Absolute Power That Is Not Corrupt

Last Sunday after  Pentecost, Cp29, November 24, 2013  Christ the King

Jeremiah 23:1-6  Ps. 46           

Col. 1:11-20    Luke 23:23-33   

Lectionary Link

  On the playground one can find children playing all sorts of imaginative roles.  Castles, kings, princesses and dragons and monsters, and it is a delight to see them have so much fun with unreality.  Perhaps it is necessary part of learning abstract thinking; perhaps in play acting heroic roles against monsters and dragons, they are internalizing coping patterns with real life situations.  Perhaps in being a monster or a dragon it is a way of believing that one can optimistically negotiate the situations of one’s life.

  All fine and good for children, but what about the followers of Jesus confessing and hoping that Jesus would be a king both when he lived and in the decades after Jesus left this world?  When adults project their imaginations of a king upon someone who really does not look like a king what are we to think about them?  What are we to think about the founders of our faith community?  How are people to think about us as we project kingship upon a person who is not kingly in the earthly ways of thinking about monarchies and political power?

   From the appointed Gospel of the day: “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."  One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah?”

  The Passion Gospel includes the mocking scorn of the kingship of Christ by the Roman soldiers and one of the criminals crucified with Jesus.

  Why would the early Christians retain in their recited story this incident of scorn?  The Passion liturgy includes an honesty about scorn for what happens often in life.  Things of value, people of value, justice values often get defeated.  Good people get snuffed out before their time.

  The powers that be often mock the values of love and justice.  People who believe and practice very good things often are crushed.  But in the Passion of Jesus we find the agents of the true king of Palestine, the Caesar, crushing to death one who bore the local myth of being a king.

  What this Passion narrative reveals in an entirely counter-logic to the earthly notion of kingship.  Lord Acton once wrote, “"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  By this definition, if one believes that God has absolute power, then God would be corrupt.  But the teaching of the kingship of Christ was a teaching about thinking about power in a different way.

  Absolute power corrupts mainly because it must rely upon the limitation of the freedom of others.   To dominate one must shut down the freedom of others.  Limit what they can do and what they can think not as a program of temperance or self-control but so that the will of the one or the few can make the energy of freedom into the energy of oppression and suppression.

  The death of Jesus on the cross literally meant that his freedom to live was taken from him.  His freedom to teach and to heal was taken from him.

  What kind of king was Jesus?  And why did his early followers persist in the belief of his kingship?  Why did they continue to perform the mockery of his kingship each time they performed a reading of the Passion narrative?

  The absolute power of God is not like the absolute power of human government.  The absolute power of God is completely permissive of the freedoms within the limits of each creature and entity.  People have freedom within their limitations.  Animals have freedoms within their limitations.  Wind and weather, flowers and rock and molecules and atoms have freedoms within their limitations.  And the absolute power of God is permissive of all the kinds of freedom which exist.

  The way in which this absolute power of God became known and manifested in the life of Jesus was through winsome, persuasive, charismatic love.  The followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had the power of a king; he had the power of clemency.  “Father forgive them.”  Pardon them, commute their sentences; they do not know what they are doing. 

  They believed that Jesus had the ability to usher a repentant criminal into a kingdom life called Paradise.  Today you shall be with me in Paradise.

  Whenever the church and Christians have tried to become a kingdom of this world in a direct way, the church and Christians have partaken of the corruption of power.  Whenever the church has respected power as propelling the energy of service, the church has best expressed the kingship of Christ.

  Today we are invited to the irony of Christ the King.  Indeed our liturgy is like children playing on the playground because we must become child-like to perceive the kingship of Christ in this world where we see so much of the corrupting effects of people who have too much power.

  What kind of king says, “Blessed are the poor.”  “Love your enemy.”  “If someone needs your coat, give it to him.”  “If someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other.”  The kingdom of Christ is a totally ironic kingdom and it forces us to see our lives differently.

