Homilies for Pentecost 13 - 16

13th Sunday After Pentecost 25 August 1996 St. George's Episcopal Church Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 16.13-20

The Man Who Saw Christ

"Simon Peter answered: you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!" (Matthew 16.16)

Sprawled on the living room floor, her crayons arrayed around her, a little girl draws furiously. "What are you drawing?" her father asks. "I'm drawing a picture of God." Her father jovially responds: "You can't draw a picture of God! No one knows what he looks like!" But she says, "They will I when I get through."

This morning's story from the gospel of Matthew is about a man who sees God. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. But his question is indirect. Not "Do you finally see who I am?" but "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" As though he's soliciting their take on how the mobs of people that have been following him around Galilee are understanding his ministry. But surely Jesus is vastly more perceptive than his obtuse disciples. He has a better sense than they do of how the crowds are responding to his preaching and healing. He's not asking to get the disciples' views on the public's reaction. He's putting a crucial question to them.

"Some say you're John the Baptist, but others say you're Elijah, and still others say you're Jeremiah or one of the prophets." Right off you suspect that they're not just reporting what other people think. They're cautiously batting around the possibilities themselves. Maybe they're afraid they'll say the wrong thing and look foolish. Probably they're waiting for some clue from Jesus so they know what he wants them to say. Their diffidence makes it plain that despite being his disciples, they have no clear idea who this Jesus really is or what he is doing. Except for the famously impetuous Peter. He blurts out "you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!" I can't imagine Peter already having this idea and keeping quiet about it. Instead I think it must have been that things suddenly crystallize for him when Jesus asks the question. I imagine him not even hearing the other disciple's goofy speculations. At that moment the pieces fall into place. The picture suddenly comes into focus. There can be only one answer. This disciple finally sees who Jesus is. The others have seen Jesus. They've witnessed the miracles and listened to the teachings. But only now does one of them see Jesus as the Christ. Like most people then, and like most people now, the disciples think they have a pretty good idea what God is like. Like most people then, and like most people now, they're getting him wrong. They try to fit him into their conventionally pious religious categories. They try to make of this utterly singular Jesus one more prophet, a returned Jeremiah, a recycled John the Baptist. No matter what they see and hear they just can't get it. But the hidden God shows himself to one of them. Peter sees Jesus as God's Son, the Messiah.

But what has Peter confessed? What does it mean that Jesus is the Christ? I once heard someone say that he had grown up thinking that "Christ" was Jesus' surname, that Jesus Christ was the eldest son of Mary Christ and Joseph Christ. But of course when we say that Jesus is the Christ we're using a title, not a name. Historically, in the religion of the people of Israel, the Christ is God's anointed, the Messiah, the one specially selected and sent by God to deliver his people. But there were in Jesus' time lots of different ideas about what the Old Testament promises of a Messiah amounted to. The people of Israel lived in hope, but it wasn't exactly clear just who, or what, they were waiting for. Peter sees Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, and as he does so he's beginning to see what that means. He's seeing something about how God will act on behalf of people, something that can't be clearly seen until Jesus himself is there.

To call Jesus Christ the way Peter did is to acknowledge Jesus as God himself with us, taking action on for us. I love Bishop Epting's phrase: he refers to Jesus as "the human face of God." He's saying that Jesus is uniquely authoritative, the one who shows us what God is like. Crucially, though, he's pointing beyond that to the fact that, in some way beyond our understanding or imagining, this man Jesus truly is the God who is with us, acting to help, heal and save us. He’s the real thing, not a stand-in. This is the confession that Jesus' question pulls out of Peter. This is the confession that makes us what we are. Sometimes this can get pushed out of view, forgotten or even lost. But without it we have no real reason to be here this morning. A Christianity that gets too interested in other things, no matter how good and important they are, misses the point.

Jesus responds to Peter's confession with the controversial "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." The rock to which Jesus refers is Peter's vision of God truly and powerfully present in Jesus. Jesus doesn't elevate Peter to the top of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. He identifies Peter's confession, the truth about Jesus, as the solid foundation for Christian faith. Earlier in Matthew's gospel we hear Jesus contrasting the wise person, who builds his house on a rock, with the foolish person, who builds on sand. The rains fall, the floods come, and the wind blows. The house built on the sand is destroyed but the house built on the rock survives. There Jesus explicitly tells us that 'to build on the rock' is to hear and act on what Jesus himself has to say. The rock is the good news of God in Christ.

An Indian wise man, not a Christian, once said "Christianity is seeing Christ. The rest is just talk." In its place, that 'rest that's just talk' can be pretty significant. Still, I think that, looking at our faith from the outside, he sees clearly what we sometimes lose sight of. Our confession is Peter's confession; if not, it's just talk.

Left to our own devices and desires we invent a God of condemnation and control, we will try to placate him, to justify ourselves, and we will in the end make ourselves in his image, condemning and controlling, fearing all things living and free, and loving power. That, for now, is the human way. But it does not have to be and it will not always be. For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. To see the face of God in Jesus is to see the face of limitless love. We see God doing whatever it takes to save us, God committed to us despite ourselves, loving us unconditionally with a powerful love that accepts us as we are and goes on to change us.

Jesus asked his disciples about who people in general were saying he is. Instead of answering that question Peter answers the right question: Who do I think Jesus is? It's easy to forget the shock Peter must have felt when he saw who Jesus is. In the natural course of things it becomes easy and familiar, so we don't feel the scandalous weight of Peter's claim that he was seeing God, seeing God in the flesh, God putting himself, in our place, on the receiving end of all the pain and despised weakness, obstinate sin and obdurate stupidity of our human condition. It was really a pretty disreputable thing to say about God. Of the disciples, only Peter was uncouth enough to come up with it.

Flannery O'Connor short story called Parker's Back is about a man who awakens from a drunken binge with a tattoo of God on his back. Hanging out with lowlifes in bars and pool halls he takes off his shirt, they see the tattoo, and fights ensue: "We don't want him in here! Get the hell out of here!" But none of the respectable Christians see anything special about his tattoo. They know better: you can't have a tattoo of God. You can't see God. God can't be associated with anything as lowly as that. Peter would have known better. The only way to see God is to see him as he freely chooses to be seen, to see him as he chooses to be: giving up his power in order to make himself one with the powerless, giving up his glory to save the ignoble, giving up his life to bring life to the dying. The only way to see God is to see Jesus, God with us.

Amen.

13th Sunday After Pentecost

2 September 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Luke 14.1,7-14

God’s Party

When Karen and I were in Texas this summer visiting my parents, my father gave us a copy of a history of the Wacome family, recently written by a distant cousin. I was somewhat disconcerted by the very first words: “The nuts that have fallen from our tree have been scattered by the winds. This is an attempt to see how big of a forest we have become.” But Karen thinks it’s an accurate characterization.

The story begins with my great-grandparents, Mary and Silas Wacome of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. The history includes the account, based largely on my grandfather’s recollections, of the event that led to the family leaving Canada and coming to the United States. He relates that in 1888 a Scotch-Irish preacher arrived in Pugwash, rented a schoolhouse, and began to preach the gospel. My great-grandmother Mary, an active member of the Presbyterian Church, decided to go hear him. She walked the mile from her house to the schoolhouse, with an infant in her arms. When she arrived at the schoolhouse the elders of her church were standing at the door, blocking her way. They said “Mrs. Wacome, you’re not going in to hear that man, are you? They have the seats painted red on one side for the blood washed ones and on the other side they have them painted black for sinners. Don’t you go in to hear him!” She answered, “I have come a long way and I want to hear what he has to say.” Mary went in, sat down in the back – the seats were not painted as the elders had said – and listened to McEwen preach on “the ruin of man and God’s remedy.” At the close of the meeting, Mr. McEwen stood at the door saying good night and asking each one if they were saved. He shook hands with Mrs. Wacome and asked, “Are you a Christian?” She answered, “Oh, I think so. I’ve joined the Church, I read the Bible, teach a Sunday school class, and give to the good cause. I guess I’m all right.” The only thing he said was “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ” and she left the schoolhouse with these words burning in her soul.

