The Great Uncovering (Proper 28B)

“The Great Uncovering”

18 November 2012

Proper 28B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

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

Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

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

When I was in second grade, my teacher suggested to my mother that I see an optometrist.  I was always sitting way too close to the blackboard and burying my face in any book I was reading.  She suspected I was near-sighted and needed eyeglasses.  I was pretty suspicious.  I had once put on my mother’s glasses; they just made things look blurry and unrecognizable.   My teacher, however, was right.  When I first left the optometrist’s office with my new thick-lensed horned-rimmed glasses on, I was stunned.  There, on all the trees across the street, were branches wreathed in hundred of individual leaves, rather than general masses of green!  There, in the reddish wall of the building across from my parents’ office machines store, were hundreds of individual bricks framed by white mortar! 

Years later it was similar, when I first wore polarized sunglasses.  I had been working as a life guard and could never see what was going on under the water because of the surface glare.  I bought clip-on Foster Grant polarized lenses.  It was magic.  Suddenly, the glare was gone and I could see everything clearly.  Inside, however, they made everything dark and difficult to see.     

When I first looked into the night sky with a telescope I was also pleasantly surprised: what once had been a mere star, turned out to be a planet with rings or striped bands or a distant galactic nebula.  But I could not make the telescope help me see anything up close that I wanted to examine.     

Lenses, filters, magnifiers:  they change our vision and make what was difficult to descry clear.   They give can give differentiation where once was sameness, clarity and detail where once was vagueness, or sometimes simply alter our view entirely and make us aware of reality that we never would have guessed.  In a real way, they uncover what was always there, but lay it bare before our eyes.    But they all need to be used in the right context, for the right need. 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture and Gospel lesson are examples of what scholars call apocalyptic writings.    The Greek word apokalypsis means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden.   The question is: what do they uncover?

Early Jewish writings like the Book of Daniel and the non-canonical Book of Enoch, as well as Christian writings like the Apocalypse or Revelation of John, are included in the genre.  Sections of other books sometimes take on characteristics of this type of writing as well.  The prime example of this is the “Little Apocalypse” of Chapter 13 of Mark, together with its parallels in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.

This literature is rich is images—often symbolic figures, numbers, angels, and animals—and has, over the centuries, inspired a lot of varied interpretation.   Much of the imagery in these books seems disturbed or obsessive—a third of the sea or the moon turning to blood here, the stars falling from heaven and killing most living things there, the “whore of all the earth” fornicating with the kings of all nations here, a multi-headed beast covered with eyes and horns devouring the righteous there.  This has led, over the centuries, to many interpreters taking this literature as if it were television-like predictions of coming events in world history and especially what will happen when this world system comes to an end. 

In the year 1,000, we had penitentes running all over Europe whipping themselves and declaring the end of the world with such images.  In the 1970s, we had “the Late Great Planet Earth”; today we have the Left Behind novels.

But this reading completely misunderstands apocalyptic, and goes against Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel.   

Just before Jesus’ arrest, Jesus and his disciples are at the Temple in Jerusalem.  It is pretty impressive: 10 stories high, with masonry stones embellished with smaller carved jewels glittering in the sun, gold leaf covering large parts of it, truly a marvel.  A disciple says, “Wow! Look at that, Jesus! Isn’t that impressive?”   Jesus replies by dismissing it all and saying, “Don’t get too exited.  Soon not one stone there will be left standing on another.  It’s all going down.”   Later, when they are on the Mount of Olives across the Kidron valley opposite the Temple Mount, with a panoramic view of the complex, the other disciples ask him about this.  Such large buildings, such destruction, just like those horrible scenes in Daniel or the later parts of Ezekiel.  It is destruction on an apocalyptic level, so they ask him how his prediction fits into the weeks, days, and schemes, the numerology and timetables of apocalyptic books: when will this destruction happen, when is the end of the world? What will be the signs preceding it?

