Observational Theology

 

November 10, 2024 – The 25th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 27B

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

What does it look like when the reign of God breaks through into this world? What are the signs that God’s will is unfolding around us? Where do we look for evidence that God is still God when it feels like the ways of the world are squeezing God’s reign out of our lives?

One of my favorite things about Education for Ministry, the four-year, small-group formation program we offer at St. Paul’s, is its emphasis on theological reflection. Perhaps more than anything else, EfM teaches participants to think theologically—to identify situations for potential reflection, examine them for theological meaning, connect them with the broader Christian tradition, and apply the insights that are gained back into their lives. The part of EfM that usually gets the most attention is the reading—the really long weekly readings from the Bible, church history, or other theological texts—but those readings are designed to equip participants for the real goal of the program, which is to engage the world around us through the lens of our faith.

That practice of observational theology has its roots in biblical examples like today’s reading from Mark. In this gospel lesson, Jesus identifies a situation that has potential, examines it for theological meaning, connects it with the broader faith tradition, and then invites his disciples to apply the lessons it offers to their lives. But, as we see in the story of the widow’s mite, the insights we gain must sometimes be mined from deep beneath the surface of our experience.

One day, Jesus was hanging out with his friends in Jerusalem. This was during the series of events that we call Holy Week. Jesus had already made his triumphal entry into the holy city, when the crowds had hailed him as God’s anointed. Then, Jesus had gone up to the temple and overturned the tables of the currency exchangers, openly challenging the legitimacy of the religious operations taking place there. In response, the religious leaders had challenged his authority to carry out such a prophetic action. One by one, the different groups of leaders—the chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees—came up to test him with different questions about faithfulness, and each time Jesus turned them aside with an impressive interpretation of the Jewish tradition.

When no one else was left to ask him a question, Jesus offered a scathing critique of some of the most prominent religious figures of his day. “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus said in today’s reading, “who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.” He was inviting the crowd to turn their expectations of who was truly faithful upside down. He invoked the sort of religious figures whom society praised for their generosity and sliced open the motivation behind their religiosity: “They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

That’s a hefty criticism, but only later does the significance of that teaching become clear. Having finished his critique, Jesus sat down outside the temple proper, across from the place where people came and dropped their offerings into the treasury. Among those who placed money into the treasury was a widow, recognizable by her distinctive dress. Jesus noticed her and heard the subtle sound of the two small coins rattling in the treasury chute, and he recognized faithfulness at work. Before the woman could slip away, he called his disciples over and pointed her out. “Do you see that widow over there?” he asked them. “She has put more into the treasury than everyone else combined because she has given her last two pennies. Others gave out of their abundance, but she has given out of her poverty, everything she had left to live on.”

The prominent religious leaders, who were admired by everyone, had achieved their prominence by exploiting the weak and the vulnerable, even this widow. Yet this woman, whose livelihood had been stolen by the very religious authorities who get credit for being faithful and generous, gave all she has to God by contributing to a religious system that was governed by the same people who had robbed her. Jesus recognized that the Torah’s repeated command to protect vulnerable people, including widows, conflicted with the contemporary religious practice of putting money in the temple treasury. That’s not because contributing to the temple was a faithless act but because those contributions were being managed by self-interested religious authorities who had failed to alleviate this widow’s poverty. And only those who look carefully beneath the surface of success, piety, generosity, and status are able to see what real faithfulness looks like.

Interestingly, Jesus does not finish this theological reflection with an imperative. He never tells the disciples to go and do likewise or that it is to people like this widow that the kingdom of heaven belongs. In other words, he never tells his followers that they, too, should give their last penny to the temple treasury—the same religious institution whose legitimacy he challenged by overturning the moneychangers’ tables. Instead, he reinterprets the significance and size of the people’s offerings in a way that isn’t obvious to the casual onlooker but becomes clear to those who see in this episode what God sees. God knows that true faithfulness depends upon the heart, and only a heart that belongs to God can become a vessel of faithfulness.

Finding ways to contemporize this story is difficult. When we think of modern-day religious leaders whom Jesus would criticize, we naturally turn to the charlatans on television who swindle billions of dollars away from vulnerable people in order to fly around in private jets and live in luxurious mansions. And, while it’s true that Jesus would certainly have had some not-nice things to say about them, I think it’s hard for us to appreciate how universally respected the religious leaders whom he calls out were. Jesus wasn’t calling out the televangelists who make most Christians cringe. He was singling out faithful icons who were held in the highest esteem across the religious culture—the sort of people who get invited to banquets, palaces, and inaugurations—and not just the inaugurations you aren’t excited about. 

Only those who dare to peel back the curtain and look beneath the power and trace back the lines of success to their origins are able to see what God sees. No matter how faithful someone looks or sounds, if they got where they are by stepping on the backs of vulnerable people, they are not the paragons of faithfulness that they seem to be. No matter how good and generous and successful a congregation, organization, or denomination is, if it was built on the subjugation of human beings or achieved its status by excluding people from the community of faith, it cannot be an institution of faithfulness until it grapples with its sinful past. And, if you want to see what God sees, you have to learn to notice where real expressions of faithfulness are made—those little gestures that most of us don’t have time for—the kind of faithful actions that come from people whom the world has forgotten to value but whose hearts belong to God.

The work of theological reflection is as important now as it has ever been, not only for participants in EfM but for all of us. We need to learn where to look for God’s presence among us and to hone our skills at recognizing how God shows up in a sinful world. We need to engage in the work of observational theology, and, to do that, we must equip ourselves by reading the Bible, coming to church, saying our prayers, remaining in community, and serving those in need. Those practices shape us into a people who can recognize and respond to what God is doing all around us. Thus, we practice our faith not to look good in anyone else’s eyes but to learn how to look at the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ.

