As the prophets wrote, we shall all be taught by God, and this is the nature of the teaching: that we ingest, literally and figuratively, the Word of God, the Word made flesh which dwelt among us, and through that word, the truth will dwell in us and set us free, and we shall have eternal life.  Amen.

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[1]    In Brueggemann, W., Cousar, C., Gaventa, B and J. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year B, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox), p 464, 1993.

[2]   John 6:29

You the Man! (2 Sam 11:26-27; 12:1-14)

     In part one of our mini-series Bored of the King David rises to power, defeating all who comes before him – including Mad King Saul – and after defeating various “ites” – the Moabites, the Ammonites and the Amalekites, to name but a few – he’s taking a well-earned rest in his cedar-paneled house, when he gets the bright idea to build one for God, who has none of it, knowing that David wants to corral the Almighty for his own kingly agenda.  But then God turns right around and lays an unconditional covenant on him, a better covenant than anybody in Israel has ever seen, that promises that David’s house – get it?  House of cedar . . . house of David, as in dynasty? – that David’s house will be a sure one, that God won’t take it away from David like God did the aforementioned Saul.

     In part two, we see David – that sure-house prediction going to his head – lusting after Bathsheba, raping her and engaging in an hilariously inept cover-up, trying to get her husband Uriah to be with his wife, so they could plausibly claim that the baby – did I forget to mention there was a baby? – so they could plausibly claim that the baby was Uriah’s, at least to Israelites who couldn’t count.  But than, Uriah – foreigner though he is – is more obedient to the Torah than David, and he won’t go down to “wash his feet,” if you know what I mean, and so the King just has him killed.  And there’s another elaborate cover-up – this one involving code words and secret messages.

     And now we’re in a bare, cell-like room, and settles on Bathsheba, beautiful even in sackcloth and ashes, and the light from a window illuminates her tear-stained face, and we know she is in mourning, and after the mandatory number of mourning-days, David sends a henchman to gather her, and then the royal ceremony and bingo, it’s finished, we can see that it’s all over, that David has gotten his way, as, might I remind the audience, the king always does . . . the deed is done, the king is married, all legal-like, and nobody will be the wiser, nobody will question the king doing kingly deeds, especially since his army is winning, especially since he’s beaten all the neighbors.  And as the camera lingers on David’s smug face, we cut to a flashback where David tells his chief flunky Joab “the sword devours now one and now another . . . Do not let the matter trouble you . . .” And subtitles give a literal translation “Do not let it be evil in your eyes . . .”

     But there’s problem with all of this, one great big fly in the ointment . . . “but the thing that David did is evil in God’s eyes” . . . and it’s a turning point in the narrative, a hinge upon which the story hangs . . . up until now, it’s pretty-much been all David, all the time . . . David sent for Bathsheba and took her and lay with her, he sent for Joab who sent for Uriah and finally he sent for Bathsheba, who became his wife . . . David’s done the sending, and the taking, as kings are wont to do, but now all of a sudden the tables are turned . . . the thing David did was evil in God’s eyes, and now it’s God who’s doing the sending, and it’s God who will do the taking.

     Specifically, God sends for his mouthpiece, and we can see ol’ Nathan as he walks toward the camera, looking like he’s right out of Central Casting – which he probably is, he looks like the Una-bomber on the Adkins diet – and he tells the king a story . . . “There was this rich man and this poor man, see, and  the rich man had many sheep and many cattle, but the poor man had only one, measly, little lamb . . .”  And anyone hearing this can figure out who the measly little lamb is, and notice that she’s a commodity.  A possession.  A thing to be stolen from her husband.  Indeed, Bathsheba’s put on par with a sheep.

     Anyway, Nathan continues to lay it on thick – and here’s where it gets kind of funny.  “This lamb grew up with this poor guy’s children, it ate with them, drank with them, and lay in his bosom.  She was like a daughter to him.”  Get it?  Daughter?  Bath-sheba, daughter of sheba?  And the rich man, faced with an unexpected visitor, doesn’t want to slaughter one of his own multitude of sheep or cattle, so he takes the poor man’s only, beloved lamb.  And we can see the poor man, tears running down his cheek, as the lamb is torn, bleating weakly, from his arms.

     Immediately David is incensed – “As the lord lives,” he says, “This man must die,” and ironically pronounces the sentence prescribed by Torah – “he shall restore the lamb fourfold,  because he did this thing,  and because he had no pity.” And Nathan springs his trap: “You are the man!” and the full force of David’s guilt comes crashing down upon him. “You are the man.”

     For the first time David realizes that all the time, and all the effort God put into him, all the good he’s done for the Lord, aren’t going to get him out of his punishment, and as if God had read his mind, God says through Nathan, “Look what I’ve done for you: I appointed you ruler and delivered you from Saul’s hand.  I gave you Saul’s house, and Saul’s wives, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  And look how you repay me – you’ve killed Uriah and taken his wife as your own!”

     And then, judgment: Because David betrayed Uriah by the sword, the sword would never leave his house.  Never would there be peace in David’s family.  Violence would mark all that they did.  Because David took Uriah’s wife, God would take David’s wives and give them to another, who will lie with them openly, for all to see.  And though David did his deeds in secret, probably for national security reasons, God would do his “before all Israel, before the sun.”

     At last, David acknowledges his actions: “I have sinned before the Lord.” And Nathan delivers one last judgment: “The Lord has put away your sin – you will not die.  But because you have scorned me, the child born to you shall surely die.” And the word we translate as “put away” is pass over, as in “pass over” the houses where the blood of the lamb is smeared, and so we immediately get the allusion to the freeing of the Israelites from Pharaoh’s clutches . . . we’re meant to associate the two, to see the Israelites’ freedom from slavery and David’s freedom from sin as cut from the same cloth . . .

     And everything happens as God says: David’s house is torn by strife and violence.  His son Amnon rapes his sister Tamar – rape ran in the family – and Absalom kills Amnon for it.  Absalom lay with his fathers wives – before all Israel, under the sun – before being killed himself.  But before it all, the first thing to come true was the death of Bathsheba’s child, the death of rape’s fruit.  And as the boy weakens, as he fights for life, David prostrates himself before the Lord.  He fasts and prays and pleads with God to save his son.  But to no avail – the child is doomed.  And as the closing credits roll, the camera pulls, back, back until David is revealed to be alone in the realization of the enormity of what he has done.