Jesus explains that such a scorecard approach to end-time signs is pointless—too many people abuse such imagery for their own advantage (“many will come and say…”).  He says they shouldn’t be too alarmed or overly excited by the appearance of apocalyptic standard stage props of “wars and rumors of wars” or natural catastrophes.  Such things, he says, are “but the beginning of the birthpangs,” that is, Braxton-Hicks’ contractions or false labor. Jesus is saying, “Don’t worry too much about any of these things.  They’re just a false alarm.  Keep calm and carry on!”  

The fact is, Apocalyptic is primarily about events and people in the world of its authors, not our day.  The Revelation of John, the classic Christian Apocalypse, itself says that it is about things that will "come to pass soon"  (Rev 1:1).   That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer. 

What is uncovered in apocalyptic is this: God's purposes and the final outcome of things when all is said and done, not "coming events."

Apocalyptic is literature written during persecution.  It seeks to understand the sufferings of the righteous and encourage them to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors.  In John’s Revelation, these are Romans under the Emperors Nero and Domitian, who put Christians in the arena to be torn apart by wild animals because they declined to offer incense to a statue of the Emperor.  In the Book of Daniel, they are Greek Syrians under Antiochus who flayed alive or boiled in oil whole families simply because they kept the Law of Moses.

Apocalyptic puts its message in rich images and code so that the readers can read it without the censors and secret police catching on and then torturing and executing them.  It is very much about “current events” as seen by the author.  It looks to the future to argue that no matter how bad things get, in the end God and the righteous will triumph and all the suffering will have been worth it.

These books read sometimes as if a highly disturbed person wrote them.  That is because the authors were people traumatized by persecution and horrible faith-devouring events.  And therein lies the importance of these writings to us.   Whatever the specifics of what hardships we may have to go through, whatever the final consummation of history that still waits us, we must remember that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of the Good.

Jesus’ “false alarm!” approach here suggests that this is the real worth of Apocalyptic speculation.  I think he would see its basic message as the same as Winston Churchill’s famous line from World War II, “If you are going through hell, then keep on going!” 

Jesus denies that apocalyptic should be read as a coded playbook of good guys versus bad guys.

Whenever anything horrible happens, no matter what, count on it that someone somewhere will mark it up as an act of God, as some punishment for some bad thing, the fault of some bad group of other people.  You know what I’m talking about.   

Pat Robertson said the 2010 Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment on Haitians’ ‘historic pact with the Devil’, dredging up a bit of Haitian revolutionary war propaganda from two centuries ago.   In 2001, Jerry Falwell blamed the 9-11 attacks also on the victims, saying that God was punishing America for lax sexual morality and casual acceptance of abortion.  The severity of Hurricane Sandy this last month was also in some quarters attributed to a Deity angry with America’s supposed moral laxness, rather than on climate change.  Louis Crew, founder of the GBLT-supporting Episcopal ministry group Integrity, says that he personally over the years has been blamed for earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires, all supposedly God’s punishments for Louie’s depravities.  “Oh, if only I had such power!” he wistfully muses. 

Jesus wants nothing to do with such nonsense.  He tells us in today’s Gospel, “Don’t worry about apocalyptic—just keep calm and carry on!  God’s kingdom is coming, and is in our midst now.  Don’t demonize others and don’t blame God for bad stuff.” 

Once, a man born blind was pointed out to him:  “Was it his parents sin or his that caused this?”  “Neither,” he said  (John 9:3).

Another time people came to him and said,  “Did you hear that the Romans massacred those countrymen of yours who were worshipping in the Temple?  Their own blood was mixed with that of the animals they were sacrificing!  What did they do that was so bad that God punished them this way?”  “They did nothing any worse than anyone else,” he replies, and continues,  “What about those people who died in the Tower of Siloam when it collapsed?  They were no worse than anyone else.”  “The lesson we should take here,” says Jesus, “is not that they were particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke 13:1-5).  

Apocalyptic is a lens to help people through bad, horrible times.  Its vision amid persecution of a bright future city of God where God will wipe away every tear is like my clear vision of those leaves and bricks after years of fuzziness.  Trying to turn Apocalyptic into something it is not, into predictive television of coming events, is like me putting on my mother’s glasses—it will only distort the world and bring more blindness, not clarity.