  I believe that the impact of the resurrection appearances upon the lives of the disciples was so pronounced that they believed they had evidence of a strength and a power over death itself.  Their experience of the resurrection appearances of Jesus made the disciple confident in presenting the narrative of the death of Jesus because they believed that kingship would be defined by the one who triumphed over death.

  The resurrection of Christ means that it is possible for us to perceive another kind of kingdom and another kind of living and lifestyle even as we live within the corrupting and corruptible kingdoms of this world.  As we perceive the kingdom of Christ in our world we don’t live in naiveté about the kingdoms of this world but we are able to receive a Spirit of peace and innocence as a counter balance to our lives in an often harsh world of the conflict of power.

  Today, you and I are invited to the kingship of Christ and to his kingdom.  We are invited to God’s forgiveness and to the Paradise of knowing that we are ever invited to new excellence in our lives.  Let us celebrate Christ as our king today but let us not make Christ as king in the images of typical earthly power, let us understand the reality of the kingdom of Christ as a new creation, as a new and peaceful way to live and serve.  We are here today to celebrate Christ as King and believe that the Absolute Power which is not corrupt is the power of winsome, persuasive, charismatic and never-ending love offered to people who are free to be convinced  to know that compassion, care, justice, love and service is the perfect expression of our freedom and power in life.  Today we are invited again to the irony of knowing Christ as our King. Amen.

The Comfort and Analgesic Function of Salvation Language

26  Pentecost, Cp28, November 17, 2013

Isaiah 65:17-25 Ps. 98:

2 Thes. 3:6-13     Luke 21:5-19   

Lectionary Link

    As one who you know to be very hung up on words and language, I am often disappointed by the misuse of language or the ignorance of language or the rather lack of lyricism in how we use language in our lives and more specifically how biblical language is misinterpreted in mode and context and application.

  One of my goals in life is to get people understand the broad and deeply rich spectrum of language and word use.  Language is perhaps the greatest truth of human experience.

  The Bible is a book of language; it is a book of words that have derived from the experiences of people who struggled with the common questions of humanity that pertain to life between cradle and the grave, and the possible life beyond the grave.

  I would ask that we understand genre and use of language and not misapply in inappropriate ways the various applications of language which function for our orientation in the great stories of humanity.

  A mother who may comfort a fevered baby with words like, “there, there little one; all will be better in the morning” could be confronted by literalist, “Mom how can you speak such untruthful things; you have no proof that all will be well in the morning.”  And what would you say to such a literalist before you smacked him in the mouth?   You would probably say, “You unfeeling idiot, do you not know a discourse of comfort does not need to be infallible predictive scientific discourse?”

   This lack of language finesse accounts for most biblical disputes by those who defend the Bible wrongly and by those who attack Bible language wrongly as being something that is does not purport to be in its use and function.

  If the Bible can be called salvation history, we could understand the word salvation to mean “health.”  The function of the Bible in its origin and now in its use is to be words of health for the community.

  How were the words of the Bible readings, words of health for people in their times of composition and how can they be words of health for us today?

  Words of health might include the functions of education, comfort and pain management.  Words of comfort and pain management might not necessarily be literally true, probable or even possible.  The mom who sings to a restless baby, “Hush little baby don’t say a word, momma’s goin’ to buy you a mockingbird.”  Well, no momma’s not going to buy a mockingbird; a mockingbird can be a teasing mischievous noise maker.   Momma’s trying to create a rhyme to comfort a restless baby.

  The Isaian prophet had some major comfort to achieve within the community.  The comfort also included some major pain management and so the words of comfort had to be downright analgesic.  They had to be escapism; they had to be fantastic.  And what were the conditions like that required analgesic words?  Not just simply Tylenol words but they had to provide the most effective pain-killers of all.

  What conditions could call for such escapism?  The Isaian writer was implying that the world was so bad that God needed to start all over with a new creation.  Jerusalem was so bad that a new Jerusalem had to be built.  The Isaian writer was doing what we all do when we’re in pain; we generalize to the entire universe.  Well, if life is so dreadful for me, it must also be for the entire universe.  When life is really bad, we can want to be somewhere else with a complete new discontinuity from the way things are.  Denial is a form of pain management.  These Isaian words are similar to John Lennon’s song, Imagine:  Denying words, utopian word, analgesic words.