Comfort and Confidence

 

November 3, 2024 – The Feast of All Saints

Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Not long ago, I was introduced to the term “emotional lability.” I was meeting with someone who started to tear up unexpectedly. As she reached for a tissue, she acknowledged that those tears had been a little closer to the surface of late, and she attributed it to being “emotionally labile.” 

Since I didn’t know anything about the clinical nature of that term, I initially heard it as something positive. The word “labile” means flexible, elastic, and malleable, which to me sounded like a good thing—as if it were a healthy way of being in touch with your emotions. Of course, the word “labile” also means unsteady and unstable, and it turns out that, in the clinical sense, that term is applied to people whose wild emotional swings have taken control of their lives. I don’t think the person I was with meant it in the clinical sense, but I wonder whether we might find a different way of talking about the nearness of emotional experience as a positive thing—maybe “emotional flexibility” or “accessibility.”

Standing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. As a child, I learned that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the bible, but it wasn’t until much later that I started to realize how profound and deep is the truth contained in those two little words: Jesus wept. We believe in a God who loves us and comes among us not as an invincible warrior who vanquishes our enemies but as tender companion who cries with us, suffers with us, and dies with us so that we might be raised with him to new life. That is the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Still, we wonder why Jesus wept. Lazarus, his friend, was dead. There’s no doubt about that. But, even from the beginning, there also seemed to be little doubt about how this story would end. From the opening verses of John 11, when Jesus first heard that his friend was sick, Jesus made it clear that Lazarus’ death would not have the final word. In his telling of the story, John stresses that, even though Jesus knew that Lazarus’ life was in danger, he stayed put for two more days in order to make sure that Lazarus had died before Jesus could get there to heal him. “For your sake I am glad I was not there,” Jesus told the disciples, “so that you may believe.” At every step, Jesus remained in control, as if he knew all along that his friend’s tragic death would be an opportunity to show his followers that he had the power to raise him from the dead. 

And, still, Jesus wept. He knew that he had the power to bring his friend back. He knew exactly what he would do. He knew that he would stand at that grave and cry out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” But, when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and when he saw the people who were with her also weeping, and when he came to the place where his friend had been buried, Jesus was overcome with emotion, and he joined them in their tears. 

God knows exactly how everything will work out. God knows that he will raise us from the dead and bring us to new and everlasting life. God knows that, because of Jesus Christ, death itself has been defeated and its sting has been robbed of all its power. And still God comes among us as one who weeps. Jesus loved Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Even though he had the power to overcome death and bring his friend back from the grave, he was not immune to the grief of his friends. He was not insulated from his own sense of loss. He felt it deeply, and he wept with his friends, real tears of pain and loss—the same tears we weep when our loved ones die.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears—not only because his gesture of compassion provides me pastoral consolation but also because he shows us that, even though we know our loved ones will rise again, our grief is not a sign of faithlessness or defeat. Like Jesus, we are filled with sadness when someone we love dies, even though we know that God will bring them back, and that sadness does not displace our confidence in the power of God’s love. Like Jesus, we can experience both.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears, but my confidence comes from something else. It has become fashionable in Christian preaching and teaching to talk about God as the one who suffers with us, who cries with us, who dies for us. And, while our faith is built upon the fact that God’s plan of salvation is accomplished through the death of God’s incarnate Son, who did suffer just as we do, it is God’s power that has triumphed over death once and for all. More than the mere companionship of a sympathetic friend, it is God’s victory over death that gives us hope, and we see that play out in Jesus’ exchange with Mary and Martha.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary said to Jesus, repeating words that her sister Martha had said only a few verses before our reading picks up. Kneeling at his feet, she offered these words as a confession of faith. We might instinctively hear them as an expression of angst and defeat, but her posture suggests that she was attributing to Jesus a profound confidence in his ability to heal the sick. Similarly, some in the crowd asked whether the one who had the power to give sight to the blind would not also have been able to keep Lazarus from dying. With this repeated theme, John, the gospel writer, wants us to see that the people around Jesus were ready to believe in him, but they didn’t realize how far that belief could go.

When Jesus told them to roll away the stone that sealed shut Lazarus’ tomb, Martha objected, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” But Jesus replied, drawing from her and the crowd a faith not only in a Jesus who had the power to cure the sick but in one who had the power to raise the dead: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” John finishes this episode with a triumphant description worthy of a Halloween script: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

Do we believe in a savior who can heal the sick or one who can raise the dead? Do we believe in a God who comforts us in our sorrow or one who defeats the forces of evil, which are the source of that sorrow? In Jesus Christ, we see that the answer is both. We are comforted by the one who is with us in our struggles, who experiences our pain and suffering, and who loves us from a place of vulnerability and weakness. And we are emboldened by the one whose suffering and death are the means by which death itself is defeated—the one who, although immune to the power of death, endured death in order to defeat it once and for all. We are moved by Jesus’ tears, and we are saved by his death and resurrection—saved by a God whose love is vulnerable yet whose power is triumphant.

Today is the feast of all the saints—all the people of God who have been buried with Christ in his death and who have been raised with him to new life. That’s you and me and the children of God who are being baptized today. And what does it mean to be a saint of God except to be able to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ? Sometimes those eyes are filled with tears because we are moved deeply by the pain and hurt that are all around us. But through those tears we also see the new life that awaits us and the whole world. We may need to be emotionally and spiritually flexible to experience the joy and the pain of life all at once, but Jesus has shown us that that is possible, and it is by following him that we learn how.

The Ending We Didn't Write

 

October 27, 2024 – The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 25B

Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Sometimes stories don’t have the endings we want, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get the ones we need.

