Salt, Fire, and Peace (Proper 21B)

Salt, Fire, and Peace

30 September 2012

Proper 21B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

When Elena and I were raising our four kids, often one or another would come to us indignant, complaining about a sibling, with the outraged and sometimes tearful demand, “Punish him.”

In today’s Gospel, the disciples come to Jesus and say, “Look at that guy there!  He is not one of us, but he uses your name. We told him to stop but he won’t. You make him stop.  Punish him.”

They have just failed to drive out an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28) and this interloper seems to be succeeding just fine.  They want to be sole proprietors of Jesus’ franchise, to defend their market niche and brand integrity.

Jesus replies, “Don't stop him. Just using my name might bring him closer to the kingdom. Whoever is not against us is for us.”

From the evidence in the New Testament, Jesus’ followers did not all agree. Matthew and Luke portray Jesus as actually saying the opposite: “whoever is not with me is against me” (Matt 12:30; Luke 11:23).   Luke, to his credit, also  preserves (9:49-50) what Mark has here, almost certainly Jesus’ position:  “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  Matthew just drops it.

Mark’s Jesus adds that even a simple kindness like giving someone a sip of water advances the kingdom. And petty nastiness, sticking out your leg to trip up any of Jesus’ “little ones” will lead to worse things than being drowned in the ocean. 

Mark takes this as a warning to keep Jesus’ own over-zealous followers from running roughshod over people like the unnamed healer.  Matthew puts the  “tripping people up” saying in a separate context, as a curse against non-believers who persecute Jesus’ followers (Matt. 18:6).

Jesus then adds (Mark 9:42-28) one of most macabre “hard sayings” of Jesus:  pluck out your eye, cut off your hand or foot, if these cause you to sin.  The image is so grotesque that Matthew (18:8-9), who normally follows Mark when he uses his material, reduces Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (17:1-4).

Origen

This is not a pronouncement of ethical law.   Even though Matthew seems to understand it this way by placing it in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (5:27-37), this saying, when read as law, it is really, really sick. Taken literally, it actually led third century Church father Origen to cut off body parts that had gotten in the way of his efforts at chastity.  As a result, Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of scripture—was never named a saint or a doctor of the Church. In fact, one of the first canons of the Council of Nicea was to ban such self-mutilators from the priesthood.

Mark’s placement of this saying in this story gives its most likely meaning on the lips of the historical Jesus.  This answer about cutting members off is indeed cutting: sarcastic (“flesh-eating”) and overstated irony. If you want to call for punishment, just remember that everyone deserves it.  “Bad people?” says Jesus, “You want me to punish them, to cut them off? Well, if it’s punishment you want, it’s punishment you’ll get.  Cut those people off? How about cutting off some of your own body parts?”  This is a vivid way of saying, “As you forgive others, so shall you be forgiven.”

Jesus then says, “For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

These are powerful images: salt and fire.  Both connect to the idea of change and stability.  Salt and fire were seen as things that prevented or slowed the great agents for transformation and decay in the world around us:  leavening, fermentation, and rotting. 

  

Any of us who have made bread know how amazing yeast is. If you don’t add the right amount and give it adequate time and sugar, your bread will come out inedible.  Adding salt for a tastier bread slows down the yeast; if you add too much salt, it kills the yeast altogether.  Baking with fire stops the fermenting dough turns it to bread. 

The whole thing was mysterious to the early Hebrews, like the mysterious difference between a living animal and a dead carcass, that so quickly would turn bad and rot.

 This wonder at change versus stability, decay or life, fermentation or preservation, lies behind many details in the Law of Moses.  No yeast is allowed during the Passover—God’s covenant time should not be corrupted by change. Wine, fermented though it is, has reached a stasis and the alcohol in it preserves it from further rapid decay. It is used at Passover, making hearts glad and being an important part of celebration.

Animals to be sacrificed had to be killed quickly in ways that of themselves delayed the process of decay. Salt, that great preservative and inhibitor of decay, is added to all meat sacrifices. They are to be put into the fire almost immediately, and the parts of the sacrifice that are not to be burnt up wholly are to be eaten by the priests and Levites quickly after the rite.