Jesus is saying here that we should take the traumatic events we experience, whether war or natural disasters, as occasions for drawing closer to others, for helping them, for being helped by them.  This is the heart of the coming of the Kingdom.  Anything else is stageprops that can and will be used by people wanting somehow to profit from it all. 

In the coming week, I would like you to ask yourself how you react to bad things in life.  Do you blame God for them, or say God is punishing someone, either you or some other group?  In prayer, seek ways to help use the traumas you experience or witness as ways to draw closer to others.  Seek ways to thus bring closer the great day when God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Question from Reader-- The Book of Revelation

A New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:1-6) 
Fontaine, Nicholas.  L’histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament.  Paris, 1670.

Dear Father Tony: 

I have heard many “liberal” teachers and Bible commentators say that the Book of Revelation is not about the future, but about things that happened during the author’s lifetime during the Roman Empire.  But one of my favorite passages is the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:1-6.  That scene is clearly a description of a future event.  So what gives?  Books like “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the “Left Behind” series seem to make the Revelation into a preview of coming events.  Is it or isn’t it about the future?   -- Just Curious  (via e-mail)

JC-- 

A very good question indeed.

As the Revelation says itself, it is about things that will "come to pass soon"  (Rev 1:1).   That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer. 

Book of Revelation is a good example of Apocalyptic literature, a style of writing in Judaism (and, later, Christianity) common in the Macchabean and Second Temple Jewish periods.  The Greek word apokalypsis means "an uncovering" or a "revealing."  What is uncovered is God's purposes and the final direction for things, not "coming events."

Apocalytpic literature is persecution literature.  It seeks to understand present (to the author) persecution of the righteous and encourage resistance to the persecutors.  It takes the rich, symbolic imagery of late prophetic literature (like Ezekiel) and develops it into a code to communicate with its readers. The authors of Apocalyptic write to encourage their readers to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors who persecute the faithful, whether the persecutors were Romans under the Emperor Domitian--as in Revelation--or the Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes—as in Daniel.  They place it all in rich images and code so that the readers can get the message without the censors and secret police of the oppressing power catching on and then torturing and executing the author and readers.  It is thus very much about "current events" as seen by the author.  It looks to the future and uses the rich symbolic language to argue that no matter how bad things get, in the end God and the righteous will triumph and all the suffering will be vindicated.  It is only about the future in the sense of its talking about the ultimate ends of God and the final triumph of Good.  It is NOT a key-word coded guidebook to previews of coming events in the distant future. 

The 666 symbol, for instance, is almost certainly code for Nero and a belief that Domitian was Nero come alive again ("Nero Caesar" in Aramaic at that time has the numerical value 666-- Aramaic and Hebrew, like Latin, gave numerical values to letters of the alphabet.)  Because the imagery of this book is so rich and loaded with emotion, over the centuries people have applied its various images to people and events in their age, always with the idea that God’s ultimate triumph would happen soon.   Many people today do the same thing, and thus believe these books predict in order specific events of our day.  I suspect that they will be shown to be as wrong in their specific prediction of coming events based on this analysis as the people over the ages who have made the same arguments in centuries past. 

But that doesn’t mean these books aren’t valuable.  Whatever the specifics of the final consummation of history that still waits us, we must remember that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of God.

Hope this helps.

T+

A Sign in our Hearts (Second Lent)

Detail, Jan van Eyck, The Crucifixion. c. 1420-25.

Second Sunday of Lent (Year B)
8th March 2009 10:00 am Eucharist
Discovery Bay Church,
daughter church of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Readings: Gen 17:1-7, 15-16; Psa 22:23-end; Rom 4:13-end; Mark 8:31-end

A Sign in Our Hearts

God, breathe into us a desire to change—
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark tells the story of what happens just after Peter first tells Jesus that he believes that he is the Messiah. In it, Jesus is quick to tell Peter that what he has been taught about this hoped-for future King of Israel is wrong. Contrary to common expectations of the Messiah, Jesus tells Peter that the Messiah he has just confessed has to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and social leaders of his people, and be killed. Peter reacts strongly to what Jesus has said and rebukes him. That means he tells Jesus off, he blasts him for being out of line.