     The story of Nathan’s oracle, and its aftermath, highlights the bald, inescapable fact that what we do has consequences.  Walter Brueggemmann likens the story to Chappaquidick – one night of pleasure, a fleeting plunge over a bridge, and a career is broken.  After Ted Kennedy drove over that bridge, he never got near the presidency again.  And so it was for David – a fleeting night of lust spun things out of control, and led to more murder, more rape, and the deaths of innocents  within his own family.

    And so it is with our own sin – the more we try to forget it, the more we try to keep it secret, the easier it is to spin out of control, and affect lives beyond our own.  They don’t have to be spectacular sins, like adultery or murder, either.  Have you ever noticed how a single, little lie can branch out so that, pretty soon, you’re telling more and more, just to counteract the effect of the first?  Just so it seems like you never told a lie in the first place?   Pretty soon, you’re asking yourself  “Now, what did I tell Bob?  What did I tell Wanda – was it what I told Bob?”  And on and on and on.

     Sin has consequences, not just for the sinner but often for others innocent of the deed.  We are all enmeshed in a web of relationships – in a church, in a family, in a community – and what we do affects every other member of that group, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not.  In the West, where individualism has been taken to pathological heights, many of us have forgotten this.  We do what is good for us to do, and to heck with everyone else . . . and our culture, of course, creates this, it magnifies it and multiplies it thousands of times . . . people who think “me first” make the best consumers, they buy the most stuff, “You deserve a steak today,” “Be all that you can be” “You’ve got a life to live . . .”  Our selfishness is created in us – or at least greatly magnified and encouraged – by the society in which we are embedded.

     And this brings us back to our original question – what happened to David?  How did he get to be this way?  Why are many kings and presidents and CEOs corrupt?  Could it be – in part – the nature of the beast, the beast by which they find themselves embraced?  Look at all the Corporate scandals – Enron, Tyco, WorldCom – the people at the top, with the power, surrounded by lawyers and PR flacks and yes-men, you can almost interchange them, you can almost exchange Ken Lay with Sam Waskal, Bernie Ebbers with Dennis Kozlowski, it’s like each of them are cogs in the machine . . .  the CEO of Boeing or IBM or Intel lays off thousands of people, ships their jobs overseas, and they can’t put food on the table, and if the CEO didn’t do it the board would replace him, it’s the nature of the beast, the nature of the economic beast . . .

     And David, caught in a full-court press of sycophants, people ready to tell him what he wants to hear, people completely willing to do whatever he wants, dependent on advisors with their own agendas, and with responsibilities, mouths to feed, embedded in a system that won’t let him go . . . and pretty soon you start believing the press, start thinking you can do anything.  You do something bad – you commit a little adultery, take a little graft, bilk the people out of their retirement money – and you cover it up, you can’t do anything else, you’re trapped . . .

     But there’s another character in this morality play, another actor, and it’s Nathan, a godly, prophetic man who literally flies in the face of the system.  Because if David was in a sense created by court, created by the powers-that-be, he also embodied them.  He was the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the President, all rolled into one.  He was the man! And when Nathan said that, when he said to David “You the Man!” he walked on dangerous ground.  He was telling a king he’d acted disgracefully.  He was telling a king he’d dishonored his God.

     And look how he does it . . .he doesn’t do it directly, he doesn’t confront him directly . . . he tells a story, a parable, not unlike that other prophet that we sing about every Sunday.  He tells him a story, a fable if you like, and it’s powerful, it convicts David of his sin . . . words, thin and fragile, lost on the wind as soon as they are uttered, yet strong enough to bring the powerful to their knees . . . and Nathan is a model for us.  What we have to offer is the Word, in all its ephemeral beauty . . . what we have to stand up to fallen creation with is the Good News, the Word confronting the world.  The Word spoken, the Word heard, the Word lived by the Word incarnate himself, Jesus Christ.

     And that’s the grace here, folks – you remember last week I promised you grace – the grace is the Word of God, incarnate in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We have the words of eternal life, and they are words that can shake us out of our enthrallment to the world, our enslavement to the powers of death.   Look what happened to David . . . he was confronted by the Word, and he repented . . . he was able, for the first time in a long time, to admit his bondage to sin.  The word of God freed him from bondage to evil, it gave him the means to throw off the yoke.  And of course, it gives us that power as well . . . we have the words of eternal life, life that starts right now, right here, not some pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.  We may not believe it, we may not feel it, it may not look like it, but we have the means to resist the world and its death-giving ways.  And if that ain’t grace, I don’t know what is.  Amen.

David Meets the Daughter of Perfect (2 Samuel 11:1-18)

     Last week, we saw King David’s attempt to build a temple for God, to tie God to his regime and to his agenda by building for God a house of cedar just like the one David himself enjoyed.  God would have none of it, and then proceeded to make an unconditional covenant with him, complete with promises that had were not contingent on anything David had ever done or ever will do, and topping it all off with a promise to make David a house, a sure house that would not be withdrawn.  And the two halves of that story – David’s wanting tie God down and God’s making the covenant with the King – oddly complement each other, and they tell a lot about the house of David, born from the grace of God in spite of David’s less than admirable need for control.

     That need is a characteristic of kings, perhaps even all leaders – perhaps even pastors . . . that’s why God had warned the Israelites about kings, although probably not about pastors . . . Samuel, the last of the judges, who’d be out of a job if there was a king, reported a conversation he’d had with the Almighty, and it went something like this: “These’ll be the ways of the king: he’ll take your sons and take your daughters . . . he’ll take the best of your fields and one-tenth of your grain.  He’ll take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys . . .  he’ll take and take and take, and you’ll end up his slaves.”  But the people wouldn’t listen, they said “we gotta have a king, so he can go out and fight our battles, and we’ll be just like all the other nations next door.”  So God gave in and after a misfire with Saul, put David in his place – and the people were overjoyed at their shining king, their handsome, ruddy-faced king, and he went out and smote all of Israel’s enemies, and unified the twelve tribes for the first time in history, and ruled over them all for forty years.

     And everything was going swimmingly until one year, at the turn of the year – when kings go out to battle – David stayed home.   And it wasn’t militarily disastrous or anything, he sent his best general Joab, and they still smote the Ammonites and laid siege the city of Rabbah, but it was troubling, because wasn’t that specifically in the kingly job-description?  Didn’t they want a king to lead them gloriously into battle like all the other nations?  And now there’s a cloud on the horizon, because it was the time when kings went out to war, but David didn’t go!