Mary didn’t go back; the persecution was too great. But those words “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ” drove her to the Bible and she came to the place where it said “All our righteousness is filthy rags” She found that she was only a religious sinner without Christ, and became in deep soul trouble but could find no one to tell her how to be saved. One day coming up from the field with a basket of potatoes the scripture came to her mind: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” She said “What can a little child do? It can’t pray, it can’t teach a Sunday school class, it can’t give to the good cause,” and then that scripture in Isaiah 45 came to her so clearly: “Look unto me and be saved.” She said, “A little child can look!” And right there, standing with the basket of potatoes at her feet, she looked away by faith and saw that the Lord Jesus had died for her sins and finished the work and there was nothing for her to do but accept him. And she did.

Eventually, John Knox McEwen returned to Pugwash and my great grandmother was baptized. They went down to the river and cut a hole in the ice. The water looked black and cold but she was so happy that neither one gave her a thought. My great grandfather Silas was not happy; he was adamantly opposed to Mary’s conversion. According to my grandfather, the day Mary was to be baptized Silas came after her in a rage with a stick of wood and , “as Saul would have slain David to the ground,” so he would have done. But she closed the door just in time to save herself, and the door was split from top to bottom. Eventually, she left Silas, taking the younger children, including my grandfather, and moved to Boston. (This why I am neither Canadian nor, more likely, non-existent.)

The world of my great grandmother, or for that matter of my grandfather, in whose words I have told the story, is foreign to me. That talk of being a sinner and being saved, heard across a century of revivalism, fundamentalism, and evangelicalism, makes me uncomfortable; it sounds either fanatical or insincere. It’s the language of a form of Christian faith and experience that has never been meaningful for me. And yet, that tale of the church elders blocking the door, trying to save my religious and respectable great grandmother from herself, and the sound of those words “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ!” still speak. They are the same words we can hear in today’s gospel from Luke.

Let’s begin by recognizing that Jesus was not a very good dinner guest. In fact he was rude and annoying. First, he criticizes the other guests. He watches them coming in and finding their places. Naturally they want the good seats; at least they want their rightful places. Making sure you’re not cheated or put down, that you get what’s coming to you: what could be more natural? Yet Jesus warns that it may well turn out that what you really deserve is drastically less than what you expect. To pay attention to getting what you deserve is a ticket to humiliation and loss. When you go to the party, Jesus advises, leave any thought of getting your just desserts at home.

Next Jesus turns to his host and informs him that he does not approve of the guest list, the list Jesus himself is on! What sort of person comes to dinner and sits there telling his host he should have invited an entirely different set of people? And it’s even crazier: don’t invite your friends, your family, people it makes sense to get to know, people that you owe an invite, no, invite people you don’t even know, people that look like pretty unpromising party material. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Some party.

The advice Jesus so impolitely offers is especially bad in the eyes of pious first century Jews, and Pharisees like his host especially. They take very seriously the religious meaning of the shared meal. Eating only with those who are genuine people of God, the righteous, the whole, the clean, wasn’t a mere matter of personal preference. It was a matter of keeping the law with the care those perilous times demanded, and in doing so defending the integrity, and ultimately the existence, of the Israel of God.

In some ways that made sense to the Pharisees, Jesus acts like a prophet; he preaches, works miracles and heals. In other ways he acts the opposite of the way a prophet should act. He doesn’t show intense concern for the Law; he seems to sit quite loose to it. He seems incapable of discriminating among people. He seems oblivious to who’s in and who’s out, to who is the sort of person worthy of socializing with a prophet of God, and who isn’t. Indeed, he seems happy to be with the most despicable people, with tax collectors and prostitutes. He seems to enjoy eating and drinking with these unclean, unrighteous, undeserving people. Instead of fasting, he leads an entourage that’s careless of propriety, an ongoing celebration open to everyone, including those it was most important to keep away from. He acts as though Israel has already been delivered, as though God has already acted to save his people from the exile of faithlessness and Roman oppression. No wonder the Pharisees are, as Luke says, watching him closely, eager to see if he’s as bad as they’ve heard.

Jesus seizes the opportunity they offer him. It’s as though he tells them. “Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly how I am: I reject the whole idea of some people deserving God’s favor and others not deserving it. You’re right: I eat and drink with sinners. That’s what you should do too. Abandon all that business about you being on the in with God and everybody else being on the outs and rely on nothing but the grace and mercy of God. Reject the scorekeeping, any keeping track of who deserves what. Escape your dreary little world of tit for tat, incurring obligations and discharging them, of getting ahead and always being afraid of losing your position. Give up any concern with getting what’s yours. Give upon any concern with giving people what’s theirs. Let God have what’s his, which is both you and the other guy. Forget the bookkeeping and just enjoy the party God is throwing. That’s the only way to blessedness, to life, to God’s peace.”

Religious folk like those Pharisees, like my great-grandmother, like you and me, must be especially wary of being party poopers, of imagining that we somehow deserve to be invited to the eternal celebration that God has on offer. We need to be just as wary not to be like those Pugwashian Presbyterian elders, convinced we’re doing God’s work when in fact we’re blocking someone’s way to the kingdom of God.

When Karen and I were in Berkeley, we sometimes attended St. Gregory’s, a wonderful parish in San Francisco. Recently I read that they have a new communion table there. Instead of the usual “Do this in remembrance of me,” the new table at St. Gregory’s has inscribed on it the Greek words for the dismissive accusation Jesus’ religious adversaries threw in his face, words that Donald Schell, one of St. Gregory’s priests, translates as “This schmuck welcomes sinners and eats with them.” On the other side of the table, in English, are these words from Isaac of Nineveh, a 7th-century bishop of the Church in Syria:

Do not distinguish between the worthy and unworthy;

all must be equal in your eyes to love and serve.

Did not the Lord share the table of publicans and harlots,

without putting the unworthy away from him?

Thus you shall confer the same benefits,

the same honors on the faithless and the murderer.

To hear these words honestly, and with the seriousness they deserve, is to hear demands for what’s humanly impossible. Think of the horrific murder – five children and two adults – that happened last week in Sioux City. What can it mean to preach and live a gospel of unconditional forgiveness, of complete inclusion, healing and reconciliation in the face of such stunning evil? Nothing that lies within our power or imagining. Truth be told, not even something we much want. By the measure of this world’s wisdom it is foolishness, sheer impossibility, morally repugnant. But with the God who came eating and drinking with sinners all things are possible. Let us pray that we be sure not to miss Christ; that we will hear his invitation, look to him, and enter gratefully into the joy of his kingdom.

Amen.

15th Sunday in Pentecost 13 September 2009

Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa

Mark 8.27-39

Losers for Jesus

In that classic film Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter, Jesus appears on the scene in modern day Ottawa, Canada, a city beset by an infestation of vampires. The vampires, mutants who can operate in daylight, are preying on the city’s lesbians, for whose tender flesh they have a nefarious use. Jesus does rather ineffectual battle with this sinister army, until the beautiful Mary Magnum shows up to help him. She begins by updating his appearance so he’ll be less conspicuous. She has him cut off his flowing hair and long beard, and she brings him to a used clothing store where he can trade in his white robe for something, as she politely puts it, “more urban.” Jesus tries on one outfit after another, each more goofy, geeky, out of date and, in Mary’s eyes, embarrassing, than the last. She finally has to pick something for him. We want Jesus on board for the battle of good against evil, but it sure isn’t easy to make him presentable.

