The Power and the Wisdom (Epiphany 3A)

He Qi, The Calling of the Disciples

The Power and the Wisdom
Homily delivered the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
22 January 2017; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

In all the hoopla and noise this week, one small detail caught my attention.  It was the homily given by Southern Baptist pastor the Rev. Robert Jefress, at the pre-inaugural prayer service held at St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street from the White House.  He compared the new President to the Biblical figure Nehemiah, who helped rebuild the Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile:  “[T]he first step of rebuilding the nation was the building of a great wall. God instructed Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens from enemy attack. You see, God is NOT against building walls!”  He then urged the President to boldly work for his goals and not to be deterred by critics.

I praise Mr. Jefress for urging the new President to be faithful in trying to build up the nation and not lose courage in his efforts to do what he believes is right.  But I take exception to this use of scripture.  I preached on wall-building about a year and a half ago, and pointed out that the Prophet Amos, viewed as an illegal alien from south of the border by the ministers in the pay of the King of Israel, taught clearly that walls can be crooked: the societies they protect can be corrupt and unjust.  Amos in vision was told to apply the plumb line to Israel, to show how far it deviated from upright.  The plumb line was fairness, justice, and compassion.  It was seeing the humanity of those whom society had judged not worthy of consideration. This was Lord’s standard then and it is the standard God sets for us today. 

Ezra and Nehemiah, among all the prophets, are perhaps the most concerned with ritual and ethnic purity and the least concerned with social justice. They are the farthest from the teachings of our Lord, who taught that caring for the most vulnerable was key to our calling, and said that when all was said and done, how we treat “the least of these, your brothers and sisters” is what divides the sheep and the goats on judgment day.  Any teacher who uses Nehemiah as a model for anyone without further qualification has a deeply flawed understanding of scripture. When someone says, “the Bible says,” you should always ask, “and what else does the Bible say?”  It is only by comparing the differing tendencies of various parts of scripture that we come to understand where the heart of scripture lies.  It is not Ezra and Nehemiah.  In the Hebrew scriptures, it is in the social justice message of the major prophets.  In all of scripture, it is in the teachings of Jesus.

Today’s lessons, once again, are about light.  Isaiah is writing in the 730s BCE.  A new thing in history had appeared: the first transnational military Empire, Assyria under its aggressive new leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who was conquering all the Middle East.  Whole countries simply ceased to exist, their leaders slaughtered and populations deported far away in the name of national security and political order.  Among the first in Palestine were the regions Zebulun and Napthali, near the Sea of Galilee, turned into an Assyrian province early on.   Eventually, all of the Northern Kingdom would disappear.

Isaiah says, “In past days, [God] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future, he will make glorious … Galilee of the gentiles.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”  This light will bring liberation: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.”  Gideon’s defeat of the huge army of Midian with just 300 warriors was for these people an icon of victory against overwhelming odds. God is the one who gives victory and light—this is the message too of today’s Psalm. 

Zebulun and Naphthali, along with the rest of the North, were never reconstituted historically—they became the proverbial “lost ten tribes.”  This left a feeling of an unfulfilled prophecy or promise: this is why the Gospel writers make such a big deal over the fact that it was in Galilee that Jesus began and performed most of his ministry.  The great light seen by those who sat in darkness, the great liberator, is understood as Christ. 

Christ’s ultimate victory over death and the grave is also seen by St. Paul as a victory against overwhelming odds.  In today’s epistle, he argues against divisions and factions in the Church, divisions based in clever arguments, appeals to wisdom, authority, and group identity.  Christ and no one else is the source of unity, Paul says.  That’s why using Christ as an identity group banner is so wrong.  Paul says true unity comes from the “power of Christ’s cross.”  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  A few sentences later, he adds, “[W]e proclaim Christ on the cross, a stumbling block … and foolishness” to the two main identity groups of his world.  But to those who follow Jesus, regardless of identity and background, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18, 23-25)

Jesus, dying on a public torture board of the Empire, is strong?  Christ, abused and outcast, is wiser than the deepest tradition of the sages?  Paul admits it:  if you don’t have faith in Christ the cross can only be seen as nonsense.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was the religion of the weak, of victims, or losers.  Its emphasis on compassion and pity, he said, simply put a guilt trip on the strong and victorious, who really had nothing to be ashamed of.  The will to power was all that mattered, not artificial concepts of sin and noble suffering.  God on the cross, for him, indeed was a god who was dead.  Any other way of seeing the cross, he said, was self-deception and foolishness.  This idea was taken up fully by objectivist writer Ayn Rand, who instead of supermen made free by the will to power and victim sub-humans rather speaks of the “producers,” and “creators” of society and wealth on the one side, and “parasites” and the dregs on the other.    

For Nietzche and Rand, it’s all about the strong overcoming the weak, the winners beating the losers. It's about "really great" people, "quality" people, casting aside and excluding "losers."  

For Christ, it’s all about welcoming, inclusion, and service.  It’s about the strength found in vulnerability.  It’s about wisdom in marginalization. As Oscar Romero once taught, “only eyes that have cried can see certain things.”   It is those who sit in darkness that see the Great Light. 

Our confident hope is that in the end, right and justice, truth and love will prevail.  If they have not yet prevailed, that is because it is not yet the end.   Nikos Kazantzakis, in his great novel The Last Temptation of Christ, says, “A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, despairs. You’ll ask me why. It is because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

 Tomorrow is the birthday of one of my heroes, fighter pilot John Boyd, who died in 2007 at the age of 70.  Boyd was the father of the F-16 because of his mathematical formulas on jet performance, and designed the basic “right hook” strategy that won the first Gulf War.  He is called the father of modern information-based warfare because of his theory of operational decision-making: the OODA loop of observation, orientation, decision, and action.  Though he was an air force major, he is beloved in the U.S. Marine Corps because of his contributions to the theory of modern warfare.  He is a hero of mine because he contributed so much to our nation, and because as an extremely gifted intellect, he struggled against bureaucratic lethargy and stupidity all his life. 

But here’s the thing:  every hero has an Achilles heel.  When you read Boyd’s biography, you realize that this is a man who could only relate to other people as adversaries or fawning devotees.  He marked people as either his enemies or his acolytes.  His whole life was a constant struggle against adversaries, enemies, except for those few moments when he was surrounded by people he identified as on his side, people who “got it.”  As effective as he was in advancing conflict theory in warfare and litigation, his life left a sad tide of human wreckage in his wake.  Marriage and family went well for him as long as all were subordinate to his will and judgment.   When they were not, relationships went to pieces, family cut off any ties with him, and former friends and colleagues abandoned him.  That's one of the reasons he is loved in the Marine Corps and not the Air Force.  Air Force colleagues learned early on that this man was too combative to be a good partner. 

Living life as one great conflict and struggle for power is the shortest way for making life a hell on earth.  Those who live by the sword die by the sword.  A winner of the rat race is still a rat.  Nietzche and Rand’s argument for striving to be a winner, quality people, at all costs is the death of our humanity.  Says Jesus, “those who seek their life will lose it and those who give up their life will win it.”

Sisters and brothers:  the cross is the way we follow Jesus: suffering for others, accepting shame, pain, and even death in pursuit of God’s reign.  But Christ on the cross is the power and wisdom of God.  We may want an easier, softer, more ego-flattering path.  But there is none.   On the way of the cross, we experience death and sit in darkness.  Embracing and accepting the way of the cross is the way we can get out of the rat race, out of the constant division, conflict, and turmoil.  Because on it, even as we sit in darkness, we see a great light.

In the name of Christ, Amen.