On July 8, 2010, LeBron James used a 75-minute prime-time special to announce that he was “going to take [his] talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” Although 13 million people tuned in to watch the announcement, relatively few left with any sense of satisfaction. Fans in Cleveland, where LeBron grew up and spent his first seven seasons in the NBA, felt betrayed. In New York, where Knicks’ fans believed they would win the LeBron sweepstakes, the thought of another decade of mediocracy led to outrage. Generally, except for those who lived in south Florida, “The Decision” was widely panned as a commercialized spectacle, which celebrated and promoted the entitlement of athletes.

Fourteen years later, after two championships in Miami, another back in Cleveland, and one in Los Angeles, a secret tape that was made to influence LeBron’s big decision has come to light. Rumors had long circulated that the New York Knicks produced a celebrity-filled video as part of their pitch to bring James to the Big Apple, but no one could verify it. The video had never been shown to the public until sportswriter Pablo Torre obtained a copy and released it. 

In the opening scene of the promotional video, James Gandolfini and Edie Falco reprise their roles from the HBO series The Sopranos as if they were living in New York under witness protection two years after the television series ended. Even if you never watched The Sopranos, you probably remember that the final scene of the final episode of the series cut to black, leaving the audience to guess what happened. It was highly controversial at the time. After six seasons, viewers wanted to know how it all ended, but the producers of the show wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. It came to be seen as one of the greatest television endings of all time, but, back then, not everyone was happy with how things worked out, but the Knicks didn’t make things any better

In much the same way, though for the opposite reason, it is hard to read the Book of Job and get any satisfaction from the way the story ends. After suffering the loss of his fortune, the agony of an illness, the death of his children, the desertion of his spouse, and the abandonment of society—and all for reasons Job cannot comprehend—God shows up and makes everything right by giving him twice as much money, ten new children, and totally renewed relationships with all the family and friends who had turned their backs on him. The only thing worse is seeing Tony and Carmela in their tiny New York City apartment two years after leaving the gangster life. To a post-modern reader, the so-called happy ending of Job cheapens the epic tale and effectively nullifies its theological message. Or does it? 

I’m not the only one who hates the way the story ends. In 1958, American playwright and poet, Archibald MacLeish, published J.B., a modern retelling of the Book of Job, with a very different ending. In the final scene of the play, Job’s wife, who earlier in the play encouraged her husband to commit suicide as an act of religious defiance, comes back to him. But, instead of accepting the simplistic restoration of their fortunes described in the biblical story, the Pulitzer-prize winning play depicts the couple clinging only to the near-extinct ember of love between them. “Blow on the coal of the heart,” Sarah says to J.B.. “The candles in the church are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart, and we’ll see by and by…”

Instead of leaving the audience to wrestle with their questions about the nature of a God who would allow such unjustified suffering, the play brings those questions right onto the stage. In one sense, the result is a far more satisfying end to the story—one that acknowledges explicitly, with its unrefined conclusion, the irreconcilable theological problems presented by the Book of Job. But, in another way, the play misses the point entirely. Although it acknowledges how hard it is for us to experience inexplicable suffering, in the place of our only true hope, it offers an even cheaper substitute—the thought that the best we can do is endure life’s hardships with the companionship of a human partner, replacing the inscrutable God of the whirlwind with an idol made in our own image.

Surely the story of Job is more valuable than a cheap fairy tale. Surely our ancient spiritual ancestors wanted a better ending just as much as we do. Surely they recognized the inadequacy of a God who would throw money and new children at Job as if that were good enough. Maybe we should do them the favor of saving the book by cutting out the last eight verses. If the story ended with Job’s repentance—his return to God—and the rebuke of his friends for suggesting that bad things only happen to bad people, maybe we’d be left with a story we’d like—one that resists the urge to overexplain and instead just cuts to black. But isn’t that the point in the first place—that our preference for a conclusion that we would have written cannot replace the ending that God has given us without sacrificing our hope in God for a misplaced our hope in ourselves?

Maybe the ending of the Book of Job is a hook designed to catch us, the readers, in our own need for certainty, as sharp and subtle as the fishhook God uses to catch Leviathan. There’s a reason Job never attempts to answer the unanswerable questions about the nature of suffering—because the greatest danger we face is not the suffering itself but our desire to explain it in satisfactory ways. 

Job’s friends take turns explaining to him that a good and just God would never permit such bad things to happen to a righteous and upstanding person. Repent, they tell him, and everything will get better. But we know that’s not how God works. Job demands an audience with God, asserting that his lifetime of unequivocal righteousness has merited a hearing with the Almighty. But we know that even the holiest among us cannot plumb the fathomless depths of God’s mind. Elihu, the young prophet, rebukes Job’s friends for their shallow theology, and he also rebukes Job for failing to subscribe to the prophetic tradition, which teaches that God hears the cries of the oppressed as long as they humble themselves. But we know that all too often the desperate prayers of truly humble people do not receive the answers we think are right.

Whenever we fall into the temptation to seek our own perfect ending and suggest that we know why another person is suffering, we commit a grave sin. Whenever we decide that our plans for how and when something will work out are better than God’s, we commit a grave sin. The Book of Job is designed to teach us that it is dangerous, abusive, and disastrous when people, in the name of God, presume to speak with certainty on matters they cannot possibly understand. And the ending of the story is wholly unsatisfying in order to remind us that the temptation to speak for God is greatest among those who claim to know God the best.

As Sara preached last week, we believe in a God who abides with us in the midst of our suffering, even and especially when we cannot understand how. In the face of our lack of understanding, we may be tempted to exchange our God for one who makes sense to us or for no God at all. But, despite God’s unwillingness to conform to our expectations, God is not wholly hidden from us. The task of our faith is not the fruitless endeavor of pursuing an unknowable God but the unending journey of seeking the presence of the one who has revealed Godself to us in love. And that love does not condemn our suffering or discount it, but it redeems it as something holy and acceptable to God.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. The way that leads to life everlasting does not avoid suffering but goes right through it. In ways that surpass our understanding, God shows us that our true hope is found in Jesus, the one who redeems our suffering by becoming our suffering. That’s an ending to the story that we could not have written on our own. That’s the good news of our faith—that our ending is neither what we expect nor what we deserve, and thanks be to God for that.