     And sure enough, idle hands are the Devil’s play-things – or something like that – ‘cause David is as bored as you can get, and he’s napping on his couch in the middle of the afternoon, and Oprah’s over and Ellen hasn’t begun, and it’s too early for the nightly news, and he’s pacing the parapet when he looks down from the roof, and there she is – a vision of loveliness, washing herself in the twilight, and she looks good to his eyes – the evening light shining in her hair lights up her golden skin – and he’s instantly smitten with love, or a reasonable facsimile thereof . . . so he calls his messengers and he sends them down to find out who she is, and they come back and tell him “It’s Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, wife of Uriah the Hittite.”  And that name . . . that name . . . it seems to fit her.  In Hebrew, Bath means daughter, sheba means seven, which is the perfect number . . . and O my gosh!  She’s Bath-sheba, the daughter of perfect!  He has to have her!

     And he does what kings can do, he sends for her and takes her – our translation inexplicably renders the Hebrew “took” as “get” – he sends for her and takes her and she comes to him and he lays with her.  And was Samuel rolling in his grave?  Did God not tell him a king would take their women and anything else they had?  David takes her though she’s someone else’s wife, though she’s purifying herself from her period . . . and he doesn’t stop to consider another meaning of her name, Bath-sheba means as well daughter of an-oath, daughter of a-promise . . . and David has made a promise to the Hebrew people, and a promise to God as well, to live by the Torah, to live by the law, and he’s broken several laws at once, and one of the biggies, one of the main laws, is good old commandment number ten:  “Thou shalt not desire thy neighbors wife.”  He’d promised, he’d sworn an oath to obey the law as the King of Israel, and here he is, breaking it with the Daughter of a-promise, daughter-of-an-oath herself . . . is that symbolic, or what?

     Well.  When he’s done with her, she goes back to her house, and the wars rage on, and by-and-by she becomes pregnant – you just knew she would, it always happens on As Jerusalem Turns – and she sends word to David saying “I’m pregnant” and now he’s in a panic, flailing around, trying to figure out how to cover it up, so he sends word to General Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” and Joab sends Uriah to David.  And you may have noticed there’s a whole lot of sending going on, and it all hinges on Bathsheba’s – for once in those male-dominated times, where women were little more than slaves, a woman has power over a man . . . she’s sends, she does what powerful men usually do, and a chain-reaction of sending is the result, like dominoes falling.  She sends. then David sends – twice! – and Joab sends, and at the end of all this sending is poor old Uriah.

     And now the story turns morbidly funny . . . when Uriah comes to the king, David hems and haws, circling the point like a hawk over a chicken . . .  He makes small talk, beating around the bush, trying to come up with an excuse for bringing him in.  “How’s it going?  Is it going all right?  How’s about my man Joab?  He OK?  How about the people . . . and the war?  All quiet on the Ammonite front?”  But he finally gets down to it, and I can almost see him slapping Uriah on the back in manly comradery “Go on down to your house, now, see that pretty little wife of yours . . . and wash your feet.”  And he’s winking at him, and nudging him, because what he’s telling Uriah to do is to have sex with his wife, that’s what “washing your feet” means, it’s a Hebrew euphemism for sexual intercourse . . . and now we can see David’s plot, he’s trying to get Uriah to go down to the house and have sex with Bathsheba, so it’ll look like the baby’s his.

     But Uriah – the Hittite, the foreigner – is loyal, and he very properly sleeps at the king’s door with the servants, and when David hears about it – nothing in a palace can be kept secret for very long – he’s dumbfounded, he can’t understand why a big strong healthy guy like Uriah wouldn’t go down to be with his wife – and doesn’t that say something about the king?   When asked about it, Uriah says: “Everybody else is camping in the field, everybody else is at war – Israel and the ark and Judah, Joab and the servants of Joab, and shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?  I will do no such thing.”

     And . . . does David get it?  Does he understand the terrible irony, the incredible contrast between Uriah and himself?  Uriah the Hittite, Uriah the foreigner.  He’s under no covenant to the Hebrew God, but he’s more loyal to that God than David, he’s more loyal to the Hebrew people and his fellow soldiers.  On the one hand, there’s Uriah, who won’t eat or drink or take pleasure with his wife, and on the other?  There’s David, who stayed home when Kings went out to war, and dallied with another man’s wife while he was at it.  Does David get the irony?   Is he chastened by it?  Does he feel remorse?  Our passage doesn’t say, but if he does, he hides it well . . . he tries one more time to get Uriah to go to his wife, this time the old-fashioned way – he gets him drunk . . . but even that doesn’t work, and in the end, he resorts to violence, and orders Joab to make sure Uriah is killed.

     And that’s kind of the way of the world, isn’t it?  In the end, the world resorts to violence.  It’s always the last resort . . . didn’t want to do it, you understand, but I had to . . . there was no other choice.  David wiggles and squirms, he goes to laughable, comic ends to avoid it, but he does it in the end, he kills Uriah just for having a pretty wife.

     And what about that wife?  What about ol’ daughter-of-perfect, daughter-of-an-oath?  She’s often pictured as a temptress, as a Jezebel, putting on some kind of erotic show, enticing David into sin, but if you look at the passage carefully, you’ll see that there’s none of that in it . . . it says he saw from the roof a woman bathing, it doesn’t say she was on a roof in plain sight, he could just as well have seen her through an open window, or in a courtyard . . . the palace was the highest roof around – one of the prerogatives of being king, y’know  . . .and the string of Hebrew verbs – he sent for her, took her, she came, and he lay with her – all have a coercive sense to them, they’re all things that the person in power gets to do.  All except one, that is . . . it says she came to him, but how could she not?  How could any woman – alone, without her husband – say no to a king, the ultimate ruler of her life?