Fire itself—able to change things totally by reducing them to ashes—is also seen as purifying, since it seemed mysteriously to inhibit change and decay after it had touched an object.  (We know now that this has to do with inhibiting microbes, but Louis Pasteur had not yet been born.) 

But for people around Jesus, fire meant purification either through radical change (things burnt to ashes) or through its ability, like salt, to preserve against fermentation and rot.

Salt too was seen as purifying, a symbol of steadiness and unchanging stability. Sharing salt at table was the ultimate sign of friendship and hospitality. Sharing it often marked covenants and promises.   Jesus said that those welcoming the Kingdom were the salt of the earth (Matt. 5:13), that would make life tasty and pleasant, preserve it from overall rottenness, and be a sign of God’s steadiness.

The ancient Jews realized that not all change was decay.  They liked their leavened bread and wine. It was in this spirit that Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a little lump of yeast in a large mass of flour dough—only a little bit would make the whole loaf rise (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20-21). But leaven for Jesus could be bad also, as when he told his followers to beware of the “leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (Mark 8:15).

The great garbage dump just outside of ancient Jerusalem’s city walls in the Valley of Hinnom (in Aramaic, Geihenna) was marked by the continually burning fires there for reducing to ashes and disinfecting the foul detritus of the city. These fires became of symbol for the purifying burning of the Day of Judgment or the eternal punishments of the damned.

Gehenna is the Greek word translated as “hell” in today's Gospel. The quotation in today's Gospel from second Isaiah about "their worm never dies, their fires never cease" is used by Jesus to describe the state of those who refuse God's call. It is vivid image of continued corruption and rottenness despite ongoing purification and disinfection.

So when Jesus in Mark says, “Everyone will be salted with fire, therefore live in peace,” he is saying this: We need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the punishment or correction of others who may seem to differ from us or not meet the standard we think God has set. And why? Because purification is a serious business that must touch us all, and eventually will touch all of each of us, regardless of who we are or what group we now appear to belong to. Purification will come to all, either through preservation or destruction, either through saving change for the good or damning change for the bad.

Jesus’ demand that we accept marginal believers or even possible competitors is rooted in his understanding of God.

God is not a mere tribal deity, not a petty partisan. God makes the sun rise on ands sends the clouds to rain on both the righteous and the wicked (Matt. 5:45). He is Israel’s God, to be sure, but only so that Israel can be a city on a hill, a light on a candlestick, salt to give flavor to and preserve the world (Matt. 5:14-16).   God is not just for Jews, not just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all.   Because we are all in God’s hand, we must accept diversity.

That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30). 

Jesus urges solidarity among all God’s creatures. That’s why even unbelievers’ offers of glasses of water build the Kingdom. That’s why Jesus here says the strange exorcist is one of his own “little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up. 

Living in peace doesn’t mean making nice, papering over evil, or thickening our conscience with an amoral detachment. Ask any marriage or family counselor, any labor mediator, or any mediator or negotiator in international or inter-ethnic conflict. They’ll all tell you that truly seeking peace is not easy, and not harmonious. It is not a false “let’s all just get along.”  It is about honestly addressing real problems.  It is about doing so in a spirit of shared endeavor, of mutual effort to let shared desires and aspirations force us to listen carefully to the other party.

Jesus continues today to call us to be good yeast leavening, bright fires enlightening, and salt enriching and preserving, the world.  He does not call us to demonize, exclude, or ostracize.

God himself will bring this world right. We all will be rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We all will be put through God’s fire. And because of this, we must live humbly and simply, praying for each other, including our enemies, and seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace.

In the name of God, Amen

Right Asking (Proper 20B)

 

Right Asking

23 September 2012

Proper 20B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

“If anyone claims to be wise and understanding among you, let them show it by good conduct and the gentle behavior that comes from wisdom.  If instead they have bitter self-seeking and partisanship in their hearts, may they not be self-promoters and liars against truth.  Such ‘wisdom’ as that does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is self-seeking and partisanship, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

“Where do the wars and disputes among you come from?  Isn’t it from your craving for what pleases you, things that are at battle with each other in the different parts of yourself?  You lust for something beyond your reach, so you commit murders.  You are self-seeking, and cannot obtain what you want, so you engage in disputes and wars.  You do not have what you want, because you just don’t pray for it.  And when you do pray for it, you do not receive, because you pray thinking that it’s a payment for getting what pleases you.