Pursuing Our Own Impossibility

 

October 13, 2024 – The 21st Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 23B

Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Have you seen the meme on social media that captures the exchange between two people, Musa (@muvilakazi) and Orpheus (@umcornell), in which the first states, “Money will not fix all of your problems,” and to which the second replies, “…no offense but money would solve literally every single one of my problems. like all of them?” Or maybe you’ve seen the meme that says, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. Have you ever seen anyone sad on a jet ski?” Or, if you’re not into memes, maybe you’ve heard the saying from the business world that anything is possible, given enough time and money.  

Money makes the world go ‘round, but that doesn’t mean it rotates symmetrically. The chasm between the poor and the rich is growing faster and faster. According to the Pew Research Center, between 1970 and 2018, the median income for middle-class Americans grew by 49%. During that same period, the median income for lower-income households only grew by 43%, but—you guessed it—upper-income households saw an increase of 64%. Similarly, since 1991, the super-rich, defined as the top 5% of households, saw an average annual increase in their income of 4.1%, while the next 15% of the not-quite-so-super-rich saw income grow annually by 2.7%, and everyone else, the bottom 80%, saw an annual increase of only 1%. [1]

Is it any wonder, in a society in which things are getting harder for those who struggle to make ends meet while things are getting easier for those who don’t, that money has become our currency of hope? I wonder what Jesus would say to us—to our culture—if we were to fall down on our knees and ask him, “Good Teacher, what must we do to inherit eternal life?”

I don’t know if it’s comforting or discouraging to read in today’s gospel lesson that the problem of wealth is at least 2,000 years old. A man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus then makes a big deal about the fact that the man had called him “good,” perhaps offering a prescribed rabbinical response designed to convey humility. But the man’s decision to call Jesus “good” is significant. It means that the man already recognizes Jesus as a religious authority—that he assumes that whatever teaching will come from the rabbi’s mouth will be of God and, thus, help him find what he seeks.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The concept of inheritance was, in those days, a lot like it is today. In time, you will receive what has been set aside for you—your allotted share—not because you have earned it, as a worker earns their wages, but because you belong to a particular family. For the descendants of Abraham, the barrier between the material and the spiritual has always been permeable, and the idea of receiving an inheritance from God has been tied up in the hope for both the physical land promised to Abraham and the boundless security of dwelling forever in the presence of God. So, when this man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, he wasn’t just interested in what it takes to get to heaven but also what is required to have a share in the coming messianic age.  

Jesus’ answer is shockingly traditional. “You know the commandments,” he said, “‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.” Although it’s not a direct quotation of Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, the answer Jesus gave is as familiar to the Jewish man as the names Moses and Elijah. If you want to inherit your share of God’s promises, Jesus seems to say, all you need to do is remain a part of God’s family, and you already know how to do that.

If the encounter ended there, the only problem this passage would present is the one posed to thoroughly Protestant preachers like myself, who would then be forced to reconcile Jesus’ emphasis on keeping the commandments with the sola fide (faith alone) foundation set forth in the letters of Paul. But that’s for another sermon because this encounter doesn’t end there. This man wants more—not more eternal life, not a bigger share of his inheritance. He wants to belong to God in a way that impacts his life now. He wants more than the familiar reminder of what it means to belong to God’s family. He’s kept all those commandments since his youth.  He wants to be a part of God’s kingdom, and he knows that Jesus is the one who can help him find it.

Jesus looked intently at the man and loved him—he agape-ed him—which is important. That lets us know that the man was serious and faithful and that Jesus was serious, too. This man wanted to be a disciple of Jesus, and Jesus saw within him the stuff from which disciples are made. There was just one thing missing—one thing that stood between this man and his full and vibrant participation in the messianic reign that God had promised: his wealth. “You lack one thing,” Jesus said. “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come follow me.”

“You lack one thing,” Jesus said. Do you know what your “one thing” is? If you asked Jesus what you needed to do in order to become a full participant in the reign of God and he looked deep into your soul and loved you, what would he tell you to give up? What one thing, more than anything else, stands in between you and the kingdom of God?

For most of us, the answer is money. We live in a world in which money is perceived to be the answer to life’s greatest problems. Those who have money feel powerful, if not invincible, and those who don’t feel especially vulnerable to whatever challenges life might bring. It’s worth noting that Jesus didn’t require all of his followers to take a vow of poverty, but he consistently taught that wealth is the greatest obstacle to our participation in God’s reign. The members of the early church took that teaching to heart, selling their private possessions and pooling their resources to be sure that no one was in need. Maybe that’s a vision for using our wealth to participate in the kingdom of God that we should reconsider. As R. H. Gundry wrote, “That Jesus did not command all his followers to sell all their possessions gives comfort only to the kind of people to whom he would issue that command.”[2] 

So what will give us comfort? I think the answer we need comes later in the story, when Jesus explains to his disciples what this difficult teaching is all about. After doubling-down by saying that “it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus gives his disciples a word of encouragement that puts everything into perspective. “Then who can be saved?” they ask him. And he looks at them with the same intensity with which he had beheld the eager man and says, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

Isn’t that precisely the place where the reign of God unfolds in our lives—in that space where what is impossible for us becomes possible in God? Doesn’t God’s kingdom always come in those gaps where our limitations are superseded by God’s infinite goodness, power, and love? That’s always the place where God enters in—not in the spaces filled up by our strength but in the emptiness opened up by our weakness—by our very dependence on God. The problem, therefore, isn’t simply our wealth but what our wealth inevitably fools us into thinking—into thinking that it’s our strength, our effort, and our ability that will save us. But that’s never the case. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that stands between us and God’s reign.