     But movies, TV-shows and countless sermons have all slandered Bathsheba, and with no evidence in the scripture that I can see . . . it’s like the courts, which still blame the woman for the rape . . . I know, it’s better now, it doesn’t happen in the courts as much, now it happens on the internet and on talking-head TV.  Case in point, a nineteen-year-old girl who accused a certain basketball star of sexual misconduct – a.k.a. rape – and there were internet sites calling her a slut, there were reports in the mainstream media of an “emotional breakdown” in her past – all inadmissable in a court of law, but what does an emotional breakdown have to do with man-in-the-moon marigolds, anyhow?  . . . and the well-funded Kobe Bryan media machine did its job, and there was Kobe’s beautiful wife – on national TV!  – forgiving him for adultery, but it wasn’t rape, she consented to it all, but she was only 19 – two years younger than my daughter was at the time – and her reputation was destroyed.  And you shouldn’t have worn that mini-skirt, young lady, it was just too provocative, he just couldn’t help himself.

     And so David – far from being lured into it by a beautiful woman, bent on seduction – commits an act of rape.  That’s what we call it when a powerful man – who commands and sends and takes – that’s what we call it when a powerful man coerces a woman into sex.

     You know, I had a preaching professor one time, who said “always end your sermons on an up-note, always end ‘em on grace, because that’s the gospel, that’s what we preach, but you know?  I think that would not be faithful to this passage, because in the end, there’s not a lot of grace in it.  In the end, it’s about sin, plain and simple . . . good-old-fashioned, personal sin, the kind your mama warned you about . . . it’s about sin and hubris, the feeling that you’re so powerful, so important, that God won’t let anything bad happen to you . . . it’s the sin of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, blubbering on TV . . . it’s the sin of Bill Clinton, of anyone – male or female – who abuses power, who uses his or her power over another to coerce them to do something they don’t want to do.

     And if you think about it, it happens a lot – it happens in marriages, it happens in business – where it’s often called good business sense – and it happens in the church.     Preachers have used the pulpit to brow-beat congregations for millennia – of course, I wouldn’t do such a thing – but they don’t call it a bully pulpit for nothing.

     Paul has laundry-lists of sins, things that are of the flesh, that tear communities apart . . . things like slander, gossip, and strife, envy, quarrels, dissensions, and factions, and if you think about them, they’re all the result of somebody trying to get power, or abusing that power once they have it . . . the Sunday-school teacher who threatens to resign if he doesn’t get his way, the gossip at the fellowship hour that gets back at his subject . . . the big-offering-giver who uses money as a weapon . . . all these things pick at a church, at a community, all of them erode its unity, and damage its effectiveness.  All of them do violence to God’s order.

          So my preaching professor notwithstanding, today we end here, with the violence of rape and murder.  In the case of David, it came from the top, just as Samuel had warned.  You give somebody – or a group of somebodies – ultimate power, and it often ends up that way.  And even though there is grace in this story, it’ll have to wait until next week when we talk about Nathan, the prophet who dared to tell the truth to a king, the man whose duty to God transcended even his own life, who risked it all to be faithful to a forgiving God.  Amen.

Berít Olám (2 Samuel 7:1-17)

     King David is a central figure in Judaism . . . he was the ruler over the last undivided house of Israel, who unified the twelve tribes, and whose reign has never been equaled since.  Jewish messianic expectations revolve around him, around a Messiah in the Davidic line who will restore the monarchy to its former glory.  Christians, of course, believe that Jesus Christ was that Messiah, and that his glorious reign is of a different nature than earthly glory or military might.  Be that as it may, David is important in both of our traditions, so it behooves us to spend a little time with him.

     But first a little background.  David, you will recall, was not the first King of Israel . . . that honor belonged to Saul.  Not that God really wanted a king, you understand . . . God warned the people through Samuel – the last of the judges, who (coincidentally, I’m sure) would lose his high-paying job if a king were to arise – God warned the people of all the bad things that would happen if they got themselves a king, but they didn’t listen, and so God had Samuel pick Saul who – holy self-fulfilling prophecy – turned out to be a less than stellar ruler, and the Spirit of God left him and an evil spirit sent from God took its place and drove him nuts, and he chased David all over Palestine before getting cornered and falling on his own sword.  So much for Saul.

     And now David is king, and he’s the best thing anybody’s ever seen, the best thing since sliced way-bread, and he defeats all his enemies – with God’s help, of course – and he’s living in a cedar house in Jerusalem – that’s a sure mark of kingliness, if you’ve developed a taste for cedar – and he gets to ruminating about how here he’s living in the lap of luxury and God’s ark is living in a tent, and there’s this prophet named Nathan who would no doubt like to serve God in a shiny new cedar temple, and son of a gun if he doesn’t say “Go, do what you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.”  But the Lord has other ideas, and that very night God tells Nathan “Go and tell my servant David:  Thus says the Lord:  Are you the one to build me a house of cedar?”  Uh, oh . . . sarcasm.  It’s never good when the Lord gets sarcastic.  God goes on “I haven’t lived in a house since the day I brought y’all up out of the land of Egypt” – not-so-subtly reminding them of who did what for whom – “but I’ve been going around in a tent and tabernacle.”

     And can you see that this speech is a remarkably understated piece of prose?  At once it conveys God’s disdain for the idea of living in cedar, and at the same time subtly rebukes David for doing the same.  I mean, if a tent is good enough for God – ruler of all rulers, monarch of all monarchs – shouldn’t a tent, or even a moth-eaten bedroll, for Moses’ sake – be good enough for David who, lest he forget, serves at God’s pleasure? God is mobile, on the move, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, like David . . .  or like David used to be, before he settled into his fancy-schmancy house of cedar.

     And God reminds David about his forebears, the ones God didn’t want replaced by a king, and he says “Did I ever once speak any word to any of your predecessors, any of the tribal leaders of Israel – whom, by the way, I commanded to shepherd my people Israel – did I ever once say “Gee.  I’d really love a house of cedar.  Why haven’t you built me a house of cedar?”  And this whole line of thought, of David getting a little fat and happy in his wooden house, will come to a head in next week’s passage, where David stays at home while others go to war . . .

     But here the God of the highways and hedges, of the tents and tabernacles, takes out after David and his request to build him a place to stay . . . this God is free, not to be confined to anyone’s box, not to be molded into anyone’s shape.  And that’s what David is trying to do . . . he’s trying to build God a place of his own choosing, to use God to legitimate his own regime, his own living-in-cedar-clad luxury . . . David wants to remake God in his own image, so he can justify the way he himself wants to live . . . and of course there’s always a lot of that going around, isn’t there?  There’s always a lot of cedar thinking to be had in organized religion . . . the most obvious being the purveyors of prosperity doctrine, the sellers of “God wants you to be happy or rich or insert-your-own-good-thing-here.”  They’re most obvious on Trinity Broadcast Network with their golden-throned sets and their “Something good is going to happen to you” message.  But those targets are only the most obvious, they’re low-hanging fruit, almost too easy . . . and they’re so egregious, so over-the-top that they obscure the fact that even mainline churches have their own air-conditioned houses of cedar built for God to occupy in a way that’s suits them just so . . .