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”   (James 3:13-4:3, translation AAH)

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

In the Sir Gawain and the Loathsome Lady, King Arthur and Gawain, one of the knights of the Round Table, come upon a damsel in distress.  To free her, Arthur fights a knight in black armor who beats Arthur through dark magic.  The Knight spares Arthur’s life at the last moment on orders from the witch he serves.  She makes a bargain with Arthur:  “If you can answer my riddle in one year you may live, otherwise, you die.”  The riddle is this:  “What do women want most?” 

 

What do women want most? Arthur and Gawain return to Camelot and for a year puzzle over this question.  They ask all the ladies of the court, the serving girls, the nuns in the convent, the farmwomen:  what do you want most?  They consult wise men and women.  Everyone has a different answer: love, wealth, security, beauty, youth, power, health, servants, children, wisdom, sexual fulfillment, a handsome and faithful lover. 

At the end of the year, they have no idea and are sure Arthur will be killed.  On the way back, they run into a repulsive old woman, a hag, alongside the road.  This loathsome lady is named Ragnell. She says she has the answer to riddle, but only for a price.  Arthur replies, “I’ll pay anything if your answer is true and saves my life.” 

The answer she gives, the true answer, is this:  “What women want most, is to have their own way.”

Today’s epistle reading tells us that it is not just women who want, above all else, to have their own way—this is what men want most too.

James says that many evils stem from self-seeking and self-will:  “Where do the wars and disputes among you come from?  Isn’t it your craving for what pleases you, things that are at battle with each other in the different parts of yourself?  You lust for something beyond your reach, so you commit murders.  You are self-seeking, and cannot obtain what you want, so you engage in disputes and wars.”

James thinks that we desire contradictory things at odds with each other, struggling between the different parts of ourselves.  You want health, but you follow an unhealthy lifestyle. You want security and wealth, but you are a spendthrift.   You want to have a happy family and a good marriage, but you are tempted to infidelity at times.

James says that self-will, even if trained to be not so self-contradictory, is still the basic problem.  “You would have what you wanted if only you prayed, but you pray wrong,” he says. “You pray thinking of if as a payment for what pleases you.”   The King James Version here captures a bit of the starkness of James’ image:  “you pray only to consume it upon your lusts.”    James is saying that if we pray because we think that by so doing we will have our own way,  because we think of prayer as a payment for our pleasure, we are making God a whore in our minds. 

Clearly, “what pleases you” here is something that we want with our broken self-will, rather than what we would want if our wills and feelings weren’t broken.

There are many scriptures that say that if we ask God in faith, he will give us what we ask.  There are also scenes in the Bible where a righteous person argues or bargains with God, and gets his or her own way. 

But these are metaphors, imperfect ones, a way of saying that God is on our side and will always give us what we need, not that we will always get what we want. 

Paul says pray always, and “make your desires known to God.”  But Paul understands perfectly well that God already knows whatever we might tell him in prayer.  When we pray, we aren’t “letting God know” anything that he doesn’t already know. 

Taking literally the image of asking God for the things we want in order to convince him to give them to us is really a kind of sick magical thinking.  The Almighty in this view is like a wacky great uncle who, if we just call long distance at the right time and tell him what’s up, will send us that check we need in the mail.  Or like some overworked divine bureaucrat with an overloaded inbox of prayer requests.  Flag them right, and they go to the top of the pile. 

As St. Augustine points out, God created space and time.  God in some ways is outside of space and time, in other ways inside and behind it all.  So it isn’t like we are going to convince God to behave in a way that he wasn’t going to anyway.  God simply is.  God simply acts.  Past, present, and future are all one from the viewpoint of God.   What appears to us as a cause, effect sequence of events to timeless God is seen all at once.

Changing God’s will is not what prayer is about.  Asking God for what pleases us is, as James says, “asking wrong.”  The point is not convincing God to let us have our own way, not telling him something he doesn’t know, not getting him on board with what we want.

The point is how such asking affects us.  Prayer changes us and makes our will closer to God’s.   Jesus’ own prayer in Gethsemane, “Please let this cup of suffering pass from me,” was not granted.  But he added, “thy will, not mine, be done.”   