When Jesus looks into our hearts and loves us, he sees what stands in the way of our full participation in the divine life. And he bids us to let go of whatever it is that makes us think that we are our own best hope. We’re not. God is. God has promised to bring us into full, abundant, and eternal life, and all we have to do is get out of the way. We must learn to accept, embrace, and even pursue that place where our impossibility becomes God’s triumph—where our misplaced faith in ourselves can be replanted into the fertile soil of faith in God. Whatever it takes to learn that truth—whatever it takes for us to know that we belong to the God whose power is made perfect in our weakness—we must pursue with all our hearts. You only lack one thing, Jesus says to us. May God give us the grace to accept it.

___________________________________

1. J. M. Horowitz, R. Igielnik, and R. Kochar, “Trends in Income and Wealth Inequality,” Pew Research Center, 9 January 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/.

2. R. H. Gundry, Matthew, 388, quoted in R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark; Eerdmans: 2002, 400.

A Banquet of Reversal

 

September 29, 2024 – The 19th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 21B

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video is available here.

I love the Book of Esther, and I think I love it most because it’s unlike any other book in the Bible. There are important theological lessons to be gleaned from the text, for sure, but it’s presented more like a soap opera or a farce than a traditional biblical narrative. The book includes ten short chapters, designed to be read aloud in one raucous sitting, and it’s the sort of script we’d expect Eugene or Dan Levy to write, not Moses or one of the prophets. 

The Book of Esther is the story of God’s people living in a foreign land. Set in the fifth century BC, it recalls a time when some of the Jewish people had settled in Persia, where they sought to maintain their identity despite living within the vast and powerful Achaemenid Empire. Scholars often note that nowhere in the entire book is God ever mentioned, effectively forcing the community of faith to search the story for God’s presence when it does not present itself in traditional ways. If you say Morning Prayer each day, you’ve noticed that readings from Esther have been featured lately, but our Sunday lectionary cycle only includes a reading from Esther once—on this day—so I don’t get a lot of chances to preach on the text, and today, instead of focusing on the search for God in story, I want to talk about parties. 

Esther is a tale of parties. In the relatively brief text, there are ten different banquets that take place. They effectively serve as the glue that holds the story together and the channel through which most of the interesting action takes place. The book opens with a six-month-long debaucherous feast that King Ahasuerus threw for his officials and ministers to celebrate his own greatness, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about King Ahasuerus. 

Then there’s the seven-day banquet the king threw for the residents of the capital city as soon as the six-month banquet was finished. After seven days of drunkenness, we are told that the king commanded that Queen Vashti come and display herself to the king and his guests so that they could admire her beauty. But the queen refused. She was not an object for their delight. She was a woman, powerful and independent. She had already thrown her own banquet for the noble women of the kingdom, and she was not about to parade around to amuse some drunken men. 

As you would expect from a man like Ahasuerus, the king was enraged, and so were his officials. One of his chief advisors said to the king, “Not only has Queen Vashti done wrong to the king, but also to all the officials and all the peoples who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. For this deed of the queen will be made known to all women, causing them to look with contempt on their husbands” (1:16-17). A kingdom that is built upon misogynistic power, we are shown, cannot withstand the threat of a strong-willed woman, so the king did what kings like that are wont to do: he published an edict that banned Vashti from his presence and that declared “that every man should be master in his own house” (1:22). Like I said, it’s a script worthy of a series like Schitt’s Creek. 

After conducting a national beauty pageant, the king selected Esther to be his new bride. Although she was Jewish, the adopted daughter of her cousin Mordecai, a leader among his people, she kept her ethnicity a secret at her cousin’s suggestion. Thus, when the king threw a banquet to celebrate his new queen, the reader can already anticipate the significance of a member of the Jewish diaspora assuming a position of national leadership in a kingdom that was not her own.

The story takes the dark turn we expect at yet another banquet. This time, the king and his chief advisor, the wicked Haman, sat down to dine together and issue a royal edict commanding the annihilation of the Jewish people in Persia. Haman persuaded the hapless king to command the genocide because he was furious that Mordecai repeatedly refused to bow down to him. When Haman learned that Mordecai was Jewish, the Bible tells us, “he thought it beneath him to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, having been told who Mordecai’s people were, Haman plotted to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus” (3:6).

Only at the banquet we hear about in today’s reading—the second in a row that Queen Esther hosted for the king and Haman—is the wicked plot revealed. The story includes lots of twists and turns that both the lectionary and I must skip over, but suffice it to say that Haman is undone by his own hubris and by Esther’s bravery and by a heavy-handed dose of irony that makes it clear this story belongs in paperback. “Look,” another of the king’s advisors declared, “the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high.” And the king said, “Hang him on that” (7:9).

But, even with the death of the antagonist, the series of banquets is not yet finished. That’s because the genocidal edict that threatened the Jewish people across the kingdom of Persia could not be repealed. In a strange layer of internal commentary on the nature of law itself, according to the Book of Esther, once the Persian king issued an official edict it could never be changed. So, after elevating Mordecai to the position formerly held by Haman, the king needed to be persuaded to issue a contravening declaration—one that would protect God’s people from the mobs that had begun to assemble to exterminate them.

Having learned nothing from his mistakes, the king handed over to Mordecai the authority to draft, seal, and publish a new edict, one that permitted the Jewish people in every city across the land [quote] “to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods” (8:11). Although God’s people were careful not to take any of the plunder—it seems they had learned their lesson from back when King Saul made a similar mistake in 1 Samuel 15—they killed 500 people in the capital city and 75,000 people across the land. Historians think that 75,000 is a fair estimate of the number of Jews living in Persia at the time, so one might say that their preemptive slaughter was a gesture of balance, though it also begs the question whether any law that condones violence could ever be justified. 