  What else was happening?  The beasts had taken over the world.  The lambs were getting eaten up by the wolves; “O wouldn’t it be nice if wolves and lambs were friendly playmates?”  In a predator and prey world, the predators were winning.  Only the extremely fit were surviving.   Wouldn’t it be nice if people could enjoy the labor of their own hands, their own homes and gardens?  Infant mortality was staggeringly high.  “O, wouldn’t it be nice if young people lived to the very minimal age of one hundred.”  There is an incredible amount of wishful thinking in such analgesic discourse.  Such discourse may only be relevant when it is needed.  (Take as directed). We should not criticize its use in the situations when it is needed.  On the other hand, we have modern day literalists in America who live in a comparative lap of luxury trying to literalize these Isaian words as an escapism future for themselves.  I would submit to you that they misuse and misapply such language.

   The writer of the Gospel of Luke was also using words of health for comforting people in beleaguered times.  By the time that the Gospel of Luke had come to its final textual edition, what had happened in the world and in the lives of some of the followers of Jesus?

  The Temple had been destroyed and all Jewish sects, including the rabbinical sect of Jesus, had fled Jerusalem for safer places.  When you've been scattered and your homes destroyed and Chernobylesque conditions prevail, you have to start up elsewhere and you need to maintain community and identity.   In a time of crisis the conditions of vulnerability prevail.  There is a power and leadership vacuum and there are those to step up to try to give explanation for why things happen and what should be done because of the crisis.  After the destruction of Jerusalem there was a leadership vacuum and pretenders arose to fill that vacuum.  People who want to be leaders during a crisis try to give answers as to why the crisis happened and how to get out of the crisis.  Some people will try to predict catastrophic outcomes.  While others will say  catastrophic and cataclysmic events will continue to happen until the big one, the final one occurs.

   The writer of Luke knew about conflict in various communities; such conflict led to suffering.  Obviously the Roman authorities had power to persecute.  On more local levels, members of various Jewish sects and their synagogues had power to excommunicate and to let their theological disagreements break out into actual community disciplinary actions and physical punishment.   When members of different Jewish sects disagreed with each other, families could be divided.  Former Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and members of the community of John the Baptist who were persuaded about the interpretation of Jesus as the messiah experienced the wrath of the members of their former communities.  The writer of the Gospel of Luke knew about the inter-Judaic conflicts between the different sects of Judaism.  This writer knew how passionately people could disagree with each other.

  A particular discourse of comfort would involve the risen Christ to be presented as an oracle of comfort for the community.  The risen Christ would have known about the destruction of Jerusalem; he would have known about splintering of Judaism into various communities.  The risen Christ as one who would have predicted all of this would be an oracle of comfort to those who had to live through the devastations.  We do not have to be literal about the words of the Gospel of Luke to understand the truth function of words of comfort.  Words of comfort arise in the form that is needed to sustain the community during difficult times and that is the greater truth.

  Words still function that way for us today.  I hope that you and I do not need the powerful analgesic words for our lives today.  I hope we can be generally pain free.  What I would pray for us to become today are words of comfort in our actions.  The United States Constitution is a document of comfort for disagreeing religious people in that it does not permit people of different religious persuasion to burn each other at the stake.  It is a more ideal language of comfort for our language to be the body language of love and justice.  What kind of language of comfort is needed today in the Philippines?  In Viet Nam?  The body language of people delivering rescue teams and supplies from concerned people all over the world.  On the ground in the areas of devastation,  the people might need the language of escape from their exigent distress even while the world tries to mobilize the corporate body language of a world organizing to bring relief.

  Whether the time of Isaiah or the time of Luke, the language of comfort and analgesia is often needed.  Such words are discourses of hope and we should not despise such language, even as we should complement such language with the body language of active justice, love and compassion.