Today’s text from the gospel of Mark portrays an unpleasant scene where the real Jesus embarrasses his real disciples. If we back up to the verses just prior to those we just read, we find Jesus passing through the town of Bethsaida, where he encounters a blind man. He rubs some spit into his eyes, but this restores his sight only partially: “I can see people but they look like trees, walking” (8.24). Jesus tries again, laying his hands on the man’s eyes, and now he sees everything clearly. Through Mark’s narrative up to now, Jesus has been trying to get his disciples clearly to see who he is, but they are like the man who can see only indistinctly. They have no distinct vision of who Jesus is. Maybe one more try will do it. But Jesus is not sanguine about his obtuse followers having at last come around. He proceeds indirectly. Jesus diffidently asks, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples report: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. The crowds have seen the miracles, the healings and the mass feedings. They’ve heard the vivid but enigmatic parables. It’s no surprise that they’ve tried to fit Jesus into their religious categories. In contrast, Jesus has been privately explaining the meaning of his words and actions to his closest followers. By now they should see distinctly who he is. “But who do you say that I am?”

Eager Peter is proud to answer: “You are the Messiah!” Finally, they get it! Jesus is no recycled prophet. He is God’s anointed, the redeemer of Israel, the savior of the nations. Jesus’ reaction is unexpected. “He sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.” The disciples anticipate being praised for their grasp of the import of Jesus’ role and mission. They’re not expecting to be put down for getting the right answer. Surely, they expect Jesus to commend them and send them to proclaim that they have found the Messiah. What does Jesus mean? Is it, “Don’t tell people that I am the Messiah!” This is how Jesus’ words usually have been understood. Taken this way, the text is a principal one behind the famous problem of the “Messianic secret” in Mark’s gospel. Why does Jesus demand silence of the demons? Why does he heal people and then tell them to keep quiet about it? Why does he bring Jairus’ daughter back from death, and try to get people to think he didn’t? And why does Jesus respond in this surprising way to Peter’s confession? Some scholars have tried to make the problem disappear: Jesus never tried to keep his identity secret; Mark made all this up after the fact to account for the fact that the people of Israel did not accept Jesus as their Messiah. Taken seriously, this leads quickly to the implausible conclusion that almost nothing in Mark’s gospel is historically accurate. Another answer, favored by many conservative students of the text, is that in Jesus’ day the idea of the Messiah had become so closely associated with violent insurrection against Rome that he had to avoid publicly claiming his rightful title. If he had permitted people to proclaim him Israel’s Messiah, the authorities’ response would have been swift and violent. Being cheered by the crowds as the Messiah guaranteed arrest and execution. I have doubts about this explanation because he does so many things that are overt claims to messiahship, and because right after ordering his disciples not to talk about him, he quite openly foretells that this is precisely what awaits him. He can hardly be saying, “Don’t talk about me being the Messiah” because he thinks this will lead to the cross, but then immediately predict his crucifixion.

So, I don’t think Jesus is saying, “Don’t tell people that I am the Messiah!” Instead, I think he means, “Stop talking about me! You’ve got it so wrong that it’s better you say nothing about me!” Does this make sense? Jesus is the Messiah! But what Jesus says next shows that the disciples’ readiness to proclaim that he is the Messiah arises from a radical misconception of who he is. For his response to Peter’s “You are the Messiah!” is to tell them that he is going to suffer, to be rejected and killed. This is desperately at odds with everything they have in mind when they triumphantly announce that he is the Messiah. They see him as the powerful, glorious winner who will defeat their enemies and make things right. They see him as doing God’s proper work in the world, at last vindicating the righteous and giving the wicked what’s coming to them. But Jesus recognizes their eagerness to embrace him as Messiah for what it is: their rejection of the God whose human face we see in Jesus, the God makes weakness, defeat and loss his own. Jesus emphatically contrasts his way, the way of the cross, to their proclamation of him as Messiah. Tradition portrays Peter’s threefold denial—“Damn it! I don’t know the man!”—the night he was arrested as his deplorable betrayal of Jesus. But I don’t think so. There, he is heartbroken, demoralized and afraid; his failure to acknowledge Jesus is a predictable human failure. It reveals the unsurprising cowardice beneath his bluster.

Peter’s terrible denial of Jesus happens not there but earlier, here, as he proudly asserts Jesus is God’s anointed and then, after Jesus responds with this crazy talk of rejection and defeat, takes him aside and rebukes him. Think of a political candidate who, after one campaign stop too many, starts saying embarrassing things and has to be shut up and hustled out of sight by his handlers. Peter and the disciples disapprove of Jesus when he starts talking this way, when he acts as if he’s not willing to use his awesome power on behalf of justice, righteousness, and God’s glory. They’re embarrassed for him and by him. They are downright ashamed of him when he talks about being bested by the scribes, the elders, and the chief priests. He’s losing his nerve, giving up, rather than leading God’s campaign to makes things right. They have sacrificed so much to follow him, and now he’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He’s making them vulnerable. He’s making them look foolish. Come on Jesus, get with the program!

Angrily, Jesus calls Peter out: “Get out of my way, Satan!” Peter imagines he’s helping Jesus get through a moment of weakness, a bad patch on the way to his messianic glory, but Jesus sees him blocking his way to the cross. Jesus pulls no punches: to be ashamed of him is to be ashamed of God, the God who has chosen not to condemn and reject but to be condemned and rejected, the God who goes to the cross and sacrifices himself for the unworthy. Peter, understandably, is ashamed to be associated with such a loser. It makes perfect human sense to feel like this, to feel ashamed for a God who humiliates himself in this way.

No less than Peter, we can be ashamed of God today. A dedicated churchgoer who had done all kinds of wonderful service once confided to me that, although he seemed like a good candidate, he couldn’t become a deacon because he didn’t believe that Jesus was God. The idea of God becoming man, he said, was demeaning to God. Exactly. And so much more if God gets himself condemned for sedition and blasphemy and put to death in a messy, public manner. But Jesus’ command to stop obstructing, and start following, him has a sharper edge, one that cuts closer to home: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus casts a stark alternative. If one does not deny himself and go the way of the cross, then he is ashamed of Jesus. If we do not deny ourselves but instead save our own lives, then, like Peter, we deny Jesus. What is he talking about? What is it to deny oneself and take up Jesus’ cross?

Last month the Lutherans held their convention in Minneapolis where they took up some of the contentious issues about human sexuality that have divided many Christian groups, not least the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. In due course they got down to the hotly contested motion fully to include gays and lesbians in the life of the church. On the floor of the huge convention hall holding thousands of Lutherans green and red microphones were positioned so anyone who wanted to could make a statement. Those who wanted to speak for going ahead with the proposal came up and spoke at the green microphone and those against it spoke from the red microphone. Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor of The House of All Saints and Sinners in Denver, was there, and she relates that as she listened to people’s comments, she, would try to fight off thoughts like “Man, that guy’s an idiot!” with more or less success. I watched people say prayerful things, hurtful things, thoughtful things, and idiotic things on both sides of the aisle….And then a young pastor got up to speak at the green microphone and the first thing he said, in a quivering voice, was “Anyone else frightened to speak? I’m shaking. Please pray for me” and the man standing right next to him at the red microphone reached over and laid his hand on him and prayed while his brother of the opposing viewpoint spoke. Then I knew that Jesus was really there, between the red and green microphones. Not in some sort of neutral “Jesus as Switzerland” sort of way, but in the “You must lose your life to gain it” sort of way. Jesus is between the red and the green microphones…between the red and the blue states… offering us life and salvation in the Words of eternal life and in the Sacrament of his own body and blood. Jesus right there between the liberals and conservatives speaking the word that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus standing there between those who are harmed and those doing the harming saying forgive as you have been forgiven.”

When so much is at stake, when we need to take a stand for our principles and defend everything that is good, and right, and true, where we want so much to assert, not deny, ourselves, what kind of loser lets go of what deeply matters to take the hand of the guy who is wrong? When what’s up for grabs is purity, truth, justice, academic integrity, the American way, or whatever looms over us claiming ultimate importance, who’s ready to let it go for something greater than the values we hold dear? Who wants to lose her well-earned claim to being right and being in the right at the foot of that cross, where a loser God hangs, useless, pathetic and powerless…and the vampires are lurking out there? What kind of loser forsakes all that is sensible and respectable in religion--and everywhere else--to take hold of that cross, to accept God’s reckless, unconditional, no strings attached love and forgiveness, and—worse—to pass on it on to everyone who comes our way, as patently undeserving as they may be?