St. Peter confesses Jesus as Christ

Clearly what Jesus is saying here is something unexpected, something new. Most of Jesus’ contemporaries draw their image of the Messiah from combining a series of prophetic and apocalyptic scriptural texts that together describe the ideal future David as a conquering hero for his people and his God, who sets up a new, just government and society that exerts world hegemony--the kingdom of God.

Jesus, in contrast, draws a very different picture of what a Messiah is by linking the idea of “Son of Man” with the idea of “suffering.” The first comes from the image of the mysterious figure in Daniel 7 who is 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. The other image suggests, though it does not directly refer to, the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure probably representing God’s people and their sufferings in history. Second Isaiah sees this 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.

It is the linking of these two disparate ideas—the idea of the Messiah and suffering—that upsets Peter. Jesus is telling him to put away any hope that Jesus is 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 degrees, 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 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.”

The Sermon on the Mount

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 if I go to Jerusalem as God wants, I will have to suffer, I will be have to killed. But despite this I still trust in God—on the third day, he will raise me up.

Jesus is using here an expression of trust 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).

That is why Peter gets so upset. I imagine that he just cannot believe what he has just heard. “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked” he says. “Don’t be so negative. Prospects can’t be so glum as that, especially with God in charge” he says. “Where’s your faith, Jesus?” he says. “How can this be the kingdom of God when evil triumphs by killing you?” he says. Or he might be saying, “Then just go a little easier on it, okay? You don’t have to go to Jerusalem. God will be happy with you for what you have already done.”

Jesus’s reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.” He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear witness of the Kingdom of God to the authorities, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. It is in their nature that they must respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering in the call despite it all. To think or feel otherwise is a defection from God’s intent, and to argue for such opposition to God’s will as Peter has done is to present temptation, just like the devil.

Then, as if to underscore the point that it is the Romans who are the ultimate powers-that-be, Mark tells us that Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Feodor Andrejeitsch Bronnikov "The Damned Field, Execution place in the Roman Empire" 1878

The word “deny” here means disown, renounce claims to ownership. “Picking 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.”

We often misread what Jesus is saying here. We think he is praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed. Or we think that Jesus had perfect knowledge of what was going to happen, and that he is referring here to his own (future) crucifixion and resurrection that any of his followers, reading the story after the fact, automatically think of. In this wrong understanding, Jesus is telling us to suffer for other people’s wrongs like he was to suffer for the sins of others.

Jesus here has no such idea in mind at all. 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.

What Jesus is calling for is this: He is calling for those who wish to follow him to actually follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high price.

The difference between Jesus and Peter here is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and grasps at that expectation, to the point of getting upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.

There is a lesson is this for us, and it is a basic lesson of the Old Testament and Epistle readings today, as well. It is the matter of trust. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is trust in God, in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything will be OK.” Nor is it “things have to go well for me, because God owes it to me and I deserve it.”

God's Covenant with Abraham

Saint Paul in today’s epistle says that God establishes his promise to Abraham even before Abraham has shown a sign of that promise by making a seal of it in his flesh by the rite of circumcision. He says that the key is that “Abraham trusted in God” despite all the evidence around him that God’s promise could not be fulfilled. Later in the same letter, Paul says that nothing can separate us from the love of God even as he lists all sorts of things that may go wrong. Again, the key is trust. For him, trust in God is a response to God’s loving act in reaching out to us. It is a seal in our hearts even more real and enduring than the seal that Abraham put into his flesh by the rite of circumcision to show his acceptance of God’s covenant.

God's Covenant with Abraham

Jesus asks his disciples to risk death and not worry about it by following him as he followed God. He asks us to trust God because of who God is, and his promises to us. He asks for single-minded trust in God. He asks us to place this seal in our hearts.

Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.

May we all learn to so trust in God.

In the name of God, Amen.