Buddhism teaches that desire is the root of all suffering and that by extinguishing desire, we achieve bliss.  James here agrees that self-seeking and wanting to have our own way is the root of most of the evils in the world and a great deal of suffering, and of turmoil within ourselves. 

But we Christians do not believe that extinguishing desire brings happiness. Happiness comes from accepting our desires, recognizing them, entering into a dialogue with God about them, and having God heal them and set them right.    We call this petitionary prayer, prayer where we ask for stuff. 

Petitionary prayer must be in the context of a broader prayer life: thanksgiving, intercession (prayer for others), praise and contemplation of God’s beauty.    As we pray our wants and desires in this broader context, we give up our insistence on having our own way. This is one of the great gifts God has in store for us as we pray.  

Through prayer we gain acceptance of what we can’t change, for the truly intolerable things that we may happen to face but over which we have no control. 

Our prayers are not about changing God.  They are about changing us.   Our prayers are a way we voluntarily reveal ourselves intimately to God and build a close relationship with him.  We tell him things he already knows but that we may not yet have realized.  We sometimes find that some of our desires can only be put before him as confessions of sin, yet another kind of prayer.  

Today’s Gospel also teaches this. The disciples argue about who is the greatest, has the most power, gets his own way the most.  Jesus takes this and turns it on its head.  He sets before them a child, the most vulnerable person in that society, the person who could least expect to get his own way.  “Be like this child,” Jesus says, “then you’ll be the greatest.”  Give up hope of having your own way in order to find true joy.  Let your will be molded by others’, most particularly God’s, in order to find your true will.  Lose your life to find it.  Surrender to win.    

This does not mean giving up on your hopes and dreams, and it most definitely does not mean becoming the willing doormat of some self-willed abuser of others.  That would be extinguishing our desire rather than praying it.  It does mean being open to change in our desires, and in being more interested in listening to God and others than in telling them what we think and what we want. 
   

Much of what passes for prayer is a show of strength, an eloquent and theatrical effort to coerce God into giving us what we want, get him on our side, have him accomplish what we desire. Meditation, on the other hand, is to be weak and powerless, often quiet, in the secure confidence of God’s care and love for us.  Listening prayer and centering prayer thus give us the joy of accepting our own weakness and of not having to pretend to be people other then who we actually are.  This is what James would call “right asking.”  

 

The ending of the story of the Loathsome Lady hints about this great process of change and trust.  The loathsome Lady Ragnell’s price for the riddle’s answer is that one of Arthur’s Knights marry her.  Sir Gawain volunteers out of love for Arthur.  The whole court pities him, since Ragnell is so horrid and foul.  On the wedding night, he goes to the wedding chamber to consummate this marriage from Hell, shuddering to even touch, let alone make love to this monster.  As he enters the chamber, she hisses, “Embrace me, husband.”  As he takes her into his arms, he sees her transformed into a beautiful young woman. It turns out this is her true form, but that she has been enchanted to be the Loathsome Lady until she could find a true knight in marriage. 
 
But part of the magic remains.  She says, “You can have me in my true form either by night or by day, but I must return to my cursed hag form at the other time. Do you want me as I am at night, when I am in your arms? Or do you choose me to be beautiful by day, when I will be seen by your friends?”

Gawain thinks for a long time. At last he replies, “This is your life. You must decide.”

And in that moment the spell is broken forever.  His gift of choice grants her complete freedom from the curse and the return of her natural beauty at all times.

Though what women want most is to have their own way, this is also what men want most.  Gawain is a true knight.  He surrenders to the Lady Ragnell three times.  But she is a true Lady, who lets him choose as well three times: when he volunteers to marry her, accepts her embrace, and gives her the choice on days and nights.  In giving up having their own way, they both are changed and find their true heart’s desire. 

 

After the death of his wife Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis was asked whether any of the prayers offered for curing her cancer had changed anything.  He replied, “They changed me.”  

Sisters and brothers, I know that God hears our prayers and sometimes gives us what we ask.  Many of us have been touched by miracles.  And God bids us all to persist in prayer and in asking for what our hearts desire.  But prayer is not a magic trick.   Petitionary prayer is part of a larger life of the spirit, a broader prayer life, where our desires and will are shaped and changed by God, and where we learn again and again acceptance.  