To celebrate their deliverance, God’s people held banquets throughout the empire. The feast of Purim, which is observed every spring, right before Passover, is a reminder not only of the time when Esther and Mordecai saved God’s people but also that the threat of their destruction does not go away when a single enemy is defeated. Even the name of the feast itself—Purim—comes from a word that means “lot,” as in the lot that Haman cast to determine the day when the Jews would be murdered. Each banquet in the story presents another reversal of fortune, and the final banquet, while a celebration of the Jewish people’s miraculous deliverance from near-certain genocide, also contains in its very name a reminder of how real the threat remains.

I wonder, though, whether Christians can hear this story—this amusing and farcical tale designed to entertain as much as educate—and draw from it a different message without undermining the importance of its original Jewish context. I wonder whether we might reinterpret the Book of Esther by reading it alongside the story of our own banquet, the Eucharist, where we, too, experience a reversal of fortune.

In his commentary, Sam Wells wrote about the Book of Esther,  

An invitation to a banquet is an invitation to a political reversal. Here the implications for Christian liturgy become evident. It begs the question, is the Christian Eucharist such a banquet— such a repeated, interactive, reading-and-performing rehearsal of reversal? The Eucharist should be the place and time where Christians recall that God has put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek— and that God, the mighty, has come down from that seat and become humble and meek so that we, if we are humble and meek, might, through the power of his Spirit, become mighty. This should be the place and time where Christians celebrate that greatest of all reversals and where they reenact the death and resurrection of Christ, the definitive reversal gently anticipated in the mission of Esther. [1]

To conclude, I want to take Sam Wells’ observation a step further. In the eucharistic banquet, we encounter the ultimate and final reversal of the cosmos. There is no going back. Death has been defeated. Sin has been put away. Our unity with God has been restored. But that great reversal comes not because our protagonist has been spared the pain of death but because he has embraced it. And that means that the path that leads to our salvation must also take us through the grave and gate of death before we can enter the joyful resurrection that awaits. And, if God has used the death of God’s Son to achieve for us the ultimate victory over death, that means that death itself is no longer a threat. Because of Christ, it has been robbed of is sting.

Whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, which we do here today, we not only recall Christ’s death and resurrection, we reenact them by partaking in Christ’s body and blood. This is, as Sam Wells suggested, a “reading-and-performing rehearsal of reversal,” but it is also the place where we submit our own lives to Christ’s death on the cross so that we, being one with him, might find new life. If we come to Communion expecting anything less than our full participation in the complete and total reversal of the world through our own death and resurrection, then we aren’t doing this banquet justice. 

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1. Wells, Samuel; Sumner, George. Esther & Daniel; Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible; Baker Publishing Group, Kindle Edition: Kindle Locations 2127-2135.

Childish Ways

 

September 22, 2024 – The 18th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 20B

Proverbs 31:10-31; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

On January 1, 1965, the undefeated Arkansas Razorbacks strode into the Cotton Bowl with something to prove. It had been five years since the Razorbacks’ last bowl victory, and they hadn’t finished a season undefeated since 1909. Further aggravating Frank Broyles’ team, the Associated Press and the UPI Coach’s Poll had released their end-of-the-season polls earlier in December, and both had declared the also-undefeated Alabama Crimson Tide as the national champion. In short, there was nothing Arkansas could do to take that title away from Alabama—except prove that they deserved it anyway.

As the Southwestern Conference champions, Arkansas faced off against the Big Eight champion Nebraska Cornhuskers in Dallas, Texas, while down in Miami, Florida, the SEC champion Crimson Tide played against Arkansas’ rival, the Texas Longhorns, in the Orange Bowl. Earlier in the season, Arkansas had defeated Texas 14-13 with a goal-line stand on a failed two-point conversion at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. In their game against Nebraska, Arkansas came from behind in the fourth quarter to win 10-7 and remain undefeated. Alabama didn’t fare as well. Texas got out to an early lead and then hung on to beat the Tide 21-17.

It wasn’t hard to argue that Arkansas should have been the unequivocal national champion. In fact, in all the polls released after the bowl games had been played, Arkansas was a clear #1. But even more than that, the transitive property of college football—a favorite among mid-sized-school fan bases—made the true outcome clear. Arkansas had beaten Texas. Texas then beat Alabama. Even though Alabama and Arkansas never played each other, the transitive property leaves virtually no doubt what would have happened if they did. But that didn’t stop Alabama from claiming 1964 as one of their so-called eighteen national championships. For what it’s worth, it was the last time the AP released its final poll before the bowl games had been played, so I guess you could say Jerry Jones’ Razorbacks won a moral victory as well.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus introduces a transitive property of his own: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” In other words, by that property, those of us who want to welcome God into our hearts should start by welcoming and honoring the children among us. Of course, Jesus is using a nearby child to make a point. The act of welcoming a child is a metaphor for the importance of humility and a reminder of the value of seeking out and including the least among us. But let’s not leave the realm of the literal too quickly. There’s more to that transitive property than a preacher’s analogy. There is something about a child that expresses the divine nature more clearly than those of us who prefer the company of adults are likely to see. 

It’s clear from the start of this episode that Jesus is trying to get his point across to the disciples but failing miserably. Last week, we heard Jesus predict his passion and death for the first time. After asking the disciples who they thought that he was, Peter said, “You are the Messiah.” And in response, Jesus began to teach them that, as the Messiah, he must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the leaders of his people, be killed, and on the third day be raised from the dead.