  This is the language of comfort that the risen Christ inspires in us today.  Let us be people who receive comfort in all the ways that we can but let us generate in all of the ways we can, a full language of hope, care, love, justice, comfort and salvation today.  Amen.

Have You Hugged a Sadducee Lately?

25 Pentecost C  27    November 10, 2013          

Job 19:23-27a   Psalm 17:1-9

2 Thes.2:13-3:5     Luke 20:27-38

Lectionary Link

  I should get one of the worst puns ever out of the way from the outset; The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, that is why they were Sad, you see.

  You and I should have pity for the Sadducees because they fare only second to the Pharisees in how we have come to characterize them as evil opponents of our hero, Jesus.

  Let’s deconstruct.  Let’s you and I be like a Sadducee today to find points of empathy.

  The Sadducees during the time of the writing of the Gospel of Luke were facing great transition and change in their lives.

  We too are people of transition and change.  Life, by definition makes us nomads; the only question is how fast we are moving from place to place or having to change our thinking because of new events and circumstances in our lives.

  How many of us here today are cradle Episcopalian?  How many of us have been in and out of various faith communities?  How many of us have been in Episcopal parishes that are significantly different from each other?  How many of us have tried agnosticism?  Atheism?  Humanism? Yoga?  Tai Chi?  TM? Zen Meditation?  Veganism?  Paganism? Fantasy football?  What are the circumstances that have forced us to move our location or forced a change in the habits of our mind?

  How many Roman Catholics have felt “kicked out” of their church when they went through the excruciating experience of divorce?  How many of them have looked to another faith community because of this?  How many Protestants have married Roman Catholics and Orthodox and ended up in the Episcopal Church as place of compromise?  How many gay and lesbian persons have felt kicked out of their religious communities?  How many people have changed churches after getting a college education and doing some critical thinking?

  We are nomads by virtue of our existence.  So let us pity the poor Sadducees or better yet let us invite people like them to journey with us.

  Why should we pity the poor Sadducees?  The Sadducees were a religious sect of Judaism. And even in the occupied city of Jerusalem, they probably fared the best of all of the Jews.  They were in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem.  They were the priestly caste; they also had a political role of negotiating the well-being of the Jewish people with the Roman occupiers.  So you can imagine what happened to the Sadducees in and around the year 70.  The chief identity of the Sadducees came from the Temple.  So what identity did they have after the Temple was destroyed?  They essentially were unemployed.  There was nowhere to do sacrifices.  The Sadducees sort of died out and became extinct like the Shakers did in America, albeit for different reasons.

  What is the point of bringing up a debate between Jesus and Sadducees after the year 70 when the Temple was destroyed?  Was it for the purpose of just rubbing it in?  I would suggest to you that the writer of Luke was more interested in inviting Sadducees to become followers of Jesus.  We are so used to treating the Gospels as a negative polemic against so called antagonistic opponents of Jesus; we can easily forget that the followers of Jesus were Jews and that they wanted to invite all Jews into the fellowship of Christ.

  Who needed a fellowship more than the Sadducees after the Temple had been destroyed and after Jerusalem had been leveled to the ground?

  Let us switch our thinking about this Gospel reading today and see it as an invitation of the early followers of Jesus to invite the Sadducees into community after they had suffered the most devastating blow of all to their community life with the destruction of the Temple.

  The encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees is presented as a highly ironic debate.  The Sadducees are presented as sort of Harvard trained lawyers who are going to take this Matlock-like country bumpkin rabbi Jesus to the intellectual woodshed.  So a mockingly scornful highly improbable scenario in a case study is presented to Jesus.  The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection because they did not believe in “legislating from the bench.”  Why?  To establish religious case law one could only use the Torah; Sadducean scholars could find no evidence, no textual precedence for the resurrection and so it could not be declared or held as an official belief.  Pharisees and other Jewish sects accepted more writings in their Scriptures than just the five books of Moses for setting precedence and so they found support for the resurrection in these writings, including this writing that we’ve read from Job today.  (A writing often used in funerals and memorial services).  If one did not believe in the resurrection how does one believe in the meaning of one’s life beyond death?   For the Sadducees, it would be more practical to be made objectively immortal in one’s offspring.  Having a child was the way to become objectively immortal.  And so do you see how the case study mixes the objective immortality of having children with the subjective immortality of the afterlife of the resurrection?