Over The Rhine’s Karen Berquist, sings a lovely song called “Jesus in New Orleans.” Today’s text brought it to mind, and I’ll conclude with some if its lyrics. It begins:

The last time I saw Jesus I was drinking bloody Mary’s in the South

In a barroom in New Orleans

Rinsin’ out the bad taste in my mouth

She wore a dark and faded blazer

With a little of the lining hanging out

When the jukebox played Miss Dorothy Moore

I knew that it was him without a doubt.

The song goes on and then concludes:

I know I’m not a martyr I’ve never died for anyone but me

The last frontier is only

The stranger in the mirror that I see

But when I least expect it

Here and there I see my savior’s face

He’s still my favorite loser

Falling for the entire human race.

Let our prayer be that we not be ashamed of the God who so wantonly comes to us in Jesus, but that we deny ourselves and follow him.

Amen.

15 Pentecost 9 September 2012 Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa

Mark 7.24-37

Bread for the Dogs

My maternal grandmother, an excitable red-haired woman, on many occasions adamantly warned against feeding bread to the dog. Bread gives dogs running fits. As a boy, I had no clear idea what running fits are, and still don’t; Wikipedia unhelpfully supplies canine hysteria and reports that the cause is unknown. Preferring not to find out, we kept Blinky the dog and bread far apart. Who knows what will happen if bread goes to the dogs?

Four Sundays last month our lessons from John portrayed Jesus calling himself the bread of heaven, God’s life-giving love made palpable. In today’s lesson from Mark’s Gospel we see what happens when Jesus brings the bread of heaven to the dogs.

Jesus has been having a bad time. His obtuse disciples understand nothing he says or does. The Pharisees, who ought to know better, are just as clueless, and exhibit an outrageous pious hypocrisy besides; they follow him around, looking for a chance to incriminate him. The news arrives that his cousin John has gotten the axe. Back home, people are snarking about his humble origins, and his family and friends say he’s insane, or even demon possessed. Across the Sea of Galilee, he saves a man who really is possessed by demons; the thanks he gets is to be told to sail back where he came from. When he heals people, he asks nothing from them but to keep quiet about it, but that’s the last thing they do. Some proclaim him Messiah, inviting a violent reaction from the Romans for an insurrection he does not intend. So now he can’t make a move without being swamped by crowds of people, some just curious, but many in manic hope dragging the blind, sick, crippled and possessed to him. He’s in danger of being crushed by the frantic mobs; sometimes he escapes only by boarding a fishing boat and shoving off across the lake. He has no time to be alone to pray, to sleep, or even eat. Things are out of control. His mission seems to be sinking in a bottomless sea of human need. He can’t stay in town; he’s in a house, the crowd surrounds it and some enterprising guys break through the roof to lower their paralyzed friend to Jesus. People seeking help come at him from all directions non-stop. He tries to keep out of sight in the countryside, far from the city crowds, but he can’t get away. So Jesus and his disciples keep moving, finally moving outside Israel altogether, to Gentile country. He’s hiding out in a house in the neighborhood of Tyre, a city about 30 miles northwest of the Sea of Galilee, on the Mediterranean coast.

It was a very long walk, but it’s no good; they found him! Suddenly someone’s shouting. It’s a Gentile woman accosting him. She falls at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her little daughter. Matthew—not Mark—records that at first Jesus just ignores her. The disciples arrive and say, “Send her away!” Then Jesus answers.

His response to the poor woman’s pleas is notorious. We expect Jesus to tell his disciples not to get in her way, that while these blockheads want to get rid of her, he’s there to help her. He is, after all, Jesus. Instead he says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to dogs.” At this point we’re used to Jesus saying harsh things to the Pharisees, but that’s O.K. Everyone hates the Pharisees; they deserve it. We don’t expect Jesus to say such a callous thing to this distraught mother, no matter how exasperated and exhausted he is. He is, after all, Jesus.

Interpreters have tried to soften this, to show that what Jesus says isn’t as bad as it sounds. We hear that the Greek word used here refers to pets, indoor dogs; a different term was used for outdoor dogs, animals of a lower status. This is no help. The Jews were in the habit of calling their Gentile neighbors dogs, an unambiguous term of contempt; using the diminutive term to refer to the Gentile child hardly mitigates the insult. Other interpreters find theological lessons in the text: Jesus aims to elicit from the woman a praiseworthy humility, something we should all have when asking God for what we want. I don’t hear her humbly acknowledging that she, a mere Gentile, rightly takes second place to the Jews, yet hoping there might be something left over for her child. I imagine her thinking: if you think it’s your duty to help the Jews first, then why are you here, not there?! This desperate but clever lady bites her tongue and feigns humility so she can use Jesus’ unkind words to her advantage. Some say that Jesus talks this way to test her faith, to see—although he supposedly already knows— whether she will persist in asking for the help she needs. One commentator even advances an erudite—though to me unintelligible—theory that Jesus detected that she was a Gentile convert to Judaism, that her response about the crumbs bears this out, so happily, she and her child are not Gentile dogs after all and the child can be healed.

I think we should reject all these readings: they dehumanize Jesus, they make him into a saint, in the worst sense of the term. They obscure the plain fact that Jesus is frazzled and frustrated, and really does at first treat this poor woman in a way that is not at all nice. Not always being nice is, after all, part of what it is to be a human being—even in the Midwest—and we should resist well-intentioned efforts to strip Jesus of his humanity. I’m not in altogether bad company in thinking this. Preaching on the text, Martin Luther describes the woman encountering Jesus at his angriest but turning his own cruel words against him. Whatever forces us to face up to the fact that Jesus—very God of very God—is nonetheless one of us—really human—is a good thing. We are always all too ready to turn him into something not altogether human and thereby hide the stunning fact of God with us.

More important here is that the desperate woman’s clever response makes Jesus re-think his mission. Take Jesus’ words at face value: he doesn’t say that the Gentile dogs can never get God’s help, but that now is not the time. He’s been pushed enough by the crowds; he can do without this Gentile woman pushing too. “Wait your turn lady!” Jesus is an astute reader of the Hebrew Scriptures. He knows that God is not God of Israel alone, but of all the world, and that God chooses Israel to be his people not to the ultimate exclusion of everyone else, but to be a nation of kings and priests, drawing all the nations to the true God, creator of heaven and Earth. But not now; Jesus sees the salvation of the Gentiles as eschatological, off somewhere in the future, after Israel has at last been faithful to the covenant and been delivered from the “exile” of foreign rule. There’s a reasonable plan for revealing the Kingdom of God, but it is already going awry, thanks to the crazy crowds, the healed people who can’t keep quiet, the infuriatingly hard-hearted Pharisees, the unreliable disciples. This impudent woman pleads, “Even the dogs under the table eat the crumbs that the children drop!” And that, of course, is absurd. To suggest that God could be satisfied giving crumbs, mere leftovers, which might, or might not, fall when and where they are needed, is ridiculous. This is not the God Jesus knows. This is not the God to whom Jesus gives human flesh. So much for the plan. So much for the proprieties. So much for keeping the unprepared mob away from God’s table. Of course he heals the child. The God who comes to us in Jesus is not going to tell the tormented girl to be a good little gentile and wait her turn. No barrier, not even one as profound as between Jew and gentile, stands in God’s way now. The God who comes to us as this frayed and frustrated Jesus wasn’t gracious when he spoke to the Syro-Phoenician woman, but what she says leads him to grasp the inescapable fact: grace abounds when this God encounters human need. God has become one of us and he is all in. This is the relentless lover reckless in pursuit of his beloved we see portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is the father of the prodigal, forgetting his dignity as he runs out to meet his returning son. Forget the crumbs: the feast is thrown open, it’s bread for all, even the dogs!