Understandably, this was more than the disciples were ready to handle. They believed that Jesus was the one whom God had sent to redeem God’s people from the tyranny of Rome, but Jesus was telling them that the redemption God had promised would only come through his suffering and death. “Lord, this must never happen to you!” Peter exclaimed with well-intentioned disbelief, but Jesus then set the record straight, rebuking Peter and saying, “Get behind me Satan.” 

That was last week. This week, at the beginning of the gospel lesson, we see that Jesus and the disciples are making their way through Galilee, their home territory, but Jesus doesn’t want anyone to know it because he’s still teaching his disciples that the road ahead will lead to suffering and they still aren’t getting the point. To illustrate the extent of their lack of understanding, Mark recalls for us that, as soon as Jesus finishes explaining that he will be betrayed, killed, and, three days later, raised from the dead, the disciples begin arguing with each other about which one of them is the greatest. Later, when Jesus asks them what they were arguing about, no one says a word because, even if they don’t understand what Jesus was trying to teach them, the disciples know enough to know that that wouldn’t get them any compliments from their teacher.

Looking around the house where they were staying, Jesus sees something that will help him get his point across—a child. Picking up the little child and holding it in his arms, Jesus says to the disciples, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Jesus recognizes that this child is the lens through which the nature of God and God’s Messiah come into focus. 

This is the child who would rather play with the box and the wrapping paper than the present that is wrapped inside. This is the child who doesn’t care what kind of car her mother drives to pick her up from daycare because all she wants is to be held in her mother’s arms. This is the child who does not need a priest or a rabbi to explain why God’s greatest victory must be accomplished by the one who gives up his life for the sake of the world. And this is the child who knows instinctively that, if God loves us like that, we, too, must love one another in the same way, even if it costs us our lives. 

You don’t have to explain those things to a little child. A child knows them because a child knows that true love beckons from us true love’s reply. And Jesus knows that, if those of us who are all grown up are ever going to remember what it’s like to believe that love is the only thing in this world that matters, we need to learn what that little child will teach us.

I have a feeling that Mark didn’t include the story of the disciples’ failure to understand Jesus’ teaching about suffering and death because he wanted us to laugh at the disciples’ foolishness or marvel at their stupidity. I think he wanted us to realize that this won’t be easy for us to understand either. We might not have as much trouble as they did recognizing that Jesus’ death is how God wins God’s victory over sin and death, but what that victory means for us in this life is a different story. Even on this side of the empty tomb, with confidence that the defeat of Good Friday will always lead to the joy of Easter, we still struggle to grasp what it means for us to believe in a savior who died for our sake. Unlike Peter and the disciples, we might begin to wrap our minds around Jesus’ selfless act, but it’s just as hard for us to accept that the path of suffering and death must be ours as well.

It's one thing to believe that the cross of Christ is a façade behind which the glory of God is hidden, but it’s another thing entirely to believe that the cross of Christ is the glory of God in its perfection. Jesus did not die for your sins so that you could be immune from suffering, pain, and death. He died so that the way of suffering, pain, and death, which you must walk in his name, will lead to life and love and peace. 

Jesus’ death is the means by which God brings life to the world. Jesus’ suffering is how God redeems the suffering of all people. If we really believe that, why do we struggle to accept that those who proclaim Jesus as their savior must suffer and die, too? Why is it so hard for us to understand that “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all?” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that love is the only thing that matters in this life. It’s the littlest children in our midst who can help us remember it.

An Outsider's Perspective

 

September 8, 2024 – The 16th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 18B

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Twelve years ago next month, our family adopted a cat from the local animal shelter. After looking through the online database of available animals, we had decided that this particular black and white cat, whom the shelter had named Andrew, would be the perfect addition to our family. So I put the pet carrier in the car and drove to the animal shelter. 

I walked in, carrier in hand, and declared, “I’m here to adopt Andrew the cat.” Only at that moment, when I saw the puzzled look on the shelter employee’s face, did it occur to me that I might want to meet Andrew and hold him before taking him home. But, when I picked him up and heard his loud, near-constant purr, I knew that he was the right one.

I went back to the front desk to confirm my choice. “Okay,” the employee said, “we’ll just need to take down some information.” Again, it hadn’t occurred to me that shelter would have any interest in knowing who was adopting its animals, but, as the questions became more and more personal, I realized that they were evaluating my worthiness as a pet owner. 

Q: “How many pets do you currently own?”
A: “Just one—a dog.”

Q: “Are you confident that your dog will welcome a new kitten into your home?”
A: “Well, I hadn’t really thought about that, but he’s a pretty nice dog, so I think so?”

Q: “What is your household income?”
A: “Really? You need to know that?”

Q: “How much money can you afford to spend on vet bills, food, litter, toys, and other supplies?”
A: “Wow, this is pretty serious. Um, enough, I guess.”

Q: “What is the cat going to be used for?”
A: “Excuse me? What is the cat going to be used for? I don’t understand.”

Q: “You know, what will its purpose be? What role will it have? Why are you adopting it?”

I had always assumed that animals were adopted to be pets, to be companions, to be a part of your family. I didn’t know why else anyone would adopt a cat—except maybe to breed the cat, but all the animals at the shelter were fixed, so that was out. I was still confused, but I could tell that my answers were being scrutinized, and I didn’t want to fail now.

A: “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be difficult. I really don’t understand your question. We’re adopting a cat because we want a cat. Help me understand what the options are.”

Q: “Are you looking for a mouser?”
A: “A mouser? As in am I adopting this cat because I want it to catch mice?” 

Feeling the pressure of the interrogation, I panicked. Was that allowed? Or was a classic Tom and Jerry situation frowned upon? I didn’t know what to say.

A: “Well, I wouldn’t be opposed to this cat catching a mouse, but that’s not why we’re getting it. We just want a cat—a pet.”