This week, in our daily prayers, let us listen more and ask less.  Let us phrase our petitions not so much as trying to convince God of giving us what we want, but of telling God about our the sad state of our hearts.  And may we always add, “your will, not mine, be done.” 

In the name of God, Amen

Superpowers Jesus? (Proper 19B)

Superpowers Jesus? 

16 September 2012

Proper 19B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

A clip from the British television series Outnumbered went viral a couple of years ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYjfDvg1WgE).  In it, a young boy and his sister ask a priest uncomfortable questions about Jesus:  “When King Herod was trying to kill Baby Jesus, why didn’t Baby Jesus zap him?”  …  Because Herod was an insignificant little speck to Jesus, and Jesus could have squished him with a hippopotamus or something.”  Little sister replies, “Jesus wouldn’t do that, he was meek and mild.  Beside, he knew all he had to do was wait until Herod was in Hell, where he could roast forever until his eyeballs exploded.”    Brother resumes:  “When Jesus was a bit older and the Romans were searching for him, why didn’t Jesus shape shift and become a Roman soldier and wait until they fell asleep and then stab them all to death?”  The priest finds his voice, “Jesus wasn’t a Power Ranger.  God sent Jesus to sacrifice him for our sake.”  “Well, wasn’t that a bit selfish of us?” the boy answers.  Sister adds: “Why couldn’t God have done it a bit differently, like writing everyone a letter and asking them to be a bit better or something bad might happen?”   Big brother: “When Jesus was being crucified, why didn’t he ask God to send a meteorite down and kill all the Roman troops and let him off the cross?”  Priest: “God sacrificed Jesus for us because he was the most precious thing for him.”  Little sister:  “So why then did he kill him?” 

We often, like these annoying children, mistakenly think that Jesus should have superpowers. 

There are plenty of stories in the Bible that might lead us to this conclusion—Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, “torching on” at the Transfiguration and finally, flying up into heaven like Superman at the Ascension. 

But as we have seen again and again in the last weeks, many of the stories about the marvelous deeds of Jesus in the Gospels are told as ways of hinting, from a post-Easter perspective, at who Jesus really is and how he interacts with each of us.  Biblical scholars of all backgrounds agree that the historical Jesus was a faith healer of great renown.  Beyond that, opinions vary.  What is sure is that these stories of wondrous deeds should not be read as if they were in comics of the X-men, Captain America, or Superman. 

Belief in Jesus as a super-hero is belief in an idol.  That’s what today’s Gospel reading is all about.   

Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ.   That means he is the ideal King or Priest of the future promised in the Hebrew scriptures.  This promised Anointed One was to set things right, vindicate the right and punish the wrong, set up God’s kingdom here.  Many believed he would be a military figure to defend God’s people from their foreign oppressors, liberate the nation, and establish a new Davidic monarchy.  Some expected a prophet or priest with wondrous powers to heal the sick, feed the people, and confound the enemy.

The bottom line?  They wanted a Messiah who would fix this broken world in an obvious, clear way that they expected, one that sounds suspiciously like super-powers, maybe not shape-shifting or X-ray vision, but at least the ability to zap enemies.

Peter’s experience of Jesus and his healings leads him to confess that he is the Messiah.  But Jesus quickly tells him that what he expects of this hoped-for future King of Israel is all wrong: the Messiah has to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the leaders of his people, and be killed.

Peter reacts:  “Jesus, you’re out of line not to expect complete and early victory as Messiah.”  Peter wants a superpowers Jesus. 

Jesus’ linking the Messiah with suffering is a completely new idea.  He uses the image of the “Son of Man” found in Daniel 7, a mysterious figure seen in the distance coming in clouds of glory looking something like “a human being” (“a son of man”) who receives kingly dominion over all nations and then destroys the evil kingdoms ruled by “beasts” or wild animals.  He says this figure will suffer, suggesting the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure representing God’s people and their sufferings in history, and never linked to the Messiah there.  Second Isaiah sees the nation’s suffering as not in vain, but rather as a witness to help bring people of all nations to knowledge of the true God, a suffering that is for the benefit of others because it brings the possibility of God’s peace and grace to all.