The Bible--A Mixed Bag

The Bible -- A Mixed Bag
2nd Sunday before Advent, 16 Nov. 2008
Choral Evensong, St. John’s Cathedral Hong Kong
CoE Year A Lectionary Readings appointed for additional Sunday Services
1 Kings 1.15-40; Revelation 1.4-18

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

You have to be struck by the great variety of material that is found in what we call the Holy Bible. There are legal codes. There is religious history and the retelling of legends (sometimes multiple retellings of varying forms of the same story). There are chapters of genealogical tables of kings long dead, as well as of what appear to be legendary forerunners of humanity. In the Psalms, you find poems clearly meant to be recited in rituals of the Jewish Temple. There are also personal laments and prayers. There are stories—stories of noble people following God at great sacrifice, but more often, of typical ordinary people whose behavior falls far below even the minimal standards of “niceness” in today’s society. There is even an erotic poem, albeit one that the compilers of the collection later took to be religious allegory, the Song of Solomon.

The morality and faith expressed in differing parts of this hugely diverse collection of writings also varies widely. Frankly, we can on occasion be shocked at what we sometimes find there, even apart from the evil deeds narrated and clearly condemned by the narrator.

In the Old Testament, the holding of women and children as chattel to be used as one chooses is seen as normal and acceptable to some biblical writers. Genocide is portrayed as “holy” war required by God by another. Polygamy and concubinage by the forebears and great kings of Israel and Judah are seen in some texts as signs of prosperity and power—evidence of God’s favor. Other texts preach xenophobia and exclusion, if not outright hatred, of foreigners. The New Testament is not itself innocent here: some of its passages teach as a standard the subordination of women and slaves, and see both groups as chattels in part of a God-ordained order. Some of the four Gospels seem to seek to paper over Roman responsibility for the death of Jesus by blaming this example of the most Roman form of execution on the Jewish religious authorities; one even seems to apply this blame it to all subsequent Jews. None of these texts are examples of our best values at work.

Even in the Psalter, the poetic collection we Christians tend to see as devotional and use in our morning and evening prayers, contains some pretty harsh stuff. Psalm 137 says, O Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who pays you back with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your babies and dashes them against the rock!” (vv 8-9). And each time I hear the exquisite Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, I am jolted by the mean-spiritedness of the line “you spread a banquet table before me—while my enemies have to stand there and watch it!”

But there are moments of bliss and ecstasy in this collection as well, and great moments of unswerving and unsparing moral clarity. The very fact that it is other biblical authors who condemn the values held by some of them is evidence of God’s work in the world, and in the production of this collection of ancient writings. Throughout the biblical record, there is trust in a God who acts and approaches his people at whatever pathetic level they may be. There is hope in ultimate intervention by this God to change what is wrong in the world, and make things right. The New Testament Gospels tell the story of what they see as God’s definitive act to do this: the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death. Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels routinely condemn fear and hatred of the foreign, legalism and the use of religion to oppress others, and tell again and again of a loving God who pours out his love and grace upon all, regardless of their condition or origin.

When we read the whole of this baggy, loose, and at times contradictory collection, it becomes clear that it impossible to say that each and every statement in scripture reflects God’s will for us.

Some sayings, passages, or teachings there, though perhaps originally intended to express what the author thought was God’s will, are within the context of the whole collection clearly preserved as bad examples, or reassurance that even God’s people can be seriously flawed.

Others, in contrast, show with great clarity what God’s intention is: the parables of Jesus, the profound hope of the second half of the book of Isaiah, the stories of grace, love, and faith—like Ruth, or Job—within the larger context of human tragedy and horror. The stories of scripture, and the great variety of emotions expressed in the poetry of the Bible, tell us that it is O.K. to be human, but not O.K. to refuse to listen to God’s call to be something better than we are. Sometimes the change is immediate, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, sometimes a gradual process, like the gradual historical effects of God’s interaction with his people over time in terms of their belief systems.

Martin Luther talked about the need for a “canon within the canon,” when it comes to interpreting the Bible and applying it to people in present circumstances. What he means by this is that we need a sense of what books and passages should be given priority in interpreting the whole so that we can sort out and make sense of such inharmonious, if not downright contradictory doctrine and ethics that one finds in the Bible. Luther never would have argued this had he believed simply that all parts of the Bible were equally God’s word.