Apparently, that answer was good enough because I was allowed to bring Andrew home to meet our family. I asked our children whether they wanted to keep the name Andrew. The shelter had given him that designation but hadn’t used it consistently, so he didn’t recognize it as his name, meaning that we could change it if we wanted to. “Do you want to change his name?” I asked. “Yes,” was the instant reply, “to Fetch.” “Fetch?” I asked. “Why Fetch?” “Because cats like to chase things,” which is true but not really in the sense that his name implies, but it stuck. We didn’t get a mouser, but Fetch regularly brings little presents into the house for us to chase around and catch. As is usually the case with cats, he’s in charge, and we seem to be there for his amusement.

In today’s gospel lesson, it’s the role of dogs in society that’s under investigation, and sorting through two radically different visions helps us understand what this passage is supposed to teach us. 

Mark tells us that “[Jesus] entered a house and didn’t want anyone to know that he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and fell down at his feet.” By this point in the gospel story, this sort of encounter is familiar. Someone in need comes to Jesus and asks him for help. But, this time, the person who asks for help is a Gentile.

It's hard for us in twenty-first-century America to appreciate how clear and distinct the divide between Jews and Gentiles was for Jesus and his contemporaries. More than a religious distinction, this was a social, economic, political, and cultural chasm that separated two radically different and fundamentally irreconcilable peoples. Everything about them was different, including the kind of pets they kept at home.

Gentile families, like this Syrophoenician woman, were fond of puppy dogs. In Pompeii, under the ashes from Mount Vesuvius, the mummified remains of a dog were found, still wearing its collar, having been kept tied up in its family’s garden when the volcano erupted in 79AD. But back then Jewish people almost never kept a dog in their home. Dogs were notoriously unclean—not just in the roll-around-in-the-dirt sort of way but in the ritual, religious sense as well. Dogs like to dig and scavenge, and there’s always a chance that a dog will uncover and come into contact with something that will make them a carrier of ritual impurity. Under rabbinic rules, dogs were not even allowed in the city of Jerusalem (4QMMT B 58-62). 

In Jewish culture, therefore, the term dog became a familiar slur for Gentiles, not only because they kept dogs as pets but also because they were thought to act like them. Unlike their Jewish counterparts, who kept kosher as an act of faithfulness, Gentiles ate more or less indiscriminately—at least without regard for their religious identity. Similarly, the Book of Deuteronomy uses the word “dog” as a label for male prostitutes, again probably because Gentile culture did not observe the same prohibitions on sexual behavior that the Jewish faith taught (Deut. 23:19). 

So when Jesus said to the Syrophoenician woman, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he was embodying a cultural divide as old as the patriarchs. He was reflecting a long tradition of faithful Jewish people who thought of their Gentile neighbors as ritually speaking no different from the stray, four-legged scavengers who roamed the streets of a city like Tyre. But that doesn’t mean Jesus was right. And the woman’s bold, clever, and self-effacing response helps us see it.

When Jesus compared the woman to a dog, he must have had in mind the kind of stray animal that threatened the religious purity of God’s people. For a faithful Jew, dogs were not a beloved pet but an unwelcomed obstacle to faithfulness. But that’s not how the woman understood it. She came from a different place—a different perspective. To her and to her people, a dog was a delight, a playmate, a companion, a best friend. To a Gentile like her, a dog belonged among the people of the house, not the garbage in the street. Why would anyone refuse to allow a sweet puppy dog to come into their home? Why would anyone not welcome a canine companion as a beloved member of their family?

With an insight that only an outsider like her could have, the Syrophoenician woman looked up at Jesus and said, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” And, with those words, she challenged not only Jesus’ denial of her request but the centuries of tradition that had taught that only the descendants of Jacob could be called children of Abraham. She might be different from Jesus and his disciples. She might not speak the same language, eat the same food, or tell the same bedtime stories to her children. But she was a child of God who belonged among God’s family because the salvation of the world, which begins with God’s love for the covenant people of Israel, can never be confined to the few. God’s love must always be given to everyone. All means all.

Jesus didn’t come to Tyre, a predominantly Gentile community, looking to heal a Syrophoenician woman’s daughter. He travelled there to get away from the religious authorities with whom he had been quarreling over issues of ritual purity. As Lora mentioned in her sermon last Sunday, they were upset that Jesus allowed his disciples to eat without washing their hands in the way that strictly religious Jews did. In response, Jesus taught them that it isn’t what goes into a person that makes them unclean but what comes out. In effect, Jesus cast aside the dietary and purification practices that helped distinguish the Jews from their Gentile neighbors, but even he may not have thought through how far the implications of that teaching would go. 

Now, confronted by a Gentile mother who effectively asked Jesus to cast aside the ethnic distinctions that defined the boundaries of salvation, Jesus was forced to make a choice. How far would God’s love reach? This woman showed Jesus that to expand the circle does not threaten God’s salvation; it only increases it. I believe that the gospel tradition records and preserves Jesus’ shocking words because it recognizes that what takes place is more than the healing of one Gentile daughter. This is an opportunity to put on the lips of a religious authority—even Jesus—the fullness of our instincts to define the family of God along ethnic lines in order that that tradition might be obliterated. In effect, because of Jesus’ exchange with the Gentile woman, her request challenges not only his presumptions about the family of God but ours as well.

No matter where she is found in relation to those at the master’s table, this gospel story shows us that our place is always standing beside the Syrophoenician woman. We cannot call ourselves Christians if we allow our religious traditions to exclude someone from the family of God, no matter how familiar and important those traditions seem to be. This woman recognizes something in Jesus that no one else has seen before, maybe not even Jesus himself. She is the one who reveals to us that, because of Jesus, no one belongs outside of God’s love.