By the next chapter in Mark something is different. Jesus has returned to the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, still beset by crowds, still healing, still being ignored when he commands the healed not to talk about it. It’s striking that the Gospel writers never seem to find anything objectionable when these people disobey Jesus’ explicit orders to keep quiet. As though in retrospect they see that when the salvation of God arrives in full force, in human flesh, there’s no containing it. As though God himself isn’t really capable of holding back his love when he finds us in our need. A large crowd has surrounded Jesus for three days, but instead of trying to get away, Jesus calls his disciples: “I’m really sorry for the people….they haven’t had anything to eat. If I send them home hungry, they’ll collapse on the way.” I suspect that when he adds, “Some of them have come from miles away” (8.2-3) he’s recognizing that some of them have walked the many miles from where he just came from, where he met the mother whose plea for crumbs changed his mind. (Earlier, Mark reported that the crowds in Galilee following Jesus included people from this, and other, Gentile areas.) So this great proto-Eucharistic feast includes a mix of hungry Jews and Gentiles, God’s legitimate children together with those they’re ready to dismiss as dirty dogs.

Jesus takes seven loaves of bread—seven the number that represents perfection, completion, fullness—breaks and blesses them and shares them with the crowd. Four thousand people eat and are satisfied. There are, Mark tells us, seven baskets of crumbs left over, but there’s no one to eat them. Everyone has eaten their fill.

Anything can happen when God breaks the rules and overturns the customs in which we feel secure and eagerly reaches out to lost and broken people, people we might be happy to leave out of it, or at least expect to politely wait their turn. What comforts will be compromised? What chaos ensues when heaven’s bread is so indiscriminately handed out? When God invites the dogs to the table? No surprise when someone—and this includes all of us, one way or another—reacts with anxiety or anger. I can’t resist reminding you of an incident that occurred in a church in Toronto a couple of years ago. A visitor brought his dog to the communion service. The priest, sensing that the man needed to see how truly welcome he was at Jesus’ table, proceeded to offer not just him, but his dog, the Eucharistic bread. (Apparently, the dog sniffed, but turned down, the wine.) She got outraged complaints from all over Canada, and she was reprimanded by her bishop for her "strange and shocking actions which contravened church policy.” Some members of her congregation got the ecclesiastical equivalent of running fits and left the church altogether. I don’t mean to advocate for canine communion, but I like the way the story illustrates how we can respond to such unseemly doings.

When Jesus headed for Tyre, he thought he was just getting a respite from the chaos, but it turns out that he was bringing God’s healing grace to the “dogs,” the wayward, despised, unclean, indifferent, and plain bad. Those apparently, but only apparently, beyond God’s reach. God going to the dogs. I looked up the term “going to the dogs” on the web, where, as you know, all information is reliable. I learned that the expression originates in ancient China, where dogs were not permitted within the cities. Stray dogs roamed outside the city, living on the garbage thrown over the walls. Criminals and other social outcasts were expelled from the city and forced to fend for themselves with the dogs. To go to the dogs was to join them, metaphorically, if not literally. In today’s text we see Jesus making his way beyond the “walls” of Israel, where he brings not crumbs but the full feast of God’s love to those who by rights should be excluded and who deserve nothing, or nothing but condemnation. We know, of course, where this leads. Jesus himself winds up outside the walls. On a cross. Out there with the dogs. Bringing the bread of life. Out there with us. .

Amen.

13th Sunday After Pentecost

2 September 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Luke 14.1,7-14

God’s Party

When Karen and I were in Texas this summer visiting my parents, my father gave us a copy of a history of the Wacome family, recently written by a distant cousin. I was somewhat disconcerted by the very first words: “The nuts that have fallen from our tree have been scattered by the winds. This is an attempt to see how big of a forest we have become.” But Karen thinks it’s an accurate characterization.

The story begins with my great-grandparents, Mary and Silas Wacome of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. The history includes the account, based largely on my grandfather’s recollections, of the event that led to the family leaving Canada and coming to the United States. He relates that in 1888 a Scotch-Irish preacher arrived in Pugwash, rented a schoolhouse, and began to preach the gospel. My great-grandmother Mary, an active member of the Presbyterian Church, decided to go hear him. She walked the mile from her house to the schoolhouse, with an infant in her arms. When she arrived at the schoolhouse the elders of her church were standing at the door, blocking her way. They said “Mrs. Wacome, you’re not going in to hear that man, are you? They have the seats painted red on one side for the blood washed ones and on the other side they have them painted black for sinners. Don’t you go in to hear him!” She answered, “I have come a long way and I want to hear what he has to say.” Mary went in, sat down in the back – the seats were not painted as the elders had said – and listened to McEwen preach on “the ruin of man and God’s remedy.” At the close of the meeting, Mr. McEwen stood at the door saying good night and asking each one if they were saved. He shook hands with Mrs. Wacome and asked, “Are you a Christian?” She answered, “Oh, I think so. I’ve joined the Church, I read the Bible, teach a Sunday school class, and give to the good cause. I guess I’m all right.” The only thing he said was “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ” and she left the schoolhouse with these words burning in her soul.

Mary didn’t go back; the persecution was too great. But those words “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ” drove her to the Bible and she came to the place where it said “All our righteousness is filthy rags” She found that she was only a religious sinner without Christ, and became in deep soul trouble but could find no one to tell her how to be saved. One day coming up from the field with a basket of potatoes the scripture came to her mind: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” She said “What can a little child do? It can’t pray, it can’t teach a Sunday school class, it can’t give to the good cause,” and then that scripture in Isaiah 45 came to her so clearly: “Look unto me and be saved.” She said, “A little child can look!” And right there, standing with the basket of potatoes at her feet, she looked away by faith and saw that the Lord Jesus had died for her sins and finished the work and there was nothing for her to do but accept him. And she did.

Eventually, John Knox McEwen returned to Pugwash and my great grandmother was baptized. They went down to the river and cut a hole in the ice. The water looked black and cold but she was so happy that neither one gave her a thought. My great grandfather Silas was not happy; he was adamantly opposed to Mary’s conversion. According to my grandfather, the day Mary was to be baptized Silas came after her in a rage with a stick of wood and , “as Saul would have slain David to the ground,” so he would have done. But she closed the door just in time to save herself, and the door was split from top to bottom. Eventually, she left Silas, taking the younger children, including my grandfather, and moved to Boston. (This why I am neither Canadian nor, more likely, non-existent.)

The world of my great grandmother, or for that matter of my grandfather, in whose words I have told the story, is foreign to me. That talk of being a sinner and being saved, heard across a century of revivalism, fundamentalism, and evangelicalism, makes me uncomfortable; it sounds either fanatical or insincere. It’s the language of a form of Christian faith and experience that has never been meaningful for me. And yet, that tale of the church elders blocking the door, trying to save my religious and respectable great grandmother from herself, and the sound of those words “Be sure you haven’t missed Christ!” still speak. They are the same words we can hear in today’s gospel from Luke.

Let’s begin by recognizing that Jesus was not a very good dinner guest. In fact he was rude and annoying. First, he criticizes the other guests. He watches them coming in and finding their places. Naturally they want the good seats; at least they want their rightful places. Making sure you’re not cheated or put down, that you get what’s coming to you: what could be more natural? Yet Jesus warns that it may well turn out that what you really deserve is drastically less than what you expect. To pay attention to getting what you deserve is a ticket to humiliation and loss. When you go to the party, Jesus advises, leave any thought of getting your just desserts at home.

Next Jesus turns to his host and informs him that he does not approve of the guest list, the list Jesus himself is on! What sort of person comes to dinner and sits there telling his host he should have invited an entirely different set of people? And it’s even crazier: don’t invite your friends, your family, people it makes sense to get to know, people that you owe an invite, no, invite people you don’t even know, people that look like pretty unpromising party material. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Some party.

The advice Jesus so impolitely offers is especially bad in the eyes of pious first century Jews, and Pharisees like his host especially. They take very seriously the religious meaning of the shared meal. Eating only with those who are genuine people of God, the righteous, the whole, the clean, wasn’t a mere matter of personal preference. It was a matter of keeping the law with the care those perilous times demanded, and in doing so defending the integrity, and ultimately the existence, of the Israel of God.