     Rick Warren, author of the Purpose-Driven Life, built a huge Southern Baptist church in California called Saddleback.  And he did it in a wholly unconventional way – he didn’t build a church building, at least at first.  He began by going out into the community, propagating small groups in homes, house-churches, if you will.  By the time they got around to building a cedar house, they had ten-thousand members.  And he did it in part to avoid cedar thinking, to avoid the comfortable, this-is-where-God-lives mentality that afflicts so many congregations . . . he did it to avoid the worship-of-the-church building and carpet and stained-glass-rose-window that plagues the mission of so many congregations, which after all is to spread the gospel in deed, thought and word . . .

     Warren did build a church, there’s value to be had in corporate worship and program development, but only after he’d established the moving-about-the-community, moving-out-into-the-community ethos of Saddleback.  He knew that our God is a mobile God, an outward facing God, who won’t be confined to a brick-and-mortar building any more than to a house clad in cedar.

     The God of David and Rick Warren and you and me and Christians everywhere is a God that’s unpredictable, a God who’s in-motion who will go wherever God wants, will be whomever God wants.  And in the second part of our passage that freedom is demonstrated in a breath-taking pact with David.  First God reviews what has been done for David, summarized in a succinct triplet of verbs:  I took you from the pasture; I have been with you wherever you went; I have cut off all your enemies.  One, two, three.  God took him up, out of obscurity, out of drudgery as the runt of Jesse’s litter.  God has been with him in all his trials, all his battles, all his running and hiding from mad kings and enemies.  God took him, was with him, and cut off his foes. One, two three.

     And it’s followed immediately by another triplet, powered by another three verbs, only this time it’s about what God will do in the future.  I will make you a great name.  I will appoint a place for my people Israel.  I will give you rest from all your enemies.  God will make, appoint, and give-rest.  God’s gracious action in the past is followed by gracious actions in the future . . . and note that none of this is conditioned on anything David has done.  As a matter of fact, unlike his offer to build God a cedar house, it is entirely out of David’s hands.

     And speaking of that, over and above all of this, or as God says, moreover, God will make David a house, and here we’re playing with multiple meanings of bet, the Hebrew word for house . . . earlier, in David’s promise and desire, it had meant temple, as in a sanctuary for the Lord.  Now, God has rejected house as a temple but promised house as a dynasty . . . this passage is the birthplace, the taproot of the house of David, over which wars have been fought and around which Messianic expectations swirl.  Surprisingly, David cannot build a house for God, but God can and will build a house for David.  In God’s utter freedom – irrational as it may seem to us – God will extend the favor shown to David in the past into the future as well.

     Unlike previous covenants with the state of Israel, the covenant with David is unconditional –God’s faithful keeping of it does not depend upon anything David or his heirs might do.  In that respect, it’s akin to the covenant with Abraham, whose heirs will be as numerous as stars in the sky.  And in fact, David’s house will be made sure, it will be a sure house, in Hebrew literally an amen bet, a house of amen . . . no matter what David or his heirs do, no matter how badly they behave, their house will be secure, their dynasty will survive . . . it will be an eternal covenant, a Berít Olám . . .

     And of course this blows out of the water the oft-expressed belief that in the Old Testament, God is angry and punishing, but in the New, God is gracious and loving and therefore our God is better than yours . . . here is clear proof otherwise.  In fact, according to Walter Brueggemann, this is the “root of evangelical faith in the Bible: that is, faith that relies on the free promise of the gospel.”[1]  Indeed, if the gospel is that God’s steadfast love is not dependent on anything we do or do not do, if it’s that God will not withdraw his love no matter what, if it’s timeless and without end, then this eternal covenant with King David, this Berít Olám, seems like gospel, like mighty good news, to me.

     For of course that’s how it is with us, isn’t it?  Even though Christians build houses of cedar and worship them, at times, instead of God, even though we stay in our boxes and try to keep God in there with us, even though we co-opt the God for all kinds of national and social agendas, God will not withdraw the favor granted to us through Jesus Christ.  Like God, grace is totally free, totally without cost to us, so gratis we don't even have to accept it.  And because covenant, our Berít Olám is so much like David’s, taking a closer look at it seems like the thing to do.  And so next week, and the week after, we’ll do just that.  Be there or be square.  Amen.

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[1]                         Brueggemann, W., First and Second Samuel (Louisville: John Knox Press), p 257.

Herod’s Predicament (Mark 6:14-29)

Sex.  I’ll say it again: Sex!  There . . . are you awake?  That’s one way to perk everybody up, get everyone to pay attention, just mention sex.  Sex—of course—sells, we all know that, it sells deodorant, it sells cars, it sells car insurance, for Pete’s sake.   I recently saw a commercial with a beautiful woman, shapely legs, improbably short skirt, sliding across the seat of her car, with a look of adoring gratitude on her face toward the big strong man who sold her Allstate.  Sex even sells Bible passages . . . I ask you—would we know the story of David and Bathsheba as well as we do if it wasn’t drenched in sex?   It’s like that with this story as well . . . it has seeped into the groundwater of our popular culture, and largely because of its titillation-value . . . who hasn’t heard about Salomé and the  Dance of the Seven Veils?   The dance that drove Herod and his guests wild with desire . . . and the story has darker overtones as well, of incest and greed . . . over the centuries, painters have painted lurid pictures of a nubile Salomé, holding John’s head on a platter . . . Oscar Wilde wrote a play that was banned in many cities . . . Richard Strauss wrote an Opera that in a recent production was labeled  for adults only,  and a few years ago, Wilde’s play was resurrected on Broadway, with no less than Al Pacino as Herod.