Scripture thus is not so much God’s thoughts written down, as they are the field notes of God’s people over the ages. They establish a dialogue with believers of all ages. It is in this sense of the Bible as a work of the believing community inspired and led by God, despite their weakness and occasional detours, that we, the believing community that produced and is also the product of the Bible, can affirm with the English reformers that the Holy Scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation.

When you look at the two readings this evening, we find two good examples of this diversity of writing style and theological framework. I’m sure that some of you while hearing them read wondered at their apparent randomness and seeming irrelevancy. Who cares about the court intrigues of a petty middle-Eastern king who reigned about 3,000 years ago? And what possible importance to us can the visions and dreams of a seer living under the persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century C.E. have?

But a common theme ties them together—God’s role in human life and history. It is an issue that remains important for us today. One has only to think of what a fix the American television evangelist Pat Robertson got himself into in 2001—trying to follow the OT prophetic model of diving God’s intention and purposes in events around us, Robertson said that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were punishment meted out by God on an immoral and hedonistic America. Public reaction was swift and unsparing. How could a man of God say that something so evil as deadly attacks on unarmed civilians be something that God had done? Robertson had to apologize within days, but one wonders whether he ever understood the bad theology behind his interpretation of events. More recently, I have heard some of my compatriots express their belief that the election of Barack Obama was, variously, either an act of God or the first move of the anti-Christ.

My point is that people still want to see God’s hand in history, but are very divided about how to determine where God’s hand is, and what God’s intention is.

The two scriptural texts we read this evening provide two very different examples of ways that believers in the past have answered the question “what is God’s role in history?”

Nathan, Bathsheba, Solomon and Abishag at David's deathbed.
Late Medieval Bible miniature.

The Old Testament reading about the accession of King Solomon to his father David’s throne is from the Book of Kings. This book is part of what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History—that great retelling of the history of the people of Israel from a religious viewpoint that takes up about a quarter of the Hebrew Scriptures. Starting with the book of Deuteronomy, it includes Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings. It largely takes the form of narratives about the weal and woe of the nation. Its author sees the nation’s well being as depending wholly and directly upon its religious health. Its author believes that if you follow God’s commandments as found in the Law, you will be blessed directly as a result of this: you will become wealthier, healthier, more powerful, more secure, and happier in all things. If you disobey God’s Law, you will be punished for it: you will lose your wealth, your family, your health, your national peace and power.

Needless to say, this view has some problems with it—sometimes bad things happen to good people and cannot be explained. The wicked can prosper, and the righteous be oppressed and die unjust deaths. But this is the moral view taken by the Deuteronomistic History nonetheless, because in the author’s world, most religions believed there was little connection between one’s worship of a god—any god—and the need for one to follow ethical prescriptions. Religion in large part was ritual or magic, and the Deuteronomic History’s view God will bless you if you do what’s right and curse you if you do what’s wrong—though it may appear at times naïve to us and overly simple—was an important step in the historical development of ethical monotheism.

In the parts of the Deuteronomistic History dealing with David and Solomon, a major measure of the religious health of the nation is the centralization and standardization of Yahweh worship in a single location—the Temple in Jerusalem that Solomon was to build. This is seen as important to separating the worship of Yahweh from that of the various fertility and wealth deities of ancient Palestine. So the story about Solomon’s accession to the throne at David’s death was religiously very important to the author.

It is a story of court intrigue, hidden factions, and royal glory to the winners and death to the losers. To understand it, you have to go back up a bit and read the whole story.

David, at the height of his power, succumbed to his impetuous and lustful self by imposing himself on the young wife of a junior officer—a foreigner—in David’s army. Her name is Bathesheba, his Uriah. When Bathsheba becomes pregnant by David, David arranges for the death of Uriah and then marries Bathesheba. The prophet Nathan then condemns David for his adultery and murder, predicting that David’s reign would henceforth be plagued with bloodshed and disaster. The baby dies, and David repents. Bathsheba then becomes pregnant again, and gives birth to Solomon. He is clearly a minor son, child of a lesser wife. But as the narrator says, “The Lord loved him” and Nathan comes to name the child.