In some ways that made sense to the Pharisees, Jesus acts like a prophet; he preaches, works miracles and heals. In other ways he acts the opposite of the way a prophet should act. He doesn’t show intense concern for the Law; he seems to sit quite loose to it. He seems incapable of discriminating among people. He seems oblivious to who’s in and who’s out, to who is the sort of person worthy of socializing with a prophet of God, and who isn’t. Indeed, he seems happy to be with the most despicable people, with tax collectors and prostitutes. He seems to enjoy eating and drinking with these unclean, unrighteous, undeserving people. Instead of fasting, he leads an entourage that’s careless of propriety, an ongoing celebration open to everyone, including those it was most important to keep away from. He acts as though Israel has already been delivered, as though God has already acted to save his people from the exile of faithlessness and Roman oppression. No wonder the Pharisees are, as Luke says, watching him closely, eager to see if he’s as bad as they’ve heard.

Jesus seizes the opportunity they offer him. It’s as though he tells them. “Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly how I am: I reject the whole idea of some people deserving God’s favor and others not deserving it. You’re right: I eat and drink with sinners. That’s what you should do too. Abandon all that business about you being on the in with God and everybody else being on the outs and rely on nothing but the grace and mercy of God. Reject the scorekeeping, any keeping track of who deserves what. Escape your dreary little world of tit for tat, incurring obligations and discharging them, of getting ahead and always being afraid of losing your position. Give up any concern with getting what’s yours. Give upon any concern with giving people what’s theirs. Let God have what’s his, which is both you and the other guy. Forget the bookkeeping and just enjoy the party God is throwing. That’s the only way to blessedness, to life, to God’s peace.”

Religious folk like those Pharisees, like my great-grandmother, like you and me, must be especially wary of being party poopers, of imagining that we somehow deserve to be invited to the eternal celebration that God has on offer. We need to be just as wary not to be like those Pugwashian Presbyterian elders, convinced we’re doing God’s work when in fact we’re blocking someone’s way to the kingdom of God.

When Karen and I were in Berkeley, we sometimes attended St. Gregory’s, a wonderful parish in San Francisco. Recently I read that they have a new communion table there. Instead of the usual “Do this in remembrance of me,” the new table at St. Gregory’s has inscribed on it the Greek words for the dismissive accusation Jesus’ religious adversaries threw in his face, words that Donald Schell, one of St. Gregory’s priests, translates as “This schmuck welcomes sinners and eats with them.” On the other side of the table, in English, are these words from Isaac of Nineveh, a 7th-century bishop of the Church in Syria:

Do not distinguish between the worthy and unworthy;

all must be equal in your eyes to love and serve.

Did not the Lord share the table of publicans and harlots,

without putting the unworthy away from him?

Thus you shall confer the same benefits,

the same honors on the faithless and the murderer.

To hear these words honestly, and with the seriousness they deserve, is to hear demands for what’s humanly impossible. Think of the horrific murder – five children and two adults – that happened last week in Sioux City. What can it mean to preach and live a gospel of unconditional forgiveness, of complete inclusion, healing and reconciliation in the face of such stunning evil? Nothing that lies within our power or imagining. Truth be told, not even something we much want. By the measure of this world’s wisdom it is foolishness, sheer impossibility, morally repugnant. But with the God who came eating and drinking with sinners all things are possible. Let us pray that we be sure not to miss Christ; that we will hear his invitation, look to him, and enter gratefully into the joy of his kingdom.

Amen.

15th Sunday in Pentecost 13 September 2009

Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa

Mark 8.27-39

Losers for Jesus

In that classic film Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter, Jesus appears on the scene in modern day Ottawa, Canada, a city beset by an infestation of vampires. The vampires, mutants who can operate in daylight, are preying on the city’s lesbians, for whose tender flesh they have a nefarious use. Jesus does rather ineffectual battle with this sinister army, until the beautiful Mary Magnum shows up to help him. She begins by updating his appearance so he’ll be less conspicuous. She has him cut off his flowing hair and long beard, and she brings him to a used clothing store where he can trade in his white robe for something, as she politely puts it, “more urban.” Jesus tries on one outfit after another, each more goofy, geeky, out of date and, in Mary’s eyes, embarrassing, than the last. She finally has to pick something for him. We want Jesus on board for the battle of good against evil, but it sure isn’t easy to make him presentable.

Today’s text from the gospel of Mark portrays an unpleasant scene where the real Jesus embarrasses his real disciples. If we back up to the verses just prior to those we just read, we find Jesus passing through the town of Bethsaida, where he encounters a blind man. He rubs some spit into his eyes, but this restores his sight only partially: “I can see people but they look like trees, walking” (8.24). Jesus tries again, laying his hands on the man’s eyes, and now he sees everything clearly. Through Mark’s narrative up to now, Jesus has been trying to get his disciples clearly to see who he is, but they are like the man who can see only indistinctly. They have no distinct vision of who Jesus is. Maybe one more try will do it. But Jesus is not sanguine about his obtuse followers having at last come around. He proceeds indirectly. Jesus diffidently asks, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples report: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. The crowds have seen the miracles, the healings and the mass feedings. They’ve heard the vivid but enigmatic parables. It’s no surprise that they’ve tried to fit Jesus into their religious categories. In contrast, Jesus has been privately explaining the meaning of his words and actions to his closest followers. By now they should see distinctly who he is. “But who do you say that I am?”

Eager Peter is proud to answer: “You are the Messiah!” Finally, they get it! Jesus is no recycled prophet. He is God’s anointed, the redeemer of Israel, the savior of the nations. Jesus’ reaction is unexpected. “He sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.” The disciples anticipate being praised for their grasp of the import of Jesus’ role and mission. They’re not expecting to be put down for getting the right answer. Surely, they expect Jesus to commend them and send them to proclaim that they have found the Messiah. What does Jesus mean? Is it, “Don’t tell people that I am the Messiah!” This is how Jesus’ words usually have been understood. Taken this way, the text is a principal one behind the famous problem of the “Messianic secret” in Mark’s gospel. Why does Jesus demand silence of the demons? Why does he heal people and then tell them to keep quiet about it? Why does he bring Jairus’ daughter back from death, and try to get people to think he didn’t? And why does Jesus respond in this surprising way to Peter’s confession? Some scholars have tried to make the problem disappear: Jesus never tried to keep his identity secret; Mark made all this up after the fact to account for the fact that the people of Israel did not accept Jesus as their Messiah. Taken seriously, this leads quickly to the implausible conclusion that almost nothing in Mark’s gospel is historically accurate. Another answer, favored by many conservative students of the text, is that in Jesus’ day the idea of the Messiah had become so closely associated with violent insurrection against Rome that he had to avoid publicly claiming his rightful title. If he had permitted people to proclaim him Israel’s Messiah, the authorities’ response would have been swift and violent. Being cheered by the crowds as the Messiah guaranteed arrest and execution. I have doubts about this explanation because he does so many things that are overt claims to messiahship, and because right after ordering his disciples not to talk about him, he quite openly foretells that this is precisely what awaits him. He can hardly be saying, “Don’t talk about me being the Messiah” because he thinks this will lead to the cross, but then immediately predict his crucifixion.

So, I don’t think Jesus is saying, “Don’t tell people that I am the Messiah!” Instead, I think he means, “Stop talking about me! You’ve got it so wrong that it’s better you say nothing about me!” Does this make sense? Jesus is the Messiah! But what Jesus says next shows that the disciples’ readiness to proclaim that he is the Messiah arises from a radical misconception of who he is. For his response to Peter’s “You are the Messiah!” is to tell them that he is going to suffer, to be rejected and killed. This is desperately at odds with everything they have in mind when they triumphantly announce that he is the Messiah. They see him as the powerful, glorious winner who will defeat their enemies and make things right. They see him as doing God’s proper work in the world, at last vindicating the righteous and giving the wicked what’s coming to them. But Jesus recognizes their eagerness to embrace him as Messiah for what it is: their rejection of the God whose human face we see in Jesus, the God makes weakness, defeat and loss his own. Jesus emphatically contrasts his way, the way of the cross, to their proclamation of him as Messiah. Tradition portrays Peter’s threefold denial—“Damn it! I don’t know the man!”—the night he was arrested as his deplorable betrayal of Jesus. But I don’t think so. There, he is heartbroken, demoralized and afraid; his failure to acknowledge Jesus is a predictable human failure. It reveals the unsurprising cowardice beneath his bluster.