Problem is, almost none of this stuff is in the scripture.  There’s no Dance of the Seven Veils, and the daughter of Herod—or is it the daughter of Herodias, as Matthew has it?—is not called Salomé in the scripture at all . . . that’s what the Jewish historian Josephus called her.  And is there really lust in the hearts of Herod and his guests?  It says that his daughter came in to dance and that she pleased Herod and his guest, it doesn’t say anything about inflamed passions and wanton sexuality . . . Mark just calls her a girl, and the Greek word he uses is the same he uses to describe the daughter of the Jairus— a little girl, twelve years old.  And so what this looks like is not some erotic carousal but a cute, innocent little-girl dance, which amuses, not arouses, Herod and his guests.  But why would Herod offer her anything if it were just an innocent frolic?  Ancient, Near-Eastern hospitality codes would suggest that the girl be rewarded for her efforts, and Herod—because of his position as King—would be even more bound by them, and you can just about see Herod—expansive as only an king can be—patting her on the head, saying “Go on . . . whatever you want.”  Maybe she’d ask for a pony, or some ice cream.

And so if that’s the case, if there isn’t any seduction at the core of this story, what’s the point?  Why did Mark choose to include this story?  It’s not like it’s about their main character, Jesus . . . or is it?  Well, Mark uses his famous technique of sandwiching one story in the middle of another, and so it behooves us to look at that here . . . it’s easy to do in bibles like the ones in the pews . . . just open them up and look at the headings for what comes before and after.  And if you do, you’ll see that the heading for the section before this one reads “The Mission of the Twelve,” and the section after says “Feeding the Five Thousand.”  Hmmm . . . curiouser and curiouser . . . looks like it’s sandwiched between two stories about mission—the sending-out of the disciples and an example of what they are sent out to do—so does that have something to do with it, perhaps?

But what could the killing of an itinerant preacher have to do with the mission of the followers of Jesus?  True . . . Herod mistakes Jesus for John raised up, which would be natural, because Jesus was doing some of the same things John did—notably, performing miracles and collecting disciples—and saying some of the same things, as in the kingdom of God is at hand.  And Herod may have thought, maybe with a guilty conscience, that like Banquo’s ghost, John had come back to haunt him . . . I can imagine sleepless nights, jumping at any noise, waiting for a ghostly figure to drift in the window to point accusingly at him . . . going over and over in his mind what happened . . . it was at a banquet and it was in his honor, of course, who else’s?  And everybody who was anybody was there . . . all the minor politicians and kiss-ups, all the toadies and hangers-on, all the lesser potentates of forgettable tribes, all carefully arranged by his social secretary in order of importance, in order of political power . . . the most important next to him on either side . . . there, on the right, and about half-way down was Bjorn, personal trainer to the stars, and on the other side, a little closer to the front, Juliet Roberts, the starlet of the moment, in a dress that threatened to break even the lax decency standards of the Empire . . . and they hung on his every word, and even though he knew they were toadies, even though he knew they were just jockeying for power, he felt a rush of pride and ego . . . and way down at the other end of the hall, the press were greedily devouring the worst food and drink in the hall, not that those swine deserved any better, with what they’d been saying about him, the unpatriotic louts . . . didn’t they know we were at war?  Didn’t they know that criticizing the government gave succor to the enemy?  He’d had to hang two of  ‘em just last week.  So when his little step-daughter came skipping in, Herod’s face softened, he couldn’t help it, because he loved his daughter, and he held up his hand for quiet and the little girl began to dance, all eyes in the room were glued to her, and even though he knew they were just trying to butter him up, his heart swelled with pride and a smile creased his face . . . and when she was done, and had taken a cute little bow, and everyone had done applauding, he looked down the table to make sure the press was watching—he’d already checked to see that it was before the print deadline—and he solemnly, but with great flourish, swore to his step-daughter  “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.”  And a sigh of . . . awe . . . swept around the tables, and a little burst of spontaneous applause, and he said to himself  All right!  Am I a King or what?

And he was so taken with his own image of himself—and perhaps some of the fine Corinthian wine he’d inhaled—that he didn’t even notice Herodius standing in the shadows, or that when their daughter whispered in her ear, a cold smile appeared on her face . . . but it sobered him right up when the girl said “Give me the head of John the Baptist on a dinner-plate.”  And his mind worked furiously, trying to figure a way out, trying to weigh the odds . . . he liked John, he liked listening to him, especially when he was safely locked away, not inciting anybody to riot or questioning his morals, but if he didn’t kill him, he’d lose face, and that was only the least of his problems.  These . . .  hyenas around the table would smell blood the minute he wavered, the second he even looked like he was welshing on a kingly promise.  And what about his Roman masters?  What would they think?  He knew the answer to that . . . they’d see it as a sign of weakness, that he’d give a fig about that seditious riffraff, that smelly, pit-scratching rabble-rouser, and the Romans didn’t get to be the proprietors of an empire by keeping weak underlings around, and it would likely cost him his head, and all his family’s as well . . . and then it became a no-brainer, cause he liked his own head a lot better than John’s, and immediately he sent and had it lopped off.

And right here that we need to pause and think about what's going on . . . Herod didn't want to kill John, he enjoyed talking with him, listening to him, even though he'd had him jailed for saying things he didn't like . . . maybe that was part of John's attraction.  Maybe Herod got tired of all the yes-men, all the sycophants buzzing around them like flies, maybe he respected somebody like John, at least as long as they're safely locked up so they can't foment revolution or anything . . . whatever the reason, Herod didn't want to kill him, but he was backed into a corner, he had to bow to the will of the crowds—I mean guests—and does this remind you of something?  Does it remind you of another ruler who doesn't want to execute someone, but gets backed into a corner?  And here's the key to what Mark's trying to do here, the comparison he's trying to make . . . of course, Pilate is pressured in exactly the same way.  He doesn't want to convict Jesus, he doesn't want to execute him, but he's backed into a corner by the crowd, which has settled on a victim, that demands he execute the Christ.

And now we understand that bit back at the beginning, about how Herod mistakes Jesus for John.  It’s a big fat clue: we are to see the likeness ourselves . . . John preaches the kingdom, Jesus preaches the kingdom . . . John performs healings and exorcisms, Jesus performs healings and exorcisms . . . John is killed for his activities, and so is Jesus.  And Mark wraps the whole story up in mission—first the commissioning of the twelve disciples, to go two-by-two out into the countryside, and then the feeding of the five-thousand, with its echoes of the last supper . . . Following Christ is dangerous, Mark is saying . . . following Jesus—healing like him, feeding the poor like him, preaching the good news like him—might just mean dying like him, as it did for John.