This linking of the idea of the Messiah and a suffering servant upsets Peter. Jesus is saying “Put away any hope that I am somehow—magically, militarily, or otherwise—going to make the hated Roman oppressors go away, or somehow win over the powerful elites in Jerusalem.”   

The “elders, priests and scribes” there, in greater of lesser degree, collaborate with the Romans. They are the beneficiaries of a huge system of oppression having at its heart the Temple cult, strictly interpreted Law, and the influence that money can buy. The major objects of this system of oppression are the very people whom Jesus has been healing and attracting throughout the Galilean rural areas by preaching the arrival of God’s kingdom with such words as “Blessed are the poor, God’s kingdom belongs to them; blessed are the downtrodden, for they shall inherit the earth.”

No, he says to Peter: “God wants me to go to Jerusalem to confront the powerful. Those powerful people will reject my message. If I go on preaching my message and go to Jerusalem, I will have to suffer and be killed. No superpowers are going to save me from that.  But despite this I still trust in God—on the third day, he will raise me up.”

Jesus is quoting here a poetic expression of hope in God from the book of Hosea, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence” (6:1-2).

Peter just cannot believe what he has just heard. “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked,” he thinks. “Don’t be so negative. Where’s your faith, Jesus?” he says. “How can this be the kingdom of God when evil triumphs by killing you?” he says, “Going with the Messiah means going with the winner.  Be a winner, not a loser.  Use your superpowers.” 

Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.”

Then, as if to underscore the point that it is Rome that is the Super Power, Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

The word “deny” here means disown, renounce claims to ownership. “Pick up your cross” refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. Crucifixion was the Roman execution reserved for revolutionaries, slaves, and bandits who fought against the established order. It was a brutal form of slow torture ending in death, all conducted in public to make sure that the shameful punishment had deterrent effect on anyone else even thinking of challenging Roman power.

So what Jesus means is something like “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me.”

Jesus here is not praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood.  Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

Similarly, Jesus is not here simply predicting in full knowledge of Good Friday and Easter what was going to happen to him.

Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That for me means that He shared our unknowing fear of the future.  It took Good Friday and Easter and then a great deal of reflection and further experience for Jesus’ followers to understand and see the ultimate significance in the words “I will be killed,” “take up your cross and follow me” and “after three days God will raise me up.”

Christians have always felt a little uncomfortable with the fact that Jesus, despite the miracle stories, appears not to have had superpowers.  The doctrine of the occultation of the divinity (the hiding or obscuring if the divinity) and the doctrine of the kenosis, or of Jesus’ emptying out of himself, both attempt to make sense of the contradiction of an Incarnate God who is human in every way but without sin, that is, in every way but without struggling against God to have our own way, without hoping or insisting on having superpowers.

What Jesus here is calling for is this: those who wish to follow him should actually follow him.   Follow God’s call and empty yourself.  Let go, and let God.  Work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when you know it may not do any good.  Do it even if it may ruin you or kill you.  Take up your cross and follow him.   Don’t try to be a superhero or expect a super-hero to help you.  Be willing to put your head in that hangman’s noose.  Follow Jesus.  Empty yourself.

Superheroes use force and flash, shock and awe.  A person carrying his cross loves, simply loves.  Superheroes struggle for outcomes and results.  A cross-carrier simply does the next right thing God puts in front of her, and does not worry about outcomes.  Superheroes work in zero sums. A crucifer trusts that death is not the end, and that in the end all will be well.  If all is not well, then it is not yet the end. 

It is a matter of trust. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is confidence in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything is gonna be OK.” Nor is it “God will zap my enemies and magically make my problems go away.”

Jesus was no superhero, and did not expect the Father to be one.  He accepted and embraced his humanity, and calls us to do the same.  Acceptance is only possible because of trust.  He asks us to trust God even when God calls us to stick our heads in a noose. 

May we all learn acceptance, and trust in God.  In bearing our cross, may we get up off our knees, stop our worship at the idolatrous altar of superheroes and superpowers, and follow Him whose love beacons to us all to follow.  

In His name, Amen.