David’s proper heir is a man named Amnon, who in the telling of the story has all of David’s faults—impetuosity, lust—and none of his virtues. He rapes one of his half-sisters, Tamar. Her brother is another son of David named Absalom. Absalom plots revenge for two years, then kills Amnon. After a short exile, he is reconciled to David, and becomes David’s designated heir. But he can’t wait for David to die, and rebels, causing a civil war in which he himself is killed. David is sorrowful, because he loves Absalom, but causes a near mutiny among his own general staff when he is too loud in expressing his grief. His general Joab, who has done most of the dirty work in killing David’s opponents over the years, half shames and half threatens David into hiding hide his grief from his troops who have just fought a war against the dead rebel.

At the beginning of tonight’s reading, David is pictured as a dottering old man who is given a young woman as a caretaker. His impotence as king in his old age is reflected in the story by his not taking advantage of the caretaker sexually. Adonijah, Absalom’s younger half brother by another father, lays claim to the throne, gathering key people in David’s government to his side, the General Joab and the Priest Abiathar.

Nathan, the prophet who condemned David for his adultery and murder, goes to Bathesheba and encourages her to “remind” David that he had promised to give Solomon the throne. The way the story is told, it looks like the two may be reminding a half-senile old man of something that had never taken place.

The story doesn’t say why Nathan does this, but presumably it is because Adonijah, like Absalom and Amnon before him, is not “a man after the Lord’s own heart” like David. In contrast to these, Solomon is loved by the Lord according to the narrator. Again, remember that it is Solomon who will end up building the single Temple in the center of the country that the Deuteronomistic Historian wants to see putting an end to mixed and localized worship.

Nathan and Bathsheba succeed. David orders the Priest Zadok and Nathan to anoint Solomon king. That is where the reading ends.

King Solomon

What comes in the next two chapters is the bloody tale of Solomon consolidating power. Finding legal and religious pretexts at first, and then abandoning even these, Solomon puts Adonijah to death, deposes Abiathar from the Priesthood, and kills the General Joab, despite his taking refuge in the sanctuary and grasping the horns of the altar of Yahweh. He continues on until all of his possible opponents are dead or unable to cause him problems.

To be sure, the story is told from the point of view of the winner. If Adonijah or his people had narrated these events, I’m sure the story would have read quite differently. It is by no means balanced history. And its theology is flawed as well. The Deuteronomist always wants there to be a quick moral to the story-- a direct link between success and blessing and righteous living (or at least working effectively for what the narrator considers the right religious side). But in life there is no such direct link. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. That is what the Book of Job is all about.

Suffice it to say that the despite all these problems of the narrative, the Deuteronomistic author sees faltering, imperfect human beings as being used by God to accomplish his purposes. A major part of this is that they—despite adultery, fratricide, sacrilege, even murder—want to know what God’s will is and try to do this. In a word, both Solomon and David are men “after the Lord’s own heart” (1 Sam 13:14), despite all the weaknesses that become so evident in the horror of these chapters.

So what can we make of the story that is positive or spiritually uplifting? I suppose it is this—despite the wrongs of David, despite the wrongs of Solomon, both kings were able to maintain a good relationship with God, though they paid the natural price of their bad behaviors. Grace is hinted at here. God’s providence is clearly implied. There may actually be hope for people like you and me.

William Blake, The Four and Twenty Elders
Casting their Crowns Before the Divine Throne.
Pen and Water Color. 1803-05,

The New Testament reading is from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation or Apocalyspe of John, and has a very different approach to the question of God in history. The Revelation follows closely the canons and style of Apocalyptic literature. The Greek word apokalypsis means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden. Early Jewish writings like the Book of Daniel and the non-canonical Book of Enoch, as well as Christian writings like the Apocalypse of John, are included in the genre.

They are the product of times of serious religious persecution. They know all too well that bad things do happen to good people, sometimes for the very reason that they are good. They seek to explain God’s ultimate justice by a variety of means—the doctrine of a life after death where one will be rewarded or punished for one’s acts, good or evil, the doctrine of a day of judgment or wrath at the end of the world when all accounts will be settled justly, and the doctrine of this ultimate moral order breaking in on the current unjust world and through cataclysm and war washing it away.