And of course, through the ages, this has been true . . . Paul, beheaded in Rome . . . Peter crucified upside down in the same place.  Thecla—martyred.  Justin—martyred.  John Wycliffe, Joan of Arc, William Tyndale . . .  all killed because they are Christians.  And it’s still going on today . . . all over the world, Christians are being killed or persecuted for their faith . . . in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam . . . wherever Christians stand up and speak out against the governments of their countries, wherever they are perceived to be a menace to the status quo, they are silenced.

We often think of the death of Jesus as a solitary event in history, and in some ways it was . . . after all, it was the Son of God up there, spiked to a tree . . . but this comparison to John shows us that in other ways, it was far from unique . . . like John, he was condemned to death for what he said, what he preached, and—again like John—he was killed not by one man, but by the system in which he lived . . . in a real sense, it wasn’t Herod and Pilate that killed them, but the whole society, the whole milieu in which they lived.  Herod was a tool, a factotum in the great Roman machine . . . if he refused to do what the machine required, he would be replaced, like a broken wheel or a worn-out gear . . . Pilate was in the same boat . . . when the crowd blood-thirstily called out “Crucify him, crucify him!” he bowed to the inevitable, and gave Jesus over to be killed.  Either man could have shown personal courage, either one could have refused, but then somebody else would’ve been found, and the job would’ve been done anyway . . . Mark is very careful to show this . . . both men—both John and Jesus—are victims of forces greater than just a single man or woman.  They are killed by an entire culture, an entire society, because they are threats to the status quo, menaces to the powers that be.

It is an article of faith for us that God so loved the world, that he sent God’s only-begotten son, that in fact God came to earth, shed of God-hood—emptied of it, to quote Paul—to suffer as humans suffer, to identify with us . . . and in this story, in the story of John and Herod and his dancing daughter, we see who he identified with . . . he identified with the oppressed of the world, with those condemned to die for being on the outside looking in, or for being a thorn in the side of the powers and principalities of this world.  He came to stand in solidarity with—and to die in solidarity with—John the Baptist, Paul of Tarsus and every poverty-stricken campesino laboring for absentee landlords in Central America.  He said it in his mission statement, in his first sermon over in Luke: he came to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, and to let the oppressed go free.

Mark wrapped this story in mission for a reason, and it’s more than just a warning, more than just a heads-up to what Christians can expect . . . following Christ, doing his mission, means standing with him against the oppressive powers, along-side of those who are under their thumbs . . . and as Christians, we need to ask ourselves who those people are in our society, who would Jesus stand with?  Is it the single parent with three children, working for a non-living-wage job, barely able to buy food?   Is it the homeless Vietnam vet, head filled with demons, wandering lost down the highway?  Who would Jesus stand with today, who are the oppressed, the poor and the captives?  As Christians, it is our job to stand with them too . . . but not alone.  Because if we stand with the oppressed, if we stand with the hungry, if we stand with the sick and the blind and the lame, one thing we can be sure of is that we won’t be alone.  Because that’s where Jesus will be as well.  Amen.

Crowd Control (Mark 5:21-43)

     It’s been a bumpy ride for you and your fellow disciples . . . it started on this side of the Galilee, speaking to your fellow Jews in parables, then explaining them all to you in private . . . like that helps a lot . . . then, on the trip to the Gentile side he sleeps in the back of the boat, and calms a raging storm with the flick of his voice . . . in Gentile country he sends a demon – Legion by name – into a passing herd of swine, then tells the former demoniac “Go home to your friends, and tell them all how much the Lord has done for you . . .”

     And now you’re back on home turf, back on the Jewish side of the sea, and right smack dab in the middle of a crowd.  And you know about crowds, how dangerous they can be . . . and this one’s no different, it’s riled up, roiling and pressing and trampling and the sun heats up the air very nicely, thank you very much, so you are sweating, the master’s sweating, everybody is sweating, and your Right Guard Sport-Stick deodorant failed hours ago, before you even got to the shore, and the crowd jostles you and everybody could use a chill pill, they’re just a little keyed up to see Jesus in person, and you’ve gone from the Sea of Galilee to this sea of people, equally dangerous, equally unpredictable, you know that a contagious violence can rip through a crowd, turn it from friendly curiosity to deadly force, from an eagerness to see and experience, to an eagerness to kill . . . and you’ll see this in action yourself before too many months are up . . . so you’re nervous there beside the sea, nervous and hot, hot and nervous, and the sweat stings down into your eyes . . .

     So it’s a welcome diversion when this synagogue official, this stereotypical symbol of the establishment religion falls on his knees – no mean feet in that crowd – and begs Jesus over and over again, my little daughter is dying, my little daughter is dying . . . come and lay your hands upon her and she will live . . . and you’re thinking . . . “Hah!  Now he comes, now when he wants something . . .” and you’re thinking “hey mister synagogue authority, mister high-muckety-muck, mister Roman-collaborator, where’s all your authority now?  Where’s all the “can’t pick corn on the Sabbath” all the “shame on Jesus, eating with sinners” all the “he must have Satan in him, casting out demons like that” . . . they’re all just dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind, when one of their kids is involved . . . well, to be honest, you’d probably do the same thing, if it was your kid . . . but still, the hypocrisy of it all, and you expect Jesus to say something, you expect him to at least point out the irony, the hypocrisy of this critical, self-righteous, let-just-face-it, downright enemy of Christ and all he stands for, but no, he just goes along, quietly, pushing his way through the crowd . . .

     And speaking of the crowd, it’s getting worse, if that’s possible, pressing in all around them, so you can feel them dangerously close, jostling and touching and bumping, and you’ll be lucky to have any insole left, all the foot-stomping going on, you’re all gonna be breaking out the Dr. Scholl’s inserts – be gellin’ like a felon – before too long .  when all of a sudden, Jesus puts on the brakes, and you almost run up his, and he stands stock still, just staring, and then he says “Who touched me?” and you can’t believe your ears, whaddya mean who touched me, everybody in the whole world has touched him, or at least everyone in that crowd, and you’re wondering if the heat is finally getting to him, if the strain of all the demon-castings, all the storm-rebuking has finally unhinged him, and you tell him so, you say “how can you say who touched me?” but he just keeps looking straight ahead . . .