A Dog Named Hoover (Proper 18B)

A Dog named Hoover

9 September 2012

Proper 18B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

I once had a friend who was facing a pretty horrible situation tell me that he did not feel he could pray and ask for God’s intervention or even sustenance because, as he said, “I’m just too rotten a person.  I’m not even sure there is a God, and if there is, I definitely am not the kind of person he would be interested in helping or listening to.”

The fact that society at large and religions in particular create and define themselves by establishing boundaries can be a real burden to those who find themselves outside of those boundaries.  My friend had a hard time believing in God, and clearly rejected many of the rules and moral strictures he thought were taught by the Church, but curiously had let these seep into his heart and sprout into a sense of guilt and shame that made it hard for him to approach God in prayer. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a person who by all standards is outside the boundaries of the right and proper—he is traveling in the primarily Gentile territory of what is now Southern Lebanon.  In keeping with Mark’s Gospel’s Messianic Secret—the idea that Jesus deliberately kept things on a low key until after his resurrection—he is incognito in a a house.  But a local woman enters and asks him for help. Strike One—women were not supposed to directly engage with strangers who were men.  In Matthew’s telling of this story, she is a Canaanite.  This use of the Old Testament word Canaanite is deliberate, and against the common usage of the period:  she is thus portrayed as an unclean pagan who might be engaging in idolatrous worship possibly involving sexual rites or child sacrifice.  Strike Two.   In Mark’s version of the story, she is a Greek, of mixed Syrian and Phoenician heritage.  A half-breed pagan to boot, coming from the two great oppressors of the Jewish people before the Romans arrived.  Strike Three.  In the telling of the story, she might as well be wearing a bell and calling out before her, unclean, unclean. 

But this gentile woman is worried about her daughter, whose abnormal behavior appears to result from possession by something or someone outside of herself.  The woman has heard that this Jewish wonder-worker Jesus can expel such spirits.  She begs Jesus to cast out the demon. 

Now the way Jesus reacts is quite offensive to us of modern sensibilities.  It was also offensive to ancient sensibilities, and that is the reason that Luke drops this story from those he borrows from Mark’s Gospel.

In Matthew, Jesus ignores her.  It is almost like he cannot hear her. 

She only gets louder. 

In the Creed, we say that we believe that God became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human in the person of Jesus.  But we usually don’t like to see Jesus as quite this human.  Here he seems to be cold and unfeeling. As she gets louder, he ignores her all the more.  

His reaction is strange, given the fact that he is traveling in what is primarily Gentile country.  The verses preceding this story, which we read last week, tell of Jesus breaking down barriers of clean and unclean in Jewish Law.  The gist of many of his parables seems to be the overflowing abundance of God's goodness and grace.  But he remains silent. 

When the disciples just can’t bear the commotion any longer and ask Jesus to break his silence and just send the woman away, his reply is that is he is focused on his work in calling his fellow Jews to change their hearts and ways, and can’t take the time for this woman.  She begs him directly, “Lord, help me.” 

His reply here is no longer simply cold and unfeeling: “I can’t take food set aside for the children and throw it away for dogs to eat.”  The slur implied by the word dogs, seems downright racist and rooted in religious bigotry.  

Christians have tried to explain away the slur, or take it off of Jesus’ lips ever since:  As I said before, Luke simply deletes the story and does not include it in his Gospel.  Some of the Church Fathers say that Jesus was simply testing the woman’s faith by using the slur ironically to see if she would persist (as if this makes the slur all that less offensive!)  Others have tried to take the sting out of the phrase by noting that the Greek word used in the text is a diminutive kynarios “little dog,” instead of the more common kynos “dog.”   So Jesus presumably would be saying,  “It’s wrong to take babies’ food and give it to puppies.”   But again, I don’t think this necessarily makes the slur less offensive.  

Again, Jesus' talk here about the economy of divine blessing almost as if it were a zero sum game is strange.  In his previous feeding of the crowd (including children), there was a ridiculous overabundance of leftovers.  But the point appears to be that Jesus is so focused on his mission to fellow Jews that he cannot hear the woman.  Matthew and Mark both do not appear to notice the ugliness of the scene as it unfolds.  

My friend, with his fear to pray to God because he was somehow unworthy, or beyond the bounds of grace, would feel right at home with this portrayal of a Jesus wholly consumed by boundaries and limits. 