  The case study involved the ancient Mosaic notion of the Levirate Marriage.  If a married man died without children, his brother was obligated to marry the widow to have a child that would be designated as his dead brother's offspring.  Apparently, if the two had become one flesh, the widow retained something of that one flesh to be able to have a child for her departed first husband even though her new husband was a former brother-in-law.  You could also see how this Levirate law protected the social welfare of a widow as well.

  The Levirate practice in the time of Jesus was not practiced, not even by the Sadducees and so you can see the hypocritical play that was involved in posing the case study to Jesus as a way of questioning his validity as a teacher.

  Jesus invited the Sadducees to see their future in other ways;  just as the Lucan church was inviting the Sadducees to see a new future after their very life identity had been destroyed with the destruction of the Temple.  What was the objective immortality of the Sadducees after the Temple was destroyed.  In a strange way the words of Jesus invites the Sadducees to see their future in a different way.  Does a Sadducee have any future life at all without the Temple?

  What is the point about quibbling about the afterlife about which no one can have specific empirical knowledge?  The function of the metaphors of the afterlife is to inspire faith, hope and comfort now.  And the issue is not really about marriage in the afterlife, or being like angels, it really is about us not limiting God in our present or in the future.

  If God is a living God, if God is a Plenitude that was before us who was with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses; if that God is a Plenitude in whom we live now, then that same Plenitude will be the future after we are gone.  That same Plenitude is able to be all of our possible imaginations of a future and even more.  If we can dream a future, then God as Plenitude is even more.

  I believe this dialogue between Jesus and the Sadducee was a wisdom dialogue about having faith in a living God.  We are limited as humans in our life span because we cannot endlessly preserve our lives in their extant conditions.  To believe in the living God is to believe in someone who can preserve more than we can preserve.  In computer hard drives we are talking terabytes; God or Plentitude must include ultimate memory of all things in such a way as to at least permit the possible narratives of a preserving resurrection life. This is to believe in God as the realm of the possible.  And resurrection is an imagination of the possible.  It is a narrative of hope that is true because having hope is true.

  So, my question today is, Have you hugged a Sadducee lately?  Let's not demonize the Sadducees.  Have you given hope for the future to someone whose life circumstances has just been changed by devastating events?  Have you offered new community to the one who has lost community, location and identity due to the terrible crises of loss?

  Have you and I ever been in a situation of one like a post-70 A.D. Sadducee when we have needed hope beyond what our own system of belief could provide?  We, too, often have been needy like the Sadducees who need new hope and a new future offered to us through invitation and acceptance within a community.  

  A Sadducee could come to believe new things through an encounter with Jesus.  A Sadducee could add a different nuance to his or her Judaism through an encounter with the risen Christ.  We, too, know the risen Christ to be with us today as representing the Phoenix who rises out of the ashes of what is lost and gives us new hope and new possibility.  And as the church and as a parish family, we are to be a place where possible hope becomes actual hope for people who need it.  Amen.

Zacchaeus, a Voyeur for Salvation

24  Pentecost, Cp26, November 3, 2013

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 Psalm 119:137-144

2 Thessalonians 1:1-5 (6-10) 11-12 Luke 19:1-10

  

Lectionary Link

 Perhaps you remember the Romantic Comedy movie from 1997 entitled,  As Good As It Gets?  In this film a reclusive, omni-phobic, misanthropic, obsessive compulsive writer, Melvin is falling in love with a waitress, Carol who is the only person who put in an effort to tolerate him.  Melvin, played by Jack Nicholson, is so pessimistic that he cannot say anything positive about anyone or anything.  With almost Tourette-like compulsion he says offensive things.  He is falling in love with Carol and he does something wonderful to help her son who has health problems; but even Carol can only take so much of his negativism.  She is at her wits end with him and she challenges Melvin to say something nice about her.