     And then . . . a voice – tremulous, hesitant, quivering – saying “Master, it was I” and you look down and there, prostrate before him, one of the filthiest women you’ve ever seen – road-dust-clogged red-encrusted robe – and the sweet-iron smell of fresh blood, and you instinctively recoil, something inside you shouting like that TV-show robot “warning, warning” only it’s saying “unclean, unclean,” but the hard-pressed crowd won’t let you back away, they’re holding you upright and real close, so you can’t help but hear the woman’s words “I’ve been bleeding uncontrollably for 12 years” and you don’t fail to get the symbolism – twelve years indeed! – and further, you know where that bleeding is from, it usually comes only once a month, and it upsets your very Jewish, very male constitution, because you know what happens when a woman’s has her period, she’s shut away in the back, shunned, and how dare she be out here among folks, transmitting her uncleanness to the rest of us, she just as easily could’ve touched you, and then you would have been unclean, you would have been an outcast, and you want doubly to run, but the crowd won’t let you, and you hear her say “I’ve spent all my money and all my father’s money on doctors, but they only made it worse, and I knew that if I could but touch the hem of your garment” and Jesus’ face is transformed in that instant, its muscles relax and his eyes light up, and compassion washes across his features like the tide on that nearby sea . . . “Daughter,” he says “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

   And though you don’t get it at the time – you’re too busy being horrified at all the “unclean” – you reflect on it later and see the powerful connections . . . she has been unclean twelve years, twelve – the same number as Israel’s tribes . . . twelve – the same age as Jairus’ little girl, the girl Jairus called daughter, just as Jesus called the hemorrhagic woman “daughter,” and when you have time, you ponder in what way she can be Jesus’ daughter, and marvel at his effrontery in taking a priestly role . . .

     But things are moving too fast, a runner comes from Jairus’ house saying “Your daughter is dead” and Jesus says “Do not fear, only have faith,” and you’re beginning to see another connection, the woman had faith, the woman believed, but so did Jairus.   Both of them fell to their knees, both of them stepped out of the crowd, both of them separated themselves from the masses, from the dangerous same-faced violence-prone crowd.  And Jesus allows just you three, just James and Peter and John, to go with him, and when you all get to the house, people are wailing and moaning, and the professional grievers are wailing and moaning and rending their clothing, and Jesus says “Why all the fuss?  Why all the bother?  The child is just sleeping”  and raucous, derisive laughter breaks out, and you gotta admit it’s pretty funny, but Jesus just flicks his wrist, like he’s brushing off flies, and suddenly they’re alone in the house, everybody has fled, everybody but you three and the mother and father and the little dead girl, and when Jesus sees her, he touches her – and this sets the sirens off in your brain again, unclean, unclean, here he is, touching a corpse, the ultimate unclean – but then he speaks Talitha cum . . . Get up, little girl . . . and for a moment, nothing happens, and everything is still, even the dust motes in the sunlit shaft of air are still . . . Talitha cum . . .

     And she does, she sits up and starts to breath, no shuddering, nor gasping, just one minute she’s not breathing, and the next . . . she is.  And then you let out a big gust of air, for you’d  been holding your breath yourself . . . and everyone is stunned, and from somewhere in your amazement you hear Jesus as he tells everyone in the room to tell no-one, to not spread the Good News of this wonderful resurrection, and finally to give her a little something to eat, just like that, practical as always, and besides . . . dead girls don’t eat.

     And you are amazed, even after all this time, even after his death and resurrection, when you can see this as a pre-cursor, a predecessor to the resurrection . . . Christ being raised from the dead by God, the loving parent – and now you understand the “daughter” part, for just as God raised God’s son from the grave, so did Jesus raise his daughter . . . but there is more than that, because it’s easy for you to see – as a Jewish Christian – that Jesus is fulfilling a priestly role, as a stand-in for God, restoring life to the dead girl who is certainly more than just a dead girl . . . as a daughter of the establishment religion, she is twelve years old, she represents the twelve tribes of Israel, and Jesus is bringing her back from the dead . . . he is making her clean, restoring her to right relations with God . . .

     As a Jew, you are under no illusions – overlaying the entire episode are questions of ritual purity, of clean versus unclean . . . the hemorrhagic woman was about as unclean as you can get, apart from being dead, that is . . . she was penniless, broke and just to touch her was anathema . . . she was as outside as you can be, the complete opposite of the synagogue leader, who was the consummate insider.  And you are amazed that Jesus healed them both, he worked at both ends of the political and social spectrum – he healed the daughter of the guy with all the power, but also the penniless, destitute, unclean beggar . . .

     And today we come to this story, not with fresh eyes like the disciples, or even the perspective of Mark’s congregation forty years later, but with jaded hearts . . . we’ve heard this story time and again, and what possibly can we glean from it when religious categories of clean versus unclean no longer apply, when for those of us in this room – none of us observant Jews – that boat has long since sailed?   We don’t classify folks as clean or unclean, do we?  We don’t refuse to associate with folks who are different from us, who aren’t like us, who don’t bathe regularly or have a different skin color or are in a different social class from us, do we? 

We don’t think that we should “take care of our own” first, before we help the other . . . do we? 

     Did you notice the order in which Jesus heals in our tale?  He makes Jairus, the well-off, well-connected established-religion guy, who gives a lot to the church – without him, it surely wouldn’t make its budget – he leaves him standing there, life draining out of his child, while the outsider is healed.  And for us today, that’s a powerful statement . . . not only does Jesus heal the outsider, not only does he take care of their needs, but they are his priority . . .  he actually lives out his own dictum that the first shall be last and the last first . . .

     What would happen if the church lived out that saying in its day to day life?  What if it put its money where its mouth is, what would it look like?  Would money for the poor still be an afterthought to maintaining the building?  Would it still be the first to go during a budget crunch?  Would there be any poor or hungry left if the church put them first and itself last?  And what would building use patterns look like?   Would church members still get first priority?  I don’t know . . . it’s all pretty theoretical, if you ask me . . .

     But what isn’t theoretical is that Christ heals both ends of the spectrum, both sides of the street, so to speak . . . because even though he stopped for the outsider, even though he healed the outcast first, even though, as our Catholic brothers and sisters say, he has a preferential option for the poor, the Good News for us middle-class, hardly-outsider Christians is that he restores us as well . . . there is more than enough grace to go around, it is grace unbounded, grace overwhelming, amazingly abundant, never-ending grace.  And it saved a wretch like me.  Amen.