Apocalyptic books are written in a code of puzzling and extravagant images so that their message can be hidden from the secret police of the day. For example-- during the 3rd century B.C. persecution of Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes IV, openly saying that the Hellenistic kingdoms were rotten to the core and that you hoped God’s kingdom would come and destroy them could get you boiled in oil or worse. So the Book of Daniel, written at that time but set dramatically in the much earlier Babylonian exile, makes this same point by saying that the world kingdoms in history before the time the book was written are like a big statue., one with a gold head (Babylon), silver chest (Medes), bronze waist (Persia), iron legs (Alexander the Great), and feet of clay mixed with iron (the Hellenistic successor kingdoms) that would be smashed to bits by a rock “cut without hands” (hopefully the Jewish kingdom to be restored by Judas Maccabee’s revolt against the Seleucids) that would come rolling from the mountains, getting bigger and bigger until it filled the whole earth (Dan 2: 36-45). While the book’s hope for Maccabean success was fulfilled, its hope that this would be the perfect kingdom of God that would make all things right in the world clearly was not. It was ultimately this problem with apocalyptic hope that spelled its doom—Christians reinterpreted it in light of the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus—seeing in Jesus the ultimate resolution of wrong in the world and fulfillment of all hope. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 by Romans trying to suppress a political rebellion based in Apocalyptic hopes and claims, Jews stopped paying attention to Apocalyptic and started focusing almost exclusively on interpreting and following the Law.

Contrary to a lot of popular belief, Apocalyptic books are generally about what was going on at the time they were written, and try to make ultimate sense of what at the time seems senseless and tragic. They are not predictive programs of “events to come” thousands of years in the future of those who wrote them.

The reading tonight is from the first vision in the Revelation of John, and sees the resurrected Jesus in Glory as the primary means of God’s righting of wrongs and realizing the hopes of the prophets and the writers of Apocalyptic. In this sense, it sees that the ultimate act of God in history is in the person of Jesus. But it also seeks to reassure Christians suffering under the horrible persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian by adapting the literary form and code-language of earlier Apocalyptic. Angels fly from the presence of God; seals are broken; scrolls of the events by which God will solve all these problems are unrolled. In the end, the wicked do not prosper, and the unjust suffering of the saints is repaid. Applying this to us, I’d say we need to have faith and persevere in doing what’s right, regardless the cost and whatever problems this may cause us.

So what of the question of God’s acting in History?

We Christians believe that the definitive act of God and revelation of God occurred in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We also believe that we must have a believing heart to recognize the grace of God, to recognize the call of God, to recognize the judgment of God, when it occurs in our life.

But we also have a lot of experience over the centuries that makes us wary of facile claims about any of these things by others. It is easy to claim that one knows the will of God; it is not so easy to actually know God’s will. It is easy to claim that God is on your side in a dispute or conflict; it is not so easy to actually be right in this claim. Kings and princes have, from ancient times, always known that getting a prophet or a seer on your side as part of your propaganda team was essential for ruling a country or winning a war. It is easy to blame your suffering or someone else’s on some wrong previously committed, and see it as punishment. But this does not make it so.

Jesus was once confronted with a question, as it were, from the front pages of the newspaper: “What do you think about those Galilieans—countrymen of yours I believe—whom Pilate’s soldiers killed in the Temple so that their blood mingled with that of their sacrifices? Jesus did not flinch at the question, but added another “newstory” of his own, “And what do you think about the 18 people killed here in Jerusalem when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and crushed them to death?” His answer on both was clear-- "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? Or that those eighteen were worse than all the others so God made that Tower collapse on them as punishment? “ “NO.” He says. They weren’t any worse than other people, and it wasn’t necessarily punishment. “BUT, we should take a lesson from these stories. Unless we repent, we are certain, sooner or later, to suffer just as badly, or perish just as suddenly as they did.”

For Jesus, God’s hand in history primarily touches the human heart and the way we behave toward others. It beckons to us, one and all, to see how hopeless and helpless we really are, and tells us to surrender to God and learn from him how to amend our lives. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

In the name of God, Amen.