Is the Gospel Only for Excessive People?

4 Pentecost, C p6, June 16, 2013   

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15  Psalm 32

Gal. 2:11-21   Luke 7:36-50  

Lectionary Link

   Do you think that the kind of faith and religion that gets most of the attention in the world is due to the excessive natures of the people who have been the formative personalities of our faith tradition?  Let face it; non-excessive people are just plain boring or at least they are not newsworthy; they don’t give you any historical markers.

  So we tend to write history based upon public heroes; the ones who are best known because of their excesses.  There has been a post-modern attempt in some circles to write an anti-hero kind of history It would be called “quotidian” history, meaning everyday life or the mundane.  What if  history were written from the notes discovered in the receipt books of a bakery in Paris, what would the history look like?  Well, some might say boring. Others might be fascinated with such details.

  The Bible is about mostly heroic excessive personalities.  King David was excessive; he even arranged the murder of one of his soldiers because he wanted the soldier’s wife.  Paul was excessively fanatic; he was complicit in stoning murders of the followers of Jesus.  So, his conversion was dramatic and he became excessive in the other direction.

  The Gospel personalities are also excessive personalities.  When is the last time you did a liturgy of washing feet with tears, anointing feet with perfume and then wiping them with your hair?  A rather excessive way of saying, “Thank you Jesus.”  If you have had seven demons cast out of you then you make the Gospel records too.

  In the appointed Gospel today, we have a parable of Jesus that kind of explains the tendency towards the excessive and heroism in the Gospel literature.  The one who has been forgiven more loves more.  I guess in using Freudian terms, it would be saying that those who have excessive amounts of destructive energy and sublimate that energy towards constructive purposes, tend to do more and hence make the history books for doing memorable things.

  But what do you and I think about this doctrine of the sublimation of the excessive as being what is truly praiseworthy in the life of faith?  Are we to mourn the fact that we have not been excessive enough; we’ve followed the rules and played it safe and lived very ordinary lives?  Does the Christian faith have anything to do with living ordinary faithful lives with no great swings from extreme vice to extreme virtues?  Do we have to go out and look to be involved in extreme vice so that we can “really” appreciate forgiveness and redemption?

  We perhaps need to be careful about allowing Christianity to be just for people of “heroic” conversion involving moving from public notorious vice to confession and forgiveness.  We have perhaps been programmed by the Gospel literature only to appreciate this dominant literary theme.  Today we can see politicians caught in the act of vice and move to great redemption because all kinds of  Christians just love the excessive sin and forgiveness theme.  I think that America is unique in our television religion; we have dramatic preachers who spend most of the money they receive in order to stay on television and they do so by maintaining this story theme; extreme sin to extreme forgiveness and redemption.  It could seem as though of Christian parishes exist for people “living in recovery” so as to keep us from wrongly using our excess in addictive ways and learning to sublimate our addictive ways by an experience of the Higher Power of God’s grace.

  Let’s be honest about the Gospels.  The Gospels are dramatic literature.  They would not be the Gospels if they were but receipts and entries in a Jerusalem bakery journal in the first century.  As dramatic literature, their purpose is to evoke response from readers.

  And so we ask, what kind of evocative judgments are drawn from us today from our dramatic biblical literature?

  I think they ask us to be honest about our excesses.  We may not have dramatic excesses or we just haven’t been caught or they may not that exciting.  How exciting is it that one plays computer Solitaire for many hours in a day?  It is a rather excessive use of time, time that may actually have other beneficial uses but it does not make the charts for an exciting vice to be converted from.

  The woman who anointed the feet of Jesus was commended for her excessive act of devotion…one which I am glad has not become a continuing liturgical act in the church, particularly with my hair impairment.  Her excess horrified the religious host who was scandalized by its social impropriety.

  You and I are like this religious host as well; we make judgments from our individual perspectives.  Your excess is not mine so I can judge you as lacking; mine is not yours so touché!   We can be dueling judgmental people always feeling good about ourselves at the expense of others.  Though, if I only feel good about myself because of how I see that you are so bad, what good is my self-worth?   And that kind of self-serving judgmentalism is what the words of Jesus exposed.   

  What do we learn from the example of Jesus, who can also be the risen- Christ nature within us?  Well, Jesus kind of, accepts the individual weird.  As good parents we accept from our children their unique art work as wonderful gifts even as the older sibling might criticize the art as inferior and get a rebuke from us.  Jesus accepts our individual gifts as they are tailored to how we love because we have known special events of grace and forgiveness.  One of the secrets of life is to learn to sublimate, yes transform, the excessive energies of addiction and waste into the devotion that can focus upon what is truly worthy, namely, the risen Christ who is always before us as what we can be in a future surpassing state of excellence.

  Jesus was also inviting the excessively judgmental religious leader to accept extreme forgiveness for such obsessive use of his discernment for criticizing people and do something excessive toward God, namely, excessively practice forgiveness as a way of life.

  Let us embrace the dramatic biblical literature, not as condemning us for not having dramatic lives but as being instructive to us about the poignant metaphors as providing instruction and direction for our transformation.  The dramatic religious personality Paul who once in fanatic religious passion wanted to kill people who disagreed with him, became one who discovered in the dramatic passion story of Jesus the metaphor of personal transformation.   Instead of killing Christians, St. Paul went to “dying with Christ” as the chief metaphor of transformation in his life.  He wrote:  “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

  You and I are invited to the metaphors of transformation in our lives as we learn to tame and corral the energies, desires, affinities, preferences, passions, into beneficial acts of Christ-like behavior for the good of our world.  Let us accept forgiveness and celebrate our excesses with Christ-like sublimation of the energies of our lives for living the Good News.  Amen.