Peter’s terrible denial of Jesus happens not there but earlier, here, as he proudly asserts Jesus is God’s anointed and then, after Jesus responds with this crazy talk of rejection and defeat, takes him aside and rebukes him. Think of a political candidate who, after one campaign stop too many, starts saying embarrassing things and has to be shut up and hustled out of sight by his handlers. Peter and the disciples disapprove of Jesus when he starts talking this way, when he acts as if he’s not willing to use his awesome power on behalf of justice, righteousness, and God’s glory. They’re embarrassed for him and by him. They are downright ashamed of him when he talks about being bested by the scribes, the elders, and the chief priests. He’s losing his nerve, giving up, rather than leading God’s campaign to makes things right. They have sacrificed so much to follow him, and now he’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He’s making them vulnerable. He’s making them look foolish. Come on Jesus, get with the program!

Angrily, Jesus calls Peter out: “Get out of my way, Satan!” Peter imagines he’s helping Jesus get through a moment of weakness, a bad patch on the way to his messianic glory, but Jesus sees him blocking his way to the cross. Jesus pulls no punches: to be ashamed of him is to be ashamed of God, the God who has chosen not to condemn and reject but to be condemned and rejected, the God who goes to the cross and sacrifices himself for the unworthy. Peter, understandably, is ashamed to be associated with such a loser. It makes perfect human sense to feel like this, to feel ashamed for a God who humiliates himself in this way.

No less than Peter, we can be ashamed of God today. A dedicated churchgoer who had done all kinds of wonderful service once confided to me that, although he seemed like a good candidate, he couldn’t become a deacon because he didn’t believe that Jesus was God. The idea of God becoming man, he said, was demeaning to God. Exactly. And so much more if God gets himself condemned for sedition and blasphemy and put to death in a messy, public manner. But Jesus’ command to stop obstructing, and start following, him has a sharper edge, one that cuts closer to home: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus casts a stark alternative. If one does not deny himself and go the way of the cross, then he is ashamed of Jesus. If we do not deny ourselves but instead save our own lives, then, like Peter, we deny Jesus. What is he talking about? What is it to deny oneself and take up Jesus’ cross?

Last month the Lutherans held their convention in Minneapolis where they took up some of the contentious issues about human sexuality that have divided many Christian groups, not least the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. In due course they got down to the hotly contested motion fully to include gays and lesbians in the life of the church. On the floor of the huge convention hall holding thousands of Lutherans green and red microphones were positioned so anyone who wanted to could make a statement. Those who wanted to speak for going ahead with the proposal came up and spoke at the green microphone and those against it spoke from the red microphone. Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor of The House of All Saints and Sinners in Denver, was there, and she relates that as she listened to people’s comments, she, would try to fight off thoughts like “Man, that guy’s an idiot!” with more or less success. I watched people say prayerful things, hurtful things, thoughtful things, and idiotic things on both sides of the aisle….And then a young pastor got up to speak at the green microphone and the first thing he said, in a quivering voice, was “Anyone else frightened to speak? I’m shaking. Please pray for me” and the man standing right next to him at the red microphone reached over and laid his hand on him and prayed while his brother of the opposing viewpoint spoke. Then I knew that Jesus was really there, between the red and green microphones. Not in some sort of neutral “Jesus as Switzerland” sort of way, but in the “You must lose your life to gain it” sort of way. Jesus is between the red and the green microphones…between the red and the blue states… offering us life and salvation in the Words of eternal life and in the Sacrament of his own body and blood. Jesus right there between the liberals and conservatives speaking the word that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus standing there between those who are harmed and those doing the harming saying forgive as you have been forgiven.”

When so much is at stake, when we need to take a stand for our principles and defend everything that is good, and right, and true, where we want so much to assert, not deny, ourselves, what kind of loser lets go of what deeply matters to take the hand of the guy who is wrong? When what’s up for grabs is purity, truth, justice, academic integrity, the American way, or whatever looms over us claiming ultimate importance, who’s ready to let it go for something greater than the values we hold dear? Who wants to lose her well-earned claim to being right and being in the right at the foot of that cross, where a loser God hangs, useless, pathetic and powerless…and the vampires are lurking out there? What kind of loser forsakes all that is sensible and respectable in religion--and everywhere else--to take hold of that cross, to accept God’s reckless, unconditional, no strings attached love and forgiveness, and—worse—to pass on it on to everyone who comes our way, as patently undeserving as they may be?

Over The Rhine’s Karen Berquist, sings a lovely song called “Jesus in New Orleans.” Today’s text brought it to mind, and I’ll conclude with some if its lyrics. It begins:

The last time I saw Jesus I was drinking bloody Mary’s in the South

In a barroom in New Orleans

Rinsin’ out the bad taste in my mouth

She wore a dark and faded blazer

With a little of the lining hanging out

When the jukebox played Miss Dorothy Moore

I knew that it was him without a doubt.

The song goes on to conclude:

I know I’m not a martyr I’ve never died for anyone but me

The last frontier is only

The stranger in the mirror that I see

But when I least expect it

Here and there I see my savior’s face

He’s still my favorite loser

Falling for the entire human race.

Let our prayer be that we not be ashamed of the God who so wantonly comes to us in Jesus, but that we deny ourselves and follow him.

Amen.

15 Pentecost 9 September 2012 Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa

Mark 7.24-37

Bread for the Dogs

My maternal grandmother, an excitable red-haired woman, on many occasions adamantly warned against feeding bread to the dog. Bread gives dogs running fits. As a boy, I had no clear idea what running fits are, and still don’t; Wikipedia unhelpfully supplies canine hysteria and reports that the cause is unknown. Preferring not to find out, we kept Blinky the dog and bread far apart. Who knows what will happen if bread goes to the dogs?

Four Sundays last month our lessons from John portrayed Jesus calling himself the bread of heaven, God’s life-giving love made palpable. In today’s lesson from Mark’s Gospel we see what happens when Jesus brings the bread of heaven to the dogs.

Jesus has been having a bad time. His obtuse disciples understand nothing he says or does. The Pharisees, who ought to know better, are just as clueless, and exhibit an outrageous pious hypocrisy besides; they follow him around, looking for a chance to incriminate him. The news arrives that his cousin John has gotten the axe. Back home, people are snarking about his humble origins, and his family and friends say he’s insane, or even demon possessed. Across the Sea of Galilee, he saves a man who really is possessed by demons; the thanks he gets is to be told to sail back where he came from. When he heals people, he asks nothing from them but to keep quiet about it, but that’s the last thing they do. Some proclaim him Messiah, inviting a violent reaction from the Romans for an insurrection he does not intend. So now he can’t make a move without being swamped by crowds of people, some just curious, but many in manic hope dragging the blind, sick, crippled and possessed to him. He’s in danger of being crushed by the frantic mobs; sometimes he escapes only by boarding a fishing boat and shoving off across the lake. He has no time to be alone to pray, to sleep, or even eat. Things are out of control. His mission seems to be sinking in a bottomless sea of human need. He can’t stay in town; he’s in a house, the crowd surrounds it and some enterprising guys break through the roof to lower their paralyzed friend to Jesus. People seeking help come at him from all directions non-stop. He tries to keep out of sight in the countryside, far from the city crowds, but he can’t get away. So Jesus and his disciples keep moving, finally moving outside Israel altogether, to Gentile country. He’s hiding out in a house in the neighborhood of Tyre, a city about 30 miles northwest of the Sea of Galilee, on the Mediterranean coast.