  And what is the nice and winning thing that Melvin finally says about Carol?  “You make me want to be a better man.”   And the word better means several things for Melvin.  Carol made Melvin be better by seeking some help for his panic condition; but she also made him better to understand the give and take of winsomeness that one has to practice to be successful in relationship and community.

  You make me want to be a better person.  This might sum up the dynamic of the encounter between Zacchaeus and Jesus of Nazareth.  Zacchaeus was more than tolerated by Jesus; he was invited by Jesus to a relationship and the end result was that Zaccheaus was inspired and motivated to become a much better person.  Jesus said about Zacchaeus:   “Today salvation has come to his house.”

   The quest for salvation might be seen to be a selfish quest in that salvation means that we become better people.  But this is the benefit of salvation; we become better people and the community becomes better for it as well.

  I was always partial to Zacchaeus.  He was stereotyped forever as being the short guy who had to climb the tree to see Jesus.  As a height challenged basketball player, I think Zacchaeus should be the patron saint of short persons; why not we have a saint for everything else?  Some traditions tells us that Zacchaeus was surnamed Matthias and became the twelfth disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot.   

  On All Saints Sunday, we trace the notion of saintliness to Jesus Christ.  Jesus was one who made Zacchaeus and others want to be better persons.  Zacchaeus became a better person first by amending his life.  He had cheated people out of money in his profession as a tax collector and after meeting Jesus he said, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much."

  What could be the literary function of this story about Zacchaeus in the literature of the early Christian community?

  It is a classical salvation story.  A very dubious person who was caught between the Jewish community and the Roman government was able to find a new status in his life.

  When people are desperate enough they become salvation voyeurs.   They start to become peeping toms for a better way of living.  “I will sneak a peek at Jesus just to see what he is all about.”   There is another incident in the Gospel of a voyeur for salvation.  You remember the woman with the issue of blood was in a crowd around Jesus and she thought, “If I just touch the hem of the garment of Jesus perhaps I will be healed.”  And she was healed and Jesus said, “Who touched me?”  And his disciples asked why would he say that with so many people around him.  And Jesus said that he felt power go out of him.

  Zacchaeus was too short to see over people and so he climbed into a tree to see Jesus.  His eyes made contact and with Jesus.  And in the crowd, Jesus was aware of the staring eyes from the seeking heart of Zacchaeus.  Jesus looked at him and said, “Hurry down for I must stay at your home today.”

  A subtext of this and other Gospel stories is that Jesus entered into fellowship with dubious characters.   Tax-collectors Jews who worked for the Romans in collecting taxes; they were called publicans and that made them automatic sinners in the eyes of the Jewish religious establishment.

  To whom did Jesus and salvations belong?  Jesus and salvation belonged to the people in need and who wanted him and the inclusive experience of salvation.  This is why we call the Gospel good news.  People catch a vision of what becoming better means.  They look for the people, the community and situation where they can become better.  Salvation is the experience of being affirmed and received into a community who support this quest of the heart to want life to be better.

  Today on All Saints Sunday, we acknowledge that saintliness comes from Jesus of Nazareth and it is still present with us in the risen Christ who is in our community.

  We as the community of the risen Christ need to be a community where saintliness means that we want to become better people and that by being together we help to make each other better people.  As we look at the role of the Christians in the community at large we need to ask this question, “Do people see Christians and want to be better people?”  There are many voyeurs for salvation in this world.  There are people looking on without us knowing it who are looking for a place of salvation.  There are people in quest to find people who would help make them be better people.

  This is our challenge as a parish community: To help each other be better people because we are together and as we do this we can become an inviting community for others to join us as they discover our parish community to be a place of salvation, a place where they can become better people.

  Let the salvation of Christ be known today in our parish community.  And let us live in such a way that we invite other people know that we are a community where they can become better people in every way.  Amen.