But the Canaanite woman persists. She takes Jesus’ harsh word and turns it on its head with a bit of wit and chutzpah:  “Oh, but dogs under the table can eat the crumbs that fall, can’t they?”  It is as if he had said, "this food is too good for you, you dogs," and she had replied, "So I'm a dog.  Don't call me Rover, call me Hoover.  'Cuz I can hoover up all those scraps just as they fall from your table!"   This kind of “battle of the wits” exchange is seen in Middle Eastern and Arab literature regularly, and is akin to the Rap world’s commonplace of a contest of insult and replying insult (“Yo’ momma is so fat that…..” “Oh yeah?  Well yo’ momma…”)

Jesus’ reply in Matthew is amazing.  “Great is your faith, woman!”  The rhetoric and word order stresses GREAT.  “You are a GIANT in faith, lady.  Finally, I find someone who gets it, and surprise, surprise, she’s a gentile!  She’s a Canaanite! She’s a she!”

The exorcism is performed at a distance, almost by divine remote control, just like in the two other stories of  Jesus healing at a distance, the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt. 8:5-13) and of the royal official’s son (John 4:46-54).   Note in all cases, the healing at a distance is done for people seen as beyond the pale.  These are stories about the far reach of Jesus’ grace, not about the worthiness or lack thereof of the recipients.  In the next story in Mark, read today, Jesus proceeds into the Decapolis, also gentile territory, and there heals a deaf man.  No longer does he seem exclusively focused on Jews. 

Reading this story as if the Syro-Phoenician woman is a model of faith for us to follow misses the point:  this is not a story trying to say that if only your faith were great enough, God will hear your prayers and grant you your wishes.  Faith here is not a magic trick.   In such magical thinking lies only pain—because when bad things happen to people, whether they are good people or bad people, this way of thinking chalks it up as the fault of those who did not get their way with God.  And if good things happen, then it is the result of the successful use of the trick.  Such a view reduces the Lord’s Book of Blessings to simply a Book of Spells.  

Put bluntly, this story isn’t about you, and about whether you are worthy or faithful enough for God’s blessings.  The focus of the story is Jesus, not the woman.   In this scene, Jesus, who loves  a good joke and regularly tells parables with brutally witty edges, is bested in a contest of wit by the wise-cracking woman who is desperate for her child’s health.  She takes the callous slur Jesus has unthinkingly adopted from his upbringing and how he has been taught about what is right, and turns it on its head.  Jesus in response, instead of glowering and shouting  “BLASHPEMY, OFF WITH YOU, PAGAN WOMAN!” and blasting her right then and there, he laughs out loud, sees he has been had, and recognizes the faith, the trust, in the woman’s heart that drives her persistence and audacity. 

And so he turns back from—repents, as it were—of the casual callousness that his focus on his mission and on the boundaries his religion has set.  To be sure, we believe that Jesus was like us in all things but sin.  He is not so much turning from sin here as he is opening himself further to the unexplored country to which God is leading him.  This scene anticipates the great shift in the Christian faith from mission only to Jews to mission to all.  It anticipates the great vision of St. Paul where “In Christ, there is no Jew nor Gentile, no slave nor free, no woman nor man.”

To me it is very comforting to think that Jesus could be shamed by a joke into changing his view and learn thereby to spread God’s grace more widely than he previously had thought appropriate. 

To me it is very comforting to think that a Canaanite half-breed pushy woman talking out of turn and beyond the bounds of propriety could get the best of Jesus and as a result Jesus would bless her simply because of who and what he was, and would bless her despite, not because of, who and what she was. 

None of us should feel like my friend, afraid and ashamed to approach God when we need God.  Maybe a little bit of pushy persistence on our part is in order, a bit more witty and humorous audacity.    The woman was desperate and willing to go all out on the off chance that what she heard about Jesus as a healer was true.  When God appears forbidding and unwelcoming to us, that is precisely the time we need to remember the words of the prayer, “O God, whose nature is always to have mercy” and that, despite whatever it may be we think separates us from his grace.  That is precisely the time that we, like this unclean foreign woman, this dog named Hoover, need to focus on the Mercy of God rather than on the boundaries that exclude us, or what people say about God's judgment. 

In the name of God, Amen