It was a very long walk, but it’s no good; they found him! Suddenly someone’s shouting. It’s a Gentile woman accosting him. She falls at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her little daughter. Matthew—not Mark—records that at first Jesus just ignores her. The disciples arrive and say, “Send her away!” Then Jesus answers.

His response to the poor woman’s pleas is notorious. We expect Jesus to tell his disciples not to get in her way, that while these blockheads want to get rid of her, he’s there to help her. He is, after all, Jesus. Instead he says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to dogs.” At this point we’re used to Jesus saying harsh things to the Pharisees, but that’s O.K. Everyone hates the Pharisees; they deserve it. We don’t expect Jesus to say such a callous thing to this distraught mother, no matter how exasperated and exhausted he is. He is, after all, Jesus.

Interpreters have tried to soften this, to show that what Jesus says isn’t as bad as it sounds. We hear that the Greek word used here refers to pets, indoor dogs; a different term was used for outdoor dogs, animals of a lower status. This is no help. The Jews were in the habit of calling their Gentile neighbors dogs, an unambiguous term of contempt; using the diminutive term to refer to the Gentile child hardly mitigates the insult. Other interpreters find theological lessons in the text: Jesus aims to elicit from the woman a praiseworthy humility, something we should all have when asking God for what we want. I don’t hear her humbly acknowledging that she, a mere Gentile, rightly takes second place to the Jews, yet hoping there might be something left over for her child. I imagine her thinking: if you think it’s your duty to help the Jews first, then why are you here, not there?! This desperate but clever lady bites her tongue and feigns humility so she can use Jesus’ unkind words to her advantage. Some say that Jesus talks this way to test her faith, to see—although he supposedly already knows— whether she will persist in asking for the help she needs. One commentator even advances an erudite—though to me unintelligible—theory that Jesus detected that she was a Gentile convert to Judaism, that her response about the crumbs bears this out, so happily, she and her child are not Gentile dogs after all and the child can be healed.

I think we should reject all these readings: they dehumanize Jesus, they make him into a saint, in the worst sense of the term. They obscure the plain fact that Jesus is frazzled and frustrated, and really does at first treat this poor woman in a way that is not at all nice. Not always being nice is, after all, part of what it is to be a human being—even in the Midwest—and we should resist well-intentioned efforts to strip Jesus of his humanity. I’m not in altogether bad company in thinking this. Preaching on the text, Martin Luther describes the woman encountering Jesus at his angriest but turning his own cruel words against him. Whatever forces us to face up to the fact that Jesus—very God of very God—is nonetheless one of us—really human—is a good thing. We are always all too ready to turn him into something not altogether human and thereby hide the stunning fact of God with us.

More important here is that the desperate woman’s clever response makes Jesus re-think his mission. Take Jesus’ words at face value: he doesn’t say that the Gentile dogs can never get God’s help, but that now is not the time. He’s been pushed enough by the crowds; he can do without this Gentile woman pushing too. “Wait your turn lady!” Jesus is an astute reader of the Hebrew Scriptures. He knows that God is not God of Israel alone, but of all the world, and that God chooses Israel to be his people not to the ultimate exclusion of everyone else, but to be a nation of kings and priests, drawing all the nations to the true God, creator of heaven and Earth. But not now; Jesus sees the salvation of the Gentiles as eschatological, off somewhere in the future, after Israel has at last been faithful to the covenant and been delivered from the “exile” of foreign rule. There’s a reasonable plan for revealing the Kingdom of God, but it is already going awry, thanks to the crazy crowds, the healed people who can’t keep quiet, the infuriatingly hard-hearted Pharisees, the unreliable disciples. This impudent woman pleads, “Even the dogs under the table eat the crumbs that the children drop!” And that, of course, is absurd. To suggest that God could be satisfied giving crumbs, mere leftovers, which might, or might not, fall when and where they are needed, is ridiculous. This is not the God Jesus knows. This is not the God to whom Jesus gives human flesh. So much for the plan. So much for the proprieties. So much for keeping the unprepared mob away from God’s table. Of course he heals the child. The God who comes to us in Jesus is not going to tell the tormented girl to be a good little gentile and wait her turn. No barrier, not even one as profound as between Jew and gentile, stands in God’s way now. The God who comes to us as this frayed and frustrated Jesus wasn’t gracious when he spoke to the Syro-Phoenician woman, but what she says leads him to grasp the inescapable fact: grace abounds when this God encounters human need. God has become one of us and he is all in. This is the relentless lover reckless in pursuit of his beloved we see portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is the father of the prodigal, forgetting his dignity as he runs out to meet his returning son. Forget the crumbs: the feast is thrown open, it’s bread for all, even the dogs!

By the next chapter in Mark something is different. Jesus has returned to the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, still beset by crowds, still healing, still being ignored when he commands the healed not to talk about it. It’s striking that the Gospel writers never seem to find anything objectionable when these people disobey Jesus’ explicit orders to keep quiet. As though in retrospect they see that when the salvation of God arrives in full force, in human flesh, there’s no containing it. As though God himself isn’t really capable of holding back his love when he finds us in our need. A large crowd has surrounded Jesus for three days, but instead of trying to get away, Jesus calls his disciples: “I’m really sorry for the people….they haven’t had anything to eat. If I send them home hungry, they’ll collapse on the way.” I suspect that when he adds, “Some of them have come from miles away” (8.2-3) he’s recognizing that some of them have walked the many miles from where he just came from, where he met the mother whose plea for crumbs changed his mind. (Earlier, Mark reported that the crowds in Galilee following Jesus included people from this, and other, Gentile areas.) So this great proto-Eucharistic feast includes a mix of hungry Jews and Gentiles, God’s official children together with those they’re ready to dismiss as dirty dogs.

Jesus takes seven loaves of bread—seven the number that represents perfection, completion, fullness—breaks and blesses them and shares them with the crowd. Four thousand people eat and are satisfied. There are, Mark tells us, seven baskets of crumbs left over, but there’s no one to eat them. Everyone has eaten their fill.

Anything can happen when God breaks the rules and overturns the customs in which we feel secure and eagerly reaches out to lost and broken people, people we might be happy to leave out of it, or at least expect to politely wait their turn. What comforts will be compromised? What chaos ensues when heaven’s bread is so indiscriminately handed out? When God invites the dogs to the table? No surprise when someone—and this includes all of us, one way or another—reacts with anxiety or anger. I can’t resist reminding you of an incident that occurred in a church in Toronto a couple of years ago. A visitor brought his dog to the communion service. The priest, sensing that the man needed to see how truly welcome he was at Jesus’ table, proceeded to offer not just him, but his dog, the Eucharistic bread. (Apparently, the dog sniffed, but turned down, the wine.) She got outraged complaints from all over Canada, and she was reprimanded by her bishop for her "strange and shocking actions which contravened church policy.” Some members of her congregation got the ecclesiastical equivalent of running fits and left the church altogether. I don’t mean to advocate for canine communion, but I like the way the story illustrates how we can respond to such unseemly doings.

When Jesus headed for Tyre, he thought he was just getting a respite from the chaos, but it turns out that he was bringing God’s healing grace to the “dogs,” the wayward, despised, unclean, indifferent, and plain bad. Those apparently, but only apparently, beyond God’s reach. God going to the dogs. I looked up the term “going to the dogs” on the web, where, as you know, all information is reliable. I learned that the expression originates in ancient China, where dogs were not permitted within the cities. Stray dogs roamed outside the city, living on the garbage thrown over the walls. Criminals and other social outcasts were expelled from the city and forced to fend for themselves with the dogs. To go to the dogs was to join them, metaphorically, if not literally. In today’s text we see Jesus making his way beyond the “walls” of Israel, where he brings not crumbs but the full feast of God’s love to those who by rights should be excluded and who deserve nothing, or nothing but condemnation. We know, of course, where this leads. Jesus himself winds up outside the walls. On a cross. Out there with the dogs. Bringing the bread of life. Out there with us. .

Amen.