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
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.
